The Winter Palace (48 page)

There was no grand ceremony, no coronation at the Moscow cathedral. At the Senate Council, Peter
III
, the new Emperor of All the Russias, flanked by the Shuvalovs, fired off his orders. From now on, no noble would be forced to serve the Tsar against his will. No soldier would be flogged with the knout. Speaking against the Emperor would no longer be a crime, and it would not have to be reported. The Secret Chancellery would be abolished. The Good and Merciful Tsar, the true father of Russia, had no need to spy on his children.

Not a day passed without an announcement, a proclamation, a ukase, and yet another appointment.

Ivan Shuvalov, no longer satisfied to be a mere curator of Moscow University, was put in charge of the infantry, marine, and artillery corps in St. Petersburg. Two of his uncles became Field Marshals, though neither of them ever smelled powder or drew a sword. Most of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting left the court for their estates, but the ones who stayed received positions within Peter’s inner circle. The Emperor, I heard, wished to assure the future of everyone who had been of use to his
beloved
aunt.

In the temporary palace, I waited for summons, but none came.

“Ask Peter to assign you to my entourage, Varenka,” Catherine urged me. “Beg him if you must.”

Dressed in her taffeta mourning dress, a black fichu over her hair, Catherine never spoke about her own waiting for invitations that never came. “My friends haven’t deserted me, Varenka,” she told me once, when I brought her another letter from Stanislav. “Even if I couldn’t have been as true to them as I had wished.”

The Stewardess of the Household gave me a hesitant glance when I listed my old positions: the reader to the Grand Duke, the Chief Maid of the Imperial Bedroom. I kept my voice even, not too insistent. The large carved desk that separated us was covered with files tied with green ribbons. Behind her, her ashen-faced attendant was taking notes.

“I have been of use,” I said.

The new Winter Palace still smelled of paint, varnish, and wet plaster.
Das Fräulein
had claimed Ivan Shuvalov’s apartment, right above the Imperial Bedroom, from which carpeted private stairs led to the Emperor’s suite. Her entourage was twice as big as Catherine’s, who was not yet invited to name her own ladies-in-waiting. The day after the state funeral, the new Emperor’s official Favorite was seen wearing Elizabeth’s jewels.

The Stewardess of the Household sighed and told me to come back in a week. But when I did, she had no time for me at all. It was her assistant who assigned me to the Imperial Wardrobe. The Chief Seamstress, she lisped, needed help. The late Empress left fifteen thousand ball gowns alone. There were shoes and silk stockings. There were purses, parasols, gloves,
kokoshniks
, and fans to sort through.

“If it suits you, Madame Malikina, that is,” she said in a brisk voice.

“I’m most grateful,” I replied.

The assistant cast a quick glance at her notes, avoiding my eyes. My daughter and I could remain in the temporary palace for the time being, she told me, but I should soon start looking for my own lodgings. The quarters at the Winter Palace were not for everyone.

The memories of the days that followed come entangled in brocades, patterned velvet, and embroidered silk. They take the shapes of caftans, sarafans, and tulle veils. Panniers and wigs. Skirts and overdresses. Entire chests of drawers are filled with panels for the sleeves, trains, and bodices, ready to be assembled into an evening gown at a day’s notice. Baskets overflow with silk undershirts. Whiffs of sour air mix with faint scents of rose water and almond milk, and everyone repeats stories of the new Tsar.

In the evenings, I crossed the corridor to Catherine’s rooms armed with words that stained.

“Inspections,” the Emperor insisted, “unexpected and unannounced,” were the essence of governance.

He swooped down constantly on the army barracks to check the state of uniforms, on the mint to weigh the coins, into the government offices to find which senior official valued his morning sleep more than his duties.

“I didn’t think that they had so much love for me,” he said of the Palace Guards saluting him as he rode past.

He made faces at the crows circling the snow-covered fields. He lolled out his tongue at the Celebrant during Mass. He played his fiddle for four hours straight. He called Russia “an accursed land.” He threw himself on his knees before the portrait of Prussia’s Frederick the Great, vowing, “My brother, we will conquer the universe together!” He pushed the prettiest of his ladies-in-waiting into a room with the Prussian Envoy, urging them “to improve this barbaric race with some good blood.”

