Tsarina

by Ellen Alpsten

  Peter placed his hand on my belly. ‘Take good care of the Tsarevich,’ he whispered, and I started: Tsarevich. To date, Alexey still held that title.

  As if my thoughts had summoned him, a messenger handed a letter from Alexey into my litter just as I was about to leave. He wrote from Brunswick, where he was with his bride Charlotte. Agneta read the message aloud to me. ‘“Your Majesty, I am glad to hear that my father has raised you in rank to be his wife, and that you are with child again. Please always bless me with your grace. I do not dare to congratulate my father, as the Tsar has left me unaware of his decision and his happiness. Please commend me to him. I am in your hands – Humbly, Alexey.” ’

  It was incredible: Peter had not told his own son about our wedding. Not that I would ever speak that thought aloud.

  ‘Enough! I’ve heard enough. Give me the letter, Agneta.’ Ernst Gluck’s daughter had been my lady-in-waiting for several months. ‘It reeks of stupor and fornication.’ I grimaced, sniffing at the crushed paper, then pushed the scroll into my sleeve.

  We rocked along to the Neva pier where Schlüter was due to arrive. The air in the litter was stuffy. I moved closer to the window to fight my rising nausea. When I fixed my eyes on a still point it usually helped, but the midday sun made the stench of the drying swamp around the city unbearable; gnats cruelly bombarded the labourers and our bearers skilfully avoided teams of workers, who were either carrying the stones needed for the construction of the Peter and Paul Cathedral or else loading the barges that sat low in the water. The architect Trezzini had carefully planned every one of the cathedral’s details, from its pointed tower, which allowed a sighting of Finland, to the exquisite furnishings of its interior, where from now on all members of the Tsar’s family would be buried. I looked across the construction site, which was teeming with workers: would my own grave, too, be there one day?

  Just then, directly next to the window of my litter, I saw a man staggering under the weight of the rocks he carried. His arms had been scourged and scarred, dark holes gaped in his skull instead of his nose and ears: he had already twice tried to escape; at a third attempt he would be killed. My stomach turned, and I drew the curtain in front of the window. I could not help him, even if I’d wanted to.

  The quay was teeming with sailors, merchants and children, girls of easy virtue, tradesmen and people strolling by checking the wares newly arrived in the city, which was in need of everything. The sweet scent of hot pies and fresh beer drifted into the litter. Babushky bent low under the loads on their shoulders, the old women blocking our route as effectively as the herds of cattle and drays laden with barrels and chests. We reached the port just as the frigate from Rostock furled its sails and sailors cast the ropes ashore. Everywhere, galleons and smaller vessels rocked on the waves, and the air smelt of salt, pitch and smoke. The wind caught at the colourful flags and bunting displayed by ships creaking at their berths. Sailors climbed nimbly from one mast to another, swinging like monkeys on the rigging. Voices shouted in all known languages, ​​and seagulls rode the wind under their widespread wings, gliding ahead before diving down into the spray and reappearing with fish glittering in their sharp beaks. Agneta gave me a hand before two guards stepped up to give me firmer support and I found my footing. How good it felt to escape the stuffiness of the Winter Palace and be here, amongst real, ordinary people. Since my wedding I had not been on my own for a moment, and I missed solitude.

  ‘Who is this Andreas Schlüter?’ Agneta asked, smoothing her skirt.

  ‘A German master craftsman who is said to have built a room entirely from amber for the Prussian King. Peter lured him to St Petersburg by promising a huge sum.’

  We were joined then by Domenico Trezzini, Peter’s master builder. I made a few pleasantries, waiting to see how long it would take for his hot-headed Italian pride to get the better of him. ‘Trezzini, what are you doing here instead of supervising things at the cathedral?’ I asked ingenuously. ‘Why, you are the man who has created the city of the Tsar with his own hands – how will they manage without the benefit of your expertise?’

  I felt him seething. ‘Oh, I’m here quite by chance,’ he said, grim-faced, looking out over the waves with brows furrowed.

  ‘What a lucky coincidence it is then,’ I said amiably.

  ‘Why did the Tsar bring Schlüter to St Petersburg?’ he burst out.

  ‘Jealous, Trezzini?’ I said, feeling quite sorry for him despite myself. ‘The Tsar admired Schlüter’s work in Berlin and has invited him to help ornament St Petersburg.’

