Russka (52 page)

Might this latest purge in fact be a good time to approach him?

It was with this in mind that Daniel the monk went to the brother who had been keeping the chronicle, and set to work.

The document which they produced, and which, in the month of February, they persuaded the nervous abbot to sign, was a splendid concoction. It reminded the Tsar of the many privileges granted to the Church in the past, even under the Tatars. That some of these were Church forgeries Daniel himself did not know. It pointed out the loyalty of the monastery and the purity of its chronicles. And it begged for much-needed land. Written in the high ecclesiastical style it was long, bombastic, and somewhat ungrammatical.

If it succeeds, Daniel thought, my position in the monastery will be unassailable.

Before sending it, the abbot rather doubtfully showed it to Stephen who read it, smiled, and said nothing.

On the morning of March 22 1568, in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow, a terrifying event took place.

The Metropolitan Filip, while celebrating the Eucharist, suddenly turned and, in the presence of a large congregation of boyars and
Oprichniki
, publicly rebuked the Tsar for his murder of innocents in the latest purge.

Ivan, in a fury, struck his iron-tipped staff upon the rostrum, but Metropolitan Filip stood his ground.

‘They are martyrs,’ he announced.

It was an act of huge moral courage. The boyars trembled.

‘Soon,’ Ivan responded, ‘you will come to know me better.’

Within days, the Metropolitan took refuge in a monastery and Ivan began to execute members of the brave churchman’s staff.

And it was unfortunate for Daniel that it should have been on the very day following this event that a clerk brought to the Tsar the Russka monastery’s request for land.

Tsar Ivan’s response was immediate, and frightening; and when Daniel saw it, neither he, nor the terrified abbot, were sure what they should do.

St George’s Day had come.

Mikhail the peasant, his wife, his son Karp, Misha the bear, and the peasant’s two other children were ready.

The work of the year was done. The harvest was long in. Indeed, there had been little enough to do since, as if in punishment for the terrible deeds of its ruler, God had sent Russia that year a dismal crop.

Over the brown and grey landscape a chill wind was bringing with it light flurries of snowdust that were speckling the wet, now hardening ground. The stout wooden huts of Dirty Place smelled dank; bare trees, bare fields having shed their last covering, waited gauntly for the snow to submerge them. St George’s Day, harbinger of the bleak winter to come.

Mikhail and his family were ready to go. The exit money was all there in the peasant’s hand. Unlike many other peasants in the area, he had no debts, having discreetly cleared them the month
before. He had a good horse and journey money besides. He was a free man. Today, he could leave.

The peasants’ plan was ambitious, but quite simple. They would go across country, through the woods, to Murom. There they would stay until, probably in the spring, they could take a boat up the Oka to Nizhni Novgorod. From there they would find a boat that was travelling out to the east on the mighty Volga to the new lands where settlers lived free.

It would be hard. He was not sure how they would find money to survive the whole journey; but they could find a way. Misha the bear would help them by earning a few
kopeks
here and there.

Yet, though the family was all packed up and ready to leave, they had not departed. For a week now, they had sat in the little hut and waited. Each day, either Mikhail or Karp would go into Russka, and each day would glumly return.

It was Karp’s turn that day. He came sadly along the path.

‘Well?’

Karp shook his head.

‘Nothing. No sign.’ He suddenly kicked the door violently, but though it made him jump, Mikhail did not reprove him. ‘Cursed swindlers!’ the young man cried.

‘Perhaps another day,’ his mother said, without conviction.

‘Perhaps,’ Mikhail said.

But he knew it was hopeless. He had been cheated.

The rules of departure from Boris’s estate were simple. The peasant must be free of debt and, a week on either side of St George’s Day, he might inform his lord that he wished to leave and pay his exit fees. That was all.

But there was one small catch. The lord, or his steward, must be there to receive the request to depart, and the necessary moneys.

A few days before the allotted time, Boris and his wife had abruptly departed for Moscow, and the house in Russka had been shut up. Mikhail had at once gone into Russka to seek out the steward, and had returned pale with shock.

