Great Catherine (6 page)

Comets were portents of disaster, as Fraulein Kayn no doubt pointed out to her companions. And there was a disaster in the making, or so it seemed to Sophie's relatives once Christian August revealed to them that his daughter was en route to Russia. He wrote to Johanna, telling her of the all but universal outrage expressed by her sisters and aunts and cousins when they learned the news. They had wanted Sophie to marry Karl Ulrich when he was Duke of Holstein. But the last thing they wanted was for her to marry him now that he was Peter, Grand Duke of Muscovy, living at a court notorious for its political instability and barbar-

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ity. She would be at the mercy of the empress, she could be murdered or shut away in a dungeon or worse. Her very soul would be in peril, amongst the heathen Russians who would be sure to persecute her for her Lutheran faith.

Johanna was not surprised by her relatives' reactions. She had expected a whirlwind of opposition, she wrote to her husband. But Providence had determined that Sophie would go to Russia, and Providence could not be denied, even by Aunt Marie Elizabeth and sister Hedwig in Quedlinburg. "We can be certain that the Omniscient brings to fruition His plans which are hidden from us," she wrote piously, praying that the Omniscient would continue to provide fresh horses and edible food and would not let them lose themselves in a blizzard.

They were nearing the Russian border. Dense silver-gray marshes spread themselves on all sides, glowing faintly in the pale light of midday. Out of the emptiness a figure rode toward them. It was a courier, sent to meet them and then to ride back the way he had come, spreading the word that their arrival was imminent. Soon another rider approached, Colonel Vokheikov, and escorted them across the frontier and on to the town of Riga.

It seemed as though the entire population of the town had turned out to greet the frozen visitors from Anhalt-Zerbst. Cannon thundered, bells pealed, and one of the empress's ambassadors, Semyon Naryshkin, made a speech of welcome. The vice-governor Dolgorukov was present with an escort of soldiers from the garrison, and there were generals and civic officials galore.

Johanna's head was turned by all the pageantry. She could now abandon her alias and assume her own honored name, as a parade of nobles lined up to bow to her and kiss her hand. For two days the display of honors continued, with guardsmen at attention and trumpeters announcing every move the visitors made. Johanna and Sophie were given warm sable coats sewn with gold brocade, fur collars and a fur coverlet, along with letters of welcome from the empress and Count Brummer.

Sophie let her extroverted mother take center stage in all the festivities, though she knew that she, as the future grand duchess, was the important one. Her mind was already at work, observing the behavior and tastes of their Russian hosts. She asked one of the generals to tell her about the imperial court, who the key personalities were and what they were like. Her political sense was already aroused, she knew she would need to inform herself as fully as possible in order to adapt.

Sophie must also have thought a good deal about Peter, recalling his pale good looks and his incorrigible behavior, his liking for her mother, and the boorish valets who were his favorite companions. She must have wondered how much he had changed in the years since their meeting at Eutin, and whether his exalted position had gone to his head.

Deep snow now blanketed the fields and marshes, and the travelers abandoned their uncomfortable coaches for a capacious and warm sleigh provided from the empress's personal carriage house. It was less a vehicle than a small house on wheels, so large and heavy that a dozen horses were needed to draw it through the snowdrifts. The sleigh was equipped with a stove, mattresses and snug fur-lined bedding, indeed the very walls were covered with fur and Sophie, Johanna and Fraulein Kayn lay on silk cushions to sleep at night. To protect them on this last stage of their journey they had a squadron of cavalry and a detachment of footsoldiers, plus the sleighs of a number of Russian nobles and officials.

Another four days of travel brought them to St. Petersburg, the city built a generation earlier by Empress Elizabeth's father, Peter the Great. Here, as at Riga, cannonades and extravagant peals of bells announced the arrival of the important German visitors and a huge crowd gathered on the outdoor staircase of the Winter Palace to greet them. The empress and most of the courtiers were in Moscow, four hundred miles away, but the Chancellor Be-stuzhev and a number of other courtiers greeted Johanna and Sophie and escorted them to their lavishly appointed rooms in the

grand and opulent structure the Italian architect Rastrelli had built for Elizabeth.

