I nodded. That’s what they say about me in all the courts of Europe. My background is the running joke that always puts envoys in a good mood. But for Peter, whatever he willed at any given time was normal and so nothing was extraordinary any longer.
Menshikov’s glass slipped from his fingers, his chin dropped onto his chest and the wine spilt, leaving a large red stain on his white lace shirt and blue waistcoat. The last weeks, days and hours caught up with him. A moment later, he was snoring and hung as limp as a rag doll in the chair. I could grant him some rest before Tolstoy and the Privy Council arrived. Then he would be carried back to his palace to sleep off his stupor. Menshikov already held the Order of St Andrew, as well as far more serfs and titles than I could grant him. There was nothing left to promise him. He had to stay of his own accord: Nothing binds people more powerfully than fear for their own survival, Catherine, I could hear Peter say.
I walked over to the window, which looked over the inner courtyard. The golden icons sewn to the hem of my dress tinkled with each step. When little Princess Wilhelmine of Prussia saw the way I dressed on our visit to Berlin, she had laughed out loud: ‘The Empress of Russia looks like a minstrel’s wife!’
I pushed aside the heavy curtain that kept at bay the inky chill of a St Petersburg winter night – our city, Peter, our dream! Alexander Nevsky Prospect and the Neva were shrouded in the darkness that now held you forever in its arms, the darkness that hid the breathtaking beauty of what you had created: the icy green shade of the waves blending to perfection with the rainbow hues of the flat façades of both palaces and houses, such a novelty twenty years ago. This city that you raised out of the swampy ground, by the sheer strength of your incredible will and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of your people, nobles and serfs alike. The bones of the forced labourers lie buried in the marshy earth as the city’s foundations. Men, women, children, nameless and faceless; and who remembers them in the light of such magnificence? If there was a surfeit of anything in Russia, it was human life. The morning would break wan and cool; then, later, the palace’s bright, even façade would reflect the day’s pale fire. You lured the light here, Peter, and gave it a home. What happens now? Help me . . .
Candlelight moved behind the windows of the fine, tall houses, gliding through rooms and corridors as if borne by ghostly hands. In the courtyard below, a sentry stood hunched over his bayonet, when with a clatter of hooves – sparks flying off the hard cobblestones – a rider dashed past him and out through a gate. My fingers clenched the catch of the window. Had the doctors obeyed my order? Or had the rider left to confirm the unthinkable? What would happen to me now? Volya – great, unimaginable freedom – or exile and death?
My mouth was dry with fear: a feeling that knots the stomach, turns sweat cold and bitter, and opens the bowels. I hadn’t felt it since – stop! I mustn’t think of those things now. I could only focus on one thing at a time, whereas Peter, like an acrobat, would juggle ten ideas and plans.
Menshikov was mumbling in his sleep. If only Tolstoy and the Privy Council would come. The whole city seemed to be lying in wait. I bit my fingernails until I tasted blood.
I sat down again close to the fire and took off my slippers, stiff with embroidery and jewels. The warmth of the fire made my skin prickle. February was one of the coldest months in St Petersburg. Perhaps I should order some mulled wine and pretzels instead of the Burgundy; that always gave me a swift boost. Was Peter warm enough in the room next door? He couldn’t stand the cold and we had always been freezing on the battlefield. Nothing is frostier than the morning after a battle, be it lost or won. I could only keep him warm at night when he sought refuge in the folds of my flesh.
People asleep look either ridiculous or touching. Menshikov, snoring open-mouthed, was the latter. I drew Peter’s last will from my sleeve and the scroll lay in my lap, so close to the flames. Its letters blurred as my tears came: real, heartfelt tears, despite the sense of relief. I still had a long day and longer weeks ahead of me and I would need to shed many more tears. The people, and the court, would want to see a grief-stricken wife with tousled hair, scratched cheeks, a broken voice and swollen eyes. Only a show of love and grief from me could make the unthinkable acceptable, my tears more powerful than any bloodline. So I may as well start weeping now. The tears weren’t hard to summon: in a few hours I might be either dead, or wishing I were, or else I’d be the most powerful woman in All the Russias.
1
My life began with a crime. Of course, I don’t mean the moment of my birth nor my early years. It’s better to know nothing of life as a serf, a soul, than to know but a little. The German souls – nemtsy, property of the Russian Church – were more wretched than you can ever imagine. The godforsaken place in which I grew up is now lost in the vast plains of Livonia: a village and a country that no longer exist. Do its izby – the shabby huts – still stand? I neither know nor care. When I was young, though, the izby that lined the red earth of the village street in rows, like beads on a monk’s rosary, were my world. We used the same word for both: mir. Ours looked just like many other small villages in Swedish Livonia, one of the Baltic territories under the rule of Stockholm, where Poles, Latvians, Russians, Swedes and Germans mingled and lived together, more or less peacefully – in those days.
Throughout the year, the road through the village held our lives together like the belt on a loose sarafan. After the spring thaw, or the first heavy rains of autumn, we would wade knee-deep in slush coloured like ox-blood from our izba into the fields and down to the Dvina river. In summer, the earth turned into clouds of red dust that ate its way into the cracked skin of our heels. Then, in winter, we would sink up to our thighs in snow with every step, or slide home on ice as slick as a mirror. Chickens and pigs roamed the streets, filth clinging to their feathers and bristles. Children with matted, lice-infested hair played there before they came of working age, when the boys stood in the fields, chasing away the wild birds with rattles, stones and sticks, and the girls worked the monastery’s looms, their delicate fingers serving to make the finest fabrics. I myself helped in the kitchens there from the age of nine. From time to time a loaded cart, pulled by horses with long manes and heavy hooves, would rumble through the village to unload goods at the monastery and take other wares to market. Apart from that, very little happened.
One day in April, shortly before Easter – the year 1698 according to the new calendar the Tsar had ordered his subjects to use – my younger sister Christina and I were walking down this road, heading through the fields towards the river. The pure air was scented with the greatest wonder of our Baltic lands: the ottepel or thaw. Christina was dancing: she spun around in circles, clapping her hands, her relief at the end of the darkness and cold of the winter palpable. I clumsily tried to catch her without dropping the bundle of washing I was carrying, but she dodged away.
Throughout winter, life in the mir was on hold, like the shallow breathing of a bear who lives off the fat beneath its fur until spring. In the long season, the leaden light dazed our minds; we sank into a listless gloom, soaked with kvass. No one could afford vodka, and the bitter, yeasty drink fermented from old bread was just as intoxicating. We lived on grains – oats, rye, barley, wheat and spelt – which we baked into unleavened flatbreads or made into pastry on feast days, rolling it thin and thinner, before filling it with pickled vegetables and mushrooms. Our kasha, the gruel on which we subsisted, was sweetened with honey and dried berries, or salted with bacon rinds and cabbage; we prepared vast amounts of this vegetable every autumn, chopping, salting and pulping it, before we would eat it every day. Every winter I thought I’d be sick if I had to eat sauerkraut one more time, but we also owed our lives to it. It helped us withstand a cold that would freeze the phlegm in your throat before you could hawk it up.