‘My enemies,’ he whispered. ‘They’re all cousins.’ The four men looked harmless enough to her. ‘Beware especially of the priest,’ he added.
Boris’s fear of the priest was founded upon a single fact: that Stephen could read. He himself could make out a few words. There were many nobles at court, he knew, who read; and the monks and priests in the great monasteries and churches read and wrote in their own, rather stylized, church language. But what was this parish priest, in a little village, doing with books? To Boris it seemed foreign and suspicious. Catholics, or those strange German Protestants who traded in Moscow, probably read books. Worse yet – so did Jews.
For there was always the Jewish danger: Boris knew about that. By this, however, he did not mean the Jewish faith as such, nor Jewish people. He meant the Christian heretics known as Judaizers.
They were a strange group. They had appeared rather briefly in the Orthodox Church the previous century and been rooted out in the reign of Ivan the Great. Some of them, like the Jews, considered Christ a prophet rather than the Messiah. But even at the time the exact nature of the heresy had been confused. What was clear though, to succeeding generations of faithful Russians like Boris, was that these people relied on logic, subtle arguments and books – and were therefore not to be trusted.
Boris knew that Daniel the monk was after his land: that he could understand. But Stephen – who knew what he might be thinking?
The little group greeted the new arrivals politely. They smiled respectfully at Elena. Then the sled moved on towards the little house, just past the church at the far end of the square, where the steward, his wife, and the servant girls would be waiting for them.
Elena smiled, trying to make her husband happy, but she felt uneasy.
Boris inspected the estate at Dirty Place the next morning.
The old steward conducted him round. He had been there since Boris was a child and was not a bad fellow. Small, quiet, close-knit, his thick hair was all grey now and the lines on his brow were so deep that it looked as if someone had scored them there with half a dozen blows from an axe. He was honest, so far as Boris knew.
‘It’s all in good order, just as your father left it,’ he remarked.
Boris looked around thoughtfully.
In certain ways he was lucky. When the Tsar’s land assessors, after Ivan’s recent tax reforms, had visited Russka, they had carefully inspected the Bobrov estate. It contained a little over three hundred chetverts, or some four hundred and ten acres of land.
The Bobrovs had been lucky on two counts. Firstly, the assessors had kindly decided that some of the land was low quality, which lessened the taxes. And secondly, the area of the estate was just a little larger than their standard measurements allowed for.
For the Russian land assessors could not compute fractions. Certain ones they knew: a half, an eighth, even a thirty-second; a third, a twelfth, a twenty-fourth. But they could not express, for instance, a tenth; nor could they add or subtract fractions with different divisors. So when they discovered that the good land at Dirty Place consisted of almost two hundred and fifty-four chetverts, which came in tax terms to a quarter of a plough plus another fifteenth, they contented themselves with a quarter plus a sixteenth – the nearest fraction they knew – thus leaving over four acres free of tax.
Thus, as they so often did, the Russians made ingenious accommodations where their expertise failed them.
Compared to many of those to whom the Tsar had granted the service, pomestie, estates, Boris was not badly off. Most of these had only half what he had. The present income from the estate however was ten roubles a year. To go on campaign cost him seven roubles for himself and his horses; his armour and equipment he already owned. He owed four roubles a year in taxes though, and he had some modest debts in Russka, including one to Lev the merchant. As things stood, therefore, he would slip slowly into debt over a few years unless the Tsar did something for him.
Yet he was not discouraged. In time, he was determined to win Ivan’s favour: and who knew what wealth that might bring him? As for the present…
‘I think we can double the income from the estate,’ he announced to the steward. ‘Don’t you?’ And when the old man hesitated, Boris merely snapped: ‘You know very well we can.’
Which was exactly what poor Mikhail the peasant had feared.
There were two kinds of payment that a peasant could make to his lord. He could pay rent, in money or kind; this was termed obrok; or he could work his lord’s land: this was boyar-service, called barshchina. Usually peasants gave a combination of both.
The peasants at Dirty Place worked only one or two days on the land which Boris retained in his own hands – the demesne. In addition, they paid him obrok for the land they held. During the last twenty years, the estate had lost three tenants: one had left for another lord; one had died without heirs and one had been sent away. They had not been replaced and thus an extra hundred acres of good land had been retained by Boris’s father. And while rents had been increased several times, they had not quite kept up with the steady rise in prices over recent decades.
Mikhail paid twenty-four bushels of rye, the same of oats, a cheese, fifty eggs, eight dengi of money and a wagonload of firewood. He also had to work nearly three acres of Boris’s land, which took him rather under one day a week. His agreement with Boris did not stipulate how his obligations were to be organized. If Boris wanted to change them, he could. And the price of grain was rising.
‘So,’ Boris remarked cheerfully, ‘we can reduce the peasant’s obrok and increase their banhchina.’
The grain he could produce on the spare land, if the peasants worked it two or three days a week, would be worth far more than the rents they currently paid. He would gain hugely. The peasants, of course, would lose.
‘We’ll start with two days right away,’ he said.
With the extra work from the peasants, and the two Tatar slaves, things would soon begin to look up.
It was two months later that Lev the merchant, upon Boris’s request, paid a respectful visit to his house. He knew the reason.
The sky was grey, the street a greyish-brown. Only the snow that rimmed the wooden fences gave a pale reminder that not all the world was dreary.
It surprised Lev that the young man and his bride had not already returned to Moscow. He supposed it must be dull for them here. Not that Boris had been idle in the country: he had carried out a thorough review of everything the estate possessed.
The merchant’s poor cousin Mikhail had lamented to him: ‘His father was never like this. He seems to miss nothing. He’s a Tatar like you, Lev.’
Though the merchant sympathized with his cousin, he admired Boris for this. Perhaps he’ll surprise them all and keep his estate yet, he thought with wry amusement.
Not that he cared. As he walked along the street, Lev knew very well where he stood in all these intrigues. He had no deep ties to any of the parties, nor did he intend to have. He was a survivor. The times were good for merchants like himself. And with this energetic young Tsar, who knew what new opportunities might open up? One had only to look at the Stroganovs up in the north, for instance, a family descended from peasants just as he was, yet who had already built themselves a huge merchant empire and, it was said, had the ear of the Tsar himself. They were people to watch and emulate.
And the way to survive was to keep on good terms with everyone. First, in Russka, that meant the monastery who owned the place. But even there one had to be careful. For if there was one part of the Church’s possessions that the Tsars in Moscow coveted, it was these valuable little towns; and sometimes the government found excuses for taking them over. If ever that happened, the young lord of Dirty Place, who served the Tsar, might be a figure of importance. You never knew.