Uncertainly, she descended the stairs.
‘Now come to me,’ the Tsar’s voice softly commanded.
She felt the icy night air on her face and tried to cover the child. She walked over the frozen snow to where the tall figure stood, not knowing, in her confusion, how she should salute him.
‘Let me see the child,’ Ivan said. ‘Put him in my arms.’ And, letting his staff rest against his shoulder, he stretched out his long hands.
Hesitantly, she passed over the child. He took it gently. It stirred, but did not wake. Nervously, under a dark stare from his eyes, she stepped back a pace or two.
‘So, Elena Dimitrieva,’ Ivan said solemnly, ‘did you, too, know that the priest Stephen was a heretic?’
He saw her start violently. There was, at that moment, a large gap in the clouds and the whole of the sky above Russka was clear. A quarter moon, now visible over the gateway, sent a pale light along the street. He could see her face clearly. Boris was standing to his left.
‘The heretic priest is dead,’ he said. ‘Even the bears could not abide him.’
There was no mistaking it. He saw her face. It was not just the horror which some weak women felt at hearing of a death, even a grisly one. It seemed as if she had received a body blow. There was no doubt: she had loved him.
‘Are you not pleased to hear that an enemy of the Tsar is dead?’
She could not answer.
He transferred his gaze to the child. It was a small, fair infant, not yet a year old. Miraculously, it was still sleeping. He looked at it carefully in the moonlight. It was hard to tell anything by its features.
‘What is the child’s name?’ he murmured.
‘Feodor,’ she whispered back.
‘Feodor.’ He nodded slowly. ‘And who is the father of this child?’
She frowned. What was he talking about?
‘Was it my faithful servant, or was it a heretic priest?’ he gently enquired.
‘A priest? Who should the father be if not my husband?’
‘Who indeed?’
She looked innocent, but she was probably lying. Many women were deceitful. Her father, he remembered, was a traitor.
‘The Tsar is not to be deceived,’ he intoned. ‘I ask you again: did you not love Stephen, the heretic priest I have rightly killed?’
She opened her mouth to protest; yet, because she had loved him, because this tall figure terrified her, found herself unable to speak.
‘Let Boris Davidov decide,’ he said, and looking towards Boris asked: ‘Well, my friend, what is your judgement?’
Boris was silent.
Now, standing between them both, and with this child, half a stranger to him, in the freezing night, an extraordinary mixture of ideas and emotions crowded into his brain. Was Ivan offering him a means of escape, a divorce? No doubt the Tsar could arrange such a thing: the abbot, to be sure, would do whatever the Tsar said.
What did he believe? He scarcely knew himself. She loved the priest; she shrank from her husband. She had, by this and other means, humiliated him, tried to destroy the pride which was – should it not be? – at the centre of his being. Suddenly all his resentment of her over the years came together in a single, overpowering wave. He would punish her.
Besides, if he gave way now, if he acknowledged the child which might not be his, then she had won. Yes: her final triumph over him. She would laugh to all eternity and he, the bearer of the ancient, noble tamga of the trident, would lay it down in the dust at her cursed feet. Not only he, but all his ancestors. At this thought, another wave of rage went through him.
And what had the Tsar told him? What had he said, with such meaning?
‘You can have other sons.’ Of course, that was it. Other sons, with another wife, to inherit. As for this boy… whoever his father was, let him suffer – for that way, infallibly, he would hurt her.
He would punish her, the child, even himself. That, he now saw, in this deep, dark night – that was what he wanted.
‘The child is not mine,’ he said.
Ivan said not a word. Taking his staff in his right hand, holding the infant, who now began to cry, in his other, pressed against his dark, flowing beard, he turned and began to walk, with the same tap, tap of his staff, towards the gate.
Boris, uncertain what to do, followed at a distance behind.
What was happening? Only gradually, in her confusion and fright, had Elena understood what was being said. Now, shivering in the snow, she stared after them in horror.
‘Feodor!’ Her cry ran round the icy market place. ‘Fedya!’
Slipping in her felt shoes, almost falling, she threw herself wildly after them.
‘What are you doing?’
Neither man looked round.
She came up with Boris, seized him, but he pushed her aside so that she fell.
And now Tsar Ivan reached the gateway where the frightened keeper, his hand on his heart, was bowing low in mortal fear.
Ivan pointed to the door to the tower.
‘Open it.’
Still bearing the child, he went inside. Slowly he began to mount the steps.
They were barring her way. Her husband and the foolish gatekeeper: they were barring her way at the foot of the tower.
She understood now: instinctively, she understood them, and the terrors that lay in the dark labyrinths of their minds.
Forgetting everything, she clawed at the two men, fought them like an animal and, with a sudden rush, burst past them, slamming the heavy door behind her and shooting the bolt.
She ran up the wooden stairs.
She could hear him now, somewhere in the darkness above her: the creak of his footfall on the stairs, the tap, tap of his iron staff on every second step. He was high above.
Desperately, her heart sinking, she ran up after him. She could hear her baby crying.
‘Gospodi Pomily: Lord have mercy.’ The words came involuntarily on her breath. Still he was high above her, so high.
It was halfway up, at the point where the tower steps came out on to the battlement that ran along the wall, that she realized she could hear nothing from above.
Ivan was already up there, in the high chamber in the tent roof where the look-out windows faced over the endless plain. She stared up at the tower that rose sheer, harsh and silent above her, and whose wooden roof made a dark, triangular shadow across the night sky. For an instant, she was uncertain what to do.
And then she heard it, her child’s cry, high in that great roof above; and looking up she suddenly saw a pair of hands hold out a small white form which then, as she herself cried out with a cry, she thought, that must have reached the stars, they tossed, like a piece of jetsam, out into the night.
‘Fedya!’
She threw herself against the battlements, reaching out, in a futile gesture, into the blackness, as the small white form, shocked into silence, fell past her into the deep shadows beneath where she heard its faint thud upon the ice.
At dawn the Tsar left. Before doing so he insisted that he receive the traditional blessing from the frightened abbot.
He added two sleds to his little cortège: one contained a substantial quantity of the monastery’s coin and plate; the other contained the bell which Boris’s family had given the monks in former times, and which he intended to melt down for the extra cannon he was making.
Soon afterwards, word came that the Crimean Tatars were indeed approaching the Russian lands. The Tsar, giving credence once more to the belief that he was a physical coward, absented himself in the north. The environs of Moscow were ravaged.
It was two weeks after the death of her child that Elena discovered, to her astonishment, that she was pregnant. The father of the child in her womb, as it had been before, was Boris.