Rebel Princess Read Free

handsome woman.
    Since there could be no question of refusing the Empress’s request, he salved his uneasy conscience with the promise he had just extracted from her and tried to dismiss the affair from his mind. After all, he considered, the courier that had arrived last night, almost on the heels of the Russian emissary, bore a message from their King, Frederick the Great, endorsing Elizabeth’s invitation and even sending for Johanna to attend an audience with him before she left for Russia.
    Christian was not a clever man, nor was he a coward, but he knew enough of the age he lived in to realize that, in sending for Johanna, something of further significance besides the marriage of Augusta was in the mind of his wily sovereign.
    â€œIt is time that you dressed, Augusta,” Christian observed awkwardly, somehow unwilling to look at his child. “You had best return to your own room.”
    Augusta slipped to the floor, bobbed a quick curtsy and ran to her apartment, while her father opened his Bible and continued reading.
    Once in her bedroom, she shut the door and climbed back into her own chilled bed, shivering with cold and excitement. The thought came to her that if the cold of Zerbst nipped her so cruelly, what of that land of furious ice and blanketing snow that was to be her home for the future?
    Russia. She said the word aloud and then laughed in sheer delight. The morning before she had greeted the world as plain Princess Augusta Fredericka, daughter of a poor and unimportant prince, whose future appeared as bleak and uneventful as the flat marshes and barren lands of her native Prussia. Tolerated by her father, despised and bullied by her mother, without wealth or family connections, there had seemed but small chance that she would ever change her lot even by marriage, for who, as Johanna had inquired acidly in her hearing, would want to marry her?
    Yet she was mature for her years, tall and high breasted, her complexion radiant with health; there was grace in her carriage; humor, intelligence and animation in her conversation as she never failed to prove when out of ear-shot of her maternal critic. For these, perhaps, some German princeling might eventually have married her, and until now the prospect had always represented conflict in her mind.
    Marriage should be a source of pleasure, an experience of those romantic and sensual transports that had been described to her in books and through the less cultured medium of the kitchenmaids at Stettin; the marital relationship was no secret to Augusta, for it was not a squeamish age.
    But her innermost heart demanded that it should offer something else. All her life, she had cherished one strong, secret ambition; her childish mind had brooded over it, peopling her drab world with riches and fantasy, and her adolescence had strengthened the half-formed desire. She wanted to be a queen. She, the humblest princess in Germany without a dowry large enough to warrant marriage, longed and dreamed of power and the possession of a crown.
    Now, as if by some miracle, Fate had provided her with the most eligible prince in Europe as a husband, a youth destined to wear an emperor’s crown, and what was more, to share it with her.… She was not to know that in the eyes of the Russian Empress her very obscurity was her greatest asset. A princess of importance might prove difficult to tame, but not this little nobody, Augusta.
    Suddenly she sprang out of bed, tearing off her night-gown, aware that the hour was late and that she had lain daydreaming and wasting time.
    Augusta splashed her face and hands with water in which thin wafers of ice floated like transparent fish, and dressed hurriedly. Standing before the small, spotted mirror, she brushed her black hair and pinned the shining mass on her head, pausing to regard her own reflection, a new, disturbing question in her mind.
    Supposing that she was not to this Grand Duke Peter’s taste?
    The image in