Chapter 13: The Warm Court
The regencies came in autumn, sixty-two of them, their carriages grinding through the first wet snow in the palace square. Inside the Winter Palace the great throne room had been cleared of its dais; Elizabeth had ordered the floor left bare, one long expanse of parquetry polished by a century of boots. The sovereigns entered in procession and stopped, all of them, at the threshold.
They had expected the old weight. Every man and woman among them had knelt under Catherine's wave at least once, had felt the honey-slow pressure take the will out of the body like a hand drawing a blade from a sheath. What met them now was warmth. It rose from the floorboards the way heat rises off a stove in a village house, and it asked nothing.
An Italian duke said it aloud before he could stop himself. "Is it true the wave comes warm now?"
"It is true," said Paul, standing by the door with his ledger under his arm. "You are feeling it ask. It has learned to ask."
They came forward slowly, in their furs and their diamonds, like people wading into a river in April. At the far end of the hall, beneath the double-headed eagle, stood Elizabeth in a plain black gown with no orders on her breast. Her mother sat to one side in a simple chair, seventy-five years old now, her hands folded in her lap, her bare feet on the cold wood. She wore no slippers. She had taken them off herself before the doors opened.
The Old Persian came first, as he always came first. He walked the length of the hall, bowed from the waist, and did not kneel. He looked at the empty space before Elizabeth's feet and then at her face.
"I am too old to pretend," he said. "Your mother's wave took. Yours has learned. I would like to hear the north's answer before I give you anything."
Elizabeth inclined her head. "It will be read first. I promised Grigori it would be read first, and I keep what I promise, even now."
Paul opened the ledger. Then he did not read from it. He drew out instead a folded paper with a broken seal, the paper that had ridden south in his brother Peter's saddlebag, and he held it up so the whole hall could see it.
"The archbishop of Vologda wrote this letter in May and never sent it. My brother found it in a drawer of his kept house. It asks to be questioned. It says, and I quote the hand itself, that the wave was three days late for him, and that he has spent those three days and every day since wondering whether his fear was ever his own. Elizabeth went to him. He kissed her foot by choice and told her it was not forgiveness. She offered her hand and he took it palm to palm, as an equal. This is his written answer, promised for May, delivered now because he wished the sixty-two to hear it before they knelt or did not kneel."
He unrolled it and read.
The north's answer shook the hall. Grigori wrote of the candle on the cathedral steps, the third candle, unlit, waiting for the day he could name the Empress without the word Empress. He wrote that he had taught the parish children their letters in the kept house, that the schools the compact built had outlived their fear of the compact, that forty-one men of his parish had volunteered for a rite they did not have to attend. He wrote one sentence that Paul read twice, slowly, because the hall would not stop murmuring the first time.
"Tell the sixty-two that the frost has learned to love, and that I have not yet learned to believe it, and that my not believing is the surest proof the Empress has given me anything honestly."
Maria Theresa was in the third row, ancient, carried in on Fersen's arm and set down with her cane. She had come leaning on it for years now; her knuckles had gone smooth and pale around the head of it. She listened to the letter with her chin lifted and her eyes closed, and those who watched her saw tears running down into the creases of her mouth before the reading was half done.
When Paul finished, the hall was silent except for the sound of the stoves. Maria Theresa opened her eyes.
"I set my Hapsburg crown on your mother's head," she said to Elizabeth. Her voice carried badly now; Fersen stepped closer to catch it. "I kissed her foot from heel upward in Moscow when your wave still took like winter. I called it a wager. I wagered that a child of hers would one day stand against her, and I lost that wager, and I was glad I lost it, and I never told her why."
"Why, then," said Elizabeth. "Tell me now."
"Because standing against her would have meant the world had a spine again. And instead of a spine, God gave it you, and you did something neither of us imagined. You did not stand against the wave. You taught it manners."
The old woman turned from Fersen's arm. She refused the arm. She walked the last twelve steps herself, cane and all, one step at a time, while sixty-two sovereigns watched an eighty-year-old empress cross a floor she had crossed before under compulsion and crossed it now under nothing at all.
She stopped at Elizabeth's bare feet. Elizabeth had removed her shoes before the reading, quietly, while no one was looking. They sat beside her mother's slippers by the chair.
"I am weeping," said Maria Theresa, "and I cannot tell whether it is grief or relief. Can you?"
"It is both," said Elizabeth. "It is usually both."
The old empress let the cane clatter to the parquetry. She went down slowly, knees first, one hand braced on the boards, and she bowed her white head, and she kissed Elizabeth's bare foot, mouth to skin, at her own pace, without any word of rite. She held her lips there a long moment, longer than ceremony ever held them, and when she drew back she pressed her forehead once against the cold instep like a woman greeting a daughter at a door.
Then she looked up, tears on her chin, and said to the sixty-two sovereigns behind her, in a voice that cracked in the middle:
"It is warm. After all these years, it is warm, and it asked me nothing. I gave it freely. I never once, in fifty years, gave anything freely. Do you understand what you are standing on?"
No one answered her. The Old Persian took one step forward, out of the row, and put his hand flat over his breast, and did not kneel, and smiled.
"This change is Alexandra's," she said. "And mark what it costs her, for she is not a child apart from the thrones — she stands second in the line of the earth. When I die, her mother takes the throne of Supreme Empress as I set it down, and Alexandra takes the Queen of Russia in the same hour, for it is hers by succession and has waited for her since her mother was crowned to it. And when her mother's reign closes, Alexandra will stand where Elizabeth stands now, and hold the throne of the whole earth. She will write decrees. She will hold two crowns before she is done. But this — this thing she gave the world in her sleep, before she could open her eyes on purpose — no decree of hers will ever be half as permanent. An eternal change to the wave. It will not go back."
