Great Catherine (5 page)

"What do you think?" Johanna asked her.

"Since it doesn't please you, it would be ill-advised for me to wish it."

"It seems that you don't find the idea repugnant."

It was not repugnant, it was exciting. Sophie had ambition, she

had never forgotten the prediction that she would wear three crowns. Yet now that she faced the prospect of actually going to Russia, it daunted her. Realizing that if she agreed to marry her cousin she might never see her parents again, Sophie began to cry. She was tenderly attached to her father and could not bear the thought of leaving him. Christian August joined in the conversation, kissing Sophie and telling her that he would not think of insisting that she go to Russia. Johanna ought to go alone, he said, to thank Empress Elizabeth in person for all that she had done for the Holstein-Gottorp family. If Sophie did want to go along, she could, but she would be under no obligation to stay on and marry Karl Ulrich—or rather Grand Duke Peter, as he now was. She could return home again and would always find a welcome.

"I was dissolved in tears," Sophie wrote in her memoirs, recalling the conversation. "It was one of the most affecting moments of my life. I was agitated by a thousand different feelings: gratitude for my father's goodness, fear of displeasing him, the custom of blind obedience to him, the tender affection which I had always felt toward him, the respect he deserved—truly no man ever had more merit, the purest virtue guided his steps."

In the following days Sophie managed to resolve her conflicting feelings and persuaded her parents to let her accept Count Brummer's invitation. No doubt Johanna's ambition for her family and her daughter reasserted itself, and everyone, even Christian August, must have been overawed by the great honor that beckoned from afar. Uncle Adolf was King of Sweden, but Sophie was being invited to occupy a far higher rank at a far more imposing court. Johanna did have a twinge of discomfort over how the decision would affect her favorite brother. ("What will my brother Georg say?" she asked Sophie. "He could not but wish me good fortune and happiness," was the tart reply.) So much for infatuation.

Trunks were hastily packed and preparations made. Sophie's wardrobe was modest—three rather plain gowns, none of them cut in the elaborate style Russian court etiquette required, a few

changes of underwear, a dozen handkerchiefs and six pairs of stockings. Even if her parents had wanted to outfit her sumptuously, there was no time to order new gowns and petticoats. And besides, Count Briimmer had been most insistent in his letter that Johanna and Sophie should travel incognito, keeping the purpose of their journey and their destination secret. Had extensive preparations been made, with new gowns and other finery, the servants would have guessed what was going on, and the secret would have been out. Sophie had to content herself with buying a new pair of gloves. In addition, her paternal uncle Johann gave her a length of beautiful blue and silver brocade fabric woven in Zerbst, which could be made into a gown later.

Sophie went to Babette Cardel to say goodbye, telling her, as she told all the palace servants and officials, that she was going to Berlin. She had to mask the pain she felt at the leavetaking, for it was essential to disguise her true destination even from her beloved governess. Babette guessed that there was more to this journey than Sophie was admitting—the servants gossiped endlessly about it—and demanded to be told the truth. But all Sophie would tell her was that she was sworn to secrecy, and could not reveal anything. Babette was annoyed and angry. Hadn't she been, in many ways, a surrogate parent to Sophie? The one who had formed her mind and helped to mold her feelings, the person who knew her best and with whom she had spent the most time? There was no dispelling the bad feeling, yet both women cried as they embraced, each sensing that she might not see the other again.

To lend plausibility to the story that Johanna and Sophie were going no farther than Berlin, Christian August accompanied them there. King Frederick II was also in Berlin at the time, the brilliant, eccentric successor to his father Frederick William, who had died four years earlier. Frederick was thirty-two, a formidable soldier who was at the same time well-read and cultivated; an Anglophile, he had once tried to escape his punitive father by running away to England.

Frederick knew all about the journey that Johanna and Sophie were about to make to Russia. His ambassador at St. Petersburg, Baron Mardefeldt, kept him informed of all that transpired at Empress Elizabeth's court, and in particular about the empress's choice of a wife for her nephew and heir.

The selection process had taken many months. Choosing a bride for the heir to the throne was a political decision, and Empress Elizabeth's officials and advisers were divided in their political loyalties. One faction, headed by the Chancellor Alexei Bestuzhev, favored closer ties with Austria, Britain, and the lesser powers within their orbit. The other, which included the Prussian ambassador Mardefeldt, the French ambassador Chetardie, many of the more influential Russian nobles and Empress Elizabeth's physician and trusted friend Armand Lestocq, favored Prussia and her political partner France. Accordingly, Bestuzhev proposed that Peter marry a Saxon princess, while Mardefeldt, Chetardie, and the others recommended a French princess. Sophie, Elizabeth's own preferred candidate, was forgotten in the factional battles that resulted.

To break the deadlock Frederick was consulted. Would he consider sending one of his sisters to St. Petersburg to marry Peter? Certainly not, he said, but he suggested the names of several compromise candidates, including Sophie. As it happened, the French ambassador had been in Hamburg at the time that Johanna's family gathered there to congratulate the departing King Adolf. He had seen Sophie, and, like most who saw her, he had been impressed. He declared himself in favor of Sophie, which pleased Elizabeth and satisfied the others, except for Bestuzhev, who was outmaneuvered by his enemies. Sophie it was.

Now Frederick wanted to meet Sophie, his compromise candidate, and he sent an invitation to Christian August, Johanna and Sophie inviting them to dine at the palace. At first Johanna refused to let Sophie go, but when the king insisted she had to give way. Frederick seated Sophie next to him at the dining table and talked

son

to her all afternoon, asking her questions, discussing the theater, literature, opera—"whatever thousand things one could ask a girl of fourteen," she remembered many years later. Frederick did not ask Sophie anything about Peter, or the Empress Elizabeth— whom he privately thought to be a woman of "sybaritic tastes," unfit to govern a realm—or about what she knew of Russia. But he sampled her mind and her understanding, and made her blush with his gallant compliments.

