Russka

Peter

Many times before in Russian history it had been thought that the end of days was approaching. But it was only in the second half of the seventeenth century that the new and ominous development began which convinced many that, this time, surely, the Apocalypse and the coming of the Antichrist must truly be at hand.

In order to understand Russia, it is important to remember that, while events in the centre may sometimes move quickly, and new ideas be introduced there, in the vast land itself, things change only very slowly. There is thus, almost always, a huge gap between what is said and what is done. And often confusing for the historian is that even the reaction of the endless hinterland to events at the centre may be so delayed that it becomes like an echo, returning long after the original sound has been forgotten and the person who made it has departed.

While historians may argue about the origins of the cataclysm that was to mark the end of old Muscovy, there is no doubt that for many Muscovites, it began in the year 1653.

It began with the Church reforms of the mighty Patriarch Nikon. And, most visibly, it concerned the way that the Russians made the sign of the cross.

If this seems strange, it must be explained that the Russian Orthodox was unlike other Orthodox Churches. Over the centuries, isolated from the rest of Christendom, it had developed its own spirit and its own practices which, as Patriarch Nikon had correctly seen, were out of line with the Orthodox mainstream. At certain points in their service, Russians sang two Hallelujahs instead of three; they used a different number of Communion loaves and made too many genuflections. They misspelt the name of Jesus in their texts, along with sundry other errors. And of all these differences, none was more obvious than their manner of making the sign of the cross.

The Orthodox did not make the sign of the cross in the manner of the Catholics. Instead of touching their forehead, chest and then crossing their hand from left to right on the chest, as did the Romans, the Orthodox with great care and solemnity touched first their forehead, then the middle of their chest, and then swung their hands first to the right and then to the left breast – in the opposite way, that is, to the western churches.

Further yet, however, the Russian Orthodox in crossing himself, or making the sign of benediction, held his fingers in a special way. For instead of closing the thumb against the fourth finger and raising the other three, the Russian would place his thumb against the fourth and little finger, raising only two fingers, the index and third.

This was the famous two-fingered sign – ‘the single hand’ as they often called it – which the Russians believed to be the pure and ancient practice. And it was this, together with his textual and liturgical corrections, that the Patriarch Nikon had set out, back in 1653, to change.

Like many Russian reformers, the tall austere Patriarch, who had so impressed Andrei, was in a hurry. He began to build a great monastery outside the capital which he called New Jerusalem. The river beside it he renamed the Jordan. Its architecture was massive, plain and severe. He planned five thrones there on which, one day, he hoped to see sitting all five Patriarchs of the Orthodox Church, with the Russian Patriarch at the centre.

His lust for ecclesiastical power, however, was his downfall. For Tsar Alexis, often away on campaign, had left Nikon in charge in his absence and even given him the highest title of Great Sovereign; and it was not long before Nikon had started to suggest, like a medieval Pope, that the Patriarch and the Church should have authority over the Tsar and the state – an idea which neither Alexis nor the boyars would tolerate. Mighty Nikon was exiled: his rule was over.

But his Church reforms remained.

At first, even in 1653, there had been opposition. A small group of conservative clergy – the best known of whom was the Archpriest Avvakum – had opposed the changes. At once the Patriarch had crushed them, and exiled Avvakum to the far north; but the opposition had continued.

In 1666 the great Church council called to settle the dispute agreed that, while the over-ambitious Nikon should be deposed, his reforms should stand and, amongst other things, three fingers should be raised in making the sign of the cross, instead of the traditional two. Those who refused to follow the new practices were to be excommunicated as heretics.

And thus began the great fissure in Russian society known as the Raskol – the Schism – and the appearance on the scene of a new and important group of Russians. In the nineteenth century they would come to be known as the Old Believers. But in these times they were called by the more general term for religious dissidents – the Raskolniki, the Schismatics.

It has sometimes been suggested that the reformers represented progress and the Raskolniki were obscurantist priests supported by illiterate peasants. This is not so. Indeed, Nikon’s new translations were done in such a hurry that they were full of inconsistencies, and he himself insisted upon details which other Patriarchs from the Orthodox Churches declared to be unnecessary. As for the Raskolniki, many were literate merchants and well-to-do peasants.

The Raskolniki also had a cogent objection, which it was hard for the reformers to answer. ‘For if Moscow is, as the Church has long claimed, the third Rome – after which, we know, there shall be no other – then how can all these things the Church has taught and practised now, suddenly, be wrong? Are we to say the practices of the Russian saints, and the liturgy confirmed by the great Church council of Ivan the Terrible, were heretical?’

In a Church which had always relied on the power of tradition, rather than textual analysis or logical proof, these objections were especially telling.

This was the quarrel at the centre. And who could guess what echo would return, after a time, from the hinterland?

Meanwhile, in the years that followed, there were other, mighty rumblings in the land.

1670

It was summer and the normally quiet little town of Russka was in a frenzy of excitement.

For the rebels were coming.

The monks, uncertain what line to take, looked to the abbot for guidance, but he himself could not make up his mind whether to defend the monastery or open its gates to them. In the town, and the nearby village of Dirty Place, opinion was similarly split. Many of the younger folk thought it would be a liberation. ‘He’s going to free the peasants,’ they said. ‘They’ll hang the Bobrovs and the land will be ours.’ But many of the older folk were more pessimistic. ‘If those rebels come,’ a small merchant remarked, ‘they’ll be like a plague of locusts.’

And nobody was even sure where the rebels were. The other side of the Volga, thought some; close by Nizhni Novgorod, suggested others; already across the Oka, declared some alarmists.

And what of their leader, the daring Cossack, Stenka Razin? In the space of a few short years his name had already become a legend. ‘He’ll rule in Moscow,’ they said, ‘like a true Tsar.’

It was amidst all this excitement that the little children of Dirty Place found a new amusement. This was to taunt a quiet, serious, sixteen-year-old girl. She paid no great attention to them, although their persistent question, accompanied by giggles and peals of laughter, hurt her more than they knew. Her name was Arina, and the question they asked was always the same. ‘Arina, is Stenka Razin really your father? Is he coming to save us? Tell us, Arina, is it really your father coming?’

It hurt her because she did not know.

Who was her father? No one would tell her.

Until she was five, she supposed it was the steward: after all, they lived with him. He was a stern, sour-faced man, and although he sometimes took her on his knee, it made little Arina sad because she sensed he did not love her. No doubt it was her fault. But when she was five, he died, and she and old Elena moved into her uncle’s large izba. And it was a little after this that a little girl told her: ‘Your father was a Cossack.’

She did not understand, and when she asked her grandmother about it, old Elena just said: ‘What nonsense.’

But Arina soon realized, instinctively, that there was something strange about her. Something wrong. There were whispers and giggles. And finally, when she was seven, Elena abruptly told her: ‘The steward wasn’t your father. It was a Cossack. That’s all. Don’t talk about it.’

She didn’t. But from that day she understood, that in the minds of the village people, this strange, unseen figure of the Cossack in her past was like a mark upon her.

A Cossack. what did it mean? She had never seen one, but she knew that they were wild, terrifying fellows; that each had a single lock of hair sprouting out of his shaved head, and long moustaches; and that they rode the steppe like the Tatars. Could it really be that one of these devils was her father? Once, hesitantly, she had asked her grandmother what he was like. ‘Just a Cossack. Dark. Forget him,’ Elena had replied curtly. And an entire year had passed before Arina had dared even to ask: ‘What was my father’s name?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not important.’ Old Elena sounded irritable. ‘What difference does it make? He’s probably dead and even if he isn’t, you’ll never see him anyway.’ Then, seeing Arina’s disappointment, she had added more kindly: ‘Don’t worry, my little dove, you’ve got all the family you need here, thank God.’

It was true. Besides her uncle – who was her mother’s brother – about half the village seemed to be related to her in some way or other. Even the priest who came to the little wooden church in Dirty Place was a distant cousin; so were two of the merchants in Russka. No, Arina supposed, she had no excuse for feeling lonely.

Life in the village was often hard: the peasants expected to suffer. Their parents could remember the grim last days of Ivan the Terrible and the Time of Troubles that followed. Twice in Arina’s short life, the harvest had failed and they had nearly starved. One year news came that a huge population of wolves – three or four thousand of them – had invaded the city of Smolensk in the west and roamed the streets in search of food.

But the greatest hardship was war. There seemed to be no end to the fighting. As feared, a new war with Poland had broken out the moment the Tsar took the Ukraine under his protection. For thirteen years, not a season went by without another batch of men leaving Russka for the Tsar’s army; and many did not return.

It was a piece of bad luck for the village that Nikita Bobrov had made a good marriage – it happened just after Arina’s birth – for what was good for the landlord was certainly not so for Dirty Place. ‘He’s got other estates now,’ Elena complained. ‘What’s it to him if half our men are killed? He just hands them over to Germans and heretics who drive them like cattle. He doesn’t care.’ Indeed, in his eagerness to please the Tsar, Nikita was generous in supplying serfs from this village – which he seldom visited – to fight under the foreign officers who so often commanded in the Tsar’s army. All through Arina’s childhood, the village seemed only half-alive, waiting for the return of those who never came.

Yet despite these troubles, her own family had emerged unscathed. For some reason, Arina’s uncle had not been sent away to fight. By good fortune his three boys, when they came of age, were not chosen either. The family prospered. Arina’s uncle was the only man in the village who was not in debt to the Bobrovs for paying his taxes and the family even had a hired labourer of their own to help in the fields.

It was only gradually that Arina realized her uncle bribed the steward. The old steward had been a peasant, but when he died, Nikita Bobrov had sent a slave in his place, and the reason why her uncle’s sons were never sent away to fight was that, somehow, he could afford to bribe this man. When she came to understand this, she was rather shocked. Wasn’t it wrong, she asked old Elena.

‘Perhaps,’ Elena said. ‘But be glad he does it.’

‘Where does Uncle find the money?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘It isn’t just, though,’ Arina said.

Elena only smiled ruefully. ‘You know the saying,’ she answered. ‘“The wolf is near, but on a cold, dark night, the Tsar is very far away indeed.” Don’t worry about right and wrong, just survive.’

The family were kind to Arina and she certainly made herself useful. She would prepare the big earthenware pot to cook on the flat-topped stove overnight and salt the food to preserve it through the long winters. When one of her cousins made a fine gingerbread board, it was she who helped him design the peacock that was to be carved on it. She embroidered well.

It was strange, given her parents, that she was so plain. From Andrei she had inherited dark hair, and from her mother a certain grace of movement. But that was all. Her face was pale; her nose, by general consent, was too long; she had a slight squint and there was a small wart on the left side of her chin. This lack of physical beauty, however, was modified by the fact that, when she allowed herself to show it, she had a smile of extraordinary sweetness.

To compensate for her shameful birth, Elena had brought her up very strictly. Grandmother and granddaughter would always be seen, at every possible church service in Dirty Place, Russka or in the monastery, hurrying quietly by, their kerchiefs over their bowed heads, scarcely even looking up to speak as they crossed themselves before the doorway of the church, and again inside; they would light candles before every icon, and say a prayer.

Above all, Arina loved to sing in the little wooden church in Dirty Place, with what became, by her fifteenth year, a beautiful contralto voice, so that the priest there would say: ‘She is our nightingale.’ And often he would remind the village people: ‘See how God, though He has not chosen to give this girl good looks, has instead given her a voice and a spirit of great beauty, by which He is praised.’

It was as well that Arina should have a religious nature, for as her grandmother told her bluntly: ‘You will never be married.’ She saw it only too clearly. Thanks to the war with Poland, there were five women to every man in the district around Russka. ‘And of all the girls, I’m afraid you’d be the last to be chosen anyway,’ Elena said, ‘so you may as well get used to the idea.’

If Arina ever felt bitter about any aspect of her fate, she never showed it. ‘I thank God,’ Elena would say to people in the girl’s presence, ‘I thank God, at least, that she isn’t headstrong like her mother.’ Submission, her grandmother taught her, submission and obedience were her only hope.

When she was a little girl, Arina had often wondered about her mother. What sort of person had she been?

Fortunately, old Elena would often talk about Maryushka. She had loved her so much that she couldn’t help it. Indeed, the memory of the vanished girl still, after all these years, seemed to exercise a fascination over the stout old woman. ‘She was a beauty, there’s no denying it,’ she would say to Arina, with a shake of her head.

Her mother’s crime, Arina discovered, was not so much her affair with the Cossack. Such things were wrong, of course, but they happened. Her crime was being headstrong.

‘The steward, you see, he didn’t know he wasn’t your father. Not at first,’ Elena explained. He might never have known if he had not continually beat Maryushka.

‘Whenever something annoyed him, he’d take it out on her,’ Elena remembered sadly. ‘He used to hit her with his fist. She should have just taken it like most women do, but no, she had to lose her temper one day, just after you were weaned. She told him what she thought of him. Then she told him he wasn’t your father.’

She sighed. ‘Ah, Maryushka, my poor dove. “I’ve done it now,” she says to me. “You have,” I said. “He’ll bide his time,” she says, “then he’ll kill me. I know him.” “Yes,” I said, “I think you’re right.” “So will you take Arina?” she says. And then, next morning, without even saying goodbye to me, she’s gone.’

So had begun Elena’s life with the steward. He had told her bluntly that since her daughter had left him like this, she had better look after him. And since he had power over her family, she had agreed. ‘But don’t you try hitting me, though,’ she had warned. ‘I’m not your wife.’

Even then, the village assumed that wild Maryushka had run away because of the steward’s cruelty, and no one would have known about the Cossack if the steward himself, in his occasional drunken rages, had not blurted it out. ‘Curse him,’ Elena would remark. ‘He doesn’t mind dishonouring himself, so long as he can blacken her name. My poor Maryushka.’

‘Where did she go?’ the little girl would ask.

‘How should I know? To the steppe. Or across the Volga.’

‘And is she there now?’

‘Perhaps. If the wolves didn’t get her.’

‘Will she come back?’ Arina had sometimes asked hopefully.

In fact, Elena felt sure Maryushka was dead. What hope of survival had a lone woman walking off into the unknown? At best she had been captured and taken as a serf by a landlord somewhere. ‘No. She won’t come back,’ she would say bitterly. ‘What for?’

Yet although she never dared to say so, the little girl had always believed that one day her mother would come. Sometimes, at harvest, when the women were out with their sickles in the field, she would watch their long, bobbing line and suppose to herself that just once, even if only for a moment, one of them would detach herself from the line and come towards her, smiling and saying: ‘See, my little dove, I have returned to see you after all.’

And at harvest’s end, she liked to go over to the big meadow that seemed to stretch to the horizon and stare at the squat haystacks that dotted the empty spaces. For some reason, then, she would become convinced that her mother was out there, concealed behind one of the haystacks, and she would run from one to another, peeping round them, half-expecting to find a strange yet familiar form, who would take her into her arms. But each time she played this solitary, foolish game with herself, she would find nothing in the empty silence of the endless meadow except the freshly cut stubble and the high, sweet-smelling stacks so that, by the time the shadows lengthened, it seemed to the little girl in her sharp imagination as if God Himself had hidden His face behind a cloud, and left her all alone.

By the time she was ten, however, the village people seemed to have forgotten about her parents; at least, no one bothered to talk about them. And her life at Russka had been quiet.

But now Stenka Razin was coming. And who knew what that might mean?

There had been similar risings before, and there would be others in the future, but no Russian rising has ever attained the same romance in Russian legend as that of Stenka Razin in 1670. Perhaps this was because it was the last real cry from the old, free Russia of the borderlands.

It had begun, far away, amongst the freedom-loving Cossacks of the Don. For by 1670 even their democratic way of life had broken down, and a new class of rich Cossacks had appeared, who cared little for their poorer brothers. It was these poor Cossacks and peasants who, around 1665, had first rallied to a daring leader known as Stenka Razin, who was operating in the southern lands between the Volga and the Don.

It might have been only some local raiding, scarcely heard of across the endless steppe, but something about the character of Razin made it more. The raids soon turned into a rising, then a full-scale rebellion. Promising free assemblies of the people in the old-style Cossack way, he swept up the Volga taking town after town. By the summer of 1670, the rebel army was huge, had taken over half of south-east Russia, and seemed about to strike across at Moscow and the Russian heartland itself.

And now, suddenly, the village remembered Arina’s father.

‘Arina’s father’s coming,’ the little children cried. And the older ones, with more cunning: ‘How much loot has Razin got, Arina? Is he going to make you rich?’

For three weeks the taunts went on, and the girl inwardly cringed.

Then, suddenly, it was over. In early autumn, the Tsar sent an army that smashed the rebels. The democratic hero fled back to the Don, where the rich Cossacks captured him and handed him over to the Tsar. The following June, he was executed in Red Square. So ended, to all intents, the old free ways of the Cossacks.

‘The Tsar’s killed Arina’s father,’ the children now cried with glee.

She tried to take no notice. Yet, long after they had forgotten to taunt her, she remained sad. Somehow the death of the dashing Razin seemed like another loss, reminding her vividly how that other Cossack, her father, had vanished from her life so many years ago. And it prompted her to ask Elena, one day in early spring: ‘The Cossack, my father – did he know my mother was going to have me?’

‘Perhaps,’ Elena answered reluctantly.

‘Then,’ she pursued, ‘didn’t he ever come to see her again? Didn’t he even want to see me?’

At first, it seemed to Arina that her grandmother had not even heard the question, because for a time she did not even deign to reply. Then at last she answered.

‘No.’

Arina said nothing. She would not raise the subject again. Clearly, neither of her parents had loved her. She supposed that, for some reason, she did not deserve it.

It did not occur to her that the real reason why Elena had paused before she replied, was that she had told a lie.

1654

There were, by the year 1654, three Russias. The first, Great Russia, was the Muscovy of the Tsars. The second was the newly added Ukraine which the Muscovites chose to call Little Russia. The third was the broad band of territory, about two hundred miles across, that lay on the west side of the great R of Russian rivers – more precisely the lands west of the ancient city of Smolensk and which extended to the marshes of Poland. Once ruled by the ancient princes of Rus, they had long since fallen into Polish hands. This western, Russian-Polish territory the Muscovites called White Russia.

And it was from White Russia, in 1654, that Andrei was returning that late summer’s day.

It had been a strange year for the young Cossack. Bogdan and his council, after mistrustful negotiations, had finally joined the Ukraine to Muscovy with an agreement which gave them huge estates. The simple peasants of the Ukraine, needless to say, got nothing.

In March, Andrei had returned to Moscow and attended the marriage of Nikita Bobrov to an heiress. And it was then that the Russian did his Cossack friend a great favour: he arranged for Andrei to join him when the Muscovite army went on campaign against the Poles.

The war with Poland – which the Tsar’s annexation of the Ukraine had made inevitable – was part of a greater and longer process. The foreign officers Andrei noticed in Moscow were part of this general preparation. For this new war with Poland was really little more than an excuse for Russia to strike a still greater blow. As Nikita gleefully told his friend: ‘We’re going to attack White Russia.’

The campaign was successful. In the south, the Cossacks of the Ukraine struck across the Dniepr; further north, the Russian army advanced westward from Moscow to the ancient city of Smolensk.

Before it was over, Andrei had twice been addressed personally by the fair, blue-eyed Tsar; and when they returned to Moscow he was informed that Alexis had granted him a new estate as well.

Andrei and his friend did not return to Moscow until July.