  ‘Schlüter has squandered the King of Prussia’s money. The foundations of his last tower wouldn’t bear its weight. Nevertheless, the Tsar appoints him director of constructions here and pays him five thousand roubles a year. I have neither such a title nor such a salary!’

  ‘The Tsar calls Schlüter a – genius.’ I pronounced the word carefully.

  Trezzini snorted, but I saw tears in his eyes. I tapped his shoulder lightly with my fan. ‘The city is big enough for ten or even twenty talented builders such as you and the German. Do not worry.’

  He bowed just as Andreas Schlüter appeared on deck, counting his belongings, since chests and bundles disappeared all too easily in the hubbub of the harbour. Compared to the men of St Petersburg, who after the long winter looked like maggots or whose faces were permanently reddened by vodka, he resembled a young god; his dark-blond hair was long and unpowdered. The open collar of his starched, pure white shirt showed off his strong neck, accentuating his fresh complexion and bright even teeth. Agneta stared at him so openly I was forced to shove her. ‘Pull yourself together, Agneta! Close that pretty little mouth. You look like a trout, gawping like that,’ I whispered.

  ‘Forgive me, Tsaritsa. But I think that only a man of such beauty can create something as wonderful as a room made solely of amber . . .’ she said dreamily.

  ‘We have not seen it yet. It is highly unlikely it exists at all,’ I replied.

  The sailors dragged Schlüter’s boxes from the ship, while he himself walked down the companionway and stepped onto the wharf. ‘It’s good to have solid ground under my feet again. So this is the Venice of the North, the paradise of the great Tsar?’ he said to me in German and bowed.

  I graciously extended my hand for him to kiss my fingers.

  Trezzini wasn’t jealous for long. Schlüter died that autumn of the fever that rose like mist from the marsh around St Petersburg. The same illness took my delicate newborn daughter Margarita. After only a few weeks of life, her name was recorded in the saddest of all the court’s many lists: the roll call of my dead children. Peter mourned with me, but I knew that in his heart of hearts he was relieved it was but a daughter that we buried. A few weeks later, he came to me and say, ‘Poor little Margarita. What is done is done and there is no way of questioning God’s will. Still, it is time now for a healthy, strong son, a strapping recruit for my army.’

  He smiled and kissed me, but his eyes were sad and serious.

  I first met Charlotte two years after her wedding to Alexey, when she finally arrived in St Petersburg. I remember the strict parting in her thin blonde hair as she curtseyed: my ladies-in-waiting giggled at her as she truly was as flat as a boy and her face was badly scarred from the smallpox. But her eyes were friendly and mild, her smile came easily, and her voice sounded like a silver bell when she said to me in German, ‘What a joy it is for me to meet you, Tsaritsa. I have heard so much of your grace and generosity that I pray to be your devoted and loyal friend.’

  She eyed me closely while she spoke so politely. I knew that the whole of Europe gossiped about me. In Paris, Madame, sister-in-law of the Great Louis, openly mocked me: ‘The Tsaritsa of Russia is mouse shit pretending to be poppy seed!’ But I opened my arms to embrace my stepson’s wife. ‘Welcome to Russia, Tsarevna. May St Petersburg become your home, as it is mine. God bless you and your marriage.’ The princess leant in to me like a bird that had fallen from its nest and I of
fered her a stool next to my throne. ‘Sit down and tell me about your wedding. Was it splendid?’

  She blushed. ‘Oh, yes. Divine, in fact. We all deeply regretted that you could not keep the Tsar company back then.’

  I hid a smile, for the one who had not regretted it at all was myself. On Alexey’s wedding day, Peter had been obliged to drag him by his hair into the chapel of Torgau Castle. The evening before, the Tsarevich had clung to his confessor, shrieking shrilly: ‘Never! I will never marry a heretic. As Tsar, I must defend our faith. How am I to do that with a Lutheran woman at my side? This is blasphemy.’

  The priest had shielded the Crown Prince with his body until Peter knouted him; Alexey got the Tsar’s fist between his eyes. The next morning he was wed to Charlotte, who was allowed to retain her Protestant faith and received twenty-five-thousand Reichstaler, a collection of extravagant tableware as well as carriages and horses from Peter – the dowry her impoverished father could not pay. Both men, Peter and the Duke of Brunswick, beamed with joy at the union. Menshikov, I heard, sent a watermelon as a present.

