On the red staircase

by Mary Imlay Taylor

I started, knowing that this was contrary to every usage of the Russian court, and that the Byzantine custom compelled the imperial princesses to remain behind a canopy. Miloslavsky saw my surprise.

“It is an innovation,” he said; “but Sophia Alexeievna is overcome with grief for her brother; and, after all, why should not a sister stand beside her brother’s corpse?”

He seemed to challenge me to express an opinion.

“I am surprised only because I know that your customs are so arbitrary,” I replied, smoothly. “In France, it would seem most natural for the czarevna to follow her brother’s body to the grave.”

“Yet it has been the cause of much dispute,” said Miloslavsky, bitterly, “and the Czarina Natalia is opposed to it. Naturally enough she does not grieve much that the elder brother has passed away from her son’s path to the throne,” he added in an undertone.

I was discreetly silent. We had passed through the anterooms out on to the Red Staircase, and stood looking down upon the crowd. It reminded me of the election of Peter, only that this was a silent throng, impressed, no doubt, by the presence of death. The procession was forming, and everywhere the black garb of mourning seemed to swallow up the light. The Russian dress of that day was a strange contrast to the French. The men wore robes and sleeves as long as those of the women, and a man’s high cap was not unlike a woman’s head-gear. It was seventeen years afterwards that Peter the Great inaugurated a change of fashion by cutting off the sleeves of the boyars, with his own hands, at a supper given by the Boyar Sheremétief. Verily, I have lived to see great changes in Russia since that day, when I stood looking down upon the Red Place, thronged with black-robed figures, and upon the bier of the Czar Feodor. It was the darkest hour in that period of history, and just before the dawn of a new reign; the star of the house of Romanof was in the ascendant, but its light was not yet diffused.

It was a dull day; the sky was heavy, and the Kremlin wore its most gloomy aspect; even the red pavement of the square was almost obscured by the mass of people, and the voices of the multitude were hushed as the deep notes of the great cathedral bells tolled solemnly, on every hand, the mournful dirge of Russia’s mightiest, laid in the dust to share at last the common fate of his humblest subject,—for how great a leveller is Death!

Miloslavsky and I were parted when we took our places in the dreary procession, and the slow march to the cathedral was begun. Every eye was turned on the Czarevna Sophia Alexeievna, who walked beside the bier of the late czar. I saw that the Miloslavskys were playing for high stakes, for the unusual presence of one of the princesses and her manifest grief were producing a strange effect upon the vast crowd surging about the cortége. It seemed a long time before we stood at last within the great cathedral, which was draped in black until it looked like a huge sarcophagus, and the multitude, swayed by a new and deep emotion, packed the immense edifice and filled the square without. It was a scene of strange solemnity. Before the altar stood the bier, covered with the imperial pall, and the tall tapers around it made a blaze of light almost dazzling in its contrast to the gloom of the rest of the great interior, except here and there, where a ray of light was caught and reflected from the gold upon the pillars. By the dead czar stood the patriarch and the archbishops in their rich robes, chanting the service, while the multitude knelt in the silence beyond. Every word that the priests chanted sounded clearly in that intense quiet, and the awful solemnity of death brooded over us. A dead man, but for that hour, czar of all the Russias still! It seemed to my imagination that some secret emotion possessed the kneeling crowd, that every breath was drawn with some new resolution, that even the atmosphere was surcharged with foreboding. The blaze of gold and silver upon the high altar flashed in the light of a hundred tapers, and every line in the patriarch’s face was magnified in that clear blaze; but beyond the circle of the tapers, not even the daylight seemed to penetrate to where we knelt in the shadow, and the low chant of the clergy rose and fell and sobbed in its monotonous refrain.

Suddenly, in the midst of that solemn ceremony, we heard a woman’s voice raised in lamentation. I think that every man in that great multitude caught his breath to listen, and every eye was fixed on that circle of flame about the pall, as the Czarevna Sophia rose and stretched out her hands in passionate supplication to Heaven. Her words were incoherent, but we heard her voice, and we saw her as she flung herself down beside the bier, clutching it in an agony of grief.

Was she acting? I asked myself the question even while I felt a scorn of myself for being contemptuous in my judgment of a stricken woman; for truly, in losing her elder brother, she had lost her chief stay and hope. Yet I knew the great Sophia too well to be wholly sure that her emotion was entirely without thought of its effect upon the people; I knew her to be an astute politician and an adroit manager. Yet it was a pathetic scene,—the strong woman’s abandon in her grief and despair. The effect upon the multitude was at once apparent; there was a murmur through the crowd, low but deep. And it was then that the Czarina Natalia took that step which caused so much unfavorable comment. Taking the little Czar Peter by the hand, she left the cathedral, and in a few moments, by some mysterious agency, the news spread through the crowd; and in that hour the czarina lost more prestige than she was likely to regain for many a long day. The sharp contrast between the agony of Sophia’s grief, and the absence of reverence for the dead in the czarina’s conduct was too strikingly presented to the people. The excuse that Natalia pleaded, that the child Peter was weary with the long service, was insufficient, for the Miloslavskys were only too eager to fan the flame of popular resentment against the young czar’s mother.