For the old fellow and his wife had mysteriously disappeared too.

They had never left the town before; no one knew they were going, nor where they might be. Their house was empty.

Even then he had scarcely been able to believe it. He had heard
stories of such trickery, to be sure, but here in Russka, beside a monastery, could such things be?

They could. As the days passed, there was no sign of the steward.

‘But don’t think they’ve all left the area,’ Karp said furiously. ‘That steward’s about somewhere, he’s hiding nearby. And if we try to leave without paying our dues, he’ll appear out of nowhere with half a dozen men. You see if he doesn’t. He’s waiting to follow us and arrest us as runaways. Then he and our cursed landlord will take more from us than ever. I’ll bet you we’re being watched right now.’

He was exactly correct. The only thing that neither Mikhail nor Karp guessed was that it was their cousin Daniel the monk who was behind it all.

For Daniel, the whole thing had been a simple matter.

After the Tsar’s terrifying message, it was clear that the monastery, and he in particular, would need friends wherever they could find them. The obvious first choice was the Tsar’s servitor Boris.

It had not taken the cunning monk long to discover that Mikhail was quietly paying off his debts. Early that morning he had sought out Boris himself and discreetly warned him that his best peasant was planning to leave. He had also reminded him of how he could prevent him.

Boris had been duly grateful.

‘I am always your lord’s friend,’ Daniel had said, and though Boris was not deceived by that, he nonetheless concluded that the heavily bearded monk might be useful to him.

‘Very well,’ he had remarked. ‘Keep me informed of anything else I should know.’

So St George’s Day passed. And the next day. And the next.

On the seventh day after, when he woke up a little after dawn, Mikhail was shocked, but not altogether surprised, to find that Karp and the horse had gone. On the table lay a little pile of money.

Three days later a man from a village five miles down the river arrived at the door with a message.

‘Karp passed through our village the other morning. He has gone. He said he left money for the horse. He’s sorry it wasn’t more.’

Mikhail nodded.

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Yes. Into the wild field.’

Mikhail sighed. It was what he had suspected. Perhaps it was where, after all, his son belonged.

The wild field: the open steppe: the land where, in recent decades, other wayward young fellows like Karp had gone to join those bands of half-brigands, half-warriors who had nowadays taken to calling themselves Cossacks.

Yes, he belonged in the wild field. They would never see him again.

‘He said please to look after the bear,’ the fellow concluded.

It was later that day that another, chilling piece of news reached Russka.

Tsar Ivan’s men had carried off the Metropolitan.

Elena kept her faith. She could still have a son.

It was Stephen who encouraged her. Though she had never spoken a word to him about Boris, the priest thought he could guess what their life must be like. He felt sorrier than ever for her, the more he knew her; yet he always advised her correctly as a priest. ‘It is not by seeking for personal happiness that we are rewarded by God,’ he reminded her. ‘It is by denying ourselves. The meek shall inherit the earth, as Our Lord told us. Therefore we must forgive; we must suffer; and above all, we must have faith.’

Elena had faith. She had faith that, after all, God would give her a son; she had faith that, one day, her husband would turn from his path. For a time, after her father’s disappearance, she had had faith that he, too, might be saved. But Boris, who had investigated the matter, informed her that he had been executed. He did not say how. It seemed to Elena that this event had shocked her husband.

Perhaps this, she hoped, would turn him back towards the paths of righteousness. So at least she prayed, though as yet in vain.

How to have a son? There was a remedy the village women used, that the priest’s wife had once told her about. It consisted of rubbing the body, and especially her intimate parts, with oil and honey.

‘They say it never fails,’ her friend had assured her.

And so now, while the man she truly loved gave her spiritual comfort, she prepared herself, as best she could, as a sacrifice for the husband whose darkening soul it was her duty to save.

The spring of 1569 brought cold weather and the promise of another poor harvest. From the Baltic came news that the enemy had snatched a fortress town. Everyone seemed depressed.

It was in early June that Daniel the monk had another talk with Boris.

