Rebel Princess (23 page)

There were mornings when the Grand Duchess took her drive alone and, once out of sight of the palace, her coachman would turn off in the direction of a solitary house some versts from the center of St. Petersburg and slow his horses until they ambled gently.

He was a good servant and devoted to his mistress; Catherine had once discovered him listening outside her door some years before and, departing from her usual courtesy, had furiously boxed his ears. This truly regal gesture had won her a follower for life, and when the door of the house opened and a handsome giant in Guards uniform sprang into the carriage, the Grand Duchess's coachman neither looked to left nor right, but whipped up his horses and drove until his mistress gave the order to return.

These meetings with her lover were an indispensable part of Catherine's life, while she carried his child. The old nightmare of Saltykov and desertion haunted her and made Orlov's presence a luxury which she refused to do without.

Those many mornings Catherine flung herself into his arms and submitted desperately to his embraces, conscious that his treatment of her was angry and ungentle.

Often he hurt her and cursed savagely at the child she bore, and Catherine's heart leaped with perverse joy. Orlov wanted her; no glimmer of paternal feeling stirred in him. The babe whose claim on his affection she had dreaded so jealously, was to him a damnable trick played upon him by a malignant Fate.

Again and again he urged her to rid herself of the burden. “Come, Catherine, make an end of it! 'Tis impossible for you to have a brat at this time; God's blood, if this is discovered, Peter Feodorovitch will have you walled up alive for adultery! I tell you its madness.…”

Catherine, her head resting against his shoulder, would smile in firm refusal. “I know all these things, my love, and I am no more pleased than you. But the risk of discovery is not so great. The sickness is gone and I show no signs that careful dressing does not perfectly conceal. Peter shall never hear so much as a cry when the time comes; I have made all arrangements. Also I cherish my life; what you suggest would like as not mean death, and I'll not die even for the joy of being beautiful again for you!

“Wait, Gregory, have patience. Only a few short months and I shall be light of our child, shapely and pleasing to you again, and ready to act when the time comes.”

So, she promised and placated while the closed carriage sped on its unobtrusive way until it paused once more by the house where Orlov parted from her. But the time was to come sooner than she or anyone else had anticipated.

On the 25th of December, 1761 (January 5th, 1762, by the English calendar), Elizabeth Petrovna died.

Chapter 11

The ante-rooms of the Czarina's suite were crowded; Elizabeth's subjects had gathered silently in accordance with the custom of their time to await the death of the sovereign and the proclamation of her successor. Catherine stood in the chamber immediately adjoining the Empress's bedroom.

A silver crucifix was clasped in her hands and her eyes were closed as if in prayer; many among the great nobles and ministers who thronged that stuffy room were kneeling, and there were some who wept.

The Grand Duchess stood stiffly, her back against the gilded wall, watching the door to Elizabeth's bedroom through half-closed eyes.

Within were four people; the Empress, stretched upon the death-bed she had fought so long, the favorite Ivan Shuvalov, whose hour of power was done, her Chancellor Vorontzov, and the priest who had come hurrying from the Imperial Chapel to comfort his royal mistress on her journey into the unknown.

The Grand Duke Peter Feodorovitch was also in that inner ante-room, and he stood insolently with his arms folded, glancing around him with an air of defiant good humor.

This was among the happiest days of his life, in that it marked the death of the woman who had domineered and overshadowed his existence for more than twenty years. His aunt was dying, surrounded by her superstitions and idolatries, none of which could save her from the dread, common fate of man; and Peter, whose whole memory of her was tainted sour by fear and hate, remembered his aunt's own terror of eternity and, careless of who saw him, stood and smiled.

Catherine Alexeievna saw his expression and bent her head over the cross she held. He grinned, while his aunt's subjects wept or kept vigil in silence, no matter what wrongs they owed Elizabeth; could any man have worked more steadily towards his own destruction?

A destruction that should be accomplished within the hour of Elizabeth's death. Nikita Panin stood quite near, holding the little Grand Duke Paul by the hand, his fat face expressionless, though she knew that he too watched that closed door.

