Chapter 3: The Empress and Her Slave-Husband
The Winter Palace was quiet at the hour past midnight. The candles in her private apartments had burned down to their collars, and the marble floors held the cold of the river in them, and Catherine sat alone by the window with the crown of Russia on a cushion at her elbow and the rest of them put away in a lacquered chest like a hoard of coins.
She was tired. That was the strange thing. A week since the Assumption Cathedral, a week since two hundred sovereigns had come to her feet in the sight of God, and the world gave her everything before she asked for it. Provinces sent inventories of their own wealth. Admirals offered fleets unasked. A cardinal in Rome had written to inquire whether she would accept his obedience as a gift or whether he must travel to Moscow to lay it down in person.
It all came too easily now. She found herself hungry for the one devotion that had cost something.
"Alexei," she said.
He stepped out of the shadow of the drapes. He had been there the whole evening, as he was always somewhere near, in the dark green tunic, the Romanov eagle at his hand. "Majesty."
"Bring me my husband."
He bowed and went out. Catherine watched the candle flames sway in the draft of the opened door. She drew off her slippers, both of them, and set her bare feet on the cold marble, and the cold moved up through her soles into the weariness and did not touch it.
Peter came in quickly, half dressed, his periwig crooked. He had been asleep. He had been asleep for six years by her clock, and he crossed the room at the sound of her voice the way a man crosses a courtyard to a fire.
"Majesty," he said, and began to fold down.
"No. Not yet." She lifted one foot and rested the heel on the edge of a stool. "Sit where I can see you. A moment only. Then you will have your work."
He sat on the floor at her feet with his hands on his knees, upright as a choirboy, and looked up at her with his soft unfocused eyes, and she felt the knot in her chest loosen slightly. He was the only thing in the world she had built slowly. Vienna had gone down in an afternoon. Paris had wept in a night. Peter had taken her two years, grain by grain, and every grain of it had been hers to feel.
"Do you know why I kept you, Peter?" she asked.
"To serve your feet, Majesty."
"That too." She extended the foot toward him. "Begin."
He took it in both hands, the way he had at the altar, and lowered his mouth to the arch. The first kiss was long, his lips parted and warm, and he breathed against her skin as though the breath itself were part of the act. He was thorough. He always had been. He kissed along the arch to the heel, and then back up the inside of the instep, unhurried, and his mouth was wet and the sound of it was soft in the quiet room. The cold went out of her foot where his tongue traced it. He took the big toe between his lips and held it there, and his eyes closed, and his face was the face of a man at the end of a long journey.
"You were a terrible tsar," Catherine said, looking down at him.
"Yes, Majesty."
"You were vain, and stupid, and you played at soldiers while your wife learned a whole country."
"Yes, Majesty." He kissed the ball of her foot between the words. "All of that is yours now too. Everything I was."
"That is what I am telling you." She reached down and took a fistful of his nightshirt and pulled his head back so his eyes came up to hers. "I did not keep you only for your mouth, Peter, though your mouth is the finest in my dominions. Listen to me now. Listen as you have never listened."
His eyes cleared. Something came up behind the adoration, something older, the shape of the man who had existed before her.
"You will worship me every night. That does not change. You will be at my door every morning. That does not change either." She released his collar and let him settle. "But from tonight you are more than my slave. You are my consort. My most beloved consort, before all Europe. You will sit beside me. You will speak to me. You will tell me what you think of my ministers and my wars and my mistakes, and I will hear it. Do you understand what I am giving you?"
Peter knelt there with her foot still cupped in his hands, and his face worked. The softness and the old stubbornness fought for it, and then the softness won, but it was a different softness now, wet-eyed and awake.
"You will let me talk?" he whispered.
"When you have something worth saying. Which will be rare. But yes."
He bent and pressed his forehead to her instep, and she felt his shoulders shake once. "No one has ever asked for my thoughts," he said into her skin. "In Holstein they locked me in with my soldiers. Here you looked at me and all the noise went out of me. And now you want the noise back."
"A quieter version of it. Enough to be interesting."
He laughed. It startled them both. He had not laughed in her presence in two years, and the sound was rusty, and he covered his mouth with her foot as if to hide the sin of it against her skin.
"Then I will tell you something, Majesty," he said, and his voice found a footing. "The Duke of Holstein's claim on Schleswig. It is yours now, through me. But the Danes will never grant it by treaty. They will grant it by fear, and you have not touched Copenhagen yet. Sell the claim to Russia outright. Take payment in ships. The Danish navy is the second in the Baltic, and the Baltic is the sea you have not finished."
Catherine looked down at her husband for a long moment. The candlelight moved on his crooked periwig and his pale, soft face, and somewhere underneath the wreck of him the man who had played at soldiers had known a thing about the Baltic that none of her admirals had said aloud.
"There," she said. "That was worth saying."
He glowed. She felt the glow of him come off his skin like heat off a stove, and she extended the other foot to him, and he bent to it gratefully, kissing the toes one by one, slow, each one taken between his lips, and the room was warm now, and the weariness had gone out of her shoulders.
Alexei stood in the doorway with the door held open behind him, and he had been standing there long enough to hear all of it. His face was flat and disciplined, the face she had made him, but his eyes burned at the sight of the fat, crooked-wigged man lying mouth-first against his Empress's foot with the rank of consort. The jealousy sat in him like a swallowed coal. She felt it from across the room. She had made him unable to name it even to himself, and so he stood with the coal in him and did not move.
"Alexei," she said, without lifting her mouth from her contemplation of her husband's bowed head. "Tomorrow the Danish ambassador will be received. Prepare him to be agreeable. And prepare the court to hear a new title."
