‘Indeed,’ my father said. ‘Tsesarevny, you are not to rule Russia. But you can pass on the right to its crown by marriage and childbirth.’
‘Marriage? Has there been word from France?’ I asked. ‘Now that I am a Tsesarevna, Versailles has all the more reason to accept my hand, doesn’t it?’
My parents swapped glances. Prokopovich piously folded his hands.
Better rule marriage out, the Leshy spirit’s taunting words rang in my mind.
‘Good things take a while to happen,’ my father said casually, yet his face twitched. He was furious about Versailles’ delaying tactics. Mother raised her eyebrows in a silent warning to me: better leave it there or one of his fits might be the result. ‘The King of France – or another good husband who reigns a powerful country,’ she said soothingly.
A husband to rein you in.
Father cast her a grateful glance – she alone knew how to handle his epileptic fits – and clapped his hands. The doors were flung open. ‘Come now,’ he said, ‘let us celebrate my new heirs. I have one last surprise for you today. Somebody who is a fount of wisdom when it comes to life as a married Tsarevna!’
13
‘Aunt Pasha!’ I called delightedly as Tsar Ivan’s widow, the Tsaritsa Praskovia, pushed her way into the little study. Since her husband’s death almost thirty years ago, she’d worn only soot-coloured clothes. When I had been a child, I had thought she looked like one of Father’s ships in full sail, all rigged out in black. An opaque dark veil covered her raven hair, which was frosted with grey and adorned with strings of charcoal-tinted pearls, each as large as a chickpea. Her dark train, too, was embroidered with a shower of black pearls and jet crystals, but even their lustre did not lighten her appearance. She was well known to Anoushka and me: Aunt Pasha had taken care of us in the beautiful countryside palace of Izmailov near Moscow each time Mother had followed Father, be it on travels in Europe or into battle.
Time had not changed our aunt, perhaps because Father looked after her so generously. Once her daughters, the Tsarevny Anna and Ekaterina Ivanovna, had been so splendidly married off to their German Dukes, Father kept Aunt Pasha in great comfort: nothing benefits a woman’s looks more than a full purse and a well-stocked pantry. Her round face was hardly wrinkled and her sour-cherry eyes twinkled as she assessed us as cunningly as when she’d caught us as children playing dress-up with her precious costume chest. While Aunt Pasha had had her own company of actors, we had not been supposed to stage plays of our own.
Now she curtsied deeply to us. ‘Tsarevny! Elizabeth and Anoushka – my little sunshine nieces,’ she cooed.
‘Please do not, Aunt Pasha. Rise.’ I stepped forward to help her up and spotted a woman standing on the threshold directly behind her. I looked at her, surprised. Her richly embroidered dress – its cyclamen colour looked familiar; was that not one of my St Petersburg cast-offs? – hung slack on her thin frame and her scalp showed bald patches where whole clumps of her straggly black hair had been torn out. The skin about her blackbird eyes looked bruised and her face marked, as if from a bad fall. Anoushka, too, had noticed her and sharply drew in her breath as the stranger’s pinched lips parted in a mockery of a smile, which made us both recoil. We bumped into Mother, who stood behind us like a wall, forcing us towards the stranger. A couple of her teeth were missing as if knocked out.
‘How you have grown, Cousins Elizabeth and Anoushka,’ the stranger said to us.
14
Anoushka and I swapped a quick glance, in which surprise, doubt and apprehension mingled. Cousins? In her house in Izmailov, Aunt Pasha surrounded herself with a court of holy men, fools, scoundrels, beggars, gypsies and other waifs and strays. She fed, clothed and housed them, as had been the tradition in olden days. Normally, they fled in terror and hid at the thought of having to meet Father; this woman might be an exception to the rule, coming to Peterhof to seek him out. The poor creature looked as if she had tumbled from a carriage, become caught in the reins and been dragged along. I was ready to greet her with pity and kindness when I met her stare, which was inky with jealous hostility. She took it all in – my primrose-yellow silk dress, cut according to the latest French fashion, its stomacher tight and sparkling with pearls and crystals, and the skirt deliciously, exaggeratedly full. Ounces of gold and silver had been added to the thread, which dainty hands had fed through the precious gown in thin needles to embroider it all over; intricate patterns of pearls and crystals gleamed like a sprinkle of sunlight. Many arshin of Lyons lace adorned the hem and sleeves as well as my full cleavage.
‘Look who is back from her Duchy in Mecklenburg: my daughter, your darling cousin Ekaterina Ivanovna,’ Aunt Pasha said.