"The imperial wave has come indoors. It greets the family by name and lets go. Its source is the grand duchess Alexandra, born February, second in the line of the earth after her mother the Empress Elizabeth, Queen of Russia after her mother, and Supreme Empress in her turn; and the change is hers and permanent."
"Come," she said. "Catherine the younger is in the family room, and she changed the world today and does not know it, and her brother knows it and has not said a word to anyone. I want to hear what my granddaughter has worked out. She has been watching us all afternoon through a door, and she will have the terms better than Paul."
"I heard the terms," said a voice from the doorway.
Catherine the younger stood there, twenty-six years old, second daughter of the Empress Elizabeth, with her twin brother Peter's arm gripped in her hand — the same grip she had held from birth, when his hand had closed on hers in the cradle and never learned to let go. She had been crying, only a little, and her hands were open.
"It does not go into Papa," she said. "Or Uncle Paul. Or Papa Fersen. It goes around them, like around stones in a stream. I asked it why and it showed me the cradle — my cradle, and Alexandra's beside it." She looked at her grandmother. "It showed me my hands holding my daughter. The wave cannot hold Alexandra the way it holds everyone else. It would be holding itself. So it holds the ones who hold her."
Catherine the elder looked at her granddaughter — the woman-child who had been proclaimed second in the line at her birth, who now stood with an infant daughter asleep two rooms away and a change to the wave in her hands that no decree would ever match — for a long time.
"And what did you answer it?" she said.
"I said thank you," said Catherine the younger. "It is my hand. I want to know what it carries."
"The imperial wave has come indoors. It greets the family by name and lets go. Its source is the grand duchess Alexandra, born February, daughter of Catherine the younger, and second in the line of the earth — after her mother Catherine the younger, who stands after the Empress Elizabeth — Queen of Russia in her mother's turn, and Supreme Empress in the line's turn after that; and the change is hers and permanent."
Then the floor moved.
Not an earthquake. Nothing so coarse. A pulse came up through the parquetry, slow as a heartbeat under a mother's ear, and passed outward from the spot where Maria Theresa's lips had rested, through the boots and slippers and stockinged feet of sixty-two sovereigns, and each of them felt it arrive at the same moment and each of them knew it was the same moment.
"What is it doing?" said an Italian duke, and his voice shook.
"It is answering her," said Catherine from her chair. She had not raised her voice. The hall heard her anyway, the way a house hears its own clock. "Fifty years I spent it like coin. My daughter spent a year teaching it to want without arriving. And now an old woman gives it a free kiss, and it does not know what to do with that, so it wonders. You are standing inside its wondering."
The pulse came again. Warmer. It had no command in it, no honey-weight, no hand at the sheath. It felt, several sovereigns would write later in their dispatches, like standing in a kitchen while bread bakes, like being a child again in a room where nothing has gone wrong yet. It asked nothing. It simply marveled.
Maria Theresa stayed on her knees. She had not meant to. Her cane lay a full arm's length away across the polished boards and she made no move toward it. She looked down at the parquetry as if the grain of the oak had changed under her.
"It is pleased," she said. "God forgive me, I know what pleased sounds like when it comes from a thing that owns you. This is not that. This is a creature discovering it has been given a gift." Her voice broke again. "I crowned the woman who made this thing, and I have outlived the thing she made, and what is lying under my knees now is not her wave at all. It is something new."
Elizabeth did not move. She stood barefoot on the floor her grandmother's office had polished, and she let the pulse pass through her own soles, and her face showed nothing except at the corner of her mouth, where something small and unguarded lived for a moment and was gone.
"You felt it learn," she said to the hall. "Just now. All of you felt it learn at once. That has never happened before. My mother's wave took a continent slowly, like frost crossing a field. This one just learned from one woman's one free kiss in the time it takes a candle to gutter." She looked down at Maria Theresa. "Stay there a moment. It is still holding the shape of what you gave it."
The Old Persian stood with his hand flat over his breast and his eyes half closed. "Twice," he said. "I have been in this hall twice under the old weight and I remember every second of it the way a man remembers a fever. This I will also remember every second of, and it is not the same verb." He looked at Elizabeth. "You promised Grigori would be read first. You have kept it. Ask me now."
"I don't ask," said Elizabeth. "That was the whole of the lesson."
"Then I will ask myself." He came forward past the kneeling empress, out of his furs, and knelt on the bare wood, and he did not kiss her foot. He set his two old hands over her two bare feet, palms down, the way a man warms a bird, and he bowed his head over them. The pulse went through him and he made a sound, once, brief, like a man remembering the name of something he had lost in boyhood.
Maria Theresa watched him from the floor. "You taught it that too," she said to Elizabeth. "The hands."
"My son taught it that. The ungifted one. He warms things and does not know he is teaching."
The wave pulsed a third time, and this time it did not move outward from the kiss or the hands. It moved from everywhere at once, the whole floor at a single temperature, and the sovereigns in the rows looked at one another and then, in ones and twos, without order and without any wave touching their wills, they began to go down. Not all of them. Not even most. Eleven of the sixty-two, then nineteen, knelt on the cold parquetry in their furs, and among those who did not kneel, not one left. They stood in the warmth like people standing in a doorway in spring, not ready, not leaving.
