Imperial Splendour

Chapter One ~ 1812-2

He was certain that the efficiency of the Russian Secret Service had noted that he was most fastidious where women were concerned, that he was the most sought-after bachelor in England and that, if they had recorded his many love affairs, they would doubtless by this time have filled many files in the Diplomatic archives.

At the same time he found Katharine’s expertise and her sophisticated art in love-making a very pleasant part of his visit.

The Duke was, however, quite ruthless where his own interests were concerned.

If he had been approached by a woman who did not attract him or by one who offended his very fastidious taste when making love, he would have had no compunction about locking his door or, if that had proved ineffective, of turning her out of his bed.

But Katharina had appealed to him sensually and her body was, as many other men had found, irresistible.

The Duke had thought, as the passion they felt for each other burst into flame in the huge carved and gilded bed in a room decorated in the French manner and filled with priceless pictures that Catherine the Great’s agents had bought in France, that she was the complement to everything that proclaimed culture.

When she had captured Count Metternich’s heart, she had been very young and perhaps he had been her first lover after her marriage.

But now, the Duke thought, she had blossomed into a woman polished like a flawless gem into a brilliance that aroused the endless admiration of the mind as well as the desires of the body.

The Duke enjoyed the duels that they exchanged with words, both witty and provocative, even while she used every feminine wile to enslave him physically.

Now, as he looked at her with his grey eyes, she leaned back against the pillows and with her long-fingered little hands pulled the sheet over her nakedness until it was just beneath her chin.

There was something young and modest in the movement and yet at the same time it was a deliberately seductive action thought out and perhaps practised like the ritual steps of a ballerina. And the Duke appreciated the very artistry of it.

“What do you think about, Katharina,” he asked, “when you are not ‘working’?”

For a moment she looked at him doubtfully and then made no pretence not to understand the innuendo that lay behind his words.

“Now I am thinking of you,” she said softly, “and there is no reason to think of myself.”

It was an answer, he reflected that revealed the very subtlety of her mind.

Who else would she think about when she was not acting on the Czar’s instructions, but about herself, her fiery, passionate Russian nature making it an absorbing subject?

The Duke glanced towards the elaborate gold and diamond encrusted clock that stood on the marble mantelpiece.

It was one of hundreds of beautiful clocks that decorated the glorious apartments of The Winter Palace, which on three floors extended for half a mile and had been part of Peter the Great’s supreme collection.

“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 c*****e 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 light 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,