In Petersburg the new rules were tested at sea. In Moscow they were finding out whether a chancery could admit its own mistake.
Off Gangut, the Russian galley fleet encountered waters where a large ship had power but no room to turn. Peter was close enough to see the masts and far enough away that his hand could not move every vessel.
The galley commander received two reports on the wind and depth. Under the old system he would have had to wait for confirmation of the overall plan. Under the new one he had the right to change the manoeuvre, provided he kept to the objective and left a record of his decision.
He took some of the galleys into shallow water, split the line and forced the heavier enemy to respond in cramped waters. Three vessels repeated the signal. A fourth could not see the flag through the smoke, but received the order through a chain of small boats.
Peter learnt the final shape of the manoeuvre when he could no longer change it.
This time the commander did not need to be pardoned for acting on his own authority. He had exercised a right created after Narva and tested at Poltava. The Russian fleet won without waiting for every decision to come from the tsar.
At the public review, the commander presented the soundings, the two reports and the time of the signal. The naval officers confirmed that they had carried out a single objective through different individual actions. Peter was then presented with the insignia of a vice-admiral. He received his rank for a fleet that had won without waiting for his personal command aboard every vessel.
While Petersburg celebrated the victory at sea, a woman in Moscow spent three days sitting by the window of a chancery chamber. She wanted to lodge a complaint against the civil chancery created to hear complaints against other departments. The scribe explained that there was nowhere to complain about that chancery itself: its own chief would decide when to investigate his own error.
Alexei heard this and ordered the petition against his own department to be registered.
The woman claimed that the announced payment for grain purchased from her had never arrived because the local collector had invoked a new deadline. No deadline had been changed in Luka's book. The investigation found the man who had invented the new deadline and sheltered behind Moscow procedure, just as contractors had once sheltered behind Ivan Naryshkin's name.
The scribe was removed from her case. The complaint was heard by a man from another chamber, while a second copy remained with the petitioner. A month later, the school for chancery apprentices followed the same procedure for a complaint against one of its own instructors.
A complaint against the civil chancery was now heard by someone who did not answer to the same chief.
The same procedure was introduced in the hospitals. After Poltava, the wounded had been allocated under temporary rules upheld by a handful of experienced physicians. Now the same lists of supplies, priority according to the severity of the wound and the right of a junior assistant to report a shortage were adopted in Petersburg, Moscow and a field hospital. In one hospital the senior physician tried to reserve the clean linen for officers. His assistant produced the rule and kept the supply for men who held no rank.
He gave the first strip of linen to a soldier with an open wound, the second to an officer who could wait. The senior physician demanded his name so that he could be punished. The assistant entered his own name and added the quantity of cloth remaining. A week later, an inspector from another chamber confirmed the order of priority and refused to let the register be rewritten after the event.
When the same procedure was adopted in a third hospital, the senior physician handed his assistant the key to the cupboard holding the clean linen. It was less than a rank and more than praise: the junior assistant could now enforce the rule without waiting for his superior's permission.
The fair distribution of linen no longer depended on the kindness of a single senior physician.
But neither the victory at Gangut, nor the Moscow hearing of the complaint, nor the new hospital procedure reconciled the two capitals. Petersburg believed that Moscow caution always arrived too late for war. Moscow saw a city that took stone, timber, craftsmen and money without naming a date for their return.
Alexei compiled a public report. On one side stood ships, quays, hospitals and new roads. On the other were halted local works, displaced families, delayed payments and lands that had already been levied twice. He did not propose closing Petersburg. He proposed counting its full cost alongside its achievements.
Meanwhile Catherine received word of a man claiming to be her kinsman. He remembered the family name, the road through Livonia and a detail from her childhood that appeared in no chancery book. He had no documents left. Under the general procedure, he was to be removed from Menshikov's household until his claim had been verified, and his post given to a man with a confirmed term of service.
She met him at the service gates. The man asked for no money and did not call her sovereign. He hummed four lines of a song sung at home, then faltered on the fifth at the very place where the girl Marta had once lost her way. Catherine could not prove kinship with that memory. But she could believe it.
All her life, other people had decided which household she would be handed into. Now the general procedure was about to put outside the gates a man she had sought for many years. The warm stone in her hand grew cold while the scribe explained how long the verification would take.
Catherine feared that her kinsman would disappear again between two entries in a book. She asked Peter to preserve his post by word of mouth, for only a few weeks.
"Luka can enter it all afterwards," she said.
Peter remembered how she had demanded a second copy of the marriage articles. But a family request seemed narrower and safer than a matter of state.
He agreed.
Menshikov received two words: "Catherine's man." They proved enough to protect more than a single post. The stewards exempted several workers, a supplier and an intermediary from inspection, each of them invoking a family commission. A narrow exception quickly became cover for people Catherine had never seen.
Luka noticed the omissions, but could not establish who had first authorised the exception. Neither Peter nor Catherine had signed anything.
That same day Alexei presented his report on the two capitals. Peter read the list of halted works and asked why his son was giving the enemy a measure of Russia's exhaustion.
"So that the next revolt does not discover it before we do."
"You turn every victory into an accusation."
"I restore its second column."
Peter heard in those words not the lesson of the Pruth but his son's desire to teach him how to govern the country. He forbade publication of the full report and permitted only the ships, quays, hospitals and roads that had been built to be announced. He ordered the information about displaced families and double levies removed.
Several influential men found Alexei after the council. They spoke calmly, did not demand the abolition of the fleet and called themselves defenders of the lawful heir. They proposed preserving copies of the banned report and continuing the Moscow rules until it was once again possible to speak of them openly.
Among them were men who genuinely wanted to curb personal exceptions. Beside them stood men who wanted to restore the old hereditary posts, close the schools and call the sea the whim of a single tsar.
They all promised Alexei protection.
He did not yet understand exactly who intended to hide behind his name.
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