The Winter Palace Read Online Free Page B

he wished to secure my future in case God called him, like Mama, before his time.
    “You have no one but me to look after you, my child. I cannot sleep in peace when I think I might die and leave you all alone,” he whispered.
    He held me tightly. I breathed in his smell, not the familiar whiff of vinegar and glue but the rare scent of eau de cologne and snuff.
    Empress Elizabeth. I thought of angels when I first saw her, of the glittering messengers of God, their winged arms herding lost children to safety. In a silvery dress, a single white feather crowning her forehead, she floated on the aroma of orange blossoms and jasmine.
    “Come here, child,” she said, her voice especially sweet as she pronounced that last word.
    I hesitated. One does not approach angels without fear.
    “Go on,” my father urged me, his hand pushing me forward.
    I walked reluctantly toward the Empress of All the Russias, my gaze cast downward, fixed on the hem of her dress sewn with gold thread and pearls. I prayed the curtsy I had practiced for days did not betray my unease.
    The Empress took my chin in her hands and raised my eyes to meet hers. “What a pretty smile,” she murmured.
    I felt her fingers on my cheeks, a smooth, soft caress. I let her words thicken around me, like the warmth radiating from the white-and-blue-tiled stoves of the palace. My father had told me that the Empress had a good heart, that she, too, knew how it felt to lose a mother and fear the future. Didn’t she bring her sister’s orphaned son to her own court? Hadn’t she just made him Crown Prince?
    “What’s your name, child?” she asked.
    “Barbara,” I said.
    “Varvara Nikolayevna, Your Highness,” my father corrected, offering my name in the Russian way, with his name echoing after mine.
    “Your father has asked me to take care of you if he dies, Varvara. Is that what you, too, wish?”
    “Yes, Your Highness,” I said.
    “Very well, then,” the Empress said to my father. I saw her folded fan touch his shoulder. “I’ll take good care of her. You have my promise.”
    My father stood a little stooped and motionless as the Empress departed, with courtiers crowding upon her, praising her benevolence. He lowered his head when a few of them stopped and inspected me through their monocles, the looks you give a caged bird. His hand when he squeezed mine was cold and moist with sweat.
    Did he guess what would happen to me?
    I stood by my father’s side, silent and trembling until the last courtier disappeared and the guards closed the gilded doors. I longed to ask which one of them was the Grand Duke Peter, but I didn’t dare.
    It was beginning to snow as we left the palace. The hackney carriage was waiting for us, the driver greeting us with a broad smile and vodka breath. By the shore of the Neva, the wind played with stray litter, a torn straw hat, a scrap of burlap, a wooden toy wheel with broken spokes.
    Convicts with shaved heads were being marched along the embankment, a whole group of them in shackled pairs. Many had their nostrils slit. Some, with the narrow eyes of Tartars, were missing a nose or an ear. As the soft, wet snow intensified, their bare heads turned white.
    Our carriage pulled onto the Isaakovsky bridge. Now that I had seen the inside of the palace, the fur blanket seemed even more threadbare, the smells of birch tar and kvass harder to ignore.
    My father said, “It doesn’t mean I’m going to leave you, Barbara. I’m just being prudent.”
    This is when I started to cry.
    I didn’t see my father die. One evening at the end of December, he pushed away a bowl of kasha and sour cream. He was not hungry. All he asked for was his usual cup of hot milk. He would take it in his bedroom, he said.
    We had just had our first Christmas without my mother. Days seemed fragmented, broken into odd pieces, a plate too full, a pinching shoe, an empty chair. The hollow, choking feeling overwhelmed me every time I had to admit that, by then,