She saw that he was lonely; that was obvious. But she also perceived that there was something brittle in him. While she wanted to comfort him, and help him grow out of what she sensed was a morbid state, her instinct told her that, as he came up against an unyielding world, he might turn back into his loneliness and demand that she share it. And it was this sense of danger, this dark cloud on the horizon, that made her a little hesitant to subjugate herself to him too quickly.
But the simple discoveries of passion, in two very young people, were enough to form the beginning of their marriage on that and the succeeding nights.
In two weeks’ time, they were due to visit Russka.
It was a sparkling winter morning as Boris and Elena, wrapped in furs, and in the first of two sleds each drawn by three horses, approached the little town of Russka.
Meanwhile, in the market place at Russka, a small but significant meeting was taking place.
To look at them, one would not have guessed that the four men – a priest, a peasant, a merchant and a monk – were cousins; and of these four, only the priest knew that he was descended from Yanka, the peasant woman who had killed Peter the Tatar.
It was Mikhail, the peasant from Dirty Place, who was especially anxious. He was a squarely built, broad-chested fellow with soft blue eyes and an aureole of wavy, dark brown hair that rose almost upright from his head. Now, his usually placid face looked worried.
‘You are sure her dowry is small?’
‘Yes,’ the tall priest replied.
‘That’s bad. Very bad.’ And the poor man stared at his feet miserably.
Stephen gazed down at him sympathetically. For four generations, ever since his great-grandfather had been named after the old monk, Father Stephen the icon painter, to whom they were related, the eldest sons in his family had been called Stephen and had entered the priesthood. His own wife was also the daughter of a priest. Stephen was twenty-two, a tall, imposing figure with a carefully trimmed dark beard, serious blue eyes and an air of quiet dignity that made him seem older. His information about Elena was sure to be good. He had contacts in Moscow, and since he could read and write – an unusual accomplishment in the priesthood at this time – he could even correspond with the capital.
‘A wife with no money – just think what that means for me!’ Mikhail lamented. ‘He’ll squeeze me till he breaks my bones. What else can he do?’
The question was asked without any rancour. Everyone understood the problem. Dirty Place was all Boris had. With a wife, and soon a family to keep, the only way he could possibly survive would be to get more from his estate and the peasants on it. Under his ailing father, things had been lax; but who knew what might happen now?
‘You two are lucky,’ he remarked to Stephen and the monk. ‘You’re churchmen. As for you,’ he turned to the merchant with a rueful smile that contained a trace of malice, ‘what do you care? You live in Russka.’
Lev the merchant was a stout man of thirty-five, with thin black hair swept back over his head and a hard, Tatar face. His beard was thick. His Mongol eyes were black and cunning although, as now, they could soften with faint amusement when simple-minded men like his cousin Mikhail assumed that his elementary business practices were some kind of fiendish cunning.
He dealt chiefly in furs, but he had extended his activities into several ventures, and in particular had prospered as a lender of money.
As was often the case in Russia, the largest moneylender in the area was the monastery, which had by far the greatest capital. But the expanding economy of the last hundred years had created opportunities for many merchants to supply credit as well, and in Russia all classes borrowed. A prosperous small-town merchant like Lev might be owed money even by a magnate or a powerful prince. Interest rates were high. Some loan sharks even charged a hundred and fifty per cent and more. Mikhail was sure that his rich cousin would go to hell when he died, but meanwhile he envied him. They were all the same, he thought, the people who lived in Russka – rich and heartless.
Since Russka had been taken over by the monastery, it had grown. There were now several rows of huts of which some were quite large, with their main rooms upstairs to keep them dry throughout the year. Over five hundred people lived within its walls which, like those of the monastery across the stream, had been strengthened. Over the gateway, now, there was a high tower with a tall tent roof made of wood. This served as a watchtower for town and monastery, to give them warning of the approach of the Tatars or the bandits who had appeared in the area several times in recent years.
There was a busy, prosperous and orderly air about the little town. In the market place, beside which there was now a stone church as well as an older wooden one, bright stalls were regularly set up. People came from all the nearby villages and hamlets. There was a tax collector in the place who received the customs dues from the traders, but the original impetus for the market was the fact that the goods supplied by the monastery were exempt from taxes. Here one could buy salt, brought in shallow draft boats from the north, and caviar. Local pork, honey and fish were all excellent. Wheat came upriver from the Riazan lands to the south.
But above all, Russka was known for its icons. The monastery had a regular little workshop. There were no less than ten monks, working with assistants, producing a constant flow of icons which were sold in the Russka market. A number of artisans, brought in by the monastery, were housed in Russka where they turned out handicrafts, some religious, others not, for sale on the stalls. People came from Vladimir, and from Moscow itself, to buy.
Now Lev turned to Mikhail and put his arm round him.
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ he counselled. And then he spoke aloud the thought that only Mikhail, amongst the four of them, had failed to grasp. ‘Don’t you realize – if this fellow has his way,’ he indicated the monk beside him, ‘young lord Boris won’t have his estate much longer anyway.’