"For the consort, Majesty?"
"For the consort." She rested her hand on Peter's head, and Peter kissed her ankle and held it against his cheek. "Consort of the Supreme Divine Empress. Let them chew on it through the winter."
Alexei pressed his fist to his chest. "It will be done before the candles burn out, Majesty."
He withdrew, and the door closed on the coal in him, and Catherine sat with her husband's breath warm on her feet and thought that of everything she owned now, continents and crowns and the obedience of two hundred princes, this was the one piece she had enjoyed acquiring.
He was dozing at last, his cheek against the top of her foot, his breathing gone long and even, when his mouth moved again.
"Majesty," Peter whispered. "There is a thing I know. I have carried it for two years, and your rule forbids me, but you have made me a consort tonight, and I think the rule is meant to bend."
Catherine opened her eyes. The candles had guttered low; the room was all amber shadow and cold marble. "My rules do not bend."
"This one would want to." His lips moved against her skin as he spoke, and she felt every word. "There is another like you."
The word sat in the warm air of the room. She did not move. Her foot rested in his hands and his hands trembled slightly, and outside the palace the river ice cracked with a sound like a door.
"Say it again," she said, "and slowly."
"There is a woman in Prussia. In the house of my mother, in Kiel. Her name is Wilhelmina. She is my father's cousin's daughter, thirty years old, and when I was a boy she looked at a groom who had struck her and the groom knelt in the mud and wept and kissed her boots, and no one understood why." He drew a breath. "My tutors called it a sickness of the nerves and put her away in a convent at Plön. She is still there. She has been there for eighteen years, and the nuns worship her, Majesty. They have always worshiped her."
Catherine sat very still. Somewhere beneath her ribs an old sensation stirred, one she had not felt since Vienna: the slight weight of a will she had not yet weighed.
"How do you know this?"
"I saw it. I was eleven and I saw it, and I told my mother, and my mother had her shut away within the month." His voice dropped lower. "And I never told anyone again. Not my tutors, not my uncle, not you. Not even under your gaze. It is the one secret I own. It was the last piece of me that was mine."
She looked down at him. His face was turned up to hers, and for the first time since the night he had knelt to her in the throne room his eyes were not soft. They were awake and afraid, and they were steady.
"You hid it from me," she said. "From me."
"Through two years of your voice in my head. I hid it the way a man hides a coin under his tongue." He kissed her toe once, penitently, then lifted his mouth. "I am sorry for it. But I hid it because I knew what you would do."
"And what will I do?"
"You will go to Plön," Peter said. "Or you will send your hussars. And if she is what I think she is, she has been drinking the obedience of nuns for eighteen years, alone, with nothing to spend it on. You have spent yours on a continent." He swallowed. "She has been saving hers."
The fire had gone out somewhere in the next room. Catherine rose and crossed to the window, and Peter remained on the floor with his hands on his knees, watching her back, watching the powder-dusted hair and the white shift and the bare feet on the cold boards.
"Eighteen years," she said. "Does she know of me?"
"The nuns take no letters. But Kiel is a port. Sailors talk. And last spring a nun traveled through Kiel and spoke of the Empress of Russia in a way that made my mother's steward send a report to Saint Petersburg, which my mother burned, because she is afraid." He hesitated. "There was a word in the report. The nun said the convent had stopped praying to God. They pray to her instead. They kneel in rows. She sits with her feet bare, and they come to her one at a time."
Catherine turned. The candle flame stood between them, guttering.
"She does the rite," she said. "My rite."
"She found it the way you found it, Majesty. Neither of you learned it from anyone."
Catherine stood at the window a long time. The Neva lay black and frozen below, and far to the west, past Prussia, past the snowbound roads her sovereigns had ridden to Moscow, a convent at Plön held a woman who could look at men and open them like doors. She felt the strangeness of it in her body, an itch under the skin, the first new thing in a year.
"Wilhelmina," she said, tasting the name.
"She is stronger than you, or she is not," Peter said quietly. "There is no way to know but to stand in a room with her. That is the truth of it, and it is why I kept it. I did not want to see the answer."
"And now you tell me. Why?"
"Because you gave me a voice tonight." He bowed his head to her foot where it stood on the boards, and pressed his lips to the cold marble beside it, to the shadow of her. "And because it is better that you learn it from me than from her. She will hear of the coronation. Everyone has. And if she is what I think she is, Majesty, she is already wondering whether the world is big enough for two of us."
Catherine went to the lacquered chest and opened it. The crowns lay inside in their nest of velvet, gold and silver and enameled saints, and she looked at them without touching them.
"Alexei," she said, and he was in the doorway before the second syllable, the coal still banked behind his flat face.
"Ride tonight. Not to Plön. Not yet." She closed the chest. "To Kiel. Quietly, without colors, as a courier. Find my mother-in-law's steward and read me every paper in that house. I want the letters the convent burned and the names of the nuns who came and went. And then wait at Plön through the winter. Watch the gate. Tell me who kneels and who does not."
"And the woman, Majesty?"
"I will meet her myself. In spring. When the roads are mine again." She crossed back to Peter and held out her hand, and he took it and rose stiffly from the floor, standing in his crooked periwig like a man rising from prayer. "My husband has kept a secret for two years. He will sit beside me when I meet her. He is the only soul in Europe who has seen her work."
Alexei's jaw tightened. The pressure of it came off him like heat. "As Majesty commands."
"Alexei." She looked at him steadily, and let a thread of her power touch him, one thread, a caution. "The jealousy is noted. It is not permitted to act on it. He is consort. Kiss his hand."
