“So this is how you demonstrate your passion for your Tsarina, my little Grigorivitch! By admiring the legs of another woman!” Her voice was cold.
“Sophie—-Catherine-Tsarina mine—-” A few more garbled words and some loverlike, subjectlike slobbering. “But those legs were hairless,” Grigori remembered after his abjectness had mollified her. “Surely no man could have such legs!”
“My husband, Peter, the Tsar of all the Russias, the Emperor of half of Europe and all Siberia shaves his legs,” she said with irony. “Also, in the privacy of the palace, he puts on my gowns and uses my perfume and poses in front of a mirror wearing one or another of my wigs. That’s how I recognized him tonight. The wig atop the goat’s head is one of mine.”
“Appalling!” Grigori’s voice quivered. “That such a passionate woman as you should have a degenerate like Peter for a husband!”
“Appalling that our mighty Russia should have such a pervert for its ruler!” She agreed with him.
“It is right that he must die and you should be Empress,” Grigori said grimly.
“He must die!” she concurred.
By this time I was sure I had identified them and the identification narrowed down the time period in which I found myself. There was only one Russian Empress that I knew of who might be called both Sophie and Catherine, who would speak German with no trace of accent as one speaks one’s native tongue, whose husband was a Tsar named Peter. Only Catherine, the Great could fit the picture.
Catherine the Great spent her first fifteen years on earth as Sophie Augustus, daughter of Christian Augustus, Prince of Anhalt—Zerbst, one of the smallest and most obscure of the Prussian states. Shortly before her sixteenth birthday she was married to the Russian Tsarevitch Peter who would one day ascend the throne as Peter III, Emperor of Russia. The marriage was arranged between the Empress Elizabeth of Russia and Frederick II, ruler of Prussia, for reasons of state. In January of 1762 Peter succeeded to the throne. In June of the same year he was deposed and then murdered. This was accomplished by a group of conspirators headed by Grigori Orlov, Catherine’s lover, one of the earliest and one of many to follow. The plot was hatched by Catherine, née Sophie, and it succeeded in making her Tsarina.
So I was in Russia in the year 1762. And a few feet away from where I was hiding behind the drapes, Catherine the Great and Grigori Orlov were conferring. My curiosity would have been less than human if I hadn’t wanted a look at one of the most fabulous sexpots in all history. I peeked out from behind the tapestry.
In the dim light from the open doorway leading to the next room I could see the couple. Catherine was dressed as an Arabian dancing girl. She wasn’t built for the part. She was tall rather than petite, voluptuous rather than lithe, ample of bosom and hip rather than slight, fair and Germanic rather than dark and Arabic. She held a dark wig in her hands and the flaxen coiffure it had concealed was piled high on her head and glinted like a mound of gold in the candlelight flickering from the next room. The domino mask she’d been wearing was pushed up over her high forehead. Clear blue eyes shone out of a strong face with high cheekbones, the visage of a Valkyrie. And while her body wasn’t that of a dancer’s, nevertheless it was impressively feminine, desirable, a body made for love, a body destined to fulfill its promise in the arms of one lover after another. Catherine the Great, Empress to be, was all woman!
Her current lover, Grigori Orlov, was half lost in the shadows. There was bulk to him, a lot of very black beard, eyes that burned with zeal. He wore a Roman toga and his legs were stoutly muscled and covered with a thick growth of black hair like the limbs of the black bear of the Urals. His demeanor too, while respectful to his love, was bearlike.
“It would be best to leave immediately,” Catherine was saying. “I don’t know how Peter got wind of this party. It was supposed to be for a very select group with the Tsar definitely excluded. But his being here just might mean that he’s compiling a dossier on me, a dossier to prove my infidelity with you, a dossier that could be used by him to divorce me—or worse. The best thing would be for us to go now.”
“All right,” Orlov agreed. “Get your coat. I’ll call to the driver to get the horses ready.”
Catherine left the room. Grigori Orlov started straight for the drapery covered windows, obviously intending to issue his instructions from there. I was too slow. He spotted me before I could get away.
He didn’t shout. Still, there was no mistaking his surprise, his concern, and his anger. The torrent of words he snarled were a well-controlled roar. They were Russian words. That much I could tell. But I couldn’t understand them. I could only guess that they comprised an oath and a threat.
I didn’t hang around to wait for a translation. He was coming on me like thunder and he’d fumbled a dagger out of the folds of his Roman toga. A shower of broken glass accompanied me as I dived out the window. Grigori gathered his toga skirts and leaped behind me.
I came up huffing frostbite. Caribbean pirate garb isn’t made for diving into Russian snowbanks. It was small consolation to know that Orlov’s toga probably wasn’t fur-lined either. There was only one way to fight the freezing cold: exercise. It was also the only way to remove my jugular from Orlov’s wildly swinging dagger. So I hotfooted it for a lap around the courtyard, hoping to lose him somewhere in the shadows.
My breath sent up smoke signals of panic as I ran. They mingled with Orlov’s furious clouds; that’s how close he was on my heels. But I had one thing going for me. For his own reasons, Orlov was no more anxious to kill me publicly than I was to be killed. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself and his royal date. I found that the closer I came to the group of lackeys around the fire, the less threatening his pursuit became. When I saw that he’d allowed a little cautious distance to get between us, I put on a burst of speed, skirted the small knot of men, and raced for the stables in the shadows of the house. Here I lost him.
I crouched behind a bale of hay, teeth chattering, and watched him search for a few minutes. Finally he couldn’t take the cold any more and he gave up. I stayed there, waiting for icicles to form on the tip of my nose, until I was sure Orlov was safely back in the house.
My knees were knocking and my teeth were going like castanets when I finally got to my feet. I didn’t dare risk going back to the house. But if I stayed where I was, I’d turn into a Russian popsicle. I glanced around me, seeking warmth and shelter. I spotted at large sled—the kind they called a troika because it’s drawn by three horses -- parked under the eave of the stable. Several fur robes were piled up at the rear of it for the benefit of the passengers who would ride there. I crawled in the back end of the troika and huddled under the furs, luxuriating in the warmth and marveling at the pins and needles telling me the blood in my veins hadn’t permanently turned to ice. My plans went no further than pinching my frostbitten earlobes to start the plasma circulating again.
After a little while, the troika suddenly began to move. I poked my head out and peered around towards the front. I saw half-a-dozen men pulling the sled out toward the middle of the courtyard where three horses had been lined up and were waiting to be hitched up to it. The cold pinched my nose and I stuck it back under the fur robes again. A few moments later the sleigh started moving again. I risked another look and saw that the horses had been hitched up and the driver was perched behind them on whatever the Russian equivalent of a buckboard is. He was guiding them around to the front of the mansion. Bells jingled on the reins as we moved.
The sleigh was drawn to a standstill again. The driver climbed down and stood holding the tethers of his three horses, waiting for his passengers. I huddled under the furs at the bottom of the sleigh, the driver’s seat above and in front of me, the long sleigh itself angling slightly upwards to my rear.