Peter the Great: A Private Life

1724, Saint Petersburg

The frost has sealed the windows at the edges, and even with the fires worked hard the room keeps the smell of river damp, wax, singed linen, and those bitter medicines they set too near the bed as if proximity could make them useful. My papers lie within reach, though reach has become a negotiable thing. Some mornings the hand obeys, some mornings it shakes first, or the strength goes out of me so suddenly that a clerk must pretend not to have noticed. That pretence is more insulting than open alarm. Saint Petersburg stands because I forced it to stand, yet I can feel men already separating the city from the labour that made it, as though stone, ships, law, and discipline might have arranged themselves if left long enough to Providence. They wait for me to tire, to wander, to soften. I do neither reliably, which unsettles them. But weakness comes in flashes now, and a flash is enough for those who want a future cleaned of the hand that built it.