The Girl Who Fought Napoleon: A Novel of the Russian Empire (5 page)

“Such an exquisite creature, this German princess,” said the empress to Alexander in private. “Did you notice the cloud of ash-blonde hair, her perfect profile like a Greek cameo?”

“She is pretty,” admitted Alexander.

His grandmother fixed her steely eyes on her favorite grandchild. “It is time to grow up, Alexander. You are fifteen years old now. I cannot impress upon you how important it is to me—to Russia!—that you marry well. And I approve of this princess. She is from my homeland.”

Alexander raised his head and straightened his spine.

“Yes, Empress,” he said.

“All right. As long as we understand one another,” said Catherine, nodding. “Now run along and visit with our guests. Make sure they feel welcomed.”

As the months went by the young Alexander did manage to fall in love with the German princess. After a fashion.

Louise wrote her mother: “Alone in my room, he kissed me lightly as he had done in church in Easter ceremony. But those kisses in church were supervised by the Empress Catherine. These were our secret. He kissed me ever so lightly just touching my lips. Not at all like Papa does when he scratches me with his beard.”

Alexander confessed to one of his tutors, General Protassov, that while he had passionate urges toward some of the women he had met at the court—especially the Polish princess Maria Naryshkina—they were not the same as the feelings he had for the young German princess Louise. His sentiments toward her were something altogether different: a deference, a tender friendship. He felt a sense of calm with her, more agreeable than the fiery passions evoked by other young women. He thought of Princess Louise as more worthy of love than anyone he had ever met.

When the empress read the general’s report, she gasped in joy.

“Worthy indeed! I shall write her parents at once. Princess Louise must begin Russian lessons immediately, and her conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church must be completed before she can be married to my grandson. A year of tutelage I would judge. She seems quite bright.”

Empress Catherine’s hips hurt. Because of her enormous girth, standing for hours was pure torture. But custom required that she stand throughout the lengthy Orthodox ceremony—and her delight at witnessing the wedding of her favorite grandson brought her such sublime happiness that she could almost ignore the pain. She tipped her chin up in a majestic gesture so that the tears—tears of joy not pain—did not spill down her cheeks.

Grand Duke Alexander, age fifteen, wore a silver caftan with diamond buttons, the ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew across his chest. The fourteen-year-old Princess Louise, renamed Elizabeth by the empress, wore a matching gown of silver and brilliant brocade, interwoven with diamonds and pearls.

Grand Duke Constantine held a crown over his brother’s head while Prince Alexander Andreyevich Bezborodko, Catherine’s foreign affairs minister, held another crown over Elizabeth.

Cannons boomed from the Admiralty less than a verst down Nevsky Prospekt from the Winter Palace. A similar volley thundered across the Neva at the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. Church bells pealed endlessly.

“The marriage of Cupid and Psyche!” exclaimed the empress. “Has there ever been a more handsome couple?”

The ambassadors and dignitaries of Europe agreed: the young imperial couple was the most attractive the world had ever seen.

Chapter 8

Sarapul, Russia

June 1799

My father’s philandering caused my mother’s rage to burn like venom in her throat. She couldn’t ignore it any longer.

Behind the closed doors of their bedroom, she screamed, “I have heard about the village girl! I know of your treachery!”

“Do not listen to gossips, Nadezhda,” my father said. “The old wives relish spreading—”

“I curse you and I curse the day we fell in love! The day I threw away my noble Ukrainian name to marry a villainous Russian. My father was right!”

“Nadezhda! I swear the girl means nothing to me.”

My mother opened the door suddenly and saw me staring at them both. She beat her breast with her fist.

“I give you my love, my honor, my life. And look!” she said, pointing at me. “Look what I have in return! An ugly monkey of a girl child, a cursed brat. And a traitorous husband who looks for love in the gutters of Sarapul.”

She fell to the floor weeping. My father turned on his heel and left. I remained paralyzed, watching my mother’s shoulders heave.

That was the night I decided to ride Alcides.

I had neither bridle nor saddle, only the halter and lead rope that tied him to a picket. He had taken to following me like a dog, knowing I had pockets full of sugared bread. I wore only my nightgown, for I no longer had clothes meant for outdoor activities. My mother had given them all away.

I led Alcides out the gate, closing it as silently as I could. I knotted the rope on the halter under the horse’s chin and climbed onto the split-rail fence beside the road. In the moonlight I saw a trace of white that encircled Alcides’s eye as he swung his big head around, looking at me perched on the fence.

“Just stand,” I said. “Stand, Alcides.”

I vaulted onto his back. He took a couple of panicked sidesteps away from the fence, startled by my weight. I clung tight to his mane and squeezed my legs around his barrel. Again he swung his head around, but this time nibbling at my toes.

I laughed. I gave him a gently nudge with my heel and we trotted off into the darkness.

Those first few months I fell off quite a bit, especially at a trot. The walk is simple and his canter was rhythmic. But trotting shook me loose time and again and I tumbled off into the grass. Still, I was young and resilient. Alcides would wait beside me until I remounted him, never running away.

How I loved the smell of the river during the warm nights of summer, the wet stones cooling in the darkness! The crickets’ chirps enveloped us, the wind shaking the moonlight high up in the birch trees. Ah! The intoxicating scent of freedom! All this revived me from the humiliation I suffered from my mother. Oh, to be out from under her roof! I cared not a lick for my bumps and bruises, nor for any dangers—real or imagined—of the night.

