Great Catherine (13 page)

When not protecting herself from the malice of others, or being subjected to disquieting scrutiny, Catherine was neglected and filled with ennui. "No amusement, no conversation, no nurture,

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no kindness, no attention sweetened this tedium," she wrote, looking back. It was no wonder she cried, and cringed when her women caught her crying, and called the doctor.

Dr. Boerhave, an educated man who was not unaware of the strains and deprivations Catherine was forced to endure, was sympathetic when he was summoned to attend her. He knew that her headaches and insomnia, her weeping and low spirits were brought on as much by fear as by any physical weakness, and that the more she went without sleep the more likely she was to contract measles—which she did, twice—and to succumb to respiratory infections. During the severely cold winters she suffered from "twelve handkerchief a day" colds, she spat blood and the doctor worried that her lungs might be infected. He examined her head one morning before the hairdresser came in and discovered that, even though she was seventeen years old, her skull bones were still in an unformed state, like those of a six-year-old. Her headaches, he said, resulted when cold air was allowed to reach the fissure in her skull.

Her teeth hurt. Often when in a state of misery, her temples throbbing and her jaw clenched in pain, she had to endure a long evening of brittle courtesies, wishing and praying that she could leave and nurse her wretchedness in privacy. For many months one of her wisdom teeth gave her particular agony until, with great trepidation, she agreed to have it pulled.

The court surgeon, inept and no doubt very frightened of what might happen to him if his work displeased the empress, grasped his tongs and asked the grand duchess to open her mouth. She braced herself for his assault, sitting on the wooden floor with one of Peter's valets holding one of her arms and Dr. Boerhave the other. The cruel tongs went in, the surgeon turned and twisted them while the victim screamed in pain, tears flowing from her eyes and nose "like tea from the spout of a teapot." With a final terrible wrench the surgeon drew out the tooth—and a large chunk of bone along with it. Now blood gushed forth like a river,

soaking Catherine's gown and staining the floor, and her whole face felt as if it were on fire.

Just at that moment the empress appeared in the doorway, and at the sight of Catherine's suffering she began to cry too. The doctor told her what was being done, and Catherine herself, as the bleeding began to subside, told Boerhave that the surgeon had only managed to pull out half the tooth—one of the roots was still in her wounded jaw. The petrified surgeon tried to feel for it with his finger, but Catherine wouldn't let him.

Servants brought basins and hot cloths and an herbal poultice to lay on the wound, the surgeon paced anxiously, and after a few hours Catherine was able to lie down and rest. In a day or two she was able to eat again. The great pain in her tooth was gone, though her jaw and chin were black and blue for weeks afterward and her headaches and insomnia continued.

One source of pain Catherine was determined to avoid. She made up her mind within days of her marriage never to allow herself to fall in love with her husband. "Had he been lovable, even the least bit, I could have loved him," she wrote, looking back. "But I said to myself, 'If you love that man, you'll be the most unhappy creature on the face of the earth.' She lectured herself sternly, advising herself to remain detached from the pitiable, at times malicious boy to whom she was now yoked. "He hardly takes any notice of you," she told herself, "he talks only of dolls . . . and pays more attention to any other woman than to you." Hardheaded and clearsighted, Catherine was fully aware of how futile it would be for her to attach herself to her husband. He would be a friend to her at most, never a cherished love.

And indeed their married life was hardly conducive to love. There was no sexual intimacy between them, Peter appeared to be utterly indifferent to Catherine as a sexual being, and, in her hearing, told his servants that her attractions were far inferior to those of his current love, Fraulein Karr. ("He was about as discreet as a gunshot," Catherine wrote in her memoirs.) They kept

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separate apartments, and though Peter slept in Catherine's bed each night, he insisted upon dressing and undressing in his own rooms, and lived as independently as he had before their marriage. He seemed, to feel no urgency about fathering an heir; though he knew perfectly well that his aunt expected him to have children with his new wife he ignored her expectations—perhaps because he knew that Catherine would bear the blame for her childless state. He may have been impotent. He was often ill, his doctor came frequently to his rooms to bleed him, and early in 1746 he caught a severe fever that lasted nearly two months.

Once again, while the grand duke struggled to recover from a major illness, the empress became panicked about the succession. If Peter should die before Catherine became pregnant, all of Elizabeth's painstaking plans over several years, all the wedding preparations, the entire sequence of events that had been meant to culminate in the birth of a child to carry on the Romanov dynasty, would have been for naught.

Peter's fever abated, but more months passed and still Catherine showed no sign of pregnancy. After nearly a year of marriage, she was barren. Elizabeth believed she knew why.

The whispering had been going on for a long time. The grand duchess, it was said, was in love with Andrei Chernyshev, one of Peter's valets. She had been discovered alone with him in a compromising situation. Her heart was his; gripped by her love for him, she could not be a wife to Peter, and so she was childless.

All the whispers reached the empress. She collected them, sifted them during the long wakeful hours of the night, and pondered what form of punishment might be a suitable response to Catherine's treachery. She ordered both Catherine and Peter to go to confession, and instructed the priest to question Catherine pointedly. Had she kissed Chernyshev? Catherine denied it vigorously. The priest relayed her denial to the empress, along with his opinion that the grand duchess was sincere. But the whispers continued, and the empress's suspicions grew until finally, tired of waiting for nature to take its course, and convinced that

Catherine was endangering the very kingdom by her faithlessness, she took action.

She strode into Catherine's apartments unannounced, and discovered the girl with her arms in bandages. Catherine had been suffering a severe headache for several days, and the surgeon had been bleeding her in an effort to alleviate it. At the sight of the empress, whose expression was ferocious, the surgeon and all the servants fled, leaving the bewildered Catherine to face Elizabeth on her own.

