*
There was nothing human in either my lover’s scream or the brief ripping sound, as if a trader tore silk off a bale in the gostiny dvor. A fleshy pink and foamy rag dangled from the pliers; a shred of bone attached to it. I tasted bile, cupping my mouth, having to watch as Buturlin – my friend, my love, once so full of courage and bravado – spouted a fountain of blood, collapsing on the scaffold boards. He lay in a puddle of russet, clutching his throat, passing out anew. The executioner threw the tongue to the hovering crows, which set upon it in a black, clamouring cloud.
‘The Tsar’s will be done!’ Prince Alexey Dolgoruky shouted, rising from his seat, and the crowd roared, ready to scatter, eat, drink and be merry. Petrushka led Katja to the Imperial sled; she cast me one last triumphant glance and climbed into the open vehicle, where she sat prettily wrapped in furs and velvet. Petrushka mounted the sled’s back, standing as a footman would, bending down to whisper to her. She nodded as the horses set off. It hurt me to breathe; I could not fight my tears, yet never tasted their salt as they froze on my cheeks in a crystalline layer.
The snowfall shrouded the sight of the coarse sled that dragged the unconscious man away: Petrushka had demoted him to a simple soldier, sending him to Kamchatka on a posting of no return. As his regiment dispersed, some soldiers looked shaken, wiping away tears they had not been allowed to shed before the Imperial couple. The simple people of St Petersburg, so little spoiled, living in their wooden houses and shacks that stood hidden behind the first row of palaces on the Neva’s riverbank, scooped up horse droppings to dry and feed their hearths with. As I sat and regained my strength, fresh flakes hid the traces of Buturlin’s suffering on the scaffold’s sullied snow. The crows returned to the trees, waiting for richer pickings next time round. Even the St Petersburg dogs, scarred, shaggy beings, stayed away. I sat, shaking and sobbing, stooped with sorrow, until the court had departed.
‘Tsarevna, let us leave. It is too cold here. I shall blend you a sleeping potion,’ Lestocq said gently, as if talking to a child. I saw real pity in his eyes, a rare thing at that point in my life. ‘You have to be strong,’ he reminded me.
Sleep? I feared nothing more. The horror of what I had witnessed would surely blight my dreams, imprisoning me in an untiring nightmare. I clasped his fingers as a beggar would a coin: ‘Strong? For what? More of that? Pain and disgrace for everyone who loves me – Augustus, Anoushka, Buturlin?’
Lestocq shook his head, snowflakes settling on his thick auburn hair. ‘God’s bow has many arrows,’ he said, touching the pocket that hid the Tarot pack, as if casting a spell.
The sight made me shudder.
He led me back to the sled and tucked me in, as a father would a child, hooking the bearskin securely across my lap.
54
‘Will Feofan Prokopovich conduct Petrushka’s wedding service?’ Alexis Dolgoruky had had the Archbishop of Novgorod, who had given Father daring counsel, placed under house arrest as soon as Petrushka came to power. Feofan, who had conducted my parents’ marriage ceremony and crowned my mother, had neither crowned the young Tsar nor was he to be seen elsewhere.
It was our last evening in the Summer Palace before departing for the Tsar’s wedding in Moscow. A maid packed my chest – it did not take her long as I barely had any dresses left to choose from; whatever I had bought with the roubles Petrushka had given me, I had sold. Once more, the Princess Cherkassky had proved to be a loyal customer and friend; once more she did not dare to wear what she bought but passed it on to her maids. In my rooms, wind chased down the chimney, making the flames cower and wafting ashes and embers.
‘Prokopovich was arrested a couple of days ago,’ Lestocq said. ‘The Secret Office of Investigation has taken him to the Trubetzkoi Bastion for questioning.’
I stared at him, mute with shock. If Feofan Prokopovich could be arrested, who then was safe? We all knew what it meant to be taken to the Bastion for questioning.
‘What else were you expecting? Alexis Dolgoruky fears him. Ostermann has to choose new allegiances. Feofan Prokopovich was your father’s closest ally,’ Lestocq said. ‘All traces of the great Tsar’s work will be eradicated. Russia is stuck in a mortal struggle between the past and the future.’