After six weeks of exhausting travel, Sophie and Johanna must have craved rest and peace, but peace was denied them. They had to meet dozens of courtiers and dignitaries, they had to be shown the principal landmarks of the extraordinary city that the great Emperor Peter had erected on a remote and unpromising marsh. They had to attend the winter carnival, to ride down a snowy hill on a toboggan—which the tomboyish Sophie thoroughly enjoyed—and to attend elaborate dinners and suppers. The chamberlain Naryshkin presented the newcomers with an exotic spectacle. Fourteen elephants, a gift to the empress from the Shah of Persia, were led into the courtyard of the Winter Palace and made to perform.

In the intervals between entertainments, Johanna was closeted with the Prussian ambassador Mardefeldt and the French ambassador Chetardie. Both instructed her on how best to ingratiate herself with the empress, and reminded her that it was the Chancellor Bestuzhev who represented the greatest obstacle to her interests and Sophie's. Bestuzhev, the ambassadors said, was strongly opposed to having Peter marry Sophie. Such a marriage would symbolize the union of Russia and Prussia (since Sophie was Frederick's nominee) and all of Bestuzhev's efforts were directed toward preventing such a union. Chetardie recommended that Johanna cut short her stay in Petersburg and try to reach Moscow by the tenth of February (by Russian reckoning; in Russia the Julian calendar still prevailed, and the date was ten days behind that of Western Europe), which was Peter's birthday. The empress would be certain to appreciate this gesture.

Still weary from their long and grueling journey, Johanna and Sophie got back into the empress's fur-lined sleigh for the trip to Moscow. They were joined by four of Elizabeth's ladies of honor, and all six women, plus Fraulein Kayn and the other attendants from Zerbst, braced themselves for four hundred miles of swaying and bouncing and general discomfort. A great many officials

joined the cortege, there were thirty sleighs in all, each requiring ten horses.

Stopping only when the horses were spent, the procession moved forward through the night, relying on bonfires tended by shivering peasants to illuminate the way. Crowds gathered to glimpse the long train of sleighs. Sophie heard shouts and asked her Russian companions what they meant. "It is the fiancee of the grand duke who is being escorted!" people were saying.

With the horses galloping at breakneck speed over the frozen snow, and the drivers at times blinded by sleet and wind, there were bound to be accidents. Passing through a village the sleigh in which Johanna and Sophie were riding turned sharply and ran into a house. The collision wrenched loose one of the heavy iron bars supporting the roof of the sleigh, and it fell heavily on Johanna's head and shoulder. Sophie was unhurt.

Johanna, shocked and smarting from the blow, thought she was dying. The entire procession came to a halt in the village while her injuries were examined. One by one the thick layers of fur came off and no blood or bruises were revealed. Johanna angrily insisted that she had been grievously wounded but eventually conceded that the furs had protected her. After a delay of several hours, the sleigh was repaired and the journey continued.

On the third day, some five miles outside of Moscow a courier approached with a message from the empress. She wanted the visitors to delay making their entrance into the city until after nightfall. They halted and waited, then proceeded after dark. Sophie's first view of Moscow was of a dim and dingy place with narrow crooked streets and scurrying inhabitants muffled in furs. Presently they came to a torchlit mansion where the empress's adjutant general, the Prince of Homburg, was waiting with the entire glittering court. The newcomers were welcomed with far less fanfare than they had been at Petersburg and were subjected to thorough scrutiny. Sophie, who had put on a pink silk gown with silver trim, must have felt very conspicuous as the prince escorted her from one grand, high-ceilinged room to the next.

She heard him murmur the names of people they passed— courtiers who bowed low—but the hundreds of faces and names must have blurred.

Then she saw Peter, taller and better looking than he had been when she saw him last, with small eyes and delicate features in a thin face.

"I couldn't bear the last hour of waiting for you," he told Johanna ingenuously. "I would have liked to harness myself to your sleigh and pull it along faster." His boyish effusiveness was encouraging. He stayed with Sophie and Johanna for several hours, while they waited in their rooms for the summons to meet the empress. Finally, late in the evening, it came. Armand Les-tocq, the empress's physician and one of her most trusted political advisers, came to tell Johanna and Sophie that his mistress was at last ready to receive them.

She met them at the entrance to her bedroom, a strikingly tall, heavy woman with a plumply beautiful face, bright blue eyes and a warm smile. Her auburn hair was elaborately arranged and sparkled with diamonds and a single long black feather; her gown, with a wide hoop skirt, shimmered with silver and gold lace. To the fourteen-year-old Sophie she was a vision of beauty and magnificence.

