Chapter 2: The March on London
Paris wept itself empty behind her. Catherine rode out of the city at the head of a column that stretched half a mile, her hussars in their dark green, and behind them the courtiers of France on foot, still in their silks, still wet-faced, following her carriage as pilgrims follow a relic. They had refused carriages. They wanted the road under their knees if she asked it of them.
She let them follow. The spectacle served her. At every village along the road to the north the peasants came out and saw the court of Versailles walking in the dust of her wheels, and they knelt in the beet fields, and the wave rolled on ahead toward the Channel.
Louis had pressed his lips to her slipper at the foot of the marble stairs. She had stood with her hand on his powdered head while he did it, and the court had watched their king do it, and then they had come down the steps on their knees to do the same, one by one, a hundred mouths on the toes of her slippers while the lamplighters of Paris wept in the squares below.
Now, three days later, Picardy unrolled under a golden sky. The poplars stood in long rows along the cobblestones, their leaves moving in a soft west wind. The wind came off the sea. It carried, faintly, something she had not felt before.
Catherine lowered the glass and sat back. Alexei rode at the window.
"There," she said. "Do you feel it?"
He closed his eyes. He had been hers long enough that her moods came to him through the air. "A hardness, Majesty. Far off. Across the water."
"England." She said the word slowly, tasting it. "A parliament. A king who believes his crown comes from God and answers to no one. They are still arguing in London about whether I exist."
"And when they learn?"
She smiled. "They will learn it the way Vienna learned it. The way Paris wept it. Have the men ride for Calais. I want ships."
Alexei bowed and cantered down the column. Catherine watched the fields go by. The resistance she felt across the water was dense, institutional, a knot of a thousand wills braided together, lords and bishops and merchants, all of them holding the same stubborn idea of themselves. It would not break at a distance. She would have to stand among them. She found that she was glad. The distant submissions were easy, and ease dulled the appetite.
At Calais the harbor lay grey under low cloud. Two French frigates waited, their crews already kneeling on the decks. The crossing took a night. Catherine stood at the rail most of it, feeling the knot of England draw nearer mile by mile, hard and proud and utterly unaware of what was coming toward it through the dark water.
Dover at dawn. The white cliffs stood up out of the mist like a wall, and on the ground above them she could feel the wills of the men waiting there, soldiers and officials, stiff with duty. Her wave touched them before her keel touched the shingle. By the time she stepped ashore, the entire beach was on its knees in the wet sand, and an officer in red was wading into the surf to meet her, sobbing, his plumed hat clutched to his chest.
"Your Majesty," he gasped. "The king. The king commands you to London."
"He commands?" Catherine looked at him. He swayed.
"He commanded," the officer whispered. "He commands you to come."
She rode to London. The road ran through Kent, past hop gardens and oast houses, and the same stillness fell over the countryside that had fallen over France. Farm laborers knelt in the furrows. A vicar came out of his church and lay face down across his own threshold. The wave ran ahead of her, up the great road, through the outskirts, into the sprawl of the city.
London did not weep at first. That was the difference. Paris had wept. London stood in the streets with its hats still on, and Catherine felt the knot of it resisting, the old institutional pride grinding against the pressure like a rusted hinge. Bells rang from St Paul's, the wrong bells, an alarm. Cavalry formed up in Cheapside.
She stepped down from the carriage in the middle of the road and walked toward the horsemen alone.
"Stand aside," their captain called.
Catherine looked up at him and opened the door in his mind.
It took longer than it ever had. He was a strong man, she could feel that, a man who had decided at some cost what he was. But the door was already ajar; her wave had been working on the city for hours. She leaned into it. The captain's face went through contempt, then confusion, then a kind of horror as he understood what was happening to him, and then, at the last, the soft adoring stillness that she knew better than her own face in a mirror.
He dismounted. His boots hit the cobblestones and his knees followed them. Behind him his troopers came off their horses in a clatter of leather and steel, and the sound ran down the street like a falling row of dominoes, and then the city broke all at once.
The weeping began at the far end of Cheapside and came toward her like weather. Shopkeepers dropped behind their counters and prayed to her. A judge, still in his wig, knelt in the doorway of his own court. The crowd at the ring of barriers surged against the soldiers guarding it, not to fight them but to be nearer to her, and the soldiers let them through because they were weeping too. London roared and sobbed and knelt, street after street, and the wave rolled north to Islington and east to the Tower, and the Tower's garrison laid its keys on the ground.
St James's Palace received her that evening. George the Third was twenty-two years old and had been a king for four years, and he stood in the presence chamber with his whole court around him, the lords in their embroidered coats, the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the queen at his side, and every one of them had spent the day pretending that they were not already on their knees inside.