Catherine rose from her chair. It took her a moment. Seventy-five years sat in her knees now the way the winter sat outside the glass. She walked to her daughter on bare feet, stood beside her, and looked out over the hall of kneeling and standing sovereigns, over the old Hapsburg on the floor and the old Persian with his hands on Elizabeth's feet.
"I spent my reign buying this," she said quietly, to no one who would record it. "It costs you nothing, and it is worth more. That is the whole of what we did, Elizabeth. That is the entire inheritance."
"You are going to make me cry in front of sixty-two witnesses," said Elizabeth.
"They already have their ledgers open," said Catherine. "Let them write it."
Maria Theresa heard the pens behind her, sixty-two of them, scratching against the warmth. She turned her head and looked at Elizabeth's feet again, at the instep her own forehead had touched, and something in her went quiet and then went further.
"I am not finished," she said.
Elizabeth looked down at her. "You are. You gave it. Take your cane."
"I will not." The old woman spread both hands flat on the parquetry. Her rings clicked against the wood. "Fifty years I did it doubled, rite and rite, because the wave held my arms. I never once went down the whole way with nothing holding me but my own knees. You will let me finish what the wager started."
Elizabeth glanced at her mother. Catherine had stopped by the chair, one hand on its back, and she said nothing. Her face was still, and her blue eyes had gone heavy and focused, the way they still went when something in the room mattered more than words.
"Do it, then," said Elizabeth.
Maria Theresa leaned forward. The furs slid from her shoulders and lay on the floor behind her like a shed skin. She stretched herself along the cold boards, arms out, palms down, her white head bowed to the grain of the oak, and then she moved the last distance on her forearms until her mouth found Elizabeth's bare foot again.
This was not the kiss from before. That one had been a greeting. This one was a sentence, spoken the only language her body had left. She kissed the heel first, and the arch, and the toes, unhurried, the way she had kissed Catherine's foot in Moscow when the wave still took like winter, except that nothing pressed her down now and nothing would have lifted her up. The parquetry was cold against her breastbone. She stayed against the cold.
The pulse came up through the floor and gathered under her. The sovereigns felt it bend toward her like a flame toward a draft, and then it did something none of their dispatches would find words for. It settled around her body, the whole length of it, the way a blanket settles around a sleeper, and it held her there without holding her down.
"She is being kept," said the Italian duke, and his voice failed on the second word.
"She is being loved," said Catherine.
Elizabeth stood barefoot over the prostrate empress of the Hapsburgs and did not move. Her hands hung open at her sides. Fersen watched them, because he was the one in the hall whose refusal was real, and he could see that his wife was fighting nothing and wanting to fight nothing, and that her stillness was chosen all the way down.
The Old Persian lifted his palms from her feet and sat back on his heels to watch. "I came to ask whether the schools would outlive her," he said, to no one, to the floor. "I have my answer. The woman outlived her own frost."
Maria Theresa drew back at last and knelt upright, swaying, without her cane. Tears had run off her chin and darkened the oak. She looked up at Elizabeth from below, and her face had gone very simple, the way faces go at the end of long arithmetic.
"I have borne sixteen children," she said. "I buried ten. I kneel more easily for you than I ever knelt for God, and I will answer for that to Him myself. Do not give it back to me. Whatever this is that lay under my mouth, do not teach it to leave."
"It has never left anyone," said Elizabeth. "It only used to take. Now it keeps."
"Then keep me." The old woman put her hand flat on the floor between Elizabeth's feet, a small gesture, an old woman's gesture, a hand on a table in a kitchen. "Not the office. Me. Maria. The one who wagered."
Elizabeth knelt. She came down slowly onto the boards in front of her, knee to knee with a ruler older than her mother's reign, and she took the old hand off the floor and held it in both of hers, palm to palm, the way Grigori had held hers in the snow at Vologda. A sound went through the sixty-two, not a gasp, lower than that, a single drawn breath that moved along the rows like wind along a field.
"Then you are kept," said Elizabeth. "Maria. Not the office."
The pulse came once more, and this time it did not go outward at all. It stayed where the two of them knelt, a small warm pool on a cold floor, and the sovereigns nearest could feel it and the ones far off could only watch two women hold one hand on the bare wood of a throne room with no throne in it.
Maria Theresa began to laugh. It was a wet, old, unsteady laugh, and it shook her shoulders, and she did not wipe her face.
"Fifty years," she said. "Fifty years of protocol, and it ends with me sitting on the floor like a grandmother. Someone write that. Paul, write that."
Paul's ledger was open. His pen was not moving. "I am writing it," he said. "My hand does not want to hurry it."
Catherine came around the chair and stood over the two of them, her bare feet beside her daughter's bare knees. She looked a long moment at the old woman who had crowned her, and then she lowered herself, joints cracking, onto the floor beside them both, and sat, seventy-five years old, on the parquetry of her own former hall.
"What are you doing?" said Elizabeth.
"Sitting with my family," said Catherine. "She is under your hand, and you are my daughter, and the floor is warmer than the chair. Let the sixty-two work out what to write."
The Old Persian rose from his knees, slow as a door, and turned to face the rows. He did not raise his voice. The hall heard him anyway.
"The Empress of Earth is sitting on the floor," he said, "and the frost is holding an old woman like a blanket. I have traveled four months to see it. Go home and tell your chancelleries what you saw, or stay and learn it. Both will be reported honestly."
No one reached for the door. Somewhere in the third row a queen of the German houses sat down where she stood, skirts spread on the cold oak, and put her bare hands flat on the floor to feel whether it was true.
