Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [153]
Or there was the Church. ‘If the monastery doesn’t get the estate, we could always go and take a tenancy on the lands they have,’ his wife suggested. Yet he wondered, would he be so much better off? He had heard of other monasteries raising rents and increasing the barshchina. ‘Let’s wait a bit and see,’ he said.
His wife would wait patiently. He knew that. She was a stout, heavy-legged creature who always made a point of glaring at any stranger; yet behind this rather harsh façade was a gentle soul who even felt sorry for Boris and his young wife who were oppressing them.
‘He’ll be dead or ruined in five years,’ she prophesied. ‘But we’ll still be here, I dare say.’
Mikhail was not so sure about his two sons though. The elder, Ivanko, was a stolid young fellow of ten with a fine singing voice, who reminded him of himself. But Karp, his little boy, was an enigma to him. He was only seven, a dark, sinewy, athletic little creature who already had a mind that was entirely his own.
‘He’s only seven, and yet I can’t do anything with him,’ he would confess with puzzled wonder. ‘Where does he get it from, the little Mordvinian? Even if I beat him, he does whatever he wants.’
There was no place for a free spirit like that on the estate at Dirty Place. There wasn’t room. As Mikhail the peasant looked about him, and did not know what to do next, he decided to consult his cousin Stephen the priest.
Boris gazed at the city of Moscow from the Sparrow Hills above. The message from Stephen the priest had said that he would call upon him that evening. There was plenty of time before he need ride down. Therefore he gazed, with neither bitterness nor, he supposed, any other strong emotion at the great citadel spread out below.
Moscow the centre: Moscow the mighty heart. On that warm September day, even the chattering birds in the trees seemed hushed.
The summer had been slow, and silent, and large, as only Russian summers can be; it had browned the whispering barley in the fields all around; it had made the silver birches gleam until they seemed as white as molten ash. Around Moscow, in high summer, the leaves of the trees – the aspen, the birch, even the oaks – were so light, so delicate, that their tiny shivering in the breeze rendered them translucent, so startlingly green that they might have been so many emeralds and opals glittering in the sun that danced through them. Only in Russia, surely, were the leaves able to say in this manner: See, we dance in this fire, infinitely fragile, infinitely strong, with no regrets at the constant message of this huge blue sky, which tells us every day that we must die.
Now, as autumn approached, the trees, and the heavy-set city itself were left with a light covering of the finest dust as, like a silent shining cloud that has hovered half a lifetime, summer now began to depart, drifting away into that huge, ever present, ever receding blue sky.
Over the thick walls of Moscow, over the huge Kremlin whose long battlements frowned above the river, everything was quiet. And who would have guessed that only months before, within those walls, death and treachery had ruled?
Thick-walled city of treachery; darkness within the huge heart of the great Russian plain.
They had betrayed the Tsar. No one was talking, but everybody knew. There was a watchfulness, a fear, in every street, at every gathering. Boris saw it in the way Dimitri Ivanov stroked his beard, or passed his hand over his bald head, or occasionally winked his rather bloodshot eyes.
He understood. They had wanted the Tsar dead: and now he was alive.
It had been close. In March, struck down with what was probably pneumonia, Ivan had been dying, almost unable to speak. On his deathbed, he had begged the princes and boyars to accept his baby son. But most had