*
The Imperial Treasury blocked my funds indefinitely – no money was needed in a convent after all, Katja was overheard jesting with her ladies upon her arrival in the Kremlin. I had nothing left to sell as Lestocq and Schwartz joined me in the sled travelling from St Petersburg to Izmailov: my last days of liberty, awaiting Petrushka’s wedding, would be spent at Aunt Pasha’s and my cousins Ivanovnas’ former house. At least my monkeys’ chatter and my birds shrieking in their cages would lighten the mood. I had refused to take any books. Reading had never done Anoushka any good, so what benefit would it be to me?
The sky was exhausted after a night of steady snowfall. Crows rose from the birches’ bare branches, cawing and flapping, as I left the Summer Palace for what was possibly the very last time. I wished to lock the sight of the house’s buttercup and crimson façade forever into my heart. Once in a cold convent cell, the memory of it would offer me solace. As I got in the sled, a rider approached on the haphazardly cleared gravel path, his horse ploughing through the snowdrifts. ‘Tsarevna Elizabeth! Wait, please,’ he called, his breath clouding around him. He got off his mount and handed me a delicate, beautifully carved chest of ebony. ‘A gift from the Bride Tsaritsa. She gave it to me before she departed for the Kremlin.’ He bowed, his cheeks bright red and raw from the cold. What on earth could Katja Dolgoruky have sent me? I shook the chest. It gave a soft thud.
‘What is it?’ asked Lestocq, sounding guarded.
‘It feels light. I shall have a look once we are in Izmailov. Let us be off.’ I tucked the chest away as I should have been surprised if Katja had sent me anything worth having. For all I knew it might be a nun’s habit, cut from coarse, dark cloth.
The journey to Izmailov passed in sullen silence, my two companions probably wondering how to present their diplomatic failure to their respective courts: all those years they had been shadowing me, championing my possible – or impossible – cause. The horses slipped many a time on the roads, their surface frozen hard as iron, making the sled veer violently. The air crackled with frost and the clouds darkened with further snow. I longed for sunlight, however bleak and short-lived it might be.
My nights would soon be long enough, if not eternal: any time now.
The thought of attending Petrushka’s wedding terrified me. I envied my cousin Anna Ivanovna, Duchess of Courland, whose letters pleading to join the ceremonies accompanied by her lover Biren were read out for the court’s entertainment and then filed away unanswered.
Izmailov offered me no respite: the formerly lovingly cared-for palace – once a testing ground for all of my Grandfather Alexis’ ideas concerning Russian agriculture – had been abandoned for years. The guards had deserted as soon as their wages had gone unpaid. Serfs and farmers had plundered the larders and cellars. Beneath the snow the orchards and the fields lay fallow and the plethora of fish ponds were suffocated with weed, turning the thick ice green with frozen lily pads. The fruit trees stooped under their load of snow. The ‘Babylon’, the maze where Anoushka and I had played hide-and-seek as girls, was almost too overgrown for me to identify. In the Wolf House, which had once been home to orphaned sable, fox and even polar bear cubs, the rotting door creaked on its hinges; the cages were empty and soiled by rats. Bats hung from the beams; their faces scrunched up in sleep.
Everything weighed down my spirits; any endeavour, either to improve my living accommodation or to impose order on the palace grounds, felt daunting and dull. I struggled with the hopelessness that lay like lead on my mind and fettered my heart. Whichever task I started seemed pointless – be it having the baskets filled with firewood, the ponds and streams dredged, the cracked tiles replaced on the roof after too many winters of heavy snowfall, or even join
ing the hunters. Whatever torment Katja planned for me, Petrushka would give it his seal of approval, I knew.
I had thought to become mistress of my own fate by refusing Petrushka, moving from pawn to player. Instead, he had instantly replaced me in his affections with Katja, and now I was firmly in her hands.
And just like that, the inner Ice Princess rejoined me in the solitude of Izmailov, occupying my heart where she settled at her cruel craft, shredding my soul with her icicle fingers, her frosty gaze puncturing my spirit into a sieve, all the last vestiges of my strength and happiness pouring out. She shadowed my every move; any mirror reflected only her, eyes exuding a pale fire that chilled me to the core.
I remembered Katja’s parting gift only a couple of days after my arrival in Izmailov. There was no key in the chest’s delicate lock, so I prised it open. As I lifted the lid, a sickly-sweet, rotten smell made me recoil. I cupped my mouth and nose, eyeing the ragged thing inside: small bones poked through dark clumps of flesh and feathers. Shocked, I dropped the chest on the hard flagstones, where it shattered. I reached for the candle to peer closely at what it had contained: at my feet lay what was left of Molniya, the peregrine falcon. My beautiful bird’s neck had been wrung before Petrushka’s hounds had mauled her. She was a tawny mess, her once shiny, subtly spotted feathers sullied by clotted blood. As hard as I tried to steel myself, Katja’s message cut straight to my heart.
