Now she was wandering about by the huts, hardly knowing where she was.
‘Where is Daniel?’ Andrei called out.
‘Inside,’ they replied. ‘What do you want with him? Who are you?’
And Andrei was just wondering what to reply when another cry rang out, this time from the roof.
‘The troops! I see them!’
They had arrived.
It was now that Andrei looked up and saw a huge figure coming down the ladder from the other window.
This must be Danieclass="underline" there could be no mistaking him, from Nikita Bobrov’s description. And from the moment he reached the ground it was obvious that, whatever his uplifted thoughts a few minutes before, he was now in a furious temper.
‘Get up the ladders,’ he roared at the people who had dared to come down. ‘Get up at once, you fools. It’s probably a trap.’ With a furious glance towards the two Cossacks he rushed to the entrance of the undercroft, moving with astonishing speed.
‘Light the fire!’ he bellowed. ‘The troops are here. Hurry!’
The people were running up the ladders again. Daniel, satisfied that the fires were now lit, was ordering the men from the undercroft up the ladder by the front of the church.
‘Up,’ he shouted. ‘Up and bar the door.’
Already, Andrei could hear a shout from near the village gate. The troops were entering.
He looked at Pavlo.
‘Better take no chances,’ he murmured. And urging his horse forward towards the church, he drew his sword.
The flames were already licking up the side of the building. From the undercroft, smoke was pouring. Andrei saw the ladders being drawn up into the building, heard the heavy doors slam and bars drop into place. One ladder remained, and Daniel was walking swiftly towards it as Andrei reached him.
As the huge fellow turned to look up at the Cossack with his raised sabre, there was not a trace of fear in his face: only anger and contempt. And his expression scarcely altered even when the Cossack stopped, open-mouthed, and cried out: ‘My God, it’s Ox!’
And it was as the two men stared at each other that a pale woman appeared above with a cry which, as he turned to look to where she was pointing, caused old Andrei to gasp once more, and wonder if he might not, after all, be in a dream.
Everything was swaying. But at last she knew where she must go. For now she saw the flames.
The flames. Like a huge candle. So comforting. She knew she wanted them.
She was walking towards them. The friendly flames, and the church, and her parents. Why did the church keep moving? She frowned. But still she pressed on.
Ah, she could hear their crackle. Feel their warmth now. If she could just find a ladder: that was what she needed.
‘Maryushka!’ Her mother’s voice. She smiled, went forward. Wasn’t that her father, with someone else by the ladder? It was. He would take her up the ladder. She cried out, tried to run towards him.
‘Maryushka!’ A man’s voice. But not her father’s. Why did the strange figure on the horse cry out her name? Why was the huge horse coming towards her?
Suddenly she felt herself scooped up, high. She was on the big horse with the stranger.
Yet why was he carrying her away from the flames, away into the darkness?
The destruction of the Bobrov estate at Dirty Place was complete.
That is to say, its principal assets – the peasants Bobrov owned – were completely destroyed.
When the troops arrived, all the ladders were drawn up. They just had time to see a large figure go in with one last furious backward glance as the door crashed shut.
They could do nothing about the fire. It had already seized hold.
And so there the matter rested. The abbot was satisfied. The authorities were content. Nikita Bobrov, when he was told about the matter, professed himself astonished and horrified.
Very wisely, Andrei had kept little Maryushka well out of sight. No one knew she had survived. But upon his return, he had given her to Nikita.
It was a hard decision. She was his granddaughter. There was no doubt about it. Quite apart from the astonishing likeness to her grandmother – which made Andrei feel almost as if fifty years of his life had not passed – she had begged them later that day to let her retrieve a last reminder of her mother. When the troops had gone, therefore, they came back to the deserted village and found, where she had left it, Arina’s bracelet. Andrei had recognized it at once as the one he had given old Elena. The troops had been so shocked by what they saw they had even forgotten to loot the place.
Yet though Andrei carefully explained his relationship to little Maryushka, and offered to take her with him, she was obdurate.
‘Let me stay with the Lady Eudokia,’ she begged.
Andrei understood; she was the girl’s only link with her vanished family, her only friend.
He did not tell her that Nikita Bobrov and his son had wanted to kill them all.
So it was, in the year 1703, that little Maryushka returned to Moscow to the house of Nikita Bobrov.
Her Cossack grandfather left a little money for her, so that, when she grew up, she could be free.
1710
A pale, chilly, damp spring day.
The ice broke late, up in St Petersburg. Sometimes the sounds of its cracking were like gunshots, they were so loud. Then would come a spring so bleak, in some years, that it was scarcely worth the having. After that a warm, dusty summer whose days, in those northern latitudes, were so long that even the three hours of so-called night were but a pale twilight in which, on the horizon, the aurora danced.
It had begun with the stout, grim Fortress of St Peter and St Paul. Then, at Peter’s direction, a town had begun to appear.
It was built on marshland. Hundreds of acres of wooden piles were sunk in the mud. Canals were dug. It was almost as if, in this desolate terrain, Peter had decided to construct a new and unnecessary Amsterdam.
But unlike the rich, reclaimed land of Holland, around this place stretched not fertile fields but poor, chilly marshland; not pasture for cattle, but wilderness from which wolves in search of food would come into the town itself.
This was the place to which, three years before, they had brought Maryushka.
She hated it.
Why did Peter decide to build his new city here? What prompted him to make it his capital?
In all probability, had the northern war been more successful, the capital of Russia might have been one of the great Baltic ports – in those very regions nowadays called Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.
But the northern wars had been slow and difficult and Peter, as usual, was in a hurry.
So it was that, against all advice, he insisted on building in this inhospitable place.
Right from the start, he had encouraged those close to him to take a house in the new town. In 1708 he had compelled all senior officials to live there. The next year he began forcibly to transfer whole villages of people to the rising city.
The fortress with its thick stone walls was built. A little nearer the sea, on the other side of the river, rose the Admiralty – a huge, fortified shipyard with a tall wooden spire with a weathervane at its centre. Numerous other brick and stone structures were rising on the marshy banks: here a church, there a palace or a warehouse. Already, in the fortress and elsewhere, the great Swiss-Italian architect Trezzini was hard at work. But for the most part, as yet, the city consisted of log and wattle huts. It was bleak.
There were only two problems: the marshy countryside around had few of the stout trees needed for building; nor were there any stone quarries. Everything had to be brought from other ports – sometimes a hundred miles away.