Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [273]
And at this reference to her part in his own ruin, he thought he saw a trace of awkwardness in her manner.
‘Whatever we do,’ he concluded grimly, ‘we shall have to act fast.’
That evening a family conference was held between Nikita and his son, together with Andrei and Pavlo. As Nikita truly said, he needed any good advice he could get. And never, as he said afterwards, had he been more glad that the old Cossack had become such a canny fellow.
As a result of this meeting, two pairs of men rode out of Moscow that very night.
The first pair was Procopy and the steward. They set out for a distant Bobrov estate.
The second pair consisted of Andrei and his son. They rode quickly, taking with them spare horses.
They were making their way to Russka.
The abbot was not a bad man, but he had no intention of allowing such things to go on in a village beside his own monastery lands.
It would make him look ridiculous.
He guessed, moreover, that several of his own monks were secret sympathizers with these folk. The old abbot certainly must have been. Well, this would show them.
For himself, he had no sympathy whatever for the Raskolniki. He had been only six years old when the council condemned them. All he knew was that they took people only from the official Church.
‘They are an unnecessary thorn in our side,’ he told his monks.
He had been appalled, the previous year, by certain signs that Tsar Peter might tolerate the existence of these people. He’ll turn against them when he discovers how obstinate they are, he shrewdly guessed.
As for Daniel and his friends, when the abbot heard the report of the two inspectors he had sent for from Vladimir, he could only breathe a sigh of relief.
‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘they spoke treason.’
Now he could send for the troops.
In the village of Dirty Place, the people were resigned.
And with good reason.
For twenty years they had continued to break the law, while stories came through from distant communities every few years of how others had suffered martyrdom for their faith.
Now the troops were coming. It was their turn.
There would be no question of mercy. Every Russian knew that. The rebellious monks at the Solovietsky Monastery had been slaughtered to a man. Since then, not dozens but scores of communities had been butchered. Worse yet, the authorities would certainly want to take the ringleaders and torture them first.
It was therefore not surprising that, in the last few decades, many threatened communities had preferred, rather than fall into the hands of the authorities, to meet the inevitable end in their own fashion.
And so, in Dirty Place, they had gone to work at once. A day after the two strangers had come, the villagers had coated the roof of their church with pitch. Then they began to fill the undercroft with straw. More bales of straw were carried into the main church. At the same time, under Daniel’s careful direction, some of the men made doors that fitted inside the windows of the church, and chopped down the staircase that led to the main door. Then ladders were placed – five of them – below the windows and the main door. By the end of a single busy day everything was ready.
They were going to burn themselves.
It was a well-known practice, this ritual self-immolation, amongst the Raskolniki.
It had been done all over Russia, though especially in the north, and since the 1660s it is estimated that tens of thousands perished in this way by their own hands, sometimes in acts of wilful martyrdom, at other times to avoid a worse fate at the hands of the authorities.
The practice was to continue in Russia, sporadically, until at least 1860.
As Maryushka watched these preparations she hardly knew what she felt. She was nine years old. She knew