Then there was the problem of Daniel the monk. More than once Daniel had hinted to him that if his work on the estate was poorly done – if, to put it bluntly, he discreetly sabotaged Boris’s efforts – it would be no bad thing.
But in the first place, he didn’t care to do it, and secondly, if the steward caught him, the consequences could be serious.
‘We could leave,’ his wife reminded him. ‘We could leave this very autumn.’
He was considering it. But there was nothing he could do yet.
The laws that now regulated when a peasant could leave his lord had been drawn up by Ivan the Great fifty years before, and renewed by his grandson the present Tsar.
No longer could a peasant go at any time, but only at certain dates stipulated by his master – the most common of which was a two-week period centred on the autumn St George’s Day: November 25. There was logic to this – the harvest was all in by then – but it was also the bleakest time in the year for the peasant to travel. There were conditions, of course: heavy exit fees had to be paid. But all the same, once he had given notice and paid his dues, the peasant and his family were free to go, to put on their Sunday best and present themselves to a new master. Whence came the ironic Russian expression for a fruitless enterprise: ‘All dressed up for St George’s Day, with nowhere to go.’
Yet here was Mikhail’s dilemma. Even if he could ever afford to leave, where should he go to?
So much of the land now was pomestie – service estates. They were small, and the men who held them often bled their peasants dry and neglected the land which was only theirs conditionally. At least an old votchina owner like Boris had more care for the place. Alternatively, there were the free lands up in the north and east – but who knew what life might be in those distant hamlets beyond the Volga?
Or there was the Church. ‘If the monastery doesn’t get the estate, we could always go and take a tenancy on the lands they have,’ his wife suggested. Yet he wondered, would he be so much better off? He had heard of other monasteries raising rents and increasing the barshchina. ‘Let’s wait a bit and see,’ he said.
His wife would wait patiently. He knew that. She was a stout, heavy-legged creature who always made a point of glaring at any stranger; yet behind this rather harsh façade was a gentle soul who even felt sorry for Boris and his young wife who were oppressing them.
‘He’ll be dead or ruined in five years,’ she prophesied. ‘But we’ll still be here, I dare say.’
Mikhail was not so sure about his two sons though. The elder, Ivanko, was a stolid young fellow of ten with a fine singing voice, who reminded him of himself. But Karp, his little boy, was an enigma to him. He was only seven, a dark, sinewy, athletic little creature who already had a mind that was entirely his own.
‘He’s only seven, and yet I can’t do anything with him,’ he would confess with puzzled wonder. ‘Where does he get it from, the little Mordvinian? Even if I beat him, he does whatever he wants.’
There was no place for a free spirit like that on the estate at Dirty Place. There wasn’t room. As Mikhail the peasant looked about him, and did not know what to do next, he decided to consult his cousin Stephen the priest.
Boris gazed at the city of Moscow from the Sparrow Hills above. The message from Stephen the priest had said that he would call upon him that evening. There was plenty of time before he need ride down. Therefore he gazed, with neither bitterness nor, he supposed, any other strong emotion at the great citadel spread out below.
Moscow the centre: Moscow the mighty heart. On that warm September day, even the chattering birds in the trees seemed hushed.
The summer had been slow, and silent, and large, as only Russian summers can be; it had browned the whispering barley in the fields all around; it had made the silver birches gleam until they seemed as white as molten ash. Around Moscow, in high summer, the leaves of the trees – the aspen, the birch, even the oaks – were so light, so delicate, that their tiny shivering in the breeze rendered them translucent, so startlingly green that they might have been so many emeralds and opals glittering in the sun that danced through them. Only in Russia, surely, were the leaves able to say in this manner: See, we dance in this fire, infinitely fragile, infinitely strong, with no regrets at the constant message of this huge blue sky, which tells us every day that we must die.
Now, as autumn approached, the trees, and the heavy-set city itself were left with a light covering of the finest dust as, like a silent shining cloud that has hovered half a lifetime, summer now began to depart, drifting away into that huge, ever present, ever receding blue sky.
Over the thick walls of Moscow, over the huge Kremlin whose long battlements frowned above the river, everything was quiet. And who would have guessed that only months before, within those walls, death and treachery had ruled?
Thick-walled city of treachery; darkness within the huge heart of the great Russian plain.
They had betrayed the Tsar. No one was talking, but everybody knew. There was a watchfulness, a fear, in every street, at every gathering. Boris saw it in the way Dimitri Ivanov stroked his beard, or passed his hand over his bald head, or occasionally winked his rather bloodshot eyes.
He understood. They had wanted the Tsar dead: and now he was alive.
It had been close. In March, struck down with what was probably pneumonia, Ivan had been dying, almost unable to speak. On his deathbed, he had begged the princes and boyars to accept his baby son. But most had been unwilling.
‘Then we shall have another regency, run by the mother’s family, those damned Zakharins,’ they argued.
What was the alternative? Strictly speaking there was, on the outer fringes of the court, the harmless but pathetic figure of the Tsar’s younger brother – a weak-headed creature, seldom seen. Even when the boyars remembered his existence, he was generally dismissed again as unfit. But what about the Tsar’s cousin Vladimir? Of all the many princes, none was more closely related to the reigning monarch and he was a man of some experience. Here was a better candidate than this baby boy.
Over the dying man, they argued. Even Ivan’s most trusted friends, the close councillors he had made himself, were skulking in corners, whispering. They were all betraying him as he watched and listened, scarcely able to speak. And what would happen to Muscovy after he was gone? Anarchy, as they fought each other for power, these cursed, treacherous magnates.
But then he had recovered. The veil, having been lifted, descended once again. His courtiers bowed before him and greeted him with a smile. The subject of his cousin Vladimir’s succession was not spoken of, as though it had never been. And Tsar Ivan said nothing.
Yet all around the court, there was an air of gloom. In May, Ivan had taken his family to the far north, to give thanks for his life at the very monastery where his own mother had gone when she was pregnant with him. It was a long way: far, far into the forests towards the Arctic emptiness. And there, in a distant river, his nurse had accidentally dropped Ivan and Anastasia’s baby son who had died in a few moments.
Over the warm, dusty citadel that summer, the sun had hung, like a silent companion to the dry, parching sadness within its massive walls. In the north-west, at Pskov, there was plague. In the east, at Kazan, the troubles with the conquered tribesmen were getting worse.
And for Boris, too, these long months had been touched by a kind of sadness.
He and Elena had hurried back to Moscow in March and taken up their modest quarters in the little house in the White Town.