Curse Not the King (27 page)

As his love for Katya Nelidoff had been a mystery to her, too, so would she fail to grasp his reverence and fanaticism for the rôle which God had appointed him to play in the affairs of men.

When the ceremony was completed, the anointed Czar's special ukase was read out. In it Paul made the throne hereditary, ordering that from that day forward it should pass to the eldest son of the ruler on his father's death.

The Grand Duke Alexander listened with no trace of expression on his handsome face, realizing that Paul was trying to stabilize the succession and put an end to the system of revolution and bloodshed by which the Crown of Russia usually devolved from one Czar to the next.

He saw his mother's eyes upon him and knew that in her ignorance she was pleased, thinking this proclamation to be a sign of goodwill between the father and the son, whereas it only conjured up a vista of long years spent waiting for what he already coveted so fiercely.

His opaque blue gaze considered his father and grudgingly accorded him another twenty years of life as it acknowledged the strength of those limbs and remembered Paul's horsemanship and physical power.

Headaches would not kill him, neither would melancholy and with all his heart Alexander cursed the God who had seen fit to inflict his hated parent with a disease that was not mortal.

His bitter reflections were disturbed by the reading of another ukase, and at the first sentences his acute wits sharpened and began to concentrate on every word.

As a token of his love for them, the Czar made a special pronouncement for the protection of his people. At the same time he restrained his nobility still further.

The ukase forbade landlords to work their serfs for more than three days in a week and ordered that they must be allowed to rest on Sunday.

Someone coughed in the congregation, and Paul's eyes scanned the packed rows of men and women with an angry stare that produced a paralysed silence. Then he gave the signal to end the service and the coronation procession reformed. Walking back to the Kremlin, blinking in the brilliant sunshine, the Grand Duke followed the great gilded canopy which sheltered the sovereign, and repeated the amazing order to himself.

The serfs were not to be slave-driven any longer; and their masters, whose wealth was derived from the mass labour of these unfortunates, were destined to lose part of their income in order to please the insane humanity of the new Czar.…

“He's mad,” the Grand Duke decided. “Only a lunatic would have made such a decree … the serfs … God in Heaven! No one in their senses would intervene on behalf of those animals and alienate every owner in the kingdom!”

As he visualized popular reaction to the ukase, Alexander's step grew light, and lighter still his heart, so that when he passed into the Kremlin in his father's wake, observers saw that he was smiling.

That evening the new Czar received the homage of his subjects. The audience took place in the historic Granovitia Palata in the Kremlin, and it was there in the setting of dark Byzantine splendour that Paul of Russia and the woman whose love affair with her Czar was to blaze like a meteor through his short reign, saw each other for the first time.

She stood in a line of hundreds of Court ladies ranged against one side of the hall, the wives and daughters of the nobility whose men were ranked on the opposite side of the great room, leaving a wide pathway to the raised crimson throne where the Czar would take his place.

When Paul entered she curtsied to the ground with the rest, her head lowered until he passed, so that her first sight was of his back, and the edge of his long robes trailing the floor. When he was seated she looked quickly up, and in the instant while she gazed upon his face her eyes suddenly flashed with excitement, retaining a picture of a stern, exalted countenance, of a level, searching gaze, and a fine strong hand—a single monster sapphire on the index finger—being extended for the kiss of homage.

“He is indeed a king,” she thought, and only added as an afterthought that he was ugly.

When her turn came to be presented she sank down before the throne in an obeisance of perfect grace, her white satin skirts spreading on the ground like the petals of some shining flower, bending her supple body until her forehead almost touched the step of the dais, while the Court Chamberlain announced her name.

“Mlle. Lapoukhine!”

She raised her head and looked into his face, then her small fingers lifted the hand he offered her and she touched it reverently with her lips.

For a long moment Paul Petrovitch stared down at her as she knelt at his feet, stared with the expression of a man who sees the dead raised from the grave, returning not as a pallid corpse but warm-blooded and vivid with life.

