No longer could a peasant go at any time, but only at certain dates stipulated by his master – the most common of which was a two-week period centred on the autumn St George’s Day: November 25. There was logic to this – the harvest was all in by then – but it was also the bleakest time in the year for the peasant to travel. There were conditions, of course: heavy exit fees had to be paid. But all the same, once he had given notice and paid his dues, the peasant and his family were free to go, to put on their Sunday best and present themselves to a new master. Whence came the ironic Russian expression for a fruitless enterprise: ‘All dressed up for St George’s Day, with nowhere to go.’
Yet here was Mikhail’s dilemma. Even if he could ever afford to leave, where should he go to?
So much of the land now was pomestie – service estates. They were small, and the men who held them often bled their peasants dry and neglected the land which was only theirs conditionally. At least an old votchina owner like Boris had more care for the place. Alternatively, there were the free lands up in the north and east – but who knew what life might be in those distant hamlets beyond the Volga?
Or there was the Church. ‘If the monastery doesn’t get the estate, we could always go and take a tenancy on the lands they have,’ his wife suggested. Yet he wondered, would he be so much better off? He had heard of other monasteries raising rents and increasing the barshchina. ‘Let’s wait a bit and see,’ he said.
His wife would wait patiently. He knew that. She was a stout, heavy-legged creature who always made a point of glaring at any stranger; yet behind this rather harsh façade was a gentle soul who even felt sorry for Boris and his young wife who were oppressing them.
‘He’ll be dead or ruined in five years,’ she prophesied. ‘But we’ll still be here, I dare say.’
Mikhail was not so sure about his two sons though. The elder, Ivanko, was a stolid young fellow of ten with a fine singing voice, who reminded him of himself. But Karp, his little boy, was an enigma to him. He was only seven, a dark, sinewy, athletic little creature who already had a mind that was entirely his own.
‘He’s only seven, and yet I can’t do anything with him,’ he would confess with puzzled wonder. ‘Where does he get it from, the little Mordvinian? Even if I beat him, he does whatever he wants.’
There was no place for a free spirit like that on the estate at Dirty Place. There wasn’t room. As Mikhail the peasant looked about him, and did not know what to do next, he decided to consult his cousin Stephen the priest.
Boris gazed at the city of Moscow from the Sparrow Hills above. The message from Stephen the priest had said that he would call upon him that evening. There was plenty of time before he need ride down. Therefore he gazed, with neither bitterness nor, he supposed, any other strong emotion at the great citadel spread out below.
Moscow the centre: Moscow the mighty heart. On that warm September day, even the chattering birds in the trees seemed hushed.
The summer had been slow, and silent, and large, as only Russian summers can be; it had browned the whispering barley in the fields all around; it had made the silver birches gleam until they seemed as white as molten ash. Around Moscow, in high summer, the leaves of the trees – the aspen, the birch, even the oaks – were so light, so delicate, that their tiny shivering in the breeze rendered them translucent, so startlingly green that they might have been so many emeralds and opals glittering in the sun that danced through them. Only in Russia, surely, were the leaves able to say in this manner: See, we dance in this fire, infinitely fragile, infinitely strong, with no regrets at the constant message of this huge blue sky, which tells us every day that we must die.
Now, as autumn approached, the trees, and the heavy-set city itself were left with a light covering of the finest dust as, like a silent shining cloud that has hovered half a lifetime, summer now began to depart, drifting away into that huge, ever present, ever receding blue sky.
Over the thick walls of Moscow, over the huge Kremlin whose long battlements frowned above the river, everything was quiet. And who would have guessed that only months before, within those walls, death and treachery had ruled?
Thick-walled city of treachery; darkness within the huge heart of the great Russian plain.
They had betrayed the Tsar. No one was talking, but everybody knew. There was a watchfulness, a fear, in every street, at every gathering. Boris saw it in the way Dimitri Ivanov stroked his beard, or passed his hand over his bald head, or occasionally winked his rather bloodshot eyes.
He understood. They had wanted the Tsar dead: and now he was alive.
It had been close. In March, struck down with what was probably pneumonia, Ivan had been dying, almost unable to speak. On his deathbed, he had begged the princes and boyars to accept his baby son. But most had been unwilling.
‘Then we shall have another regency, run by the mother’s family, those damned Zakharins,’ they argued.
What was the alternative? Strictly speaking there was, on the outer fringes of the court, the harmless but pathetic figure of the Tsar’s younger brother – a weak-headed creature, seldom seen. Even when the boyars remembered his existence, he was generally dismissed again as unfit. But what about the Tsar’s cousin Vladimir? Of all the many princes, none was more closely related to the reigning monarch and he was a man of some experience. Here was a better candidate than this baby boy.
Over the dying man, they argued. Even Ivan’s most trusted friends, the close councillors he had made himself, were skulking in corners, whispering. They were all betraying him as he watched and listened, scarcely able to speak. And what would happen to Muscovy after he was gone? Anarchy, as they fought each other for power, these cursed, treacherous magnates.
