Chapter 14: The Hundredth Year
The candles in the old apartments were burned down to their thirds before the knock came. Catherine sat in her chair by the window, a shawl over her knees, her feet bare on the cold marble. She was a hundred years old and she no longer wore slippers in her own rooms. The floor knew her.
Peter came in slowly, one hand on the doorframe. He was ninety-six and his periwig had been gone for decades; his own white hair stood thin against the candlelight. He wore no uniform now, only a plain grey coat, and velvet slippers still, out of habit older than memory.
"Elizabeth's clerks are still writing," he said. "I heard the pens from the corridor. A whole hall of them."
"They have written for a year." Catherine did not turn her head. "The abdication of a seventy-five year old Empress takes longer to draft than the taking of a continent did."
He laughed, a dry sound. He lowered himself into the chair opposite her with the care of a man handling something breakable, and for a while neither of them spoke. Below them, muffled through three floors of stone and velvet, the Winter Palace went about its preparations. Somewhere a page ran. Somewhere a door closed.
"Do you remember Cheapside?" she asked at last.
"The cavalry captain." Peter's unfocused eyes found the ceiling. "He broke in under two minutes and I was ashamed of him for it."
"I was not breaking him." She turned her head at last and looked at him, and her blue eyes still held that lingering, heavy focus, though she had not commanded a living soul in fifty years. "I was measuring the city. He was only where I set my foot."
"And London was under you by supper." He said it without horror now. He had stopped being horrified on schedule, around their fortieth year, and had told her so plainly, and she had recorded it in the ledger herself.
The shawl had slipped. Peter leaned forward and pulled it back over her knees, tucking the corner with two fingers, precise as a man folding a dispatch. His hands shook at that distance and were steady at this one.
"The theft," he said. "You called it that in the abdication. Your own word, in front of ten thousand."
"My word, and Paul read it aloud, and the standing book recorded that I did not take it back."
"You never did." He settled back. "I have thought about that a great deal this year. Whether I would have preferred to be stolen by someone who named it theft."
"Would you?"
"I would not have preferred anyone else." He said it simply, the way he said everything now. The mercurial temper had been eroded so long ago that even the pit where it had been was smooth. "But it is a strange thing to be a man's whole answer for seventy-four years."
"You were never my answer." Catherine reached down and worked her toes against the cold marble, an old, unconscious motion. "You were my first subject. The rest were copywork."
He smiled at that. He had learned to smile at the truth of himself, which had taken longer than the surrender had.
Outside, the bells of the Alexander column began the hour, and the pens upstairs, if they were still writing, did not pause.
"Elizabeth will set it down well," Peter said. "She set yours down well. Ten thousand kneeling by choice, and the wave learning her name before it learned to fear her."
"It never learned to fear her. That was the whole difference between us." Catherine looked at her own bare feet as if they belonged to a stranger she had known a long time. "I took. She receives. The world kneels to her because it wants to have knelt."
"Grigori wants to have knelt to you, and he never did."
The old woman was quiet a moment. "Grigori is the finest thing my daughter's reign produced, and neither of us may claim him."
"May we claim the peace?"
"You may claim whatever you performed." She lifted her eyes to him. "You performed the rite of the house before any of it. Before the Guard, before London, before the coronation. Everything after was built on that floor, Peter. Not this marble. Our floor."
He looked at her feet then. Not the way he had looked at them at twenty-six, vacant and obsessive and starving. He looked the way an old man looks at a document he signed in his own blood and has never once regretted or understood.
"The clerks upstairs," he said, "are writing the abdication of the Empress who receives. And I am ninety-six years old, and I am asking my wife for the rite one last time."
"You do not need to ask."
"I know. I ask because it is mine to ask. That was the whole point of everything, in the end." He pushed himself up from the chair, slowly, his knees cracking on the second motion, and she did not help him, because she knew he would refuse the help.
He came around the chair and stood before her. The candlelight put his shadow long across the marble, and the shadow bent as he went down, one knee, then the other, the velvet slippers flat against the cold floor. No wave in the room. No gaze. Nothing in the world but an old man and the bare feet of a woman a hundred years old.
He took her right foot in both hands. His palms were warm; his hands had always run hot, even in the first winter, even when he had been broken and did not yet know what he was for. He bowed his head and pressed his mouth to the arch of her foot, and held it there, and the hold was the rite, and had always been the rite.
Catherine sat still. Her hands lay open on the shawl, palms up, the way she had opened them at the tenth hour fifty years ago to let the wave pass out of her. She did not close them.
"You are trembling," she said quietly, against no one.
"From the floor," he said into her skin. "It is May and the marble is still winter."
She reached down and put her hand on the white crown of his head. It was the only thing she ever touched without intent, and she had touched it ten thousand times.
"The wave is in the floors below us," she said. "Warm now. It knows your knees better than it knows any knees in the empire. It will not enter you. It will only watch."
"Let it learn." He lifted his mouth from her foot and looked up at her, and his restless, unfocused eyes were more focused than they had been in seventy years. "Let it learn this too. That a man can give what was never taken from him, at the end, when everything else is signed away."
"Elizabeth will abdicate on Thursday."
"I know."
"And after Thursday there is no throne in the world for you to kneel to. Only a family."
"There has only ever been a family." He bent again, and this time he kissed her ankle, the thin skin above the heel bone, where the pulse ran. "The thrones were the carriage. You told Alexandra that yourself. I was only there before you said it."
