Imperial Splendour Read online

“It is five o’clock,” he observed, “and in four hours I have promised to breakfast with the Czar. Until then I intend to sleep, Katharina.”

  There was a note in his voice that told her it would be useless to plead with him.

  She merely smiled and, rising from the bed apparently completely unselfconscious of her nakedness, she walked to a chair where she had thrown down the elaborate satin and lace negligée which she had entered the room in.

  She might have had a child, but her body was still that of the beautiful naked angel as Clement Metternich had described her.

  Wrapped in her negligée, she slipped her feet into a pair of velvet mules embroidered with pearls.

  “Sleep well, my adorable Englishman,” she purred. “I shall count the hours until I can kiss you again.”

  She flashed him a smile that gave her face a sudden witchery and she then moved across the room.

  She touched the panel in the wall. It opened and, without looking back, she stepped into the dark aperture. Then the panelling swung back and closed behind her.

  The Duke sat still for a moment and then he climbed into bed and closed his eyes, but he found, however, that the sleep he desired eluded him for the moment.

  His brain was still active and again he was thinking not of Katharina and the fire that they had ignited in each other, but of Russia and the Grand Armée of France. Six hundred thousand men strong and immensely impressive.

  Equally the Duke argued with himself that a third of the soldiers were unwilling German conscripts drawn from subject territories.

  The first thing he had learned on reaching St. Petersburg was that Alexander had been astounded when he heard that Napoleon was heading towards the ancient and sacred Capital of Russia.

  He had never imagined that the Emperor would actually attempt to march to Moscow and the thought of the inevitable carnage appalled him.

  The one blessing from the Russian point of view, the Duke told himself, was the fact that the Czar was not himself leading the Russian Armies.

  His record as a Military leader had been so disastrous that even now every setback was attributed to his influence.

  Because his sister had been so desperate, she had written to him bluntly in a manner that no one else would have dared to do,

  “For God’s sake, do not decide to assume command yourself. There is no time to lose to give the Armies a Chief in whom the men will have confidence. As for you, you cannot inspire them with any.”

  Amazingly, Alexander had heeded her pleas and left the Army.

  He had travelled back to Moscow, then to St. Petersburg. Everywhere he heard criticisms of the High Command and everywhere there was a cry for Kutuzov, whose name spelt magic for the people.

  Alexander had no faith in General Kutuzov. He felt that he was a figure from another century, but he decided to bow to popular demand and told the Duke on his arrival,

  “The public want him so I have appointed him. As for me I wash my hands of the whole affair!”

  The Duke understood that he was feeling peeved at being more or less deposed in favour of a sixty-seven year old General who was lazy, licentious and knew nothing about modern warfare.

  Other people in The Winter Palace, however, informed the Duke that Kutuzov, despite all his shortcomings, had the common sense born of long years of experience.

  “He is slow but tenacious,” an elderly statesman said, “lazy, but discerning, impassive but cunning.”

  All this information the Duke conveyed in code by special Courier to London.

  He hoped with one of his more mocking smiles that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister would be able to make something out of it.

  ‘The one thing about Russia,’ he told himself, ‘is that the unexpected always happens and at least there is nothing monotonous here in day to day life.’

  He realised that he was enjoying himself in his own rather cynical fashion and with that thought in his mind he fell into a deep sleep.

  *

  At nine o’clock the Duke was admitted to the Czar’s private apartments.

  To get there he walked through what seemed to him to be miles of the most beautiful and finely decorated rooms that he had ever seen in his whole life.

  He had been quite prepared for magnificence for the stories of St. Petersburg’s treasures and the splendour of its buildings had been told and retold in London.

  It had been the extravagant Empress Elizabeth who had pulled down the original wooden Winter Palace built by Peter the Great and her architect, Rastrelle, in eight years covered an area of two million square feet with over one thousand rooms and one hundred staircases.

  The Empress Catherine, when she came to power, commissioned a Summer Palace that would outshine Versailles and in St. Petersburg she had added three buildings to the immense Winter Palace, which were known as ‘The Hermitage’.

  Between the two buildings there were courtyards heated in winter where rare birds flitted amongst the trees and shrubberies.

  The Empress had instructed her Ambassadors in Paris, Rome and London to keep a sharp lookout for art bargains and they bought her plenty of fine pictures by great Masters such as Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Van Dyck and Poussin.

  The Duke glanced only perfunctorily at these magnificent works of art for his mind was still concerned with Bonaparte’s advance into Russia.

  ‘It would be a tragedy,’ he told himself, ‘if treasures such as I see here should be lost to posterity.’

  When he reached the Czar’s apartments, he was saluted by the sentries of the Grenadiers of the Golden Guard.

  Picked for their great height, out of all the Regiments who wore the Russian bearskins, they were the most gorgeous.

  They wore white trousers and leggings, a black tunic with gold cuffs and collar and cutaway tails, gold-edged with red on which was fastened a cartridge case embossed with a double-headed eagle.

