The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak Read Free Book Online Page B

and so fast that I was terrified he would die. What would I tell his servants when they found me in his dead arms? Would the footman have to break them to free me?
    His fingers closed harder on my wrists. Something in me closed and folded.
    He guided my fingers to the scar on his chest. Three white lines just above his heart, and the fourth, the deepest of them, where my whole finger could hide.
    He guided my hand inside his breeches, closed my fingers on his member. My hand was all wet and sticky. Then he put his hand between my legs, and I felt something soft and sinking give in, like soot falling down the chimney.
    When it was over, he asked, “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
    “No,” I said. “You did not hurt me.”
    I believed it then.
    “Nothing happened. I didn’t take anything from you, Varvara. You are still a virgin.”
    He slurred his words.
    I watched his head loll on the ottoman, his red-rimmed eyes heavy with sleep.
    I stood up, wobbly on my legs. My mother’s dress was wet with his seed. My shoes were lying under his desk. I bent to pick them up but did not put them on. As I walked to the door in my bare feet, I could hear the Chancellor snore. I turned toward him. My eyes avoided the opening in his breeches. In candlelight, the bald patch on his skull shone like a polished shield.
    Outside the Chancellor’s room I could no longer hold off the sickness of my stomach. I vomited into a giant vase that stood in the corridor, but my head was still spinning from vodka, and the sour taste in my mouth did not go away.
    By the time I got back to the room where I slept, the vodka rush had worn off. My hands were sticky, and my fingers smelled of vomit. The jug in the room was empty, so I peed into a chamber pot and washed my hands as best I could in my warm piddle. Then I took off my mother’s soiled dress and tied it into a bundle. When no one was watching, I would scrub it clean.
    I fell into a shallow sleep, and when I awoke that night I saw the moon, its face veiled with luminous mist.
    I do not remember my dreams. In the morning, when the chambermaid filled the water jug, I hurried to it, pushing the other girls on my way. I tried not to think of the Chancellor’s hands on my breasts, of my mother’s dress, crumpled and soiled.
    Nothing happened. You are still a virgin
.
    I dipped my hands in the water and washed them with soap. Then I washed them again. Through the palace window I saw the Neva, the edges of the gray waves sparkling in the morning sun.
    “Spying, Varvara,” the spymaster of the Russian court would tell me later, “is the art of using people who do not believe in loyalty, whose appetites are enormous and unpredictable, and whose motives are always suspect. Anyone working for us can be bought by a higher bidder. The best spies are not those who work for money or out of fear. The best spies are those whose deepest desires are fulfilled by their master.”
    There were so many lessons. There were so many such nights. Nights soaked with promises, rewarded with praise. I was smart. Clever. Pretty. I was nimble and quick. I knew when to keep silent, and when to speak up. I listened and remembered all I had heard.
    I was no longer a seamstress, a nameless palace girl, a stray without a soul in the world who cared if I lived or died.
    My future was bright, the moment of my triumph near.
    In the corridors of the Winter Palace, on my way from the Chancellor’s chambers to the Imperial Wardrobe, I warmed myself with such thoughts.
    The summer was long gone, the court had settled back in the Winter Palace, but I still had lessons to learn. Nothing was quite what it seemed. Those who wouldn’t deign to look at me in the hallways had secrets dirtier than mine.
    If I had any doubts that there were other, faster ways to the Empress’s good graces, the Chancellor dispelled them: “The Empress is fond of weddings,” he would say. “If she doesn’t find you irreplaceable, she will marry you off to