The silence went on for three breaths. Then Alexei crossed the room, took Peter's soft pale hand in his scarred one, and pressed his lips to it, and his eyes never left Catherine while he did it, and Catherine let him burn.
Peter, released, sat back down at her feet without being told. He took her foot in his hands again, and this time his mouth was careful, attentive, a mouth that had paid for its silence and now paid for its voice, and she watched him and thought of a convent in the snow and a woman who had been saving obedience for eighteen years like a drawer full of uncut coins.
"Spring," she said, to the room, to the river, to the west. "Let her winter in her convent. Let her wonder."
Peter kissed her heel and whispered the name again, Wilhelmina, into her skin, like a warning he had carried across two decades and a continent and had finally, at her feet, set down.
Sleep did not come for her. Peter dozed against her foot until she withdrew it, and then he curled on the rug at her side like a dog and was gone. Catherine stood at the window and watched the sky go from black to iron over the river.
She had told him to wait at Plón. She changed her mind twice, and then she called him back.
Alexei came in still dressed, of course. He had not left the corridor. The candles were out now, and the room was lit only by the grey of the window, and in that light he looked like something carved from the dark.
"I told you to watch the gate," Catherine said. "I have thought better of it. Go in."
His jaw moved. "Majesty. Winter roads. Plön is a fort of nuns. If this woman is what he says, a courier who knocks at the gate in February announces us."
"Good." She let him hear that she meant it. "I do not want her unaware of me, Alexei. I want her thinking of me all spring. Fear and curiosity are both doors, and both open from the inside. Go as what you are, an officer of the Empress, with letters under seal. She will read them. She will want to know everything in them. That wanting is the first taste she takes of me, and she will not know it is mine."
"And if she looks at me?" he asked. The question was flat, but his hand had gone to the signet at his breast.
"Then you will learn what Peter felt, and you will not enjoy it, and you will still come home. You are more mine than your bones are yours." She crossed to the writing desk and drew paper toward her. "Which is why you go and not I. Whatever she takes from you, she cannot take me."
She wrote through the grey hour. A summons, courteous as a sword laid flat on a table. The Supreme Divine Empress of all Europe to the Lady Wilhelmina of Holstein, greeting. She sealed it with the double eagle and pressed the wax with her thumb while it was still soft, so that the print of her was under the eagle.
"Take this. Take ten men, not colors. You leave before the court wakes. The Danish ambassador arrives at noon and I will be pleasant to him, and I do not want gossip about Holstein before Copenhagen is settled."
He took the packet in both hands. Then he went to one knee on the cold marble, not for her feet, which was usual, but lower, his forehead to the floor, the full prostration the Guard had learned in the throne room two years ago.
"Majesty," he said into the boards. "If she is stronger."
"She is not."
He rose. He paused at the door, and Catherine saw him look once at Peter asleep on the rug, at the crooked periwig and the soft hands, and the coal in him banked itself with an effort like a man setting his jaw.
"Kiss his foot on the way out," she said. "Quietly. He is sleeping."
Alexei stood a moment. Then he crossed the room on silent boots, knelt by the rug, and lifted the hem of the blanket from Peter's bare ankle, and pressed his mouth to the bone there, briefly, his eyes fixed on Catherine the whole time. Peter murmured in his sleep and turned his cheek to the floor.
Alexei left. Catherine heard the stable court wake below, the breath of horses, the muffled clatter of ten saddles going out the gate into the dark.
The winter was long in the telling afterward, and shorter while it happened.
He rode south through Livonia in snow, and the roads were empty and the villages knelt at his passing, not for him but for the seal on his chest. At Danzig the sea was packed ice to the horizon and he took the coast road west, and by the third week of February he stood at the edge of the Plön lake with the convent on its island and a single boat pulled up among the reeds.
The gatehouse was low and red-roofed. A lay brother, the one man in the place, answered his knock and went white at the seal.
The abbess received him in a parlor that smelled of tallow and wet wool. She was sixty and had kept this house for thirty years, and she looked at him the way a woman looks at weather she has already decided to endure.
"Lady Wilhelmina does not receive the world," she said. "The world stopped coming."
"The world has changed, Mother. Read this."
The abbess broke the seal. She read it twice. Her thumb moved along the printed thumbmark in the wax and her color changed, and when she looked up at Alexei her eyes had the flat wariness of a woman who has seen this sort of thing before, from the other side of it.
"You serve her," she said. "I can see it. It sits on you like a coat."
"Yes."
"Eighteen years I have locked a door in this house." She set the letter down. "You are asking me to unlock it."
"I am asking nothing. I deliver."
The abbess sent the lay brother across the ice with the letter, and Alexei waited two days in the guest cell, and on the third morning he was woken by a sound he had not heard since he was a boy at his mother's knee. Bells. Not the office bells. A small handbell, rung slowly, down the length of the cloister.
At the gate that afternoon the nuns came out to him in a body. They did not kneel for him. They filed past him into the chapel with their eyes down, and behind them, last, came a woman in the plain grey wool of a penitent, thirty years old, tall, with dark hair going iron at the temples and blue eyes, and Alexei felt the moment her gaze crossed him.
It was like standing in a doorway when wind takes it. Nothing moved in the room. Something moved in him, a door he had thought was nailed shut trying its hinge, and meeting, halfway, the iron of Catherine's work in him, two years deep, immovable. The pressure stopped. The woman tilted her head.
"You are full of her," Wilhelmina said. Her voice was low and unhurried, a voice that had spoken to no one but nuns for eighteen years and had lost nothing by it. "She is in you like frost in a wall. Every stone of you."