Nikita had asked Andrei to remain in the capital in the new and much larger house which he and his wife now occupied, but on their return to the capital they learned that an outbreak of plague had begun. At first they hoped that it would die down; after a few days, however, Nikita came home with grim news. ‘The rumour is that they’re going to seal the royal family’s apartments in the Kremlin. The Tsaritsa and her household are leaving the city. I should get out, Andrei. Go and enjoy your new estate in Little Russia.’

Andrei had taken his advice. And so it was that late in July he had left the city to return home.

He decided to go by way of Russka.

He had not been able to discover anything about the fate of Maryushka. Nikita, who had not been near the estate for a year, had an idea that the steward’s young wife might have had a child, but he was not sure. So it was with some curiosity that he rode out eastward towards Vladimir and then turned south.

He was in a strange mood. Things had gone very well for him. He was becoming rich. Yet his friend’s marriage, and a few close brushes with death on campaign, had reminded him vividly that, even well into his twenties, he was still alone. This child, if it exists, will be all I have given to the world, he mused, as he made his way through the late summer countryside. Even if I cannot claim the child, I’d like to see it.

He brought some presents with him.

Often, he felt melancholy. Once, just past a village on the River Kliasma, he saw a raft moored in midstream. It had a single mast from the top of which hung a rope; and at the end of the rope, with a large iron hook under his rib-cage, hung the body of a man. Obviously he must be a robber of some kind, for this kind of death was the standard Muscovite punishment for river pirates. But as he drew closer Andrei saw from the man’s baggy trousers and long moustaches that he had been a Cossack. He had obviously hung there for a week already.

A Cossack: a brother. Yet not, of course, a brother.

‘He was poor. I am rich.’

For some reason even his own good fortune, compared to this fellow’s, filled Andrei with a sense of desolation.

It was three days later that he came in sight of Russka.

He was still half a mile from the little town when he met Elena. She was walking through the woods.

She recognized him at once, but her stolid, sturdy face gave no sign of pleasure or even of interest at the meeting.

After a brief greeting he asked: ‘Did Maryushka have a child?’

‘Yes.’

‘A boy?’

‘A girl.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘The baby is at the village. Maryushka – who knows?’ And Elena explained her daughter’s departure.

He was appalled.

‘She just walked off?’

‘Into the forest. Or the steppe perhaps. She’ll be dead now.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he suggested.

‘Perhaps.’

He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I must see the child.’

‘What for?’

It was hard to say. But he knew he wanted to.

‘Stay away,’ the older woman said. ‘He knows about you – the steward. You can only make things worse for us, and the child, if he sees you.’ And reluctantly Andrei realized that she was probably right.

He drew out a purse of money. He had brought it for Maryushka. There was also a little golden bracelet – rather fine – in which was set a large amethyst. ‘Give the little girl these, when she gets married.’

Elena took them without comment. ‘Goodbye,’ she said bleakly.

He paused, looking down at her, feeling awkward. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally.

She glanced at him, but there was no hint of forgiveness in her eyes. Then she spat.

‘For what?’

He was silent.

‘Leave now, Cossack,’ she said in a voice that was full, not of hatred, but of a dull contempt.

Andrei returned her sullen gaze. For a second, that word – Cossack – and the way it was said, annoyed him. Am I to be despised by a Russian peasant, he thought irritably.

It seemed that old Elena had read something of his thoughts, for now she decided to speak again. ‘Do you know, Mister Cossack, what the difference is between you and a Russian man?’ she asked quietly. ‘Just one thing: that you can ride away.’ She spat again. ‘The steward gets drunk and beats Maryushka. You get her pregnant and ride into the steppe. And we women, who suffer, we remain, like the earth. You trample us, yet without us you are nothing.’ Then she shrugged. ‘God made us want you. Our eyes make us despise you.’

Andrei nodded. He understood. It was the eternal voice of Russian womanhood.

Slowly he remounted, and without another word rode quietly away. He did not expect that he would ever see his daughter. Only when he was several miles away did he realize that he had forgotten to ask her name.

Elena never told Arina about her father’s visit, though she carefully hid the money and the bracelet under the floor. Why cause trouble, she thought. If the steward gets to know about the money, he’ll want it. As for the Cossack – better Arina shouldn’t think about him. And, as the years went by, and she saw how plain the girl was, she thought: The poor child will never get married, anyway. What use has she for a dowry?

And so she had given the money to her son, and he had used it to bribe the steward.

1677

Her life had been blameless. Of what, then, should Arina be afraid?

She was twenty-three and had not married, nor even been close to it. She knew very well that she never would be. Womanhood had only made her plainer. The wart on her chin had grown larger. It was not absolutely disfiguring; she was not unsightly; but when one came near her, it was impossible to overlook it. This, she told herself, was God’s way, in His infinite wisdom, of ensuring that she would be always humble. She prayed each day. She made herself useful. She had no enemy in Russka or Dirty Place. Yet always there was a nagging fear in her mind. She was afraid that they would take her church away from her.

This fear was not unreasonable. For she was one of the Raskolniki.

The development of the religious Schism at Russka had been typical of many provincial settlements: which is to say, it had been slow.

It had taken two years for the Patriarch’s new prayer books to reach the monastery. When they had, the abbot put them quietly away in his room and refused to acknowledge that he had even received them. The monks were never told about it.

In many ways the abbot admired Nikon. Hadn’t the Patriarch stood up for the dignity of the Church? Hadn’t he fought the Tsar when Alexis had tried to limit the gifts of property the Church might receive? Undoubtedly Nikon was a fine Russian churchman. But the abbot also had friends amongst the party who opposed the reforms and who objected to Nikon’s high-handed ways. He mistrusted the Ukrainian and other scholars whom Nikon brought in. He was jealous of their influence and considered them too Catholic – too Polish – for his taste.

He preferred to stick to his old loyalties, both personal and liturgical. And so at the little Monastery of St Peter and St Paul, the monks had continued with the old service and made the sign of the cross with two fingers, and since few people from Moscow came there, no one was much the wiser.

Except for some of the monks. For even in that backwater, it was not long before they came to learn of the new form of service, and asked the abbot what was to be done. Only after a year however, would he even show the new books to the more senior and trustworthy brethren. And having shown them, he ordered them to obey him in all things. When Nikita Bobrov or any churchman of significance visited the monastery, he used the new form of service. As soon as they were gone, he reverted. And so they continued until the time of the great Church council of 1666.

Even in the little monastery at Russka, though, there could be no more dodging the issue after this. Reluctantly, the abbot followed the new rules, and the monks were ordered to do the same. Authority was authority. The council was acting with the Tsar. All must obey.

Except at Dirty Place.

Not that anyone knew. The abbot, if he guessed, said nothing. Nikita Bobrov who owned the village had no idea. The local peasants knew, but then, who ever talked to them?

For the little community at Dirty Place was led by Silas the priest.

He was a quiet fellow. His grandfather had been the son of the priest Stephen, who had been killed by Ivan the Terrible; but since that time, Silas was the first of the family to take up the priesthood again. His own father had been a modest trader in Russka.

His thoughtful face and serious blue eyes resembled his ancestor’s but he was only of medium height, and an accident as a boy had given him a slight limp. Though he lacked any great physical presence, there was a quiet, rather passionate determination about him that gave Silas authority amongst the peasants.

It was when he went to Nizhni Novgorod to study for the priesthood that he had come in contact with the priests who were to protest against the reforms. This was not surprising. Besides being a great trading centre, the old city at the meeting of the Volga and the Oka was still something of a frontier. Once past Nizhni Novgorod, one was in the vast wild emptiness of the north-eastern forests. Here were all manner of remote communities and hermits; here were the true, simple Russians, who made their houses in the forest with their axes and who struck every blow for the Lord.

Near Nizhni Novgorod, also, had come the family of the great opponent of reform, the priest Avvakum; and it happened that, while serving as a deacon there, Silas had met a kinswoman of the fiery priest and married her.

He was not a learned man. At Nizhni Novgorod they had taught him to read, but his objections to the reforms were not sophisticated, like those of the abbot. Indeed, apart from his wife’s connection with Avvakum, he would scarcely have been able to say who was right about many of the issues in the dispute between the priest and the Patriarch.

Silas’s feeling of disquiet had deeper roots. It was instinctive. And it concerned the very core of the Russian Church, indeed of Russia itself. It was a feeling that Russia’s heart had been invaded, her soul perverted: and that this was the work of outsiders. ‘Why does the Tsar need so many foreigners?’ he would ask. ‘Why are our troops led by Germans? Why does the Tsar import craftsmen and let the boyars keep musical instruments in their houses?’

And if at first he had been confused by the technical details of the Church dispute, by the time of the great Church council of 1666, Silas no longer had any doubt about what was wrong. ‘First they let Poles and Greeks tamper with the liturgy; now the foreigners have taken over,’ he exclaimed to his wife. And then, dropping his voice at the horror of the thing: ‘I’ve even heard that some of the new translations were done by Jews.’

And to his little congregation at Dirty Place the priest would declare: ‘To us Russians, to simple Christians, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, only one thing is of importance. It is not worldly knowledge: for where shall worldly knowledge and foreign cunning lead us if not into greater sin? It is not subtle argument: for what can we humble people know, compared to the wisdom of God? It is love; it is devotion. It is the blessed quality, the sacred and burning ardour in each one of us to serve God faithfully, reverently, in the way shown us by Our Lord and by the Saints. That is all that matters.’ And here he used a word that was, and would long remain, close to the heart of every Russian: ‘We must live our lives with blagochestie.’

Blagochestie: it meant piety, ardent devotion, loyalty, faithfulness. It was attached, always, to the Tsar in old Muscovy – the pious Tsar. And above all, for men like Silas, it meant faithfulness to the old ways, to sacred tradition. It meant the humble love and religious awe of the Russian peasant, against the proud, rational, legalistic western world towards which they sensed the authorities were trying to drag them. It meant the world of the icon, and the axe.

In Dirty Place, therefore, Silas continued to use the old forms of the service: he said two Hallelujahs, and he made the sign of the cross with two fingers.

It was dangerous. The authorities in Moscow were determined to be obeyed. Far in the north, when the abbot of the great Solovetsky Monastery by the White Sea had ordered his monks not to use the new liturgy and even told them not to pray for the Tsar, troops had besieged the obstinate rebels, and finally massacred them.

No one knew how many other communities were secretly doing the same thing, but it seemed that the underground movement was growing. Some protesters were like Silas, purely religious; others complained at the Tsar’s high taxes and at their harsh living conditions. Whatever their reasons, the sense of sullen protest was growing and Moscow knew it. There was going to be trouble.

So far, the little community at Dirty Place had received no official attention, but what if it did? What would Silas and his congregation do then? No one seemed to know but Arina had good reason to be worried.

It was in the spring of that year, on a cool, damp day, that the stranger appeared at Russka.

Like any traveller, he went to the monastery where the monks gave him food and shelter. Though he said that his name was Daniel, he seemed unwilling to explain anything more about himself, and when the monks asked him where he came from he answered only: ‘From Yaroslavl.’

Which, when they reported it to the abbot, made him smile and remark: ‘He looks it. They have real Russians up there.’

Yaroslavl was ancient. Like other north-eastern cities – Vladimir, Rostov, Suzdal – it dated back to Kievan times. It lay to the north, on the loop of the great River Volga, and beyond it was the vast taiga forest that stretched to the Arctic tundra. The symbol that the city bore on its shield was, appropriately, a bear carrying an axe.

They were mighty men up in those parts: the same simple, determined men who had come down with their scythes and axes to drive the Poles out of Muscovy in the Time of Troubles.

The stranger was such a fellow. He was huge, with a shaggy head, a massive, grizzled beard and a large nose which, with the passing of the years, had spread outwards so that it took up the middle of his bearded face like a large smudge. Often he sat, very still, staring before him, or holding out one of his huge hands to feed a bird. Gentle in all his gestures, it was also obvious that he was enormously strong.

But what was he doing there? No one had any idea. He possessed a little money. He did not seem to be a runaway peasant. He carried with him a tiny icon, black with age, and a little book of psalms, from which it appeared he could read. Yet he said he was not a priest.

On the third day of his stay in the monastery he became ill. A fever seized him and for a short time the monks thought he would die. But he recovered and soon he was to be seen wandering about the countryside nearby.

A week after his first walk, he had a private conversation with the abbot. After this, the monks learned two things. The first was that, during his fever, a voice had commanded him to stay at Russka. The second was that he could paint icons, and had asked the abbot if he might take lodgings in the town and join the other painters there. To this the abbot had agreed.

So it was that Daniel came to live at Russka.

He was a good craftsman, but though he would paint parts of icons, under the directions of others, he would never paint the figures themselves, claiming that his skill was not sufficient. The icons in question, being run-of-the-mill copies for sale by the monastery, were by no means great works of art; but his modesty pleased the other painters.

He kept himself to himself. Not only could he paint, but he was an excellent carpenter. He observed every fast strictly, and spent several hours each day praying and genuflecting. Following the Old Testament to the letter, he would not eat any of the forbidden meats, including veal, rabbit and hare.

It was noticed also that on Sundays Daniel went to the little church at Dirty Place where Silas conducted the service. But since he went to the monastery too, no one thought much about it.

In Dirty Place, the villagers soon got used to the strange, quiet fellow who used to appear amongst them. The men had nothing against him; the women decided they liked him because he was reputed to be hardworking, and they sensed something gentle, almost reverential, in his bearing towards them. He was a holy man of some kind, they decided. And one old woman remarked: ‘He’s a wanderer. One of these days you’ll turn round, and he’ll be gone.’ For it was surely true that there was something about him that was apart.

Above all, they took their tone from Silas, who on several occasions had been seen talking quietly to the big fellow and who pronounced firmly: ‘He is a godly man. He has the true blagochestie.’

For two years the strange fellow came each week to Dirty Place, keeping himself to himself and scarcely speaking to a soul. And still no one was any the wiser about him. All they knew, with satisfaction, was that when he made the sign of the cross, he did so with two fingers.

1684

For Nikita, the whole business had been a disaster.

It might have been all right, despite everything, if he hadn’t quarrelled with that damned Tolstoy. That was the trouble. ‘And now we’re completely out of favour,’ he lamented to his wife.

The question was – what could they do about it? Which was when she had made her curious suggestion.

It was doubly galling because the family had been doing well ever since the Romanovs came to the throne. The first Romanov had rewarded Nikita’s grandfather in two ways. He had allowed him to convert the old estate – held on pomestie service tenure under Ivan the Terrible – back into the hereditary votchina that could not be taken away. And he had given him some more votchina, from the good land beside the monastery, as well. Nikita’s marriage had brought him fresh estates. He kept them all in good order. His peasants worked three days barshchina and paid him modest rents in cash and kind. They were, he supposed, no better and no worse off than most peasants. In addition, he had bought several small parcels of land south of the River Oka in Riazan province, on the edge of the steppe where the soil was rich and where his stewards used slave labour – a combination of men who could not pay their debts and of captured Tatar raiders. The returns there were excellent.

Nikita had done well. Indeed the family’s status had never been higher. For though the Tsar had finally abolished the old mestnichestvo records of precedence – which, though terribly inconvenient, had guaranteed the Bobrovs a certain status – Nikita had managed to get himself raised into the coveted ranks of the Muscovite nobility. This meant that he lived in Moscow, close to the Tsar, and even dreamed of being a candidate for the provincial governorship. If only he had been able to take that one, further step into the Tsar’s favour, he might have become a rich man.

And though his wife and he had known the sadness – all too common in Russia – of losing children, in 1668, Praise the Lord, a robust little boy had been born who showed every sign of surviving. They had named him Procopy.

As he approached his fifties, therefore, Nikita had been sanguine. He enjoyed good health and high rank. Though growing stout, he was elegant. All he had to do was attract the favourable notice of the Tsar.

Things had certainly been changing in the capital. The court of Alexis had been growing more cosmopolitan, more western. Great men like the Tsar’s friend Matveev encouraged western manners; a few of the inner court circle even shaved their beards.

As an ambitious man with some education himself, Nikita was drawn towards these court circles. The great Matveev liked him and became his mentor. Though he still had a healthy suspicion of all foreigners, Nikita occasionally changed his kaftan for a Polish coat. He had heard German musicians play at Matveev’s house. He occasionally attended a church with a choir that performed part-singing in harmony, in the western manner. And in 1673 he had even obliged his wife to attend one of the new entertainments arranged by the Tsar – a play.

She had not approved.

Her name was Eudokia, or in full: Eudokia Petrovna Bobrova. She was Bobrova because, like all Russian married women, she took the feminine form of her husband’s name, Bobrov. Her patronymic came from her father Peter, whose memory she still revered. And people usually addressed her, respectfully, as Eudokia Petrovna.

She was a powerful woman: black-haired, thickset, with a round face whose placid gentleness completely belied her character. A strict conservative, she was fully conscious of her wealth and her late father’s high position as a military commander. When guests came to their house, she remained out of sight until she was summoned to serve the men brandy after their meal; then, having saluted the guests, she would discreetly depart again. But in private, with other women, or alone with her husband, she had no hesitation in expressing her views. On no subject were they stronger than the changes favoured by the court. A foreigner without a beard, she told him, looked like a chicken that had just been plucked. The western music and plays were sacrilegious: ‘I go to church to hear the Word of God, not some Polish whining,’ she would say.

Above all, honouring her father’s memory, she was contemptuous of the Tsar’s army with its foreign officers. ‘These Germans: what do they know? They know how to give orders. Good.’ She would stand up and mimic an unfortunate peasant standing in utter confusion with his musket. ‘I’ve seen them,’ she would cry. ‘The officer calls out. Nobody understands. He tries again – ah, now they understand. So this one turns left. This one goes right. This one fires his musket. One advances, one retreats. They don’t know what they’re doing. And why? Because the officer who drilled them the week before had a different method altogether. Imbeciles!’

And Nikita would roar with laughter because it was perfectly true, the officers from different countries often brought their own drill books with them, which did not agree with each other, and which they utterly refused to change.

On this, as on many other matters, Eudokia would conclude with the words: ‘Things were better in the time of Ivan the Terrible. He’d have sorted them out.’

It was strange, therefore, that she did not approve of the Tsar’s wars. To Nikita, the absorption of the Ukraine and the drive into the Polish territories to the west meant glory for Russia. To his practical wife, however, they did not. ‘War just means ruin for our poor peasants,’ she complained.

Even Nikita admitted she had a point. There were at this time a hundred thousand men under arms. The military took up sixty-two per cent of the state’s budget and, as always, the taxes fell on the peasants. ‘If we go on like this, we’ll have another rebellion like Stenka Razin’s,’ Eudokia predicted.

She began to insist, each year, that they inspect their villages, which Nikita found a great bore; and she personally would interview the peasants and frequently give them money. ‘It’s lucky we’re rich, with so many peasants to feed,’ he would remark wryly. But she paid no attention.

Given her conservative views, therefore, it did not surprise Nikita that in religious matters his wife should sympathize with the Raskolniki. Nor was she alone among the noblewomen of the day. The Tsar’s first wife had done so. And a little group of prominent ladies, including one of the great boyar family of Morozov, had not only supported the followers of Avvakum but even gone to prison for it. Such sympathies, however, were becoming unfashionable amongst the noble class, as well as dangerous; and Nikita had told Eudokia she must keep her thoughts to herself.

He supposed that she had.

The troubles of Nikita Bobrov began with a change in the court, when suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Tsar Alexis had died, leaving behind him a court split into two factions.

By his first wife he left several daughters and two sons: Fedor, pleasant but sickly and Ivan, an unfortunate child, mentally retarded and with a growth of skin over his eyes. By his second wife, a woman of modest birth, Alexis had left two infant children – a baby girl and a boy of three.