  She chattered on breathlessly and a few scarlet spots bloomed on her pale, sunken cheeks. ‘Well, at least the Tsar was with us. I cried like a fountain when my father led me up the aisle to the Tsarevich.’

  Charlotte had been sold to Alexey just as I had been sold to Vassily, I thought with sadness, though for rather more money. ‘On the morning after the wedding, the Tsar sat on our bed and chatted with us,’ she said. The poor girl! Alexey had probably raped her more or less, and then she had to report to Peter on the consummation of the marriage. My eyes grazed her narrow waist and she blushed: there was no sign as yet of a pregnancy.

  All the courtiers were seemingly engrossed in conversation, but I knew they were straining their ears. ‘I’ll give you Marie Hamilton as a lady-in-waiting. She will help you form your household,’ I said. Charlotte kissed my fingers and Marie Hamilton curtseyed submissively. But by the look in her big green eyes I knew that she understood I was to be kept fully informed of everything that happened in Alexey’s household and bed. Marie Hamilton would follow my orders just as she already fulfilled the Tsar’s wishes.

  55

  The guest Peter most ardently wished to welcome to his new city – peace – made itself scarce. For two years Menshikov and thirty thousand soldiers roamed the northern German princedoms in order to negotiate peace, but the governments were wary of having to feed Menshikov and his men after the Swedes’ long years of occupation. The wounds of the Thirty Years War – which started almost a century ago, the ruling European powers locked in a murderous struggle for supremacy – were yet to heal in the heart of Europe; so that even Peter was impressed when Menshikov pressed further money from Lübeck and Hamburg, which had just been ravaged by the Black Death. Despite all the German complaints, Peter refused to call Menshikov back; one-third of the funds raised paid for the construction of the new fleet.

  In May, when the first sunshine warmed our souls and skin, Peter went to Finland to wage war further. When Helsinki gave itself up to the sixteen thousand Russian soldiers, he wrote to me from Åbo in early September: ‘Soon Finland will be purged of any Swedes. The Finnish girls have rosy thighs, but I have not laughed for days. Remain faithful to your starik, who loves you so dearly, and come to me, Catherinushka, as soon as you can. Kiss our little daughters goodnight.’

  I smiled when Agneta paused in her reading: after a short knock, Charlotte’s new lady-in-waiting hurried into the room. I waved Agneta out and eyed Marie Hamilton, the beautiful Scotswoman who stemmed from the German Quarter in Moscow. She, too, was pregnant. Who was the child’s father: Peter or the former Streltsy soldier Grigori Orlov? He had escaped the executions by sheer courage and cheek. When he mounted the scaffold, where Peter was waiting, axe in hand, Orlov kicked aside the head of the man who had been executed before him and shouted, ‘By God: must I make room for myself ?’ Peter, always appreciative of bravery and wit, pardoned him there and then, and today Orlov blessed the damy of St Petersburg. I had heard he was hung like a horse.

  ‘What’s the matter, Marie? You seem out of breath?’ I asked mockingly.

  ‘It is about the Tsarevich,’ she panted, laying her slender hand on her ample bosom, not at all embarrassed about her condition.

  I sat up, excited. ‘Is Charlotte finally pregnant?’

  ‘On the contrary. Alexey has not slept with her since their wedding night.’

  ‘What?’ That was the last thing I had expected. Like his father, Alexey suffered from a surfeit of lust.

  ‘Worse, just this afternoon he asked his confessor how he could rid himself of her and send Charlotte back to her parents,’ Marie Hamilton cried.

  ‘And what did the old fool answer?’

  ‘Apparently this can easily be done if you are married to a woman of another faith who is barren. If she does not bear him a child in three years of marriage, he can expel her, the priest says. Otherwise he can baptise her, shave her head and send her to a convent. Charlotte does nothing but wail and when Alexey sees her, he throws whatever is to hand at her, be it a chair, a vase or crockery.’

