Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [113]
Sometimes she would visit the lesser churches. There were many of these, in wood and stone. The smaller stone churches were especially beautiful to look at. The Novgorod architects not only favoured the placing of Greek crosses over the domes, as was often done in Russia now, but they liked to alter the shape of the old Byzantine dome. Instead of the broad old cupola, like an upturned saucer, they sometimes squeezed the top up into a point, so that it resembled a helmet. And more elaborate still, they might even give the sides of this helmet dome a slight bulge so that it looked like a large, shining onion.
They were miniature versions of the cathedrals, with a main chamber above and a smaller cellar below where services could be held when it was cold. Yet though they were of stone, many of these churches had been built by boyars and merchants just like those who had visited Milei that terrible evening. Instead of the high galleries where princes could look down upon the people, they contained on their upper floors little corner chapels where the family of the founding merchant could worship and where, often as not, the merchant’s dark bearded image stared out severely, yet smugly, from a fresco on the wall.
Perhaps it was her mood, but these places, too, soon filled her with repulsion.
And still she was pregnant with the boyar’s child. What was she to do?
She had no doubt he would provide for the child. But what would become of her? Where would she live? And would she ever get a husband? Though the married women in Slav villages might take part in the careless sex that sometimes followed the end of a drunken feast night, it was shame to any man to find his young wife not a virgin. If his neighbours knew, they would probably paint his door posts as a sign of contempt. An unmarried woman with a child stood few chances.
In any case, she hated Milei now, and the child was his.
To her own surprise, she found that often she had no feeling for it. The little life inside her belonged to him and to this big city. She was carrying this burden against her will. She wanted to be rid of it, turn her back on Novgorod, and flee to another world.
‘I do not want it,’ she often murmured. ‘I am not ready for this. And it ties me to him.’
Yet while she was full of this resentment, a part of her yearned to give life; and her instincts told her that the further she went into her pregnancy, the more terrible it would seem to lose the child.
Sometimes she did not know what she wanted. She either walked about listlessly, or sat alone, staring into space.
Milei, sensing her discomfiture with him, yet not troubling to find out the cause, sent for her less.
In January she finally decided: I will get rid of it.
But how? She knew that girls sometimes ended unwanted pregnancies by jumping off a gate. Somehow she had no wish to try that. So what to do? For two days she wandered around thinking that perhaps she would, thanks to some divine intervention, slip and fall on an icy street and have a miscarriage. She went and prayed before Novgorod’s most sacred icon – Our Lord of the Sign. But though the icon had once preserved the city against the men of Suzdal, it did nothing for her. At last, in despair, she began to search around the market place. Surely there must be someone there who would know how to do such things.
She found her one afternoon, in mid-January: a hard-faced old woman with a wart on one hand, who sold dried herbs at a little stall near the river.
When she explained what she needed the old woman seemed neither surprised nor shocked, but her small, brown eyes gave her a careful, cold look.
‘How many months?’
Yanka told her.
‘Very well. But it will cost you money.’
‘How much?’
The old woman was silent for a minute.
‘Two grivnas.’
She gasped. A small fortune.
The old woman looked at her, but showed no sign of giving anything away.
‘Well?’
‘Can you be sure