Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

As the choir sang, Xenia had clasped my hand hard. Tears had shone in her eyes, and they had a bright, ecstatic look. Now, the courtiers stirred to life and began to talk amongst themselves, but she remained still and as vacant in aspect as one in a trance.

“The choir sang as I have never heard them,” I said to her.

She did not answer, though she was usually happy to hear the choir praised, making no distinction between this and praise of Andrei in particular. People hurried past us, heading back up the rise to where a supper had been laid on long tables in the open air. At long last, like a person returning from a great distance, she blinked and her eyes took in her surroundings.

“The choir sang as I have never heard them,” I repeated. Still caught in reverie, she nodded.

She was uncommonly quiet for the remainder of the evening, and not even Andrei’s merriness roused her from her distraction. He expressed concern that the journey had overtaxed her. “Are you unwell?” he asked.

“No, no, I am fine. It is…” She scanned the air for more words but did not find them. “Do you not feel it?”

“What?”

“That our lives are shadows. You, me, all this, it does not mean a thing.”

He was at a loss how to answer.

“No, that sounds horrible, I am not expressing it well. What if the lake, the trees, the heavens, everything we can see, is a forgery, like painted scenery? Lovely as it is, what if it is not real and there is something else?”

With a little shake of her head, she fell back into silence. She was quiet and more distractible the next day, but she gradually returned to herself once we had left Lake Svetloyar and come home again.

With each passing season, my father grew less willing to assume the expenses attendant on my being out in society, and my prospects dimmed a little further. I can fix no moment when expectation gave way to anxiety. Where once I had wondered at intervals whether the husband in my future might be kind or cruel, as the years passed I found myself thinking less about his character and fearing only that he might not exist. It was akin to awaiting the arrival of a distant guest to a party: in the whirl of other guests, his absence may not even register at first, and when it is noted, there is perhaps only a slight vexation at the person’s lateness. But as time goes on, this vexation changes to apprehension and then distress, until his absence casts a longer shadow than his presence might ever command.

In the winter of my twentieth year, the matter came to a head. At the same time that my brother went into the Guards, my father was retired from it. Freed from his service to the crown, he was now able to remove his family from the city and live out his remaining years on his own land.

Going with them would settle my fate—my father’s estate was on the Kashinka River, six days’ journey from Moscow, and there were no eligible men in the vicinity. Aunt Galya proposed that I stay behind with her under the roof of her elder daughter. I cannot guess whether my aunt had anticipated Nadya’s answer when she made the suggestion, but Nadya was indignant. She had already to contend with Kuzma Zakharovich’s wretched daughter and her own mother, and now she should take in a cousin as well? Her sister had no burdens, she countered; why should not Xenia do her share?

Andrei and Xenia showed great kindness in making me welcome, even insisting that it was I who would be doing them a service by keeping Xenia company when she could not travel with Andrei. And so, I went to live with them.

My things were sent ahead, and when I arrived, I learnt that she had put my bed in the upstairs room next to hers. This room had been kept unfurnished in expectation of children. Now, the door stood open, and I saw beyond the threshold that a curtain had been made for the window, my personal linens were already unpacked in the wardrobe, and the icon that had guarded my sleep since birth hung in the corner. I demurred, saying that I should be content to sleep with the servants, but Xenia shook off my protests.

“Nonsense. If it’s bad luck to buy the cradle before the child, maybe it’s just as bad to keep a room empty.” Her manner was so easy that I didn’t guess at the time what this kindness must have cost her.

The first year of their marriage had passed without any sign of a child, and then a year became two and then three. In the fourth year, she had got with child but her womb would not hold it and it was lost before it quickened. She rarely spoke of her disappointment, but after I moved into their house I came to sense that it was never far from her thoughts. She kept in her room a little icon of Saint Paraskeva, who gives children to barren women, and a candle was kept lit before it. Each month, when her blood came, she was prone to tears over the littlest things.

The Imperial family was also waiting on the Grand Duchess to produce an heir for the throne. From the start of their marriage, the Empress had insisted that the ducal couple should be locked together in their bedchamber each night, like prisoners, so that they might get a child. One of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting whispered that in this enforced privacy, Peter spent all night playing with his tin soldiers, lining them up in formation across the wide plain of their bed and engaging them in mock battles, or sawing on his violin whilst the Grand Duchess tried to sleep.

As time ticked on, the Empress was observed to be increasingly impatient and irritable towards her. She accused Catherine of conducting an affair and set spies on her to report her every move. The Grand Duke, meanwhile, showed no interest in his wife and flirted openly with the Princess of Courland, who was hideous and seemed to have nothing to recommend her save that she would speak in German with him.

It was rumored that in the end Her Majesty had given up and looked the other way so that Catherine might take a lover. Shortly after, she was with child. Rumors were thick that Sergei Saltykov was the father. If true, the child’s parentage became moot, for in May Catherine miscarried whilst traveling. Though she had made every effort to please her husband and her Empress, this grave failure could not be offset by any amount of charm.

Of course, I was not privy to any of this directly but heard it through Xenia, who heard it from I know not whom. Xenia felt a heightened sympathy for the Grand Duchess, and took Her Highness’s sorrow as her own. Every conversation turned to the loss of this child and would end in tears. The Grand Duchess’s circumstances merited sympathy, certainly, but hardly so extreme a response; in truth, I felt she became a bit tiresome on the subject.

We were dining one evening at the house of one of the Roslavlev brothers, a captain in the Izmailovsky Guards, and the buzz about the table concerned a Mademoiselle Shavirova, one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, who was thought to be the Grand Duke’s most recent infatuation. That afternoon and in the presence of the Grand Duchess, the two of them had sat with their heads bowed together and giggled through most of the concert.

It is safe to say that no one at the table cared for the Grand Duke, but though tongues were loosened by a good deal of wine, they were not so loose as to say a word outright against him. Instead, their mirth was directed at the mademoiselle, who was, it was agreed, the least attractive of the Grand Duchess’s ladies. Someone ventured the opinion that love could not possibly be this blind. Another agreed that it was not love but spite against Catherine for her attentions to Saltykov.

This is the way of life in Petersburg—even the lowliest person in society watches the court from whatever his distance and follows the rivalries and intrigues like a sporting match—but Xenia could not treat the gossip as mere diversion. When someone at the table said that the Grand Duke must surely be deprived of his wife’s affection if he sought solace from such a toad, Xenia spoke as if she were defending her own honor.