Elena had faith. She had faith that, after all, God would give her a son; she had faith that, one day, her husband would turn from his path. For a time, after her father’s disappearance, she had had faith that he, too, might be saved. But Boris, who had investigated the matter, informed her that he had been executed. He did not say how. It seemed to Elena that this event had shocked her husband.
Perhaps this, she hoped, would turn him back towards the paths of righteousness. So at least she prayed, though as yet in vain.
How to have a son? There was a remedy the village women used, that the priest’s wife had once told her about. It consisted of rubbing the body, and especially her intimate parts, with oil and honey.
‘They say it never fails,’ her friend had assured her.
And so now, while the man she truly loved gave her spiritual comfort, she prepared herself, as best she could, as a sacrifice for the husband whose darkening soul it was her duty to save.
The spring of 1569 brought cold weather and the promise of another poor harvest. From the Baltic came news that the enemy had snatched a fortress town. Everyone seemed depressed.
It was in early June that Daniel the monk had another talk with Boris.
By now the monk was worried. Things at Russka were looking bad. Not that he was entirely to blame. The events of recent years – the ever higher taxes for the northern war, the disruption of the Oprichnina and the land confiscations – had hurt the Russian economy. That, with the failed harvest, was causing a grim recession. The revenues from Russka were sharply down, and the old abbot seemed to be at a loss, complaining to him one day about the shortfall, yet the next suggesting: ‘Perhaps we are too harsh with our people in these difficult times.’
He had several times seen the old man looking appealingly at Stephen after these conversations. Something had to be done.
And then there had been the business with the Tsar the previous spring. That had not helped Daniel’s reputation either.
For instead of agreeing to or refusing their request for land, Ivan had sent a strange but insulting message. It was an oxhide: no more, no less. The messenger who brought it, a young black-shirt, obviously following the Tsar’s instructions to the letter, threw this object derisively at the old abbot’s feet, in front of all the monks, and cried out: ‘The Tsar says to you: “Lay this hide upon the ground and the land within it he will give you.”’
‘Is that all?’ the terrified abbot had asked.
‘No. The Tsar himself promises to visit you and give you the land you have chosen, and anything else you deserve.’
‘It is you, Daniel, who have brought this upon us,’ the abbot sadly remarked, after the messenger had gone. ‘As for this oxhide,’ he sighed, ‘I suppose we shall have to keep it.’
The hide had remained, ever since, in the abbot’s room – an uncomfortable reminder that Ivan would be coming to see them one day.
The first task for Daniel, therefore, was to put Stephen in his place. It was not difficult.
‘I think you should know,’ he told Boris, ‘that the priest spends more time at your house, now that his wife has died.’ And for good measure he added: ‘You once told me he was a heretic. I saw him taking something from that Englishman you brought here. The English are all Protestants, I hear, and this was a piece of paper.’
It was enough. He was sure of it. Boris had said not a word; but he was sure it was enough.
Already for Boris it was a year of evil portent. In the north, there was doubt about the loyalty of the cities of Novgorod and Pskov. Far in the south, in the Crimea, the Ottoman Turks with the Crimean Tatars were reported to be preparing an offensive against the lower reaches of the Volga. And now, this summer, word had come that the two powers of Poland and Lithuania, though they had acted together for generations, were being formally unified into one kingdom, ruled by a Catholic Polish King.
‘And that means one thing,’ he had told Elena. ‘It means that we shall have Catholics from Kiev to Smolensk – right at our doors.’
And now the monk was telling him that his wife might be unfaithful with the priest. He said nothing, but for long hours he brooded about it.
He hardly knew what to think. Part of him was filled with rage and with a loathing of both the heretic priest, whom he had never liked, and his wife. Yet if Daniel had thought that this was a good way to get Stephen disgraced, or at least banned from Russka, he was to be disappointed.
For Boris decided to take no action for the present, except to have the two of them discreetly watched.
There were two reasons for this. The first was that, having mastered the first wave of his jealousy, his intelligence told him that the suspicion might not be true. The fact that the priest saw his wife was hardly proof of anything. The second was a more devious thought: for if he could prove she was unfaithful, he could, with good conscience, divorce her.
Look at Tsar Ivan, he thought. He had married again and had had sons by both marriages. The Tsar had an heir. Perhaps with another wife, who did not secretly shrink from him…
And so began a new phase in his marriage.
Elena was entirely unaware of the pattern of his thoughts. How could she guess, when he was always something of a stranger to her? The idea that she might be unfaithful both hurt and enraged him; and yet, at the same time, it made her seem more desirable so that he found himself completely torn between the desire to keep her – a contaminated woman – at a distance, and the desire to possess her.
And poor Elena could only think: He suffers his black moods and yet, after all, he sometimes finds me attractive.
Sometimes, lying beside her, enclosed in this, the armour of his secret rejection of her, he would even, scarcely knowing that he did so, will her to be unfaithful. Though whether it was to be free of her, or to satisfy some deep, destructive tendency in his own nature, he himself would have been quite incapable of analyzing.
In this way he passed the month of June.
The weather had been changeable after late frosts in the spring. The harvest would be ruined.
On a hot and unusually sultry afternoon in late July, when even the breeze had stopped, as though realizing the futility of doing anything, Boris had ridden back from Dirty Place to Russka; and he had just come into the dusty little square when he saw, a hundred yards away, Stephen the priest slowly coming down the staircase from the upper floor of his house. He must have been seeing Elena.
His heart missed a beat.
The square was empty. The wooden houses around it and the stone church seemed to be held in a kind of empty stasis, as if they were awaiting a breath of wind that, with its gentle kiss, might bring them back to life.
As Boris approached his house, Stephen was walking away from him, his head sunk in meditation. He rounded a corner and disappeared.
Quietly Boris went up the stairs and opened the door.
She was there, by the open window. She was gazing out at the street, at the place where Stephen had been a few moments before. Her fingers, he noticed, were resting on the wooden frame of the window and a shaft of sunlight fell just across them as they lay there, very still. She was wearing a simple dress of light blue silk. He, having been in the fields, was for once not in black but in a white linen smock, tied with a heavy belt, like one of his peasants.
Although his heart was pounding, he breathed very quietly; he wondered how long she would stand there, gazing after the man. He tried, without moving, to see the expression on her face. A minute passed. Then another.
At last she turned. Her face was very calm; but she started when she saw him and, when he did not speak but only looked at her, she blushed a little.