A moth, I thought of him then, drawn to the flame, blind to anything except the flickering candle. Such was our Tsar. Such was our future, if nothing was done to stop it.

Catherine listened as I spoke, looking up from her books and papers. The ample folds of her mourning dress hid her belly, heavy with child. Her dangerous secret was well kept, wrapped in excuses of migraines that demanded lying flat in a darkened room, with just old wheezing Bijou for company.

“Does he speak of me at all, Varenka?”

“I hear that he calls your mourning for the Empress ‘theatrics.’ Who is my wife fooling, he asks everyone, with these black shawls of hers? How long is she going to stand in the chapel like an ugly black crow, crossing herself?”

“Does anyone laugh?”

“A few.”

Quite a few, I knew but did not say.

The Shuvalovs cast their nets wide. Word had been sent out: Join us and you will be rewarded. As soon as it became clear Peter was not going to consult his wife on anything, those who had declared their support for Catherine began to waver.

At the new Winter Palace, Catherine’s name evoked frowns of concentration, as if the memory of her had to be dragged out from somewhere deep.
The Emperor’s estranged wife
, I heard dismissive whispers,
hiding away. What shall it be for her? Some distant country estate? Or a monastery cell?

Ailing, I heard, pushed aside, visited by only a few.

Her ills were of little consequence. Like her friends. For what did they have to defend her? Stories of blunders repeated in desperation?

Was that all?

For the second time in my life, I thanked God for the Orlovs.

The Palace Guards, Grigory and Alexei assured me, did not forget their misgivings. They never failed to notice when the Emperor appeared in public not in the Preobrazhensky greens but in the blue uniform of a Prussian colonel. When he replaced the Russian Order of Saint Andrew with the Order of the Black Eagle, a treasured gift from the King of Prussia.

“Our time is coming, Varvara Nikolayevna. As soon as the baby is delivered. As soon as Katinka is well enough!”

The Orlovs’ time, I called it in my thoughts, heady, dangerous, and rushed. Grigory and Alexei on the prowl, gathering allies, promising, threatening, cajoling, haggling for support. Ivan, Fyodor, and Vladimir awaiting orders in their big house on Millionnaya Street.

The five Orlov brothers, thick as thieves. All behind Catherine, pregnant with one of the brothers’ child.

Grigory and Alexei didn’t care if anyone watched them. In the temporary palace, emptier with each passing week, the floors shook under their swaggering steps. Every evening, they brought news of yet another disgruntled officer, another member of this or that noble family pledging their support. When Catherine’s voice faltered, when she paused, when her hands rested for too long on the swell of her growing child, the two brothers would exchange glances and break the seriousness of the moment with one of their skits:
The Orangutan and his Prussian Master, The Last Oranienbaum Feast
. Not much more than youthful merriment, I decided, but enough to make Catherine laugh.

“We’ll push him to his knees … teach him a lesson he won’t forget.”

I, too, could not stop myself from giggling when Grigory Orlov, his voice turned shrill, waved his hands madly or marched with stiff legs in the imitation of a Prussian goose step.

Ever since the Secret Chancellery had been abolished, men calling themselves former spies peddled denunciations by the dozen or traded in seedy tales. Sins once entrusted to a priest at confession were sold by the dozen. “If you do not buy yours,” the sellers whispered, “someone else will.”

From his exile in Goretovo, former Chancellor Bestuzhev no longer complained that crows fighting over carrion provided his only entertainment. He had written to the new Tsar, begging to be allowed back at court, but his letter had gone unanswered. To me he offered the wisdom of country proverbs, which, he was sure, would also please the Grand Duchess:
When the cat is away, the mice will play. When harvest is weighed, one cabbage can tip the balance
.

I threw his letter into the flames. For me, time had assumed the shape of Catherine’s rounding belly, the tightening of her skin, the steady kicks of a baby’s foot.

A woman’s time brings its own conclusion, hopeful but unsure of its end.

By the end of February, Catherine only visited the Winter Palace to see her son.

Paul would turn eight in September. He was wetting himself at night and had started to suck his thumb again. On the day Count Panin told him that his father had become Emperor, Paul blinked his eyes and asked only what happened to his aunt’s cat Pushok.

