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I saw her hand rise, I felt the stinging pain of her slap across my cheek.
    “You are a nobody, girl. This is who you are. A
nobody
. And a nobody is who you’ll always be.”
    I didn’t wait for another slap. I hurried back to my place and picked up the dress I was working on. My cheek stung, and I pricked my finger, drawing a bead of blood.
    Behind me I heard other seamstresses mutter about how the Empress didn’t care much about either books or writing. And even if she cared, didn’t she have more important people than a Polish stray to assist her?
    I could feel my heart harden. I knew myself smarter than Madame Kluge, smarter than the maids who were now laughing at me. I imagined the Empress coming in and seeing me bent over her gown. As beautiful as I remembered her from that first day I’d seen her, smelling of orange blossom, a feather in her powdered hair.
    “What are you doing here, Varvara Nikolayevna?” she would ask. “Why has no one brought you to me? What fool gave you this sewing to do?”
    I imagined Madame Kluge’s unease, her lips stammering apologies and pleas for forgiveness. “She is my ward,” the Empress would dismiss it all in anger, “and I shall take care of her, just as I promised her father.”
    Madame Kluge, the color drained from her face, her eyes cast low, would bend her head. And then her turtle’s face would flush with fear, as the Empress ordered her out of her sight.
    My own fate would be assured. I would wear silk dresses with wide sleeves that made my hands look slender. I would sleep in the alcove by the Imperial Bedroom. No one, ever, would pass me by without seeing me.
    Weeks went by, and in the Imperial Wardrobe I found myself more and more awkward and slow. The blisters on my fingers never got a chance to heal; my shoulders ached from constant bending. Other seamstresses were praised for their stitches, while my efforts were never noticed. Each time Madame Kluge saw me, she gave me a haughty look of scorn.
    The daily bowl of kasha with a thin sauce kept the worst of hunger away, I had a roof over my head, and yet none of it mattered. I was an orphan at the mercy of strangers who kept me away from the Empress. If I was able to talk to her, remind her who I was and what she had promised my father, my luck would surely change.
    One raw April day, emboldened by despair, I wrote a note to the Empress and pinned it inside the shawl wrapped over the big pandora’s dress. I reminded Her Imperial Highness of the prayer book my father had restored for her and of her promise to assure my future. I wrote,
I lie awake, day and night, thinking of the day Your Majesty touched my face
.
    Madame Kluge brought the note back with a triumphant smirk. She made me read my own words aloud to the titters of other seamstresses. The bit about my father, especially.
An artisan of true grace and imagination
, I had written,
a man who had always believed in the greatness of the Russian heart
.
    “We like big, fancy words, don’t we?” she said and sneered, before tearing my note to pieces.
    I didn’t answer.
    “A stray will always be a stray,” she hissed. If I persisted in my underhanded ways, she predicted a future collecting horses’ dung in the street. “Which your illustrious father would be doing now, had he not hurried out of this world.”
    I did not know how to hide the hatred in my eyes.
    Madame Kluge took out her horse whip and lashed it across my shins. I felt a searing flash of pain, then another. I watched the skin of my legs turn white first, then red.
    I clenched my teeth and vowed never again to cry.
    A month later I was still waking up long before dawn. I would slip out of the chilly room where the sewing maids slept, and wander through the corridors like one of the palace cats. The Empress, I had heard, didn’t sleep much at night. Perhaps, if I kept walking through the palace corridors, I would run into her or the Grand Duke. I heard of the liking he had taken to a