Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [152]
He was perfectly right, Elena had several times asked her mother and sister what they thought of Boris, and it was her sister who had assured her: ‘When my husband gets moody, I let him see it doesn’t bother me. I just go on cheerfully and laugh him out of it. He always comes round.’
She was a busy young woman, rather pleased with her role as older adviser. It did not occur to her to notice that Boris and her own husband were entirely different.
And so now, when Elena made clear to Boris that she did not take his mood seriously, when she continued, a little smugly, to look cheerful in his presence, it made him think only: So, they have taught her to despise me.
He had been brooding angrily about this for several hours when she made her greatest mistake. It was only a casual remark, but it could hardly have been worse timed.
‘Ah, Boris,’ she said, ‘it’s foolish to be so downhearted.’
Foolish! Was his own wife now calling him a fool? In a sudden flash of frustrated rage, he leaped to his feet, his fists clenched.
‘I’ll teach you to smile and laugh at me when I am worried,’ he roared.
And as he took a step towards her he hardly knew what he might do, when a hammering on the door, followed by the sudden entrance of Stephen the priest, distracted him.
The priest, looking deeply concerned, hardly noticed Elena, and before even crossing himself before the icons, delivered a message that drove everything else from Boris’s mind.
‘The Tsar is dying.’
Whichever way Mikhail the peasant looked, he could see only trouble.
Young lord Boris was away in Moscow with his wife, though he paid brief visits from time to time. But no doubt he would return for another protracted stay before long, and who knew what he would think of doing next?
The new barshchina was a heavy burden. In addition to this service and some small payments to Boris, he also had to pay the state taxes, which usually cost him about a quarter of his grain crop. It was hard to make ends meet. His wife wove bright, cheerful cloths decorated with red bird designs, which she sold in the Russka market. That helped. There were small ways of cutting corners too: he was allowed to pick up any dead timber in the landlord’s woods and like everyone else, he ringed a tree here and there to kill it. But there was no money left over at the year’s end and he had only enough grain of his own stored to get him through one winter after a bad harvest. Those were his total reserves.
Then there was the problem of Daniel the monk. More than once Daniel had hinted to him that if his work on the estate was poorly done – if, to put it bluntly, he discreetly sabotaged Boris’s efforts – it would be no bad thing.
But in the first place, he didn’t care to do it, and secondly, if the steward caught him, the consequences could be serious.
‘We could leave,’ his wife reminded him. ‘We could leave this very autumn.’
He was considering it. But there was nothing he could do yet.
The laws that now regulated when a peasant could leave his lord had been drawn up by Ivan the Great fifty years before, and renewed by his grandson the present Tsar.
No longer could a peasant go at any time, but only at certain dates stipulated by his master – the most common of which was a two-week period centred on the autumn St George’s Day: November 25. There was logic to this – the harvest was all in by then – but it was also the bleakest time in the year for the peasant to travel. There were conditions, of course: heavy exit fees had to be paid. But all the same, once he had given notice and paid his dues, the peasant and his family were free to go, to put on their Sunday best and present themselves to a new master. Whence came the ironic Russian expression for a fruitless enterprise: ‘All dressed up for St George’s Day, with nowhere to go.’
Yet here was Mikhail’s dilemma. Even if he could ever afford to leave, where should he go to?
So much of the land now was pomestie – service estates. They were small, and the men who held them often bled their peasants