Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [280]
So what was he to do with her? Old Andrei the Cossack had left a little money. The girl was to be free. He had supposed he would marry her to an artisan or someone of that class. In the meantime she had lived in their house, acting as a maidservant to Procopy’s wife, and apparently contented. He supposed he was fond of her, in a way.
In recent years Procopy had become rather sombre. Partly this was the result of years of campaigning. But it was not only war that wore him down.
‘It is my country as well,’ he would say sadly.
Why was everything so impossible? Why could one never impose order on this huge, backward land?
‘The Tsar is a Titan!’ Procopy would exclaim admiringly. ‘Yet this country is like a stubborn sea.’
Sometimes he wondered if anyone was truly with the Tsar. The people certainly weren’t. Even many in the established Church, let alone the Raskolniki, thought he was the Antichrist. The richer merchants were coming to hate him because he taxed them, literally, into ruin. The nobles and others whom Peter had compelled to live in St Petersburg would have been glad to see the back of him so they might return to the comfort of Moscow. They hated the sea; their houses here cost a fortune; even the price of food, shipped in from hundreds of miles away, was exorbitant. It was difficult to build so much as a road across the desolate marshes to Moscow.
In the south there had been two Cossack revolts, one down by the Caspian, at Astrakhan, another on the Don led by Bulavin, which had been nearly as big as Stenka Razin’s.
Who did like Peter then? Men like himself, he supposed: those who served him: the new aristocrats.
For Peter was creating a new kind of state in Russia – one based on service, where any man could rise. It was beyond anything that even Ivan the Terrible had tried. He was even giving titles on the basis of service now, and that rogue Menshikov, the former pie-seller, had been made a prince!
And he, Procopy, had done well serving Peter. He had nothing to complain of. He had only two fears. One was of losing Peter’s favour. The other was of losing Peter himself.
‘He’s always exposing himself to danger. It’s a miracle he hasn’t been killed a dozen times,’ he would lament. ‘And if Peter goes, I don’t know what will happen to us. For I have nothing to hope for from his son.’
The Tsarevich Alexis. Not many people liked him, but he was the heir. And no one knew what he would do.
There was something about him. He didn’t say much, but there was a kind of silent resentment in the tall, saturnine young man that was rather frightening. He was twenty. After sending his mother to a convent, Peter had given him to German tutors, then to Menshikov to bring up. After that, the Tsar had tried to make a military man of him, without much success. His only enjoyment seemed to be getting drunk.
But if the boy was reserved and resentful, Procopy couldn’t altogether blame him.
Not only was Peter rough with his heir, but he had taken a new wife now – a former Lithuanian peasant who had given him more children! A mere peasant – a Lithuanian prisoner of war. She had changed her name now to Catherine. She was the Tsaritsa. Peter openly adored her. And Alexis’s mother, whom he was forbidden to see, was still locked up in her convent at Suzdal. No wonder he was moody!
‘And the trouble is, no one knows where he stands on the reforms,’ Procopy told his wife. ‘He daren’t oppose his father, but he certainly prefers to be in Moscow with his mother’s people and those damned Miloslavskys. We can’t trust him.’
Peter was planning to send the boy abroad. He wanted to find him a German wife. ‘And the sooner he goes the better!’ Procopy remarked. ‘Perhaps marriage will improve him.’
There was so much to think about. The northern war was reaching an important juncture. Since last year, Sheremetev and thirty thousand men had been besieging Riga. Procopy wanted to get there himself, quickly, before it fell. Peter did not like his friends to miss the action.
He must leave in a day or two. But first there was