Which was why she had sent the message to her parents.
It had been quite easy. Anna had taken the message, and given it to a merchant travelling to Vladimir. He in turn had given it to a friend of his who was going to Moscow. The two women had not even needed to tell Stephen about this arrangement. The message itself was quite simple: Elena had not complained of being unhappy, but just let them know that she was by herself. Could they not send her someone – she had suggested a certain poor female relation – for company?
So it was with a cry, first of joy, and then astonishment, that she saw on the grey February day of Lev’s visit, not one but two sleds draw up by the house and realized that they contained not her poor relation, but her mother and sister!
They stayed a week.
It was not that they behaved unkindly. Elena’s mother was a tall, imposing woman, but she treated Boris with a friendly politeness; her sister, a stout married woman with children of her own, was full of laughter, seemed delighted with everything she saw and paid two visits to the monastery, making flattering remarks about its church, the icon by Rublev, and the other benefactions from his family, each time.
Of course, there were the extra expenses of providing wine for them, and extra fodder for six horses. A week of entertaining them, and Boris knew that his loan from Lev the merchant would not be quite enough. But even that was not so bad.
It was that he felt excluded.
On the simplest level, Elena insisted on sleeping beside her sister, while her mother occupied the other upstairs room and Boris slept downstairs on the big stove. The two sisters seemed to find this a great joke, and he could hear them chattering half the night. He could, he supposed, have forbidden this, but it seemed pointless. If she prefers her sister’s company to mine, he thought gloomily, let them chatter away all night.
But it was the daytime that was worse. The three women were always together, talking in whispers upstairs. He supposed they were talking about him.
Boris’s ideas about women were similar to those of many men at that time. There were many essays by Byzantine and Russian authors in circulation amongst those who could read, which testified to woman’s inferior nature. All Boris knew came from people under these influences, and from his father during his long widowhood.
He knew that women were unclean. Indeed, the Church only allowed older widows to bake the Communion bread, not wishing younger, profane female hands to contaminate the loaves. Boris always washed himself carefully after making love to his wife and even avoided her presence as much as possible when her time came each month.
But above all, women were strangers to him. He might have his little adventures from time to time, like the girl at Nizhni Novgorod, but when he came upon women as a group, he felt a certain awkwardness.
What were these women doing here in Russka? Why had they come? When he had politely asked them, Elena’s sister had answered gaily that they had come to look at the bride and at her husband’s estate and that they would be gone ‘in the twinkling of an eye’.
‘Did you ask them to come?’ he asked Elena, on one of the few occasions he could catch her alone.
‘No,’ she answered. ‘I did not.’ It was, after all, the truth. But he noticed a slight awkwardness about her when she said it. She is not mine, he thought. She is theirs.
At last they left. As they were leaving Elena’s mother, thanking him kindly for his hospitality, said pointedly: ‘We look forward to seeing you soon in Moscow, Boris Davidov. My husband and also his mother await you anxiously.’
It was a clear enough message – a promise of possible help from Dimitri together with a suggestion that the old lady would consider it disrespectful if he did not present himself before her soon. He smiled wanly. Their visit had cost him almost an entire rouble. If this was any hint of what married life in Moscow might cost, he would take his time before returning.
But what had these untrustworthy women been up to while they were eating him out of house and home? What had they done to his wife?
At first, all seemed to be well. Once again, he joined her at nights, and their lovemaking was passionate. His hopes rose.
It was two weeks later that he happened to suffer a change of mood. There was good reason for it. He had discovered certain deficiencies in the farm equipment and in the grain stores that had apparently escaped the steward. At the same time, one of the Tatar slaves had sickened and suddenly died. What little hired labour there was in the area was all contracted to the monastery. So he would either have to buy another slave or farm less land that year. He could see that a second loan from Lev the merchant was going to be needed. Whichever way he turned, it seemed that all his efforts were being thwarted.
‘You’ll work something out,’ Elena told him.
‘Perhaps,’ he had replied gloomily. And he had gone to the window to be alone with his thoughts.
It was a few hours later that she had come to talk to him.
‘You worry too much, Boris,’ she had begun. ‘It’s not so serious.’
‘That’s for me to judge,’ he told her quietly.
‘But look at your gloomy face,’ she went on. There was something in the way she said this, something faintly mocking as though she were trying to laugh him out of his mood. Where did she get this new boldness from? Those women, no doubt. He glowered.
He was perfectly right, Elena had several times asked her mother and sister what they thought of Boris, and it was her sister who had assured her: ‘When my husband gets moody, I let him see it doesn’t bother me. I just go on cheerfully and laugh him out of it. He always comes round.’
She was a busy young woman, rather pleased with her role as older adviser. It did not occur to her to notice that Boris and her own husband were entirely different.
And so now, when Elena made clear to Boris that she did not take his mood seriously, when she continued, a little smugly, to look cheerful in his presence, it made him think only: So, they have taught her to despise me.
He had been brooding angrily about this for several hours when she made her greatest mistake. It was only a casual remark, but it could hardly have been worse timed.
‘Ah, Boris,’ she said, ‘it’s foolish to be so downhearted.’
Foolish! Was his own wife now calling him a fool? In a sudden flash of frustrated rage, he leaped to his feet, his fists clenched.
‘I’ll teach you to smile and laugh at me when I am worried,’ he roared.
And as he took a step towards her he hardly knew what he might do, when a hammering on the door, followed by the sudden entrance of Stephen the priest, distracted him.
The priest, looking deeply concerned, hardly noticed Elena, and before even crossing himself before the icons, delivered a message that drove everything else from Boris’s mind.
‘The Tsar is dying.’
Whichever way Mikhail the peasant looked, he could see only trouble.
Young lord Boris was away in Moscow with his wife, though he paid brief visits from time to time. But no doubt he would return for another protracted stay before long, and who knew what he would think of doing next?
The new barshchina was a heavy burden. In addition to this service and some small payments to Boris, he also had to pay the state taxes, which usually cost him about a quarter of his grain crop. It was hard to make ends meet. His wife wove bright, cheerful cloths decorated with red bird designs, which she sold in the Russka market. That helped. There were small ways of cutting corners too: he was allowed to pick up any dead timber in the landlord’s woods and like everyone else, he ringed a tree here and there to kill it. But there was no money left over at the year’s end and he had only enough grain of his own stored to get him through one winter after a bad harvest. Those were his total reserves.