Russka (51 page)

‘And the fact is,’ he told his father-in-law, ‘if I break the Company rules and ship some goods through Narva on my own account, the profits could be excellent.’ He would not be the only English merchant to do so.

Wilson had no great love of his fellow countrymen. In recent years, half the fellows they had sent out had been wild young men, who seemed to the Russians, and to Wilson, to be searching for women and drink as much as for trade. The question was, where could he get goods undetected by his fellow traders?

There was an added urgency about this business, too. For Wilson was nervous for the future. The war in the north was sure to continue. When the chief representative of the Muscovy Company had last returned to England, it was with an urgent request from the Tsar that he should bring back both skilled men and supplies for the war in the north with Poland. They had recently arrived. If he was to make a shipment out through the Baltic, the sooner the better, before the trouble started.

But there was another piece of news, a whispered rumour that had gone through the English community like a shock wave in the last few days; and it was this which had caused him to look at the Tsar’s stout fortress so carefully.

For to the departing Company envoy Ivan had given a secret message, which had at once been shared with the tight-knit English community. He had asked Queen Elizabeth of England for asylum, should he ever wish to flee Russia.

‘Is he in such danger?’ ‘Are there things we do not know?’ the merchants asked one another.

Whatever Ivan’s reasons for this strange request, it cast a cloud over the sky. Wilson wondered what to do.

And here was one of the black-shirts, standing right beside him.
Wilson had learnt to speak passable Russian: one had to in a country where no one spoke any foreign languages. As an English merchant, he was not especially afraid of the
Oprichniki
. He decided to address the fearsome figure in black, therefore, and see what he could find out.

Boris was surprised to be addressed by the merchant, but answered him politely enough. Indeed, pleased to find that the foreigner spoke Russian, he conversed with him for some time. Wilson was cautious. He gave no hint to the black-shirt of what he knew, but by careful questioning he soon satisfied himself that Boris, who had recently been at the Tsar’s headquarters outside Moscow, had no sense of impending disaster. And for his part, Boris made a great discovery. This Englishman wanted a cargo of furs, and he wanted to obtain them discreetly. Boris did not have many, but he was sure he could find more. What a stroke of luck.

‘Come to Russka,’ he said. ‘None of your English merchants has ever been there.’

That autumn and the following spring were busy times for Daniel the monk. They were also disturbing.

The fact of the matter was, he was losing the abbot’s favour.

It was his fault. In his zeal to make money for the monastery, he drove the traders in Russka too hard. Nothing they did escaped him; and as a consequence, they tried all the harder to cheat him. The net result of this was that both the monk and the traders were in a state of irritation with one another and the monastery’s profits benefited very little.

Though discreet complaints were made to the monastery from time to time, the abbot, who was an elderly man, did little more than half-heartedly reprove Daniel. And when, in reply, Daniel assured him that the townspeople were all rogues, the old man usually found it easier to believe him.

And so matters might have continued indefinitely, if Stephen the priest’s wife had not died, forcing him to enter the monastery.

For it did not take long for the traders to suggest that things would go better if Stephen, whom they liked, were to be put in charge of Russka.

The abbot was loath to act. He was, truth to tell, a little nervous of the determined monk. ‘He’s very efficient, you know,’ he lamented to an old monk who was his confidant. ‘And if I took
Russka away from him,’ he sighed, ‘one never knows what he might do. He’d make a fuss, I’m afraid.’

All the same, he began to drop small and not very subtle hints. ‘You have done good work in Russka, Daniel. One day we must find you a new challenge.’ Or: ‘Are you tired, sometimes, Brother Daniel?’

It had only taken one or two such conversations to whip Daniel up into a fever of anxiety and activity, which had made the abbot in turn more afraid of offending him, and at the same time to wish, still more, that he could find some way of getting rid of him.

Stephen, for his part, was aware of these developments but did nothing to encourage them. He was not afraid of Daniel and privately disapproved of him but, he concluded, he had enough souls to pray for, including his own.

Besides, he had other and more personal problems to deal with.

It was the greatest pity for him, however, that he did not realize the strength, and desperation, of Daniel’s passion.

Stephen was still the priest at the little church in Russka. The people of the town still looked to him for spiritual guidance, just as people in the area had looked to his father and grandfather before him. It was also only natural that he should continue to minister to Elena in her own home and, perhaps, to visit her a little more often than he had before, simply because her former companion, his wife, was no longer there to do so. God knows, he often thought, her life must be lonely enough.

And so it was. She had even made two visits to Moscow that autumn to see her mother; she had gone back the second time because she had sensed her mother was worried about something – though what, she would not say. At one point her mother had suddenly asked: ‘Your Boris, is he still our friend?’ And when she had hesitated, because she did not know herself, her mother had quickly said: ‘No matter. It’s of no consequence.’ And then a moment later: ‘Do not tell him I asked you.’

‘Would you like me to stay here for a while?’ she had asked. Little as she now liked Moscow, it seemed to her that her mother needed company at present.

But her mother had put her off. ‘In the spring, perhaps,’ she had said absently.

Elena was lonely, and concerned. How, therefore, could she
help smiling with pleasure to hear that the priest had arrived to see her?

It was not long before there existed between them a friendly intimacy that could safely last as long as neither allowed it to be established, by any word or gesture, that they were half, perhaps more than half, in love.

The tall, dark-bearded priest, in his late thirties, was showing the first streak of grey hair in his beard which if anything, in her eyes, added to his attractiveness. She admired him: indeed, he was to be admired, for he was a fine man. And they experienced the passion of those who have first come to terms with suffering, which is more measured and therefore potentially more powerful than the instantaneous passion of the young.

He would read the service to her. She would pray. At other times they would talk, though never of personal matters.

