But if Procopy did not understand what he saw, it still made a profound impression on him, and he intuited much that he did not fully comprehend.
With Peter, he had been impressed by the ships and the huge ports. The cannon he had seen on board the ships had hugely excited him and, with Peter, too, he had been delighted to discover that one could obtain greatly superior gunpowder in the west.
But when his father had questioned him upon his return and asked him which country he admired most, he replied: ‘I think it was Holland.’
‘Why?’ Nikita enquired. ‘Is it their ships, their trade?’
Procopy shook his head.
‘No. It is…’ he searched for a word ‘… it is their order.’ And seeing Nikita look puzzled, he went on: ‘They have even tamed the sea. I saw great walls – not like our wooden walls across the steppe to keep out the Tatars, but huge walls of stone to keep out the sea itself. They call them dykes. They have taken land back from the sea and laid out fields – thousands of them, all so neatly arranged in squares and rectangles, within their dykes. You can scarcely credit that men could accomplish such a thing. And they have canals, straight as arrows, that stretch to the horizon.’
Nikita looked unimpressed.
‘We do not need such things in Russia. We have land without end.’
‘I know. But don’t you see,’ Procopy went on excitedly, ‘that’s not the point.’ It was something he had been brooding about ever since he first saw these wonders. ‘The point, Father, is that they have conquered nature. They have imposed a pattern, an order, on the land, even the sea itself.’ He paused and then added with a sudden flash of insight, ‘It’s as if, in their own hearts and minds, they ordered themselves.’
Nikita laughed.
‘I can’t see us Russians ordering ourselves. Can you?’
Procopy agreed.
‘No, I can’t. But we can impose order from above. That’s the only way to do it, as the Tsar himself has said to me many times.’
Nikita sighed.
‘So do you mean that you and the Tsar have come back meaning to impose your will upon Mother Nature?’ he asked with a wry smile. ‘My poor Procopy, nature in Russia is mightier than any Tsar. You cannot impose anything upon her. The land,’ he suggested, ‘is endless.’
But now it was Procopy’s turn to smile.
‘Wait until you’ve seen Tsar Peter try,’ he remarked drily.
If these comments depressed Nikita, because he thought them impractical, it was nothing to the effect they had on Eudokia.
‘God made nature,’ she warned him, ‘and if you seek to impose your order upon nature too, then I say that this is nothing but pride. You and your Tsar are evil.’
And to Procopy’s great sorrow, he found his mother estranged from him.
Strangely enough, all three parties to this argument were profoundly and equally Russian: Eudokia in her religious conservatism; Nikita in his fatalism; and perhaps most of all young Procopy in his optimism. For, having seen the outside world and its order, even if remaining unaware of its complex underpinnings, Procopy had assumed that, just as the villagers in Russia can build a house in a day, so with a strong leader and a titanic effort, a new order can be imposed from above. This belief is the perennial tragedy of Russia.
What, then, had the embassy really accomplished?
In fact, a great deal. Peter had wanted to study shipbuilding: he and others had done so quite thoroughly. He wanted new armaments, gunpowder that did not continually misfire, and knowledge of modern fighting methods, especially at sea. He obtained all of these. He also opened up new avenues for trade.
The Russians’ diplomacy failed. No one wanted to fight the Sultan of Turkey at that time. But if his drive to the warm seas of the south might be stalled, Peter had discovered in his travels that there could be other alliances he could make that would get him access to the other trade route he needed: the Baltic Sea in the north.
Above all, it was the long-term consequences of the embassy which were the most important. Men like cunning old Peter Tolstoy might not have learned a great deal about shipbuilding, as they had been told to do, but they came back with a wealth of observations, a knowledge of foreign languages, and some insight, at least, into European education and culture. These were the early Europeanized Russians, the group of which Sophia’s counsellor Golitsyn had been the forerunner. These were the men who, in the long run, would open Russia’s windows on the west.
Was Procopy Bobrov such a man? Not quite. But though he lacked the desire to educate himself profoundly, he had still taken in enough to see that his homeland was centuries out of date.
This had one sad consequence. For while her sense of religious propriety had separated Eudokia and her son, Procopy now found a subtler barrier between himself and his father. Nor could he help it.
For to Nikita, his son had become a stranger. It was not his western style of dress, nor his travels as such. But Nikita could sense, in that faint but unmistakable reserve in Procopy’s manner, by the distant look in his eye, that his son no longer warmed to the same things; he knew something his own people did not. Nikita had seen German and English officers look at their Russian troops that way.
He’s not really a Russian any more, he thought. And, hardest of all to bear for a man who had always thought himself more educated than his fellow nobles: He secretly despises me.
This, then, was the young man who had just walked into the courtyard, and at whom Daniel was staring in disbelief.
For Procopy was wearing a smart green uniform, close-fitting, with buttons down the front in the German manner. His legs were encased in breeches and stockings. And apart from a neat moustache, he was cleanshaven.
Of course, in the old Cossack days in the Ukraine, when men still called him Ox, Daniel had been used to cleanshaven men. But here in the north – that the son of Nikita Bobrov should do such a thing! – he could only stare in wonder.
Nikita, following his gaze, smiled a little apologetically.
‘The Tsar’s friends came back from their journey cleanshaven,’ he remarked.
‘The Tsar himself has shaved the beards of the boyars at court,’ Procopy reminded him. ‘He says he won’t tolerate people at his court looking so primitive. He told me so today.’
Primitive! Daniel winced at the word. He saw Eudokia start as if she had been slapped, and then look away from them. It was a calculated insult.
Yet Nikita Bobrov appeared to ignore this rudeness. It seemed he had something else on his mind. He turned to his son with a look of enquiry.
‘You came from Preobrazhenskoe?’
Procopy nodded.
‘Well?’ Nikita asked.
‘It’s decided. We have some confessions. We begin the executions tomorrow.’ He took his father by the arm. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you about it.’ And he led him into the house.
Only now did Eudokia turn to face Daniel and his little family again. He saw there were tears in her eyes.
‘Thank God,’ she cried softly. ‘Thank God that you have come.’
Only gradually did Daniel realize the full horror of what was going on. Only during the course of that winter did he come to understand why the Lady Eudokia had felt so in need of his presence. And he himself was not sure how he could comfort her.