He would read the service to her. She would pray. At other times they would talk, though never of personal matters.
And this, had it been possible, would have been the courtship of two serious people, amidst the gathering storm of events which their own decency prevented them from fully anticipating.
What extraordinary good fortune it was, Daniel thought, that God had given him the gift of observing two things at once.
Had it not been so, he might have missed one or other of the highly significant though small events that took place in the market place on an early October afternoon that year.
The first concerned the English merchant, Wilson, who had arrived the evening before with Boris. After spending time with Lev the merchant, the two men had ridden off to Dirty Place, and the monk had not seen either of them again until he had chanced, when he was taking the little ferry across the river to the monastery, to see the Englishman coming along the path deep in conversation with Stephen.
He had waited, and then taken the ferry back again, so that he could follow them. What might they be up to?
In fact, they had met by chance – Wilson returning ahead of Boris to Russka, and Stephen going for a walk. The priest, curious to meet an Englishman, had plied him with questions and Wilson, who was a good judge of character, soon decided that this literate fellow was safe to talk to and told him what he wanted to hear.
It was not long before the subject turned to religion. Here Wilson was cautious, but the priest reassured him.
‘I know about you Protestants. There are people like the Trans Volga Elders who are a little like you in Russia. Our own Church needs reform too, though it’s unwise to say so at present.’
And it was after quite a long talk on the subject that Wilson had finally shown the priest one of his printed pamphlets.
Stephen was delighted.
‘Tell me what it says,’ he begged. And so, to the delight of the normally solemn priest, Wilson translated it as best he could.
The little tract was vituperative. It called the Catholic monks vipers, leeches, robbers. It said their monasteries were rich and vain, their ceremonies idolatrous, and much else besides.
‘It’s against the Catholics, of course,’ Wilson assured him, but the priest only laughed.
‘It applies to us, too,’ he said, and he made Wilson go over the sheet with him once again, memorizing it.
Before they reached the town, Wilson had wisely secreted it under his cloak again, but it was as they reached the far end of the market square, where the priest took his leave, that Wilson as a little gesture of friendship, put his hand into his cloak and slipped the piece of paper into Stephen’s hand.
What does it matter? he thought. They couldn’t understand a word of it even if they could read.
This was the gesture that Daniel saw.
And it was at the same moment that he noticed, at the other side of the market place, another tiny movement.
It was Karp, the son of that foolish fellow Mikhail the peasant who made it.
He and his bear had just done a few tricks to amuse some merchants who had come down from Vladimir to buy icons. They had thrown a few small coins on the ground, and Karp had just scooped them up and handed them to his father who was standing nearby.
That was all. Nothing more. The handing of the coins had taken place at the very same moment that the Englishman handed Stephen the piece of paper. Why should it have been significant?
Because – and here, in all its glory, was the near genius of the observant monk – because he had noticed the expression on the faces of Mikhail and his son.
He could not have put it into words. Was it a look of complicity? Perhaps, but more than that. It was something about the way Mikhail stood and looked about him: a sort of defiance. No, it was not just that. It was that the sturdy peasant had, just for an instant, taken on the character of his son. He had looked, thought Daniel, like a man who is free. Indefinable. Unmistakable.
And in a flash he guessed. They were hoarding money.
He stored both these pieces of information in his mind, and decided to learn more.
In November 1567, just after he had set out northwards across the winter snows, Tsar Ivan abruptly cancelled his new campaign against the Baltic and hurried back to Moscow. Boris returned with the rest of the army.
A new plot had been discovered. The conspirators were hoping to kill Ivan in the northern snows, with the connivance of the King of Poland. There was a list of names; and who knew how many more might be implicated in this business?
In December the Oprichniki went to work. With axes under their cloaks and a list of names in their hands, they rode about the streets of Moscow making house calls. Some were exiled. Some impaled.
At the end of the second week in December, a party of Oprichniki came to the house of the bald, stout nobleman Dimitri Ivanov. His son-in-law Boris was not one of them. They conducted him to a chamber in the armoury in the Kremlin. There they had prepared a huge iron pan, underneath which was a fire. In this they fried him.
His death was recorded briefly in a secret list prepared for the Tsar. In common with over three thousand others who died in the coming months, the names upon this list, since known as the Synodical, were consigned to oblivion and it was forbidden to mention them.
At the same time, all the monasteries in the land were instructed to send their chronicles to the Tsar for inspection. By this means, Ivan ensured that no records of events were kept for these terrible years.
Daniel the monk was confident, even cheerful.
Thank the Lord that a century and a half ago, the monks had made such a good job of writing the chronicle. There was little in it that could possibly embarrass the Tsar. Throughout, the references to the Tatars were offensive and the Moscow princes were treated as heroes in the struggle against them.
Five years ago, to celebrate Ivan’s victories over the Moslem Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, the monastery had added crescent moons under the crosses above the church domes in the monastery itself and in Russka, as symbols of the triumph of Christian armies over Islam.
Our loyalty cannot be questioned, he thought contentedly.
The new purge in Moscow had had a satisfactory side-effect for him. The old abbot had been so distressed by the whole business that he had been scarcely capable of conducting ordinary business, and the question of the Russka administration seemed entirely to have slipped his mind.
Besides, Daniel was more confident than before that he could defend his position there.
Once again therefore, in early spring, his mind turned to the old question: how could he enlarge the monastery’s estates?
Boris’s land, now that he was one of the Oprichniki, was of course out of the question. That left one other piece of land, a little to the north, that now belonged to the Tsar himself. Might Ivan be persuaded?
It was not a foolish idea. Despite his restrictions on the Church acquiring new land, Ivan himself had remained a generous donor.
‘He strikes down his enemies; then he gives the Church some more land, to save his soul,’ one of the monks had cynically remarked.
Might this latest purge in fact be a good time to approach him?
It was with this in mind that Daniel the monk went to the brother who had been keeping the chronicle, and set to work.
The document which they produced, and which, in the month of February, they persuaded the nervous abbot to sign, was a splendid concoction. It reminded the Tsar of the many privileges granted to the Church in the past, even under the Tatars. That some of these were Church forgeries Daniel himself did not know. It pointed out the loyalty of the monastery and the purity of its chronicles. And it begged for much-needed land. Written in the high ecclesiastical style it was long, bombastic, and somewhat ungrammatical.