Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [392]
But amidst all this excitement, Misha Bobrov – though he personally believed that emancipation was desirable – was very calm. ‘People mistake the new Tsar,’ he told his wife. ‘They say he’ll be a reformer and perhaps he will. But actually he is a very conservative man, just like his father. His saving grace is that he is pragmatic. He will do whatever he has to do to preserve order. If that means freeing the serfs, he’ll do it. If not, he won’t.’
Many landowners, however, were nervous. ‘I’ll tell you a useful trick,’ one fellow landlord told him. ‘Some of us reckon that if the emancipation comes, then we’ll have to give the serfs the land they till. So what you can do is to take your serfs off the land – make them into household domestics for the time being. Then if this awful thing happens you’ll be able to say: “But my serfs don’t till any land.” And you may not have to give them a thing!’
And, indeed, Misha actually discovered one landlord in the province whose lands were completely untilled, but who had suddenly acquired forty footmen! ‘A trick,’ he remarked to his wife, ‘which is as stupid as it is shabby.’ The Bobrov serfs stayed where they were.
Whatever changes were coming, Misha was looking forward to being at home. He had inherited not only Bobrovo, but also the Riazan estate from Ilya. ‘I shall devote myself to agriculture and to study,’ he declared. After Ilya’s death five years before, he had discovered the huge unfinished manuscript of his Uncle’s great work. ‘Perhaps I can complete it for him,’ he suggested.
No, there were plenty of things to think about. But still, the matter of Suvorin and the priest intrigued him.
‘For the one thing I regret about giving Suvorin his freedom,’ Alexis had always told him, ‘is that once he’s not under my thumb, he’ll start bringing his Old Believers here and converting people. And I always promised the priest I wouldn’t let that happen.’
In his years away on military service, Misha had rather forgotten about this; but now he had returned and had begun making some enquiries, it was soon clear to him that, indeed, this transformation had taken place.
The Suvorin enterprise was growing rapidly. The jenny imported from England for the cotton plant had been a huge success. Savva Suvorin now employed half the people living in the little town of Russka. His son Ivan ran the business in Moscow. And while it was not clear to Misha whether all those Suvorin employed were Old Believers, there was certainly a core of them at the factory; and the fact that recent legislation had broken up some of the Old Believer groups, including the radical Theodosians, had obviously not stopped some sort of observances continuing almost openly. Indeed, Timofei Romanov once obligingly showed Misha the house in the town where they met to pray.
Yet – here was the puzzle – there was no word of protest from the priest at Russka.
The first time Misha had asked him about this, the priest had denied it. ‘The congregation at Russka is loyal, Mikhail Alexeevich. I don’t think you need worry about that.’ His red beard was turning grey now. He was fatter than ever. Congregation or not, Misha thought, he certainly looks well fed.
Misha even once, out of curiosity, confronted Savva Suvorin himself. But that worthy, gazing down at him contemptuously from his great height, merely remarked with a shrug: ‘Old Believers? I know nothing of that.’
It was on a Sunday morning, one day in December, that Misha received his little moment of enlightenment. He was standing in the snow-filled market square in Russka, shortly after the church service, which had been rather poorly attended. He would have gone home; but it was at just this time, as it happened, that the sled bringing newspapers from Vladimir often arrived, and he had hung around for a little while in hopes of getting the latest news.
He was still waiting there when he noticed the red-headed priest emerge from the church and begin to walk ponderously towards his house. With him, Misha noticed, was a rather surly-looking fellow, also with reddish hair,