The Old Persian watched the queen sit, and then he did the same, folding himself down with a grunt onto the oak. After him came a Hessian landgrave, and then a boyish archduke whose name half the hall would have to ask. The rows broke their shape. Sovereigns were finding the floor the way a congregation finds knees, each at their own pace, and none of it had been commanded.
Elizabeth rose from the boards. She stood over Maria Theresa's hand, which still lay in hers, palm to palm, and she looked down the length of the hall at the kneeling and the sitting and the still-standing, and she did a thing no one had written in any protocol book.
She offered the hand. Not to one. To the hall.
She lifted Maria Theresa to her feet first, both hands, taking the old woman's weight without ceremony, and then she stepped back from her, and she raised her right hand into the air between them, palm open, fingers loose. She said nothing. She let the gesture hang there in the warmth of the room the way a candle hangs in a doorway.
"Do you know what she is doing?" said Catherine, quietly, to the Old Persian beside her.
"I watched her do it in the snow at Vologda," he said. "Grigori took it. I have spent four months deciding whether I would."
Maria Theresa looked at the open palm, and then at Elizabeth's face, and her own crumpled and reformed. "That is not the rite," she said.
"No," said Elizabeth. "The rite is the foot. This is the other thing. It is harder than the foot. The foot you can give to an office. This you can only give to a person."
"Who first?" said the old woman. "I have been first at everything for fifty years. Let me not be first at this."
"The Persian," said Elizabeth. "He came four months to ask a question. Let him answer it however he answers."
But the Old Persian shook his head slowly. "I came to ask whether the schools would outlive her. The letter answered me before I could kneel. Let the hand go to someone who has not yet decided what this empire is." He looked down the rows. "I will take it last, if it is still offered when the room is done with it."
Elizabeth kept the hand up. The warmth in the floor had gathered again beneath her bare soles, a small patient pool of it, and the sovereigns nearest her could feel it leaning toward the open palm as though it too were waiting in the line.
A Swedish count moved first, unexpectedly, a grey man from a grey house whose regency had signed late and coldly. He crossed the boards, stopped an arm's length away, and looked at the hand the way a man looks at a bridge he is not sure will hold.
"Is this a test?" he said.
"It is a hand," said Elizabeth. "If it were a test, my mother would be giving it."
"I knelt under her wave in London," said the count. "I have never in my life shaken a sovereign's hand."
"Nor have I ever held one out," said Elizabeth. "We will both be new at it."
He took it. Palm to palm, one breath, and let go, and walked back to his place with his jaw set like a man who has swallowed something large and found it nourishing. The pulse in the floor followed him back to his row and settled there, and the sovereigns on either side of him looked down at their own boots.
Then the German queen who was sitting on the floor got up off her skirts without help and came, and then a prince of the Italian houses, and then an archbishop whose face said he had spent the whole reading preparing a refusal and had watched the refusal dissolve somewhere around the phrase forty-one men volunteered. They came in no order. Some took the hand quickly, the way one takes hot bread. Some stood a long moment first. One sovereign of the northern houses gripped it hard, once, and said nothing at all, and Elizabeth let the nothing stand.
Paul wrote none of the names. He had closed the ledger. He stood with his pen capped in his fist, and when Fersen caught his eye he said, "This one is not for the record."
"Everything is for the record," said Fersen.
"Not this. She will tell me if she wants it written. That is what my office is. It is also what my sister is."
Catherine had not moved from the floor. She sat with her hands around her own bare feet, warming them, an old woman's posture, and she watched the hand go down the rows. Her blue eyes had stayed heavy and focused, but nothing pushed out of them. She was only watching, and the room knew it, and the knowing made what the room was doing truer.
"Count them for me," she said to Paul.
"Thirty-one hands taken. Two regencies have refused, politely. Nine have not come forward and have not gone."
"Thirty-one," said Catherine. "In one morning. It took me eleven years to get thirty-one courts to kiss the foot, and I had to bend half of them."
"You had worse tools," said Paul. "You had me in short coats."
Maria Theresa had stayed standing near the front, swaying slightly, one hand at the small of her back. She watched the last of the middle rows come forward, and when the flow of them thinned she turned to Elizabeth.
"There," she said. "Now it is done properly. A hand given is worth a hundred kneelings. I learned that just now, at my age, on a cold floor. Write that, Paul."
"You said my hand does not want to hurry it," said Paul. "It still doesn't. But I will write that one."
The Old Persian came forward last, as he had promised himself. The hall had gone quiet in a new way, the quiet of a room where something is being finished. He stood before Elizabeth's open palm, which had been in the air now for the better part of an hour and had not once lowered or closed, and he studied it.
"I am the one who asked the question," he said. "Whether the schools would outlive her. Here is my answer, and then here is my hand, and you may have them in that order."
"Give me the hand first," said Elizabeth. "You have earned the right to be backwards."
He laughed, a dry rustle, and took her palm in his two old hands, and held it longer than the others had, and bent his white head over it without kneeling. "The schools will outlive all of us," he said. "That is what I will tell Persia. And I will tell them the Empress of Earth has calluses."
"She has rowed since she was nine," said Fersen, from the wall.
"I know," said the Persian. "I made inquiries. It is why I trusted the letter."
Elizabeth lowered her hand at last. She flexed the fingers once, and looked out at a throne room with no rows left in it, only sovereigns distributed across a cold floor like people at a village fire, and she looked down at her mother sitting among them with her feet in her own hands.
"We were going to hold an audience," she said. "Petitions, dispatches, the ordinary machine."
