He was a pleasant young man of about Andrei’s own age. Andrei now noticed that he had pale, rather ivory skin and a broad, handsome forehead crowned with thick, wavy black hair parted in the middle and brushed carefully back. Yet if this upper part of his face made Andrei think of a Polish nobleman, the rest seemed to derive from a quite different source. His high cheekbones and rather slanting eyes, despite the fact that they were blue, suggested a Turkish or Tatar ancestry. It was as though a high European face had been compressed in its middle section to produce a slightly squashed though quite agreeable effect.
He introduced himself as Nikita, son of Ivan, Bobrov. The name meant nothing to Andrei.
The two young men fell into an easy conversation. The clerk seemed eager to talk to this visitor from the south and it was not long before he warmly suggested: ‘Come to my lodgings today. We can talk better.’
It seemed an excellent chance to learn more about this great state which the Ukrainians were trying to join, and Andrei accepted willingly. He agreed to come that afternoon.
The lodgings of Nikita Bobrov were in the fashionable kitaygorod quarter, but they were modest, consisting of three rooms on the upper floor of a stout wooden house belonging to a merchant.
His host was not alone when Andrei arrived. Standing at one side of the main room was a middle-aged man in a heavy sheepskin. At the far end stood a plump woman with a younger one beside her, whose face Andrei could not quite see in the shadows.
The man in the sheepskin was of medium height. His bad-tempered face might once have been pale but now it was blotched; he had small dark eyes and his hair was parted in the middle and pulled tightly down his head so that it seemed to become one with his flowing beard. Everything about him, his body, his eyebrows, his entire character, appeared to be close-knit. He might have been a small merchant. And he was obviously as angry as he dared be.
Nikita briefly excused himself while he turned back to this man, whom he now addressed with an air of finality.
‘I can talk to you no more, Ivan,’ he said firmly. ‘My mind is made up. You see for yourself that Elena has hurt her leg and needs Maria to help her. She can’t even get to the market. You can’t object to your wife helping her mother. And even if you do, I’m ordering you, so there’s an end of it. You’re to leave now and return here after Easter with those missing rents.’
‘I should never have brought her,’ the fellow mumbled angrily.
‘That’s beside the point. And take care you bring those rents when you return,’ the young man added severely, ‘or I’ll have you thrashed.’
The man glowered in the direction of the two women, but reluctantly placed his hand on his heart and made a low bow to Nikita before going out. His heavy steps could be heard going down the stairs outside. Andrei thought he detected a stifled laugh from the younger of the two women, but a moment later they, too, bowed and vanished into the next room.
‘My steward,’ Nikita explained with a smile. ‘A difficult fellow.’ He indicated two benches by the window and they went over to them. ‘The fact is,’ he confessed, ‘I brought a widow from my village as housekeeper to save myself the expense of hiring servants in Moscow. Now,’ he added ruefully, ‘I have family quarrels on my hands. The penalty of being poor,’ he grinned. ‘Let’s talk of other things.’
Andrei soon discovered, rather to his surprise, that he and his host shared several things in common. As his face suggested, young Bobrov’s mother, who had come from Smolensk, was Polish and thanks to her he had early on been taught to read and write and scan a little Latin – in fact, a similar education to the one Andrei had got in Kiev. He even knew some Polish courtly tales. But while this degree of education was becoming more common in the Ukraine, it was still very rare in Russia and the young clerk had been delighted to discover someone his own age who shared these attainments.
As Andrei had hoped, his friend was happy to give him all the information he wanted about the politics of Moscow.
‘You came at a good time and you took your letters to the right people,’ Nikita assured him. ‘The Tsar and the boyar Morozov are your friends, and that’s important. The people hate Morozov because he has a silver-plated carriage and he put high taxes on bread and salt, but he’s powerful. His wife and the Tsar’s wife are sisters and their family, the Miloslavskys, control a lot of the court.’ He grinned. ‘Morozov even owns part of the big ironworks you saw at Tula.’
‘But we asked for the Tsar’s protection before, and nothing came of it,’ Andrei reminded him.
‘True, but things have changed. The first time you asked, the Tsar was younger and your letter arrived in the middle of a popular revolt here. Half the suburbs were in flames and Morozov nearly lost his life. Moscow wasn’t ready to take on a commitment that risked war with Poland. But we’re stronger now and the Tsar’s in control.’
‘What about the Church?’ Andrei asked, remembering Bogdan’s words.
‘The Church wants union. You know the Patriarch of Jerusalem himself came to Moscow to plead your cause. And we already value your Ukrainian scholars.’
Andrei knew that the Patriarch of Jerusalem had been in Kiev at the very time of Bogdan’s triumphal entry and that after this he had gone north. He also knew that a number of Ukrainian scholars had recently been set up in a house in the Sparrow Hills at Moscow’s edge. All this seemed to augur well.
‘But the greatest and most powerful friend you have is not even our master the Tsar,’ the young man solemnly told him. ‘It’s our new Moscow Patriarch.’ And now Andrei noticed that his host unconsciously dropped his voice a little in respect: ‘Patriarch Nikon.’
Andrei had noticed that although this new Patriarch had only been chosen the previous year, people already seemed to speak of him with a kind of awe.
‘They say,’ Nikita went on, ‘that he may be a new Philaret.’
This was a remarkable claim. For when, forty years before, the amiable Michael Romanov had been chosen by the Zemsky Sobor as the first Tsar of the new dynasty, it was not long before his father, the austere Patriarch Philaret, was virtually ruling the state for him. Could this new Patriarch, whom he knew to be of humble origins, really be so powerful?
‘Wait till you see him,’ Nikita said.
Nikon’s interest was simple, it appeared. He wanted to see Moscow recognized as the equal if not the highest of the five patriarchates of the Orthodox Church. The dignity of the Moscow Patriarchate had to be raised. They needed more saints. Only a year before, the body of Metropolitan Filip, whom Ivan the Terrible had murdered, had been ceremoniously brought back to Moscow to be venerated in the Kremlin church. He also knew that the Russian Church was backward, its texts corrupt and its scholarship inferior. He wanted to correct all this and, together with the Ukraine, make the ancient lands of Rus a mighty bulwark against the Catholic and other religions of the west.
‘He’s already started to reform the prayer book and the liturgy,’ Nikita explained. ‘It seems we’ve even been making the sign of the cross the wrong way.’
‘Is there any opposition?’ Andrei wondered.
‘Yes. A bit. There’s a small group amongst the senior zealots who don’t approve. They hate change.’ He laughed. ‘I got waylaid in the Kremlin not long ago by some fellow from the provinces called Avvakum – I ask you, what a name! – who went on about it for half an hour until I shut him up. But Nikon’s very powerful and he’ll make short work of any opposition. You can be sure of that. And then, my dear fellow, Moscow will truly be the third Rome,’ he added enthusiastically.