The little boy’s name was Peter.

The family of Alexis’s first wife, the mighty Miloslavskys, had not been pleased at the appearance of the second wife’s family, the humble Naryshkins. Above all, they hated the Tsar’s friend Matveev, who had first introduced the couple.

It was a predictable Muscovite business. Young Fedor became Tsar; Peter and his mother were kindly treated, but the Miloslavskys took over all the reins of power. It did not take them long to find a pretext for arresting Matveev. That educated gentleman was foolish enough to be found with a book of algebra in his baggage, which was, naturally, taken to be a form of black magic. Even Nikita, when he heard of the arrest of his mentor, could only shake his head and remark: ‘He was asking for trouble. What did he want with such stuff anyway?’

Though he had lost a powerful patron, the change at court did not mean the end for Nikita Bobrov. He was not important enough to worry the Miloslavskys. He had friends. Given time, he might have continued his advance.

Except for those fatal words to young Tolstoy.

The palace of Kolomenskoye lay not far outside the city of Moscow on gently rising ground beside the river.

It was an extraordinary collection of buildings. For generations a summer residence of the Tsars, Alexis had added to its stone churches and bell towers a large, sprawling set of wooden houses and halls as exotic and striking to the eye as the twisted cupolas of St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square. Great bulbous domes, high tent roofs with windows peeping out, huge onion-shaped gables and massive exterior staircases – the place was a riot of Russian forms taken to extremes. Like much of the church architecture of Alexis’s reign, it was exuberant and ornamental. It was as though, seeing their own architecture for the first time with partly westernized eyes, some of the builders in Russia had decided to take their traditional forms and play with them, twisting them, piling one next to another, until the final result was a tremendous, exotic stage-set, a gigantic Muscovite honeycomb imbued with an impressive, rich heaviness.

And it was on a sunny summer’s day, walking in the gardens before Kolomenskoye Palace, some years into Tsar Fedor’s reign, that Nikita encountered Peter Tolstoy.

Why was it that he disliked the fellow so much? Tolstoy was a strong man – no doubt about it – with heavy black eyebrows and piercing blue eyes. He was intelligent. Perhaps too intelligent, perhaps cunning. He was about ten years younger than Nikita, but he knew more – and both of them were aware of it. His family’s no better than mine, Nikita thought irritably; yet something about Tolstoy told Nikita that he was going to the top.

When, therefore, young Tolstoy started to walk along beside him, Nikita experienced a wave of irritation. As far as he could, without being rude, he tried to ignore him. He only vaguely listened to what was being said. And so three or four minutes passed before, to his surprise, he suddenly realized that the damned fellow was talking about Eudokia, his own wife.

He started to listen. What was Tolstoy saying? Schismatics? Danger? Now he really began to pay attention, and what he heard made him tremble.

For it seemed that Eudokia had been talking. Behind closed doors, to other women, thank God, but she had been talking all the same: arguing, in her usual way, in favour of the Raskolniki.

And very quietly, like the smooth courtier and diplomat he was, Tolstoy was warning him about it. Women’s talk of course, but things were being said. If such things came to the wrong ears… ‘We men are always the last to know,’ Tolstoy remarked with a smile. But it seemed all Moscow knew. And as Nikita looked across at the other’s calm, impassive face, he was filled with a sudden fury. Why was Tolstoy saying all this – as an act of kindness? Or was it a threat – a piece of information he could use at a future date? Was the fellow trying to establish a hold over him for some reason? It wasn’t clear.

Worst of all, he was being made to look a fool. He had little doubt that Tolstoy was speaking the truth. Eudokia was disobeying him, and this young man was quietly telling him that he couldn’t control his own wife. Yet even then, he might have kept his temper, had it not been for one tiny thing.

The two men had paused in their walk. Nikita, full of resentment, had been staring at the ground when, feeling the other man watching him, he looked up into his face. And met Tolstoy’s eyes.

Nothing in the world is more unwise than to give an expressive look to a person one does not know very well. For it is sure to be misinterpreted, usually because the other sees therein the reflection of his own thoughts. So it was with Nikita and Tolstoy. By the look of worldly cynicism Tolstoy then gave Nikita, he had meant to convey: ‘Ah, my dear fellow, there’s no accounting for women’s chatter.’ But what Nikita saw was: ‘My God what a fool you are, and we both know it.’ It was the last straw. He exploded.

‘You vile young rascal,’ he abruptly burst out. ‘Do you think I haven’t always known you for what you are? If you want to spread gossip about my wife, you’ll find it rebounds on you. I promise you that.’ And then, very quietly: ‘Take care or you may regret this.’

It was foolish. He knew it almost before he had finished. But seeing Tolstoy wince in surprise, he mistook this also for a look of contempt, and turned on his heel.

As for Tolstoy – who in reality had only meant to do a favour to a useful fellow – he at once concluded that Nikita must be an enemy: just important enough to be dangerous, and who might need to be neutralized one day.

‘Yet how,’ as Nikita afterwards moaned to himself, ‘could I have been so stupid?’

For the Tolstoys, though only of the minor aristocracy themselves, had married into the family of the mighty Miloslavskys.

Nikita continued to serve, and to hope. He made friends in high places. He even came to know the great prince Basil Golitsyn – a powerful westernized noble whom he hoped to secure as a patron. From Tolstoy, he heard nothing, and he put the incident at Kolomenskoye out of his mind. A few years more, a little luck, and he still might secure that governorship.

He was away, visiting a distant estate, when in the early summer of 1682 news reached him of the unexpected cataclysm in Moscow; and the whole business was so quick that, though he hurried back, it was all over before he reached the capital.

Poor Tsar Fedor had died. He had produced no children and so there were two possible heirs – the unfortunate Ivan, last son of Alexis by his Miloslavsky wife; and the handsome young Peter, still only nine years old, son of the Naryshkin girl. A half-blind, simpleton cripple or a young boy; the mighty Miloslavsky clan or the upstart Naryshkins.

But there was one other factor which Nikita had never considered: poor Ivan had a sister.

Princess Sophia was not a beauty. She was fat; she had an oversize head; her face was rather hairy and, as time went on, carbuncles appeared on her legs. As a princess, she was also expected to live in seclusion in the royal palace. But Sophia was both intelligent and ambitious. She had no intention of staying in seclusion, or of allowing the Naryshkins to push out her Miloslavsky relations.

In an astonishing series of events, and taking advantage of a sudden revolt of the powerful Moscow regiments of streltsy, Sophia had the Naryshkins hacked to pieces in the Kremlin Palace itself. It was an appalling and terrifying affair, taking place before the very eyes of young Peter and his mother – a terrible reminder that this was old Muscovy still, as dark, as morbid as in the days of Ivan the Terrible.

Then she had both Peter and the unfortunate Ivan declared joint Tsars – and herself made Regent.

The strange coronation took place in late June. Nikita Bobrov, having returned, was present. The two boys, robed in vestments glinting with gold, and heavy with pearls – one youth blind and half-dumb, the other only a child – were each crowned, in solemn state, with the so-called Cap of Monomakh. But behind them was Sophia. For the first time in Russian history, a woman held the reins of power.

And as he watched, Nikita thought of something else, which made him very afraid. For when Sophia began her bid for power, two men had ridden into the streltsy quarter to whip them up. One was Alexander Miloslavsky. And the other was Peter Tolstoy.

‘My dear Nikita Mikhailovich, my dear friend. We must have a talk.’

There was no more urbane man in all Russia than Sophia’s new chief minister, Prince Basil Golitsyn. Some whispered that he was also her lover. Could it really be so? Nikita was not in a position to know. But Golitsyn was certainly powerful and, Nikita believed, looked upon him with favour.

When he had been summoned to attend upon the prince in the Kremlin, therefore, he had dared to hope it might be good news. And now, seeing the great man advancing towards him, with these friendly words, he scarcely even noticed all the other people in the room, or the expressions on their faces. He saw only Golitsyn, and the fact that he was smiling.

For even to a man of some importance, like Bobrov, the prince was dazzling. He was, in truth, the first of the great, cosmopolitan Russian aristocrats who were to impress even the grandees of Europe for the next two centuries. Had it been anyone else, Nikita might even have been shocked by Golitsyn. It was not just that he spoke Latin; nor even that he drank only moderately and that his palatial house contained western pictures, furniture, even Gobelin tapestries; but he would welcome foreigners to his house, including even – Nikita had heard with horror – the dreaded Jesuits. Yet no one could deny that Golitsyn was a true Russian. No family was nobler or more ancient. And besides all this, as he now came towards Nikita, the more modest noble was aware of the wonderful quality which God had given to nearly all members of the grandee’s family: an extraordinary charm.

Instead of a kaftan, Golitsyn wore a close-fitting Polish coat, with buttons down the front. His beard, instead of flowing broadly over his chest, was trimmed to a neat point. His calm, slightly Turkish face suggested a subtle, perhaps veiled, intelligence.

Gently he took Nikita by the arm and walked with him to one side of the large room. ‘You know, my dear friend, I had hoped to see you a provincial governor,’ he said quietly. Nikita’s heart missed a beat. What did he mean? Some other promotion? But seeing his agitation, Golitsyn only sighed. ‘I want you, my friend, for both our sakes, to be very calm,’ he murmured. ‘As I say, I had hoped. But, alas, it will not be possible. You see, our local administration in Russia is, as you know, less than perfect.’

Even in his nervousness, Nikita could not help a smile at this delicious understatement. The local administration was a bribe-ridden shambles.

‘Consequently,’ the prince went on, ‘we must place huge reliance on the governors. They’re all we have. And unfortunately, even the slightest shadow upon a candidate, in certain circles, makes an appointment impossible.’ He paused. ‘You’ll also know that one of the most urgent tasks at present is for each governor to help the Church stamp out these heretics, these Raskolniki. The Regent Sophia is adamant…’ He waited a moment to give Nikita time to reflect.

‘There are rumours – whether or not they are unfounded, I hardly need to tell you, my dear friend, is perfectly irrelevant – there are rumours in certain high quarters which suggest that,’ he let the words fall gently, ‘were you to prosecute the Raskolniki, you might possibly find yourself embarrassed. I’m sure you understand.’ He paused again, then gave Nikita a smile. ‘Do not despair, Nikita Mikhailovich, you may rise again tomorrow. And I myself might fall. But today, I can’t help you.’

Nikita swallowed. His throat felt very dry.

‘What can I do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I shall always be ready to serve,’ Nikita said with what dignity he could muster.

Golitsyn was silent.

‘You may of course prefer to reside in Moscow,’ he said after a few seconds, ‘but you should feel free to visit your estates if you wish.’

So it was truly over. They didn’t want him in Moscow. For a second – he could not help it – he felt tears in his eyes; but he managed to blink them back.

‘Come, my dear fellow, let me escort you to the door,’ Golitsyn said kindly.

Only as they went back across the room did Nikita look up and realize that about thirty people were watching; at the same moment, he noticed that in one corner, with calm, expressionless faces, two of the Miloslavskys were also quietly watching. And beside them stood Peter Tolstoy.

Then he understood that it had been a public execution.

So it was that the distinguished ancestor of Russia’s great novelist dealt with Nikita Bobrov.

It was only human nature that, in the days which followed, it was not his known enemy but kindly Golitsyn whom Nikita came to resent. So he executed me to please Tolstoy and the Miloslavskys, he brooded. But then, that man would do anything for power. And in his mind he conjured up, in some detail, what he supposed might be the relations between Golitsyn and the Regent Sophia, dwelling in particular upon her known imperfections, and some others he imagined for himself.

Nikita was finished; his career was over. What should he do now? Above all, how could he advance the family interests – what should be done about Procopy?

He was a pleasant youth. He looked remarkably like his father, with the same broad forehead and black hair; he was somewhat given to enthusiasms – perhaps too much so. But his excitement was infectious and gave him great charm. It would be tragic if the cloud over the family should prevent him having a fine career.

To Nikita’s great surprise, it was Eudokia who supplied the answer. ‘We’ll get nothing from Princess Sophia,’ she argued. ‘So our only hope is to gamble on the next reign. Let Procopy go and serve the boy. Let him serve young Peter.’

Peter? Who knew anything about the boy? Would he ever be allowed to come to power by Sophia and the scheming Miloslavskys?

‘He’s our only chance,’ Eudokia repeated. ‘Just leave the whole business to me.’ And rather to Nikita’s surprise, it was not long before she was summoned to see the boy Tsar’s mother, and returned with an invitation for Nikita to pay young Peter a visit.

He was to go, not to the Kremlin, but to a little village just outside the capital, called Preobrazhenskoe.

It was two months later, as the leaves were beginning to fall, that Nikita Bobrov and Eudokia came to Russka.

Procopy had been successfully placed in Peter’s household. No one wanted Nikita in Moscow. So he had decided to visit his estates.

He found his house in the town needed repair, and sent for men at once. He visited the monastery and gave the monks some more money to say masses for his father. He carefully inspected Dirty Place. And Eudokia, as was her way in the country, took care to inspect everything too. It was in this way that she discovered, as she put it, ‘just the man’ to undertake the more elaborate carpentry needed in the house.

‘He’s an icon painter,’ she explained, ‘but a wonderful carpenter too. You must meet him, Nikita. His name is Daniel. His wife’s a treasure too.’

Nikita met them. The fellow was huge; the woman of no interest. Yet Eudokia was always talking to them. Indeed, after a couple of weeks, she seemed to think the sun shone out of their eyes. Personally, he couldn’t think what she saw in them.

Silence – some believe – gives a man power. So it seemed to be with Daniel. For though he said little, and asked for no consideration at all, the people of Russka looked up to him.

Not that they knew him. Even now, after seven years, he was still a mystery. Yet, like some huge old oak tree in the forest, his whole presence suggested permanence, and a comforting stability which seemed to come from the earth itself.

He even looked like a tree, his wife thought fondly. In the winter months, he would wrap himself in a thick, dark gown that reached to his ankles and which looked like a monk’s habit. On his head he would wear a high, conical cloth hat, trimmed with fur so that his wife, glancing up at the old watchtower with its high, tent roof, would say: ‘Why do we need a watchtower with my husband here?’

At other times, emerging sedately from the swirling snow, he would look like some ancient winter god, coming from the endless greyness of the forest.

In his presence she always had a sense of perfect peace. She knew him as well as it is possible to know another being; she knew that, at the core of this mighty oak, resided a man of huge wisdom. When they slept together she experienced frequently, not only that oceanic feeling within herself but also the sense that, like all truly simple people, he possessed a life without end.

Yet she knew nothing of his past. She knew only that, for some reason he would never explain, he had not been married before; and that, thanks be to God, he had changed his mind.

She also knew that sometimes, in private, Daniel was deeply troubled.

He had not planned to marry when he came to Russka. I am too unworthy, he told himself. How can I ask another to share my life when I am confused and so steeped in sin? Nor would he have stayed, if it had not been for Silas.

It was not only that Silas made the sign of the cross with two fingers. The priest seemed instinctively to understand his troubled soul. ‘Remember,’ he would quietly admonish him, ‘we are here to suffer; but we are forbidden to despair. If you are troubled by the world, still more are you called to rejoice in the Risen Lord.’

And gradually, in the little wooden church, as he looked around at the simple villagers and as he felt that intense, emotional warmth which is the hallmark of the Russian Church, Daniel found, for the first time in years, that he had no further urge to move on. For wherever I wander, it can only be the same, he considered. What else could there be, after all, but the warmth of the little village community, huddled together, naked before the Lord, in the endless Russian plain?

It was one Sunday after he had been there two years that old Silas had quietly come up to him and said: ‘It is time, I think, that you married.’

Greatly as he revered the priest, he had wanted to contradict him. ‘I am too old – I’m over fifty,’ he protested. ‘And I am unworthy.’

But Silas had been firm. ‘Not so. It is not for you to decide you are unworthy.’

‘But… I had not thought. Whom should I marry? And who would have me?’

Silas had smiled. ‘If, as I believe, it is the Lord’s will, you will know.’ And seeing Daniel for once look utterly confused, he had continued: ‘You should marry one who is beautiful – not unto men, but unto God. You should marry one by whom God is rightly praised.’ He smiled again. ‘You will be guided.’

That week, and the next, Daniel had considered the matter. He felt uncertain, yet also a little excited. He thought of all the women in Russka and Dirty Place, but came to no conclusion.

It was on the third Sunday, as he stood in the little wooden church at Dirty Place, that he found his attention caught by one person in particular. Why had his head slowly turned that way? Why, because she was singing, of course: she was singing with a voice of extraordinary beauty. And then, looking at her poor, plain face with its unsightly wart – a pale face that would have been almost ugly but for the lovely expression of rapt, religious attention that it wore – he saw what the priest had meant.

He spoke to her uncle and her old grandmother immediately after the service.

And so it was that, to old Elena’s astonishment, and at the unheard of age of twenty-five, Arina was married to Daniel.

On her wedding day, Elena solemnly gave her granddaughter a golden bracelet set with a large amethyst. She did not say where it came from. Then she, with all the rest of the family, escorted Arina to Daniel’s little house in Russka.

Both husband and wife had been astonished at their own happiness. They were each of them so surprised to be married at all; neither had any vanity; they could only try, rather humbly, to give happiness to the other, and as a result their love progressed with extraordinary speed.

For Daniel, the sight of this plain woman, who had never dared to hope for love, moved him profoundly. The natural tenderness which his feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness had always held back, now suddenly found expression. There was nothing to prevent it: the priest had told him it was his duty to love.

He was tender, and determined to succeed. He studied her, observing her secret doubts and need for reassurance until, with a sense of delight, he saw that like a tree after winter she was quivering into life.

Like many Russians, they called each other not by their first names but in the ancient manner, by their patronymics. At first, this had led to a small discussion. ‘For,’ as Arina confessed with a blush, ‘my real father was a Cossack and I do not know his name; but my supposed father was called Ivan.’ His father, he had told her, was called Peter; and so, since the full form of patronymic was now in general use, he was, to her, always Petrovich; while she was Ivanovna.

If only Daniel could have felt that his personal joy was a harbinger of better days to come.

He had wandered so many years, all over Russia, troubled by his sinful past, seeking peace yet never finding it. He had sought out holy men. But it was only during his time in Yaroslavl that he had truly found them. For it was there, in the wild Black Lands beyond the Volga, that he had met the stern Trans-Volga hermits and their followers. These were the true Russian believers, these austere and godly men who lived in the forests. In the manner of ancient Israelites, they felt their daily lives were close to God. Some were prophets. They shunned the evil world they saw around them. Like Avvakum and the other Raskolniki they were shocked at the changes in the Church, and with even more certainty than Avvakum they declared that these signs of wickedness meant the coming of the Antichrist himself.

‘Prepare with prayer and fasting,’ they advised, ‘for the end of days is nigh.’

Sometimes, having found such happiness at Russka, Daniel had wondered if perhaps the hermits over the Volga had been mistaken. By chance, after many years of the harshest winters, the climate in north Russia had become milder the year after his marriage: the cold season had been shorter, the crops better. Might it be a hopeful sign? But when, after four years of marriage, his wife had failed to become pregnant he sadly concluded: It is probably a sign that, for the faithful, the world is becoming too wicked a place for children to live in.

In 1684, if any confirmation were needed of the wickedness of the world, the blow fell.

An edict from the Regent Sophia outlawed the Raskolniki. Suspected schismatics could be tortured and anyone sheltering them would lose their property. For obstinate offenders the penalty was death. On the day that news of this terrible edict had reached Russka, Silas had come to Daniel’s house near the market square and spent an hour talking with him urgently. When he emerged, he was looking grim.