Anoushka and I swapped a shocked look. So, this was one of our cousins Ivanovna, whose good luck and fortune as a married Tsarevna Anoushka and I had envied just weeks ago!
Before we could greet her, Ekaterina turned away, her voice chiding: ‘Come now, meet the family. For God’s sake – do not claw at my skirts. Your fingers are grimy.’ Behind her scant figure, a pale young girl was hiding, clutching the stiff fabric of Ekaterina’s dress – yes, it was one of my cast-offs! – with really rather grubby little hands. Her slanted dark eyes were set in a curiously round, plain face. She cowered like the mouse I kept in my bedroom, only my pet was better fed and cared for. The girl stared, taking it all in: my giant of a father, leaning against the windowsill where the rays of the afternoon sun framed him like a halo; my mother, sparkling like a jewel casket; Aunt Pasha, who opened her arms welcomingly, beaming a wide smile; Menshikov’s relaxed demeanour; and finally Feofan Prokopovich, who bowed his head in a polite greeting.
Ekaterina pulled the child close. They both curtsied deeply, which revealed the bald patches on her scalp. ‘I am back, dearest Father-uncle, as my husband left much to be desired.’ She ever so slightly, cunningly, offered her maimed face to the bright light. My father chewed his lip, weighing her brutally mutilated looks. Her hair should grow again. His cook would fatten her up. Possibly those missing teeth could be fixed: the German Quarter in Moscow was home to an ivory carver, if not two.
‘Welcome back, Ekaterina Ivanovna, my niece. And who is this?’ Father openly appraised the child, who returned his gaze dully.
‘This? This is the son and heir I failed to give my husband, the Duke, much to his displeasure,’ Ekaterina said. ‘Meet my daughter Christine, Princess of Mecklenburg. I hope for her to be brought up here in Russia as a Romanov.’
Aunt Pasha smiled at my mother, eyebrows raised expectantly. Even as a Tsar’s widow, she still had to make sure to bring in her harvest and hustle for what she thought was her due.
Mother took the cue: ‘Dearest Pasha, you have looked after Anoushka and Lizenka so well whenever I accompanied the Tsar. We are so grateful for all the kindness you have shown them – and me. Princess Christine is most welcome here. She will be treated like my daughters’ younger sister.’
Anoushka and I stooped, kissing the child on both cheeks; her skin and hair smelled of the cheap camphor soap used to keep nits at bay. Christine’s dark features placed her clearly within Aunt Pasha’s side of the family, the Saltykovs. I cast about for something friendly to say to Ekaterina and noticed another woman sidling up to Aunt Pasha. I almost recoiled but caught myself in time: this was Maja, my aunt’s trusted maid. The poor woman was harelipped, a terrible punishment meted out at birth. The skin between her thin upper lip and wide nostrils lay open in an awful gash, showing gums and yellow teeth. Yet Maja had already been Aunt Pasha’s maid when our uncle Tsar Ivan chose her as his bride, being led by his advisers past a bevy of shy, innocent boyars’ daughters in the Kremlin Hall of Facets, as he had been incapable and too ill to walk himself.
‘Tsarevny,’ Maja lisped, and curtsied to us.
‘Maja.’ Anoushka smiled at her. ‘How good to see you. I still remember how you spoiled us with hot chocolate from Spain the first time we arrived in Izmailov as young girls.’
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p; ‘True,’ I chimed in. ‘And you took us to the “Wolf House” to see the polar bear cubs that had been born there, before showing me the shortcut through the “Babylon”, the maze in Izmailov. What luck to look after three generations of Romanovs, Maja – now that Christine is here.’
Maja blushed. ‘You are too kind, Tsarevny, to remember a humble woman like me at all. It will be my joy to look after Her Highness.’ She smiled at Christine, who recoiled, looking aghast. ‘Would you like some chocolate, too?’ Maja asked, having suffered much worse reactions a thousand times over due to her looks. The girl shied away, hiding behind her mother and pointing her fingers in horns, a sign against the Evil Eye. ‘Hexe,’ she shrieked in German. ‘Böse, böse Hexe.’
‘What is she saying?’ Aunt Pasha frowned.
Ekaterina shrugged. ‘Nothing but the truth. She is calling Maja an evil witch.’
Maja flushed.
‘Go,’ Aunt Pasha said curtly and the maid fled.
‘This is quite a reunion,’ Mother smoothed things over. ‘Let us celebrate! The only one missing is your other daughter, dearest Pasha. What a shame not to have Anna Ivanovna here. That is the downside of marrying off your daughters abroad.’