"It has held itself," said Catherine. "Adjourn it. Take me to the family room and give me tea, and let Maria come, and let the sixty-two find their own way to their carriages. If any of them get lost in the corridors, the floor will keep them warm until someone finds them."
Maria Theresa laughed her wet old laugh again. "I have been dismissed from audiences before," she said. "Never into a sitting room."
"Then you have outlived that too," said Elizabeth, and she offered the old woman her arm.
Maria Theresa took the arm, and they had gone no more than four steps when the Old Persian stopped in the middle of the floor and turned back.
"There is one thing this morning has forgotten," he said, and his voice carried to the last row. "The woman who founded all of it is sitting on the boards with her feet in her own hands, and not one of the sixty-two has given her anything."
The hall went still. Catherine looked up from her feet, and for a moment her face was the old face, the one that had bent kings. "I retired," she said. "That was the entire point of the ceremony."
"You retired the office," said the Persian. "Nobody retired you."
Paul uncapped his pen without deciding to. "There is no protocol for this," he said. "There is no page for it. The rite was always performed to the holder."
"Then write a new page," said the Swedish count, who had shaken a sovereign's hand for the first time an hour ago and had not yet recovered from it. He crossed the floor, and he stopped in front of Catherine's chair that was not a chair, only a place where she sat, and he looked down at her bare feet on the cold oak.
"Supreme Empress," he said. "I knelt to you in London under the old weight. I have hated you for thirty years in a small tidy way, the way one hates weather. I would like to give you the hate back before I kneel."
"Give it to the floor," said Catherine. "It is warmer than I am."
He knelt. The wave came up through his knees, and every soul in the hall felt it find him, and this time they felt what it did with him. It did not take. It warmed him through, the whole way down, and it held him there with the full weight of its power, complete and absolute and irresistible, and the holding felt nothing like frost. He bent his grey head and kissed her bare foot, mouth to skin, and stayed.
"It is still compelling," he said against the oak, and his voice had gone unsteady. "Do you all feel it? It could hold me here until spring and I could not lift a finger against it. It is absolute. And it loves. God in heaven, it loves while it holds."
The German queen came next without being called. Then the Italian prince. Then the archbishop who had prepared a refusal, and the boyish archduke, and the sovereign of the northern houses who had gripped Elizabeth's hand and said nothing. They came in no order, and the line formed itself, and Paul stood at the edge of it with his ledger shut under his arm and his pen capped, because this was not for the record, this was for the floor.
Maria Theresa did not join the line. She stood at Elizabeth's side, leaning on the young arm, and watched her contemporaries go down one by one before a woman she had crowned.
"Fifty years ago I set the crown on her head and kissed her heel upward," she said. "The wave held my arms like iron bands and it was cold as a cellar. This is the same rite. Look at it. It is the same rite and it is not the same thing at all."
"It is the same thing grown up," said Elizabeth.
"It is the same thing forgiven," said Maria Theresa.
Louis of the French houses came forward late, an old man now in a furred coat, and he did not kneel at once. He stood over Catherine's feet and wept standing, openly, the way he had wept in Paris when he declared France hers.
"You made me yours with a word," he said. "I have wondered all my life whether I ever had a choice that day. May I have it now, at the end? May I choose what I was forced into?"
"You may choose," said Catherine. "That is the only thing I have to give."
"I choose it," said Louis, and he went down, and the wave took him entire, and it was warm, and he kissed her foot like a man coming home to a house he had dreamed of for forty years.
One by one they came. Sixty-two sovereigns, and every one of them knelt on the bare parquetry of the throne room with no throne in it, and every one of them kissed the bare foot of the retired Empress, and the wave rose through them all and held each of them with its whole absolute strength, and it did not take anything. It gave. It was irresistible the way spring is irresistible, and it compelled them the way love compels, entirely and without a single cold joint in the machinery, and the hall learned it together, sixty-two minds at once, that power does not have to be cold to be complete.
The last was the Old Persian. He had watched every knee in the room, and when his turn came he came slowly, and knelt, and set his two old hands over her two bare feet before he bowed his head.
"You bought a continent with fear," he said. "And your daughter taught the purchase to pay for itself. I kissed no foot in this hall until today. I give you this one freely, and I feel the strength of the thing that holds me, and I report to Persia that it is kind."
He kissed her foot, once, and sat back on his heels, and did not get up.
Catherine sat among them all with her feet freshly warmed and her hands empty in her lap. Her eyes had gone heavy and blue and focused, but nothing pushed out of them, and nothing needed to. Seventy-five years old, barefoot on her own former floor, held by the attention of every throne on earth, and for the first time in her life not one kiss under her roof had been taken.
"Paul," she said quietly.
He came at once, ledger against his chest. "Not for the record," he said. "I know."
"For the record," said Catherine. "One line. Write that on this day the rite was performed to the founder, freely, by all sixty-two, and that the wave compelled them utterly and loved them while it did. Write that it is permanent. Whatever it has become this morning, it does not go back."
Paul opened the ledger and wrote it standing, and his pen did not hurry. When he finished he read it aloud, once, to the room, and the room heard its own name in the sentence and understood that it had been changed.
Elizabeth came and stood beside her mother's chair. She looked down at the hall of sovereigns still distributed across the floor like a congregation after service, and at the Persian who had not risen, and at Louis drying his face on his sleeve.
"You realize what you have done," she said. "You have made the homage to yourself a founding rite. They will perform it every autumn now. They will invent the tradition within a year and swear it was always ours."