  Hearing this, I struggled to control my anger, rising so hastily from my stool that it toppled over. In my heart, I dearly wished to believe in Alexey – to me he was still the timid boy I had met so many years ago, who’d smiled at me shyly on the Kremlin’s balcony. Peter had left him to Menshikov’s guidance and to careless, often brutal tutors. It wasn’t Alexey’s fault that he had not an ounce of his father’s strength of character. Still, he was the Tsarevich, and this was more serious than I had thought. ‘Get my carriage and my cloak. I shall pay a visit to my stepson,’ I ordered. A servant ran off, his metal-capped soles sounding on the wooden parquet.

  ‘But . . .’ Marie began, sounding worried.

  ‘But what?’ My Imperial green silk cloak was placed on my shoulders and I felt stronger and empowered to do whatever I had to do, stretching out my arms and raising my chin. ‘Dress me up, Marie. I have to look like the Tsaritsa.’

  She hung a necklace of multiple strands of turquoises and diamonds around my neck and hooked the matching pendants into my ears; bracelets snapped shut around my wrists. ‘Alexey has guests in the Winter Palace tonight,’ she said carefully, her eyes lowered.

  ‘Whatever that means. Do you think I have not seen a feast before? Don’t worry, I’m not easily shocked,’ I said dryly, as I checked my appearance briefly in the mirror. Good. Marie curtseyed to me as deeply as her swollen belly allowed.

  The small staircase of the Summer Palace on the Fontanka Canal was still warm from the day’s sunshine when we left. Our carriage shook on the gravel drive through the garden that Peter had carefully planned. Marie fought against nausea, but I felt no compassion for her and looked out of the window instead. Dusk drew a veil of blue light over the water, and in the balmy, bright summer’s night lovers were sitting on the steps of the jetties along the river, talking and laughing. On the quayside, men taught their sons how to swing their fishing rods into the Neva, and the teal-coloured feathers of the ducks blended with the river’s waves. St Petersburg evenings cast a spell like a net, in which we all were caught as helplessly as fish.

  The carriage jerked to a halt outside the Winter Palace. Alexey and Charlotte had moved in to its cold splendour, whilst Peter and I preferred the simplicity of the Summer Palace with its Delft tiles, low ceilings and brightly painted wooden walls. It was a house, properly speaking – our house – and not a palace.

  I looked up at the imposing façade, Trezzini’s masterpiece: torches flickered behind the countless windows, whether the rooms were in use or not. Footmen hurried to my carriage, but otherwise the vast courtyard was empty. When I got out, I heard voices raised in rude songs in the upper reaches and laughter and shrieks from Alexey’s banquet. Suddenly I had a premonition that made my skin tingle.

  ‘Give me your whip,’ I ordered the coachman, and he passed it to me with a look of surprise. I
clenched the silver-mounted handle in my fist. ‘Marie. Show me the way.’

  Our steps echoed up the wide, empty staircase and then along the corridors of grey and white marble; our figures were reflected in the high gold-framed mirrors along the walls. Soldiers stood to attention at every corner we passed, but no courtiers were to be seen. They were either with Peter in the field or else had used his absence finally to spend some time with their families.

  ‘Should we really do this?’ Marie whispered, but I followed the sounds of voices and music until we reached the small black marble dining-room.

  The guards outside the door crossed rifles with bayonets spiked on top. ‘No passage, by order of the Tsarevich!’ a soldier with spots as big as bulbs on his face barked; the other one had barely any teeth left and gave an empty grin.

  ‘If you do not wish to go to Siberia tomorrow, boys, or be broken on the wheel, then make yourself scarce,’ I said coolly.

  ‘The Tsaritsa,’ Marie snarled, and both men knelt, banged their foreheads on the floor and muttered reverences and apologies. I entered and the first person I spotted in the hall full of carousing, cavorting people was Charlotte herself. It was unbelievable. The wife of the Tsarevich of All the Russias was serving his drunkard friends beer! Just then, one of them smacked her meagre backside. ‘Ouch! What a bony arse! But vodka is a magic potion: it makes any girl beautiful,’ he howled, pinching her naked arm. The princess fought back tears and from the other end of the hall I heard hoots and claps. I felt cold to the pit of my stomach, to witness her humiliation.

  ‘Take Charlotte to the Tsarevich’s bedroom,’ I ordered Marie, who fought her way through the crowd to the weeping and cowering Crown Princess.

  I myself turned up the collar of my cloak, though nobody noticed me; they were all too drunk. When I reached the other end of the hall, a group of men stood gathered around a table, jeering. ‘Yes! A toast to our Crown Prince!’