Catherine closed her eyes. Somewhere above them a clerk dipped a pen, and downstairs the warm wave lay in the floors like a cat in the sun, and the empire of sixty-two regencies prepared itself, without knowing it, for the second free pair of hands in a century.
"Then it is wholly yours," she said. "This last one. It always was."
Peter said nothing. He held her foot the way he had held it in the felt chamber, in the coronation year, in the hunger of the first winter, and the holding did not change at all.
The wave rose.
It came up through the marble the way warmth comes up through a stone that has lain all day in the sun, without motion, without sound, a pressure in the room that was not pressure. It gathered beneath the chair, beneath Catherine's bare feet, beneath the knees of the old man kneeling on the cold floor, and it lay there and watched.
Catherine felt it first at the soles. Fifty years had passed since she had opened her hands, and still she knew the difference between a warm floor and an attending one. She did not move. Her hand stayed on the white crown of Peter's head.
"It has come up," she said.
"I know." Peter's mouth was still against her arch. "It is under my knees. It has been under my knees since the third floor."
"Can you feel what it is doing?"
"Learning." He said the word into her skin. "It is learning the way an old man gives a thing he was never made to give. It has never had that before. Everything else it has had was chosen young."
The wave pressed once, softly, against the soles of her feet, the way a child knocks on a door it has been taught to knock on before entering. Catherine let it in as far as the ankle and no further, and there it settled, warm, patient, folding itself around the thin bone like water around a stone.
"It is asking something," she said. "It has learned to ask. It will not take."
"Let it ask."
"It wants to know what this is. What we are doing here, without a command, without a ceremony, without witnesses." She looked down at him. "It has knelt with ten thousand by choice. It has held the deacon cold and then warm. It does not know this room."
"Then tell it."
"I do not tell it. It reads." She closed her eyes. "It is reading you, Peter. It has read you for fifty years through the floors and it has never once understood you, and tonight it thinks it will finally understand you, and it will not, and that is the finest thing about you."
Peter laughed. The laugh moved through his shoulders and into her foot, and the wave flinched at the motion, drew back half an inch, and returned.
"It felt that," he said. "It thought the rite had ended."
"The rite does not end. It is only performed."
He shifted his grip, both hands around her ankle now, thumbs resting on the pulse, and the wave lay along his forearms like a cat testing the warmth of a hearthstone. It did not enter him. It pressed and drew back, pressed and drew back, the rhythm of something knocking.
"It is asking you now," Catherine said. "I can feel it against your wrists. What is it asking?"
"It is asking why." His thumbs did not move. "Why I kneel when nothing commands it. Why I kneel when the thrones are signed away and the office is finished and there is no one in the world who requires it of me."
"And what will you answer?"
"I will not answer. It will watch the answer."
He bowed his head again and kissed the other foot, the left, the one the wave was not folded around, and the wave moved at once to cover it, sliding warm across the cold marble skin, and found nothing there to read but an old woman's foot and an old man's mouth and the floor's own winter.
The candles burned. Somewhere above, a hall of pens went on writing the abdication of Elizabeth, who received, and the wave lay in the room of the woman who had taken, and for the first time in its long warm life it watched a thing it could not copy.
"You were right," Catherine said at last, quietly, to the floor as much as to him. "It does not understand."
"Will it ever?"
"No. And that is your office, Peter. Elizabeth holds the chancellery. Alexandra holds the succession. You hold the one thing the wave will study for a hundred years and never learn." She opened her eyes. "The man who was taken and stayed."
He lifted his head. The candlelight stood in his unfocused eyes, and for a moment they were not unfocused at all.
"I did not stay," he said. "I arrived. There is a difference, and it took me seventy years to find the word for it, and I found it tonight, on this floor, holding your foot."
"Say it to the wave."
"I am not saying anything to the wave." His voice was steady and entirely his own. "I am saying it to my wife. The wave can overhear."
The wave pressed once more against her soles, soft as a breath, and lay still. It had stopped knocking. It was only there now, warm beneath the two of them, and Catherine understood that it had given up understanding and chosen instead to keep the room, the way the floors of the parish at Vologda had kept the archbishop's house. Not reading. Guarding.
"It has stopped watching us," she said. "It is watching over us. There is a difference, and it learned the word tonight on this floor."
"Then we have taught it one thing between us."
"One thing in a century. It is enough. Elizabeth's whole reign taught it receiving. Yours has taught it keeping." She drew her shawl higher with her free hand. "Come up off the marble. You are ninety-six and the floor is winter, and the rite is performed."
"Not yet." He settled his cheek against the arch of her foot, the way a man rests against a doorpost of a house he has come home to. "A few minutes more. It is the last first time. Tomorrow it will only be the last."
Catherine did not argue. Her hand stayed where it was, on the white crown of his head, without intent, and the wave lay warm in the floor beneath them both, keeping what it could not understand, while above them the pens of the chancellery wrote on toward Thursday, and Thursday came closer one dipped nib at a time.
He finally rose to his knees. It took him three motions: the hands first, flat on the marble, then the knees lifting, then the straightening of the spine, which cracked twice and stopped him once halfway. The wave shifted under him like water parting around a lifted stone, and Catherine's foot went cold where his hands had been.
"There," she said. "Performed."
"Not finished." He knelt back on his heels, swaying, and steadied himself with one hand on the arm of her chair. "There is a difference, and you taught me that one too."