But then he had recovered. The veil, having been lifted, descended once again. His courtiers bowed before him and greeted him with a smile. The subject of his cousin Vladimir’s succession was not spoken of, as though it had never been. And Tsar Ivan said nothing.
Yet all around the court, there was an air of gloom. In May, Ivan had taken his family to the far north, to give thanks for his life at the very monastery where his own mother had gone when she was pregnant with him. It was a long way: far, far into the forests towards the Arctic emptiness. And there, in a distant river, his nurse had accidentally dropped Ivan and Anastasia’s baby son who had died in a few moments.
Over the warm, dusty citadel that summer, the sun had hung, like a silent companion to the dry, parching sadness within its massive walls. In the north-west, at Pskov, there was plague. In the east, at Kazan, the troubles with the conquered tribesmen were getting worse.
And for Boris, too, these long months had been touched by a kind of sadness.
He and Elena had hurried back to Moscow in March and taken up their modest quarters in the little house in the White Town.
Elena would make daily visits to her mother or her sister. Whispered news of the dark developments in the court would reach them each day, either through Elena’s father or from her mother, who had friends amongst the elderly ladies granted quarters near the royal women in the palace. Boris found himself often alone and with not much to do. To fill the time he took to walking about the capital and visiting its many churches, often hovering for some time before an icon, and saying a perfunctory prayer before moving on.
Yet although their life was quiet, he could not avoid expense. There were the horses to be stabled, the giving of gifts, and above all the yards of silk brocade and fur trimming for kaftans and dresses required to visit those who, he was assured, might be useful to him.
He could not help it: he resented these expenses which he could not really afford. Sometimes, when his wife arrived back happily from a visit to her mother, full of the latest news, he felt a kind of sullen anger, not because she had behaved badly towards him in any way, but because she seemed always to believe that all was well. Then, when they lay together at night, he would lie almost touching her, wanting her, yet holding back, hoping by this
little show of indifference to worry her enough to break through the wall of family security that seemed to surround her. How can she really love me, if she does not share my anxiety? he wondered.
But to young Elena, these little shows of indifference only made her fear that her moody husband did not care for her. She would have liked to cry but instead her pride made her shrink from him, or lie there surrounding herself with an invisible barrier so that he, in turn, thought: See, she does not want me.
It was a particular misfortune that he should have encountered a young friend in the street one day. They had retired to a booth to drink for a time, and after asking about his health and that of his wife, this world-weary and unmarried young worthy had remarked: ‘All marriages turn to indifference, and most to hatred, they tell me.’
Was it so? For weeks this foolish little sentence preyed on his mind. Sometimes he and Elena made love several nights running, and all seemed well; but then some imagined slight would interrupt the uncertain course of their relationship and as he lay beside her in secret fury, the words would come back to Boris’s mind and he would decide: Yes, it is so; and he would even will it to be so, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So it was that the young Russian stood on the edge of the chasm of self-destruction, and gazed into it.
Sometimes, in front of the icons in the churches he visited, he would pray for better things; he would pray that he might love his wife always, and she him, forgiving each other’s faults. But in his heart, he did not really mean it.
It was on one of these occasions, as he was standing before a favourite icon in a small local church, that he happened to fall into conversation with the young priest named Philip. He was about the same age as Boris, but very lean, with red hair and a hard, intense face that seemed always to be bobbing forwards as though, like a chicken looking for food, he could seize the subject under discussion with a few quick dabs beyond his beard. When Boris had expressed an interest in icons, and told him that his own family had given a work by the great Rublev to the monastery at Russka, Philip had become wildly enthusiastic.
‘My dear lord, I make a particular study of icons. So, there is a Rublev at Russka? I did not know it. I must go there, to be sure. Perhaps you would allow me to journey with you one day? You would? You are very kind. Yes, indeed.’
And before he knew it he had acquired, it seemed, a friend for life. Philip never failed after that to meet him, at least once every two weeks. Boris thought him harmless enough.
Elena did not tell him she was pregnant until July. She expected the baby at the end of the year.
He was excited, of course. He must be. Her family all congratulated him. It seemed that this news must make all the women busier than ever.
And when he thought of his father, and realized that this might be the son who would continue their noble line, he felt another rush of emotion; a determination that, at all costs, he must succeed, hand the estate on in good condition, and more.
Yet as he sat beside Elena he would look across, see her smiling at him as though to say: ‘Surely now he must be pleased,’ and think: She is smiling at me; yet it is also her treasure that she guards in there. This child just completes her family: it will be theirs more than mine. And, anyway, what if it’s a girl? That will be no good to me, yet I shall have to pay for it. In this way, often, the joy they told him he must feel turned to secret resentment.
He did not make love to Elena once he knew she was pregnant. He could not. The womb suddenly seemed to him mysterious, sacred – both vulnerable, and for that reason, rather frightening. Like a pea in the pod: sometimes, that was how he saw it; and who but a monster would break open that pod, disturb the little life inside, or destroy it? At other times, it made him think of something darker, subterranean, like a seed in the earth that must be left in the warm, sacred darkness before, at its season, emerging into the light.
In any case, Elena was often away these days. Her father had an estate just outside the city. She often went there, in the weeks of late summer, to rest with her family.