Arina had remained outside while the two men talked and did not venture back until some time later. But when she did, she found Daniel so deep in prayer that he was unaware of her presence. She had never seen him so agitated before. With tears in his eyes, he was prostrating himself before the blackened little icon in the corner, knocking his forehead on the floor and murmuring: ‘Lord have mercy. Let this cup pass from me.’ And feeling that she was intruding, Arina had begun to back out of the room.

It was just as she was doing so, however, that her husband said something else, that seemed to her very strange. For suddenly, staring up at the icon with a look of desperation he cried out: ‘Yet who am I, Lord, to ask for mercy – If who have murdered, not once but many times?’

Arina gazed at him. What could he mean? Surely the words were not to be taken literally, for it was hard to imagine her husband hurting a fly, let alone committing a murder. What, then, was in his mind? And it struck her, with a greater force than ever before, how little she still knew about the life of this man whom she unreservedly loved. And being ignorant, she thought, how can I help him now, in his hour of need?

When they were alone that evening, Daniel told her about Silas’s visit. Faced with the terrible new threat of the edict, even the old priest had been uncertain what to do. ‘He honoured me by asking my advice,’ Daniel gravely told her.

‘And what did you tell him, Petrovich?’

‘For my sins, I advised him to go on.’ He looked at her with troubled eyes. ‘If we continue, even in secret, it may bring great misfortune upon us – upon you too, Ivanovna,’ he confessed.

She bowed her head. Whatever suffering might lie ahead, she knew that she only desired to share it with him.

‘It is all I have – this faith,’ Daniel suddenly burst out. ‘I have wandered all my life in search of truth, Ivanovna. I cannot turn back now.’

And it was then, because the moment seemed right, that Arina begged him: ‘Will you not tell your wife something of your past life, Petrovich?’

It was a strange tale he had to tell: a story of solitary wanderings that seemed to have taken him all over Russia. He told her about the elders he had met at Yaroslavl. ‘And before that, for a time, I was a lay brother in a monastery. That is when I learned to read.’

And now Arina told him what she had overheard that day and gently asked him: ‘What did you mean, Petrovich, when you said that you had murdered?’

To which, to her surprise, he sadly answered: ‘Yes, it is true. I have killed.’

For several moments after this confession he was silent, then he slowly continued, ‘You see, Ivanovna, even when I was a child, I had a passion for justice. Indeed, I would be so offended by anything that, to my childish eyes, seemed unjust that I would even pretend to be a fool, not to understand what was going on – so that often the other boys thought me simple in the head.’ He smiled regretfully. ‘Nowadays, of course, I know that justice belongs only to God, and that goodness can only be found in prayer. But when I was young, I believed there could be true justice in the government of men: and when I did not find it, I became angry.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I fought. I joined Stenka Razin.’

‘You were in his rebellion?’

He nodded. ‘And we killed, Ivanovna. In the name of justice we killed not only soldiers and wicked officials, but God knows how many innocents too. At the time I thought it right: now I can only throw myself at God’s feet and beg for mercy.’

‘You were a Cossack then?’

‘I was. A fighting Cossack. I fought with Bogdan too. I thought nothing of killing in those days.’ He paused. ‘Later, I wanted so much to break with my evil past that – as though I had taken holy orders – I changed my name to Daniel.’

‘What was it before?’

‘Stepan.’ He smiled gently. ‘Though since my brother Cossacks thought me big and simple, they gave me another name. They used to call me the Ox.’

1698

Procopy Bobrov was an enthusiast. He was thirty-one yet, to his mother at least, he sometimes seemed like a child. Often she would say: ‘It was the worst thing I ever did in my life, to send him to Preobrazhenskoe.’ And when the nice, sensible wife she had chosen for him complained that he shamefully neglected her, Eudokia could only sigh sympathetically and remark: ‘I’ll do what I can, my dear. But it’s that accursed Peter who makes him so.’

For this was how, in private, she referred to the Tsar.

Preobrazhenskoe was a pleasant spot – a modest wooden hunting lodge with large stables, only three miles from Moscow’s walls and close by that other satellite of the city, the German quarter. All around stretched broad meadows, dotted with silver birches; further away lay a white-walled church whose blue dome looked rather cheerful against the paler blue of the sky. And it was there that the sixteen-year-old Procopy Bobrov had made the acquaintance of a striking twelve-year-old boy, already as tall as he was.

The women’s network of Eudokia’s family had worked only too well. The young Tsar’s Naryshkin mother had been only too grateful to greet a friend for her son from a sound old family like the Bobrovs. For her state was pitiable: except when he was needed for some ceremonial appearance, the boy Peter was ignored; their allowance was so small she had even had to beg the Patriarch for extra funds; and fearing for their safety, she was glad enough to keep out of sight at Preobrazhenskoe.

‘There is nothing – nothing! – good that one can say about Peter,’ Eudokia would cry contemptuously. ‘He’s nothing but,’ she’d search for words, ‘a German lout!’ If only she had never sent Procopy to Preobrazhenskoe. That was where the trouble had begun. The boy’s mother was at fault. He had not been properly supervised, allowed to run wild, mix with all sorts of company. He ate like a peasant – even Procopy admitted that. And he was forever playing soldiers with his friends. Including Procopy, thanks to her folly.

Preobrazhenskoe – the Tsar had taken the name of his little village and given it to one of his new household regiments: the Preobrazhensky Guards. Procopy was an officer in it now. How she despised them, with their foreign uniforms! And Peter’s childish games, his endless playing at soldiers – they had developed into real wars now.

And to think she had supposed that nothing could be worse than the rule of Sophia and that terrible Golitsyn: the Pole, as she called him.

Their foreign wars had been their downfall. That Golitsyn with his foreign ways – he was the one who wanted to be friends with the Poles. In return for another peace treaty with them, he had foolishly promised to help them against the Turks and their vassal the Crimean Khan.

A war against the Tatars on the steppe. It had been a disaster, and a costly one. The great men of the state had turned to Peter and in 1689 Sophia and her favourite had fallen from power: she was sent to a convent, Golitsyn into exile.

Peter was seventeen. Though technically he was still co-ruler with poor Ivan, it was time for him to assume control.

‘But does he rule? Does he behave like a man?’ Eudokia would furiously demand. ‘No. He plays his games like an evil child, which is exactly what he still is.’

Briefly, she had been hopeful. The old Patriarch, having at last got rid of Golitsyn, was determined to rid Holy Russia of all these foreign influences. But then he had died, and Peter’s strange regime began.

And strange it certainly was. While a small council, including his mother and some of the Naryshkins, acted as an informal regency, the hulking boy refused to take any interest in his empire at all. Often, he stayed at Preobrazhenskoe. But even worse, he spent more and more time in the German quarter, amongst the foreigners. And it was not long before his behaviour became scandalous.

‘The German suburb! What kind of people does one meet there?’ Eudokia would comment contemptuously. ‘And see what kind of games these heretics like to play.’

It cannot be denied that the behaviour of Peter and his friends, some of whom were old enough to be his grandfather, was totally outrageous; and while historians have tended to gloss over this as either the high-spirited buffoonery of an adolescent, or else a calculated political message, it is very hard to see why they should have acted so.

At the heart of it all was the so-called Jolly Company – a group of friends who might at any given moment number a dozen or two hundred. Some were Russian, but many were foreigners. They included a brilliant Swiss adventurer, Lefort, and an otherwise sensible old Scottish general, Gordon.

It was not the drunken parties, which might go on for days at a time. That was perfectly Russian. It was not even that they might, if you were a merchant or nobleman, visit your house and smash all the furniture. Russians were rather proud of Tsars, like Ivan the Terrible, who wreaked havoc at the slightest whim. Russians could even forgive, when he was sober, Peter’s fascination with foreign crafts, and his learning the rudiments of mathematics and navigation – though these interests were certainly eccentric.

But what could anyone make of his open and insulting mockery of religion?

For in these years, the young Tsar formed what he called his Drunken Synod – the All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters. One of his drinking companions – his old tutor – became Prince-Patriarch, though this was changed to Prince-Pope. Dressed up in ecclesiastical regalia, he would appoint a drunken synod of cardinals, bishops, abbots and other priests. And then, mocking the liturgy, making lewd benedictions over the company continually, the Prince-Pope under Peter’s direction would lead the Drunken Synod in its all-night drunken revels. They were not just held indoors, out of sight in the German quarter. The young Tsar and his friends used to take to the streets of Moscow, even in Lent, taking good care to outrage every religious sensibility of the people he was to govern. So that the foreign ambassadors from the west – who were themselves entirely used to the high-jinks of young aristocrats, or the occasional calculated outrages of the students in their ancient university towns – could only conclude that the young Tsar had little interest in his people and that, ingenious or not, he was vulgar without being amusing.

For several years, this extraordinary regime had gone on. No one could control the wayward youth, it seemed. His mother, as Eudokia had done with Procopy, found him a wife. But Peter seldom even visited her. Then his mother died, but still his strange adolescence continued.

What was the young Tsar thinking of?

As time passed, it seemed to Eudokia that when he was sober, young Tsar Peter thought only of two things. One was war.

‘And the other is boats. Boats – everything with this man is boats!’ she would complain. And when Procopy laughingly reminded her that Russia was a land of rivers she would brush him aside irritably. ‘You know very well what I mean. It’s these accursed boats that go to sea. No Russian has ever needed to go to sea.’

‘Not so. The ancient Rus went to sea. They went across the Black Sea to Constantinople. And that’s what we’ll do now.’

‘First it’s the Crimean Khan and his Tatars, now it’s the Turkish Sultan himself you want to attack,’ she said drily.

‘Precisely.’

For though Peter’s conduct might be odd, there was no doubt that he had, from the first, dreams of conquest. They were very natural dreams.

Who, after all, were Russia’s heroes? Were they not great men like St Vladimir, Yaroslav the Wise, and mighty Monomakh in the days of ancient Kiev? And in those times, had not the state of Rus traded freely from the Baltic to the warm Black Sea? Did it not crush the tribesmen of the southern steppe? Had not the ancient Rus kept a settlement by the mouth of the Don in old Tmutarakan? Was there not a colony of Rus in the imperial city of Constantinople herself? Yet now, Russia possessed only a miserable little toehold, at the frozen northern end of the Baltic Sea, while the rich Baltic ports were still in the hands of the Swedes and Germans. In the south, the mouth of the Don was closed to Russians, guarded by the Turkish port of Azov, and the Turkish fleet entirely controlled the warm Black Sea. Finally, most insulting of all, and centuries after Moscow had thrown off the Tatar yoke, the Tatar Khan of the Crimea still sent huge raiding parties across the steppe, stealing Slavs by the thousands from the villages of the Ukraine and sending them to the slave markets of the Middle East. He even had the impertinence to claim tribute from the Tsar; and though his claim was ignored, the Russian government – humiliatingly – still found it wise to send him handsome gifts.

So if Peter, like Ivan the Terrible before him, wanted to break out to north and south, it was not so surprising.

Boats: they were the answer. Young Peter had discovered boats – real boats – from the foreigners in the German suburbs. He had built a boat of his own. He had seen, up in the north, the foreign vessels that came to distant Archangel or plied the Baltic Sea.

That was what he needed – a fleet to go down the mighty Don and break through, past Azov, to the warm Black Sea. It was time to turn his war games into the real thing. They would build galleys first, for the Don; then real ships for the sea.

Strangely, if Procopy Bobrov had been excited by this adventure, his father was equally so. For though he was not required on the campaign, the sixty-five-year-old former official had now acquired a new lease of life. The young Tsar needed timber for his fleet. Above all, he needed ash trees for masts.

‘They’re getting some from Tula, but we have plenty on our estates,’ he had declared happily, and immediately made the Tsar a present of one of his woods.

When the news came, in 1696, that the Turkish fort of Azov had fallen, he was ecstatic.

‘Can’t you feel it?’ he cried to Eudokia. ‘I can. I feel a warm wind blowing into our northern forests – a warm wind from the south.’

One other development had taken place during the Azov campaign: Peter’s invalid half-brother Ivan had died. It was not an important event in itself but it meant that now, as he returned to Moscow in triumph, Tsar Peter at the age of twenty-four sat alone upon the throne.

‘He may be wild,’ Nikita had assured his wife, ‘but now we shall see great things.’

Even he however had been thunderstruck by what happened next: Peter’s triumphal entry into the capital.

It took place on a sunny October day in 1696. By the Moscow river a triumphal arch had been erected in the Roman manner, with huge statues, one of Mars, the other of Hercules, on each side. Below it was a model of the Turkish Pasha in chains.

When the procession came, it was headed by Peter’s tutor – the man who played Prince-Pope in the infamous Drunken Synod – dressed up in armour. Then in a gilded carriage came the Swiss Lefort. Then more carriages. Then came a cart containing a traitor who had foolishly helped the Turks during the campaign. The instruments of the torture and execution he was to suffer were displayed beside him.

And at last, towards the rear of a procession that went on for miles, came Peter.

To many who had never got a good look at him before, he was an astounding sight. He was built like an athlete. He had a mop of dark hair, a moustache like a Cossack, and piercing, staring eyes. He stood no less than six foot seven inches high.

Yet this young Russian giant was not wearing Russian dress. He wore a German uniform, a black coat and a huge black three-cornered hat in which he had jauntily stuck a long white feather.

And there was not a priest in sight.

No icons came before the procession; no priests with banners. No welcoming speech from the Patriarch; no church bells rang. A Roman Caesar had come, wearing a German uniform; a pagan procession was entering the capital of Holy Russia.

‘Yet even the Romans had their gods,’ Nikita murmured. ‘And even Genghis Khan, pagan that he was, did not despise the Church.’ And as he gazed at the procession he thought he saw a new, harsh sun that would burn away all the shadows.

As for Eudokia, she stared with furious disgust.

‘When his mother died, and he would not even stay at her bedside, I said he was unnatural,’ she remarked. ‘Now I have seen the face of evil itself.’

Yet even this horror had been as nothing to what was happening now.

For in 1698, Peter had, once more, done something that no ruler of Russia had ever done.

He had travelled abroad. And he had taken Procopy with him.

While they were away, Eudokia had scarcely even visited Moscow. The place had become hateful to her. Instead she had spent most of her time alone, down at Russka, where she continued to pass long hours in the company of the priest Silas, and Daniel and his family.

But now Peter and her son were back. And in Moscow, all hell had broken loose.

Daniel approached the capital with a mixture of curiosity and dread.

Could the rumours he had heard since Tsar Peter’s sudden return from abroad really be true? It was many years since he had been to the capital, but when he received the summons from that godly woman Eudokia Mikhailovna, he had not hesitated but had come, bringing with him his wife and little daughter.

For – and it often puzzled Daniel that God should have granted such a gift in these evil days – he and Arina, after nearly fifteen years, and long after they had given up hope, had unexpectedly been blessed with a daughter. She had been born in 1693 when Arina was thirty-nine and he was in his sixties. And now here he was, aged seventy, with a wife and a six-year-old girl.

At first, when he and Arina had gazed at the little baby who had so wondrously appeared, they had been astonished by one thing: she did not in the least seem to resemble either of them.

It was old Elena who, with a smile of delight, solved the mystery.

‘To think that, in my last days, I should have been granted such a thing,’ she muttered. ‘The child is my Maryushka, to the life.’

So that was what they called her: Maryushka. And old Elena, in the last three years of her life, would sit with the child every day with as much pride as if it had been her own.

Yet if little Maryushka had come into their lives like a ray of sunshine, what dark years they were into which she had been born. All over Russia, but especially in the north, the government had continued to persecute the Raskolniki. Some sought martyrdom by challenging the authorities. Others continued to worship in secret.

The early years, after the terrible edict, had been especially difficult. No one had been sure what to do. But Silas and Daniel had consulted the friends of Avvakum and with them had reached a wise conclusion.

‘There is no merit in challenging the government and calling down its wrath,’ Daniel would tell his little family. ‘The edict is wrong, but perhaps in future it will be changed. We shall continue to pray, in secret, as we have been taught. We shall not seek trouble, but if persecution comes, we must suffer it as best we may, secure in God’s protection.’ It was a course that hundreds, even thousands of little congregations had followed in that vast land. No one, neither the government nor the congregations themselves, knew how many.

Daniel was cautious as he approached Moscow, it was understandable. The capital was not only the seat of persecution. It had also become a place of danger. For that very summer, while the strange young Tsar had still been abroad, the streltsy had revolted again.

Had Sophia, still in furious exile in her convent, put them up to it? No one knew. Fortunately for Peter, his counsellors had managed to smash the rebellion very quickly. But the Tsar had hurried home anyway and now, a month after his arrival, all Russia was waiting to see what their young ruler would do.

As Daniel entered the suburbs, however, the huge city seemed to be quiet. His little cart made its way slowly towards the city’s outer wall, passed through and came eventually to the kitaygorod where the Bobrovs had their substantial house. And there at last, with the late afternoon sun pleasantly on his back, he led his wife and daughter into the large, dusty courtyard.

It was a big, wooden house on two floors, with a massive outside staircase. Around the courtyard were a number of lesser buildings, in which he would be given lodgings.

He placed his hand on his heart and bowed low as the grey-bearded figure of Nikita himself appeared and gave him a courteous greeting. A moment later, from the upper floor, Eudokia came out, smiling; before her walked a serving girl, with a pleasant face, carrying bread and salt in welcome.

‘Welcome, faithful Patriarch,’ she said.

How the old man’s heart warmed. His face, usually rather solemn, creased into a smile. That little word ‘faithful’ meant so much to them both. It meant that, despite their different stations in life, they were friends. It meant that she relied upon him for emotional support. He knew it. And lastly it meant something else, which was never spoken of before her husband.

‘My Lady Eudokia Mikhailovna,’ he said fervently, bowing low in greeting. He had only seen her in Russka before, never in Moscow. In Russka she dressed simply. But here in the capital she was magnificently attired in rich red brocade and a headdress studded with pearls. Though he despised all the trappings of worldly wealth, old Daniel could not help thinking that she looked very well in her finery.

Though they were in the heart of Moscow, the afternoon seemed to be completely silent. Hardly anyone was passing in the street outside. In the courtyard, a single mulberry tree gave shade in one corner – which shade was scarcely needed on such a pleasant autumn day. The horse in the shafts, sensing that he was at journey’s end, had dropped his head and was twitching his lips thoughtfully, while the flies settled on him.

And so, like old friends, the rich landlord and these poor artisans talked gently together in low tones, exchanging a little news. For even Nikita, now that he was getting old, found the presence of these simple people from the country strangely comforting.

It was while they were conversing like this, and just as Daniel was thinking it was time to unharness the horse from the little cart, that he suddenly saw Eudokia stiffen and a curious look of awkwardness pass over Nikita’s face.

At that moment, he also became aware that someone was coming through the gateway behind him; and at the same time he heard Nikita Bobrov say, in a voice whose heartiness was not quite natural: ‘Ah! Here is my son Procopy.’

And then, as Daniel turned to look, his mouth fell open in horror.

Procopy was charming, Peter had always found him so, and intelligent.

The young Tsar’s friends at the village of Preobrazhenskoe had included all kinds of people. There were men of the old princely and boyar families; there were sons of the nobility, like Procopy; there were lesser gentry, and there were even lowborn men like his favourite Menshikov who was said to have sold pastries in the street as a boy.

One thing united them all: they were devoted to Peter.

And then, of course, there were the foreigners in the German quarter.