By now the monk was worried. Things at Russka were looking bad. Not that he was entirely to blame. The events of recent years – the ever higher taxes for the northern war, the disruption of the
Oprichnina
and the land confiscations – had hurt the Russian economy. That, with the failed harvest, was causing a grim recession. The revenues from Russka were sharply down, and the old abbot seemed to be at a loss, complaining to him one day about the shortfall, yet the next suggesting: ‘Perhaps we are too harsh with our people in these difficult times.’

He had several times seen the old man looking appealingly at Stephen after these conversations. Something had to be done.

And then there had been the business with the Tsar the previous spring. That had not helped Daniel’s reputation either.

For instead of agreeing to or refusing their request for land, Ivan had sent a strange but insulting message. It was an oxhide: no more, no less. The messenger who brought it, a young black-shirt, obviously following the Tsar’s instructions to the letter, threw this object derisively at the old abbot’s feet, in front of all the monks, and cried out: ‘The Tsar says to you: “Lay this hide upon the ground and the land within it he will give you.”’

‘Is that all?’ the terrified abbot had asked.

‘No. The Tsar himself promises to visit you and give you the land you have chosen, and anything else you deserve.’

‘It is you, Daniel, who have brought this upon us,’ the abbot sadly remarked, after the messenger had gone. ‘As for this oxhide,’ he sighed, ‘I suppose we shall have to keep it.’

The hide had remained, ever since, in the abbot’s room – an uncomfortable reminder that Ivan would be coming to see them one day.

The first task for Daniel, therefore, was to put Stephen in his place. It was not difficult.

‘I think you should know,’ he told Boris, ‘that the priest spends more time at your house, now that his wife has died.’ And for good measure he added: ‘You once told me he was a heretic. I saw him taking something from that Englishman you brought here. The English are all Protestants, I hear, and this was a piece of paper.’

It was enough. He was sure of it. Boris had said not a word; but he was sure it was enough.

Already for Boris it was a year of evil portent. In the north, there was doubt about the loyalty of the cities of Novgorod and Pskov. Far in the south, in the Crimea, the Ottoman Turks with the Crimean Tatars were reported to be preparing an offensive against the lower reaches of the Volga. And now, this summer, word had come that the two powers of Poland and Lithuania, though they had acted together for generations, were being formally unified into one kingdom, ruled by a Catholic Polish King.

‘And that means one thing,’ he had told Elena. ‘It means that we shall have Catholics from Kiev to Smolensk – right at our doors.’

And now the monk was telling him that his wife might be unfaithful with the priest. He said nothing, but for long hours he brooded about it.

He hardly knew what to think. Part of him was filled with rage and with a loathing of both the heretic priest, whom he had never liked, and his wife. Yet if Daniel had thought that this was a good way to get Stephen disgraced, or at least banned from Russka, he was to be disappointed.

For Boris decided to take no action for the present, except to have the two of them discreetly watched.

There were two reasons for this. The first was that, having mastered the first wave of his jealousy, his intelligence told him that the suspicion might not be true. The fact that the priest saw his wife was hardly proof of anything. The second was a more devious thought: for if he could prove she was unfaithful, he could, with good conscience, divorce her.

Look at Tsar Ivan, he thought. He had married again and had had sons by both marriages. The Tsar had an heir. Perhaps with another wife, who did not secretly shrink from him …

And so began a new phase in his marriage.

Elena was entirely unaware of the pattern of his thoughts. How
could she guess, when he was always something of a stranger to her? The idea that she might be unfaithful both hurt and enraged him; and yet, at the same time, it made her seem more desirable so that he found himself completely torn between the desire to keep her – a contaminated woman – at a distance, and the desire to possess her.

And poor Elena could only think: He suffers his black moods and yet, after all, he sometimes finds me attractive.

Sometimes, lying beside her, enclosed in this, the armour of his secret rejection of her, he would even, scarcely knowing that he did so, will her to be unfaithful. Though whether it was to be free of her, or to satisfy some deep, destructive tendency in his own nature, he himself would have been quite incapable of analyzing.