As Boris gazed over the city now, on this warm September afternoon, he told himself that he must accept what fate had in store. Elena was due back the following morning with her mother. He would be kind to her. The afternoon was wearing on. There was a heaviness in the golden haze; yet at the same time, in the blue sky, a slight hint of the autumn chill ahead. At last he sighed.
What the devil did Stephen the priest want with him, though? It was time to go and find out.
The tall young priest was polite, even respectful.
He had come to Moscow to visit a distant relation, a learned monk, and before leaving the city he had requested a brief audience, as he rather elaborately put it, with the young lord.
The matter was very confidential. It concerned the peasant Mikhail.
Boris was slightly surprised, but told him to go on.
‘Might I ask, Boris Davidov, that you will not mention this conversation to anyone at the monastery?’ the priest asked.
‘I suppose so.’ What was the fellow up to?
Then, very simply, Stephen outlined poor Mikhail’s dilemma. He did not tell Boris that the peasant had actually been encouraged to sabotage the work on the estate, but he did explain: ‘The monastery may well be tempted to take him from you. They would gain a good worker, and you would lose your best peasant – which in turn would make it harder for you to keep up the estate.’
‘He can’t leave,’ Boris snapped. ‘I know very well he can’t afford the fees.’
Under the law, a tenant wishing to depart upon St George’s Day not only had to clear any debts he had to his landlord, but had also to pay an exit fee from the house he had occupied. The rates for this were stiff – more than half a rouble – that was more than the value of Mikhail’s entire yearly crop, and Boris was quite right in thinking he could not pay it.
‘He can’t afford it, but the monastery can,’ Stephen quietly reminded him.
So that was it. An underhand way of stealing another man’s peasants was to pay their exit fees for them. Would Daniel the monk do such a thing to him, a Bobrov? Probably.
‘So what are you suggesting, that I should remit some of my peasant’s service?’
‘A little, Boris Davidov. Just enough to help Mikhail make ends meet. He’s a good peasant, and I can tell you, he has no wish to leave you.’
‘And why are you telling me this?’ Boris demanded.
Stephen paused. What could he say? Could he tell the young man that, like many churchmen, he disapproved of the monastery’s growing wealth? Could he tell Boris that he felt sorry for him and his rather helpless young wife? Could he tell him that, as things were, he was worried that Mikhail’s sons, if they did not eat enough, might be tempted towards a life of crime when they were older, or towards some foolish act? He could not.
‘I am only a priest, an onlooker,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Let us say it is my good deed for the day.’
‘I shall bear what you have said in mind,’ Boris answered non-committally, ‘and I thank you for your concern and the trouble you have taken.’
With this they parted, the priest believing that he had done both the peasant and his lord a Christian service.
After he had gone, Boris paced about the room, going over the conversation carefully until he was sure he had got it straight in his mind.
What kind of fool did they think he was? Did that tall priest think he had not noticed the little smile of cunning on his lips? On the face of it, he had come to help, but Boris had learned better than to believe that. He thought of Tsar Ivan, betrayed by all. He thought of the four cousins, standing together on the day he had arrived with Elena at Russka. He thought of his wife, too, who sometimes shrank from him in bed. No, they were none of them to be trusted, none. ‘I must stand alone,’ he murmured, ‘and I must be cleverer, more ruthlessly cunning, even than they.’
What was the priest up to then? Why, he was baiting a trap: an obvio
us trap too, damn him. For if he reduced Mikhail’s service, who would benefit? The peasant, of course – Stephen’s cousin. And what would be the effect? To leave him, Boris, short of money: so that he would have to borrow more and bring himself a step closer to losing the estate to the monastery.
‘They just want to ruin me,’ he muttered.
The cunning priest. Only one thing he had said might be true. It was possible that the monastery, if it couldn’t get the estate yet, might try to steal Mikhail.
How, he wondered, could he prevent that?
All that month he considered the matter; yet surprisingly, of all people, it was the curious priest Philip, with his bobbing head and his passion for icons, who gave him his answer. It lay in a palace intrigue.
The strange business began in the Kremlin – in the dark recesses of the Tsar’s innermost court. It had been festering there for a long time, and it concerned the Church, and the fact that one of Ivan’s advisers hated another.
For with the increasing need for pomestie estates for Ivan’s loyal followers, some of his closest counsellers wanted him to support the Non-Possessors and take the Church’s lands. The Metropolitan was looking for a way to head them off. And that year he found it.
The fellow who was leading this campaign, a priest named Sylvester, was foolish enough to be friends with a man who could be accused of heresy. From this small beginning, the Metropolitan saw, a huge intrigue could be put together. Other, worse heretics were found: the accusers constructed a chain showing that if one man knew a second, the second a third, the third a fourth, then, to be sure, the first man and the fourth were plotting together. Better yet, a link between some of these conspirators and the family of Prince Vladimir, Ivan’s cousin and possible successor, could be discovered.
The Metropolitan was delighted. The dangerous Sylvester could now be shown to be the friend of heretics and of Ivan’s enemies. A show trial could be called as a warning, a shot across Sylvester’s bows.