Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [261]
The revellers were on their way to the sumptuous house of Lefort; at their head, as usual, was Peter’s old tutor dressed as the Patriarch. Beside him went another, representing Bacchus, god of wine. He, too, wore a bishop’s mitre: but that was all he wore, since he was otherwise stark naked. Some of the party carried wine and mead, others huge dishes of the offensive, the ungodly tobacco weed, which they had lit. Others yet were swinging censers which Daniel realized were also smoking not with incense but tobacco. He had heard from young Procopy that the Tsar, when he was in England, had given Lord Carmarthen a monopoly to import the evil plant into Russia. Now here were the Tsar’s companions putting tobacco in church censers!
When, soon afterwards, he heard that the Tsar’s friend Lefort had suddenly died, he could only say: ‘It is God’s judgement.’
In April, as if as a further punishment from God, food shortages began in Moscow and prices soared.
Yet all these things, Daniel soon realized, were only the advance signals of the great evil that was to come.
So far, the Tsar’s attention had been directed only upon his own court and the streltsy. Now, in the months that followed, he was to turn his fearsome gaze upon his people. And Daniel was brought from shock and misery to despair.
It began one evening when Procopy strode into the courtyard and, seeing Daniel, casually remarked: ‘Well, Daniel, you’ll be shaving your beard off tomorrow.’ And seeing the carpenter’s look of amazement: ‘You haven’t heard? Yes, you’re going to look just like me. The Tsar is issuing a ukaz tomorrow morning.’
The ukaz: the edict. All Tsars had used them, but from Peter they would flow in a torrent. And the ukaz he issued in 1699 was devastating. All the people – not just the boyars, but simple men like Daniel, even peasants – were to shave their beards!
‘It’s all right,’ Procopy added with a grin, ‘you can pay a fine instead.’
The ukaz was very simple: all except priests must shave. Anyone who refused must pay a fine and wear a bronze medallion round his neck on a chain. The scale of fines was carefully calculated. For the enserfed peasants it was a modest half kopek. But for a free man, an artisan or even a coachman, it was a stiff thirty roubles; for a tradesman, a punishing sixty; for a noble like Bobrov, a hundred.
There was no way that Daniel could afford to pay.
Though he had been shocked by the sight of Procopy, the doings of the court nobles had always belonged in a world apart. This however was different. ‘I do not know how it is for nobles,’ he declared to Arina, ‘but for ordinary men there is no question – to shave one’s beard is a mortal sin. I cannot do this thing.’
‘You must not,’ Arina agreed, while little Maryushka gazed at him in astonishment. She could not imagine the revered figure of her father without his grey beard.
Within the Bobrov family the ukaz also created a storm.
‘Never,’ cried Eudokia. ‘The idea is unthinkable.’ And when Nikita muttered irritably about the expense, she stormed: ‘I’d rather give all that I have than allow such a thing.’
The next day, looking triumphant yet rather sheepish, Nikita suddenly appeared before her with only a moustache. She turned on her heel, and would not allow him near her for a month. And when he complained, she only replied coldly: ‘You can beat me, if you’re enough of a man, but you’ll get nothing else from me.’
Meanwhile, she secretly went and bought a bronze disc for Daniel, and insisted that he accept it from her. ‘At least we shall have someone who looks like a God-fearing man in the house,’ she said firmly.
And so the terrible year went on until, at its end, came the events which were, at last, to take Daniel to the edge of the abyss.
Procopy was cheerful. He was busy too. The streltsy had been utterly crushed and Peter’s power was unassailable.
His own position was good: the Tsar was his friend.
‘And if he trusts you,’ he told his father, ‘he’s the kindest fellow in the world.’
For it had to be admitted that, for all his brutality, Peter could