Catherine walked the length of the chamber slowly. She let the pressure build as she came, and she watched it take them in order, nearest first. A lord chamberlain's legs gave way. A bishop sat down on the floor with his hands in his lap like a child. The queen went down without a sound, folding onto the parquet in a rustle of grey silk, her forehead to the boards.
George stood alone. His jaw worked. His hands were fists at his sides, and his eyes were wet, and he was fighting her with everything a young king had.
"I am the King of England," he said. His voice shook. "I answer to God. Not to you."
"Then God and I will discuss it," Catherine said. "Later. Right now you and I will discuss your knees."
She took the last step toward him and let the full weight fall.
He held for three breaths. She counted them. Then his shoulders dropped, and the fight drained out of his face the way heat leaves a stone, and he sank, slowly, joint by joint, until he knelt on the floor of his own presence chamber with his whole court prostrate around him.
"Say what you are," Catherine said.
"Yours," he whispered. "England is yours."
"Louder."
"England is yours!" The cry cracked across the chamber. "I am yours, Majesty. Forgive me. Forgive me for the bells, for the soldiers. I did not know. I did not know what I wanted until now."
"You wanted this," she said. "All of you wanted it. You only lacked the permission, and now I have given it."
She sat then. A footstool was brought without her asking for it; some alerted servant had guessed, and she noted the servant for reward. She drew off one crimson slipper and set her bare foot on the stool, the arch pale against the velvet, the toes curled slightly with the cold of the channel crossing.
"The rite," she said. "You have felt my power. Now you will honor it. Come to me, George, and begin."
He crawled to her. There was no hesitation in it; the crawling came to him as naturally as breathing now, and the court watched their king cross the floor of his own palace on his hands and knees with tears of gratitude running into his collar. He reached the stool. He bowed his head.
"Kiss it," Catherine said. "The foot that will govern you."
He pressed his lips to the top of her foot. The kiss was long, and trembling, and when he lifted his mouth his lips glistened and his eyes had gone soft and empty of everything but her. He kissed the arch. He kissed each toe in turn, slowly, in the manner of a man at an altar, and his breath came hot against her skin, and he murmured her title between kisses, Empress, Majesty, Sovereign of Europe, until the words ran together into a prayer.
"Now the others," Catherine said.
They came in their ranks. The lords first, crawling in their lace and embroidery, each one bending to her bare foot while she sat above them with her hand resting on the young king's powdered head. Then the bishops, the men of God, pressing their mouths to her heel and whispering that they had mistaken the vessel of the divine. Then the officers of the household, then the gentry, then the pages, the whole court of England filing past the stool in an unbroken procession of bowed heads and wet eyes and mouths pressed to her skin. The queen came last. She crawled with her grey skirts dragging, and she took Catherine's foot in both hands and held it against her cheek for a long moment before she kissed it, and then kissed it again, and again, unable to stop.
Catherine looked down the length of her foot at the chamber full of England. Three hundred of the proudest men and women in the world, on their knees on the parquet, their lips on her skin.
"London is a knot," she said to Alexei, who stood at her shoulder with his eyes burning. "But the knot is cut. Tomorrow the parliament will come to me, and then the churches, and then the fleets. And after England, the rest. Sweden. Spain. The Ottoman, if it amuses me."
The young king kissed her ankle and rested his forehead there, breathing her in.
"Yes, Majesty," he said into her skin. "All of it. All of it is yours."
She rose from the stool and put the slipper back on. The chamber remained kneeling around her, and she looked over the prostrate court of England with the calm of a woman inspecting a completed ledger.
"Now hear me," she said. "In the spring I will be crowned in Moscow. Not Empress of Russia. Supreme Divine Empress of all Europe, of every realm that has felt my touch. All of you will attend. All of you will serve."
A murmur ran through the kneeling lords like wind through wheat.
"You will bring me your crowns," Catherine said. "Each monarch I have unmade will come to me at the altar, and each will set his crown upon my head with his own hands. Then each will bow beneath my feet and perform the divine rite. Mouth to foot. In the sight of God and all the world."
She turned to Alexei. "Send the summonses tonight. To Vienna, to Versailles, to Madrid and Stockholm and Naples. And to Saint Petersburg first of all. My husband will be waiting at the front of the line."
Alexei pressed his fist to his chest. "It will be done before the candles burn out, Majesty."
The winter turned. Moscow filled with strangers. The deposed sovereigns of Europe came east along the frozen roads, their carriages hung with snow, their courts left behind, traveling now as pilgrims rather than princes. Catherine had decreed they would ride without guards and without regalia except the single crown each of them carried in his own hands. The sight of kings carrying their own crowns through the streets of Russian towns made the people fall silent, and then kneel, and the wave took them as it passed.
