Curse Not the King (5 page)

They were brave words but her voice quavered uncertainly, and Rasumovsky looked down at her and smiled.

“You won't denounce me to the Czarevitch,” he said softly. “He would have me killed. You won't deliver me to that because I love you.”

Natalie had begun to tremble. “You're mad,” she whispered. “Mad.… For God's sake, André … go now. I'll say nothing to anyone, I promise you.…”

It was as much a plea for herself as for him, a plea to leave her in peace, not to do the thing she dreaded and yet longed for; even as she spoke she knew that it was useless, and in her heart she surrendered and was glad.

“I am mad … mad with love of you. And you're not indifferent to me. Don't pretend, Natalie, you have betrayed yourself a hundred times.…”

As he advanced upon her the Grand Duchess backed away from him and, turning, tried to reach the window. It was a futile attempt at flight from the inevitable. There was no one to hear her cry or see her signal had she had time to make one, for Rasumovsky sprang forward and caught her.

When he first touched her she resisted; her small fists struck at him and she strained backwards, trying to avoid his kisses. He held her tight against him as she struggled, murmuring his love and need of her.

“You are so beautiful …” he murmured, aware that her small hands were clinging to him and that her resistance was turning to response.

“André … Oh, André …”

He picked her up and carried her to a couch which was pushed back against one of the tapestried walls.

“I love you,” he had said, over and over again, and for the first time in his life the empty formula had meaning. The fulfilment of desire had flooded him with a tenderness that he had never felt for any other woman, and in the face of this he became suddenly defenceless.

He looked up at her and smiled; they gazed at each other in silence for a moment, and in that moment expressed a love for which no words would have been adequate.

Rasumovsky raised himself upon one elbow, and touched her face with gentle fingers.

“You're more beautiful than ever, Natalie. They say a woman's beauty blossoms fully in the hour of love.… I am only afraid that anyone who sees you will suspect …”

“Beautiful? Like this … with my hair down like a peasant girl's?” For answer he wound a thick strand of her dark hair round his hand and kissed it.

“I love you, Natalie Alexeievna. You are revenged. No woman has heard that from my lips before without hearing a lie. But to you, I tell the truth. I love you and before God, I'm afraid for myself.…”

“Why afraid, my love?” she asked him gently, and sat upright so that she leant against his shoulder.

“Because I've lost my freedom … because I feel that if you deny yourself to me I shall never know peace again.… Do you love me enough to forgive me for what I've done to you and to myself?”

“I love you enough not to care,” she said calmly. “I must have always loved you, André. From the moment I saw you on the boat. Only I was a child then and didn't understand. With Paul I had no idea what love could mean. It was never love for me. But I know now, my dearest one.”

He bent and kissed her and when the embrace was over she rested her cheek on his shoulder and smiled absently, tranquil and dazed with happiness.

“It is snowing again, my love,” he said after a moment, looking out of the long window on the opposite wall.

“Thank God. It'll cover our footprints. Oh, André, why do we have to go back! I wish we could stay here for ever. Paul will be waiting for me, sitting in his rooms watching my door, like a lovesick dog.…”

“Don't speak of him!” Rasumovsky said savagely. “He has the right to you that should only belong to me.… I have to live with that. I have to wait upon him, see him looking at you, knowing that when you are alone with him he's making love to you.…”

“I'm not going to let him touch me, not now. I can't help it, André; I shall keep him away as much as I can. Then I can be with you.…”

“I have always hated him.… Now I could kill him, because you are his wife. Come here, my adored one, let me hold you again, forget the Czarevitch … forget everything but ourselves.”

It was quite dark when they parted at last, parted unwillingly and with the promise of a meeting the next day to sustain them.

“To-morrow, Natalia.”

“To-morrow, here and at the same time. I'll find some excuse for the Czarevitch. Farewell, my love. Until tomorrow.…”

Within a little while the fire in the grate flickered into a last false glow of life and then died out; the pavilion was dark and silent, its window panes coated with snow, the dim shapes of the furniture fading into a background of stillness and dusk, until it seemed a trysting place for ghosts, as if the lovers who had left it were already dead.