"In the beginning I was very timid with him," Sophie recalled, "but gradually I became accustomed to him, until by the end of the evening we were on the most cordial terms—so much so that the entire company was wide-eyed in amazement to see Frederick in conversation with a child."

On another occasion Frederick talked to Johanna, telling her bluntly that he had been instrumental in bringing about Sophie's good fortune and striking a bargain with her: if Johanna would serve as his eyes and ears at the Russian court, promoting Prussian interests there and acting in concert with his ambassador Mar-defeldt, then he, Frederick, would ensure that Johanna's rotund sister Hedwig would become Abbess of Quedlinburg. Christian August, with his goodness and his devotion to virtue, Frederick did not approach.

Johanna and Sophie set out on their secret journey in three coaches, taking only a minimum number of servants: a gentleman of the chamber, M. de Lattorf, four chamber women, a single valet de chambre, several lackeys, a cook, and, as companion and chief lady-in-waiting to Johanna, the superstitious Fraulein Kayn. On the orders of Count Brummer, Johanna adopted the name "Countess Rheinbeck," and swore her servants to secrecy about her true identity and the actual purpose of the journey. Christian August rode with his wife and daughter as far as Schwedt on the Oder, then he went on toward Zerbst, while they turned north. Sophie embraced her father for the last time, cherishing the letter of advice he gave her and remembering his caution that she should never, under any circumstances, abandon the Lutheranism in

which she had been raised for the religion of the Orthodox church.

The brief, frigid days were at their shortest. A pallid yellow sun rose late and lay just above the horizon for only a few precious hours, illuminating trees and fields glistening with frost. The first snowfall was late that winter, but icy winds and hard, pelting rain swirled around the swaying coaches as they lumbered over the rutted post road, sinking suddenly into deep ditches and coming perilously close to overturning. Ordinary travelers never used the post road, they went by sea, and then almost never in winter; storms and ice made the Baltic unnavigable between December and April, when sensible people stayed home. Lone couriers braved the post road in all seasons, but they took their lives in their hands, for robbers haunted the bleak outlands and no search parties went out to look for couriers who lost their way or froze to death before they could reach shelter.

The frosts grew thicker, the cold more biting as they reached Danzig on the Baltic coast. Huge chunks of ice floated on the frigid sea, the rocky shoreline was frozen, the dunes covered with ice. Johanna and Sophie, bundled in layers of wool, had to wrap woollen scarves around their red, swollen faces to protect them from the fierce wind. Black and blue from being tossed about and jolted in the coach, they longed for nightfall when the outriders would lead them to a posting station—or better still an inn with a huge earthenware stove where they could warm their hands and feet and thaw their stiff, bruised bodies. Inns were few and far between, however, and generally filthy. No special quarters were available for Countess Rheinbeck and her entourage; they had to join the innkeeper's children and livestock in the cluttered common room.

Inn parlors were pigsties, Johanna complained to her husband in a letter written on the road. Dogs, hens and cocks rooted in the layers of straw and ordure on the floor, babies bawled in cradles, older children huddled together for warmth, "lying one on top of the other like cabbages and turnips" on ancient tattered feath-

son

erbeds drawn up close to the stove. The food was terrible, there were bugs and rats and sometimes the wind howled through holes in the roof or walls, making sleep impossible. Sophie, trying to wash down her dinner with large quantities of the local beer, became sick to her stomach. Johanna, having satisfied herself that neither the innkeeper nor his numerous children had smallpox, ordered a bare plank brought for herself and lay down on it, fully clothed, in an effort to sleep.

Once the travelers reached Memel both inns and post houses ceased. The impossible roads grew more rutted and at times disappeared altogether. Frozen marsh gave way to lakes covered with a treacherous crust of ice, thin in some places and thick in others. The coachmen hired local fishermen to test the firmness of the ice before venturing across, knowing that if the brittle crust gave way the coaches and their occupants would not survive their plunge into the chill black water. Where ice-clogged rivers flowed into the sea, the coaches were loaded onto wooden ferries and poled across. There were long delays to repair broken axles and take on fresh provisions, and when the horses grew tired, the servants were sent out to bargain with peasants for fresh teams.

By the end of the third week of travel, with the cold becoming more and more severe and Sophie's feet swelling so badly from frostbite that she had to be carried in and out of the coach, she must have been having second thoughts about her impulsive decision to present herself to Empress Elizabeth. As she ate her unpalatable supper while a servant tried to rub life back into her painfully swollen feet, her thoughts must have turned to Karl Ulrich, her irritable, recalcitrant cousin who would one day be emperor of Russia. The boy, now on the threshold of manhood, who would, if all went well, become her husband. She must have recalled his pallor and his delicacy, his battles with Count Brum-mer and his affection for his loutish valets, his liking for Johanna and his insatiable appetite for wine. She must have wondered, as she struggled to compose her miserably cold body for sleep, whether it might have been wiser to marry Uncle Georg and settle into obscurity.

Chapter Four

»*o»»

\\f I EEK AFTER ARDUOUS WEEK THE TRAVELING PARTY

W crawled northward along the shores of the Baltic, into the teeth of the bitter wind. As they passed through each village, peasants wrapped in layers of rags came out to stare at the coaches, crossing themselves and murmuring prayers. Each evening the travelers bedded down where they could, and listened to the wolves howling outside. Along the mist-enshrouded Latvian coast the villages thinned out, and the blanched landscape took on a wearying sameness. At night, however, the sky was lit by the spectacular glow of a comet. Sophie was enraptured. "I had never seen anything so grand," she wrote in her memoirs. "It seemed very close to the earth."