Torment Becomes Them by Warwick Gleeson

AS SHE KNELT AT THE CATHEDRAL ALTAR in the year 1762 for her royal coronation as Czarina of All the Russias, Catherine Romanova felt like starting a new war. She’d already endured two hours of a five-hour ceremony while wearing twenty pounds of silk and nine pounds of Imperial Crown; and to increase the burden even further, the droning excess of pomp and boredom had drained her of patience, not to mention goodness.

Wishing to distract herself from the seemingly endless prattle of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch as he recited Old Testament scripture, as well as the oven of suffocating heat created by a hoop dress big enough to hide twenty dwarves, Catherine lifted the curtain on theater. She replayed to herself Earth’s most important war to date—the ultimate conflict to define the fate of human nature itself. Her old violin-playing mentor, Niccolo Paganini, had dubbed it “The Utopia War.”

While the aged Patriarch stumbled over a droll reading of Malachi, her musing inevitably took her back to the time just before the war, to another world at age fifteen when she lived in the Castle Bärenthoren and had been known to all of Europe as the famous and unruly Princess Fredericke von Anhalt (aka “Freddie”)—the name born by her proudly until her terribly boring coronation now underway.

Dear God, help me survive this day. My destiny is Catherine, but my soul is Fredericke.

Even though her every breath and eye blink was being carefully watched and measured by the gaseous Moscow nobles who filled the pews of Assumption Cathedral, her first memory began with a sound. A barely audible titter, like distant footsteps on decayed leaves. She’d considered the scraping sound of a mouse to be the origin, or some other invading creature, for every now and then a cat bird or a dove flew into the study and fell to the floor, finally tiring itself out with fearful flutters.

So truly, it could have been any number of things.

Nonetheless, Freddie vowed to ignore the disturbance and return to her prior task: recreating the Greek mathematics of Eratosthenes to determine Earth’s circumference while imagining herself the gallant Sir Francis Drake sailing the Azores in search of Spanish gold.

Putting quill to paper, she sketched the hull of Drake’s ship, The Golden Hind, before jotting down a few notes on the logic of Eratosthenes, and just as she measured the miles between the two cities in his equation, Syene and Alexandria, the strange tittering repeated. But louder this time. Enough to make her hand slip, the point of quill jaggedly defacing her work.

What in Beelzebub’s name? she asked herself.

The disturbance had become too curious to allow any further progress on the circumference of Earth, and though Freddie hated breaking personal vows, she rose from her writing desk, determined to learn the truth.