Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [259]
This was the Russian knout, with which most prisoners were interrogated.
Tsar Peter was very concerned about the mutiny of the streltsy. He had seen his own uncle hacked to pieces by them when he was a boy and he knew they were capable of overturning him and putting Sophia back in his place. The questioning was urgent, therefore. Not only the streltsy but two of Sophia’s maids were stripped and knouted – although Peter leniently allowed one of these a simple execution when he discovered she was pregnant.
As well as the knout, Peter in person supervised the putting of some prisoners to the rack and also had them roasted on a fire in front of him. Yet the streltsy were still so obstinate in their silence that on at least one occasion Peter tried to cure a mutineer’s silence by breaking open his clenched jaws with a stick.
Procopy Bobrov was present at a number of these interrogations.
He was there for a particular reason. As soon as they arrived back, Peter had joined the young man to his newly formed government department. It was called the Preobrazhensky Prikaz – in effect, a secret police bureau. And right from the start, it would make itself feared.
‘The streltsy aren’t talking much, even under torture,’ Procopy told his father. ‘But we do know they planned to replace Peter and they were going to kill every foreigner in Russia too. We’ll deal with them, though.’
The executions that autumn went on for three weeks, from the last day of September to October 18.
On October 12, there was a sudden dense fall of snow, plunging Moscow directly into winter, but the daily public executions went on.
Daniel witnessed several. The victims died in various ways, though usually they were beheaded or hanged. Peter also demanded that his boyars and friends should take a hand in the executions, and Daniel heard Procopy say to his father one evening: ‘The Tsar’s curious to see some people beheaded in the European way, with a sword instead of an axe tomorrow. Have you a good heavy sword you could lend me?’
Daniel saw Procopy at work the next day. Someone else in the crowd told the old man that he had seen the Tsar himself behead several men.
All these events Daniel witnessed with sorrow, but not with horror. The knouting, the executions: the streltsy had rebelled and it was only to be expected that they would be punished.
His horror began one morning when they brought out the regimental priests.
It was in Red Square. There, before the great, exotic towers of St Basil’s Cathedral, Peter’s men had erected a huge scaffold – but not just an ordinary scaffold: this one was in the shape of a cross. They led out the priests to the scaffold. Daniel braced himself to witness a monstrosity.
But what happened next took his breath away entirely. For now, to perform the hanging, came the court jester. He was dressed as a priest.
The same day, in the gardens of the Novodevichy Convent, a hundred and ninety-five more of the streltsy were hung on gibbets, near Sophia’s window.
All these corpses were to be left dangling – strange, frozen spectres, for five long months through the winter.
And what was Daniel to make of all this? He thought he knew. As the months passed, he became increasingly certain. Yet even then, he did not wish to form the thought himself.
Why had Eudokia summoned him? For comfort. Because, Daniel soon realized, there was no one else she felt she could trust.
Her son was godless. Her husband, wanting success for his family, said nothing.
‘You see for yourself, all around, what has come to pass,’ she told him privately. ‘Help me, good Daniel, to know what to do.’
Ostensibly he was there as a carpenter. And, indeed, he did some beautiful joinery in their house, so that Nikita himself soon forgot his irritation at his wife’s unexpectedly sending for the fellow. The landowner would proudly show Daniel’s workmanship to visitors, and had he not refused to work for anyone else, Daniel could have had many commissions.
In a way, both the Bobrovs came to be glad of this addition to their household. For while his wife