Sometimes I saw him pull on his ear until it bled. Sometimes I heard him sob, long, wolfish howls that ended in a choking silence.
He never asked me anything, but he refused to let me leave.
He’ll get better
, I thought.
For Catherine
. So that the Empress does not send her away.
Once when I thought him asleep I bent over him to adjust his pillow. Under the thin layer of gauze, I could barely discern the redness of swollen skin.
He opened his eyes and stared at me. I kept smoothing the lace of the pillow trim. He didn’t stop me, not even when my fingers brushed his hair.
“Your fiancée is worried, Your Highness,” I said softly. “She wishes to be allowed to see you.”
“I don’t want
her
here.”
The venom of his words startled me. “Why not?”
“She listens to the Devil.”
“Who says such nonsense to you?” I asked. “Who dares to spread such mean rumors?”
Before I could say anything more, I felt Peter’s long, thin arms around my neck. Sobs racked his thin body, and he would not be soothed. He wouldn’t tell me who spoke of Catherine to him. He shook his head when I described how despondent Catherine had been all these weeks while he lay in fever, how she worried that he still refused food.
He clung to my arm as I tried to soothe him, his fingers digging into my flesh. In the morning I would discover my arm was covered with bruises.
“He is still very weak,” I told Catherine in the morning. “But I’m sure that the worst has passed.”
One late afternoon, as I was reading to the Grand Duke, the guards announced the Empress’s arrival.
I closed the book, stood, and curtsied as she swept in. She did not look at me. Her silk dress rustled as she walked toward her nephew, with the swift, graceful steps of a dancer. He was resting on the bed, his velvet dressing gown tied tight around his thin frame, his face covered with gauze.
She clapped her hands. She had an announcement to make.
“The doctors say that you have been cured,” she told Peter.
“I feel faint,” he muttered.
“You are faint, for you need fresh air,” the Empress agreed cheerfully. “No more of this darkness, no more lying around all day.”
“My throat still hurts.”
But the Empress refused to listen. In spite of Peter’s protests and pleas, she forced him to stand up. She ordered the chambermaids to fling open the curtains, to admit the last light of the day.
The afternoon sun was bright enough to make us squint.
From where I stood I saw the back of a silver-framed mirror the footman had brought. The maids were holding it in front of Peter.
“There,” the Empress said, and lifted the gauze from his face. “Look.”
“I don’t want to,” he mumbled, and covered the scars with his hands.
But the Empress would not stand for it. She peeled his hands away and held him firm so that he could take a good look at himself.
“This is not me!” Peter screamed.
I stole my first glimpse at the gaping mouth, the lips fat and earthworm-pink. His cheeks were swollen, covered with pockmarks, each a bloody stamp of pus. Puffed folds hooded his eyes, made them smaller and empty.
I recognized that vacant gaze.
The Grand Duke recognized it, too—the dead eyes of his grandfather’s monsters. I heard a scream, a long, piercing wail of agony.
“
This is not me
!”
The Empress held the Grand Duke in her arms as he cried. It would all pass, she crooned. The redness and the swelling. Soon he would put on weight. Of course, not all the scars would disappear, but he was not a woman. Why should he cry over a blemish or two? A man did not have to have pretty skin. A man needed to be strong. Invincible.
I slipped out of the room as swiftly as I could without drawing attention to myself.
I sat on the chair outside the Grand Duke’s bedroom and took a shaky breath. From behind the doors came a wail, and another one, and then nothing but the Empress’s voice, singing a lullaby.
Spi mladenets, moy prekrasnuy
Sleep, my young one, my beautiful
As soon as the doctors declared the Grand Duke cured, the Empress ordered Catherine and Princess Johanna to move back to the Winter Palace.
Slowly, the court returned to its old ways. In the Empress’s suite, doors were left open again for visitors, and music filled the evenings. There was talk of a ball, a masquerade, and a display of fireworks in honor of the Grand Duke’s recovery.
