While the English might be useful to the Tsar, he in turn could be very useful to them.
‘We sought a passage to Cathay by sea,’ Chancellor told Wilson, ‘yet it seems to me we can reach the east by land. Down the Volga, beyond the lands of the Tatars, lies the orient. Below the deserts lies Persia. With his protection, our merchants might reach such places after all.’
George Wilson soon decided that this strange, huge land was the best opportunity he would ever have to make his fortune. But he found it a disquieting place all the same.
It was not the violence, the crudity, or even the cruelty of the people. He cared nothing about any of these. It was their religion.
It was all-pervading. There seemed to be priests and monks everywhere. People crossed themselves for, it seemed to Wilson, no reason at all; and in every house there were icons to which people bowed.
‘’Tis like popery,’ he remarked, ‘only the idolatry of the Russians is even greater.’
Like most of his compatriots, George Wilson was a Protestant. He had been a boy when Henry VIII of England broke with the Pope in Rome. Now Henry’s son was on the throne, and all good Englishmen were supposed to be Protestant. This was a faith which suited Wilson very well, not from any profound religious conviction, for he had none, but rather because he had a rooted if secret dislike of all authority, and also because a certain harsh pride made him enjoy reading the tracts that attacked the abuses, and theology, of the old religion with fierce logic.
‘These Russians are fools,’ he concluded. But since he thought that of most people anyway, it did not greatly signify.
And when, in January, Chancellor told him that, after their return to England that spring, he intended to lead another expedition to Muscovy, and asked him if he wished to join it, Wilson insistently replied: ‘I do.’
He would make his fortune here. Besides, he had another reason in mind, too. The German merchant, also a Protestant, had an unmarried daughter, and no son. The girl was a little heavy, but handsome. A nice, plump girl, he thought.
He would return.
To Elena, it seemed that Boris had slowly grown another skin, on top of his own.
That, at least, was how she came to think of it.
Sometimes she had the impression that he was still moving about, rather uncomfortably, inside this carapace; that if she could find a way to break through, she would still find him within. At other times, it would be as if this new, ever thicker layer were stuck fast, glued on to his own skin and all of one piece with it. Then, even when he came to her intimately, it felt as if she had in her hands a strange animal with a thick hide, whose mind she did not know.
Not that, in the succeeding years, she saw him very often.
For three years the armies of Russia, led by Kurbsky and others, smashed the Tatar revolts around Kazan. They went further, across the eastern Volga into the land of the Nogays; even the distant Tatar Khan of West Siberia, beyond the Urals, acknowledged Ivan as his overlord. Twice, huge fleets went south down the mighty Volga, through the steppe to the desert lands of Astrakhan and took that city too.
Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan: how exotic Ivan’s new titles proclaimed him to be. Huge new chronicles were prepared, glorifying the Tsar and his family, and where necessary rewriting history so that the sacred mission of the Russian royal house should be clearly understood. All references that even hinted at former cooperation of the Russian princes with their Tatar overlords were removed.
It was now that, at one end of Moscow’s Red Square, the Metropolitan ordered the building of that fantastic collection of exotic towers apparently grafted together to make a new Russian life form. Unlike any other, the building later became famous in history as St Basil’s Cathedral.
Ivan would have liked, next, to defeat the mighty Khan of the Crimea as well; but for the present, that was too tough a nut to crack.
So it was that Tsar Ivan, trying to open the doors of his landlocked prison, turned northwards to threaten his neighbours – those rich Livonian ports he needed so much on the shores of the Baltic.
At first it seemed he might succeed.
No wonder, then, that Elena saw little of her husband. The life of the servitor was hard. Often there was little to eat. Blistering heat or tremendous cold: these were his lot. Before leaving for the north Boris had returned from Astrakhan with some modest plunder – a few roubles’ worth, that paid off some of his debts – and a hardened man.
His relationship with her father, never warm, now became distant. This was not a personal matter – indeed, Dimitri was pleased with his son-in-law’s career – it was a question of politics.
The trouble had begun when Boris had returned from Astrakhan. Beneath the new harsh exterior, Elena sensed a kind of elation in him. For while his armies had been subduing the steppe and desert by the Volga, Ivan and his inner counsellors had been pressing through another kind of victory at home: the reform of the realm.
Once again, in common with all the centralizing rulers of the era, it was the magnates and their clients that he was determined to crush. The old rewards for service, though they were not what they had once been, were curtailed. Instead of a boyar or serving prince being given a city to feed off, local men, chosen by the gentry and merchants, were to administer each locality. But most important of all, it was now decreed that all holders of estates – whether the service pomestie or the privately inherited votchina – must give the Tsar military service when summoned.
‘That will teach those lazy devils who is master,’ Boris grimly remarked in front of his father-in-law. ‘Do you know that half the estate holders in Tver were giving no service to anyone?’
‘Then tell me,’ Dimitri Ivanov asked acidly, ‘exactly what is the difference now between your estate, which you inherited, and a mere pomestie? Since the Tsar usually allows the son to carry on after the father on the service estates.’
Boris considered.
‘There’s a legal difference, technically; but in practice you’re right. There’s no difference. If you don’t serve, the Tsar will take your estate away.’
‘And you are happy with that?’
‘Yes. Why should I not want to serve the Tsar? Don’t you want to?’
It was a wicked question for he knew very well that his wife’s family held several estates and that, at present, none of them was actually serving.
Dimitri said nothing, but passed his hand over his bald head with obvious irritation.
‘If a man doesn’t want to serve the Tsar,’ Boris went on coolly, ‘I personally would have to conclude that he must be the Tsar’s enemy.’
‘You should conclude no such thing, young man,’ Dimitri thundered.
‘I am glad to hear it,’ Boris answered drily.
Elena’s mother had managed to separate the two men after that. But the damage had been done.
Nor was it just a dispute between two men. Elena knew very well that the bad feeling between her husband and her father represented a growing divide between those who were behind the reforming Tsar, and the members of the old ruling classes, great and small, who disliked the whole tone of his rule.