Nikita was finished; his career was over. What should he do now? Above all, how could he advance the family interests – what should be done about Procopy?
He was a pleasant youth. He looked remarkably like his father, with the same broad forehead and black hair; he was somewhat given to enthusiasms – perhaps too much so. But his excitement was infectious and gave him great charm. It would be tragic if the cloud over the family should prevent him having a fine career.
To Nikita’s great surprise, it was Eudokia who supplied the answer. ‘We’ll get nothing from Princess Sophia,’ she argued. ‘So our only hope is to gamble on the next reign. Let Procopy go and serve the boy. Let him serve young Peter.’
Peter? Who knew anything about the boy? Would he ever be allowed to come to power by Sophia and the scheming Miloslavskys?
‘He’s our only chance,’ Eudokia repeated. ‘Just leave the whole business to me.’ And rather to Nikita’s surprise, it was not long before she was summoned to see the boy Tsar’s mother, and returned with an invitation for Nikita to pay young Peter a visit.
He was to go, not to the Kremlin, but to a little village just outside the capital, called Preobrazhenskoe.
It was two months later, as the leaves were beginning to fall, that Nikita Bobrov and Eudokia came to Russka.
Procopy had been successfully placed in Peter’s household. No one wanted Nikita in Moscow. So he had decided to visit his estates.
He found his house in the town needed repair, and sent for men at once. He visited the monastery and gave the monks some more money to say masses for his father. He carefully inspected Dirty Place. And Eudokia, as was her way in the country, took care to inspect everything too. It was in this way that she discovered, as she put it, ‘just the man’ to undertake the more elaborate carpentry needed in the house.
‘He’s an icon painter,’ she explained, ‘but a wonderful carpenter too. You must meet him, Nikita. His name is Daniel. His wife’s a treasure too.’
Nikita met them. The fellow was huge; the woman of no interest. Yet Eudokia was always talking to them. Indeed, after a couple of weeks, she seemed to think the sun shone out of their eyes. Personally, he couldn’t think what she saw in them.
Silence – some believe – gives a man power. So it seemed to be with Daniel. For though he said little, and asked for no consideration at all, the people of Russka looked up to him.
Not that they knew him. Even now, after seven years, he was still a mystery. Yet, like some huge old oak tree in the forest, his whole presence suggested permanence, and a comforting stability which seemed to come from the earth itself.
He even looked like a tree, his wife thought fondly. In the winter months, he would wrap himself in a thick, dark gown that reached to his ankles and which looked like a monk’s habit. On his head he would wear a high, conical cloth hat, trimmed with fur so that his wife, glancing up at the old watchtower with its high, tent roof, would say: ‘Why do we need a watchtower with my husband here?’
At other times, emerging sedately from the swirling snow, he would look like some ancient winter god, coming from the endless greyness of the forest.
In his presence she always had a sense of perfect peace. She knew him as well as it is possible to know another being; she knew that, at the core of this mighty oak, resided a man of huge wisdom. When they slept together she experienced frequently, not only that oceanic feeling within herself but also the sense that, like all truly simple people, he possessed a life without end.
Yet she knew nothing of his past. She knew only that, for some reason he would never explain, he had not been married before; and that, thanks be to God, he had changed his mind.
She also knew that sometimes, in private, Daniel was deeply troubled.
He had not planned to marry when he came to Russka. I am too unworthy, he told himself. How can I ask another to share my life when I am confused and so steeped in sin? Nor would he have stayed, if it had not been for Silas.
It was not only that Silas made the sign of the cross with two fingers. The priest seemed instinctively to understand his troubled soul. ‘Remember,’ he would quietly admonish him, ‘we are here to suffer; but we are forbidden to despair. If you are troubled by the world, still more are you called to rejoice in the Risen Lord.’
And gradually, in the little wooden church, as he looked around at the simple villagers and as he felt that intense, emotional warmth which is the hallmark of the Russian Church, Daniel found, for the first time in years, that he had no further urge to move on. For wherever I wander, it can only be the same, he considered. What else could there be, after all, but the warmth of the little village community, huddled together, naked before the Lord, in the endless Russian plain?
It was one Sunday after he had been there two years that old Silas had quietly come up to him and said: ‘It is time, I think, that you married.’
Greatly as he revered the priest, he had wanted to contradict him. ‘I am too old – I’m over fifty,’ he protested. ‘And I am unworthy.’
But Silas had been firm. ‘Not so. It is not for you to decide you are unworthy.’
‘But… I had not thought. Whom should I marry? And who would have me?’
Silas had smiled. ‘If, as I believe, it is the Lord’s will, you will know.’ And seeing Daniel for once look utterly confused, he had continued: ‘You should marry one who is beautiful – not unto men, but unto God. You should marry one by whom God is rightly praised.’ He smiled again. ‘You will be guided.’
That week, and the next, Daniel had considered the matter. He felt uncertain, yet also a little excited. He thought of all the women in Russka and Dirty Place, but came to no conclusion.
It was on the third Sunday, as he stood in the little wooden church at Dirty Place, that he found his attention caught by one person in particular. Why had his head slowly turned that way? Why, because she was singing, of course: she was singing with a voice of extraordinary beauty. And then, looking at her poor, plain face with its unsightly wart – a pale face that would have been almost ugly but for the lovely expression of rapt, religious attention that it wore – he saw what the priest had meant.
He spoke to her uncle and her old grandmother immediately after the service.
And so it was that, to old Elena’s astonishment, and at the unheard of age of twenty-five, Arina was married to Daniel.
On her wedding day, Elena solemnly gave her granddaughter a golden bracelet set with a large amethyst. She did not say where it came from. Then she, with all the rest of the family, escorted Arina to Daniel’s little house in Russka.
Both husband and wife had been astonished at their own happiness. They were each of them so surprised to be married at all; neither had any vanity; they could only try, rather humbly, to give happiness to the other, and as a result their love progressed with extraordinary speed.
For Daniel, the sight of this plain woman, who had never dared to hope for love, moved him profoundly. The natural tenderness which his feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness had always held back, now suddenly found expression. There was nothing to prevent it: the priest had told him it was his duty to love.
He was tender, and determined to succeed. He studied her, observing her secret doubts and need for reassurance until, with a sense of delight, he saw that like a tree after winter she was quivering into life.
Like many Russians, they called each other not by their first names but in the ancient manner, by their patronymics. At first, this had led to a small discussion. ‘For,’ as Arina confessed with a blush, ‘my real father was a Cossack and I do not know his name; but my supposed father was called Ivan.’ His father, he had told her, was called Peter; and so, since the full form of patronymic was now in general use, he was, to her, always Petrovich; while she was Ivanovna.