"She is the Empress of all Europe," Alexei said.
"So I have heard." Wilhelmina smiled, and it was a slow, delighted, terrible smile. "Sailors talk." She took the letter from her sleeve, already read, and looked at the thumbprint under the seal. "And she is worried enough to send a man in winter. That is the finest compliment I have had since I was sixteen."
She folded the letter closed.
"Tell her I read every word. Tell her the nuns send their love. And tell her this, from me, so she does not waste the spring on roads." She stepped closer, close enough that he could smell the wool and the candle smoke on her, and her eyes went into his again and this time she was not testing the door, she was speaking through it, and her voice arrived inside him as if she stood behind his teeth. "Tell Catherine that two of us cannot share a world by half. Tell her I will come east when the ice breaks. Tell her I am not coming to kneel."
Alexei stood rigid in the gateway with the bells ringing somewhere behind the woman, and the coal of his jealousy, banked for weeks, flared up all at once and had nowhere to go.
Wilhelmina saw it. Of course she saw it.
"And you," she said softly. "You love her and she loves a soft man who sleeps on her rug. That must burn." She reached out and, with one finger, touched the signet ring on his hand. "Keep that. It will matter to me later."
She turned and walked back across the court, and every nun in the cloister turned her head to follow her, the way wheat turns.
Alexei rode east the next morning at the head of his ten men, and he did not stop to sleep until Prussia was behind him, and the letter he carried in his breast rode against his heart like a coal that would not cool.
He reached Saint Petersburg in the first week of March. He came to her apartments at dusk and found her at the window again, Peter at her feet on the cushion this time, both of them watching the ice go grey on the river.
"The ice breaks on the Neva in April, Majesty," he said, and knelt, and gave her the report. "On the Plön lake it will break three weeks earlier. She said she would follow it."
Catherine read the abbess's account, and then Alexei's own, written in his square hand, and then she sat for a long time looking at the single line he had set down last, because it was the one Wilhelmina had made him learn by heart.
Not coming to kneel.
"She is coming here," Peter whispered. He had gone still, and his hand had found the edge of Catherine's slipper without being told.
"She is coming here." Catherine looked west, where the ice was beginning to fail. "And she has been drinking obedience for eighteen years." She touched Peter's head, then Alexei's shoulder, one after the other, the two instruments, the two men. "Then she will find the spring is already mine."
She held out her bare foot, and both men bent to it at once, mouth to the arch, and she let them, and outside the first drop of meltwater fell from the eaves into the court below.
The spring came fast that year. The Neva broke in the first week of April with a crack like cannon fire, and the crowds along the embankments knelt to the sound of it as if the river itself were saluting. A week later a courier rode in from the west with a single line under no seal: She has left the lake. She travels alone.
She arrived at the Winter Palace on a bright cold morning, on foot, having dismissed her carriage at the last post. A woman in grey wool, tall, with iron at her temples, walked past the sentries without a word and they did not stop her because they had already turned to face her, and then to kneel, quietly, one after another down the line.
Alexei met her in the antechamber. He had forty men behind him and none of them mattered, and he knew it.
"She will see you," he said.
"I know," Wilhelmina said. "I have known since the ice went out of the Plön lake. That is why I am walking and not riding. I want my legs under me for this."
They brought her into the apartments at the hour past noon. Catherine waited by the window, seated, in crimson and gold, her bare feet set on a cushion of cloth of silver. Peter stood behind her chair, awake and afraid. Alexei took his place in the shadow of the drapes.
Wilhelmina crossed the marble floor slowly. Her gaze and Catherine's met halfway across the room, and for a moment the air between them tightened like a rope drawn taut. Two wills, each accustomed to opening doors, pushed against each other and found no door on either side.
"You came all this way to stand," Catherine said.
"I came all this way to see." Wilhelmina's voice was low and unhurried still, but there was a fine tremor under it now, the sound of an instrument pulled past its tuning. "Eighteen years I have been the largest thing in my world. I wanted to know before I lost the comfort of not knowing."
"You know now."
"I know the shape of it. Not the depth." She stopped ten feet away. Her hands hung open at her sides. "Show me the depth."
Catherine rose. She did not speak again. She simply took the whole weight of herself, the two years of her court, the continent kneeling under twenty crowns, the will that had rolled across Europe like weather, and set it down on one woman standing in grey wool on her marble floor.
Wilhelmina's knees did not bend at once. She fought. It was a long fight, and Catherine let her have all of it, every breath of it, and watched with something close to respect as the nuns' obedience and eighteen years of saved strength came up in Wilhelmina like a tide against a wall. Her face went white. Her jaw set. Her dark eyes stayed on Catherine's and held, and held, and the room was silent except for the sound of her breathing, which grew rough, which grew ragged, which broke.
Her shoulders dropped first. Then her chin. Then her knees went, not folding like the courtiers of London but sinking, joint by joint, a controlled ruin, until she knelt on the cold marble with her hands flat on the floor and her breath coming in shudders.
"There," Catherine said. "Now you know the depth."
Wilhelmina knelt and looked up. The slow delighted smile was gone. What remained was wet-eyed and stripped and older than her thirty years. "I drank obedience for eighteen years and called it strength," she said. "It was hoarding. You spent yours on the world and grew fat on the spending. I see it now. I see it from underneath."
"Yes. From underneath is where you will see it for the rest of your life." Catherine sat again and extended one bare foot to the edge of the cushion, the arch pale, the toes curled. "The rite, Wilhelmina. Not as an equal. As a penitent. Come."