"Then finish it and come up."
He took her foot once more. Not the rite now. He pressed his thumb once to the arch, the way a clerk seals a letter he will never reopen, and let go. Then he rose, and it was a longer labor than the descent, and she counted the motions out of habit and did not help him with any of them.
He stood at last, grey coat askew at one shoulder, and looked down at the floor between her bare feet.
"It is still there," he said. "Warm. Do you feel it? It has not gone down."
"It is going to stay the night." Catherine worked her toes against the marble, and the warmth rose to meet them. "It has decided we are its business. Like Fedot and the parish. Like the floors of Vologda."
"Then the floors will keep us and the chancellery will keep the empire." He laughed once, short. "Between the two of them, I have never been kept so much in my life."
"You like it."
"I was made to like things. It is the one part of me nobody had to touch."
He crossed to the window, slower than he had crossed to her chair, and stood looking down into the courtyard. The river beyond was black. The city lay out to the east in a dusting of lamps, and somewhere among them the archbishop's Vologda was four hundred versts of dark country away, with its third candle still unlit and its answer owed in May.
"Thursday," he said, to the glass.
"Thursday."
"She will stand on the floor the way you stood on it. Barefoot, I would wager. She has always wagered the same way you do."
"She wagers better." Catherine drew the shawl up over her knees. "I wagered and won everything. She wagers and gives it back. The second is the harder hand."
Peter turned from the window. The candlelight found the deep lines at his mouth, the paper-thin skin over his temples, and the stillness in his eyes that had come with the years like frost coming into a window, clear and not cold.
"May I ask you something I have never asked?"
"You have asked me everything. Seventy-four years of asking."
"Not this." He came back to the chair but did not sit. He stood over her, and his hands hung at his sides, and they were shaking again, the way they shook at a distance and never near her. "The first winter. When you broke me. Was there a night, even one, when you lay awake and thought of letting me go back? Before you knew what I would become?"
The room was quiet. Above them, the pens went on. The wave lay warm in the floor and did not move.
"Every night of the first winter," she said. "And three nights of the second. And once, on the evening before Cheapside, when the captain rode out of the crowd with his saber up and I thought, for one breath, that a saber might have ended all of it before it began."
"And then?"
"And then the saber came down, and London was under me by supper, and I never lay awake about it again." She looked up at him. "I chose you, Peter. Before the wave chose you. That is the truest thing in every ledger Paul ever read aloud, and it is in none of them."
"I know it." His voice roughened and he let it. "I have known it forty years. But knowing and hearing are two words, and tonight is for words."
"Then hear it once more and go to bed." She held out her hand, palm up, the way she had opened it at the tenth hour. "You are ninety-six, and Elizabeth will want you standing at the front on Thursday, and you will insist on standing, and I will insist on letting you."
He took her hand. He bent, and pressed his mouth once to her knuckles, the way Paul had at the last breakfast, and the wave in the floor rose a half-inch toward the touch and lay back down again, keeping.
"Good night, Catherine."
"Good night, Peter."
He went to the door. At the frame he stopped, one hand on the wood, the same hand that had steadied him coming in. He did not turn around.
"The wave," he said. "It will still be under the floor tomorrow. And Thursday, when she stands down. What do you think it will do?"
"Nothing." Catherine said it with certainty, and the certainty was fifty years old. "It has learned to keep. We taught it that tonight, one thing in a century, and it was enough. It will keep the room empty for us. That is what floors are for, when the people who used them are done."
He nodded, though she could not see it, and she knew it anyway, and went out. His slippers whispered on the marble of the corridor, softer than the pens upstairs, and the door closed on him with the sound of a house settling for the night.
Catherine sat alone. The candles had burned to their stubs and she did not call anyone to trim them. The wave lay warm against her bare feet, keeping, and she let it, and above her the chancellery wrote Thursday closer and closer, one dipped nib at a time, and her feet on the cold marble had never once, in a hundred years, needed slippers in her own rooms.
She was reaching for the candle snuffer when the knock came again. One knock, soft, the knock of a man who has changed his mind in a corridor.
Catherine did not tell him to enter. She never had. The door opened and Peter stood in it, grey coat still askew, one hand pressed flat against his chest as though checking that his heart was where he had left it.
"I could not sleep," he said. "The floor kept me in my rooms too. It followed me down the corridor, you know. Warm under the boards the whole way, like a dog."
"Sit, then."
"Not in the chair." He came in and stood over the low bench by the window, the one she kept for no one. "I want to tell you something. Or ask you. I stood at the door down there for a quarter of an hour deciding which."
"Ask. You have earned the worse of the two."
He sat on the bench after all, slowly, and the wave gathered beneath it without being asked. He looked at his own slippers.
"The first stolen night," he said. "Do you remember what you said to me?"
Catherine was quiet. A hundred years of memory, and it came up quickly, that night, the way cold water comes up through stone.
"You were in the blue room," she said. "Before the Hermitage. There was a fire that smoked. You had shouted at me about Holstein all through supper, in front of the ladies, and I came to your rooms after midnight without knocking, which no one did, ever. And you said, before I had spoken a word, that you were sorry."
"I was sorry."
"You were terrified. Your hands were shaking on the bedpost." She looked at the window, at the black river. "And I sat down on the edge of your bed and I looked at you, and I did it deliberately, for the first time with intent in a closed room, and your face went smooth. And you said, do you remember what you said?"