  The Duke found the Czar waiting for him. Tall, fair-haired and externally handsome it was easy to understand that the Russian people had looked at Alexander on his accession like a Fairytale King come to save them from all their miseries.

  Yet when, at twenty-four years of age, he had ridden to his Coronation in 1801, a wit in St. James’s had remarked,

  “He was preceded by men who had murdered his grandfather, escorted by men who had murdered his father and followed by men who would not think twice about murdering him!”

  The Duke had heard from one of the Czar’s closest friends that, when Alexander had learned of his father’s cruel death, he had burst into tears.

  “I have not the strength to reign,” he had sobbed to his wife. “Let someone else take my place”

  The Duke had begun to think that the vision of Paul’s strangled battered body haunted the Czar.

  He was perceptive enough to know that Russians could suffer in their souls in a way that perhaps men of other nations are unable to do.

  He had known the Czar for some years personally and he was aware that he was often mentally convulsed with an inner agony that would, he thought, become worse rather than better as he grew older.

  As he might have expected, the Czar was this morning looking worried and speaking in a manner that had a touch of hysteria about it.

  “The news is bad – very bad!” he told the Duke after he had greeted him.

  “What have you learned, Sire?” the Duke enquired.

  “That Bonaparte is still marching towards Moscow!”

  The Czar spoke as if he could hardly bear to say the words and then he sighed,

  “God knows if it is the truth. To be honest no one seems to know what is happening.”

  The Duke was not astonished at this statement.

  Methods of communication between the Army and the Czar were mostly haphazard and incompetent, as were a great many other things in Russia.

  They sat down to breakfast at which, as was usual, there were three kinds of bread.

  One was a roll of white bread called kalatch, as l
ight as a feather and eaten hot, which was made from water brought especially from the River Moska.

  This water was delivered to all the Palaces in St. Petersburg, a custom that dated from the previous century.

  As they ate, the Czar, instead of talking about what was happening to the troops under Kutuzov’s direction, did nothing but quote passages from the Bible.

  When the Duke looked at him in surprise, he explained,

  “Yesterday I was told that my lifelong friend, Prince Alexander Golitzen, is a traitor.”

  “That is impossible!” exclaimed the Duke, who knew the Prince quite well.

  “I tried not to believe what I was told,” the Czar said in a low voice, “but my informant said that he is constructing an impressive new Palace where he could entertain Napoleon.”

  “Surely you don’t believe such a wild tale?” the Duke asked.

  “I went at once to visit Golitzen and asked him point-blank why he had chosen to build in such troubled times.”

  “What was his reply?” the Duke asked.

  “The Prince answered, ‘Your Imperial Majesty need not fear an invasion if you trust in Divine Providence’.”

  The Duke raised his eyebrows, but made no comment and the Czar went on,

  “Golitzen then reached up to a bookshelf to take down a heavy volume of the Bible. It slipped to the floor and fell open at the page on which is printed Psalm 41.”

  The Czar paused impressively and the Duke said,

  “I am afraid, Sire, I have forgotten that particular Psalm.”

  “‘I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and fortress, my God, in Him will I trust’,” the Czar quoted.

  His voice had deepened and sounded impressive as he added,

  “Golitzen convinced me that the opening of the Bible at this place was not a coincidence but a direct message from God.”

  “I hope the Prince was right,” the Duke commented dryly.

  “I am sure of it!” the Czar said. “All night I have been reading the Bible and meditating on God and our situation. I believe we will be saved.”

  The Duke found it difficult not to remark that the Russians would certainly need the help of the Almighty as they could not hope to rely entirely on their Army.

  Before he left England, he had seen a report by Dr. Clarke, an Englishman who had paid a visit the Tula arms factory only two years earlier in 1810 and he had been appalled by the incompetence he found there.

  His report said,

  “The machinery is ill-constructed and worse preserved. Everything seemed out of order. Workmen with long beards stood staring at each other wondering what was to be done next, while their intendants or directors were either drunk or asleep. Notwithstanding all this, they pretended to issue thirteen hundred muskets a week from the manufactory!”

  “What was the actual figure?” the Duke had asked.

  “I have no idea,” was the answer, “but we have learnt that the Russian muskets, besides being clumsy and heavy, misfire five times out of ten and are liable to burst when they are discharged.”

  The Duke had thought that French spies must have provided Napoleon Bonaparte with the same type of report as Dr. Clarke’s.

  On invading Russia he was doubtless anticipating that the resistance he would encounter would not be very effective against his forces, highly organised and armed as they were with the latest most up to date equipment.

  It would, however, have been pointless and merely unkind to repeat any of this to the Czar. So the Duke did his best to talk of other things, knowing that there was nothing to be gained by having ‘The Little Father’ of such a great country in such depths of despair.

  ‘Perhaps things will turn out better than I anticipate,’ he told himself optimistically.

  But he found, when he moved amongst the Royal Family and other people staying in the Winter Palace, that they were as apprehensive as he was.

  He also found the whole atmosphere so depressing that he decided to call on Princess Ysevolsov whom he had known for many years.

