Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [180]
‘And that means one thing,’ he had told Elena. ‘It means that we shall have Catholics from Kiev to Smolensk – right at our doors.’
And now the monk was telling him that his wife might be unfaithful with the priest. He said nothing, but for long hours he brooded about it.
He hardly knew what to think. Part of him was filled with rage and with a loathing of both the heretic priest, whom he had never liked, and his wife. Yet if Daniel had thought that this was a good way to get Stephen disgraced, or at least banned from Russka, he was to be disappointed.
For Boris decided to take no action for the present, except to have the two of them discreetly watched.
There were two reasons for this. The first was that, having mastered the first wave of his jealousy, his intelligence told him that the suspicion might not be true. The fact that the priest saw his wife was hardly proof of anything. The second was a more devious thought: for if he could prove she was unfaithful, he could, with good conscience, divorce her.
Look at Tsar Ivan, he thought. He had married again and had had sons by both marriages. The Tsar had an heir. Perhaps with another wife, who did not secretly shrink from him …
And so began a new phase in his marriage.
Elena was entirely unaware of the pattern of his thoughts. How could she guess, when he was always something of a stranger to her? The idea that she might be unfaithful both hurt and enraged him; and yet, at the same time, it made her seem more desirable so that he found himself completely torn between the desire to keep her – a contaminated woman – at a distance, and the desire to possess her.
And poor Elena could only think: He suffers his black moods and yet, after all, he sometimes finds me attractive.
Sometimes, lying beside her, enclosed in this, the armour of his secret rejection of her, he would even, scarcely knowing that he did so, will her to be unfaithful. Though whether it was to be free of her, or to satisfy some deep, destructive tendency in his own nature, he himself would have been quite incapable of analyzing.
In this way he passed the month of June.
The weather had been changeable after late frosts in the spring. The harvest would be ruined.
On a hot and unusually sultry afternoon in late July, when even the breeze had stopped, as though realizing the futility of doing anything, Boris had ridden back from Dirty Place to Russka; and he had just come into the dusty little square when he saw, a hundred yards away, Stephen the priest slowly coming down the staircase from the upper floor of his house. He must have been seeing Elena.
His heart missed a beat.
The square was empty. The wooden houses around it and the stone church seemed to be held in a kind of empty stasis, as if they were awaiting a breath of wind that, with its gentle kiss, might bring them back to life.
As Boris approached his house, Stephen was walking away from him, his head sunk in meditation. He rounded a corner and disappeared.
Quietly Boris went up the stairs and opened the door.
She was there, by the open window. She was gazing out at the street, at the place where Stephen had been a few moments before. Her fingers, he noticed, were resting on the wooden frame of the window and a shaft of sunlight fell just across them as they lay there, very still. She was wearing a simple dress of light blue silk. He, having been in the fields, was for once not in black but in a white linen smock, tied with a heavy belt, like one of his peasants.
Although his heart was pounding, he breathed very quietly; he wondered how long she would stand there, gazing