Free Empress of the Night by Eva Stachniak Page A

reveal themselves. Gifts arrive with assurances of devotion: swaths of fabric, cases of wine, rare books, invitations to name-day celebrations, requests to join her at cards. Peter’s staunch supporters, Countess Shuvalova and her brothers-in-law, are still plotting against her, but Chancellor Bestuzhev—her onetime enemy—now pesters the Grand Duchess with promises of support.
    In the Winter Palace it is either her or Peter.
    The future Emperor comes to his wife’s rooms every evening. Sucking on his clay pipe, sending clouds of suffocating smoke in her direction, Peter delivers his revelations. Russian ships are so rotten that a royal salutewould sink them. Earthworms, boiled with oil and red wine, are the soldier’s best remedy for bruises. Peter’s eyes do not rest on her but seek her maids-of-honor, the true recipients of these daily visits. It is for them that Peter curls his wigs into fashionable pigeon wings and perfumes himself like a sultan. Or, rather, for one of them in particular. Elizabeth Vorontzova, whom everyone calls Das Fräulein . “Yes, Your Highness … No, Your Highness … How smart you are, Your Highness …” Vorontzova may be short, ugly, and coarse, but not to Peter.
    She, his wife, tries to summon her rage, but fails. The truth is that nothing but her lover’s presence can rouse Catherine out of despair. She concocts Serge’s lean face out of memory scraps, searches for his low, thick voice in the voices of other men, imagines his touch, his caresses, until the pain of his absence stabs too hard. It feels as if she were slowly being torn apart, piece by piece.
    “Your Highness must hear me out,” Chancellor Bestuzhev says. “There is no good way to say it. I won’t even try.”
    In Sweden, Chancellor Bestuzhev informs her with a pleasure he doesn’t even try to hide, Serge Saltykov strides like a peacock, clad in the glory of his imperial love affair. “Frivolous,” the Chancellor says. “Indiscreet.” Serge boasts of the Grand Duchess’s passion for him, hints at what rewards it might yet bring.
    “I don’t believe it,” Catherine screams. She has heard these words before. Rumors have always stuck to Serge. “Why does everyone wish me to stop loving him?”
    The Chancellor of Russia nods gravely and changes the subject. Das Fräulein ’s antics irk him more and more. Her preening. Her coarse jokes that make the Grand Duke laugh: A fly comes to the tavern and asks for a plate of shit with onions. “Only go easy on the onions,” the fly tells the tavernkeeper. “I don’t want to stink.”
    The Chancellor sighs and suggests that such jokes are easy to reproduce. He could supply Her Highness with a whole line of them, grand lords and ladies with urgent needs to relieve themselves in most unusual places, or the usual permutations of sexual couplings. “Your Highness could also make her husband laugh, occasionally … knowing how laughter provides release.”
    Catherine shakes her head.
    Bestuzhev is not the only one who tries to poison her feelings for Serge. Everyone feels entitled to blacken her lover’s reputation. Varvara ticks off her questions on her fingers, one by one: “Hasn’t he sent his wife away just to be free of her tears? Hasn’t he pawned his mother’s jewels?”
    Serge may be bad-mouthing her at the Swedish court, she concedes, but only because he believes that this is the only way to protect her. Put more distance between them. Stop the rumors that would hurt her and her son.
    All she needs is to talk to him.
    Hear him out.
    Make him see that she has not changed.
    And she will see him. As soon as he comes back to Russia for the New Year.
    1755 will be the year of great changes.
    She has begged Empress Elizabeth to excuse her from appearing at the New Year’s ball. And now, her request granted, dressed in a white muslin gown, she ties her hair with a pink ribbon and perfumes her body. Before leaving, her maid has been ordered to put more logs