The empress hastened to embrace Johanna, and looked critically, then approvingly, at Sophie. Vanity was among Empress Elizabeth's besetting sins, and she had chosen Sophie as a prospective bride for her heir in part because it was clear from Sophie's portraits that she would never be a beauty. Elizabeth needed to outshine those around her, she couldn't stand having other pretty women nearby. At thirty-four, she was as striking as ever, though very fleshy, but there were lines at the corners of her lively blue eyes and her pink cheeks had faded. She relied on cosmetics to restore her look of youth, and she had developed a sharp eye for potential rivals.

The most beautiful woman at Elizabeth's court, Countess Lopukhin, had felt the wrath of the empress. Pink was Elizabeth's

favorite color, and she had made it an unwritten rule of the court that she and she alone could wear it. The countess had dared to ignore this edict and had worn a pink gown. Indeed she had gone even further and copied the empress's hair style, adding a pink rose to her coiffure. Incensed, Elizabeth commanded the countess to kneel, and while the entire court watched, she cut the rose from her hair (and some of the hair with it), then slapped her smartly on both cheeks. She took the further vindictive step of banishing the countess's lover to Siberia, and hounded the countess herself, finally accusing her formally of plotting against the throne.

Sophie, curtseying in her pink and silver gown, was ignorant of the story of Countess Lopukhin, yet she was aware that the empress was staring at her, she felt her scrutiny along with her affability. The empress was scrutinizing Johanna too, and suddenly she saw something in Johanna's face that made her rush from the room. When she returned sometime later it was evident that she had been crying. Johanna looked very much like her late brother Karl August, Elizabeth's long-dead fiance. Seeing Johanna brought back tender memories of Karl August, and the sentimental empress had been overcome.

That evening Peter dined with Sophie and Johanna, and Sophie, listening to him talk, was astonished at how childlike he was. Though older than she was—he was to turn sixteen the following day—Peter still had the interests and passions of a ten-year-old. It was not just that he had led a sheltered, tethered life: Sophie had observed that for herself, and could make allowances for it. But beyond that, there was something essentially unformed about this very boyish young man, physically slight, with a thin chest and thick waist and underdeveloped muscles. Something essential to manliness had been left out of his makup, he chattered on about soldiers and uniforms and drill in a puerile way that Sophie found disconcerting. Still, he had a guileless charm and fair good looks, and everyone said that he was a young man of great promise. Distrusting her uniquely skeptical judgment, Sophie decided to be pleased with him.

The rituals of Elizabeth's very large and grand court put a distance between the empress and the visitors from Zerbst. Sophie caught sight of Elizabeth only briefly as she walked briskly along the wide corridors or through the crowded reception rooms on her way to attend official functions. She was a gleaming icon, glimpsed from afar.

Sophie began to find out more about her. That she was the daughter of the venerated Emperor Peter the Great she already knew. That Elizabeth owed her beauty to her mother, a peasant woman who had been Peter's second wife, she now found out, along with the fact that Elizabeth had been born out of wedlock. The empress's physical vigor was evident, as was her fondness for expensive finery and for unrestrained eating. She loved to ride and hunt, she wore her ladies out with her energetic stride and her fast gallop. She was capricious, moody, temperamental.

Sophie knew that Elizabeth had not been educated or trained for rulership. Her father had not intended that either of his daughters should succeed him, and Elizabeth spent much of her childhood and young womanhood away from the court, living in the countryside and interesting herself in the lives of the peasants on the imperial estates. While her earthiness and hearty physicality were nurtured in this rural existence, her mind remained uncultivated, and though intelligent and shrewd, she was mentally lazy.

Elizabeth had courage, certainly—and much boldness. When the throne passed to a distant relative of her father's, the infant known as Ivan VI, Elizabeth had allowed herself to be persuaded to seize it from him. Encouraged by a small circle of advisers, including her physician Lestocq, and being assured that she had the full approval of the French and Swedish courts, Elizabeth went to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards in Petersburg and appealed to them to back her in a coup. She put her fate in the guardsmen's hands—and they did not fail her. The infant Emperor Ivan was deposed and, with his parents and siblings, imprisoned.