pineapples, for another decorating cakes with trellises of spun sugar and candied violets. Many went there only to sample what new novelty would be presented.
That evening we were served a dish of roast suckling pig stuffed with quails, these in turn stuffed with mushrooms. Leonid Vladimirovich’s daughter sat at table with her little pug dog seated on a chair next to her. Eufimia, short-limbed and fat, bore an unhappy resemblance to the bug-eyed little beast, a likeness she had witlessly enhanced by dressing the dog in a collar of the same gold lace that trimmed her own bodice.
“He is very clever,” Eufimia said. “Observe this.” Pulling the leg off a quail, she held the tiny drumstick just above the dog’s nose. “Didi, demonstrate how Mademoiselle Talyzina danced the mazurka at court.” She waggled the drumstick just out of its reach, and it rose onto its hind legs, tottering and spinning. Everyone laughed and applauded. Someone hummed a tune to accompany the dog, and others began to call out the names of various persons for Didi to imitate.
Count Razumovsky whispered, “Would that the mistress had the charms of her pet.” I could think of no witty answer but smiled encouragingly. Gospodin Chogalovsky on my left repeated the remark to the person on his left and I watched it circle the table, a discreet whisper, a titter, a shared glance, until it reached Xenia. Inclining her head towards her neighbor, she listened, but her fierce eyes remained fixed on the dog. By now, it was wheezing desperately from its exertions. It collapsed onto its haunches but then struggled back up when Eufimia dangled the drumstick in front of its nose.
Xenia rose. “May I try?” she asked Eufimia. She waited, holding out a hand.
Reluctantly, Eufimia passed her the drumstick. “Hold it just above his snout,” she instructed.
“Like so?” Xenia held out the drumstick but so low that the dog lunged and snatched a bit of greasy meat from the bone. She feigned surprise and dropped the drumstick to the floor, whereupon the dog fell off its chair and began to devour it.
“Oh, dear.” She could not keep from laughing. “Good boy, Didi! Look with what relish he enjoys his meat.”
“I can’t think who he puts me in mind of,” said Gospodin Chogalovsky. Someone volunteered the name of an Austrian attache with famously bad table manners.
“Yes, that’s him exactly!”
The game turned to one in which Didi was encouraged to eat in the manner of various people we did not like. Scraps of food were tossed on the floor, and the dog happily snuffled them up.
Eufimia pouted. “No, make him dance.” She held up another drumstick but could no longer engage her dog’s attention.
One of Eufimia’s several suitors—she might be unattractive, but she stood to inherit much charm— volunteered that he would happily dance if he might feed from her hand. With a simper, Eufimia held up the drumstick and requested the figures of a sarabande. He obliged, to more laughter. Such was the nature of our amusement most evenings.
Andrei, being attached to the court, was compelled to move in its seasonal cycles, quitting Petersburg in the spring for more hospitable climates. From Petersburg to Moscow, to Oranienbaum and the summer palace at Tsarskoye Selo, to monasteries and country estates and back again—the Empress was a restless traveler, and wherever she went an endless line of carriages and carts snaked behind her carrying all her furniture and her several thousand dresses and shoes, and behind them her vast retinue, often nearly a quarter of the populace of Petersburg, a moveable city of pilgrims journeying endlessly from shrine to shrine, seeking some new diversion.
Because Xenia could not bear to be apart from her husband, she often numbered amongst these travelers. Even I, who had no relation to the court, was brought along on one such journey, an Imperial pilgrimage to Lake Svetloyar. Xenia had arranged it. A pilgrimage, she reasoned, would provide opportunities for informal meetings and conversation. And I should not have to dance.
The court left Tsarskoye Selo after the roads were dry and traveled first to Prince Merchersky’s estate near Nizhny Novgorod. After a week of the Prince’s hospitality, the vast machine of the Empress’s retinue set out on foot for the lake.
Within two hours of our departing, word came back through the line that Her Imperial Majesty was fatigued. We were compelled to stop then and there and await carriages to convey us the remaining nine or ten versts to our lodgings. The next day, the carriages returned us to the exact spot where we had previously left off, and we continued walking from there. That afternoon, we made little more progress before the Empress suffered a blister on her heel. Again, we waited for carriages to shuttle us forward in small groups, a tedious process that took longer than it would have to walk the same distance. And so it went. Each day, the carriages deposited us on this same stretch of road and then picked us up again some incremental distance farther on. It was three days before we passed our lodgings on foot and four days before the tail of the line accomplished this same feat.
Xenia did not forget her purpose in bringing me along, and contrived each day to put us in the company of various unattached men. Into the second week, we stood one afternoon by the side of the road watching the procession of pilgrims pass, until she spotted a page she had met the previous evening. My first thought was that Xenia had misjudged: I had seen this same young man seated at supper next to one of the Shuvalov brothers.
“Yes, he is their nephew,” she answered.
“He is too far above me.” I did not add that he was too pretty as well.
“The heart does not know its station.”
She took me by the arm and fell in just ahead of the page. When he caught sight of her, she expressed delight at the happy accident of meeting again.
“This is my cousin Daria Nikolayevna of whom I spoke. Dasha, this is Ivan Ivanovich. He is a great lover of books. I told him last evening that you read.”
He expressed his pleasure at making my acquaintance and asked if I might commend any books to him. I had read the whole of what was available to me—the Psalter, the domestic rules of the
Had we more time, we might have gotten on well, for he was frank and intelligent and fond of ideas. But our walk was cut short by a pebble in the Empress’s slipper.
We did not see Ivan Ivanovich again over the next several days. After Xenia asked Andrei to make inquiries, we learnt that the page had been moved to the head of the procession and was now walking in the company of the Empress herself.
“I fear the Shuvalovs have designs for him.” Andrei was grim. It seemed the brothers, dangerous and tireless schemers both, had brought their nephew on the pilgrimage with the purpose of introducing him to the Empress. By all appearances, they had calculated rightly the particular weakness of their sovereign. This young man, twenty- seven years her junior, had caught the Empress’s fancy, and the enemies of Razumovsky were gleefully predicting that the Count would be out on his ear soon.
Andrei reflected the gradual darkening of the courtiers’ mood. The lake lay no more than one hundred and twenty versts to the east of our starting point, but it had taken us nearly a fortnight to cover half that distance, for we could walk at best an hour a day before Her Majesty became winded or footsore. Prince Merchersky remarked that the early fathers might never have made it to the Holy Land had they been obliged to wear corsets and slippers. It began to seem we should be on that road forever, and the prospect bred a restive ill-temper which spread like disease in the close quarters. However various were our lodgings en route, they shared the quality of being overcrowded. Xenia and I were compelled one night to lie in a doorsill and were woken a dozen times by people stepping over us. On another night, we slept seated in a long queue of carriages parked before the inn where the Empress and her ladies were bedded.
Xenia, however, remained cheerful. She liked being out of doors and relished every aspect of travel. As we walked, each new prospect excited her, though its only virtue might seem to be that it was unfamiliar. Even the small hardships, she insisted cheerily, were a diversion from one’s daily routines and familiar discomforts. Why, she might even become a wandering monk. Andrei replied that she would make a terrible monk. “How would you manage without your dresses and baubles? Besides, you have no gift for being alone.” She snugged her arm into the crook of his and said that he was right. Though she could live without her worldly possessions, she would die if
