Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [174]
‘Is he in such danger?’ ‘Are there things we do not know?’ the merchants asked one another.
Whatever Ivan’s reasons for this strange request, it cast a cloud over the sky. Wilson wondered what to do.
And here was one of the black-shirts, standing right beside him. Wilson had learnt to speak passable Russian: one had to in a country where no one spoke any foreign languages. As an English merchant, he was not especially afraid of the Oprichniki. He decided to address the fearsome figure in black, therefore, and see what he could find out.
Boris was surprised to be addressed by the merchant, but answered him politely enough. Indeed, pleased to find that the foreigner spoke Russian, he conversed with him for some time. Wilson was cautious. He gave no hint to the black-shirt of what he knew, but by careful questioning he soon satisfied himself that Boris, who had recently been at the Tsar’s headquarters outside Moscow, had no sense of impending disaster. And for his part, Boris made a great discovery. This Englishman wanted a cargo of furs, and he wanted to obtain them discreetly. Boris did not have many, but he was sure he could find more. What a stroke of luck.
‘Come to Russka,’ he said. ‘None of your English merchants has ever been there.’
That autumn and the following spring were busy times for Daniel the monk. They were also disturbing.
The fact of the matter was, he was losing the abbot’s favour.
It was his fault. In his zeal to make money for the monastery, he drove the traders in Russka too hard. Nothing they did escaped him; and as a consequence, they tried all the harder to cheat him. The net result of this was that both the monk and the traders were in a state of irritation with one another and the monastery’s profits benefited very little.
Though discreet complaints were made to the monastery from time to time, the abbot, who was an elderly man, did little more than half-heartedly reprove Daniel. And when, in reply, Daniel assured him that the townspeople were all rogues, the old man usually found it easier to believe him.
And so matters might have continued indefinitely, if Stephen the priest’s wife had not died, forcing him to enter the monastery.
For it did not take long for the traders to suggest that things would go better if Stephen, whom they liked, were to be put in charge of Russka.
The abbot was loath to act. He was, truth to tell, a little nervous of the determined monk. ‘He’s very efficient, you know,’ he lamented to an old monk who was his confidant. ‘And if I took Russka away from him,’ he sighed, ‘one never knows what he might do. He’d make a fuss, I’m afraid.’
All the same, he began to drop small and not very subtle hints. ‘You have done good work in Russka, Daniel. One day we must find you a new challenge.’ Or: ‘Are you tired, sometimes, Brother Daniel?’
It had only taken one or two such conversations to whip Daniel up into a fever of anxiety and activity, which had made the abbot in turn more afraid of offending him, and at the same time to wish, still more, that he could find some way of getting rid of him.
Stephen, for his part, was aware of these developments but did nothing to encourage them. He was not afraid of Daniel and privately disapproved of him but, he concluded, he had enough souls to pray for, including his own.
Besides, he had other and more personal problems to deal with.
It was the greatest pity for him, however, that he did not realize the strength, and desperation, of Daniel’s passion.
Stephen was still the priest at the little church in Russka. The people of the town still looked to him for spiritual guidance, just as people in the area had looked to his father and grandfather before him. It was also only natural that he should continue to minister to Elena in her own home and, perhaps, to visit her a little more often than he had before, simply because her former companion, his wife, was no longer