‘How is Anna doing in her Duchy of Courland?’ Father asked, while the dwarf d’Acosta circled Christine and mimicked Maja, pulling up his lip, which made the child giggle. Then he tugged her dress and dashed off, inviting her to a game of ‘It’.
‘How is she? Does she not report regularly to you, the Tsar, as is her duty?’ Pasha purred, clearly content to have achieved her goal of placing her granddaughter Christine in the Imperial household
‘She does.’ Father sighed. ‘Sometimes, at least. Mostly she asks for a more generous personal purse.’
‘I apologise for my daughter’s rotten behaviour. Anna never ceases to shame her house,’ Aunt Pasha snorted. ‘She has taken up with a former groom. I have forgotten his name. Brinn or Bronn or something like that. He lives with her in the palace… ’
Her words shocked me, and Anoushka, too, stared at me, wide-eyed. Not bad enough that Ekaterina had left her husband, her palace and her Duchy! Aunt Pasha’s other daughter, the Duchess of Courland, Anna Ivanovna, ‘lived’ with a groom. The thought of any contact with such hairy, smelly, sweaty and coarse fellows as grooms was horrid to us. What about her husband, the Duke?
‘A groom? It’s Anna Ivanovna the Terrible indeed!’ d’Acosta chuckled. He’d left Christine standing in the middle of their game, panting and red-cheeked. The little man then hopped about, neighing and clapping his hands to mimic the sound of hooves. The child picked up on the game and followed him around.
‘Behave, Christine. Out, creature!’ Aunt Pasha thundered, kicking him squarely on his little backside. If she as Anna Ivanovna’s mother was allowed to chide her wayward daughter in public, a jester and an imp certainly was not. ‘Go and stuff your ugly face in the kitchens.’
D’Acosta was unabashed: he laughed and now pretended to eat, gulping, eyes bulging, cheeks distended. ‘In Russia we don’t need bread and milk. We devour each other instead, blood and bone and all!’
‘Enough!’ Mother ordered, her tone of voice making d’Acosta retreat anew beneath Father’s desk, his vantage point of observation.
‘I thought Cousin Anna Ivanovna was married to the Duke in Courland?’ Anoushka dared to ask. Our cousins Ivanovnas’ marriages and lives were the only indication of our own likely future that we had. Seeing Ekaterina, and hearing about Anna, tinged my excitement with hesitation, if not serious doubt – and fear.
‘Well, yes. Or, she was, at least.’ Mother dabbed her eyes in a show of sympathy. ‘For three days anyway. Such a terrible, unjust tragedy.’
‘Ha! I wish I had been so lucky as to enjoy such a brief marriage. Instead, I had to suffer almost a decade of – all this.’ Ekaterina waved one hand to encompass her own battered appearance, blinking away tears.
‘What happened after those three days to Anna’s Duke?’ I asked.
‘May God have mercy on his soul.’ Aunt Pasha crossed herself using three fingers. ‘He had feasted so much at the wedding that he fell sick when leaving St Petersburg, three days after the celebrations. He tumbled from the sled, fell headfirst into the snow and suffocated.’
‘My God,’ I gasped. ‘Why did Anna then not return to live with you, Aunt Pasha?’
‘She has to hold Courland for Russia.’ Father shrugged.
‘Also, her husband had spent all her dowry already to settle his gambling debts. So, who would have her now?’ Ekaterina said. ‘It’s a common theme amongst Germanic dukes. Though mine beats all records. He never returned the dowries he received with his two first wives, whom he divorced, leaving the poor women as penniless and undesirable as I am.’
‘What about the emerald I gave him at your wedding? It was huge – as big as a walnut. And my other gift, the four hundred trained soldiers in uniform?’ Menshikov enquired.
‘Split into a thousand pieces since long,’ Ekaterina said. ‘And the men were sold off as foreign mercenaries.’
‘You want yourself to be seen as a generous prince, Menshikov, yet you keep accounts like the baker’s son you were,’ Pasha cut in. ‘Anna is lucky to have Courland for her home. A stable boy or groom or whatever this chap Biren is, is the best she can hope for now, the wretch.’ She shook her head as if to say: What did I do wrong?
‘We all make mistakes,’ Father declared, tired of the bickering. ‘Welcome back, Ekaterina. My brother’s daughters are like my own. Young Christine will be raised as a Romanov. Menshikov, stop squabbling over a handful of heyducks, because that is what your so-called soldiers were. Make yourself useful and get Champagne – lots of it. Let us toast Anoushka and Lizenka,’ he ordered.