He waited, as she did, for the end to come, for the Chancellor to produce the casket in which he knew the Empress's will to be kept, and for the words which would make an Emperor of his fidgeting charge:

“Our beloved great nephew Paul Petrovitch, by the grace of the most High God, shall upon the hour and day of our death, succeed and reign in our stead, to the exclusion of all others who might make claim to our estate and Kingdom. His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke Peter being of unsound mind and unable to fulfill the burdens of our realm, is hereby disinherited, to our great grief.…”

Panin knew those words by heart; he had seen them, penned in the Empress's own hand and placed in the jeweled casket which had belonged to Peter the Great. Catherine knew them also, for he had repeated them to her, and she had heard the further sentences in which Elizabeth decreed her Regent.

The Grand Duchess risked a quick glance at Peter and then looked down as he met her eye. He favored her with a scowl of hatred, and the threat in his expression did not escape her. Already he was savoring the prospect of his long-delayed revenge, imagining her helpless, unaware in his crazy triumph that his Imperial Aunt had deprived him of the Crown. Catherine closed her eyes and sighed inwardly.

How long, in God's name, before that mumbling prelate came to the door and the sickening suspense was at an end.

What would Peter do when that will was read? What would be the effect upon those waiting crowds, not only the great ones born in the shadow of the throne, who filled the outer rooms and passages, but that other concourse, humble and nameless, whom she had seen from her window, gathered outside the walls and gates, kneeling in the bitter, driving snow.

Suddenly her heart leaped in her breast and, despite her show of piety and self-control, the traitorous color flamed in her cheeks. The handle of the door was turning, and at the sound every head was raised.

Slowly the great double doors swung open and the jeweled vestments of the Orthodox priest gleamed softly in the light of the candles in their crystal chandeliers.

He advanced a few steps into the ante-room, and Catherine could see the figure of the Chancellor, Elizabeth Vorontzov's uncle, moving behind him.

“Her Imperial Majesty, Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias, died upon the stroke of two o'clock. May the most High God have mercy.…”

It was come. Catherine breathed hard and looked at Panin. Her hands gripped the crucifix until the image of the dying Savior was imprinted upon her palms. Twenty years of patience, of suffering and humiliation, of ultimate intrigue and treason were about to bear fruit.

Peter, smiling and moving forward before the priest's announcement was even delivered, would be eliminated from the throne and her son and Saltykov's would seem to mount it. For the moment.…

The thought flashed through her mind that she would send Peter to the Schüsselburg, that massive tomb of stone from which few prisoners escaped. The prelate had ended his speech and Peter elbowed his way to the royal bedroom as the priest stood back to let him pass.

The heir to the throne must pay his last respects before his accession was proclaimed. The Grand Duchess blinked away spurious tears and followed him, the blood in her veins racing with excitement, her brain, clear and calculating to the end, bidding her remember her condition and be calm.

Elizabeth lay in the center of her state bed and the embroidered curtains were looped back that her body should be visible to all. Her face was very pale and the delicate features a little sunken, but in death something of her vanished beauty had returned; the crimsoned mouth was firm, the painted eyelids shut, her hands, still white and glittering with the rings that nothing would induce her to remove, were clasped over her still breast, and the priest lifted one of them reverently for Peter Feodorovitch to kiss.

The Grand Duke stood by the side of the huge bed and made no move. She was dead; his enemy and persecutress, symbol of all that he detested in this alien, horrible land that she had called on him to rule. If there was indeed a hell as fierce as her guilty conscience had envisaged, then Peter consignd her to it with all his heart.

Outside the church bells had begun to toll in the curious discordant Russian fashion, and the sound came to them, muffled by the heavy, falling snow. Elizabeth Petrovna was dead. Now let her successor be proclaimed.

Catherine's eyes were fixed on the Chancellor, and Panin, leading the child Paul to do homage to the late Empress, also watched him closely. With measured tread Vorontzov advanced into the center of the room, and it suddenly occurred to Catherine that his hands held no casket such as her son's tutor had described.