Procopy was lucky that, with his ready wit, he was included by Peter not only in the military company he kept at the village, but in the frequent parties in the German quarter. Not only did it bring him closer to the boy-Tsar, but it had also opened up for him another world.

For the German quarter was utterly unlike the rest of Moscow. Its broad streets were neatly laid out; its houses were frequently of Dutch brick or stone with pleasant little formal gardens. Its little Protestant churches seemed light and open compared to the dark Muscovite churches that glimmered with gold. In short, it was a small oasis of Europe, of bourgeois order and culture, cleanliness and discipline, fenced off in its compound across the fields from the huge, untidy and exotic, Asiatic jumble of Moscow.

Some of the several thousand merchants and soldiers who lived there were second or third generation immigrants. But to the Russians – unless they had converted to Orthodoxy and made the effort to Russianize themselves entirely – they were contemptible: dumb foreigners. In the slang of the day, the German suburb was often called the kokuy – which was the name of the brothel quarter in the city proper.

Yet here lived Englishmen who understood the weaponry and tactics of modern war; here could be found Germans who, far from being ‘dumb’, as their Russian name implied, spoke many languages. Here were Dutchmen who understood how to build sea-going ships and how to navigate.

These were wonders about which the Russians were not only ignorant, they were not even curious. Procopy himself had been present when one day a faithful general, thinking to please the boy-Tsar, proudly brought back an astrolabe from abroad, by which means, he explained, the cunning foreigners could navigate by the sun and stars. Peter had been delighted. No one had ever seen such a thing before. ‘How does it work?’ he had asked. ‘How?’ The general was nonplussed. ‘I never thought of asking,’ he replied.

That the astrolabe had at that time been in use for nearly two thousand years they did not know.

But nothing had impressed Procopy more than the way that the young Tsar had found not only a Dutchman who could explain it to him but had sat down with an exercise book day after day, week after week, until he had slowly mastered the unfamiliar mathematics of the thing.

‘I tell you,’ he explained to his father, ‘I admire him as a Tsar, for behind his wildness is something formidable. But I love him as a man. It’s not just his curiosity, which is past anything I’ve ever seen. But he struggles so hard! I watched him with his mathematics. It didn’t come easily to him at all, but he wouldn’t give up. That’s what I like. He makes mistakes, but he just won’t give up.’

Procopy had got to know the German suburb very well; and though he had not the driving passion for knowledge that Peter had, he began to have some understanding of the wealth that it represented. Indeed, he even began to think of himself as rather advanced, a man ahead of his time.

Until he went on the great embassy abroad.

The great embassy of Peter of Russia to western Europe has become such a part of the folklore of world history that its true nature is often forgotten.

The folklore is that Peter, thirsty for western civilization, visited Europe and then returned to civilize his own country and make it as much like the rest of Europe as he could.

This is not true.

Firstly, as to Peter’s reason for going, the latter must certainly leave no shadow of doubt. It was to prepare for war – as a start, against Turkey. Diplomatically, the embassy was to persuade western countries to join an anti-Turkish alliance. The practical side of the tour of Europe was to learn shipbuilding so that Russia could build a proper, sea-going fleet.

Already in 1696, soon after his victory at Azov, Peter had sent fifty horrified Russians, without their families, to western Europe to learn navigation and shipbuilding. Amongst them, amazingly, was the fifty-two-year-old Tolstoy who had somehow, despite his close links to Peter’s Miloslavsky enemies, managed to get into Peter’s favour.

His own embassy, therefore, followed soon after.

But why did Peter himself go; and why did he go incognito – officially only as a junior member of the party led by his ambassadors?

We do not know for certain. But it was probably to give himself more freedom to roam unofficially in the dockyards of the west. Certainly he spent months working as a ship’s carpenter and learning the whole business very thoroughly.

It also perhaps gave this devotee of the Mock Synod and the Jolly Company more opportunity to play the fool. This he and his friends also did. In London, they were installed, near the docks, in the house of the distinguished diarist John Evelyn, and so effectively wrecked both house and garden that the great Sir Christopher Wren, who inspected the place afterwards, estimated the damage at the then astounding sum of three hundred and fifty pounds. Amongst other items, the floor had to be renewed; the tiles from the Dutch stoves had been pulled off; the brass door locks broken; the feather beds ripped open; all the lawns and a four-hundred-foot-long, nine-foot-high holly hedge – one of the horticultural prizes of London – completely destroyed.

In this manner, in 1697–8, Tsar Peter came to learn about the civilization of Europe.

The Baltic; the port of Riga; the German states of Brandenburg and Hanover; Holland; England; Hapsburg Vienna; Poland.

It was not, Procopy would say in later years, that he had entered other lands. He had entered another century.

He never really understood how great the difference was. This was not lack of intelligence on his part. The huge, two-thousand-year-old tradition of philosophical enquiry, from Socrates to Descartes; the splendours of the Renaissance; the beginnings of modern science; and, most of all, the complex and flexible western societies with their ancient institutions, professions, legal and moral codes and brilliant culture – all these things, despite some imported books and furniture at the Tsar’s court, were simply not comprehended by more than a handful of Russians. None of Peter’s entourage really understood what they were seeing. Peter himself certainly did not, nor could he have.

But if Procopy did not understand what he saw, it still made a profound impression on him, and he intuited much that he did not fully comprehend.

With Peter, he had been impressed by the ships and the huge ports. The cannon he had seen on board the ships had hugely excited him and, with Peter, too, he had been delighted to discover that one could obtain greatly superior gunpowder in the west.

But when his father had questioned him upon his return and asked him which country he admired most, he replied: ‘I think it was Holland.’

‘Why?’ Nikita enquired. ‘Is it their ships, their trade?’

Procopy shook his head.

‘No. It is…’ he searched for a word ‘… it is their order.’ And seeing Nikita look puzzled, he went on: ‘They have even tamed the sea. I saw great walls – not like our wooden walls across the steppe to keep out the Tatars, but huge walls of stone to keep out the sea itself. They call them dykes. They have taken land back from the sea and laid out fields – thousands of them, all so neatly arranged in squares and rectangles, within their dykes. You can scarcely credit that men could accomplish such a thing. And they have canals, straight as arrows, that stretch to the horizon.’

Nikita looked unimpressed.

‘We do not need such things in Russia. We have land without end.’

‘I know. But don’t you see,’ Procopy went on excitedly, ‘that’s not the point.’ It was something he had been brooding about ever since he first saw these wonders. ‘The point, Father, is that they have conquered nature. They have imposed a pattern, an order, on the land, even the sea itself.’ He paused and then added with a sudden flash of insight, ‘It’s as if, in their own hearts and minds, they ordered themselves.’

Nikita laughed.

‘I can’t see us Russians ordering ourselves. Can you?’

Procopy agreed.

‘No, I can’t. But we can impose order from above. That’s the only way to do it, as the Tsar himself has said to me many times.’

Nikita sighed.

‘So do you mean that you and the Tsar have come back meaning to impose your will upon Mother Nature?’ he asked with a wry smile. ‘My poor Procopy, nature in Russia is mightier than any Tsar. You cannot impose anything upon her. The land,’ he suggested, ‘is endless.’

But now it was Procopy’s turn to smile.

‘Wait until you’ve seen Tsar Peter try,’ he remarked drily.

If these comments depressed Nikita, because he thought them impractical, it was nothing to the effect they had on Eudokia.

‘God made nature,’ she warned him, ‘and if you seek to impose your order upon nature too, then I say that this is nothing but pride. You and your Tsar are evil.’

And to Procopy’s great sorrow, he found his mother estranged from him.

Strangely enough, all three parties to this argument were profoundly and equally Russian: Eudokia in her religious conservatism; Nikita in his fatalism; and perhaps most of all young Procopy in his optimism. For, having seen the outside world and its order, even if remaining unaware of its complex underpinnings, Procopy had assumed that, just as the villagers in Russia can build a house in a day, so with a strong leader and a titanic effort, a new order can be imposed from above. This belief is the perennial tragedy of Russia.

What, then, had the embassy really accomplished?

In fact, a great deal. Peter had wanted to study shipbuilding: he and others had done so quite thoroughly. He wanted new armaments, gunpowder that did not continually misfire, and knowledge of modern fighting methods, especially at sea. He obtained all of these. He also opened up new avenues for trade.

The Russians’ diplomacy failed. No one wanted to fight the Sultan of Turkey at that time. But if his drive to the warm seas of the south might be stalled, Peter had discovered in his travels that there could be other alliances he could make that would get him access to the other trade route he needed: the Baltic Sea in the north.

Above all, it was the long-term consequences of the embassy which were the most important. Men like cunning old Peter Tolstoy might not have learned a great deal about shipbuilding, as they had been told to do, but they came back with a wealth of observations, a knowledge of foreign languages, and some insight, at least, into European education and culture. These were the early Europeanized Russians, the group of which Sophia’s counsellor Golitsyn had been the forerunner. These were the men who, in the long run, would open Russia’s windows on the west.

Was Procopy Bobrov such a man? Not quite. But though he lacked the desire to educate himself profoundly, he had still taken in enough to see that his homeland was centuries out of date.

This had one sad consequence. For while her sense of religious propriety had separated Eudokia and her son, Procopy now found a subtler barrier between himself and his father. Nor could he help it.

For to Nikita, his son had become a stranger. It was not his western style of dress, nor his travels as such. But Nikita could sense, in that faint but unmistakable reserve in Procopy’s manner, by the distant look in his eye, that his son no longer warmed to the same things; he knew something his own people did not. Nikita had seen German and English officers look at their Russian troops that way.

He’s not really a Russian any more, he thought. And, hardest of all to bear for a man who had always thought himself more educated than his fellow nobles: He secretly despises me.

This, then, was the young man who had just walked into the courtyard, and at whom Daniel was staring in disbelief.

For Procopy was wearing a smart green uniform, close-fitting, with buttons down the front in the German manner. His legs were encased in breeches and stockings. And apart from a neat moustache, he was cleanshaven.

Of course, in the old Cossack days in the Ukraine, when men still called him Ox, Daniel had been used to cleanshaven men. But here in the north – that the son of Nikita Bobrov should do such a thing! – he could only stare in wonder.

Nikita, following his gaze, smiled a little apologetically.

‘The Tsar’s friends came back from their journey cleanshaven,’ he remarked.

‘The Tsar himself has shaved the beards of the boyars at court,’ Procopy reminded him. ‘He says he won’t tolerate people at his court looking so primitive. He told me so today.’

Primitive! Daniel winced at the word. He saw Eudokia start as if she had been slapped, and then look away from them. It was a calculated insult.

Yet Nikita Bobrov appeared to ignore this rudeness. It seemed he had something else on his mind. He turned to his son with a look of enquiry.

‘You came from Preobrazhenskoe?’

Procopy nodded.

‘Well?’ Nikita asked.

‘It’s decided. We have some confessions. We begin the executions tomorrow.’ He took his father by the arm. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you about it.’ And he led him into the house.

Only now did Eudokia turn to face Daniel and his little family again. He saw there were tears in her eyes.

‘Thank God,’ she cried softly. ‘Thank God that you have come.’

Only gradually did Daniel realize the full horror of what was going on. Only during the course of that winter did he come to understand why the Lady Eudokia had felt so in need of his presence. And he himself was not sure how he could comfort her.

As Procopy had announced, the executions of the mutinous streltsy had begun the day after Daniel’s arrival.

Indeed, they might have started sooner if the interrogations – which had been going on down at Preobrazhenskoe – had not been so difficult. For very few of the mutinous soldiers were prepared to talk, despite some extensive persuasion.

It was at that time in Russia normal procedure in all cases of this kind to give prisoners the knout to elicit a confession. The use of torture in interrogation was normal in most countries at that time, whereas it is used in far fewer countries today, but a word of explanation may be needed about the Russian method.

For it is sometimes thought that the famous Russian knout was just a kind of whip, or a flail like the English cat o’ nine tails. But whereas the English navy, in the last century, would give a man a thousand lashes with the cat and reckon he might live, a twentieth of that ration with the knout would have killed him. And though, say, a Bobrov might have thrashed a peasant on his estate for some misdemeanour, he would probably have used the rods called batogs, not a knout.

The knout was three and a half feet long and made of leather. Much thicker than batogs, it was also very heavy. As a result, when a blow was struck, which the knout-master did by leaping forward and swinging with all his force, it actually sunk a wound, like a bar, into the victim’s back for the depth of half an inch or so. The skin was completely pulverized. Blood and tissue flew with every stroke. If the knout-master worked down your back, by the second time round he would be at the bone.

In order to appreciate how thorough the Russians were in this matter, however, it should further be explained that the more severe method was first to tie the victim’s hands behind his back and then haul him up by the hands with a rope over a beam. This meant not just that he hung before the knout-master but that his arms were actually dislocated from their sockets while the knouting went on. When lowered, the arms could then be forced back into their sockets again.

This was the Russian knout, with which most prisoners were interrogated.

Tsar Peter was very concerned about the mutiny of the streltsy. He had seen his own uncle hacked to pieces by them when he was a boy and he knew they were capable of overturning him and putting Sophia back in his place. The questioning was urgent, therefore. Not only the streltsy but two of Sophia’s maids were stripped and knouted – although Peter leniently allowed one of these a simple execution when he discovered she was pregnant.

As well as the knout, Peter in person supervised the putting of some prisoners to the rack and also had them roasted on a fire in front of him. Yet the streltsy were still so obstinate in their silence that on at least one occasion Peter tried to cure a mutineer’s silence by breaking open his clenched jaws with a stick.

Procopy Bobrov was present at a number of these interrogations.

He was there for a particular reason. As soon as they arrived back, Peter had joined the young man to his newly formed government department. It was called the Preobrazhensky Prikaz – in effect, a secret police bureau. And right from the start, it would make itself feared.

‘The streltsy aren’t talking much, even under torture,’ Procopy told his father. ‘But we do know they planned to replace Peter and they were going to kill every foreigner in Russia too. We’ll deal with them, though.’

The executions that autumn went on for three weeks, from the last day of September to October 18.

On October 12, there was a sudden dense fall of snow, plunging Moscow directly into winter, but the daily public executions went on.

Daniel witnessed several. The victims died in various ways, though usually they were beheaded or hanged. Peter also demanded that his boyars and friends should take a hand in the executions, and Daniel heard Procopy say to his father one evening: ‘The Tsar’s curious to see some people beheaded in the European way, with a sword instead of an axe tomorrow. Have you a good heavy sword you could lend me?’

Daniel saw Procopy at work the next day. Someone else in the crowd told the old man that he had seen the Tsar himself behead several men.

All these events Daniel witnessed with sorrow, but not with horror. The knouting, the executions: the streltsy had rebelled and it was only to be expected that they would be punished.

His horror began one morning when they brought out the regimental priests.

It was in Red Square. There, before the great, exotic towers of St Basil’s Cathedral, Peter’s men had erected a huge scaffold – but not just an ordinary scaffold: this one was in the shape of a cross. They led out the priests to the scaffold. Daniel braced himself to witness a monstrosity.

But what happened next took his breath away entirely. For now, to perform the hanging, came the court jester. He was dressed as a priest.

The same day, in the gardens of the Novodevichy Convent, a hundred and ninety-five more of the streltsy were hung on gibbets, near Sophia’s window.

All these corpses were to be left dangling – strange, frozen spectres, for five long months through the winter.

And what was Daniel to make of all this? He thought he knew. As the months passed, he became increasingly certain. Yet even then, he did not wish to form the thought himself.

Why had Eudokia summoned him? For comfort. Because, Daniel soon realized, there was no one else she felt she could trust.

Her son was godless. Her husband, wanting success for his family, said nothing.

‘You see for yourself, all around, what has come to pass,’ she told him privately. ‘Help me, good Daniel, to know what to do.’

Ostensibly he was there as a carpenter. And, indeed, he did some beautiful joinery in their house, so that Nikita himself soon forgot his irritation at his wife’s unexpectedly sending for the fellow. The landowner would proudly show Daniel’s workmanship to visitors, and had he not refused to work for anyone else, Daniel could have had many commissions.

In a way, both the Bobrovs came to be glad of this addition to their household. For while his wife was devoted to the parents, Nikita found himself delighted by the presence of the little girl.

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’s Drunken Synod.

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 be tolerant of human weakness.

‘He’ll forgive you almost anything as long as you never lie to him,’ Procopy said. ‘Once, when I was late on parade, he looked so angry I thought he was going to have me knouted, but when I told him I’d been drunk the night before and had only just woken up, he laughed and told me not to do it again.’

Above all, Procopy was cheerful because he knew that Peter was preparing for a great adventure – he was going to seize the Baltic ports.

It was a secret. The Swedes were strong and it would be necessary to take them by surprise. Brandenburg, Denmark, Saxony, all wanted to attack the Swedes and share out the rich Baltic lands of the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians amongst themselves. But Peter could not strike north until he was sure that he, in turn, would not be attacked by the Ottoman Turks in the south. All that year, therefore, he assured the Swedish envoys to Moscow that he was their friend, while his own envoy in Constantinople tried to conclude a satisfactory treaty with the Sultan.

Meanwhile, Russia was arming.

The new English flintlocks were a huge improvement on the old muskets of the streltsy, which had been completely unreliable. Equally impressive were the new bayonets from France.

‘See how neatly it’s done,’ Procopy explained to his father and Daniel one day. ‘Instead of firing and then fitting the bayonet into the barrel, and then removing it if you want to fire again, these cunning Frenchmen have thought of fitting the bayonet on to the outside of the barrel, so you can actually fire with the bayonet fixed!’

Neither man had ever seen such a weapon and even Daniel, the former Cossack, agreed that the thing was well done.

Above all, the state would need money.

‘We’re going to tax everything we can get our hands on,’ Procopy declared. ‘Even people’s beards,’ he laughed. ‘And since trade will improve when we’ve got our Baltic ports, we’ll make the merchants cough up too.’

‘How will you do that?’ Nikita asked.

‘Simple,’ his son replied. ‘Administrative reforms.’

And he explained how Peter was now going to allow all local tradesmen to be completely free of the control of the provincial governors and let them elect their own officials. ‘That will please them, I should think,’ Nikita said. For though he himself had once hoped to be a governor, he knew very well how corrupt their administration was.

‘Not really,’ Procopy grinned. ‘You see, we’re doubling their taxes!’

Indeed, though many of Peter’s reforms were for the ultimate good of Russia, it is certainly true that most were actually thought of originally as ways of raising revenue more efficiently.

Not only money, but men were pouring in. Procopy insisted that Nikita send a good complement from his estates, including Russka. ‘And make sure they’re all shaved,’ he remarked. When his father observed that, for his part, he couldn’t see why it mattered whether the peasant recruits were shaved or not, Procopy quickly cut in: ‘Of course it does. That way we can spot deserters at once.’

There was another way of getting men as well as applying to landlords. ‘We’re going to make sure the peasants who’ve been freed by their masters don’t get off,’ Procopy explained. ‘They’re to report to the recruiting officers or lose their freedom.’

‘So their freedom will be the army?’

‘That’s right.’

And Nikita could only shake his head at such ruthless efficiency.

But what, in the long run, did all these changes mean? This was what puzzled Nikita.

He was not shocked, as Eudokia and Daniel were. And though he found Procopy’s air of superiority hurtful, he tried to be humble and to interest himself. He saw whole regiments dressed like Germans. He saw his son lead his wife out in a new German dress, in which she looked rather bashful. He saw the Church mocked and the Tsar’s only son taken from his mother and given into the care of foreigners.

‘And all I want to know,’ he burst out to Procopy, when they were alone one day before Christmas, ‘all I want you to tell me is, where are we going? Are we to stop being Russians altogether? Is that the idea? I even heard someone say the Tsar would prefer us all to speak Dutch.’