The gentle, joyful hiss of the sleds. They ran down the gleaming road of the frozen River Rus, between the lines of soft, snow-laden trees until, round a curve, the banks opened up to several broad, white meadows.
In the first sled rode Boris and Elena. In the second, the five Tatar slaves, Elena’s maid, and a huge quantity of baggage.
And now at last, there lay Russka before them, with the monastery below it. How quiet it was. Under a clear, light blue sky the wooden tent roof of the tower, glistening in the sun, reminded Boris of a tall sheaf of wheat or barley, tied just below the top, standing in a field after harvest. He squeezed Elena’s hand and sighed with pleasure at the familiar, childhood sensation of being enveloped in the peace of the Russian countryside.
The tower, it seemed to him, was like a token of summer and of fulfilment, hanging in the bright winter sky.
Elena, too, smiled. Thank God, she was thinking, that the place was not quite as small as she had feared. Perhaps there might be a few women here that she could talk to.
In no time they were gliding up the slope and round to the gate. As they entered the main square, she noticed the four men standing together near the centre. Seeing the sleds, they turned and bowed respectfully. It seemed to her that they were also observing her carefully. They appeared friendly enough. She pulled the furs up to cover her face as the sled came towards them; she noticed that one was a priest and one a monk.
It was impossible to see the expression on the face of Daniel the monk, because his thick black beard covered so much of it that one could really only make out the two small bright eyes that looked out watchfully at the world, and the top of what were obviously broad, pock-marked cheeks.
He was on the short side, stockily built, but with slightly rounded shoulders. His quiet, stooping manner suggested a submissiveness proper to his religious calling. He spoke rather quietly, yet there was something about his hard brown eyes, an occasional suddenness in his movements, that suggested a passionate nature either repressed or concealed.
He was watching the young couple intently.
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br /> Stephen the priest, observing both, felt sorry for Boris and Elena. He had liked Boris’s father, admired his long fight with sickness, and buried him with a sense of personal loss. He wished young Boris well.
As for Daniel the monk, Stephen did not approve of him.
‘People say that I love money,’ Lev had once remarked to him, ‘but I don’t come near that little monk.’
It was true. The merchant’s rapaciousness had bounds; there was the ordinary give and take of the market place in his dealings. But Daniel the monk, though he had nothing of his own, seemed to be obsessed with acquiring wealth: he wanted it for the monastery.
‘He is greedy for God,’ Stephen had sighed. ‘It’s a crime.’
The great battle between those who thought the Church should give up its riches, and those who thought it should keep them, had been fought for generations. Many churchmen believed the Church should revert to a life of poverty and simplicity – especially those followers of a saintly monk named Nil Sorsky, who lived in the simple communities in the forest hinterland beyond the northern loop of the Volga. This faction, encouraged by these stern Trans-Volga Elders, became known to history as the Non-Possessors; though most people in Russka, and many in the capital too, referred to them affectionately as the Non-Greedy.
But they lost. A little after 1500 the Church council, led by the formidable Abbot Joseph, declared that the Church’s lands and wealth gave her a power on earth that was wholly desirable. Those who thought otherwise were in danger of being called heretics.
Stephen the priest privately favoured poverty. His cousin Daniel, however, had shown such diligence in everything relating to business that the abbot of the Peter and Paul Monastery had made him the supervisor of the monastery’s activities in the little trading town. To hear Daniel talk about the fall of Kazan, you might have mistaken him for a merchant or a tax collector. ‘We can pick up some of the extra trade through Nizhni Novgorod and from the south,’ he would explain eagerly in his soft voice. ‘Silk, calico, frankincense, soap …’ He would tick them off on his fingers. ‘Perhaps we can even get some rhubarb too.’ For some reason this luxury was still imported from the east.
But above all, Daniel’s secret mission in life was to help the abbot enlarge the monastery’s lands.
He would probably succeed. For generations the Church had been the one section of the community which had continuously increased its landholdings. Two years before Tsar Ivan had tried to limit the scale of this growth by insisting that the monasteries and churches must have his permission before they accepted or bought any more land. But these rules were always hard to enforce. In the central regions of Muscovy, at this time, the Church owned about a third of the land.
There were two desirable estates close by. One was just to the north and east, a tract of land that had passed back into the hands of the Moscow princes. Perhaps Ivan would grant them this: for despite his recent attempts to limit them, he was still a huge giver of land to the Church himself. And then there was Dirty Place.
Boris’s father had held on to his estate, but would the young man with his wife and small dowry be able to? Daniel smiled. Probably not. They would either give the land to the monastery in return for a life tenancy: this was often done. Or they could sell it outright. Or they could get themselves ever deeper into debt until the monastery took the estate over. Boris would be well treated. His family’s long connection with the monastery would ensure that. He would live out his life with honour. The monks would pray, after his death, for this noble benefactor who gave his lands to the service of God. We’ll look after him,’ he would say.
There was only one problem the monk foresaw. Knowing the monastery’s intentions, the young man would try very hard to keep his independence, as his father had done. He would do everything he could to avoid borrowing money from the monastery. ‘Which is where you come in,’ Daniel had told Lev the merchant the day before. ‘When the young man wants to borrow, offer to lend to him and I’ll guarantee the loan,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll see that you don’t suffer by it.’