And this, had it been possible, would have been the courtship of two serious people, amidst the gathering storm of events which their own decency prevented them from fully anticipating.

What extraordinary good fortune it was, Daniel thought, that God had given him the gift of observing two things at once.

Had it not been so, he might have missed one or other of the highly significant though small events that took place in the market place on an early October afternoon that year.

The first concerned the English merchant, Wilson, who had arrived the evening before with Boris. After spending time with Lev the merchant, the two men had ridden off to Dirty Place, and the monk had not seen either of them again until he had chanced, when he was taking the little ferry across the river to the monastery, to see the Englishman coming along the path deep in conversation with Stephen.

He had waited, and then taken the ferry back again, so that he could follow them. What might they be up to?

In fact, they had met by chance – Wilson returning ahead of Boris to Russka, and Stephen going for a walk. The priest, curious to meet an Englishman, had plied him with questions and Wilson, who was a good judge of character, soon decided that this literate fellow was safe to talk to and told him what he wanted to hear.

It was not long before the subject turned to religion. Here Wilson was cautious, but the priest reassured him.

‘I know about you Protestants. There are people like the Trans Volga Elders who are a little like you in Russia. Our own Church needs reform too, though it’s unwise to say so at present.’

And it was after quite a long talk on the subject that Wilson had finally shown the priest one of his printed pamphlets.

Stephen was delighted.

‘Tell me what it says,’ he begged. And so, to the delight of the normally solemn priest, Wilson translated it as best he could.

The little tract was vituperative. It called the Catholic monks vipers, leeches, robbers. It said their monasteries were rich and vain, their ceremonies idolatrous, and much else besides.

‘It’s against the Catholics, of course,’ Wilson assured him, but the priest only laughed.

‘It applies to us, too,’ he said, and he made Wilson go over the sheet with him once again, memorizing it.

Before they reached the town, Wilson had wisely secreted it under his cloak again, but it was as they reached the far end of the market square, where the priest took his leave, that Wilson as a little gesture of friendship, put his hand into his cloak and slipped the piece of paper into Stephen’s hand.

What does it matter? he thought. They couldn’t understand a word of it even if they could read.

This was the gesture that Daniel saw.

And it was at the same moment that he noticed, at the other side of the market place, another tiny movement.

It was Karp, the son of that foolish fellow Mikhail the peasant who made it.

He and his bear had just done a few tricks to amuse some merchants who had come down from Vladimir to buy icons. They had thrown a few small coins on the ground, and Karp had just scooped them up and handed them to his father who was standing nearby.

That was all. Nothing more. The handing of the coins had taken place at the very same moment that the Englishman handed Stephen the piece of paper. Why should it have been significant?

Because – and here, in all its glory, was the near genius of the observant monk – because he had noticed the expression on the faces of Mikhail and his son.

He could not have put it into words. Was it a look of complicity? Perhaps, but more than that. It was something about the way
Mikhail stood and looked about him: a sort of defiance. No, it was not just that. It was that the sturdy peasant had, just for an instant, taken on the character of his son. He had looked, thought Daniel, like a man who is free. Indefinable. Unmistakable.

And in a flash he guessed. They were hoarding money.

He stored both these pieces of information in his mind, and decided to learn more.

In November 1567, just after he had set out northwards across the winter snows, Tsar Ivan abruptly cancelled his new campaign against the Baltic and hurried back to Moscow. Boris returned with the rest of the army.

A new plot had been discovered. The conspirators were hoping to kill Ivan in the northern snows, with the connivance of the King of Poland. There was a list of names; and who knew how many more might be implicated in this business?

In December the
Oprichniki
went to work. With axes under their cloaks and a list of names in their hands, they rode about the streets of Moscow making house calls. Some were exiled. Some impaled.

At the end of the second week in December, a party of
Oprichniki
came to the house of the bald, stout nobleman Dimitri Ivanov. His son-in-law Boris was not one of them. They conducted him to a chamber in the armoury in the Kremlin. There they had prepared a huge iron pan, underneath which was a fire. In this they fried him.

His death was recorded briefly in a secret list prepared for the Tsar. In common with over three thousand others who died in the coming months, the names upon this list, since known as the Synodical, were consigned to oblivion and it was forbidden to mention them.

At the same time, all the monasteries in the land were instructed to send their chronicles to the Tsar for inspection. By this means, Ivan ensured that no records of events were kept for these terrible years.

Daniel the monk was confident, even cheerful.

Thank the Lord that a century and a half ago, the monks had made such a good job of writing the chronicle. There was little in it that could possibly embarrass the Tsar. Throughout, the
references to the Tatars were offensive and the Moscow princes were treated as heroes in the struggle against them.

Five years ago, to celebrate Ivan’s victories over the Moslem Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, the monastery had added crescent moons under the crosses above the church domes in the monastery itself and in Russka, as symbols of the triumph of Christian armies over Islam.

Our loyalty cannot be questioned, he thought contentedly.

The new purge in Moscow had had a satisfactory side-effect for him. The old abbot had been so distressed by the whole business that he had been scarcely capable of conducting ordinary business, and the question of the Russka administration seemed entirely to have slipped his mind.

Besides, Daniel was more confident than before that he could defend his position there.

Once again therefore, in early spring, his mind turned to the old question: how could he enlarge the monastery’s estates?

Boris’s land, now that he was one of the
Oprichniki
, was of course out of the question. That left one other piece of land, a little to the north, that now belonged to the Tsar himself. Might Ivan be persuaded?

It was not a foolish idea. Despite his restrictions on the Church acquiring new land, Ivan himself had remained a generous donor.

‘He strikes down his enemies; then he gives the Church some more land, to save his soul,’ one of the monks had cynically remarked.