"No," Peter said. "I have never remembered it. That is why I came back. That is the whole reason I knocked."
"You said, 'I do not know what I am, but I think you do.'"
The words stood in the room. The wave pressed up once against the floorboards, soft, listening.
"And then?" he asked.
"Then I took your hands off the bedpost and put them on the floor. I put you on your knees on a smoking rug in a blue room in March, and I gave you my foot, and I did not tell you to worship it. I only put it there. You understood the rest without being taught." Her voice was level. "You wept while you did it. You said my name twice, and both times it sounded like a man arriving somewhere."
"I do not remember it," Peter said again, and his voice was not level. "I have that night in me somewhere, and it is gone, and I have hated that for forty years. Everyone keeps their first night. The deacon kept his. The Old Persian keeps his. I keep nothing."
The wave had gone very still under the bench, the stillness of something attending to a grief it had never been shown.
"Then take it back," Catherine said.
He looked up.
"It is in me, not in you. I remember every word of it, every motion of your hands, the smell of the smoke from the fire. I have carried it a century the way I carried the ledgers." She drew her feet in under the shawl, and then, deliberately, put them out again, bare on the marble, the way she had put one foot on a smoking rug in March. "Give me your hands, Peter."
He came off the bench and knelt before her, and it was the descent of a young man, quick, uncounted, the slippers left behind him without noticing. The wave rose with him and folded itself around his knees and did not enter, and he did not feel it at all, because he was seventy-four years away.
"Close your eyes," Catherine said.
He did. She put her hands on either side of his face, and the old blue eyes fixed on him with that lingering, heavy focus, and for the first time in fifty years she used it. Not to command. She poured the night into him.
The blue room. The smoking fire. The bedpost under his young hands. The shout still dying in his own throat about Holstein, about the aunt's dresses, about nothing. And then the door, and no knock, and a woman in a white shift sitting down on the edge of his bed and looking at him, and his anger going out of him like heat out of an open window, and the sentence coming up out of him without his choosing it. I do not know what I am, but I think you do.
Peter's breath broke. His hands found the marble, not the bedpost, and went down, and Catherine gave him her right foot, and he took it in hot young palms and pressed his mouth to the arch, and wept, exactly as he had, and said her name twice.
The wave lay along the floor around them and read the whole night at once, a century old and brand new, and understood none of it, and kept all of it.
"There," Catherine said, when his breathing came back. "It was never gone. It was only kept in the wrong house."
He lifted his head. His face was wet and young and ninety-six all at once.
"You gave it to me freely," he said. "You used it. For a minute, and freely, and for me."
"I stole one night in my life before the throne. Tonight I gave one back." She took her foot from his hands and closed her own eyes, briefly, the effort of it showing in her face like weather. "That is my accounting, Peter, made tonight, before Thursday. One theft, one restitution. Let the standing book record the balance if it ever learns how."
"It will not. It is under the floor and it does not understand us, and you said that was the finest thing about me."
"About us." She opened her eyes. "Help me up. The candles are dead and I am a hundred years old, and I find I want to sleep in my own bed tonight instead of this chair."
He stood and took her hands and brought her up out of the chair with the care of a man handling something breakable, and she leaned on his arm, and the wave went with them across the dark marble toward the bedroom door, warm, keeping, carrying a blue room and a smoking fire in its floors from that night onward.
The bedroom door stood open and neither of them crossed it. Through the gap, from the corridor beyond, came a sound that had not been there an hour ago: singing, low and many-voiced, rising from the courtyards below.
Peter stopped with her hand on his arm. "The night office," he said. "I had forgotten it was Wednesday."
"I never forget it." Catherine turned from the bedroom door toward the window instead, and the wave went with them, warm under the boards.
Below, in the great court of the Winter Palace, a thousand candles had been lit. Not for the abdication. For her. The congregation stood without clergy at their head, the way they always stood now, and sang the office of the holy mother in the plain chant that had come out of the parishes and spread through sixty-two realms in the last twenty-five years.
"When did it begin?" Peter asked. "Truly begin. Not the shrines. The singing."
"The year after I stood down." She stood at the glass, her bare feet on the cold stone of the window recess. "A woman came from the Volga villages to the gates with a letter she had written to me. Not a petition. A letter, as to a grandmother. The guard brought it up and I answered it in my own hand. She told her parish. There was a second letter. Then there were four hundred."
"And then there were shrines."
"Then there were shrines." Below, the chant turned and rose on its second verse. "I never ordered one. Paul can confirm it in the ledgers. I never ordered one, and there are thirty thousand of them, from Iceland to the Yellow Sea."
Peter came and stood beside her at the window. His reflection and hers hung together in the black glass, two old shapes above a field of small flames.
"Do you hear what they sing?" he asked.
"The third verse. Yours, as it happens. 'She was there before the wave, and she is there after it.'" Her mouth curved without warmth or without coldness. "Elizabeth abdicates on Thursday and the world barely sings. I do nothing on a Wednesday and a thousand candles burn under my window."
"Does it trouble you?"
"It interests me." She said it in the voice she had used on ministers, long ago, and then it softened into something older. "Elizabeth holds the rule. Alexandra will hold it after her. But the devotion never passed to them, and it was never mine to give or refuse. The world made a mother of me and did not ask. I have been seized by my own subjects, Peter, and the seizure was the one I never planned."
