Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [260]
Maryushka was, indeed, an enchanting little girl. With her bright, freckled face and shining eyes she seemed to suppose that it was only natural that all the world should be her friend.
‘She’s a dainty little thing,’ old Nikita would marvel. ‘She could be a dancer.’
Even Procopy, whose impatience with Daniel was not always concealed, used to pick her up and carry her about with him whenever he visited the house. He had a wife and two little children of his own. ‘So you,’ he would tell her, ‘must be my sweetheart.’
‘Where’s your beard?’ she would always, fearlessly, ask him. ‘Why haven’t you got a beard?’
‘The Tsar tore it off,’ he would laugh.
She revered her father. She knew that he was older than the fathers of the other children, but knowing also with what respect he was treated in Russka, supposed that he was therefore someone quite out of the ordinary. When she was very little, she had for some time thought that he and God the Father must be one and the same.
If Nikita was amused by Maryushka, Eudokia did indeed find the comfort she sought with Daniel and Arina. Each day, she came quietly to pray with them. Often, when Daniel was working in the house, she would stand near him, watching silently. He was, Daniel saw at once, necessary to her. And as she once confessed to him herself: ‘I have been a strong woman all my life, but in this new world, I feel as if all that I have known is being taken away. Do not leave me just yet, faithful friend.’
When she could slip out undetected, she would even put on a simple peasant’s cloak and go with Daniel and his family to their secret church services. And Daniel permitted himself a smile when he remarked: ‘They’ll think you are my wife, and that Arina is my daughter, and Maryushka our granddaughter.’
She herself was amazed to discover what Daniel had managed to learn in his first week: that these services for Raskolniki were taking place in secret all over Moscow. Nearly always, in the capital, they were held in private houses rather than churches. There, sometimes in the room of a modest artisan, they would take out their icons, darkened with smoke and age, place them on the walls, and pray earnestly together, making the sign of the cross with two fingers.
But if Daniel brought Eudokia comfort, he found none for himself.
While the streltsy executions continued by day, Peter was still seen, by night, at the houses of his friends in the German quarter. With him, it was well known, was his mistress Anna, while his wife, despite the fact that she had given him a son, scarcely saw him at all. By late October, the executions temporarily stopped. Peter left the capital to go down to the River Don, where he was once again building a new fleet. The seven weeks of fasting that preceded Christmas began and for a time Moscow was quiet. But at Christmas, Peter was back. He and the Mock Synod paraded through Moscow and the German suburb on two hundred sleds in a wild effort at carol singing, which Daniel, then at prayer, fortunately missed.
With January and February came the traditional celebration of Epiphany and the Pre-Lent Carnival; the public executions also began again. On February 3, Peter insisted that all foreigners in the Moscow area attend to witness the execution of three hundred more of the streltsy who had wanted to murder them.
It was also at this time that Peter began in earnest his campaign to force his court into western clothes by personally cutting the long kaftans of the boyars at a feast, just as he had cut off their beards a few months before.
To complete his political and personal innovations, Peter now made Sophia formally take the veil as a nun; and sent his own wife who so bored him, despite her miserable protests, into a convent at Suzdal. Their son, whom Peter had not much bothered with, was now sent to his sister and given a German tutor.
It was not, however, until the carnival week just before the start of Lent that Daniel finally saw the horror of Peter