For a short period, Catherine returned to Petersburg, where Panin awaited her with grave news of the Pugachev rebellion. The troops and cannon sent to quell them had proved almost useless; the savage measures enforced against the rebels had done nothing to deter them; Catherine's lands ran red with blood and echoed to the hammerings of hastily erected gallows; the armies of both sides burned and slew without mercy.

But the revolt spread, thousands of starving, discontented serfs streamed to join the man they believed to be their rightful Czar, backed by the fiercely independent Cossack tribes.

Word reached the Empress that posters proclaiming her a traitorous usurper had been found in Petersburg itself, that daring voices had cried out for the Czar Peter the Third. And finally the dreaded sequel followed; the rebels in the Urals and the malcontents in the city had begun to mention Paul.

Panin and her councillors resumed their pleas for her son's imprisonment and death. It was the only way, they insisted; Pugachev was not the real danger; he would be routed, punished, publicly executed and the matter would end with him. But the true menace was the Czarevitch. It might even be that he was intriguing with his mother's enemies.

Catherine listened to them in silence, fighting the temptation to take their advice and humour her own wishes by serving her son as she had served her husband. Instead, she compromised. If Panin could show her that the Czarevitch was treating with her enemies, she would sign the order for his arrest and death within the same hour.

Satisfied, the Minister assured her that his spies were always active and departed, his heart lighter with the hope of catching out his enemy.

As an added precaution, he set a watch upon Natalie Alexeievna.

Early in spring the Empress returned to Tsarskoë Selo, and though she made frequent trips to Petersburg, and spent some time in Moscow, the Czarevitch and his little court remained at the Summer Palace. There were rumours of an impending change in Catherine's household, and the handsome favourite Vassiltchikov trod warily, confiding to some that the Empress treated him with growing indifference. Another rival had appeared, but no one knew for certain who it was.

While the Court gossiped and speculated, Paul pretended not to listen, and in fact those summer months at Tsarskoë Selo were among the happiest of his life. All those who saw him were aware of the change that marriage with Natalie had wrought in him.

The sullen, ugly boy, his awkwardness increased by an air of sour suspicion, had given place to a young Prince, a Prince who stood erect for all his short stature, and who had suddenly acquired dignity and self-assurance. Towards his mother and his enemies he did not relent, but his altered character now made his hatred a force to reckon with, and the court opportunists came flocking to right themselves as an insurance for the future. But flattery did not deceive him, for he knew its worth, and while accepting it he made a mental note of those to whom he owed past grudges.

One day there would be a reckoning; sinners who thought their crimes forgotten and unpunished would render him account in blood, and often his eyes rested menacingly upon the figure of the Guards officer, Alexis Orlov, and recalled that as a boy, trembling with hatred for his father's murderer, he had once vowed to match the jagged left-hand scar on Orlov's cheek with an identical incision, before the head was severed from the body.

But the matter of his revenge must wait, for love of his young wife took first place in his thoughts.

To him she was the embodiment of everything he worshipped; the missing comfort of his motherless childhood was waiting for him in her arms; she gave him the companionship denied the boy who never had a playmate or an animal to love, and she appeared the fair goddess of all adolescent dreams.

He was immensely proud of her, tender and unselfish, blundering only through ignorance, and completely blind to her tepidity and faults. Also he believed quite genuinely that she loved him with a passion as unbounded as his own.

Her health was the only blight upon his happiness, for his wife pleaded constant headaches and spent long hours ostensibly resting in her room. In his tenderness and anxiety, Paul humoured her lightest wish, and was comforted by the doctors when they assured him that though perhaps a little tired, the Grand Duchess was in good spirits and quite well. He became grateful for her companionship, and treasured their hours together; the smallest word or gesture of affection sufficed to please him, and since the physicians hinted that she was fatigued from love-making, he mastered his intense desire for her.