"I invented worse traditions," said Catherine. "At least this one is warm."
Maria Theresa laughed her wet old laugh from the doorway, where she had stopped with Fersen's arm. "Write the date twice," she said to Paul. "The day the frost learned to love, and the day the love learned to kneel."
Maria Theresa stepped forward.
Not on Fersen's arm. She pushed the young arm away gently, took up her cane from where it lay near the front rows, and walked back into the hall she had just been dismissed from. The sovereigns still on the floor turned to watch her come. Paul's pen, already recapped, hung in his hand.
"I said write the date twice," she said, when she reached the center of the room. "I have one thing more to write before you close the page."
"You gave everything this morning," said Elizabeth. "Twice. I counted."
"I gave to you, and I gave to the floor." The old woman stopped in front of Catherine, who had not risen from the boards. Her shadow fell across the bare feet in the old Empress's hands. "I have not given to her what I came to Russia to give. Fifty years I have carried it and found one excuse after another, and this morning took them all away, and now I have none left."
Catherine looked up at her from the floor. "Then sit down and give it."
"It will not keep if I sit."
The Hapsburg empress leaned her cane against the wall, and it stood there alone, and nobody in the hall had ever seen her without it. She went down onto her knees, more slowly than she had gone down for Elizabeth, one hand out against the oak for balance, until she knelt facing the woman who had taken her empire and been given her crown in return.
"The wager," she said. "I told your daughter I was glad I lost it and never told her why. That was a half-truth told standing up. Here is the whole of it, told from the floor where half-truths do not survive."
She put her hand flat on the parquetry, palm down, beside Catherine's bare foot.
"I did not come to Moscow to crown you. I came to see whether the reports were true, that a Prussian girl had broken the Guard with a look. I watched you take Vienna on the way and I felt my own will go out of me like heat out of an open door, and I swore I would destroy you if it cost me everything. That was the wager. Not that Elizabeth would stand against you. That I would."
The hall had gone very quiet. Louis of the French houses had stopped drying his face.
"And then I crowned you," she went on, "with the wave holding my arms, and I felt what it felt like to be held, and some rotten loving part of me that I had spent sixty years governing liked it, and I never governed it again. Every rite after that I told myself was policy. Vienna's safety. The borders. The grain treaties. And every rite after that I was lying, and I have carried the lie the way one carries a stone in a boot, and I am sixty years too late putting it down."
"Why tell it now," said Catherine, "on a cold floor, at your age?"
"Because you taught the wave to want without arriving, and I never taught myself anything, and I am old enough that this is my last named day." Her voice held steady until the end of it and then did not. "You took everything from me and made me glad of it, and I have hated that gladness for fifty years, and this morning I kissed your daughter's foot and the gladness came back without the hate, and I do not know what to do with that except say it out loud before God and Paul's ledger."
Paul's pen was moving. "For the record," he said quietly, "she is saying it aloud."
"I heard the pen," said Maria Theresa.
Catherine shifted on the boards. She drew her feet out of her own hands and set them flat, and for a moment her blue eyes went heavy and focused, the old weight gathering behind them, and the nearest sovereigns felt the air change. Then she closed her eyes and let it go, deliberately, visibly, her shoulders dropping with it.
"I could take even that last truth from you," she said. "Make you glad the whole way down, seam the hate shut so you would never find it again. It would take a breath." She opened her eyes. "I am not going to. That is my answer. It is the only gift I have left that is worth anything."
"I know," said Maria Theresa. "I felt you reach and stop. That is why I am telling it on the floor."
The old woman stayed kneeling. Then she did the thing the whole hall had learned that morning. She turned her hand over on the parquetry, palm up, and held it there between them, open, an old hand with smooth worn rings on it, shaking slightly with the effort of the knees.
"This is not the rite," she said. "The rite I performed doubled for fifty years and it cost me nothing but my knees. This is the one I never gave anyone, because it makes the giver a person, and I have been an empire too long."
Catherine looked at the open palm a long moment. Then she reached out and took it, and pulled, and the two old women came up off the floor together, each taking the other's weight, neither letting go, and they stood in the middle of the bare throne room hand in hand like two grandmothers at a market, and Maria Theresa laughed her wet laugh and Catherine, seventy-five, laughed with her, once, a short rough sound that no one in the hall had heard from her in thirty years.
"There," said Maria Theresa. "Now write the date three times."
"Paul," said Catherine, still holding the hand, "how many?"
His pen had stopped. He looked at the page. "Twice," he said. "I wrote the second date before she said it. I do not know when."
"You are becoming a poor recorder," said Elizabeth, coming to take her mother's other side. "The family will ruin you."
"The family already has," said Paul. "I sat down on the floor during the rites and I have no note of doing it."
The Old Persian rose last of the standing few, unhurried, and looked at the two old women at the center of the hall, and at the open palm that had closed around a closed palm.
"Persia will want to know what was given here," he said.
"Tell them nothing was given," said Maria Theresa. "Tell them it was returned."
The Old Persian bowed and turned back toward the rows, and it was then that the floor changed again.
It was not a pulse. It was a settling, the way a house settles at night when the stove dies down. Every soul in the hall felt the warmth shift its weight, and Fersen, standing at the wall with his arms crossed, felt it arrive inside him and stop there. He had spent thirty years being the one thing the wave could not touch. It had never touched him. It touched him now, lightly, the way a hand rests on a shoulder, and it knew his name.
He said nothing. But Elizabeth saw his face change from across the floor, and she knew what she was looking at. Her husband, the measure, the real refusal, was being greeted.