The chant below reached its close, and the court fell silent, and in the silence a single voice began the litany. Holy mother, who knelt first and was knelt to last. Pray for us. Holy mother, whose feet are cold so ours are warm. Pray for us.
"That last line is new," Peter said. "Or old. I cannot tell anymore."
"It is the oldest thing in the service and they keep rediscovering it." She watched the candles. "It began with the foot. Everyone thought the foot was the rite, because the foot was what they saw. But the foot was only the door. A hand is given and it is a hand. A foot is given and the whole body has bent. They understood that before the theologians did. The priests spent ten years arguing about me, and the parishes simply lit candles and told me their troubles in letters, and the letters won."
"You answer them still?"
"Two a week. Tuesday and Friday, an hour after supper. The archbishop of Vologda reads the ones I cannot reach and answers in my name, which he resisted for four years and then performed better than any bishop alive." She turned from the window. "Help me to the prie-dieu."
Peter looked at the small kneeling bench by the wall, the one piece of furniture in the apartments that had not been there in their first century. Dark oak, plain, worn pale at the knee-rest. A single candle burned before it on the floor.
"You keep an office of your own," he said. "I have never once seen it performed."
"You were never meant to. It is the only rite in my life that has no witnesses." She crossed the room without his arm, slowly, and lowered herself to her knees on the bench with her hands on its edge. "The world kneels to holy mother Catherine. Holy mother Catherine kneels to the floor of her own room, once a night, and says the only prayer she has ever trusted."
"Which is?"
"Watch and learn. You are the one man alive the wave never understood. You may overhear."
She bowed her head. The wave rose up through the marble to meet her knees, and lay there, and did not enter.
"I was given a gift," she said to the floor, in the voice of a woman alone. "I used it, and it became a theft, and the theft became a peace, and the peace became this. I do not know what I am."
Peter stood very still in the middle of the dark room. His own words, from a blue room in March, returned to him down seventy-four years, spoken back to him now from the other end of a life.
"That is not a prayer," he said. "That is a question."
"It is the only one I have ever had." She did not lift her head. "The world made me its mother and mothers are supposed to know. I answer two letters a week and I do not know. I kneel to my own floor and I do not know. And the floor keeps me anyway, and the world sings anyway, and that is the whole of my theology, and it has thirty thousand shrines."
The wave pressed once against her knees, soft as a child's knock, and lay back down.
"You see it," she said. "It does not understand me either. It has read me for a hundred years and it kneels to me and it does not know what I am, and so it keeps me, the way the floors of Vologda kept Grigori's house. We are all of us kept by things that do not understand us, Peter. That is the deeper rite. The foot was only where it started."
Peter came to the bench and knelt beside it, not to her, beside her, both of them facing the floor and the single candle. His knees cracked once and he let them.
"Then I will keep the office with you," he said. "Two letters a week I cannot answer either, and a floor that keeps me without understanding me. I have been performing this rite for seventy-four years under another name."
Catherine reached along the bench without looking and found his hand. Her eyes held their lingering, heavy focus, and she did not use it.
"Then the shrine has two communicants," she said, "and the service will have to be rewritten again."
Below them, in the court, the last candle of the office guttered and was not replaced, and the wave lay under the whole palace like warmth under a winter stone, keeping a hundred-year-old woman and a ninety-six-year-old man kneeling side by side to a floor that loved them without knowing what they were.
They stayed kneeling a while. The candle on the floor burned down toward its brass dish, and neither of them moved to save it. Then Peter's knees shifted on the stone, and Catherine felt the motion through the bench, and knew before he spoke.
"You are going to get up," she said.
"I am going to get up." But he did not. His hands stayed flat on the edge of the prie-dieu, beside hers. "There is one more thing. I have been carrying it since the corridor, and I thought it was the question about the first winter, and it was not. That question was only the door. This is the room behind it."
"Then say it from the floor, if it needs the floor."
He turned from the bench. He faced her, kneeling, and the wave rose under him and folded itself around his knees, and the candlelight stood in his eyes, and his face was very old and very clear.
"Give me the rite," he said. "The last one. Not the one I performed at the beginning of the night. That one was for the hundred years. This one is for Thursday."
"Thursday is three days away."
"Thursday is when the last throne in the world goes out from under my knees. After Thursday I will kneel to you for the rest of my life and it will cost nothing, and cost nothing is the only thing kneeling has never been in this family." His hands were shaking again, at that distance, and he did not hide them. "Let it cost me once more. Let me go down on marble that is winter, for a wife who is a hundred, with no office, no wave, no witness, and nothing owed. Then I will be finished arriving."
Catherine looked at him for a long moment. Then she drew her feet in under the shawl, and stood, and it took her four motions, and he did not help her with any of them, and she did not ask. She crossed to her chair by the window and sat, and put her feet out bare on the cold marble, the old unconscious motion, and pulled the shawl over her knees.
"Then come and be finished," she said.
He left the slippers where he had knelt. He came across the dark marble on bare feet, and the wave went with him the whole way, a warm lane laid through the cold floor, and where he stepped it warmed and behind him it cooled, so that he crossed the room on a road that closed after him.
He went down before her chair. One knee, then the other, on bare stone. His breath came short with the descent and he let it, and did not rush it, and did not steady himself on the arm of her chair. He gathered her right foot into both hands without asking, because the asking had been made and answered, and the hot old palms closed around the cold arch, and the warmth went into her foot and out of his hands like water out of a full vessel.