On this subject, to his surprise, his son reassured him.

‘For while I dare say the Tsar would be delighted if we did speak Dutch, he won’t attempt such a thing,’ Procopy laughed. ‘But you see, Father,’ he went on, ‘to understand what’s going on you have to look not to Russia, but outside.’

‘What for?’

‘Because no one in Russia realizes how backward we have become. If you went to London or Amsterdam, you’d see at once. Didn’t Tsar Alexis import foreign officers and methods in your day? Yet wasn’t he a good Russian?’

‘He was,’ said Nikita piously.

‘We Russians must use whatever seems good to us, then, and reject the rest,’ Procopy continued.

‘But why does the Tsar hate religion?’

‘He doesn’t. But the Church is so backward, so superstitious, so opposed to any change, that he cannot work with it.’ He paused. ‘Tsar Peter, Father, is like a giant dragging a great army up a hill. Only the army is all facing the wrong way and pulling downwards. He has to be strong. He has to be firm. He has to act, if you like, like Ivan the Terrible to achieve anything at all. Only in this way can he make Russia strong.’

‘Then we are not to become westerners? We can still be Russians once we have caught up?’

Procopy put his hand on his father’s arm.

‘Of course. I will tell you what the Tsar said to me only last week. He said: “Procopy Nikitevich – we need Europe for twenty years. Then we can turn our backs on her.”’

1700

Then came the blow.

Old Russia ended.

To many of the population, it was a cataclysm, as though the firmament of heaven had been riven. By this terrible sign, Daniel knew, as he had long suspected, that the end of days was indeed at hand. And gathering together Eudokia, Arina and little Maryushka, he told them gravely: ‘The Apocalypse has begun. The Antichrist is here.’

It was, indeed, the dawn of a new era.

For in December 1699, Tsar Peter had decided to change the calendar.

To understand the significance of this event, it must be remembered that in Russia, as yet, it was not the year 1699 at all. It was the year 7207 from the Creation, which system of counting, in all the centuries since the times of ancient Kiev, the Russians had never given up.

It must also be remembered that the year began not in January, but in September.

This, too, as any Russian could have explained, was logical. For did not the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis speak of the apple on the tree? Clearly, then, when the world began, it must have been the autumn season!

The fact that the rest of the world used a different system was only further proof of how wicked other countries were.

This was the calendar which Peter in December 1699 decided to change. He issued a ukaz that the very next month, the new system, a new year, and a new century were to begin. Thus, in January, it became the year 1700.

He made only one concession to Russian sensibilities. The Catholic countries of Europe had by now adopted the modern, Gregorian calendar. The English, being Protestant, were then still using the older, Julian calendar. The small difference between the allocation of solar days to the year meant that as each century passed, the small gap between the two calendars grew larger. By this time, the Julian was already eleven days behind the Gregorian. But it was better to be a little late than to agree with the Pope! Peter therefore decided to use the Julian calendar and as a result, until 1918, the Russians would continue to be nearly two weeks behind the west.

This, then, was the new age which Peter brought to Russia. He decreed that in the first week of January, a branch of pine or juniper should be hung over every door, in celebration.

And to Daniel, and many like him, this was the final confirmation of all that they had feared.

The idea that the world was approaching its end, though not new, had been growing enormously in Daniel’s lifetime. It was not only the Raskolniki who thought so. The collection of Ukrainian tracts predicting the end, called the Book of Cyril, had been widely read long before the Schism. The followers of Kapiton, whom Daniel had known on the Volga, had been urging the peasants there to prepare for the Apocalypse since Daniel was a young man. Indeed, it had been a regular monk who had remarked to him one day: ‘You know, after the Church council, Nikon himself began to think the end was coming.’

The end was near. The question was: when exactly would it come? By the time of Daniel’s arrival in Moscow, it was widely believed that it already had.

Endless calculations of the date were made, especially by the Raskolniki. About a thousand tracts on the subject have survived. All took as their premise that the number of the Antichrist was 666, and while some made their calculations from the split between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and others argued that the Antichrist lay bound for a thousand years and then waited for his number, nearly all the calculations pointed to a year between 1666 and 1691.

In Russka, Daniel had been torn. While he feared that the end was near, the new joy he had found in his little family had made him hope that it might not be so. But in Moscow that hope had evaporated.

Strangely enough, it was a former monk, who had just joined the Raskolniki, who convinced Daniel. He was a small, intense fellow, and they had met at one of the secret prayer meetings at a private house. The monk had been an icon painter, which had drawn them together in the first place, and he had a formidable collection of pamphlets. He also had numerous prints which depicted Tsar Alexis and Nikon as the horns of Antichrist, or Nikon as the Beast of the Apocalypse.

He knew the Book of Revelation thoroughly, and quoted passage after passage explaining how each referred to a current event.

As Daniel became daily more appalled by what he saw in Moscow, his head also became more full of the monk’s formulae and quotations. The fellow is certainly learned, he concluded. And it seems to me that what he says must be true.

But if indeed the end had come, then that must mean that the Antichrist himself had arrived upon earth. Many thought so. And in that case – who was he?

Some said Tsar Alexis. Others believed that it was Nikon, who, many of them added, must also have been Jewish!

But here again, the little monk had better information.

‘Tell me this, who was Peter’s real father?’

‘Tsar Alexis.’

‘Perhaps. But why then is he such a dark giant? Can you think of another?’

Daniel gazed uncomprehendingly.

‘Ah, my friend, you are a good man: you do not see evil. I tell you, the father of this Peter was none other than the wicked Nikon himself. And this foul, illegitimate offspring is not a true Tsar at all. Does he behave like a true Tsar?’

Daniel could only agree that he did not.

‘It is Peter himself who is the Antichrist,’ the little monk concluded in triumph. ‘It is he who is here to begin the Apocalypse. Be warned.’

God knew, with each passing month, Peter was giving his subjects good cause for thinking that this must be the case. And no wonder, too, that if any final proof was needed, it came with this new and infamous act of changing the counting of the years.

‘For is it not said,’ the monk reminded Daniel, ‘that the Antichrist shall change the time? Is it not said that the years of God shall be abolished when the years of Satan are proclaimed?’

‘All this is true,’ Daniel agreed.

‘Bear witness, then,’ his friend admonished him, ‘that this is indeed the Antichrist.’

The festival of Epiphany, which falls on January 6, was always celebrated in Russia in a very beautiful way.

Deriving from the ancient Jewish Feast of Lights, the festival of Epiphany – or Theophany as the Orthodox usually call it – means ‘The Shining Forth’. At this festival are especially remembered Christ’s appearance to the Wise Men, and his baptism by John in the River Jordan.

It is a lovely and a delicate festival, calling to mind images of light, water and a dove descending.

At Epiphany, in Russia, it was the custom to bless the waters; and in Moscow this ceremony was of particular beauty.

Little Maryushka was excited therefore when her father announced that morning that they would all go to the river to watch.

She had been aware of a tension in the air for the last three weeks. She had seen her parents and the Lady Eudokia consulting each other and heard such words as ‘wickedness’ and ‘the Second Coming’ murmured. She had seen the decoration over the doorways and heard people say it was the New Year; but since her father sternly told her it was not, she supposed everyone else must have made a mistake.

But today, at least, all seemed to be well. There was only the faintest wind. The cloud cover was high and thin, so that the pale presence of the sun was sensed, if not seen. The streets were full and by the time they reached the river a huge crowd was gathering. She could even see people sitting on the tall roofs of the houses. They crossed the frozen river and took up a position opposite the high walls of the Kremlin.

In the middle of the frozen river, inside a large area enclosed by rails, stood a little wooden building, like a shrine, densely hung with icons. Before it she could see a broad circular hole in the ice, like a well. Young priests and deacons were standing about there.

Maryushka looked up at her father. Although she already understood what it meant to be one of the Raskolniki, she hoped it was all right to enjoy these ceremonies performed by the ordinary Church; she was glad, therefore, to note a look of approval on Daniel’s face as he gazed at the river, and she held her mother’s hand happily.

Soon, she knew, she would see both the Patriarch and the Tsar himself as they sat in splendour, on twin thrones upon the ice, to watch the blessing of the waters. She was so fascinated that she forgot even to glance up at her parents again.

Across the ice now, she could see the front of the procession. A banner was waving; there was a faint glint from the jewelled mitres of the priests. They were coming.

But then, suddenly, another sound was heard: the sound of pipes and drums – brisk, cheerful, but harsh. And now on to the ice swung column after column of soldiers, marching smartly in step. They wore close-fitting German coats of red, green or blue, with gaiters and tricorn hats. They carried flintlocks. And they were cleanshaven. In front of each company marched a man with a banner; and before the first column strode a huge, tall man dressed in a green uniform. While the drums rolled and the pipes squeaked, some twelve thousand foreign-looking soldiers marched out on to the ice and formed a huge square around the area where the priests were to bless the waters.

Only when the troops were in place did the priests come on to the ice.

But now at last they came. How stately, how gorgeous the procession was. A huge gold cross was followed immediately by an enormous lantern with mica windows, carried on the shoulders of a dozen priests, in which huge candles were burning brightly. Some five hundred priests in their golden robes and jewelled mitres followed in stately procession behind: archbishops, bishops, archimandrites, priests and deacons; and as they gathered, hundreds of tall tapers were lit. On a raised dais now, a deacon stood holding aloft a huge banner on which, in gold, was depicted the double-headed eagle of the Russian Tsars. On a throne sat the Patriarch. Here, indeed, was all the gorgeous panoply of old Russia.

But where, she wondered, was the Tsar? Why was the Patriarch sitting alone?

‘Where is Tsar Peter?’ she whispered.

‘He’s there,’ Arina replied.

Maryushka frowned. Which one was he then?

The blessings had already begun. A mitred priest was passing the censer over the water: one, two, three times. Long candles were being dipped in the water. The waters were being blessed.

It was a sacred moment. At this instant, Maryushka knew, the waters of the river were mystically transformed into those of the River Jordan. This, indeed, was holy Russia.

During all this time, the massed troops had remained silent. At each important point in the service of blessing, the huge standard with the double-headed eagle had been waved, and the standards of the soldiers, as if in reply, had at once waved back in unison. As the ceremony ended, they were brought forward to be sprinkled with Holy water.

Then it was done. The priests began to turn. When suddenly the whole sky appeared to crack.

To Maryushka, for a second, it seemed as if the world must have come to an end. The great thunderclap, followed by a roar, seemed to fill the whole sky, the whole day. She started so violently that she left the ground. And then, even as the mighty roar of the cannon massed along the Kremlin wall was reverberating back and forth across the river, a second awful crash followed as the twelve thousand men before her raised their muskets and fired a volley into the air; a few moments later there was another; then a third.

And the little girl, completely taken by surprise, burst into tears.

This was Tsar Peter’s contribution to the celebration of Epiphany.

Only afterwards did her parents explain to her that the tall man in green, standing far away from the Patriarch, was the Tsar and that the roar of the guns was meant to be a happy celebration.

As for Daniel, it seemed to him that, for the first time, he had truly seen the face of the Antichrist.

It was hard. It was cold. It was unlike anything seen in Russia before. For the Antichrist, this Peter, he now realized, was the state itself, without religion. And he remembered a phrase he had heard some Moscow Raskolniki use only the week before, and which he had not quite understood.

‘That’s it,’ he murmured. ‘All power is Antichrist because all men are subservient to it.’

Peter was the new state. And he was about power.

It was a week later that his friend the little monk disappeared.

Daniel heard that they had taken him to the Preobrazhensky Prikaz for questioning. Ten days later, he heard from the community of Raskolniki that the little fellow was dead. He had freely confessed to saying that Peter was the Antichrist. He even told his guards that they should not obey the Tsar. But he had refused to name any accomplices. They had punished him by the death known in Russia as kopchenie: with this method, the victim is slowly smoked to death like bacon.

It was the week after this that Daniel left Moscow for Russka.

1703

Andrei was pleased to be going to Moscow again – all the more so since he had discovered by letters that his old friend Nikita Bobrov was still alive.

And I understand he’s still rich, like me, he thought with a grin.

Life had been good to him, Andrei considered. There had been tragedies: he had lost three children and his first wife. But there had been a happy second marriage and three more children, of whom his greatest joy was his son, Pavlo.

What a handsome, brave young fellow he was – a true Cossack.

As for their estates – they were considerable.

‘Which is why,’ he would remark slyly, ‘I am a good Russian!’

Since the days of Bogdan and the union with Muscovy, the Ukraine had suffered some terrible times while Poland and Russia fought over her, and Cossack factions had fought between themselves in the period usually known as the Ruin.

But that was over now. After numerous disputes, Russia and Poland had finally signed a perpetual peace. Poland kept the land west of the River Dniepr, with the exception of ancient Kiev, and Russia held the land to the east, known as the Left Bank. At this time also, the Orthodox Churchmen in Kiev finally placed themselves under the Patriarch of Moscow instead of Constantinople. There was some grumbling – because these Ukrainians still considered themselves more sophisticated than the Muscovites – but they did it.

It was also at this point that Russia found a new and satisfactory Hetman to rule the Left Bank. He was a nobleman of polished manners and education who had at one time served the Polish King. His name – almost as famous as Bogdan’s in the Ukraine – was Ivan Mazeppa.

His aim was very simple: control the land for Russia; strengthen the Cossack gentry; leave the poor Cossacks and peasants as they were; and, of course, enrich himself. This policy made the ordinary people hate him, but it certainly worked.

Ivan Mazeppa, in a feat rarely equalled in the highest days of feudalism, managed in thirty years to amass very nearly twenty thousand estates. He also gave estates to his faithful officers, who included Andrei and his son. ‘Thanks to Mazeppa we have ten estates,’ Andrei would remind his son. ‘And see how cleverly he has managed to make a friend of young Tsar Peter.’ For it was true that Mazeppa had managed to form a close and very profitable friendship with the new Tsar, who trusted him more than most of his court.

And, thank God, young Pavlo was in the good graces of Mazeppa. Better still, he had fought his first campaign with him when the Cossacks helped at the taking of Azov. Pavlo had been only seventeen, but he had caught the attention of Tsar Peter himself. Who knew what sort of career he might one day have! He could even be Hetman.

He was a dark, handsome young man of twenty-five, a little shorter than Andrei had been, but very strongly made. The previous month he had broken his arm in a fall, and returned home to visit his parents while it mended. And though at first young Pavlo had been furious to be out of action, Andrei had suddenly remarked to him one day: ‘My boy, I think perhaps this is an opportunity after all.’

The times were certainly exciting. Russia had begun her great war on the Baltic coast with Sweden. And Charles XII, that country’s bold young king, was still so confident he could defeat the half-trained Russians that he had calmly attacked Poland as well. For a good Cossack, all this could only mean one thing – an opportunity to fight and enrich oneself. ‘The Tsar needs good men for his northern campaign. And Mazeppa’s going to ask his permission to take back some of the Polish lands across the Dniepr,’ Pavlo had told his father. ‘Either way, I can’t wait to get into action.’

‘But there are more ways of getting ahead than fighting,’ old Andrei had reminded his son. ‘Look at Mazeppa.’

What better time could there be for Pavlo to go to Moscow and recommend himself to Tsar Peter?

Everything had worked out well: Mazeppa himself had given Pavlo a letter to Peter; Andrei had discovered that his old friend Nikita Bobrov had a son who was close to the Tsar. It was with high hopes, therefore, that he rode northwards into Russia. Of the young Tsar he did not know a great deal. The poor Cossacks hated him. They respected his conquests in the south and the fact that he had finally ended the payments to the Khan down in the Crimea. But they hated the new religious ways – many had already become Raskolniki – and they detested the new war in the north. Their wild and undisciplined ways were useless against the trained infantry of the Swedish King. Losses had already been high. ‘We’re cannon fodder for English and German officers,’ they truly said. But none of this greatly concerned Andrei now. A Cossack landowner was a very different fellow from these poor fighting peasants.

It was spring when he left Kiev. The weather was getting warm, and the rivers were settling down again into their new courses. For each year, in their full spate, the melting rivers carried downstream such a mass of branches, ice floes and debris of all kinds, that their courses were subtly altered. Here a bank would collapse; there silt pile up a new one; fallen trees might turn a stream into new channels; a meadow become a swamp. Each year it was the same river, yet not the same.

So, too, Andrei reflected, he was taking the same journey that he had taken half a century before: the same, but different, and this time with his son.

Though he felt healthy, a little voice within had told him that he should not expect to make any more long journeys after this one. He was strong, but he was seventy-four. And so it was with a certain nostalgia, now, that he prepared to see Moscow for the last time.

How many memories rose up before him as he rode: memories of his youth, of the Ox, of the girl Maryushka.

Faces, he thought, that I shall never see again, on this side of life’s river.

In the year 1703, the Bobrovs had a new Moscow house.

It was stout, squat, on two floors: and it was built of stone. The rooms were low, but large; the floors were made of massive wooden planks, which were polished. The furniture was simple – a stout table, some wooden chairs. And in the main room, after the icon in the corner of course, the place of honour was occupied by a tall square stove with a chimney, which was covered with Dutch tiles.

Procopy Bobrov had taken six months to persuade his father to import these tiles, but old Nikita, now that he had this stove, was proud of the thing.

‘Dutch,’ he would say, as he conducted his guests to look at them. ‘Yes, they’re Dutch all right.’

So it was to the new stove, in the month of May that year, that Nikita Bobrov delightedly conducted his old friend Andrei and his son Pavlo.

‘What a joy this is,’ he cried. ‘After so many years. And as you see,’ he added, with a wave of the hand at the stove and the house in general, ‘things have changed since you were last here.’

They had indeed.

How strange it was to Andrei to find his old friend both cleanshaven, apart from a moustache, and in a tight-fitting German coat.

‘Why,’ he laughed, ‘my dear Nikita, you look almost like a Cossack!’

‘Ah, yes.’ Nikita looked a little sheepish, yet also rather proud. ‘The Tsar’s orders, you know.’

For within a year of the beard tax, Peter had struck again. This time, all classes above the peasant were to wear Hungarian or German short coats instead of their long kaftans which, though undoubtedly warmer in the Russian winter, Peter had decided were too old-fashioned and impractical. He had even hung dummies, correctly dressed, by the city gates to instruct his subjects what to do.

‘Yes,’ Nikita went on, ‘you’ll find everything’s very western now. Young people allowed to meet each other before they’re married; our women not to be kept in seclusion – he even has them attend court with their husbands. Progress in every way, I dare say.’

Though Andrei also noticed, when Eudokia came in to greet him, that she wore a long Russian dress in the old style and greeted him in the traditional reverent manner.

‘My wife preserves the old ways in the house,’ Nikita remarked, with a trace of embarrassment.

For their part, the two Ukrainians thought it rather graceful. Andrei was fascinated by all that he saw and learned in the coming days.

Nikita was obviously happy to see him, insisted he stay in his house, and took him everywhere. But it was not just the changing face of the city but the subtle change in attitudes that he noticed.

For where, in their youth, Nikita had been harsh towards foreigners, now there was in his tone something faintly, but unmistakably, apologetic. ‘We have apothecaries in the city now, you know,’ he would say. ‘And a newspaper.’ Or: ‘There’s a new school of navigation here, and another for foreign languages about to start. But, of course, I dare say you’re used to such things in Little Russia.’ On another occasion, he even remarked humbly, ‘The Tsar has authorized Protestants. Do you think that is right?’

Above all, Nikita noticed the change in the power of the Church.

