The Winter Palace Read Online Free

mid-breath, clipped with pain.
    I remember the faint squeak of doors leading to the room where rows of bottles filled with herbal infusions stood on a shelf, each labeled in my mother’s neat handwriting. I remember the sharp scent of mint on the glass stopper I held as Mama measured out thirty drops that sank into a lump of sugar, staining it green. She let the sugar dissolve in her mouth before swallowing it and then, still trying to smile, she adjusted the golden chain with a Virgin pendant on my neck. As she led me to the parlor, I thought of how soft and warm her hand was, with tapered fingers, just like mine.
    In the parlor Mama said that she needed to lie down, for just a short while. I shouldn’t bother Papa, for he had important work to do. Without him, the apprentice would surely damage the bindings.
    “I’ll feel better before the cannon is fired at Petropavlovsky Fortress at noon,” she whispered. “I promise.”
    “Can I lie beside you?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she said, and made room for me on the ottoman. I must have looked frightened, for she stroked my cheek and made me swear I would not worry. I was fifteen years old and didn’t know of promises that cannot be kept, of shivers that would not go away.
    By the evening she was dead.
    In the days after my mother died I tottered through hushed rooms, frightened and lost. Silence rang in them, but I was consumed by a belief that I could still catch her if I hurried. Sometimes I could feel her presence, her silky kiss, the gentle squeeze of her hand. “I have something to tell you, Basieńka,” her soft voice promised. “Something important. Something you need to know.”
    I didn’t turn in the direction of the whisper. I didn’t want to see that she was not there.
    It was in the long empty days after Mama’s death that I learned to listen.
    “Take them,” I heard a servant urge another, pointing at my mother’s knit silk stockings embroidered with roses. “Master won’t know!”
    Balls of dust gathered in the corners while the maids gossiped in the alcove as if I was not there. In the street I saw a woman wearing my mother’s bonnet and her sash. Two of Mama’s silver jugs had also disappeared.
    People betray themselves so carelessly in front of children. Clues drop like fairy-tale bread crumbs that mark a path through the forest. Sometimes they whisper, but my hearing has always been superb. Sometimes they switch languages, but I have always been clever with words.
    “What does it matter?” Papa said, when I begged him to search the maid’s trunk. “It won’t bring your mother back, will it?”
    The maid who took the knit stockings sickened first. She complained of pains in her stomach, and her face flushed beet-red with fever. “Nothing good ever comes from working for foreigners,” her father muttered when he came with a hay cart to fetch her body. Before leaving, he spat on the ground and waved a fist at my father and me. Then the butcher’s apprentice, two houses away from us, woke up with his back covered in a red rash, as if the bathhouse demons had flayed his skin.
    It was all our fault, I would overhear in the days that followed. Poisonous, hushed voices stalked me in the kitchen, the alcove, our garden with its flimsy fence.
    We were foreigners. Roman Catholics, Poles. We didn’t eat carrion or beaver tails as other Latins had done, but we were up to no good. We had come to Russia with falseness in our hearts, wishing to convert Russians to our Latin faith.
    The maids recalled my mother’s sins. Hadn’t she said that there was nothing wrong in depicting the face of God the Father? Hadn’t she scolded me when—in my innocence—I crossed myself in the Orthodox way like them, with three fingers touching, from left to right? Was it a wonder that she was struck dead? “Just as she reached for bread,” I heard the maids gossip. “On the day of
our
fast.”
    I do not recall when I heard the word
cholera
first, but suddenly