‘Toasting the girls?’ Aunt Pasha asked, eager to please Father. ‘Do we finally have news from Versailles? I shall be the first to cheer that.’
‘Not quite yet,’ I said.
‘Father just made us Tsesarevny.’ Anoushka smiled. ‘Even if we will not rule, we will pass on the right to the Russian throne.’
‘Tsesarevny! Did you come up with this grand new title, Feofan Prokopovich? Trust you and your spin on words. How wonderful!’ Aunt Pasha almost suffocated us in her embrace; her gown’s scent of myrrh and cloves was intoxicating. She smelled like a week of Yuletide. As I came up for air, I saw Ekaterina Ivanovna snatching her daughter’s hand, making the child reel. I sensed my cousin’s thoughts, twisting and turning like a caged weasel. What would her life back in Russia be like? I felt pity for her: her bed had been made by others and she had been forced to lie in it.
Pasha’s voice was treacly as she repeated: ‘Tsesarevny of All the Russias. I must tell Anna Ivanovna that in my next letter. That should shatter the eternal boredom of her life in Courland. Apparently, she spends all day lying on a bearskin and lathering herself in butter.’
‘That would take a lot of butter,’ Ekaterina giggled.
‘Enough. Here is the Champagne.’ Father seized two bottles from Menshikov’s hands, who had more stuck in the crook of his elbows and beneath his armpits. The morning had been too dry for his taste already. Two chamberlains followed, carrying a silver vat large enough for little Christine to bathe in. It was filled with roughly hewn chippings from the Peterhof ice house and a dozen or so more bottles.
‘To my beautiful daughters!’ Mother raised her brilliantly coloured Murano chalice, which broke the bright light of Peterhof into prisms. The Champagne was as frothy as a frivolous joke and tickled my nose when I took a sip. Menshikov burped after emptying a first glass bottoms up, and going immediately for a refill. Ekaterina had downed three glasses, when I had not finished half of mine, and made two spare, empty goblets discreetly disappear into the folds of my old dress: their gilt rims should fetch a good price in the gostiny dvor. Christine was cross-eyed with tiredness, crawling beneath Father’s desk to join d’Acosta. Mother and Aunt Pasha chatted of old times. Father leaned by the open wi
ndow on his own before beckoning me closer to say: ‘To your health and Russia’s glory, my Lizenka, little chicken. Did you know that people in Versailles have more Champagne than blood in their veins?’
As we stood there by the vista of the Bay of Finland, my love for him linked the two of us like the opposite ends of a bracket, as if the others were not even present.
Menshikov with his usual jealousy would have none of it. He stepped up to us and raised his glass. ‘What a decision! Here’s to the Tsesarevny. Why did you not consult me at all?’
‘Why should I?’ Father smacked him playfully with the dubina. ‘Your patronym should be insolent, Menshikov.’
I toasted them: ‘To the glory of Russia, always.’ I felt warm and loved, surrounded by friends and family, happy ever after. Though as I turned back to the room, my eyes met Ekaterina Ivanovna’s hungry dark gaze before she quickly averted it. And just like that I remembered Anoushka’s question, back in Grandfather Alexis’ throne room in Kolomenskoye:
‘Do you think they ever mind?’
‘Mind what?’
‘That we are now the first ladies in Russia, even though mad Ivan was Father’s elder brother and a reigning Tsar, too.’
Every blessing can be a curse, and too many people wanted what I had: I was the Tsar’s daughter.
15
The summer flew by in a haze. As the sweet season gave way to falling leaves and chilly winds, we joined Father in Riga, a stronghold of the powerful Hanseatic League and formerly the seat of the Order of the Teutonic Knights. The city was the trump in his newly stacked pack of political cards, the Western Baltics, now part of All the Russias for eternity. In the Great Hall of Dünamünde Fortress, fires roared, servants scuttled from kitchen to table to avoid a beating if the food grew cold, and acrobats somersaulted over the flagstones or juggled with shiny wooden clubs.
‘Who is the sour-looking fellow over there?’ I asked my mother: opposite us, a young man held himself upright with difficulty; his slight build and pallor singled him out amongst the red-faced, shouting revellers. He fastidiously avoided flying food and patently disliked having drink spilled over his new, well-tailored clothes. As other men shoved and encouraged him, half jovial, half annoyed, he refused either to link elbows with them or to join in with raucous drinking songs, curtly shaking his head. Everything about his face was thin: his nose, lips, even the lids and lashes of his pale blue eyes, making him look washed out.
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