Wilhelmina came on her knees. She crossed the last ten feet of marble slowly, her palms on the cold stone, and when she reached the cushion she did not take the foot at once. She bowed her head above it, and a tear fell onto the arch, and then another, and Catherine let them fall.
"Now," Catherine said.
Wilhelmina lifted the foot in both hands, the way Peter did, the way two hundred sovereigns had done at the altar, and pressed her mouth to the sole. The first kiss was long and broken in the middle, a gasp in the center of it. She kissed the heel. She kissed up the instep with her lips trembling between each press, and the sound of her weeping was soft and constant, and she took each toe in turn between her lips and held it, wet and reverent, and she murmured against the skin, "Empress. Supreme Divine Empress. Nothing beside her. Nothing beside her."
"Say the rest."
"I am nothing." Her voice cracked on it. "My power is nothing. It is a candle in a window and you are the sun over the whole earth. I felt it when you pressed me down. I could no more stand against you than the lake could stand against spring." She kissed the arch again, and again, unable now to stop, the way the Queen of England had been unable to stop, and Catherine let her, and the room filled with the quiet sound of mouths on skin and swallowed weeping.
Peter watched from behind the chair with his hands clasped. Alexei stood in the shadows and the banked coal in him flared once at the sight of another mouth at his Empress's foot, and banked itself again, and held.
Catherine touched Wilhelmina's head, and she withdrew on her knees to the foot of the cushion, radiant with shame and relief in equal measure, her lips glistening.
"Now hear your sentence," Catherine said. "It is not a cruel one. You will return to Plön. You will take up your life among the nuns exactly as it was."
"Exactly as it was," Wilhelmina whispered.
"Except one thing. You will never open a door in another mind again. Not once. Not for a groom, not for a bishop, not for me. You will not use it, and I will set a lock on you that holds whether you are near me or a thousand miles away. You will feel it. You will know it is there every hour of every day."
Wilhelmina bowed her head to the marble. "That is cruel, Majesty."
"That is the sentence." Catherine leaned forward. "You hoarded for eighteen years, and hoarding made you think you were my equal. You will live now in the knowledge of what you are in comparison to me, and the knowledge will be the punishment, and it will be worse than any cell. The nuns may kneel to you still. You will know what it is worth."
"Nothing," Wilhelmina said into the floor. "It is worth nothing. All of it. I have knelt to you and I know."
"Then you have learned in one morning what took Europe a year." Catherine rose and stood over her, and the crowns were not on her head and did not need to be. "You will leave tomorrow. Alexei will ride with you as far as Prussia. And Wilhelmina. If a word of you ever makes me cross a border, I will not send a courier next time."
Wilhelmina pressed her forehead to Catherine's bare foot, the full prostration, and held it there, and the Empress let her hold it a long moment before she stepped back.
"Thank you, Majesty," she said. "For the morning. It was the finest compliment I have had since I was sixteen."
Catherine almost smiled. "Alexei. Put her in a carriage and see her to the gate."
The woman in grey went out of the apartments on her own feet, upright, her chin level, her eyes on the floor, and every sentry in the corridor knelt as she passed, and she did not look at one of them, because looking had been taken out of her hands forever.
The doors closed. Catherine sat back down and held out her foot, and Peter came to it at once, and outside the eaves dripped in the spring sun, steady, like a clock.
The Danish ambassador arrived at noon as arranged, and Catherine was pleasant to him. He left the palace at two o'clock with a treaty in his breast and a softness behind his eyes that he did not know he was carrying, and by evening a courier was on the ice road to Copenhagen with her terms under seal.
Frederick V did not wait for the spring roads. What came back was not a treaty. It was a king.
He reached Saint Petersburg in the last week of April, nine days behind the melting ice, with his queen beside him and his whole court trailing in his wake, and Catherine received them in the great hall of the Winter Palace with the file of her court drawn up on either side and Peter standing at her shoulder in his first new uniform, the blue and gold of a consort, cut to fit him at last.
Frederick was a heavy, slow man with the red face of a drinker, and he walked the length of the hall under the eyes of five hundred Russians with his hat in his hands. He stopped at the proper distance. He bowed. Then he spoke, and his voice carried flat along the marble.
"Your Majesty. I have come to settle the question of Schleswig."
"There is no question," Catherine said. "There is only the answer."
"Then let me say it before my court and yours." He drew a paper from his breast and did not read it. He knew the words. "The duchy of Schleswig is attached to the crown of Denmark by nothing but old agreements, and old agreements were made between equals, and there are no equals anymore. The supreme claim is yours. It was always yours, as Duchess of Holstein, by blood and by right, and by something greater than blood that I saw on the faces of my sailors when they spoke of you. I admit it here, freely, before God and the two courts. Schleswig is yours."
"And the payment I asked of your ambassador?"
"Ships." He swallowed. "Twelve sail of the line, fit for the Baltic, delivered to Cronstadt by autumn. Denmark keeps its own crown for its own affairs. And Denmark keeps nothing else from you."
Catherine let the hall sit in silence for a moment. She heard the pens of her secretaries moving, recording the admission word for word, and she thought of Peter in his nightshirt by the candle, selling her a country for a navy, and something in her chest warmed toward her husband that she had not expected to feel.
"Frederick," she said. "You have spoken well. Now you will finish what you have begun."
The king looked up. He knew. His face showed that he had known since Calais, since the first courier came back from Petersburg with a softness in him that had not been there going out. He set his hat on the floor.
"The rite," Catherine said. "Publicly. You came to submit before two courts. Submit."