His lips moved several times, but no sound came, until at last a hoarse whisper of astonishment escaped him, reaching the ears of the Empress who was seated on a lower level of the dais.

“Natalie.…”

Instantly Marie started, and looked more closely at the girl who should have long since passed to her and left the Czar.

Paul gazed at her as if bewitched, gazed into a perfect face of exquisite features and complexion, noticed a red, trembling mouth and the line of a delicate neck upon which her beautiful dark head was balanced like the bloom of a black rose.

Natalie … Natalie Alexeievna.… He repeated the name as he looked at her, aware that no rage rose in him at the resemblance, only a painful stabbing ache, as if some deep and dreadful wound had just reopened. Her movements, the proportions of her body, the bone formation of her oval face, with the straight nose and thin dark brows were almost identical with those of the woman he had loved and lost so many years ago.

“What is your name, Mademoiselle?” he asked her, and his voice shook.

“Anna Petrovna Lapoukhine, your Imperial Majesty.”

Her answer broke the spell. The voice was not Natalie's; it was low-pitched, devoid of the distinctive German intonation. And then he realized that her eyes were not like Natalie's either.

They were as black as jet, huge and brilliant, vividly expressive.

“You may go, Mademoiselle,” he said slowly, aware that his wife was staring at the girl and that a long line of courtiers waited for her place before the throne.

He could never remember who came after her, for that dark, lovely face was superimposed upon his vision long after his eyes had followed the small, graceful figure in the dress of bridal white and seen her vanish into the background of the crowded hall.

“Anna Petrovna.…” The words spoken in that deep-toned voice echoed in his brain, until he might have fancied that she whispered in his ear, and during the State banquet which ended the day of his coronation, Paul Petrovitch searched the long tables for another sight of her.

But he looked in vain; his head ached with the dull, threatening pain that turned to stabs of searing agony, and his tired eyes focused in a futile attempt to distinguish one face among so many hundreds, until they blurred and he succumbed to weariness, staring unseeing at the golden tableware spread out on the table before him, remembering another feast now long forgotten.

Then Natalie Alexeievna sat beside him, instead of his plump Empress Consort, and Catherine watched from the raised chair, under the golden eagle arms of Russia, which he now occupied.… Not in this vaulted chamber, with the frescoed walls, but in the gracious, glittering banqueting hall of the Winter Palace.… And Natalie, Natalie dressed in white like that other, who had appeared before him for the first time that night and yet personified an image that had never left his heart.

He knew that Marie Feodorovna watched him, and that her gaze was anxious, and he suddenly divined the motives which impelled her to defend her former enemy Katya Nelidoff, forcing upon him a relationship withering in disappointment and distrust, and that after that evening he would never, never want again. And, understanding, he was angry.

When the banquet had ended and he lay alone in the carved bed in the State apartment of the Kremlin, he felt more at peace; the throbbing in his head was a monotonous, dull pain, familiar enough to be borne patiently, and the low-ceilinged, ancient room enclosed him with an atmosphere at once alien and harmonious.

It was a sombre, magnificent room, with faded red walls trellised with golden mosaic and frescoed stories of the life of Christ, a room impregnated with memories of the past and into which the brittle, rational eighteenth century had never penetrated. A long line of Russian monarchs had slept within the wooden walls. Michael, the first of all the Romanovs, had lain where Paul lay, on the night following his coronation, and after him had come the tyrants and usurpers, the puppets and martyrs, who had since occupied the Russian throne.

The immense, airy palaces of Petersburg and Tsarskoë Selo reflected nothing of this brooding, ancient spirit; their pastel colouring, the profusion of bright gilt and coloured marbles, the gracious gardens, wore a façade of borrowed culture, a tribute to the feminine taste of nearly fifty years of female autocrats, who sought to escape the fact of their country's barbarism and their own, by living in the surroundings of the distant West.

Now one of the most tragic and ill-starred of all the Czars of Holy Russia turned in the old four-poster bed, remembering the young and lovely face of his new subject, and realized in triumphant hope that the limitless power accorded him in matters relating to the State extended to his private life as well.