He bowed his head. His mouth found the arch and held, and the hold was the whole rite, and the room was silent except for the small sound of his breathing against her skin.
The wave rose beneath them both and lay still. It did not knock. It had stopped knocking an hour ago, and now it only kept, and Catherine felt it keeping the way one feels a full church keeping a bride and groom.
"You are not trembling," she said.
"No." He spoke into her foot. "I noticed. For the first rite tonight I shook like a man in his first winter. For this one I am still. I think the stillness is what being finished feels like."
"Say the words, then. You have never needed them, but you have never been finished before."
He lifted his mouth only far enough to speak. "My wanting is mine. It was taken and it stayed, and staying made it mine. It belongs to your feet while I have breath, and after breath it belongs to the floor that kept us, and it was never once a theft, because I arrived."
The wave pressed up once, very softly, through the marble under his knees, and lay back down, and Catherine understood that it had copied nothing and learned nothing and would remember everything.
"Finished," she said.
"Not yet." He kissed the arch once, briefly, the seal, and then did not rise. He knelt back on his heels and stayed there, looking up at her, and the candle from the prie-dieu threw his shadow across her bare feet. "One thing more. The last last thing. I promise it is the last last thing, and you may put it in the ledger that I said so and was wrong twice tonight already."
"Say it."
"Thursday, when Elizabeth stands down. I want to kneel in the square. Not at the front, where you will insist on putting me. In the crowd. In the ten thousand. One kneeling old man among the kneeling, no name, no rite, no office. Let me find out what it is they all feel, that I have only ever felt from the inside of it."
Catherine was quiet. Above them a pen dipped somewhere in the chancellery, and below them the city lay in its dust of lamps, and between the two the wave lay warm under the marble, keeping.
"You will not find out," she said at last. "You will kneel in the crowd and it will feel like this room feels, and you will know it already. But I will not refuse you. It is the first thing you have ever asked me for that costs you nothing, and I find I want to see you pay nothing once, in the square, among them."
"Then it is settled."
"It is settled. Now get up off my floor, Peter, or you will be finished on it, and I refuse to bury you on a Wednesday with the abdication still unwritten."
He laughed, and the laugh cracked in the middle the way old men's laughs crack, and he took her offered hand and rose. It was slow, and it hurt him, and he let her see both, which was new, and which was the finishing, and she knew it and did not say so.
At the door he stopped again, hand on the frame, and this time he did turn around. The candle stub behind her threw her shadow long across the marble, bare feet and wide skirts, a shape the whole world knew and had made thirty thousand shrines to, and he looked at it the way no one else alive was permitted to look at it.
"Good night, Catherine," he said. "I will knock tomorrow. And Thursday. And Friday, if the floor will have me."
"It will have you," she said. "We taught it that tonight."
He went out, barefoot and unsteady, and his feet made no sound on the marble at all, because the wave had gone down the corridor ahead of him, laying the warm road home.
Alone, Catherine reached for the snuffer and did not use it. The warmth under the marble was growing.
She noticed it first as a difference in pressure, the way one notices a door opened in a far room. The wave had lain beneath her feet like a cat. Now it lay like a tide, gathering itself below the ground floor of the palace, drawing up out of the foundations, out of the river mud and the old pilings, out of a hundred years of floors. It rose an inch. Then another.
She took her feet off the marble.
The marble warmed without her. Along the walls, the cold of May went out of the stone, and the air in the room changed the way air changes before a storm, thicker, sweeter, a pressure behind the ears that she had not felt since she was a young woman with the whole Guard on its knees in this same palace.
"No," she said to the floor.
The wave rose anyway. It did not enter. It had learned that much and kept it. But it climbed the walls, and the candelabra flames stood straight and tall, and the dark mirror in the corner clouded at its lower edge like breath on glass.
Catherine sat still and watched it come.
It had never done this. In fifty years it had asked, and knocked, and kept, and learned the alphabet of a child and the grief of an old man, and it had never once gathered. Gathering was hers. Gathering was the word for what she had done in throne rooms and cathedrals and on the road to London, and she knew the feeling of it from the inside the way a soldier knows the feeling of the drum.
It was learning to gather. Tonight. From watching Peter.
She put her feet back down. The warmth closed around them instantly, warm as the palms that had held her arch an hour ago, and she understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with power, what the wave was doing. It had watched an old man give a thing that was never taken. It had read the whole night twice, the rite and the restitution, the blue room poured back into its owner. And it had gone away and done the only thing it knew how to do with what it had read.
It had begun to make a gift.
The wave gathered below the floors of the Winter Palace, and it was not for Elizabeth, and it was not for the crowd, and it was not for Thursday. It rose toward the one room where a hundred-year-old woman sat barefoot in a chair with her shawl over her knees.
"What are you doing?" Catherine asked the floor. She had not spoken aloud to it before. The words came out in her own voice, the plain one, the one she used on two letters a week.
The wave answered by rising further. It came up through the walls now, warm on both sides of her, and the room filled with a presence like sunlight filling a courtyard, without direction, without demand. It lay against her ankles, her knees, her open hands, and it pressed once, softly, and held the pressure.
She knew the grammar of that. She had invented it.
It was kneeling.
The wave, which had knelt under ten thousand by choice and carried four traitors to Petersburg and held a sleeping great-granddaughter like a blanket, was kneeling to her. To the woman who had taken. Fifty years after she had opened her hands and given it away, it had come back on its own, gathered out of the foundations of her own palace, and knelt.