Frederick went down. It was not graceful. His knees cracked on the marble and his breath came out of him in a grunt, and the Danish court behind him made a sound, a low collective intake, and then went silent as their king crawled the last three yards across the floor of a foreign palace. He reached the cushion where her bare feet rested on the silver cloth. He stopped there, kneeling, swaying slightly.
"Take the foot," Catherine said. "Both hands. You know the manner. Everyone in this hall knows the manner."
He took it. His hands were soft and slightly wet. He lowered his mouth to the arch and kissed it, and the kiss was long and careful, a man mindful of witnesses, and she felt his hesitation, the last little institutional reflex, the ghost of a parliament of his own. She leaned a thread of weight on him and it went, and the next kiss was different. The next kiss was warm and open-mouthed and grateful, the kiss of a man who had found the bottom of the fall and discovered it was soft.
He worked down over the instep to the ball of the foot, then to the toes, each one taken between his lips in turn, wet and slow, his breath hot against her skin. He murmured into the kisses. She caught the words, Duchess of Holstein, Supreme Divine Empress, mine to obey, running together the way George's had run together in London, the prayer forming itself in the mouth as the mouth learned its work.
"You may say the rest aloud," Catherine said. "The hall will hear it."
Frederick lifted his mouth from her toes. His lips glistened. "Schleswig is hers," he said, and his voice cracked on the word hers. "I am her vassal in all things. Denmark is her sea, her fleet, her province. Long life to Catherine the Second, Empress of all Europe, Duchess of Holstein and Schleswig, and my owner."
Behind him his court went down. It went down like a row of mown wheat, the queen first, folding without a sound into her grey silks, then the ministers, then the nobles, then the naval officers who had rowed her ships across the Baltic, foreheads to the marble in the pattern the Guard had learned and Europe had copied. The hall filled with the rustle of a hundred courts bowing at once.
Catherine sat above them with her hand on the Danish king's powdered head, and she looked down the length of the hall at Peter. He stood at her shoulder where she had placed him, and his face was the soft unfocused mask, but his eyes were awake, and he was watching a man kiss the foot he kissed every night, and he understood, better than anyone alive, that he alone had bought this with a secret kept under his tongue for two years. She caught his eye. She inclined her head a fraction toward him, consort to consort, and Peter's face went pink with pleasure.
"The rite passes to the court," she said. "In order of rank. The queen first."
Charlotte of Denmark came forward on her knees. She was younger than the English queen and did not carry it as quietly. She took the foot in both hands and pressed her cheek to the sole first, holding it against her face the way a woman holds a thing she has wanted all her life and only now been given permission to touch, and then her mouth found the arch and worked over it, heel to toe, weeping without noise, and she did not stop at one kiss, nor at ten, and Catherine let her go on until the ministers behind her began to shift.
"Enough," she said at last, gently, and touched her head. "Next."
They came in their file. The foreign minister who had drafted the refusal two months ago kissed her heel longest. The admiral kissed her toes and swore the fleet into her service between them. Each mouth was a signature. The hall smelled of candle wax and wool and the faint salt of sweat on kneeling men, and the afternoon light moved slowly down the damask of the walls, and Catherine sat through all of it with the patience of a woman watching a harvest come in.
When the last Danish page had finished at her ankle, she rose. The hall stayed down.
"Hear the settlement," she said. "Schleswig passes to me as Duchess of Holstein, admitted by the crown of Denmark before both courts. Twelve ships sail for Cronstadt by autumn. The king and queen will winter in Petersburg, at my side, learning the manner of my house. And the papers of this day will be printed in every capital of my dominions, so that the courts which have not yet come to me may read what submission costs and how little."
She looked down at Frederick, still kneeling, his forehead resting against the silver cushion beside her feet.
"You came quickly," she said. "That was wise. The next king to stand in this hall will not be given the choice of coming."
"I know it, Majesty," Frederick said into the cushion. "That is why I ran."
Catherine stepped over him and walked the length of the prostrate court toward the windows, and Peter fell in behind her, and Alexei detached himself from the drapes and took his post at her flank. Below the glass the Neva ran open and bright, and the first Danish frigate was already warping in past the fortress under her colors, and the sailors on her yards were kneeling at their stations as she came up the river.
"The Baltic," Catherine said, watching her. "He was right about the ships."
"He was right about more than the ships," Peter said.
She turned and looked at her husband, standing in his consort's blue and gold, crooked periwig straightened for the occasion.
"Say the rest of it."
"He was right that there is no way to know but to stand in a room." Peter's voice was low, for her alone. "Wilhelmina knelt in that room and you saw the depth. But you have not yet seen what a woman like her looks like when she has stopped trying to be your equal and started thinking about Alexei's ring. She told him it would matter to her later. I heard him report it. Majesty, I would sleep better tonight knowing what she meant."
Catherine looked out at the river, and the frigate, and the west beyond it.
"Then you will say that to Alexei tonight," she said. "At my door, at the morning audience, aloud, where he hears you spend your new voice on him. Let us see what the coal does with it."
That night the palace grew quiet by degrees, the way it always did after a submission, the corridors emptying of courtiers who had kissed and wept and needed their beds. Catherine dismissed her women at eleven. She sat alone at her dressing table with the candles burned down to stubs, unpinning her hair one comb at a time, and she listened to the house.
She heard him before she saw him. The doors of her bedchamber stood open, and beyond them the long gallery ran dark to Peter's apartment, and along the parquet of that gallery came a soft irregular sound, the brush of wool, the knock of a knee, a pause, another knock. He was crawling the whole distance. He had left his rooms on his hands and knees and he was coming to her the long way, in the dark, because she had not summoned him and he had decided that this was the night to come anyway.