In the shadows around the state bed a man knelt weeping. It was Ivan Shuvalov. Weeping for his dead mistress and the eclipse of his power.

Suddenly the Chancellor stopped; his right hand went to his heart and his voice rang out through that still room, echoing into the ante-chambers until it seemed that the walls of the palace reverberated with his words.

“Peter the Third, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias! Long live the Czar!”

Back came the cry, rolling in a deep, toneless murmur of submission. “Long live the Czar!”

For a single, desperate moment Catherine Alexeievna looked at Count Panin, and saw in his face a bewilderment and horror equal to her own. The plan had miscarried; Elizabeth had revoked her promise, there was no will. Then slowly the Count followed the Grand Duchess's eyes and his hand clasping that of the boy Paul began to tremble.

On an inlaid chest Catherine saw a small casket encrusted with jewels. It was open.

Then her gaze rested for a terrible moment upon the face of the Chancellor, uncle to the Grand Duke's mistress.

On the mosaic floor, near the grate which held a roaring fire, there remained a few damning wisps of blackened ash.

“This means revolution!” The Princess Dashkov was seated on a stool at Catherine's feet, and the two women were alone in the newly occupied Czarina's apartments in the palace.

Catherine leaned back in her chair and her square jaw jutetd out; it occurred even to the violently prejudiced Dashkov that her adored friend's expression made her less than beautiful. For a moment the mask had slipped, and Catherine looked every day of her thirty-two years; the chiseled features were granite hard and spoiled by the aggressive angle of that jaw, her full soft lips were set in a determined line, and she stared coldly over the princess's head, looking with bleak eyes at some vision of her own.

This means revolution.
Orlov had spoken those same words only a few hours before, his great fist descending upon her inlaid dressing-table with a force that set the golden toilet articles scattering. The ruse had failed; Elizabeth Vorontzov's kinsman had seen and destroyed the will which placed the Consort's crown forever beyond the reach of his niece, and the oath of allegiance had been taken by Peter III in the Cathedral within a few hours of the Empress's death.

Not one voice had been raised in protest. The court, the army and the people had bent their necks to the new yoke with the characteristic fatalism of their race. The despised Grand Duke, once the object of universal scorn, had suddenly become the lord of all the Russias, the mightiest ruler of the world, and all men's lives were in the hollow of his idiot hand.

The new Empress had stood among the crowd as an ordinary spectator, and no mention of her name or her son's had been made to those taking the oath.

“I cannot understand it,” the Princess said, gazing unhappily into Catherine's face. “I was so sure that some demonstration would arise … only one word, one voice was needed for your friends to have begun the cry: long live the Empress Catherine! Oh, I almost shouted it myself when I stood there in the Cathedral, listening to that old hypocrite preaching his sermon, comparing the advent of this little monster to the coming of the Christ!”

Catherine smiled and shook her head. “I fear it will not be Peter's fault if I do not go to my heavenly salvation before the day appointed by old age!”

The Dashkova's small face flushed with love and admiration. Only a woman as brave and wonderful as Catherine could have found it in her heart to make a joke of the danger she was in.

But in fact, Catherine's show of humor covered a fury of disappointment and uncertainty. There she sat, comforted by this girl of barely nineteen years, her plans confounded, her greatest enemy riding on the crest of power, carrying in her body the child of an adultery which would demand her life as forfeit if it were discovered.

Orlov had been right; she should have rid herself of the child she carried. Now it was too late; she must wait until nature delivered her from the thrall of physical weakness, wait and hope that Peter's friends might advise patience before testing his new-won power by imprisoning his wife too hurriedly.

Orlov and the Dashkova had set the pattern for the future with their words. There was no course left to her but revolution … if Peter did not strike first.

The year 1762 opened with a Czar upon the throne of Russia for the first time for many years. Peter the Third assumed the mantle of autocracy which had been worn by a succession of women and had rested for a brief period on the shoulders of the tragic child Ivan.