Catherine spent most of the time in her rooms, alone, or praying in the palace chapel while Princess Johanna, eager to celebrate her return from oblivion, threw herself into rounds of important visits. Chevalier Betskoy, whose ardor had visibly diminished during the time of uncertainty, was back at her side. Johanna always looked the other way when I passed her in the palace corridors, as if it would diminish her worth to acknowledge my greetings.
I saw Catherine almost every day, although our time together was brief. The Empress refused to allow the Grand Duchess to visit her fiancé. Each time we met, Catherine would ask if the Grand Duke ate well, which books he liked me to read to him, if he could stand without holding on to a chair.
He was stronger with each day, I assured her.
The story of shipwrecked seafarers who mistook a giant whale for an island was his favorite now.
He listened to music after dinner.
She never asked me how he looked. And I was grateful for it.
Two more weeks passed before Catherine was allowed to see her fiancé for the first time since his illness.
I had just finished my daily reading when the footman appeared in the doorway and announced the arrival of the Grand Duchess. Peter winced, teeth closing on his fingernails. I could see how hard he fought not to cover his face. That day he was wearing a bushy powdered wig, making his head look bigger than it was. Not a good match for his still-scrawny neck.
Catherine walked in, too fast, I thought, too eager.
“I brought you a present, Peter,” she said, halting in mid-step. I saw her face grow pale. I saw her eyes slide away in a revulsion she didn’t know how to hide. I saw the blind, raw fear that made her gasp.
“What is it?” Peter demanded.
“A violin.”
She held out the case. When he touched her fingers, her hand recoiled.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
“I was so worried, Peter,” Catherine persisted, her voice too tight. “It was terrible not to know what would happen. I prayed for you. I was so frightened. They wouldn’t let me see you.”
“Who wouldn’t?” He opened the case but did not remove the violin.
“The Empress. My mother. Everyone. I tried to learn to play the clavichord, but I’m not musical like you.”
She spoke fast, words meant to cover her unease, but how could he not see the quiver of her lips, the forced smile?
“You cannot stay very long,” he said. “I’m still weak.”
“I prayed for you, Peter.”
“You said that already.”
The Grand Duke pushed the violin case aside. He picked up one of his model soldiers. “I may still die. I have to be careful.”
“Then you will be careful,” she said. “We’ll both be very careful. You won’t die.”
The right words, I thought, but they’d arrived too late.
From the field that stretched in front of the Winter Palace came loud barks. Dogs were chasing one another out there, as they often did. From time to time a squeal marked a moment when play turned to menace.
In the silence that followed, Peter gave Catherine a fleeting, ferrety look.
“Don’t come any closer,” he snarled when Catherine approached his bed. She stopped.
He knocked a toy soldier from the side table.
“Pick him up.”
She bent obediently. When she handed the figure to him, he wouldn’t take it.
“Put it where it was.”
She set the toy soldier on the table. I could see how she willed herself to look at Peter’s pockmarked face.
“Go away. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
She did not move.
“Go,” Peter insisted, his voice higher, more shrill.
She bowed.
“
Go
!”
Slowly, she turned and walked away.
Later that night, I slipped into Catherine’s room. She lay motionless, her eyes wide open. Her left foot, bandaged, was elevated on two pillows.
She had been bled again.
I didn’t have to ask her what had happened. I had already heard the maids whisper that as soon as the door to Peter’s chambers closed behind her, the Grand Duchess had clutched at her stomach. She had barely made it to the privy before she vomited the omelet she’d had for breakfast. In her room, she vomited again. Her body trembled, her face was flushed, but her hands were chill as ice.
The maids gossiped that her mother had ordered her to stop crying. When she couldn’t, Princess Johanna had slapped her daughter’s face. “If he sends you away now, you fool, there is nothing but shame for you back home,” she screamed.
The Grand Duchess, the maids whispered, didn’t calm down until the surgeon opened her vein, until his bowl filled with four ounces of her blood.
I took Catherine’s hand in mine. I felt the gentle squeeze of her fingers, still cold to the touch.
I gently wiped tears from her face.
She turned to me. And then in that full, soft voice, she said, “I don’t know what I would do without you, my Varenka.”
