When she could slip out undetected, she would even put on a simple peasant’s cloak and go with Daniel and his family to their secret church services. And Daniel permitted himself a smile when he remarked: ‘They’ll think you are my wife, and that Arina is my daughter, and Maryushka our granddaughter.’
She herself was amazed to discover what Daniel had managed to learn in his first week: that these services for Raskolniki were taking place in secret all over Moscow. Nearly always, in the capital, they were held in private houses rather than churches. There, sometimes in the room of a modest artisan, they would take out their icons, darkened with smoke and age, place them on the walls, and pray earnestly together, making the sign of the cross with two fingers.
But if Daniel brought Eudokia comfort, he found none for himself.
While the streltsy executions continued by day, Peter was still seen, by night, at the houses of his friends in the German quarter. With him, it was well known, was his mistress Anna, while his wife, despite the fact that she had given him a son, scarcely saw him at all. By late October, the executions temporarily stopped. Peter left the capital to go down to the River Don, where he was once again building a new fleet. The seven weeks of fasting that preceded Christmas began and for a time Moscow was quiet. But at Christmas, Peter was back. He and the Mock Synod paraded through Moscow and the German suburb on two hundred sleds in a wild effort at carol singing, which Daniel, then at prayer, fortunately missed.
With January and February came the traditional celebration of Epiphany and the Pre-Lent Carnival; the public executions also began again. On February 3, Peter insisted that all foreigners in the Moscow area attend to witness the execution of three hundred more of the streltsy who had wanted to murder them.
It was also at this time that Peter began in earnest his campaign to force his court into western clothes by personally cutting the long kaftans of the boyars at a feast, just as he had cut off their beards a few months before.
To complete his political and personal innovations, Peter now made Sophia formally take the veil as a nun; and sent his own wife who so bored him, despite her miserable protests, into a convent at Suzdal. Their son, whom Peter had not much bothered with, was now sent to his sister and given a German tutor.
It was not, however, until the carnival week just before the start of Lent that Daniel finally saw the horror of Peter’s Drunken Synod.
The revellers were on their way to the sumptuous house of Lefort; at their head, as usual, was Peter’s old tutor dressed as the Patriarch. Beside him went another, representing Bacchus, god of wine. He, too, wore a bishop’s mitre: but that was all he wore, since he was otherwise stark naked. Some of the party carried wine and mead, others huge dishes of the offensive, the ungodly tobacco weed, which they had lit. Others yet were swinging censers which Daniel realized were also smoking not with incense but tobacco. He had heard from young Procopy that the Tsar, when he was in England, had given Lord Carmarthen a monopoly to import the evil plant into Russia. Now here were the Tsar’s companions putting tobacco in church censers!
When, soon afterwards, he heard that the Tsar’s friend Lefort had suddenly died, he could only say: ‘It is God’s judgement.’
In April, as if as a further punishment from God, food shortages began in Moscow and prices soared.
Yet all these things, Daniel soon realized, were only the advance signals of the great evil that was to come.
So far, the Tsar’s attention had been directed only upon his own court and the streltsy. Now, in the months that followed, he was to turn his fearsome gaze upon his people. And Daniel was brought from shock and misery to despair.
It began one evening when Procopy strode into the courtyard and, seeing Daniel, casually remarked: ‘Well, Daniel, you’ll be shaving your beard off tomorrow.’ And seeing the carpenter’s look of amazement: ‘You haven’t heard? Yes, you’re going to look just like me. The Tsar is issuing a ukaz tomorrow morning.’
The ukaz: the edict. All Tsars had used them, but from Peter they would flow in a torrent. And the ukaz he issued in 1699 was devastating. All the people – not just the boyars, but simple men like Daniel, even peasants – were to shave their beards!
‘It’s all right,’ Procopy added with a grin, ‘you can pay a fine instead.’
The ukaz was very simple: all except priests must shave. Anyone who refused must pay a fine and wear a bronze medallion round his neck on a chain. The scale of fines was carefully calculated. For the enserfed peasants it was a modest half kopek. But for a free man, an artisan or even a coachman, it was a stiff thirty roubles; for a tradesman, a punishing sixty; for a noble like Bobrov, a hundred.
There was no way that Daniel could afford to pay.
Though he had been shocked by the sight of Procopy, the doings of the court nobles had always belonged in a world apart. This however was different. ‘I do not know how it is for nobles,’ he declared to Arina, ‘but for ordinary men there is no question – to shave one’s beard is a mortal sin. I cannot do this thing.’
‘You must not,’ Arina agreed, while little Maryushka gazed at him in astonishment. She could not imagine the revered figure of her father without his grey beard.
Within the Bobrov family the ukaz also created a storm.
‘Never,’ cried Eudokia. ‘The idea is unthinkable.’ And when Nikita muttered irritably about the expense, she stormed: ‘I’d rather give all that I have than allow such a thing.’
The next day, looking triumphant yet rather sheepish, Nikita suddenly appeared before her with only a moustache. She turned on her heel, and would not allow him near her for a month. And when he complained, she only replied coldly: ‘You can beat me, if you’re enough of a man, but you’ll get nothing else from me.’
Meanwhile, she secretly went and bought a bronze disc for Daniel, and insisted that he accept it from her. ‘At least we shall have someone who looks like a God-fearing man in the house,’ she said firmly.
And so the terrible year went on until, at its end, came the events which were, at last, to take Daniel to the edge of the abyss.
Procopy was cheerful. He was busy too. The streltsy had been utterly crushed and Peter’s power was unassailable.
His own position was good: the Tsar was his friend.
‘And if he trusts you,’ he told his father, ‘he’s the kindest fellow in the world.’
For it had to be admitted that, for all his brutality, Peter could be tolerant of human weakness.
‘He’ll forgive you almost anything as long as you never lie to him,’ Procopy said. ‘Once, when I was late on parade, he looked so angry I thought he was going to have me knouted, but when I told him I’d been drunk the night before and had only just woken up, he laughed and told me not to do it again.’
Above all, Procopy was cheerful because he knew that Peter was preparing for a great adventure – he was going to seize the Baltic ports.
It was a secret. The Swedes were strong and it would be necessary to take them by surprise. Brandenburg, Denmark, Saxony, all wanted to attack the Swedes and share out the rich Baltic lands of the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians amongst themselves. But Peter could not strike north until he was sure that he, in turn, would not be attacked by the Ottoman Turks in the south. All that year, therefore, he assured the Swedish envoys to Moscow that he was their friend, while his own envoy in Constantinople tried to conclude a satisfactory treaty with the Sultan.