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masculine pleasures.
“It is a long series of rooms,” Alina said, then added, “with halls which lead on one side to an
exit through the stables, and on the other side to a dock. They have their own bathhouse there and a
steamroom and sauna. Where the gentlemen sweat out their poisons and beat each other with rushes.”
“Two exits, do you say?” Cynthia inquired, her ears perking up at the most relevant part of the
description. This was scarcely good news for the wives. “So the men can travel unseen by either
boat or horse to visit their mistresses, I presume? Or are the pleasure women brought into the palace
instead?”
Alina laughed, blowing out a great puff of smoke.
“The pleasure women,” she said. “I’ve never heard them called anything quite like that. If
they’re the pleasure women, I wonder what that means for the rest of us.”
Cynthia waited for more, but it was not forthcoming.
There was a great deal of speculation within the palace as to why after four years of marriage,
Ella and Serge had yet to produce an heir. She was of the perfect age and constitution. He was older,
past forty but still a fit figure of a man, capable of riding and shooting with the best of them, or so it
was said. Therefore, wagged the tongues, where was the baby?
If there was to be one, the servants would have known before the royals. The maids were
aware of which bedsheets had dried smears on them in the mornings and which did not, and they
certainly knew which ladies produced monthly pads for disposal and which did not, and thus could
generally predict the impending arrival of heirs long before their fathers were privy to the happy
news. In fact, there was protocol around even this aspect of imperial life. The cloth pads were
placed in a special container once they were bloodied, then carried away not to be washed and
returned but burned, since palace etiquette dictated they were never to be used again. The other
discarded items from the Romanov women – the dresses and gloves and shoes and even their lingerie
- were passed on to their personal maids, but not these. The Russians were too superstitious about
blood, especially aristocratic blood, no matter how it had been rendered. The pads collected from
the elite apartments were merely burned, but those from the chambers occupied by the family were
furthermore burned by a priest, in a ceremony not unlike that of a funeral, a ritual of mourning for a
child who was not to be. Cynthia was too accustomed to Anglican logic to accept the folkloric roots
of Russian Orthodoxy or to understand how these people who looked so elegant on the surface could
indulge in such primitive rites without batting an eye. She could only speculate on the thoughts of the