Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [147]
They were a strange group. They had appeared rather briefly in the Orthodox Church the previous century and been rooted out in the reign of Ivan the Great. Some of them, like the Jews, considered Christ a prophet rather than the Messiah. But even at the time the exact nature of the heresy had been confused. What was clear though, to succeeding generations of faithful Russians like Boris, was that these people relied on logic, subtle arguments and books – and were therefore not to be trusted.
Boris knew that Daniel the monk was after his land: that he could understand. But Stephen – who knew what he might be thinking?
The little group greeted the new arrivals politely. They smiled respectfully at Elena. Then the sled moved on towards the little house, just past the church at the far end of the square, where the steward, his wife, and the servant girls would be waiting for them.
Elena smiled, trying to make her husband happy, but she felt uneasy.
Boris inspected the estate at Dirty Place the next morning.
The old steward conducted him round. He had been there since Boris was a child and was not a bad fellow. Small, quiet, close-knit, his thick hair was all grey now and the lines on his brow were so deep that it looked as if someone had scored them there with half a dozen blows from an axe. He was honest, so far as Boris knew.
‘It’s all in good order, just as your father left it,’ he remarked.
Boris looked around thoughtfully.
In certain ways he was lucky. When the Tsar’s land assessors, after Ivan’s recent tax reforms, had visited Russka, they had carefully inspected the Bobrov estate. It contained a little over three hundred chetverts, or some four hundred and ten acres of land.
The Bobrovs had been lucky on two counts. Firstly, the assessors had kindly decided that some of the land was low quality, which lessened the taxes. And secondly, the area of the estate was just a little larger than their standard measurements allowed for.
For the Russian land assessors could not compute fractions. Certain ones they knew: a half, an eighth, even a thirty-second; a third, a twelfth, a twenty-fourth. But they could not express, for instance, a tenth; nor could they add or subtract fractions with different divisors. So when they discovered that the good land at Dirty Place consisted of almost two hundred and fifty-four chetverts, which came in tax terms to a quarter of a plough plus another fifteenth, they contented themselves with a quarter plus a sixteenth – the nearest fraction they knew – thus leaving over four acres free of tax.
Thus, as they so often did, the Russians made ingenious accommodations where their expertise failed them.
Compared to many of those to whom the Tsar had granted the service, pomestie, estates, Boris was not badly off. Most of these had only half what he had. The present income from the estate however was ten roubles a year. To go on campaign cost him seven roubles for himself and his horses; his armour and equipment he already owned. He owed four roubles a year in taxes though, and he had some modest debts in Russka, including one to Lev the merchant. As things stood, therefore, he would slip slowly into debt over a few years unless the Tsar did something for him.
Yet he was not discouraged. In time, he was determined to win Ivan’s favour: and who knew what wealth that might bring him? As for the present …
‘I think we can double the income from the estate,’ he announced to the steward. ‘Don’t you?’ And when the old man hesitated, Boris merely snapped: ‘You know very well we can.’
Which was exactly what poor Mikhail the peasant had feared.
There were two kinds of payment that a peasant could make to his lord. He could pay rent, in money or kind; this was termed obrok; or he could work his lord’s land: this was boyar-service, called barshchina. Usually peasants gave a combination of both.
The peasants at Dirty Place