It was a courtier, Leo Naryshkin, for thirty years the devoted friend of Catherine, who noticed that the twitch in Paul's left cheek had disappeared. Others observed that the nervous habits had disappeared, the tricks of caricature were passing from his manner, and as a result the likeness to the dead Czar Peter was not nearly so pronounced.

Naryshkin, who knew very well the history of that old love affair, and the bastardy of the child ostensibly legitimate, spoke to the Empress one evening as the two were playing cards.

Leo, his hair now thickly streaked with grey under the powder, watched Catherine with admiring eyes. Thirty years of unrequited love had aged him, but the fire of his desire for her still burned.

The fall of Gregory Orlov had rekindled hope in him, and the knowledge that she was tiring rapidly of his successor brought Naryshkin to her side once more. But he was careful to say nothing of these things.

Instead, he talked of Paul.

Catherine put down her cards and listened.

“You find him much changed then?” she asked.

“Yes, Madame, almost beyond recognition. This child from Darmstadt has transformed him. God knows, I thought him a grotesque; now he has dignity, almost presence. One might remember who his mother is,” he added, smiling.

Catherine's expression did not soften.

“He hasn't changed to me, Leo. He hates me still, calf love for Mistress Natalie hasn't altered him in that. She, too, looks on me with disapproving eyes, primed by my son. I'm not a happy mother, my friend. The children born of me, whether they are hidden bastards like Paul, or the son of Gregory, prove rebellious and ungrateful. You know Panin urges me to have the Czarevitch arrested?”

Naryshkin nodded.

“He's afraid for his own skin, in case your son succeeds you while he is still alive. If I remember, Nikita's safety was always his first consideration.”

Despite herself Catherine laughed.

“You mean the morning of the Revolution when he hid in his bed with the covers over his head, pretending to hear nothing till one side or the other had won the people over? Ah, yes. Then he brought Paul to the Church of Our Lady of Kazan to swear allegiance to me.…”

“I'll vow that Paul remembers it as well as we,” Naryshkin remarked drily. “Therefore Nikita seeks to bury the memory and the Czarevitch in the Schüsselburg.… Don't listen to him yet, Madame. Be patient with the boy. He's young and he may turn towards you.”

Impulsively Catherine held out her hand to him, and Leo lifted it to his lips and kissed it. There was no shadow of formality between them.

“He'd never believe that you pleaded for him. He hates you, too, my dear friend; he told a lackey once chat he was sure you'd been my lover, and that when he came to the throne he'd punish anyone who shared my bed. If I die and he succeeds me, what will befall you, then? What will he do to all those that I love who are left to his mercy?”

Naryshkin held her beautiful fingers in his, watching the jewels in her rings flashing in the candlelight.

“If what he thinks had ever been true, I would consider any punishment worth the payment. But it won't occur, Catherine. You'll live for many years to torment my heart. And you'll be ruling Russia long after I'm in my grave.”

When he left her, Catherine sat alone at the card table, turning up the squares of pasteboard at random, thinking of his words and her own.

If Paul succeeded her, the lives of everyone she cared about would be in jeopardy. Leo, despite his extra years, the Orlovs, even poor stupid Vassiltchikov, whose dismissal was about to take place; he, too, would suffer for the two years he had been her lover. Scores of helpless men and women would become the objects of Paul's vengeance, and Catherine never underestimated the strength of his memory or the extent of his vindictiveness.

He was loyal, she knew that too, and ambitious, as she was herself. Many of her traits were in him, but until his marriage, his nervous disability had hampered their development. She had tried to make peace by giving him a wife, and the union was rapidly changing him into a dangerous rival.

She remembered that Panin thought him conspiring with Pugachev, and that the pamphleteers and street-corner voices who cried out, “Long live the Czarevitch, down with the Empress Catherine,” did so with his consent. How true that was she did not know, but if anyone could discover it and trap him it would be Panin. And if it were proved, she could take action.

They would all be safe then, all those she loved and who depended on her, and if Paul were declared a traitor it would not plague her conscience; it would never haunt her like the death of Peter and of Ivan.