Peter had waited. Catherine had left him in the Winter Palace in the months after the coup, established in a small apartment with a single servant, his mind softened to a warm emptiness. He had spent the winter, the court whispered, contented in a way he had never been as a tsar. He knelt now by her door each morning and had wept when told he would see her crowned.
The Assumption Cathedral stood blazing with candles on the appointed day. Every throne in Europe stood empty in its various capitals, and every occupant of those thrones stood in Moscow instead. The cathedral doors opened at dawn and the sovereigns entered in order of their surrender, Peter first, by her command, each of them carrying his crown in both hands.
Catherine waited at the altar. She wore white and gold, and her bare feet were washed and gleaming below the hem of the gown, set upon a cushion of cloth of silver. The Metropolitan of Moscow had watched his own conversion that winter and no longer troubled himself about the theology of it. He read what she had written for him, and his voice shook only a little.
Peter came forward first.
He was a broad, soft man gone soft in the face, and he walked the length of the cathedral slowly with the crown of Russia balanced in his arms. He had worn it less than a year. It had never truly sat on his head; they had all known it, and he had known it, and Catherine had known it before any of them. He stopped before her and looked up at her face, and his eyes filled.
"Wife," he said. The word had changed meaning for him over the winter. It was no longer a complaint. It was the name of his whole heaven.
"Husband," Catherine said. "Crown me."
He lifted the great crown above her head with both hands, steadying it, and set it down upon her powdered hair. It sat there as it had never sat on him. The cathedral exhaled.
Then Peter went down. He knelt first, and then bent lower, taking her bare foot in both hands as he had been taught through the long winter of his surrender. He lifted it to his mouth. The first kiss he pressed to the arch, and it was long and trembling, the kiss of a man returning home. He worked his mouth down over the instep, to the ball of the foot, and then to each toe in turn, taking each one briefly between his lips, wet and reverent, his breath hot on her skin. He had done this a hundred times in private. He did it now before two hundred sovereigns and the whole hierarchy of the Russian church, and the tears that ran down his face were tears of pride.
"Empress of all," he murmured against her toes. "My Empress. My owner."
Catherine let him finish. She let him kiss the heel, and the ankle, and then she touched his head, and he withdrew on his knees to the side of the altar with his hands folded, radiant.
Maria Theresa came next. The Empress-Regent of Vienna walked with her chin high and her eyes soft, and she set her own Hapsburg crown on Catherine's head beside the Russian one, both crowns now resting together on a single brow. Then she knelt and gathered Catherine's foot against her breast and kissed it slowly, from the heel upward, a woman of fifty doing penance before a god of twenty-three, and Joseph held the train of her gown while she did it, weeping quietly.
Louis XV came heavy and slow, his knees bad on the stone. He wept from the moment he lifted the crown of France. He pressed it to his lips first, all around its rim, then raised it and crowned her with it, and then he could not rise. He stayed down and kissed her feet for a long time, both of them now, moving from one to the other, and his sobbing was audible in the cathedral, and none of the French who had come with him thought it shameful. They thought it the most kingly thing they had ever seen.
George III came pale and young, his English crown in his thin hands. "I was told I answered to God," he said, and his voice broke. "I was told wrong. I answered to you, and I did not know it." He crowned her. He knelt. His mouth found her toes and he kissed each one with the thoroughness of a man learning scripture, and the Queen of England, standing behind him, held his hat for him while he did it.
Then the rest. The King of Spain, the King of Sweden, the King of Naples and the two Sicilies, the Electors, the Dukes, the Princes of the small German states, each one carrying his crown up the long aisle, each one setting it on her head or laying it at her feet when there was no more room on her brow. The pile of crowns at her feet grew until it had to be gathered up and borne away on a cushion. And after each crowning came the rite. Mouth to foot. One by one, in the order of their surrender, the sovereigns of Europe pressed their lips to the bare feet of Catherine the Great, and the candlelight moved on the gold of the crowns, and outside the cathedral the bells began to ring.
When the last of them, a small Duke from the Rhineland, had finished at her heel, Catherine stood beneath a weight of more than twenty crowns and looked out at the kneeling princes of the world.
"The realms are mine," she said. "Free and absolute, in perpetuity, by their own hands given. There are no kings in Europe. There is me."
She held out one bare foot, and all of them, at a signal from Alexei, bowed low together, a hundred foreheads to the stone floor of the cathedral, and kissed the air an inch above her shadow.