By day, I was a prisoner in the house. But at night, I was a free-roaming spirit. Like most Russian children, I had grown up with tales of ghosts, corpses, wood goblins, and even water nymphs who would tickle their victims to death. And of course the child-eating witch Baba Yaga, who lived in a house atop long rooster legs. Those orange, taloned legs would run down even the swiftest and most cunning child, pluck him up, and feed him to Baba Yaga. That is, if Baba Yaga did not catch him herself, flying in her mortar, rowing the wind with her pestle.

But I was not afraid of the night. I was part of its blackness, hidden from my mother. I could fly on the back of my horse away from her like a spirit of the netherworld.

Freedom!

Each night Alcides and I ventured farther and farther from home, traveling across the plains of Sarapul and along the Kama River. Finally, a year after I had first lit upon Alcides’s back, I rode up Startsev Mountain. The call of the nightingale met us as we climbed the stony path, and my hair was swept by the low-hanging branches of oak, maple, and elm.

That night I had a fall. A hard fall indeed.

I can’t remember what happened . . . I don’t remember much about that night.

I returned home with a rip through the sleeve of my nightgown and mud and bloodstains I could not wash out. My maid Ludmilla was my mother’s spy. When she saw the condition of my nightclothes, she suspected the worst. She reported to my mother that though I was only fourteen years old, I must be having a clandestine affair.

“We will watch her tonight,” said my mother. “She must take after the filthy ways of her father. I will not let her further dishonor our family.”

But when my mother watched me, she saw that I headed not directly for the gate, but to the stables. The stableman was a notoriously heavy drinker at night. His weekly pail of vodka was too often emptied by the very next morning.

My mother saw me emerge from the stable with the wild Circassian stallion and gasped.

“Rouse Karl!” said my mother, as I fumbled with the gate lock.

The maid ran and shook the snoring stableman awake and he came running, as best as a drunkard can run.

“Where do you think you are going, miss?” Karl asked, approaching me. He took the lead rope from my hand and led Alcides back to the barn.

There was nothing to do but return to the house and my mother’s outrage.

When my father heard that I had been riding Alcides, he did not punish me. Instead he vanished for a few days, returning with a package wrapped in tanned leather and tied up with horse-hair rope.

“For my little cavalry girl,” he said.

Never had I been so in love with my papa. He was proud of me! He wiped the tears from his eyes. “My Nadezhda, who rides a horse I can barely manage. You must be part Cossack.”

“What is it, Father?” I asked, running my fingers over the smooth leather wrapping.

“Open it.”

My fingers flew over the knots, untying the twine. I could not believe what lay within.

Indigo-colored trousers. A tall fur hat in the Turkoman style. And a blood-red tunic—a Cossack
chekmen
—with a leather belt, fringed with brass fittings and a small engraved box. Polished brass bullets were nestled in the small pockets of the
gaziry
set diagonally across each breast. Real bullets!

My father’s eyes were moist.

“It is the uniform of the Cossacks of the Caucasus Mountains—to match Alcides’s breeding. You will ride with me today on Alcides. Side by side. No one needs to know you are a girl, Nadezhda,” he said, patting me on the knee.

Never had I been so happy. Never.

My father rode his chestnut mare beside us. She was a Prussian warhorse and, though much taller than my Alcides, could not outrun him on a straightaway. My father challenged me over and over to race on the dirt road, where we galloped wildly past hay wagons, vegetable carts, and even an aristocrat’s carriage one morning.

Alcides and I left him behind to eat our churning dust, crossing the chosen finish line seconds ahead. I heard him erupt in laughter and shouts of “Hurrah! Hurrah, Nadezhda!”

I smiled, rubbing the chafed calves of my leg where the boots pinched my tender flesh, gripped against the saddle.

“I am used to riding bareback, Father,” I said, rubbing my legs. “And in a nightgown.”

My father laughed, pulling up his mare who pranced under him.

“That is why you have the natural seat you do,” he said, nodding. “You have no formal training, which shows. But your instincts and way with the horse are striking.”

A cloud of dust rose from the road about a half verst from us. I saw horses in the distance, with riders dressed the same as I, but in sky-blue tunics and britches, rather than my red. They rode in a ragged formation—hardly a formation at all.

“Cossacks!” I said.

“There is a Cossack regiment stationed here to suppress the Tatars’ incessant thievery and murder,” said my father, reining his horse in the opposite direction. “The Tatars are taking a toll on the region.”

“But isn’t this the Tartars’ homeland?” I asked.

“It is Russia. All land belongs to the Romanovs! The commander of Imperial Guards has sent the Cossacks here to patrol.”

“Are we returning home?” I asked.

My father turned to me, giving me a look from head to toe. “Yes, of course. The Cossacks may have something to say about your Cossack
chekmen
, little miss. I would rather they not discover you are a girl.”

“Oh, but Papa!” I said. “I should love to meet them!”

“That savage lot? Ah, Nadezhda,” he sighed. “You truly have no fear. If only you were a son, you would be the staff I would lean on in my old age.”

I withered inside at his words, my heart shrinking like a drop of water on a griddle. I looked over my shoulder at the galloping regiment as it disappeared into the horizon.