"Paul," she said. "Come here."
Paul came. Halfway across the boards he stopped, one boot in the air, and set it down very carefully. His ears had gone red.
"It is in the room with me," he said. "It has never been in the room with me. I have been the ungifted one for forty years. Sisters and mothers and nieces, and none of them ever."
Catherine had gone still on the floor. Her blue eyes were open and heavy and focused, and she was not looking at the hall. She was looking down at the parquetry under her own hands, at the grain of the oak, the way a woman looks at a floor she has known all her life and finds a new board in it.
"It is not my change," she said. "I taught it wanting. Elizabeth taught it asking. Neither of us taught it this."
"Taught it what, Mother?"
"To come indoors. To the family. The wave has always gone outward, like frost across a field, like light from a lamp. It has never once turned around and come home." She looked up at her daughter. "When did it learn to come home?"
Elizabeth had gone pale. She was a fast mind, and the arithmetic was already done, and she did not want it done.
"April," she said. "The practice began in winter. By April it arrived warm and loved us uncommanded. We thought that was the practice. We thought we had taught it." She looked at Fersen across the hall. "And Alexandra was born in February."
The name went through the room. Sixty-two sovereigns, most of them grandmothers and grandfathers of dynasties, understood it before anyone said it aloud, the way families understand a thing at a table before the words come.
"The infant," said Maria Theresa. "The grand duchess. The heir to the heir."
"She has never left the palace," said Elizabeth. "She has never left her cradle. She has done nothing but be born, and sleep, and be held." Her voice went uneven in the middle of it. "And every soul in this hall has felt her for months without knowing the name of what they felt."
Fersen crossed the rest of the floor and stood beside his wife. He did not take her hand. He held out his own palm, and looked at it.
"It touched me," he said. "One moment. Light as a sleeve. It said my name, and then it let go." He looked up. "It let go, Elizabeth. Nothing in that thing holds on the way the old wave held on. It greets and releases. Do you understand what that is? That is how your mother touches Peter. That is how a grandmother touches a boy she loves."
In the hall, the warmth had gathered into something almost visible, a low gold light along the boards, and the sovereigns were sitting in it like people sitting by a hearth they had just been told was alive.
Louis of the French houses had not left the floor. He spoke from his knees, quietly.
"Every generation changes it, then."
"It is the way of the gift," said Catherine. She said it slowly, and she was not speaking to the hall. "I was born with the taking. My daughter was born with something larger, and she spent her reign teaching what she was born with. And now a child five months old has changed it in her sleep." She put one hand flat on the oak. "This change is Alexandra's. She will never write a decree. She will never hold a throne. This is what she gave the world, before she could open her eyes on purpose. An eternal change to the wave. It will not go back."
"Write it," said Elizabeth.
Paul had his ledger open. His pen did not move.
"I am trying to find the sentence," he said. "The wave is now, what. Write me the wave."
"You are the record-keeper," said Elizabeth. "Write what you felt in the corridor just now."
He looked at the page for a long moment. Then he wrote, and read it aloud.
"The imperial wave has come indoors. It greets the family by name and lets go. Its source is the grand duchess Alexandra, born February, and the change is hers and permanent."
Maria Theresa had sat down on the boards again, caneless, without appearing to decide it. She was laughing her wet laugh, and this time there was no grief in it at all.
"I wagered against your mother," she said to Elizabeth. "I wagered against you. And now I am sitting on a cold floor being warmed by a baby I have never met." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "Take me to her. I have held sixteen children of my own and ten of them are in the ground, and I would like to hold the one who did this."
"She is in the family room," said Elizabeth. "She is asleep, and she is with my mother, which is to say she is with my mother."
"Then we will wake her," said Catherine, "and apologize for it."
They went out of the throne room together, the strangest procession that floor had ever carried. Elizabeth walked first with Fersen, and Maria Theresa came between Paul and the Old Persian, who had attached himself to the party without asking. The sixty-two stayed where they were. No one had dismissed them and no one wanted to go. They sat in the gold light on the bare oak, and the warmth lay over them like a held breath, and in the third row the German queen put both palms flat on the floor and left them there.
The family room was small and hot, with the stove ticking and a cradle by the window. Catherine the younger sat in the chair beside it with the boy Paul asleep on her shoulder and her grey-eyed daughter Catherine standing at the rail of the cradle, six years old and very serious, watching her twin sister as though on duty.
The infant grand duchess was awake. She lay on her back with her fists open, both hands unclenched, palms turned upward toward the ceiling, and the warmth in the room came from her direction and had always come from her direction, and no one in the family had thought to wonder about it until today.
"She is holding her hands open," said Catherine the elder. She stopped in the doorway, seventy-five years old, and looked at the small upturned palms. "She has slept like that since she was born. I thought it was nothing. A habit of the body."
"It is not a habit of the body," said Elizabeth. "Look at what she is doing with them, Mother. She is doing what we spent a year teaching ourselves. She was born doing it. Wanting without arriving. Hands open, taking nothing."
Maria Theresa came to the rail. The baby turned her head toward the old woman with the unerring instinct of the very young toward warmth, and made a small sound, and held out one fist, and closed it, and opened it again. The wave in the room gathered itself around the old Hapsburg like a cat around a familiar skirt.
Maria Theresa did not laugh this time. She bent over the rail and wept without any sound at all, and the baby watched her do it with her open hands.
"What is her gift, then, in the end?" said Catherine the younger, quietly, from the chair. "Say it plainly. I want it said while she can hear it, even if she cannot know it."