It was a lonely walk through Izmailov’s dark, silent corridors. In the kitchen I waved off the maid who slept in the warm ashes of the oven, guarding the fire during the night – leave me alone! – and shovelled some glowing embers onto a cast-iron tray. I crashed back the door’s heavy bolt and slipped into a pair of heavy servant’s boots that were standing on the threshold. The cold of the clear night bludgeoned me, but I forced myself out of the door. I broke through thigh-high snow, struggling to balance while clutching the remains of the chest and carrying the fire tray. My fingers became numb and every breath stabbed my lungs. If I walked too far, I should never return; for a heartbeat, the thought seemed alluring, but then I fought it. No! Not yet. Not here.
The edge of the deep, dark frozen Izmailov Forest stood before me like a wall. I reached the shelter of the first trees, scraped the icy snow aside and hunched over, stiffly shaping a dome of frozen twigs and rimy leaves. The tinder was slow to light, but I showered it with sparks, blowing carefully until there was a first crackle. Flames danced blue and yellow, bathing me in cold light. Molniya’s corpse was frozen stiff when I placed it on the pyre; for a breath or two, the fire shied away from her. As the flames finally seared her feathers, the metallic smell of her bloodied flesh was hard for me to bear. I waved it away, choked by tears: ‘Fly safely, my friend,’ I whispered, then rose to crush the last bits of Katja’s accursed chest beneath my boot, finally feeding the ebony splinters to the flames. Once Molniya was gone, I kicked snow on the fire, hearing it hiss and watching it die. The ashes I ground into the frozen earth. As the last bitter smoke rose to the stars and the full moon, my beautiful bird returned where she belonged: to Mother Russia.
The day of the Imperial wedding drew closer.
Once my lonely Yuletide was over, I should have another week of liberty. The court relished being in Moscow once more: women set upon the gostiny dvor like a plague of locusts, men never left the kabaki and the Red Square’s many coffee houses, reading newspapers, sipping the hot, bitter brew, exchanging gossip and eyeing the endless stream of newcomers: Russians from all over the realm poured into the city. Come Epiphany, Petrushka blessed the waters of the Moskva by stripping off his cloak under the clerics’ watchful eye and dipping himself in the freezing waters through a hole drilled in the thick ice. Prince Alexis Dolgoruky applauded loudly: it seemed Russia was to return to the old ways. It was as if Father and all his hopes and endeavours for his realm had never been. I tried to make discreet enquires about Feofan Prokopovich’s fate, but in vain. Was the priest alive still?
That winter was colder than any other in Russia’s memory. Birds fell from the sky, frozen in mid-flight. The Izmailov lawn was strewn with feathered corpses, hard as stone when I gathered them. The single mica panes in the houses’ lead frames were covered in crystalline frost patterns inside and out. Rime whitened the bare flagstones – all the rugs had been stolen and sold – as well as the bare walls; Aunt Pasha had taken all the hangings when she moved to St Petersburg. My fingers shrivelled when I yanked open a window to rub my face with snow. The shock did not put an end to my waking nightmare. As cold as the house was, a deeper chill rose from deep inside me. Bleakness flowed through my veins, covering my hoary soul. I was lost in an eternal Russian winter, the beast that could as yet bring any enemy to his or her knees.
I summed up my life so far. The men who had loved me – both Augustus and Buturlin – had been struck down because of it. From now on I must stay a spinster and bear no child. In any case, in a short while I was to be sent to a convent, shackled to the void of my endless numbered days, as possibly my wrists and ankles would be to a wall. I fought the fear and instead relished the memories of the love and friendship I had shared with Augustus as well as my love and lust for Buturlin.
I decided no regret should weigh me down further.
‘You have to eat,’ Lestocq urged me, while clearing away my untouched dishes: simple fare such as baked potatoes and smetana, sauerkraut and kasha laced with bacon rind. This was as far as our budget stretched.
I shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about me. It is too late. Save yourself.’