The new Imperial Nursery with its view of the winter road across the snow-covered Neva was three corridors away from the Emperor’s suite, and Catherine could come and go without being seen by anyone except Count Panin, his Governor.

She told me of these visits when we were alone, her voice strained with pain.
Did you sleep well?
she would ask her son.
Did you like the book I brought you? Will you show me your drawings?
Paul would hide his face in the folds of his nurse’s apron and shake his head. If Catherine implored him to look at her, he would lift his head long enough to reveal his florid face and then hide it again.

“This is Peter’s doing, Varenka,” Catherine seethed. “He wants to keep me away even from my own son!” I didn’t like to see her eyes flare, her fingers snap. There was a baby in her womb. Babies were shaped by their mothers’ thoughts, harmed by them.

Nothing Catherine said or did in that nursery made any difference. Her son’s small face puckered in a stubborn grimace at the sight of her. What could she do but leave in tears?

“Can you go to Paul, Varenka?” she asked me after one such disastrous visit. “And take Darya with you?”

The thought enticed her, softened her face.

It would calm her greatly, Catherine continued, grasping my hand in hers, bringing it to her heart. The mere thought of our children playing together. The chance, however slight, I or Darenka might have to assure her son that he had a mother who loved him.

I can still hear Catherine’s plea. So fervent with hope.

“We have been friends for so long, Varenka. We both have witnessed the power of malice. We know how much has been destroyed already. We know what is at stake.”

How could I not agree?

By March, nightmares came. Dreams of bellies splitting open, of waters flooding the room. “As if sent by the Devil, Madame,” the trusted maid who had come to fetch me blithered.

I hurried across the corridor to Catherine’s bedroom. Her teeth were chattering; her lips were livid. She muttered about babies swaddled in cobwebs, babies with fins and flaps, babies with no mouths, with no eyes.

She, too, had been to Kunstkamera. She, too, had seen Peter the Great’s monsters.

Having sent Masha to Millionnaya Street for the Orlovs, I’d offer her tea sweetened with white honey, a glass of
malinovoi
, raspberry kvass. When these didn’t help, I’d suggest a brisk walk along the empty corridors.

By the time we returned to her rooms, Grigory Orlov would be waiting. “Silly Katinka,” he’d mutter, scooping Catherine up in his arms as if she weighed less than a feather.

I’d wait until the doors to her bedroom closed, and then I’d leave.

In the first week of April, Peter
III
, the Emperor of All the Russias, came to the Imperial Wardrobe on one of his famous inspections. He was dressed in Prussian blue.
Das Fräulein
was clinging to his arm, her black eyes gliding through the dresses spread on tables, assessing their worth.

“That was all hers?” she exclaimed. On her finger, a garnet ring flickered in the light. Blood-red, set in white gold. Elizabeth’s favorite. Her eyes passed me as if I did not exist.

The Emperor of Russia took off his wig. His thinning scalp was covered with blistering wounds, the result of constant scratching.

“So this is where you are now, Varvara,” he said, turning toward me. “I was wondering what happened to you. Have you been treated well?”

He put the wig back on, glancing at the dressing mirror to see if it was straight, but right away he noticed a basket filled with wooden dolls, Elizabeth’s pandoras. He picked up one of them, naked, with twisted limbs, and waved it over his head, like a trophy.

“Yes, Your Highness,” I answered. “I’ve been treated very well.”

“Good,” he said, tossing the pandora back into the basket. “Show me the ledgers, then.”

The Chief Seamstress handed me the heavy bound ledger and stepped back, marred with resentment for being overlooked. The other seamstresses bent over their sewing, trying to steal glances at the Tsar. I could already imagine their gasps after his departure.
How handsome, how elegant, how splendid, how kind
.

I opened the volume at random, pointing at the lists of evening gowns, morning dresses, costumes from Elizabeth’s masquerades.

Das Fräulein
yawned, but Peter paid her no heed. He licked his thumb and turned the pages, staring at some of them longer than others. I wondered what caught his attention. The description? The price paid? The names of new owners beside the dresses that Elizabeth had given away as gifts?

He closed the ledger, frowning.