Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [168]
‘She is well,’ he answered briefly. ‘I spoke to her father-in-law.’ It was not much; but she did not pursue the subject. From time to time, Boris glanced at her.
Elena seldom went to Moscow now. Despite the fact that her family were there, she did not care to, nor did Boris encourage her to do so.
Since the Oprichnina began, the atmosphere in the capital had been tense and often frightening. Right from the start there had been disappearances and word of executions. From the old princely cities came news of wholesale confiscations, great princes and magnates losing all their lands and being sent to miserable little farms on the distant frontiers of Kazan. ‘The whole business is disgusting,’ Elena’s father told her on one of her few visits to the city. ‘Half the people being executed have done nothing at all.’ She had heard that, the other day, one brave fellow called Gorbachev, following his father to the block, had picked up his father’s head and told the people watching: ‘I thank God we both die innocent.’
‘You know what’s most frightening?’ her father had continued. ‘People think he’s kicking these people out to make room for his henchmen, these cursed Oprichniki! Forgive me, I know your Boris is one. But look carefully and you’ll see that’s not what he’s doing. Most of these confiscations haven’t been in Oprichnina lands at all. The Oprichnina is full of his supporters. He’s actually destroying the opposition outside; then he’ll turn these black-shirts loose upon all the rest of us. It’s a plot to destroy us all.’
She had found the Oprichniki terrifying. Some were nobles and gentry but many were little more than peasants. ‘Some are even foreigners – just common mercenaries,’ her mother exclaimed in disgust. ‘They have no ties, nothing.’
Indeed, in their black uniforms and cloaks they looked to Elena like some strangely vicious order of monks.
There was something else her father told her, too.
‘Do you know what the latest orders from the Tsar have been? That if any foreigner asks about what’s happening, we are to deny that the Oprichnina exists. Can you imagine it? I was in a magnate’s house the other day, and an envoy from Lithuania was there. “What about this Oprichnina?” he asks our host. “Never heard of it,” says he. “But the Tsar’s holed up in a fort outside the city,” the fellow protests. “And what about those fellows in black shirts?” “Oh,” says the magnate, “that’s just a summer residence, and those are some of his servants, a sort of new regiment.” There were thirty of us in that room and none of us knew which way to look. But we all kept mum, of course.’
That spring there had been a reprieve for a few of the exiles. But two Metropolitans had resigned, or been forced out, because they couldn’t stomach this new terror state.
And now had come this latest, appalling news.
As he looked at Elena, Boris tried to analyze what he saw. She was still the same girl he had married: quiet, a little nervous, anxious to please, yet at the same time capable of taking refuge from him in the web of family and women’s relationships from which he felt himself excluded. But there was something else now: suffering had given her a certain quiet dignity, a self-sufficiency that sometimes made him admire her and sometimes made him angry. Was her dignity a reproach to him; was it, even, a sign of scorn?
Only when Boris had finished eating, only when to delay the question any longer would have been absurd, did she finally ask, very quietly: ‘So what really happened in Moscow?’
What indeed? It had been Ivan’s own idea to call the great council of the people – the Zemsky Sobor. And to Boris and everyone else, it had seemed a good idea. Not of course that it was representative in any true sense. They had just collected together nearly four hundred of the gentry, clergy and some leading merchants into an assembly.