Once again, another department for the Church had been set up, but this time, Andrei gathered, the Tsar was effectively taking some of the Church revenues for the state.

‘He’s also taken a lot of church bells,’ Nikita explained, ‘for the cannon.’

But far more striking, and shocking, was something Peter had simply failed to do.

For three years before, the old Patriarch had died. And since he was nowadays their Patriarch too, the Orthodox in the Ukraine had wondered who the new one would be. So far only a temporary stand-in had been appointed. But when Andrei asked his host who he thought would succeed, Nikita shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. The word is that there isn’t going to be one. Peter doesn’t want one.’

‘What do you mean? The Tsar can’t abolish the Patriarch. He isn’t God.’

But Nikita only shook his head. ‘You don’t know him,’ he said quietly.

Yet if these matters depressed him, the news of the war, at least, was very encouraging. After some false starts, Peter had succeeded in getting his first foothold on the Baltic. He had not yet managed to hold any of the great Baltic ports like Reval or Riga; but the previous year he had got back a fort up by Lake Ladoga, by the entrance to the River Neva where, centuries before, the legendary Alexander Nevsky had driven back old Russia’s enemies. ‘There’s only one more fort up there – it’s where the Neva runs into the sea,’ Nikita explained. ‘Once he has that, he’s got access to the sea. Not much of one,’ he added with a smile, ‘but enough for him to claim a victory!’

A week later the news came. It was brought by Procopy. ‘He’s got the fort. There’s been a battle on the River Neva with a Swedish flotilla: he won that too. The Tsar’s got his foothold in the north.’

He had indeed. It was a desolate, marshy place: the name Neva, in Finnish, meant ‘marsh’. There was really nothing there but a fort. However, the River Neva led to Lake Ladoga, and from there one could penetrate the huge river system of north Russia. Compared to Reval or Riga further south along the Baltic coast, it was nothing much.

But in 1703, it was what Peter had. And he was delighted. He awarded himself and his favourite Menshikov the Order of St Andrew, which he had recently instituted. He let it be known that he would enter Moscow in triumph in June. And he immediately set to work to build a new and stronger fort at the place, having a stout log house built for himself on the river bank near its foundations.

‘So what are we to call this new fort of the Tsar’s?’ Nikita asked.

‘The Peter and Paul Fortress,’ Procopy replied. ‘When I left,’ he added, ‘he was talking of building a town up there too. You know how he gets these sudden ideas.’

‘A town? Up there in the marshes?’

‘I know. It doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps he’ll change his mind.’

‘And what does he want to call it?’ Nikita demanded.

Procopy grinned.

‘St Petersburg, I believe.’

And it was just while they were digesting this preposterous idea that a messenger arrived with news that drove all thought of Peter’s little victory from Nikita’s mind.

It was his steward from Russka.

And it seemed that the whole place had gone completely mad.

All along, perhaps, Daniel had known that it would come to this.

He had known it in his heart three years before, when old Silas the priest had died. That had been in the summer, just six months after his own return from Moscow.

It was remarkable, really, that the little community had been able to continue for so long, even up to then. It could not have done so without friends.

In the first place, there was the abbot. Daniel had always strongly suspected, but only in his last few months did old Silas positively tell him, that the abbot was a sympathizer.

‘He knows what we do and says nothing. That is why nobody bothers us,’ Silas explained.

The other danger might have been the Bobrov steward: but he was one of the Raskolniki himself and attended their secret services.

The third, and equally important friend, was Eudokia Bobrov.

Her interest in the community had to be secret. Only Silas, Daniel and his family knew, and they all agreed that there could be no other way. The villagers themselves did not know. Had Nikita himself ever guessed, needless to say, he would have clamped down at once. But if ever an icon, a prayer book, some candles were needed, mysteriously Silas or Daniel had always found the money and the needed articles had appeared.

‘We remember you in our prayers, good lady,’ Daniel had told her.

The monastery was lax but conformed. If once the Bobrovs had been suspected under the old regime, under Peter they were trusted. Russka was rather a backwater anyway. So for nearly two decades, while many Raskolniki left the centre of Russia for the frontier lands, and while there might be trouble at Nizhni Novgorod or on die Don, the authorities had just assumed that Russka was quiet. As for Dirty Place – who had even heard of it?

In the early spring of 1703, Silas had told Daniel he was dying.

‘I shall go this summer. You must take over.’

‘I too am old,’ Daniel protested.

‘You are the only one who can lead them,’ Silas replied.

‘Yet how shall I be ordained a priest?’ Daniel asked.

For this was now, and would always remain, the central problem of the Raskolniki.

They were the true Church yet outside the Church. No bishops had joined them and so there was, technically, no one to ordain priests. As the last of the original priests in the movement – men like Silas, who had been ordained before the Schism – died out, how were they to be replaced?

Some Raskolniki were prepared, if they could find one, to take on a disaffected priest from the new Church, as long as he underwent a ritual purification. Others used the old method, which the Church now frowned on, of electing their own parish priest. In the old days, such a man was submitted to the bishop for ordination. Now, without bishops, he remained an elder, recognized by his congregation alone.

Officially, therefore, when Silas died, it was decided that the congregation at Dirty Place should go to the church at Russka – though a priest from the monastery would go to the little church in the hamlet from time to time to hold a service in the proper manner.

Unoffically, however, having carefully washed and purified the little church whenever the priest from the monastery had come there, the Raskolniki of Dirty Place, led now by Daniel, continued their own services in secret.

At the end of the year there came another crisis. The steward died.

What if Bobrov should send a new man who was not of their persuasion?

Immediately Daniel wrote a letter and Nikita was rather puzzled, a few days later, when Eudokia said to him: ‘Let me choose a new steward for Dirty Place. I know the estate far better than you.’

Since he had many other things on his mind, Nikita had agreed and rather forgotten about the matter; while at Christmas Daniel had been delighted to welcome the new young steward in the little church at Dirty Place.

But the greatest threat to their safety still remained.

It is sometimes thought that Peter was liberal over matters of religion. And up to a point this is true. A year before, in 1702, he had not only authorized Protestants to worship freely but his laws had proclaimed the principle of religious toleration – certainly something no Tsar before would ever have dreamed of.

That same year, encountering a whole area full of Raskolniki up in the north, he had told them they might worship as they pleased so long as they produced a certain quantity of iron for his war effort. As time went on, though, Peter often fulminated against them and their old-fashioned ways; he also, rather contemptuously, issued laws which allowed Raskolniki to practise – but made them pay double taxes and wear a distinguishing yellow badge on their coats.

It was freedom – though of a rather poor kind; but some found they could live by it.

Yet for many Raskolniki, Peter had done nothing at all. For the one thing that he still absolutely demanded of all men, was the one thing they could not give: total loyalty and obedience to the Tsar and his new, secularized state. How could they obey him when they were coming to see him as the Antichrist himself?

Above all there was one unchanging requirement to which they could not yield.

‘We cannot, in conscience, pray for the health of the Tsar,’ Daniel declared. ‘That is impossible. If we do that, then we deny all that we believe in.’

Maryushka was with some other Russka children, fishing in the river on the monastery side, the morning that the abbot died.

They knew that something must have happened when they saw the monks hurrying about at the gate, calling the lay brothers in from the fields. A few moments later, the church bell started to ring.

That the abbot would die one day was to be expected. He was very old. But in fact he had dropped quite suddenly, in the monastery library, hence the confusion. Curious as always, the children had run to the monastery gates. At first the monks ignored them. But a lay brother soon told them; and immediately Maryushka ran off to tell her father.

And when she saw the look that Daniel gave Arina, she understood that this death meant something very serious indeed.

Yet at first, Maryushka thought she liked the new abbot. He was a pleasant-looking man in his fifties, with a round face and very pale blue eyes, who would stop to talk to children in Russka.

But he was an outsider. The death of the old abbot had caused a visitation from the authorities. They had not been impressed with what they saw; the election of a new abbot was stopped and the monks, to their great annoyance, had had this new man imposed upon them from Vladimir.

He had arrived in early May. Two weeks later, he had become suspicious of what was going on at Dirty Place. A week after that, two strangers arrived at the monastery, and were closeted with him for some time.

How warm the church always seemed to Maryushka.

It was a simple, wooden building with a little octagonal tower over its centre. One came up a flight of wooden steps to the covered porch by the west door; though beneath this was an undercroft with a stove where they often gathered in the depth of winter.

Inside the church, though the wooden ceiling hid the tower itself from view, the room was high and light streamed in through the open windows. There was a little iconostasis of four tiers, although the top row, the prophets, was so close to the ceiling that it had to be set at an angle. All the painting had been done by local artists, some of it very crude; overall, it looked reddish, rather squashed and friendly.

It was a warm, late afternoon in early summer. The sun was gently lighting up the icons of the local saints beside the Royal Doors. In the shadows in the corners, candles had been lit before other, darker icons.

The whole village was there, standing together in the stillness, while little particles of dust danced in the long shafts of sunlight above. Sometimes, when the village was at prayer like this – the men with their long beards, the women with scarves tied over their heads – it seemed to her as though they were timeless: as though the present itself, having been foreshadowed, was also a memory, dreamlike in its quality.

This was her family: the people with whom – such was the will of God – she was to live and die. And for that very reason, she belonged to them and they to her in the gentle, warm intimacy of the little church.

Her father was conducting the service. Still, though she was nine, she saw him as a Patriarch – as unshakable, as timeless as one of the prophets on the iconostasis. He, like Silas, will die, she knew. Yet he will never die. He will be with me here, always. She stood beside her mother. As she sang the responses, how lovely, yet how sad her voice sounded.

They had just reached the Litany when Maryushka noticed the two visitors quietly enter the little church. Other heads turned also.

She saw them bow, and make the sign of the cross with two fingers before standing reverently at the back.

Her father, too, had seen them. For an instant, as he began the prayers, she saw him hesitate. But then, looking up as though for guidance, he solemnly went on.

As he went through the prayers, she tried to concentrate. But she could not help looking back to see what the strangers were doing. Nothing, it seemed.

Was there something even more fervent than usual in Daniel’s prayers? Was there, on that quiet, late afternoon, some particular tinge of sadness, yet of warmth in her mother’s singing?

It was as Daniel raised his hand for the final benediction that the two men suddenly stepped forward.

‘Stop the service!’ one cried.

‘This is an affront to the Church and to the Tsar,’ announced the other.

Slowly, carefully, Daniel completed the benediction. Then, gazing down at them, he asked: ‘You have something to say to me?’

‘You make the sign of the cross with two fingers,’ the first called out.

Daniel said nothing.

‘Why have you not prayed for His Majesty, the Tsar?’ demanded the other.

Again, Daniel did not answer.

How fine he looks, Maryushka thought. Truly this is Elijah himself.

No one in the congregation moved.

‘We shall take you with us,’ the first said to Daniel.

‘I shall stay here.’

It was a simple statement. As the two men glanced round at the congregation they saw a dozen silent, bearded faces which told them they would not.

‘We’ll see how you like to argue with the Tsar’s troops,’ they said. ‘They will persuade you to pray for the Tsar.’

Daniel shook his head slowly.

‘The Tsar is Antichrist,’ he said simply.

The men gasped.

‘You dare to say so?’

Daniel looked at them steadily. The words had been spoken. It was inevitable, one day, that they must be. What choice did he have?

He continued to stare at them, silently.

‘Shall we deal with them, Father?’ It was a young man from the back. ‘We could drown them.’

Daniel turned his gaze towards him.

‘God forgive you for your angry thought,’ he said quietly. ‘Let them depart in peace.’

As Maryushka watched the two men leave, she could feel the little congregation fill with dread. They all turned back to Daniel, looking for guidance.

‘My children,’ he said, ‘we must continue to pray together, hopeful always of deliverance. But, we must also be prepared. For now, it may be, the time of suffering is at hand.’

It was an hour later that he wrote the letter which, it was agreed, the steward should carry to Moscow.

Nikita Bobrov was beside himself.

The news this wretched fellow brought was bad enough. But the letter! It was beyond his worst nightmares. He shook with anger.

‘What in the world is to become of the Bobrovs now?’ he cried. And suddenly, for the first time in years, the clever, mocking face of Peter Tolstoy rose up in his imagination. ‘So, you devil,’ Nikita shouted to the empty room, ‘you expect to see me humiliated a second time!’

The fact was that the young steward had panicked. Though he was a sympathizer of the Raskolniki, he was not made of such stern stuff as Daniel and his friends. Nor was he part of their community. When the two spies came he had been terrified. His first thought was to flee into the forest; but that he rejected as impractical.

It was just as he was wondering how to escape that Daniel came to see him with his letter.

‘Go to the Lady Eudokia with this,’ the old man ordered. ‘You are the steward. No one will hinder you if you leave quickly.’

It was all the bidding he needed. Long before dark, he was riding towards the capital. But when he got there – what should he say? What should he do?

The first thing to do was to open the letter. He did so carefully, read it slowly, and sealed it again. It was as he suspected. Daniel had given Eudokia a brief account of what had taken place, asked for help if she could give any, and if not, ended with an expression of their mutual faith.

And I’m part of it, he thought grimly. Lady or not, they’ll find out: she’ll die for it along with them, and so will I.

There was only one chance. Give the letter to Nikita himself.

Perhaps, somehow, he can hush it up, the steward thought. Anyway, he’s the only man who can protect me.

So it was that the distraught fellow had arrived at the house, and handed the letter to Nikita.

Nor was it surprising that Nikita should have been beside himself.

‘What can have possessed you?’ he shouted at his wife. ‘No one among us nobles has taken an interest in these accursed people for twenty years!’

‘It may not be the fashion but I did what was right,’ she answered stiffly.

‘Right! You think it right to refuse to pray for the Tsar and call him Antichrist? Can’t you see – it’s not just a question of religion: your carpenter isn’t merely one of the Raskolniki, he’s committed treason!’

‘Because of his faith.’

‘The Tsar isn’t interested in his faith. He’s interested in treason,’ Nikita yelled.

That was the point, Eudokia thought. That was exactly why so many Russians called him Antichrist.

‘Nor will the Tsar take kindly to our family being involved,’ Nikita pointed out. ‘If we didn’t know, the fact that some of our peasants were traitors might be overlooked. But,’ he waved the letter, ‘there is proof we are involved. I myself, and perhaps you, could be knouted. Our lands will very likely be taken away. Procopy’s career is probably finished. Whatever your views, I do not understand how you can do this to your family – a second time.’

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 what death was.

Yet what was it? Would there be pain? What did it mean, to cease to be? Did it mean darkness, nothingness – for ever? Her head reeled at the thought. What would it be like, this unconscious journey across a plain, without any ending?

Her parents would be with her – that was the thing. The thought was like a ray of sunlight, lightening and warming the frozen darkness. Her mother, her father: even here, at the approach of death, she wanted, with all her heart, not to escape the flames but to be with them, her hands in theirs.

Love was stronger, surely, than death. Even if not, it was all that she had.

They stayed in the hamlet now, most of the time; and as the sun shone upon the little church, prepared to receive them, they waited, and prayed, and watched.

Andrei and Pavlo rode quickly. Two days passed. Three. They were drawing near.

In a way, Andrei was excited. This was certainly an adventure. He was glad, also, to be able to do his old friend a favour.

‘After all,’ he remarked to his son, ‘you and I have nothing to lose in this matter. But if we pull it off, then Bobrov will certainly be in our debt.’

It was strange that now, near the end of his life, he should be revisiting the scenes of his youth again, so unexpectedly and in such circumstances. Destiny seemed to be playing a curious game with him.

It was on the second day that he remarked casually to his son: ‘Do you know, I once had a child in the village we’re going to? A girl.’

‘God be praised, Father: did you really? What was her name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What became of her?’

‘God knows. Perhaps she’s dead.’

‘Or one of these Raskolniki.’

‘Perhaps. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘Well, our task is clear enough anyway.’

‘Yes, it is.’

By now, they both assumed, the luckless steward who knew too much had been disposed of by Procopy Bobrov.

‘Kill him and throw him in a marsh somewhere,’ Andrei had advised. ‘No one will ever ask – but if they do, say he ran away.’

As for the mission to Russka, he had been adamant.

‘Neither of you Bobrovs must go near the place. You know nothing. We’ll take care of the whole thing for you.’

As long as they were right in thinking that the villagers did not know about Eudokia’s role, the plan should work.

It was very simple. The torturers must not get to Daniel and his family. There must be no confessions.

They were going to kill them.

It was already dusk and, at that season of the year in those northern regions, the nights were very short.

The sky was overcast. The air was sultry, with a threat of thunder, as the hamlet prepared to sleep.

But little Maryushka could not sleep.

Each night, she slipped out to stand by the river in the darkness, eagerly drinking in what might be her last free minutes. As usual now, she stood near the village, gazing northwards.

Despite the sultry atmosphere, the clouds were thinning. Here and there, as if to light her upon her journey, strips of stars were appearing in the night sky.

It was what the Russians call a ‘sparrow night’. On the horizon, soundless flashes of lightning appeared, like distant white flames, flickering as though to suggest that, vast as the land was, all the great plain on such a night might still be drawn together in a huge intimacy – from the arctic wastes to the warm steppe – to witness this tremulous show.

How beautiful it is, she thought. And it occurred to her that perhaps the earth was bidding her farewell.

An hour passed. Still she did not sleep. Then another. Another still.

And then a boat came slipping swiftly downstream from Russka. A boy was paddling frantically.

‘They’re coming,’ he cried. ‘Soldiers.’

And she turned and ran.

Andrei and Pavlo were lost. The old Cossack was sure that Russka lay somewhere down this little river, but in the many years since he had been there, he had forgotten just where.

It was well into the evening when they had finally given up and made their camp for the night.

The two men were astonished then to be suddenly woken, an hour before dawn, by the sound of voices and tramping feet nearby.

They were good Cossacks. In a flash both men were up and armed. Andrei was with the horses, keeping them quiet. Pavlo was watching, listening.

The sounds were from across the river. They were soldiers marching through the shadows. In the faint light from the stars, Pavlo saw the outline of bayonets. Two people, the officers presumably, were talking in low tones: in the stillness, their voices carried easily across the river.

‘I did this before once, up by Yaroslavl,’ he heard the officer say. ‘Catch them at dawn, that’s the thing. We’ll have the whole village in our hands before they even know we’re there.’

The tramping feet went on. Pavlo estimated there were forty or fifty men. He waited until they were past.

There was not a moment to lose. The village must be closer than they thought.

Quickly the two men saddled their horses and started downstream.

‘We’ll go down the river on this side and get ahead of them before we cross,’ Andrei said.

It was not easy to make much speed in the darkness. The troops had already got past the little town of Russka when the two Cossacks reached it. As they did so, they noticed the boy who had seen the troops pass sliding down the stream in his little boat.

Daniel moved from house to house, waking the villagers.

They came out in the darkness before the grey dawn, a little confused, obviously frightened, some of them wrapping themselves in cloaks against what seemed to them to be a morning chill.

At each house, Daniel calmly entered and, waking the head of the household said quietly: ‘It is time.’

Maryushka stood inside the little hut they had been occupying, watching her mother. Though she had been up all that warm night in only a linen smock, the little girl had now started to shiver uncontrollably.

Arina seemed very calm. By the light of a taper, she quickly arranged her dress and put her feet into her shapeless bast shoes. She took a long shawl and draped it over her shoulders. Then she tied a scarf over her head. Then she ran her hands once, carefully, down her thighs. It was a little gesture she always made before she went to church.

Today, however, she did one other thing which the shivering girl noticed.