Elizabeth looked at her daughter for a long time.
"The taking was my grandmother's gift," she said. "The asking was mine. Hers is the letting go. She has made the wave into a thing that can hold the whole world and still open its hands." She looked at Catherine the elder. "You spent your reign learning to stop taking. She was born having never taken at all. That is why it came home to the family, Mother. It is not a frost anymore, and frosts have no houses. It lives with us now."
Paul wrote the last line standing in the doorway, and his pen did not hurry. "The wave has come indoors," he read. "Its house is the family." Then he capped the pen and sat down on the floor by the stove, beside his niece the grey-eyed child, who had already sat there first.
The Old Persian paused in the doorway, half turned back toward the hall. He had gone four steps toward the family room and stopped, and his old face worked through something before he said it.
"There is a thing undone," he said. "I counted the rites this morning. The foot was given to the daughter and to the founder. Not one soul in that hall went down before the throne itself. The traditional homage has not been performed."
Elizabeth looked at him, and then at the infant with her open hands, and something settled in her face.
"Paul. Have the dais brought back. Both thrones. Have the sixty-two recalled from their carriages."
"Every one of them is still sitting on the floor," said Paul. "No one has left."
"Then they will only have to stand up."
They carried the infant through the corridors, and the palace seemed to lean after her. The servants who lifted the dais pieces into the throne room worked quickly and said nothing, and the sovereigns came back from the cold oak in ones and twos, shaking feeling into their knees, finding their places not in rows this time but in a wide arc, close, the way family stands.
The thrones went up beneath the double-headed eagle. Elizabeth took the greater one, and Catherine the younger the lesser beside it, and the grand duchess Alexandra lay across her mother's lap in a shawl of white wool, five months old, fists open to the ceiling. Catherine the elder refused a chair. She stood at the foot of the dais in the place she had stood at her own coronation, barefoot, seventy-five, her blue eyes heavy and at rest.
The Old Persian came forward first, because he had named the thing undone and would not make another wait for him.
"The old rite," he said, standing before the three of them. "Say it for me, Paul, because I never learned the words. I only learned the floor."
Paul set the ledger down on the dais step. He did not read from it. "Fealty and allegiance to the Supreme Empress of Earth. To the Queen of Russia, heir to all she holds. To the grand duchess Alexandra, second in the line of the earth. Sovereign, heir, and heir of the heir."
"Then I owe it three times," said the Persian, and he went down.
He stretched himself flat along the boards, arms out, and pressed his mouth to the parquetry at the foot of the dais, and then he rose to his knees and kissed Elizabeth's bare foot, mouth to skin, unhurried. "I swear it to the sovereign," he said against her instep. "The schools will stand. Persia will stand with them."
He moved on his knees to Catherine the younger and kissed her foot the same way. "To the heir." Then he turned, and the whole hall watched an old man crawl the last short distance to the hem of the shawl, and he did not kiss the small bare foot of the infant so much as lay his lips against it, barely, the way one touches wax to test whether it has cooled. The warmth came up through him and settled in his shoulders like a coat.
"To the heir of the heir," he said. "Who changed the world in her sleep."
He rose, and stood aside, and did not wipe his eyes.
The Swedish count came next. He had shaken a sovereign's hand that morning, and now he prostrated himself full length, forehead to the oak, and said the words against the floor before he said them to anyone's face. "Sovereign, heir, and heir of the heir. I hated your mother for thirty years in a small tidy way. I unswear it here, all three of you, entire."
They came in no order and in a tide. The German queen went down with her skirts spread wide on the boards, and kissed all three feet, and lingered longest at the shawl. The Italian prince swore in his own language and translated himself badly and was understood anyway. The archbishop who had prepared a refusal said the words in the voice of a man reciting something he had learned as a boy and only now comprehended, and when he reached the infant he wept over her small hands and could not finish, and Elizabeth waited, and he finished.
The wave did not take any of them. It held every one. Sovereign after sovereign lay full length on the cold oak and felt it gather under their breastbones, complete and absolute, a strength that could have kept them there until spring, and it asked nothing and warmed everything, and the swearing came out of them sounding less like submission than like gratitude.
Louis of the French houses went down slowly, an old man's knees on old oak. "I declared France yours with a word I did not choose," he said at Elizabeth's foot. "I choose it now. France is yours. I am yours. And that small one there has my whole heart and I never met her."
Maria Theresa came late in the tide, on her cane, and left the cane standing against the wall again. She prostrated herself full length before the thrones, the doubled rite she had performed for fifty years, and it took her a long time to get down and a longer time to move along the dais on her forearms from one bare foot to the next.
"Sovereign," she said at Elizabeth's foot. "Heir," at Catherine's. And at the shawl she stopped, and looked up into the small grey-shadowed face, and said the last of it very quietly, so that only the dais heard. "Heir of the heir. I held ten of my children in the ground. I have come four months to hold the one who warmed the floor I die on. Let this count as the oath for my whole house, forever."
"It counts," said Elizabeth.
The infant opened one fist and closed it over the old woman's finger, and held it, and let it go.
Maria Theresa stayed kneeling at the rail a long moment with her hand where the baby had held it. Then she got up off the oak without help, which she had not done in years, and no one in the hall failed to notice, and Paul noticed most of all.
The last was Peter, Elizabeth's son, the ungifted envoy, who had stood at the back of the arc the whole afternoon with his Traveling coat still dusty from the north. He came forward when the hall was done, and he did not kneel at once.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.