At four in the morning of what was now the sixteenth of April, the wife and daughter of the Senator Peter Lapoukhine were arguing fiercely.

The house in Tverskaia Street was a handsome building, for the family were wealthy as well as well-born, and the bedroom where Anna Lapoukhine and her step-mother were quarrelling was large and luxuriously furnished.

Madame Lapoukhine was a stubborn woman, hard-eyed and calculating, impervious to anything but greed and the embraces of her lover, an officer of the Moscow garrison.

Her domination of the household was unquestioned, the Senator obeyed her and took care to keep in her good graces. But Anna Petrovna was far from tractable.

“I've told you,” Madame repeated angrily. “Your father has forbidden you to go to Court again!”

“You mean you've ordered him to forbid me!”

Anna glared at her step-mother, her beautiful face dark with temper.

The delicate grace which had so captivated Paul masked a fierce temperament, a bold tongue and a passion for taking risks. The firm mouth and obstinate chin revealed these traits, coupled with the liquid black eyes that could harden and blaze if once her will was crossed.

“You stopped me,” she repeated. “You fool of a woman … didn't you see how the Czar looked at me?”

“Oh, I saw,” Madame retorted. “And I also saw how the Empress looked at you while you knelt there, displaying yourself to her husband.… Do you suppose that by to-morrow he'll remember you exist?”

“Yes!” her step-daughter interrupted, stung by the jibe.

“You flatter yourself, Anna. Just because a few men here in Moscow lose their heads over you, you think the Emperor himself will do the same! Why, you foolish creature, the Empress Marie would dispose of you before he ever reached you!
I
was watching
her
and I've no mind to end my days in some fortress because the Czar might speak a few words to you and then forget about you. And I've heard that she's well content with this plain Nelidoff who gives her no trouble. What do you think would befall anyone who tried to upset that arrangement? The Czar would have to send for you personally before it would be safe.”

“How do you know he wouldn't?” Anna asked her, and Madame Lapoukhine shrugged.

“If he did, that changes everything,” she admitted and a sudden vision of the honours which must fall to the family of a royal favourite made her eyes shine.

“But the risk is too great. You're to stay at home, Anna. He leaves for Petersburg in a few days.”

Anna Petrovna turned away from her, ashamed of the tears of disappointment that filled her eyes, feeling a sense of loss that was as sharp as a physical pain at the reminder that in a short time that strange, ugly, fascinating man would be hundreds of miles away.

“Very well,” she said, and bit her lip to stem the tears until she might shed them in private.

“But I know one thing, Madame. He'll come back!”

But the Senator's wife was not listening, she was half-way through the door, satisfied, too relieved by the capitulation to heed the prophecy.

A fortnight after his coronation, Paul Petrovitch returned to Petersburg, and he made the long journey through cheering crowds and decorated towns in a mood of restless discontent. The Empress, who travelled with him, noted his humour and accurately guessed the cause.

No one was more thankful than the complacent, yet watchful wife when the Imperial Court left Moscow without the reappearance of that disturbing daughter of the Senator Lapoukhine. Marie had passed her days in dread of a meeting between Paul and the brazen, beautiful creature, whose resemblance to the Grand Duchess Natalie had been affirmed by her spies.

Having abandoned her pride and condoned the adultery with Katya Nelidoff, Marie was determined to keep the advantages which she had won by making Paul's mistress her protegee. And she thanked God that the momentary threat to her security seemed to have faded into the background.

Paul still remembered her and looked for her, the Empress noted that, and for a time she trembled lest he should send for the girl, but his diffidence with women and the endless State functions which filled every moment of their short stay averted that danger, until the day dawned when he left the Kremlin without having seen Anna Lapoukhine again.

While she smiled and conversed with him in her slow, humourless way, Marie Feodorovna made a mental note to ensure that Mlle. Lapoukhine remained in Moscow and that any request from the family to come to Petersburg should be firmly refused.