"I stole you," she said. "I have said it in every ledger. Paul read the word aloud to ten thousand."
The warmth did not move.
"You should kneel to Grigori. You should kneel to the deacon. You should kneel to my daughter, who taught you receiving, and to the Old Persian, who taught you questions. Not to me."
The wave pressed again. Held. And this time Catherine felt something in the press that she had felt only once before in a century, on a smoking rug in a blue room in March, from a terrified young man who had said her name twice like a man arriving somewhere. Wanting. Held back and arrived at anyway. The thing Peter had spent his life teaching it without knowing he was teaching it.
It wanted her. Not the office. The office stood empty and would stand emptier on Thursday. It wanted the woman in the chair, the cold feet, the unanswered letters, the prayer to the floor.
Catherine sat with her palms open on the shawl, and a hundred years of arithmetic went through her, and none of it balanced. She had stolen a husband and called it theft and been forgiven by the theft itself. She had built a peace and confessed the theft in front of ten thousand, and the confession had become the corner stone of thirty thousand shrines. And now the last debt in the world was being offered to her by the only creditor she had never listed in any ledger.
"You will not understand me," she told it. "I am the one thing you will study and never learn. Peter said it of himself and it was half true. It is wholly true of me."
The wave gathered higher. The flames stood taller. Down the whole length of the palace, she felt it moving through the floors, warm, and out into the city, street by street, quarter by quarter, rising under the paving stones like spring under a frozen river. A watchman near the bridge would feel it through his boots and think of summer. A nurse at a window would feel the floor warm under her slippers and pick the child up without knowing why. Two hundred thousand people asleep on a warm floor in May.
And above them, in the chancellery, the pens stopped.
She heard it through three floors, the cessation, the small silence of a hall of clerks lifting their heads at once. Then the pens resumed, faster, and one set of footsteps came down the servants' stair at a pace no clerk should ride down stairs at, and a knock landed on her door, one knock, soft, the knock of a woman who has changed her mind in a corridor.
"Enter," Catherine said, and had never said it to her daughter in her life.
Elizabeth came in. She was seventy-five and her hair was white and unpowdered and her hands were ink-stained to the second knuckle, and she stood in the doorway with her cheeks dark with blood and her eyes on the clouded mirror.
"The wave is in the chancellery," she said. "It came up under the writing tables. It warmed the ink wells. Catherine, it came to me first, and it passed me by. It went through the whole hall, under every clerk, and it went past me and up to this floor. To you."
"It has gathered," Catherine said.
"It has never gathered. It receives and it keeps. What have you done?"
"Nothing. That is the whole of it. I have done nothing for fifty years, and tonight I did the smallest thing of my life. I told an old man where the first night went."
Elizabeth crossed the room. She looked down at her mother's bare feet on the warm marble, and at the flames standing straight in the candelabra, and at the open palms on the shawl.
"It is kneeling," she said. "To you. I can feel it from here. It is kneeling to the one of us who took."
"Yes."
"And it will not be refused. I know the feel of a thing that will not be refused. I have been that thing." Elizabeth sat down slowly on the low bench by the window, the one kept for no one, and put her ink-stained hands in her lap. "The clerks will not finish the abdication tonight. They are warm and they are weeping and they do not know why, and the chancellery smells like my grandmother's kitchen. What do we do with it?"
Catherine looked at her own feet on the warmed marble, and the warmth held them the way hot old palms had held them, and she gave her daughter the only answer the ledgers had never contained.
"Nothing," she said. "We let it arrive. I have spent a century learning the difference between taking and receiving, and this is neither. It is being kept by a thing that has decided to give. Thursday can wait one night."
Below them the wave gathered, warm under the whole city, and held.
The family room had not changed in fifty years. The same low table, the same worn benches, the same crack in the third floorboard that Paul had filled with wax at nine and never let anyone repair since. It was there the family gathered, past midnight, summoned by a page who was told only to say that the wave had risen and no more.
Young Catherine came first, grey-eyed, fifty-three, still in chancellery ink. Her twins followed, Alexandra holding her brother's wrist the way her father held hers. Fersen came behind Elizabeth. Paul arrived last, carrying the small ledger he had carried for sixty years.
"Say it again," young Catherine said, standing in the doorway. "From the beginning, mother. What it did."
"It gathered," Catherine the elder said. She sat in her usual place, bare feet flat on the warm boards. "It rose out of the foundations and knelt. To me."
The room absorbed that. Alexandra crossed to her grandmother and knelt beside her chair, laid one hand flat on the floorboards, and held it there a long moment.
"It is still warm," she said. "But it is not speaking to me. It speaks to everyone. It has spoken to me since I was born." She looked up, and her grey eyes were troubled. "Why is it silent with you?"
"Because it does not know what I am," Catherine said. "It has never known. Silence is its highest courtesy."
Peter lowered himself onto the bench beside his son. "It spoke to Elizabeth through the floors of the chancellery. It passed her by on its way up. Elizabeth. The woman who taught it everything it does now."
"I felt it," Elizabeth said. She sat with her ink-stained hands open in her lap. "Fifty years of reign and it has never once gone past me. Tonight it did, and I am not wounded, and that is the strangest part. I watched it climb toward her the way one watches a river find the sea, and I thought, of course. Where else would it go?"
