Ghost Ship Orlova

The Orlov Diamond (Part 3)

Count Grigory Orlov bowed to Empress Catherine of Russia, doffing his hat and going to a knee. He counted away the seconds to measure how deep his disfavor had become.

"How kind of you to visit, your Excellency," Catherine said, her voice somehow free of irony.

"How kind of her Royal Highness to grant this humble servant a moment of her precious time," he replied, his voice a syrup of sarcasm. He raised his gaze to calculate just how far he might goad her, the Empress's avarice exceeded only by her appetites.

On either side of her throne knelt her current errand boys, one of them the Count's erstwhile rival, Grigory Potemkin.

Orlov scorched the man with a scowl before returning his gaze to his beloved Catherine. Whatever her appetites, Orlov knew only he was man enough to sate her.

"What have you been about, my wayward Count?" Catherine twittered, as though at her own impromptu rhyme.

He rose and settled back on his haunches. For such an audience, only the Empress might be seated. "In search of that which might secure to me the lost affections of my beloved."

Catherine had chosen to receive him in one of the lesser audience chambers off the Grand Hall, where she was known to host elaborate and lascivious Imperial Balls. Old world tapestries hung from walls of parquet mahogany. Multiple crown moldings rimmed a frescoed ceiling. Taking up every inch of the ceiling was a depiction of Peter the Great storming the planets of the nearby Hottoman Empire. Called the Great Room, the scene of many an intimate liaison between them, they'd unofficially dubbed it the "Peter" room. On this occasion, guards lined the walls on both sides, their gazes straight ahead and stoic, their presence signaling he'd get not a moment of intimacy with his beloved.

As did the presense of the playthings on either side of her throne. "Griggy, Borya, we will talk later," Catherine said, not taking her eyes off Orlov.

Potemkin immediately bowed his head in her direction. "Your Highness, I cannot. What would the people say of your virtues if you were to be alone with this man?"

"Nothing more than they're already saying, I'm sure. Go on, before I throw a tantrum at you." Catherine's gaze did not leave Orlov.

He felt the burn of her desire, and his gaze remained locked with hers as the other two men retreated from the room.

"Grisha, you fool, barging in like this. I was observing the perfect tête-à-tête between my paramours when I received news of your arrival."

For a moment, he was bewildered. "Observing? Unlike you, my darling, to sit nearby and observe."

"Oh, I was right in between them while they went head-to-head." She sighed and fanned herself. "It was glorious."

He didn't know whether she was being ingenuous or goading him.

"Right over there," she said, indicating a divan near the door.

He saw it was out of place.

"We were thinking of renaming the room 'Potemkin's Chamber.' What do you think?"

Goading him, he decided, rejecting the first riposte that came to mind. No sense in telling her to rename her back passage in his honor. "Several villages are better deserving of his name, I think. Call the room whatever you desire, my love, as long as you dedicate your heart to me."

"What?" Catherine tittered and looked at him from behind her fluttering fan. "Why in heaven would I do that?"

With a flourish, Orlov produced the Amsterdam Diamond, the erstwhile Eye of Vishnu. "May I present to Her Royal Highness the largest diamond in the galaxy?"

The fan froze, her stare fixed upon the stone.

He had her. Count Grigory Orlov knew in that moment he could have asked anything of her. Further, whatever he asked, she would grant.

It was the moment he'd waited for. The moment he'd anticipated when he'd first set out four years ago for Tamil Nadu in search of the largest known diamond in the galaxy. The moment he'd imagined during long nights of planning, during his long convalescent after Sarfas had purloined the diamond from him, during his long vigil outside the brokerage run by Sarfas on New Amsterdam.

The moment when he might capture her heart forever.

She stared at the diamond, as though mesmerized.

And something changed for Count Grigory Orlov.

He saw beyond the façade of Empress Catherine Romanov. Publicly regarded as a great humanitarian and a benevolent despot, Catherine had brought the Russian Empire a significant degree of legitimacy among its Milky Way neighbors, foundress of institutions of great learning in dogged pursuit of imperial ambitions far beyond her beggardly beginnings as a princess in name only with few holdings and little money.

What Orlov saw wasn't the esteemed Russian Oligarch who'd first married an emperor and then had usurped that emperor's power, but an avaricious virago whose only goal was to aggrandize herself.

He saw all this too late and now had no other choice. Simply by showing the diamond to her, Orlov was committed to giving it to her.

The glimmer in her eye told him he might ask anything of her.

And Orlov found she had nothing he might want.

"Grisha, you amaze me," Catherine breathed lustily, her gaze never leaving the diamond. "Where did you get it?"

"A merchant in New Amsterdam. Didn't know what he had, apparently. I researched its past, came from a statue of Visnu on the planet Tiruchirapalli in the Tamil Nadu Constellation. The Eye of Vishnu, they called it." He deliberately downplayed his role in its theft. Knowing now that what he'd sought was a chimera, there wasn't any point in regaling her with the tale of how he'd acquired it.

"Well, I shall name it in your honor, and it will reside in the most august place in the crown jewels—atop the Imperial Scepter!"

And years later, as Count Grigory Orlov watched events at the palace from afar, he noted that Empress Catherine the Great kept the Imperial Scepter at her side nearly all the time, wielding it like a magic wand to command the loyalty of her generals and to negotiate treaties with the other major powers.

He always wondered what might have happened if he'd demanded the return of her affections for the inordinately-sized diamond obtained through inordinate effort, and then given to Empress Catherine for nothing more than a kind word.

Living out his life on Petrograd in the Pleiades Constellation in the Marble Palace, a gift to him from Empress Catherine the Great, Count Grigory Orlov never did regain the affections of his beloved. Only on his deathbed did it ever occur to him that he may never have had those affections at all, that perhaps her only purpose in granting him any attention was to overthrow her husband and usurp the crown from the Emperor Peter III.

She wouldn't do that, would she? he wondered as he expelled his dying breath.