That night, I took out the piece of amber with the two bees. Through the cracks of the paneled walls seeped the smell of incense the maids burned in the Grand Duke’s room to sweeten the air. A candle sputtered. An owl hooted somewhere on the palace roof.
Could life ever be simple again? Will I ever wake up with a light heart?
I thought of the Chancellor’s hands, the brush of his fingertips on my skin. I thought of Purgatory, where the tally is kept of all our sins to be measured against our good deeds. What would be heavier, compassion or greed? Mercy or betrayal?
I thought of the living praying for the dead.
Would anyone pray for me?
I don’t recall falling asleep, but when I woke up the piece of amber was still in my hand.
At midnight of the first Sunday of March 1745, Great Lent began with the solemn tolling of the cathedral bell.
The Bible, the priests reminded the faithful, says that before the deluge man ate nothing but the fruit of the earth, extracted through backbreaking labor. This is why foods not absolutely essential for the maintenance of life must be given up at Lent in penance for human sins.
The Empress, still exhausted after the Great Duke’s illness, abstained from her annual pilgrimage and was allowed to eat fish twice a week. The convalescing Duke was fully exempt from the fast and took Communion in his bedroom.
Only Catherine ate nothing but bread and boiled vegetables. She drank water instead of wine and took her coffee without cream. She stood by the Empress’s side at Mass and took Communion before gathering her maids-of-honor in her rooms for daily prayers.
She was still sending the Grand Duke presents. A set of model soldiers for his re-creations of the famous battles. A Polish guitar strung with catgut instead of wire.
The Grand Duke refused to see his fiancée. If he spoke of her, he never called her Catherine or even the forbidden “Sophie.” It was always “she.”
“
She
is here again? Does
she
have nothing else to do? Tell her I am busy with my music. Tell her I have an important letter to write.”
I longed to scold him, but you cannot scold a Crown Prince. You can only ignore the petulant sneer on his lips and repeat, “The Grand Duchess asked if she could come back later. The Grand Duchess said she didn’t mind waiting.”
In the antechamber to his rooms, Catherine sat patiently for hours until he relented and ordered me to allow her in. When he did, I would open the door to the sight of her face, white and drawn.
I hoped I was the only one to notice her tears.
Sometimes he turned his back on her and refused to talk. Sometimes he would order her to make herself useful. That meant arranging troops on the model battlefield he was working on or holding the pieces of fortifications he was gluing together. “You’re so clumsy!” he yelled when she put soldiers in the wrong place.
When he told her the visit was over, she left, her pale face serious, composed, impossible to read.
“The redness will go away,” she would say when anyone asked her about her fiancé. “The hair will grow back. He is alive. This is all that matters.”
To the Empress, she said that the Grand Duke often spoke about his gratitude. “Your Majesty saved his life. No mother could have done more for her son.”
She kissed the Empress’s hands. “Now it is my turn to make him happy,” she told Elizabeth.
I noted the blush, the modest bow, the flash of eyes widened with awe and gratitude. She had learned her lesson: No one would ever again see her disgust or fear.
If you act long enough, acting becomes part of you.
I was not the only one to take note of the changes in the Grand Duchess. Even the Chancellor stopped calling her a little
Hausfrau
, and he no longer smirked when he mentioned her name.
But just when I began thinking that Catherine had a chance, the Chancellor played his trump card, the one I wanted so badly to forget.
I was with the Empress in the low-ceilinged garret at the west wing of the palace when the Chancellor came with Johanna’s letters.
“Stay,” he said when I rose to leave.
I froze.
“Your Majesty should take a look at this,” he said, handing her the pages covered with Princess Johanna’s crooked scrawl.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Prussian gratitude,” he answered.
She gave him an impatient look but took the letters and motioned for him to hold a candle closer.
He stood beside the Empress as she read, his red velvet jacket unbuttoned, a monocle in his right eye flashing every time he moved his head. The Empress emitted grunt after angry grunt.
Giving us her sweat-stained dresses, as if we were beggars. Making us sing praises of this filthy palace … this daughter of a peasant … playing an Empress when she would be happier in a stable …