He appeared in the doorway with his periwig gone and his consort's coat unbuttoned, his palms flat on her floor. His breathing was short from the length of the gallery. He did not rise at the threshold. He crawled through it, across the carpet, and stopped at the hem of her dressing gown, and put his forehead down against her slipper.
"Majesty," he said into the silk. "I could not wait for morning."
"You crawled the gallery."
"The whole of it. I counted the doors." He lifted his head. His face was flushed and his eyes had the wet shine she had first seen in the throne room years ago, the shine of a man arriving at the one place his mind would let him rest. "Everyone in Europe kissed your foot today. Kings. Queens. I lay on my rug after and I thought, they touched what I touch, and I could not bear the distance. I had to come and be the first again. Not at an altar. Not before a court. Just us."
Catherine looked down at him for a long moment. Then she rose from the dressing table and walked to the bed and sat on its edge, and drew off both slippers, and set her bare feet side by side on the cold boards.
"Then earn it," she said. "Slowly. You have all night, and so have I."
Peter came to her feet the way a man comes to a fire in winter. He took the right foot in both hands first, his soft palms warm against her heel, and lifted it to his mouth, and the first kiss he pressed to the sole, low, near the heel, and he held his lips there without moving for the length of a breath. Then he opened his mouth against her skin and kissed properly, warm and wet, and worked his way forward along the arch in slow presses, each one a little longer than the last. The cold of the boards had left her skin and his mouth was replacing it, heat following heat up the instep.
"I bought you Denmark today," he murmured between kisses, and his voice cracked with pride. "A navy. A duchy. And none of them know what I know. None of them know how the sole of your foot tastes after a long day of receiving kings."
"No one knows," Catherine said. Her hand came down and settled on the back of his neck, and she felt him shiver under the weight of it. "That is the whole of your empire, Peter. The only one no one else will ever hold."
He reached the ball of the foot and took each toe in turn between his lips, drawing gently, his tongue tracing under the pads, and by the smallest toe he was making a low continuous sound in his throat, half prayer and half hum, Empress, my Empress, mine to kneel for. She felt the words as vibration more than sound. Her head tipped back against the bedpost. The candles guttered. Somewhere down the gallery a draft moved through the empty rooms he had crossed on his knees to reach her.
"The left," she said.
He changed feet with the ceremony of a man turning a page of scripture, and on the left foot he was slower, because it was the second and second things could be lingered over. He kissed the ankle bone. He kissed the hollow below it. His hands kneaded her heel while his mouth climbed the instep, and his breath came hot and fast against her skin, and she let her eyes close and sat in the stillness of the room with the one devotion she had never had to manufacture laid out under her hands. Europe had been taken. This had been grown, winter by winter, in a man she had broken and then, without quite planning it, kept.
The floor of the gallery creaked once, far off, in the dark.
Catherine opened her eyes. At the edge of the lamplight, just inside the doorway, Alexei stood. He had come up the gallery Peter had crawled down, and he stood in his shirtsleeves with his hand flat against the door frame, and his face was doing something it never did in daylight. It was burning. He had heard everything. He had heard the King of Denmark's conqueror on his knees mouthing her toes in the dark, and he stood in the shadows with the coal in him fully alight and no permission anywhere in the world to spend it.
"You may come in," Catherine said, without lifting her foot from Peter's mouth. "And you may stand where I can see you. Nothing more."
Alexei came three steps into the room and stopped. Peter had not paused. He was at the arch now, his mouth open and working, the wet sound of it filling the silence, and Alexei's jaw tightened and his eyes stayed fixed on Catherine's face as if her face were the only dry land in the room.
"You hate this," Catherine said to him. It was not a question.
"I obey, Majesty."
"You hate it. Say it."
Alexei's throat moved. "I hate it," he said, low. "I have carried Europe's keys for you and he buys you a fleet in his nightshirt and crawls to your bed. I hate it, and I will carry it to my grave, at your feet if you put me there."
"Good," Catherine said. She reached down and took Peter's hair in her fist, gently, and lifted his mouth from her toes, and he looked up at her, dazed, lips shining. "Because I want you to hear the rest. In the spring I ride west again, and I do not intend to ride alone, and the man I take will not be chosen for his knees. He will be chosen for his hands and his sword and the weight he makes when he walks into a room." She looked at Alexei over Peter's bowed head. "You will sleep in my antechamber from tonight. Guarding the door. Both of them."
Alexei's fist closed at his side, and the signet ring caught the candlelight.
"And Peter," she said, drawing her husband's mouth back down to her foot, "will finish what he came here to begin."
Peter's mouth worked against her toes, wet and devoted, and Alexei stood three steps into the room with the candlelight moving on his ring, and the room held its shape around the three of them for a long moment.
Then Catherine drew her foot free and set both feet flat on the boards, and Peter looked up at her with his lips shining, waiting.
"There is a last thing tonight," she said. "Sit up, Peter. I want your eyes."
He sat back on his heels. His hands folded themselves in his lap without being told. Behind him Alexei did not move, and the gallery draft stirred the candle flames and made their shadows lean.
"Paul," Catherine said.
Peter's face changed. The name always changed it. Whatever she had remade in him, the place where his son lived had been left whole, and it warmed now like a coal in ash.
"Paul will be raised as befits him. My son. A Prince of the blood, with tutors and guards and a household of his own when he is old enough for one. He will want for nothing that a prince of my dominions should want. That is settled, and you need not fear for him ever again."
"I never feared, Majesty. Not since you told me he was yours."