Paul opened the ledger but did not write. "There is no column for this. I have kept this book for sixty years and there is no column for a wave that kneels to the woman who stole it."
"Add one," Catherine said.
"What would you call it?"
Catherine considered. The candle on the table guttered and righted itself without wind.
"Call it the column of the kept. Put Peter in it first. He was the first thing the wave never understood and decided to love anyway."
"I will be in good company," Peter said.
Young Catherine sat down across the table from her grandmother. "Then we must speak plainly, because Thursday comes at dawn regardless. Mother abdicates. I ascend. And the whole world will have heard by then that the wave rose in the night and knelt to a woman who holds no office at all." She spread her ink-stained hands. "What am I to be crowned over? An empire with something above it that will not explain itself?"
"You will be crowned over the roads," Elizabeth said. "The schools. The parishes with their records and their named days and their hinge. That was always the empire. The wave was only ever the weather over it."
"And the weather now has a allegiance I cannot command?"
"It never had one you could command," Alexandra said. Her hand was still on the boards. "That is its whole history. Grandmother took it. Mother received it. It learned. And now it has decided, on its own, that the one who took is owed something the rest of us cannot pay." She withdrew her hand and stood. "I have listened to it my whole life and tonight is the first time it has kept a secret from me. I think the secret is the shape of its gift. It is making one. I can feel it working under the city like a builder at night."
"Then Thursday will be interesting," Fersen said. It was the first thing he had said. All of them looked at him, the one man the wave had never once touched. He shrugged. "I will stand in the square as I always stand, the only unmoved head in ten thousand, and I will watch it do whatever it has spent all night building. Someone must be unimpressed. It is my office."
Paul laughed, a short dry sound exactly like his father's. He wrote one line in the ledger. Read it aloud: "The wave has risen and knelt to Catherine the elder. No office attaches. No answer was asked. Recorded at the second hour."
"Add that it is still here," Catherine said. "It will be here at dawn. It will be here under every foot in the square. Whatever Elizabeth sets down, and whatever Catherine the younger takes up, it will be under all of it, keeping."
Elizabeth looked at her mother across the table. "Then let us speak of legacy plainly too, while the family is whole and the night is ours. Mother, your reign stole a continent and confessed the theft. Mine received it and gave the rule back. Paul, read me what you wrote the night I was proclaimed."
Paul turned pages without looking at them. He knew the book by heart. "Proclamation of Elizabeth, first of her name. Read aloud to ten thousand. Ten thousand knelt by choice. The wave learned to speak her name."
"And what would you write tonight, at the end of it?"
Paul was quiet a long moment. Then he closed the ledger on his thumb.
"Reign of Elizabeth, last of her name. She held the chancellery for fifty years and made every throne on earth a clerkship. She invented the named day, the hinge, and the practice of wanting without arriving. She was passed by by the wave once, on the last night, and called it of course." He looked up. "Shall I write it?"
"Tomorrow," Elizabeth said. "Tomorrow it will be a record. Tonight it is only true."
Alexandra had gone to the window. Beyond the glass the city lay warm and lamplit, and under the lamplight, she said, without turning, the floors were warm too, street after street, all the way to the river.
"It is not gathering anymore," she said. "It has settled. It has finished whatever it was making." She turned. "Grandmother. I think it made it for you. And I think it will give it to you in the square, at dawn, in front of the world."
Catherine drew her shawl higher. The warmth under her feet pressed once, softly, and held.
"Then I will stand barefoot," she said, "and see what a theft looks like when it is finished."
The wave pressed once more under her soles, and then the warmth shifted. It moved. Catherine felt it leave her feet and travel the boards, a warm lane crossing the family room, and stop where Peter sat on the bench beside Paul.
"Grandmother." Alexandra said it sharply, her hand back on the floor. "It is going to him."
Peter stood. The motion took the three familiar counts, hands, knees, spine, and Paul put out a hand to steady him and was waved off. The wave ran ahead of him under the boards, and where he stepped the floor warmed, and the whole room watched the warm lane follow an old man across the dark.
He did not stop at the table. He came around Catherine's chair and went down.
One knee, then the other, on bare boards worn pale by a hundred years of the family's kneeling. He gathered her right foot in both palms without asking, and the hot old hands closed over the cold arch, and the warmth went through her ankle and up the bone.
"Peter." Catherine's voice was level and quiet. "You have been finished for two hours. You said so on your own floor."
"I finished the rite of the house." He bowed his head over her foot. "This is not that rite."
"Then what is it?"
"It is the one I promised you in the square." His mouth was close to the arch of her foot and she felt each word through the bone. "You told me to kneel in the crowd and find out what they feel. But dawn is three hours off, and the square will be watching, and I will not learn anything in front of ten thousand that I cannot learn in front of six."
Elizabeth sat forward on the bench. "Let him."
"None of you are watching," Peter said into the foot. "That is the condition. You are here and you are not watching. That is the thing the crowd has and the rite has never had. I have knelt to her in halls and cathedrals and in this room, and every time, someone was keeping record. The wave was reading. Paul was writing. Tonight the wave is not reading, and I want to know what kneeling is when nothing at all is taking notes."
Paul closed the ledger on his thumb and did not open it.
The wave lay still beneath Peter's knees. It did not knock. It did not copy. Catherine could feel it holding itself back the way it had learned to hold a want, present and refusing to arrive, and she understood that Peter had asked it for exactly that, in whatever grammar the floors had between them.
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.