Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

Only Gaspari seemed not to feel it. Perhaps he had long ago accustomed himself to mortification, but standing across from me, he looked enviably at his ease, an elegant and haughty woman among graceless sisters. Such was the confusion worked on me by the metamorphoses that I found myself grateful to be partnered with him, and not only because he seemed disinclined to expose my secret. When he stepped lightly to my side and we moved arm in arm into the maw, I was emboldened by feeling invisible beside him.

The columns blended and divided again, and now first the gentlemen and then the ladies passed through the gauntlet unaccompanied. As I felt each person fall away ahead of me, my dread returned and deepened. My turn came. The line opened and then closed up again behind me, and I processed with painful slowness, like a mouse through the guts of a snake. Step, step, chassé. I repeated it silently. The tunnel of faces down which I moved was interminable, a thousand eyes staring as though to burn away my costume and expose me. I felt particularly conscious of my hands and could not recall what to do with them. Step, step, chassé. Step, step, chassé. At last I reached the end and gasped up air like a dying fish. Gaspari gave me a solicitous look from across the gap before the shifting dancers reeled him away, and with new partners the figure was repeated.

The figures of the polonaise are endless. At some point, I thought I saw Andrei or at least a part of him. He was standing in the company of two others, who hid him from view, but the back of his apricot gown was reflected in the dark gleam of a window. When next I was returned to that vantage point, he was gone.

The dancers began to move sullenly together and apart like the mechanical figures of a clock, excepting when the mathematics of the dance coupled two who were already linked by gossip. When the Grand Duchess Catherine linked arms with Count Stanislav Poniatowsky, the British ambassador’s secretary, their approach was heralded by an airy rush of whispers, like a wave rippling down the length of a pebbled shore. I had become numb to the torment of passing through the line and had fallen to contemplating smaller mortifications—the weariness of my feet within their buckled shoes, the chafing of my bound breasts—when the lady on my left caught sight of a promising diversion and alerted the gentleman facing her.

“Attendez.” She nodded in the direction of an approaching couple. “You know,” she whispered, “she carried on with that creature for months, and right under the Count’s nose. Naturally, he never suspected. It was only her dog that betrayed her.”

Our two lines parted for the couple to pass, and the Countess Stroganova sailed into view, her hand resting at the slender waist of Gaspari.

My mind struggled to reconcile the picture. They looked too much alike to be lovers. With their fingers touching lightly tip to tip, he might have been her image reversed and elongated by the distortion of a poor mirror. I wondered how it would be to lie with someone who was in all ways but one a sister.

“What of the dog?” the gentleman asked. We had come together again with the requisite bows and curtseys.

“When the monster came to their house to sing, her little spaniel ran up to it and licked at its ankles like an old friend. Thus she was exposed.”

At last we were returned to our original partners and rewarded with the promise of supper. The guests waited to enter the adjacent hall in order of precedence, and from this clutch Andrei appeared, looking a bit untidy but merry.

“Xenia, my dear wife!” Each of his exhalations announced how he had spent the past hours. “I thought I had lost you.” He grasped both my hands as though we had been parted for months and, turning, thanked Gaspari effusively for keeping me amused. “I’m grieved to have missed seeing the promenade. A Frenchman would not let me go. You two must promise to dance a minuet after supper so I may have a second chance.”

A page approached Gaspari to direct him to his seat. He took my hand and lifted it to his painted lips. “Arrivederci per ora.”

When he was out of earshot, I whispered, “Signor Gaspari knows I am not Xenia.”

Andrei waved off the news breezily. “It’s no matter. He’s the soul of indiscretion, but there are few here who would deign to hear anything from him but music.”

“Is he to sing?”

“No, he claims the Grand Duke invited him personally. My guess is that it’s His Imperial Highness’s notion of a jest, seating him above the salt like that, a bit of scandal to irk the Grand Duchess.”

Our own seats placed us across from the counterfeits of a young sailor and an older Cossack. Andrei greeted the Cossack, who looked at him questioningly. “It is Colonel Petrov.” Andrei swooped into a low bow, forgetting his wig. He snatched at it, righted the nest atop his head, and smiled ingratiatingly.

“I am grateful you do not know me in this hideous getup. But no costume can disguise your beauty, Madame Lopukhina. May I present my wife, Xenia Grigoryevna. I hope you will forgive her; the cold weather has made her hoarse.”

It was Andrei’s habit to be pleasing, and drink only made him more courtly. With each course, he grew more lively and expansive.

At three o’clock, the throne was still conspicuously empty. As no one might leave before Her Imperial Majesty arrived, the assembled guests rose from supper and plodded round the dance floor again like beaten nags. Endless refrains of a minuet issued from the nodding musicians and kept the dancers at their paces.

At last Her Imperial Majesty arrived. Whatever relief might have been felt was snuffed by her appearance. She entered the hall with uncharacteristic slowness and leaned heavily on the arm of Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, her legs too swollen to bear her full weight.

I have sometimes consoled myself that having been born without beauty, I have not suffered the loss of it. Those who take delight in their own physiognomy and who see themselves reflected in the admiring eyes of the world must feel each wrinkle as keenly as the cut of a razor. At the peak of her bloom, Elizabeth Petrovna’s beauty had been inspiration for the poets and painters of the age and had known no rivals. What rivals appeared later she had quashed, forbidding them to wear pink in her presence or to adorn themselves with jewels that might outshine her own. She had surrounded herself with flatterers and had taken as favorites a string of boys in whose company she might feel her own youth again. Only a monarch may be so self-deceiving, but no amount of fawning could conceal the truth any longer. She was old and sick, and one could see in her eyes the desperate rage of a trapped animal.

Even at her best, Her Imperial Majesty was notoriously hard to please, and the courtiers were in no mood to make the attempt now. As they fell into line to be received by their sovereign and fulfill their duty, they discreetly signaled pages to have their horses readied. The moment the Empress had lumbered past us, Andrei guided me into the throng flowing towards the door.

We emerged into the late December night. The sharp air cut through my cloak and stung my legs but revived me like a tonic. I admired the glittering sky and the lights of the palace falling across the snow in gold stripes. A buzz swelled at our backs as more and more guests emerged from the hive.

Andrei was merry. He snatched off his wig and, tossing it onto the step, stamped on it as if killing a rat.

“What a night! But we survived our test. To think of you dancing with Gaspari!” He laughed. “I am as lucky as a sultan in my wives.” He swooped in and woozily swiped my cheek with his lips, and began to sing the same light ditty I had first overheard in the carriage years before and that so often came unthinking to his lips. If you look on me fair, my love, I shall not fear to die. And I shall not want more Heaven than what is in your eye. The familiar notes thawed the frozen air. This poor sinner only prays to be kissed to Paradise.