At which Lev had laughed, and his Tatar eyes had shown a flicker of amusement.
‘Ah, you monks …’ he had replied.
And now the young man was approaching.
Elena was surprised, as the sled crossed the square, to hear her husband mutter a curse. What a strange, moody fellow he was, this young man. But when she glanced at him, he gave her a rueful grin.
‘My enemies,’ he whispered. ‘They’re all cousins.’ The four men looked harmless enough to her. ‘Beware especially of the priest,’ he added.
Boris’s fear of the priest was founded upon a single fact: that Stephen could read. He himself could make out a few words. There were many nobles at court, he knew, who read; and the monks and priests in the great monasteries and churches read and wrote in their own, rather stylized, church language. But what was this parish priest, in a little village, doing with books? To Boris it seemed foreign and suspicious. Catholics, or those strange German Protestants who traded in Moscow, probably read books. Worse yet – so did Jews.
For there was always the Jewish danger: Boris knew about that. By this, however, he did not mean the Jewish faith as such, nor Jewish people. He meant the Christian heretics known as Judaizers.
They were a strange group. They had appeared rather briefly in the Orthodox Church the previous century and been rooted out in the reign of Ivan the Great. Some of them, like the Jews, considered Christ a prophet rather than the Messiah. But even at the time the exact nature of the heresy had been confused. What was clear though, to succeeding generations of faithful Russians like Boris, was that these people relied on logic, subtle arguments and books – and were therefore not to be trusted.
Boris knew that Daniel the monk was after his land: that he could understand. But Stephen – who knew what he might be thinking?
The little group greeted the new arrivals politely. They smiled respectfully at Elena. Then the sled moved on towards the little house, just past the church at the far end of the square, where the steward, his wife, and the servant girls would be waiting for them.
Elena smiled, trying to make her husband happy, but she felt uneasy.
Boris inspected the estate at Dirty Place the next morning.
The old steward conducted him round. He had been there since Boris was a child and was not a bad fellow. Small, quiet, close-knit, his thick hair was all grey now and the lines on his brow were so deep that it looked as if someone had scored them there with half a dozen blows from an axe. He was honest, so far as Boris knew.
‘It’s all in good order, just as your father left it,’ he remarked.
Boris looked around thoughtfully.
In certain ways he was lucky. When the Tsar’s land assessors, after Ivan’s recent tax reforms, had visited Russka, they had carefully inspected the Bobrov estate. It contained a little over three hundred chetverts, or some four hundred and ten acres of land.
The Bobrovs had been lucky on two counts. Firstly, the assessors had kindly decided that some of the land was low quality, which lessened the taxes. And secondly, the area of the estate was just a little larger than their standard measurements allowed for.
For the Russian land assessors could not compute fractions. Certain ones they knew: a half, an eighth, even a thirty-second; a third, a twelfth, a twenty-fourth. But they could not express, for instance, a tenth; nor could they add or subtract fractions with different divisors. So when they discovered that the good land at Dirty Place consisted of almost two hundred and fifty-four chetverts, which came in tax terms to a quarter of a plough plus another fifteenth, they contented themselves with a quarter plus a sixteenth – the nearest fraction they knew – thus leaving over four acres free of tax.
Thus, as they so often did, the Russians made ingenious accommodations where their expertise failed them.
Compared to many of those to whom the Tsar had granted the service, pomestie, estates, Boris was not badly off
. Most of these had only half what he had. The present income from the estate however was ten roubles a year. To go on campaign cost him seven roubles for himself and his horses; his armour and equipment he already owned. He owed four roubles a year in taxes though, and he had some modest debts in Russka, including one to Lev the merchant. As things stood, therefore, he would slip slowly into debt over a few years unless the Tsar did something for him.
Yet he was not discouraged. In time, he was determined to win Ivan’s favour: and who knew what wealth that might bring him? As for the present …
‘I think we can double the income from the estate,’ he announced to the steward. ‘Don’t you?’ And when the old man hesitated, Boris merely snapped: ‘You know very well we can.’
Which was exactly what poor Mikhail the peasant had feared.
There were two kinds of payment that a peasant could make to his lord. He could pay rent, in money or kind; this was termed obrok; or he could work his lord’s land: this was boyar-service, called barshchina. Usually peasants gave a combination of both.
The peasants at Dirty Place worked only one or two days on the land which Boris retained in his own hands – the demesne. In addition, they paid him obrok for the land they held. During the last twenty years, the estate had lost three tenants: one had left for another lord; one had died without heirs and one had been sent away. They had not been replaced and thus an extra hundred acres of good land had been retained by Boris’s father. And while rents had been increased several times, they had not quite kept up with the steady rise in prices over recent decades.
Mikhail paid twenty-four bushels of rye, the same of oats, a cheese, fifty eggs, eight dengi of money and a wagonload of firewood. He also had to work nearly three acres of Boris’s land, which took him rather under one day a week. His agreement with Boris did not stipulate how his obligations were to be organized. If Boris wanted to change them, he could. And the price of grain was rising.