The Winter Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

even the shawls hidden in Mama’s closet smelled of nothing more than dry rosemary.
    In a few days we would welcome the new year. The year I would turn sixteen, and would no longer be a child.
    The new maid who took the milk upstairs screamed when she opened the door. She wouldn’t let me inside but made the sign of the cross over my head and tried to hold me in her arms, muttering her incantations against fate, as useless as hope. Her apron still smelled of Christmas baking, of raisins, vanilla, and cloves.
    “Call your priest, Varvara,” she insisted, barring the door with her body. “For pity’s sake, send someone for your priest!”
    I pushed her away.
    When our priest arrived with an altar boy, Papa was lying on his bed, his face ashen and still. His fingertips were purple, as if he had bruised them in the last moments of his life. On the desk there was a sheet of paper with his writing on it. A quill lay next to it, the nib chipped.
    “His heart broke,” the priest said, and I imagined my father’s heart shattered into razor-sharp, transparent slivers.
    My father’s last words contained no message for me. Instead, he had jotted down some reminders for the following day. Ever since the news of Empress Elizabeth’s patronage of him spread, orders for new bindings had been pouring in. He planned to buy two more jars of glue. His tools needed repairing, knives had to be sharpened. The tip of his favorite polisher was broken. A new place should be found for storing leather, for he spotted signs of mildew on the pigskin.
Sweet almond oil
, he had written,
works best for greasing the surface
.
    The priest knelt and intoned the Prayer for the Dead. I too fell to my knees.
Wieczne odpoczywanie
, I tried to repeat after him,
Eternal rest
, but my voice caught on these solemn words and broke.
    Useless
, I thought, for on that dark December evening all that mattered were silence and tears.
    The new commissions had not been enough. My father had too many debts, I was told. Our house and the contents of his workshop had to be auctioned off. I saw my mother’s favorite carpet rolled and taken away. I saw my father’s books stacked in crates on a wagon. My whole inheritance amounted to a small bundle and a few rubles wrapped in a piece of cloth.
    The Empress, I kept thinking, promised to take care of me.
    It was February of 1743, the coldest month of the year, when I arrived at the Winter Palace. The footman with sour breath who had brought me told me to wait, leaving me in the servants’ hall. No one took any notice of me but a palace cat, which kept rubbing itself against my ankle. I saw servants scurrying back and forth, chased by fear. I heard slaps, curses, invisible feet pattering up and down service corridors. An icy draft of air touched my cheek. Fear swelled in my throat.
    I shrank inside my skin and waited.
    When dusk fell, a tall, silvery-blond woman entered the room. Her dress looked heavy and must have been warm, for I caught a pungent whiff of her sweat. She gave me an impatient look. Pushing away the cat, she began complaining of smudged doorways, marks on windowpanes, and fur on the ottomans. The German vowels gave her Russian a sharp, accusatory sound.
    “I’m Varvara Nikolayevna,” I ventured. “The Empress sent for me.”
    “I know who you are,” the woman snapped, her dark eyebrows drawing together, a dismissive smile on her lips. I decided that her face looked like a turtle’s, far too small for her big body. Later I would learn her name: Madame Kluge, the Chief Maid, charged with my welfare.
    “Come, girl,” she ordered, and I followed her, cradling my bundle, noting the worn floorboards under my feet, the chinks in the paneling, the balls of dust gathering in the corners. A thought came that I was nothing but a fly, allowed a few steps before someone would bring down the swatter.
    We didn’t go very far. In the palace kitchen I was given a plate of thin gruel and a tin cup of kvass. I was