Catherine, who described the scene in her memoirs, recalled being so frightened that she was sure Elizabeth would beat her. She had rarely seen such a fearsome display of anger, and she felt helpless as the empress paced back and forth in front of her, then pinned her against the wall, accusing her in thunderous tones of having betrayed Peter with another man.

"I know you love someone else!" she raved over and over, working herself into such a state of rage that Catherine's servants, who were cowering on the other side of the door, became convinced that their mistress was in mortal danger. Madame Kraus, not knowing what else to do, ran into Peter's rooms and got him out of bed, telling him to come quickly to rescue his wife.

Peter threw on a robe and came as quickly as he could. As soon as he entered the room where the two women were the atmosphere changed. Elizabeth backed off and Catherine was able to move away from the wall and begin to catch her breath, wiping her tearstained face, her chest still heaving. Abruptly the empress addressed herself affectionately to Peter, speaking in a normal tone of voice, ignoring Catherine entirely. She stayed on for a few more moments, never looking at Catherine, and then left.

The alarming scene was over—for the moment. Peter went to his bedchamber to dress for the evening meal, and Catherine, badly shaken, sat down and tried to recover her presence of mind. She bathed her eyes and dressed, knowing that word of the terrible incident would have reached everyone in the palace by the time she emerged from her apartments to go to dinner. She felt,

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she later wrote, "as though the knife were in her breast," yet she managed, with supreme self-control, to eat her dinner in outward calm.

After dinner, still very upset, she threw herself down on a sofa and tried to read. But she could not concentrate, the words blurred on the page. In her mind's eye she kept seeing another image, that of the fierce-eyed, red-faced empress, shouting at her and shaking her fist, saying again and again that it was her own fault that she had no child.

Chapter Eight

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CHANCELLOR BESTUZHEV WAS SEVERELY DISPLEASED. NOT only had the empress disregarded his advice in choosing the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst to marry her nephew and heir, but she was tolerating the intolerable: that the princess was not yet pregnant.

In the chancellor's view, Peter and Catherine were two wayward, spoiled children who needed badly to be taken in hand. The best way to do this, he decided, was to appoint new, strict guardians to discipline them. He drew up instructions to be given to these disciplinarians, once they were appointed, and presented them to Elizabeth in May of 1746.

The instructions for Catherine's new guardian stressed the primary importance of the grand duchess's reproductive obligations. Catherine must be made to understand, Bestuzhev wrote, that she had been elevated to imperial rank solely to provide the empire with an heir to the throne, and nothing must interfere with her swift accomplishment of that goal—not personal friendships or trifling with "the cavaliers, pages, or servants of the Court," not clandestine meetings with representatives of foreign powers, certainly not familiarities or flirtations. A pattern of conduct must be set for the grand duchess by her new chaperon, one in which all frivolity and shallowness was avoided and seriousness cultivated, along with wifely devotion and allegiance.

At the same time, Peter's new guardian must reverse the ill effects of his bad upbringing, Bestuzhev's instructions insisted. Peter must be compelled to mature, his embarrassing habits must be restrained. Now that he was a married man, he must be made to see that he had new and serious obligations. He must be kept from spending his time with vulgar dragoons and uneducated lackeys, forced to give up his regiments of wooden soldiers and made to adopt a dignified posture and civil manners.

Bestuzhev's instructions reveal just how odd a creature Peter was, his arms and legs constantly jerking and twitching, his scarred face a grotesque mask of scowls and frowns and clownish expressions, his speech foul and his favorite diversion pouring wine over his servants' heads at the dinner table. There was a manic quality to Peter's pastimes: he giggled and chortled while disrupting church services and provoking dignitaries by telling them dirty jokes. His pronounced cruel streak had more than an edge of lunacy to it. People said that he was mad, or would soon go mad, and averted their fear-filled eyes from his sometimes wild ones.

The chancellor made his written recommendations to the empress, and the empress, after two weeks, finally read them. She decided to appoint to the post of Catherine's guardian her first cousin Maria Choglokov, a handsome young woman in her early twenties who, though somewhat thick-witted, had a strong sense of propriety and was not likely to be susceptible to Catherine's charm or to be diverted by her wiles. Humorless, unimaginative, and inclined to be spiteful, Maria was nonetheless a model wife who adored her good-looking young husband and had already given him several children. More than any of her other qualities, it was her fruitfulness that appealed to Elizabeth; Maria was perpetually pregnant, and the empress hoped that by placing her in charge of Catherine, some of this fruitfulness would be passed on to her.

Where Peter was concerned the problem was more difficult. The grand duke's tutors and his governor Brummer, who had

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endeared himself to Catherine and "loved her like a daughter," were not easy to replace. Elizabeth chose Prince Repnin, a cultivated aristocrat whose refined tastes, she hoped, would in time elevate Peter's aberrant ones. Witty, gallant and sociable, the prince was also a military man, a general, and had a soldier's candor and sense of loyalty. Whether Repnin could control, let alone transform, the willful grand duke was an open question. But for the moment it was Catherine who drew all the empress's attention.

There was yet another purge of Catherine's and Peter's servants, with the favored ones sent away. In the aftermath all the remaining servants were upset a^nd anxious, Catherine wrote in her memoirs, and she and Peter indulged in "some sad reflections."

That very afternoon the chancellor came to visit Catherine, bringing the pregnant, dour Maria Choglokov with him. As soon as Catherine saw her she burst into tears. "This was a thunderclap for me," she recalled. Not only was Maria a slavish partisan of the inimical chancellor, but she was known to be mean-spirited and rancorous, and Catherine, who had been suffering under the "Argus eyes" of Madame Kraus, now foresaw that she would come under worse scrutiny—edged with malice.