  He had found when he arrived at The Winter Palace, a letter written in her usual animated and flowery manner, begging him to take the first opportunity he could find of renewing their friendship.

  “My poor husband is, of course, away on the Battlefield,” she wrote, but I will receive you with open arms as one of my closest and dearest friends in England and I want too for you to meet my Little Tania. She was only ten or eleven when you last saw her. Now she is very beautiful and, when this tiresome War is over, I want to present her to our friends in London and have her make her curtsey to the Queen at Buckingham Palace.”

  The Duke had read the letter and found quite a lot of information written ‘between the lines’. He knew that Prince Ysevolsov was one of the richest men in Russia. His family, like other members of the Nobility for some generation’s past not only owned huge estates but a fantastic number of serfs.

  Prince Ysevolsov, the Duke remembered, was supposed to own twenty-five thousand serfs in different Provinces of the country.

  He not only used them as goldsmiths, carpenters and ebony carvers but for his private theatrical company and his Corps de Ballet.

  He had his own theatre where he gave performances for his friends and his wife was as beautiful and valuable as his other possessions.

  She had, however, both Austrian and English blood in her and she had often said to the Duke that she hoped that her children, when they grew up, would not marry Russians.

  The Duke, with his retentive memory, had now a very good idea why she was pressing upon him the attractions of her daughter Tania.

  It would, in fact, be a very suitable match for the daughter of one of the richest and most important Noblemen in Russia to marry one of the richest and most prestigious Noblemen of England.

  But the Duke told himself that the Princess would be disappointed. He was now thirty-three and had so far evaded matrimony.

  Although he had come perilously near to being swept up the aisle from time to time, he had always at the last moment extracted himself from a difficult position.

  In the past few years he had ensured that the danger did not occur by having little or nothing to do with young girls.

  His love affairs were always conducted with married women or widows and he made it clear from the beginning of his acquaintance with the widows that he preferred his bachelor freedom.

  “You will have to marry one day to have a son.”

  It was a sentence that was repeated and re-repeated to him until he told himself that, as far as he was concerned, the Dukedom could go to his younger brother and his family without it causing him one qualm of regret.

  The more he saw of the women who had made London under the Prince of Wales, now the Prince Regent, the gayest and one of the most promiscuous Cities in the world, the more he was determined that love affairs were one thing but marriage was most certainly another.

  He had no intention of marrying a woman who would be unfaithful to him and disliked the idea of having to deceive his wife or to lie in an effort to protect himself.

  He knew that he was too proud and had too much integrity to wish to debase himself in any way least of all by falsehood and deception.

  “I shall never marry,” the Duke had said not once but a thousand times.

  He thought now that it would be a pity if he could no longer indulge in such delightful intrigues such as the one that had happened last night without experiencing a somewhat guilty conscience the following morning.

  As it was, he imagined with amusement, that either the Czar or someone in the Foreign Ministry would undoubtedly be now asking Katharina what she had learned from him the night before.

  And, although he was certain that with her agile mind, she would give them something to chew over and he had said nothing to her that could not have been published in every Russian newspaper that existed.

  He had seen Katharina in the distance at luncheon looking alluringly attractive in a gown
that was definitely Parisian and wearing fantastic jewels, which he was certain had not been given to her by her aged and fortunately absent husband.

  Their eyes had met for just one moment across the Reception room into which they had moved when the meal was over.

  She told the Duke without words that she wanted him and he had only to lift his finger for her to be at his side.

  What she signalled, however, made the Duke decide that before he concerned himself once again with their fiery love-making, he should extend his knowledge of St. Petersburg and perhaps find out from outside The Winter Palace what other people were thinking.

  Accordingly he walked down the magnificent marble stairway with its white and gold pillars to the front door.

  Here he ordered one of the drotskis that were always at the disposal of the Czar’s guests and, having given instructions to be taken to the Ysevolsov Palace, set off in the sunshine.

  Even for August it was very hot and there was just a little breeze coming from the river although there was a touch of salt in the air.

  The enormously wide roads laid out by Peter the Great had practically no traffic on them at this time of the day when most people preferred to remain at home, and anyway, owing to the ominous news, there was less entertaining than usual.

  As he drove along, the Duke enjoyed looking at the magnificent Palaces and buildings so different in their brilliant colours to the grey Palladians of England.

  The Roumainzov Palace was painted orange, the Ministry of Justice blue, the enormous Pavlovski Barracks designed for Czar Paul was yellow.

  The Duke was most interested in the Manège de la Garde à Cheval. It was painted green and had a portico of eight Doric columns of white granite.

  With his great knowledge of horseflesh, the Duke had already admired the black horses of the Gardes à Cheval, the chestnuts of the Chevaliers Gardes and the dapple greys of the Gatchina Hussars.

  The drotski drawn by two excellent horses reached the Ysevolsov Palace within five minutes.

  The Duke entered the hallway, which if not as magnificent as that in The Winter Palace, could certainly stand comparison with any house he had visited elsewhere in the world.

  A footman took him up the grand marble staircase, which divided and rose to a landing ornamented with exquisite specimens of Chinese porcelain.