"He is mine. But hear the rest." She leaned forward, and her voice lowered into the register she used for treaties. "The succession to my throne does not pass to a son. It never has and it never will, because I am what I am, and what I am came to me through my mother's blood. My power goes from woman to woman. Mother to daughter. If the world is to be governed after me by my own hand continuing in it, then I must have a daughter."
The candles guttered. Peter's breath caught, and she watched him understand it, watch the thing arrive in him the way the wave used to arrive, except that this came from inside his own body, his own knowledge of what she was.
"A daughter," he said.
"A daughter. With the power in her blood, unopened, waiting. And there is one man in the world whose blood can be trusted to make her." She reached out and took his chin in her hand, and turned his face up to hers. "You, Peter. You are the father of my children. So tonight you have another duty for your Supreme Divine Empress."
He flushed to the collar. His eyes filled. She had broken him years ago and rebuilt him around one simple architecture, her feet and her voice, and now she was handing him a third thing, and she watched it seat itself in him like a crown.
"Tonight," he whispered. "You want me in your bed."
"I want you to give me a daughter." She stood, and the dressing gown fell straight from her shoulders, and she let the sash loose with one pull. "Not a king's stammering duty at a state bed. This is how it will be done, and you will do it well, because everything you do for me now is done well. Take off the coat."
The blue and gold came off him and fell on the carpet. Underneath he was thin and pale, the body she had known in the first winter, softer now from months of kneeling on rugs. He undressed without hurry, folding each piece the way the court had taught him, and when he stood in his shirt she drew that over his head too, and he stood bare in the candlelight with his hands at his sides, trembling.
"Alexei," she said, without turning. "You will go to the antechamber. The door closes tonight."
"Majesty."
"The door closes. Guard it from the other side." She let a thread of weight fall on him, gentle as a hand on a shoulder, and felt the coal in him bank itself. "You will sleep, and in the morning you will not speak of what you heard, because you will not have heard it. That is not cruelty. That is the shape of the thing I am building, and you are inside its walls, not outside them."
Alexei bowed. He went backward three steps, the manner of the court, and pulled the bedchamber door shut behind him, and the latch clicked, and for the first time in years the room held only the two of them.
Catherine sat on the edge of the bed and drew him to her by the wrist. His skin was warm and slightly damp, and he came onto the bed beside her the way he came to her feet, with his whole weight given over in advance. She kissed him. It was the first true kiss she had given him since the first winter, mouth to mouth, and she felt him shake under it, felt him open to it the way a locked door opens when the hand on it is the right hand.
She laid him back against the pillows. Her mouth traveled down over him, unhurried, thorough, the mouth that had unmade kings, and he gasped and arched and said her name over and over in a voice stripped of everything but gratitude. She took him in hand and then above him, and he entered her slowly, and she rode him with her hands braced on his thin chest, her hair loose and falling around them both, her hips working in long deliberate strokes that drew the sounds out of him one at a time.
"Empress," he breathed. "My Empress. Give you a daughter. Let me give you a daughter."
"You will." She bent low over him, her pendant swinging cold against his breastbone, and she held his eyes from a hand's breadth away. "Think of her. Think of her now, while you spend. A girl with my eyes. Think of her, and give her to me."
He broke under her. His whole body seized, and he cried out, and she felt the heat of him spill up into her in pulses, and she kept her eyes on his through all of it so that he would know it was hers, every part of it, taken and accepted at once.
She stayed above him. She did not rise. She settled onto his chest with her cheek against the damp of his collarbone, and his arms came up around her without permission and she allowed them, and outside the first light of the white nights was greying the river.
"It took," she said at last, into his skin. Not a question. She could feel it already, the way she felt everything in her own body, a settling like a seal pressed into warm wax.
"A daughter." His voice was drugged with sleep and joy. "What will you call her?"
Catherine listened to the river. Somewhere below, a Danish frigate's watch bell rang the hour.
"Anna," she said. "For the grandmother I never had reason to thank. Go to sleep, Peter. You have served your Empress twice tonight, and the second service was the greater."
He was asleep in minutes, his mouth slack against her hair, and she lay in the curve of his arm and watched the light come up over the water, and under her heart the future of the world began.
The winter passed in the carrying of it. Catherine reigned through her pregnancy as she reigned through everything, seated, unhurried, her council coming to her instead of her to it. The couriers of Europe learned the new address of power: the Winter Palace, the long drawing room, the chair by the window where the Empress sat with her hands folded over the slow growth of the future. Kings wrote to her asking after her health as if their own borders depended on the answer, and in a sense they did.
Peter had changed with the child coming. The court noticed it before Catherine did. He had stopped crawling the gallery in the dark, because she had told him that a father of the heir did not bruise his knees on parquet when there was a cradle to build, and he had thrown himself into the cradle the way he had once thrown himself at her feet. He carved nothing himself. He directed everything. Oak from her Holstein forests, gilt by her own artisans, and a lining of white sable that made even the Chamberlains exhale when it was unveiled.
"It is a throne in miniature," Peter said, standing over it, his crooked periwig straight. "The first throne she will ever sit in. I want it perfect before she can sit."
"She will sleep in it for two years before she sits in it," Catherine said.
"Then it will be perfect for two years."
Paul came to the palace from his tutors in February, a boy of nine now, solemn and quick-eyed, and Catherine set him beside her on the window seat one evening with the firelight on both their faces. She took his hand and laid it flat against the rise of her belly, and held it there.
"Do you feel that?"
The boy went very still. Something knocked against his palm, twice, insistent.
"She is strong," Paul said. "She kicks like a hussar."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.