‘Drink at least,’ he insisted, lacing my chai with vodka and possibly some laudanum: I soon slipped into a heavy sleep riddled with nightmares. Augustus was with me, inflaming my senses. Then Anoushka lit a furnace, showing me the burn marks on her arms, sparks and embers flying. In the ensuing blaze, Buturlin held me tight before he faltered, melting like a tin soldier, his body a bubbling, toxic puddle at my feet. The child Petrushka grew into a man before my eyes, his features sharp and bird-like as Molniya’s, his gaze a whetted blade, ready to stab me. Flames devoured the scarlet Imperial seal, the double-headed eagle crumbling away before it fell to ashes, smoke billowing in the shape of a peregrine falcon before dissolving into thin air. Curse the Romanovs: the Leshy spirit bared its fangs. I woke, sobbing and scared. Lestocq bled me as I was burning with fever.
I fought him and his damned needles and knives, ordering him to leave me, but he settled close to my bed, lining up his Tarot cards, letting them dance and spiral under his deft hands. ‘Put those away!’ I moaned, recalling the horror of their prophecy for Buturlin. Yet as I fell back weakly amongst the cushions, my face sweaty and my mind reeling, his eyes were still glued to the cards, a frown on his forehead.
55
Petrushka braved the cold to greet the regiments that were to stand guard over his winter wedding, thousands of men, acknowledging them one by one, like a good and gracious Tsar. In all he spent four hours on the ice. Afterwards, he mounted the same light sled that had carried Katja and him away from Buturlin’s scaffold, standing upright behind the seat, exposed to the freeze that kept even hardy Muscovites in their homes. Katja wore a tight bodice of blue velvet adorned with golden toggles to match her sparkling eyes and display her famously full breasts; her fine-boned face was haughtier than ever. Sapphires and diamonds sparkled in her ears. Two dozen horsemen in silver livery accompanied them, musicians played and pageboys ran alongside, showering the couple with scented petals on this bleakest of midwinter days. Petrushka bowed to Katja, complimenting her on her beauty: whatever dark force had driven him to this engagement, he seemed determined to carry it through in style.
As Katja was whisked away to recuperate in a hot banja, Petrushka returned to the Kremlin. One hour later he complained of a searing headache. He was served steaming glasses of grog before being wrapped in heated furs. Although his fever soared, his attendants wasted hours before calling in the doctors. The Tsar’s teeth chattered, his limbs trembled; he was unable
either to stand or to sit for crippling backache. When diarrhoea and vomiting set in, his physicians were finally called.
Petrushka was confined to a darkened, overheated room where he lay delirious.
As I left Izmailov, the sky hung low over the palace, ready to spit with sleet. Laden bushes and trees groaned for fear of further snow; crows’ sooty wings covered the heavens. In the waiting sled, a maid placed a hot copper pan at my feet and another one beneath my blanket. She curtsied and kissed my hand, crying and taking leave for good: ‘God bless you, Tsarevna Elizabeth. Russia loves you, and always will.’
As my sled set off, the first pustules had appeared on Petrushka’s young face, neck and shoulders: searing, angry and ruby-red. Smallpox took just hours to blossom. The boils burst, spreading their vile pus, before turning scarlet and scabby. He screamed, pleading to scratch, but his physicians forced his hands into mittens and bound his wrists to the bed. They bled him and kept the room, which was stuffed with fearful courtiers, heated at banja level. The Tsar gasped, suffocating and begging for air, yet no one dared give the order to open the window. In the Dolgoruky Palace, Katja had been locked in her apartment where she howled, unhinged by the news that had upended her life once more.
No one dared approach her.
I was oblivious to all this when I arrived at the Kremlin in the early-morning hours, preferring to journey on through the darkest of nights than stay at a grubby inn, its windows nailed shut against the cold and hung with wax cloth, the straw on the floors soiled and rotten. My sled’s torches ate into the inky blackness, their tar dripping into the snow and making a hissing sound, keeping wolves, bears and highwaymen at bay. I held my whip and Lestocq and Schwartz their pistols at the ready. The Kremlin’s steward was sleepy and half-dazed with drink; the rooms he allotted me were much too mean for someone of my rank. My mounting dread rendered Lestocq’s laudanum useless. I could not sleep even as my lids burned with fatigue. I avoided the mirror in my room: soon, I should be shorn-headed and lacking any last traces of finery. I was twenty-one years old yet felt I had already endured enough for ten lives if I added up all my loves and losses. I paced the room, torn by fatigue and fear.
The Tsarina's Daughter Page 27