Slowly, rather meditatively, she reached over to her left wrist, on which she always wore a gold bracelet. It was a fine piece of work, set with a single, large amethyst, and Maryushka knew that her mother was very attached to it. Now however she took it carefully off and laid it down beside the stove.

‘What are you doing?’ the girl whispered.

Arina smiled at her kindly.

‘These are earthly things, Maryushka,’ she said gently. ‘But now we are going to a heavenly kingdom.’

Then her mother went quietly over to a corner of the room and came back with a small container.

She had seen her mother and some of the other women go out into the woods a few days before and return, after several hours, with some unusual berries. They had been several hours more in one of the huts, making something with these berries, and then Arina had come home with this little container; but she would not tell Maryushka what it was.

Now Arina poured some liquid out into a little wooden cup and brought it over to her.

‘Drink this.’

It looked dark.

‘What is it?’

‘Never mind. Just drink it.’

The liquid tasted strange. A kind of bitter juice.

Arina looked at her carefully.

‘You’ll stop shivering soon.’

‘Did the other children get this?’

‘Yes. Some of the grown-ups too, I dare say.’

There were many berries in the Russian forest. Some had extraordinary properties. One, in particular, was used by the Raskolniki upon these occasions.

They went outside.

All the villagers were coming out of their huts now, and making their way silently towards the little church. Maryushka looked around for the soldiers, but there was no sign of them yet.

At the church, some of the men were putting the ladders in place. She saw her father, watching over everyone, as they gathered.

For several minutes they waited. She saw Daniel and three of the older men go round from hut to hut, to make sure that no one was missing. When they gravely returned, she saw her father give a nod.

It was time.

Silently, slowly, the villagers began to go up the ladders into the church. As it happened, she and her mother were rather at the back. She glanced around. Still no sign of the soldiers.

Five of the men were to remain outside. Four of them, at the signal, would light the straw in the undercroft. Then they would quickly mount the ladders, pull them up after them, and barricade the door. Properly prepared, the building would be ablaze in moments, and there would be nothing the Tsar’s troops could do except bear witness to the sacrifice.

The fifth man was up on the roof, acting as look-out. It was he who would give the word.

The villagers were mostly in. Now it was Arina and Maryushka’s turn.

Strangely, Maryushka found that she had stopped shivering. She mounted the ladder quite calmly. She even felt a curious, rather agreeable warmth inside her as she entered the church.

The candles were lit – more of them than usual. All around her she saw familiar faces, looking taut and pale.

Soon afterwards Daniel entered.

He addressed them from before the doors of the little iconostasis.

‘Brothers and sisters,’ he said solemnly, ‘it seems the time has come. For those who are faint-hearted, remember, it is an easier death by far that we go to than that which would otherwise await us. And to you all, I say: Our God, in His Kingdom, awaits us. He is with us now, already. His arms are open. He is Our Father and He welcomes us, at last, from this evil world. Prepare therefore to enter, through Christ’s perfect love, into His Kingdom of eternal light.’

Then he began to read the prayers.

How familiar, and yet how strange, it all seemed. Her mother was beside her. Her sweet voice, singing the responses, was so lovely, so comforting. The candles seemed to be glowing with an extraordinary brightness. How sweet, how lovely, their warm flames. She felt a little dizzy.

For it was now that the berries took their effect and Maryushka began to hallucinate.

They were coming. In the pale first light of dawn, the man on the roof saw the figures crossing the river.

He hesitated, then, drawing a deep breath, called down to the men below.

He too must go down now. He knew it. He must go inside. But for a few moments more he remained up there, looking round at the dawn, peering at the figures approaching.

Then he frowned. He stared again. Surely there must be more. But no, into the village were riding not a contingent of soldiers, but only two men. And in the half-light they did not look like the Tsar’s men at all.

They were Cossacks.

Below, he could see that three of the men had already gone into the undercroft with their torches. The fourth was just following them.

He looked all around. The two Cossacks were quite alone.

‘Stop!’ he called down. ‘It’s not the Tsar’s men at all.’

Could it be that, after all, it was a false alarm, a reprieve? Cossacks – why, they might even be Raskolniki!

‘Stop the fire! There are no troops,’ he cried urgently again.

It was not until they were actually in the village that Andrei and Pavlo realized what was happening.

‘My God,’ muttered Andrei, ‘they’re burning themselves.’

‘Our work’s done for us then.’

Andrei nodded. ‘As long as the man Daniel dies. We still have to make sure of that.’

They rode slowly forward.

And as they did so, they saw that people were starting to come out of the church, down the ladders.

It was the one thing Daniel had not foreseen. A false alarm. He had not planned for it. Nor, therefore, had he calculated the effect that it might have on some of the congregation. For it is one thing to stand up and face death with the rest of the community; it is another to hesitate when there is an offer of reprieve.

About a third of the village, nearest the exits and hearing the shouts from outside, made for the ladders.

Arina was taken by surprise too. As people pushed past her, she tried to continue the responses. Then, after a few moments, Daniel stopped the prayers. Only then did she suddenly realize that Maryushka was no longer by her side.

Below, meanwhile, everything was in confusion.

The men in the undercroft were now trying to put out the fire they had started. But it was not so easily done, for the straw had been well prepared.

At the foot of one of the ladders, about a dozen people were standing, staring at the two Cossacks, who in turn were calmly watching them.

And no one, it seemed, had noticed the little girl.

In the confusion inside, with people jostling near the window, she had been accidentally shoved into the path of a large man making for the exit. Scarcely troubling to think, and finding the child in his path, he had casually picked her up, tucked her under one powerful arm, and carried her down with him, dropping her when he reached the ground.

Now she was wandering about by the huts, hardly knowing where she was.

‘Where is Daniel?’ Andrei called out.

‘Inside,’ they replied. ‘What do you want with him? Who are you?’

And Andrei was just wondering what to reply when another cry rang out, this time from the roof.

‘The troops! I see them!’

They had arrived.

It was now that Andrei looked up and saw a huge figure coming down the ladder from the other window.

This must be Daniel: there could be no mistaking him, from Nikita Bobrov’s description. And from the moment he reached the ground it was obvious that, whatever his uplifted thoughts a few minutes before, he was now in a furious temper.

‘Get up the ladders,’ he roared at the people who had dared to come down. ‘Get up at once, you fools. It’s probably a trap.’ With a furious glance towards the two Cossacks he rushed to the entrance of the undercroft, moving with astonishing speed.

‘Light the fire!’ he bellowed. ‘The troops are here. Hurry!’

The people were running up the ladders again. Daniel, satisfied that the fires were now lit, was ordering the men from the undercroft up the ladder by the front of the church.

‘Up,’ he shouted. ‘Up and bar the door.’

Already, Andrei could hear a shout from near the village gate. The troops were entering.

He looked at Pavlo.

‘Better take no chances,’ he murmured. And urging his horse forward towards the church, he drew his sword.

The flames were already licking up the side of the building. From the undercroft, smoke was pouring. Andrei saw the ladders being drawn up into the building, heard the heavy doors slam and bars drop into place. One ladder remained, and Daniel was walking swiftly towards it as Andrei reached him.

As the huge fellow turned to look up at the Cossack with his raised sabre, there was not a trace of fear in his face: only anger and contempt. And his expression scarcely altered even when the Cossack stopped, open-mouthed, and cried out: ‘My God, it’s Ox!’

And it was as the two men stared at each other that a pale woman appeared above with a cry which, as he turned to look to where she was pointing, caused old Andrei to gasp once more, and wonder if he might not, after all, be in a dream.

Everything was swaying. But at last she knew where she must go. For now she saw the flames.

The flames. Like a huge candle. So comforting. She knew she wanted them.

She was walking towards them. The friendly flames, and the church, and her parents. Why did the church keep moving? She frowned. But still she pressed on.

Ah, she could hear their crackle. Feel their warmth now. If she could just find a ladder: that was what she needed.

‘Maryushka!’ Her mother’s voice. She smiled, went forward. Wasn’t that her father, with someone else by the ladder? It was. He would take her up the ladder. She cried out, tried to run towards him.

‘Maryushka!’ A man’s voice. But not her father’s. Why did the strange figure on the horse cry out her name? Why was the huge horse coming towards her?

Suddenly she felt herself scooped up, high. She was on the big horse with the stranger.

Yet why was he carrying her away from the flames, away into the darkness?

The destruction of the Bobrov estate at Dirty Place was complete.

That is to say, its principal assets – the peasants Bobrov owned – were completely destroyed.

When the troops arrived, all the ladders were drawn up. They just had time to see a large figure go in with one last furious backward glance as the door crashed shut.

They could do nothing about the fire. It had already seized hold.

And so there the matter rested. The abbot was satisfied. The authorities were content. Nikita Bobrov, when he was told about the matter, professed himself astonished and horrified.

Very wisely, Andrei had kept little Maryushka well out of sight. No one knew she had survived. But upon his return, he had given her to Nikita.

It was a hard decision. She was his granddaughter. There was no doubt about it. Quite apart from the astonishing likeness to her grandmother – which made Andrei feel almost as if fifty years of his life had not passed – she had begged them later that day to let her retrieve a last reminder of her mother. When the troops had gone, therefore, they came back to the deserted village and found, where she had left it, Arina’s bracelet. Andrei had recognized it at once as the one he had given old Elena. The troops had been so shocked by what they saw they had even forgotten to loot the place.

Yet though Andrei carefully explained his relationship to little Maryushka, and offered to take her with him, she was obdurate.

‘Let me stay with the Lady Eudokia,’ she begged.

Andrei understood; she was the girl’s only link with her vanished family, her only friend.

He did not tell her that Nikita Bobrov and his son had wanted to kill them all.

So it was, in the year 1703, that little Maryushka returned to Moscow to the house of Nikita Bobrov.

Her Cossack grandfather left a little money for her, so that, when she grew up, she could be free.

1710

A pale, chilly, damp spring day.

The ice broke late, up in St Petersburg. Sometimes the sounds of its cracking were like gunshots, they were so loud. Then would come a spring so bleak, in some years, that it was scarcely worth the having. After that a warm, dusty summer whose days, in those northern latitudes, were so long that even the three hours of so-called night were but a pale twilight in which, on the horizon, the aurora danced.

It had begun with the stout, grim Fortress of St Peter and St Paul. Then, at Peter’s direction, a town had begun to appear.

It was built on marshland. Hundreds of acres of wooden piles were sunk in the mud. Canals were dug. It was almost as if, in this desolate terrain, Peter had decided to construct a new and unnecessary Amsterdam.

But unlike the rich, reclaimed land of Holland, around this place stretched not fertile fields but poor, chilly marshland; not pasture for cattle, but wilderness from which wolves in search of food would come into the town itself.

This was the place to which, three years before, they had brought Maryushka.

She hated it.

Why did Peter decide to build his new city here? What prompted him to make it his capital?

In all probability, had the northern war been more successful, the capital of Russia might have been one of the great Baltic ports – in those very regions nowadays called Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.

But the northern wars had been slow and difficult and Peter, as usual, was in a hurry.

So it was that, against all advice, he insisted on building in this inhospitable place.

Right from the start, he had encouraged those close to him to take a house in the new town. In 1708 he had compelled all senior officials to live there. The next year he began forcibly to transfer whole villages of people to the rising city.

The fortress with its thick stone walls was built. A little nearer the sea, on the other side of the river, rose the Admiralty – a huge, fortified shipyard with a tall wooden spire with a weathervane at its centre. Numerous other brick and stone structures were rising on the marshy banks: here a church, there a palace or a warehouse. Already, in the fortress and elsewhere, the great Swiss-Italian architect Trezzini was hard at work. But for the most part, as yet, the city consisted of log and wattle huts. It was bleak.

There were only two problems: the marshy countryside around had few of the stout trees needed for building; nor were there any stone quarries. Everything had to be brought from other ports – sometimes a hundred miles away.

Thus Peter began his new western capital.

A chilly spring day in St Petersburg, and Procopy Bobrov, a heavy woollen cloak over his uniform, was walking briskly along a muddy path by the River Neva.

A damp, salty wind from the sea was driving up the Neva from behind him, catching the back of his ears so that they were wet, red and tingling.

He was quite alone. But from time to time he would glance round and stare behind him, despite the fact that the wind then smacked him harshly in the face; and even as he screwed up his eyes to peer into it, like a sailor before the mast, something indefinable in his manner suggested he was embarrassed.

The fact was, he was afraid of being seen by Maryushka.

He pressed on in this manner for some distance, turning repeatedly to make sure she was not following him.

It was, undeniably, a confounded nuisance that, just when he thought he was rid of her, she should have embarrassed him like this. But she had come to him, pleading, in such a way that…

The fact was, his conscience troubled him.

Maryushka. They had all been kind to her. She had no complaints about that.

She had spent the first few years with the elder Bobrovs in Moscow until first Nikita and then Eudokia had died. If she could not have been happy, those years had at least been peaceful.

After the disaster at Dirty Place, Nikita had ruled his household with a rod of iron. The Raskolniki were never even to be mentioned. The family went to the authorized church. Even Eudokia, now, was so shaken that she did not speak of the forbidden subject to the little girl, even in private. Occasionally, after Nikita had gone, the old woman had spoken tenderly about Maryushka’s parents, but that was all.

Then Eudokia had died and Procopy had taken her on.

Procopy had not wanted Maryushka. She knew it perfectly well. But he had promised his mother that he would look after her until she married, and so she had been taken to the new city on the Neva.

Procopy’s house was large. Like everything in St Petersburg, its size was regulated by the Tsar. Since Procopy owned five hundred peasants, his house had to be two storeys high, and built of timber and plaster in the English manner. Thanks to this, it leaked. Each spring, the Neva overflowed and flooded the cellar.

Two of the houses nearby had been destroyed by fire; everyone in the city – merchants, nobles, even Peter himself – was part of the fire-fighting force. The Tsar himself had been present with his axe at one of these fires, and had saved the nearby houses. When the other one burnt he had been away on campaign, and people had just watched as three more houses had caught fire and had been destroyed as well.

How Maryushka longed for Russka and the hamlet at Dirty Place.

Alas, however, Dirty Place was empty.

When the Bobrovs had lost all their peasants there, they had intended to move families from their other estates to repopulate the place.

‘After all, we own plenty of souls elsewhere,’ Procopy had remarked.

But even so, they never had enough. The trouble was Tsar Peter’s endless wars.

It has been calculated that in over two decades, Peter enjoyed only a few months of actual peace. The wars in the north dragged on interminably. Everything was subject to them. Nobles, merchants, peasants – the entire huge country was bled by the huge cost. And so it was that, year after year, when the Bobrovs told their stewards to choose people to send to Dirty Place, the word came back that all the spare men had already been despatched to the recruiting officers.

‘For we can’t ruin three other estates just to get one started again,’ Procopy would point out.

There was another reason – though she did not know it – why Maryushka would never see Russka again.

‘People might recognize her there,’ Procopy confided to his wife. ‘And although the business with Daniel and my mother is all over now, it might be embarrassing for us.’

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 this tiresome business to attend to. He strode along the river: where was the place she said she had seen the fellow?

Maryushka was in love. It had all been so simple, so natural.

She had just seen him, and known that instant sense of peace and happiness, followed by an extraordinary lightening of the spirit. It had been so simple, yet so miraculous. For the young man had felt it too. After that, there was nothing more to say.

He was a peasant, from one of the Bobrov estates just west of Moscow. He had been sent to St Petersburg the previous month in charge of half a dozen sleds full of provisions for the household.

When she had told Procopy that she wanted to marry him, he had looked thoughtful.

‘He’s a peasant,’ he began.

‘I don’t mind,’ she had said quickly. ‘I’m used to life in a village.’

Procopy’s face had cleared. Maryushka, being innocent, had not realized that he had only been afraid that she would want him to give this valuable young fellow his freedom.

‘Very well then. If it’s what you want, you shall go down to the village this spring, as soon as my wife can replace you,’ he said. And he had given her a third of the money old Andrei had left for her. Not that he wanted the rest but he judged that, as a peasant’s wife, to have more might be bad for her.

Maryushka was happy. She was in love, and in a few days she was to leave St Petersburg for ever. Though she still often thought of her parents, the pain of the past was fading as she looked forward to her new life.

She had been walking by the Neva only the day before when she had seen the men digging a trench. That was nothing unusual. There were hundreds of such gangs of unfortunates – peasants, conscripts, prisoners of war – who made up the army of workers that Tsar Peter had ordered to build his new capital.

Indeed, she would hardly have glanced at these poor fellows if she had not noticed that one of them seemed to be staring fixedly at her.

She looked down.

There in the broad, half-frozen trench stood a dark fellow of middle height who might have been handsome once. Even now, he had tried to trim the greying stubble of his beard, but without complete success. His eyes were sunken. He had lost several teeth. And as they gazed at each other, she saw him tremble.

It was Pavlo, her Cossack uncle.

There could be no doubt about it. Though she had been young at the time she would never forget the faces of the two men who had rescued her from the fire and brought her back to the Bobrovs in Moscow.

‘Pavlo.’

‘Maryushka.’

‘Why are you here?’

He tried to smile, then his mouth began to work and she realized that it was difficult for him to speak. Something came out she did not understand. Then he was racked by a fit of coughing.

He tried again.

‘Mazeppa.’

Then she understood.

For in the few years since they had last seen each other, everything had changed in the Ukraine. And to the Great Russians of the north, then and ever since, the name of Mazeppa has meant only one thing: treachery.

The reasons why Peter fell out with the Little Russians of the Ukraine were as inevitable as they were tragic. Basically, they failed him. The huge contingents of Cossacks who came to help him fight the Swedes were no match for the highly trained north Europeans. They suffered appalling casualties – over fifty per cent very often. As a result, Peter despised them; he not only gave them Russian and German officers but started quartering his own troops in the Ukraine too. This was exactly what the Ukrainians hated most. Why should they be humiliated? And what was Peter’s distant war to them anyway?

It was in the autumn of 1708 that the crisis really broke. The war had been going badly for Peter. No one thought he could win, and the powers of Europe, while they laughed at his new capital in the icy marshes of the north, were looking forward to seeing his empire broken and then dismembered.

And it was then that the victorious Charles XII of Sweden joined the Poles for a great drive against poor Russia. They were expected to attack Moscow. That would be the end of Peter. But then the Swedish King swung south instead – against the Ukraine.

And Mazeppa joined him.

Was it treachery? Undoubtedly. Was Mazeppa a schemer; had he been negotiating with Peter’s enemies for years? Of course he had. He was the Cossack Hetman. Was Peter blameless then?

Certainly not. Quite apart from his ruthless treatment of the Little Russians, he had also sent a message, at this moment of crisis, that they must defend themselves without his help. And though he was hard-pressed himself, the Ukrainians quite rightly claimed that this broke the agreement they had made with Russia back in Bogdan’s time – that Russia would protect them. To save his land, Mazeppa did what he thought he had to.

It was a mistake. In a lightning strike, Peter’s favourite Menshikov took Mazeppa’s capital and stores and butchered almost the entire population of the place, soldiers or not.

The Ukraine hesitated. The Russians clamped down. Some Cossacks joined Mazeppa. Many did not.

The following spring came the great battle of Poltava.

This battle was, perhaps, Peter’s finest hour. He himself, whatever his faults, was completely fearless. One musket ball knocked his hat off, another hit his saddle, and another was stopped by a silver icon he wore round his neck. But at the end of that great day, the mighty Swedes were utterly routed.

Europe was astounded. The eccentric young Tsar had won after all; defeated mighty Sweden. The map of Europe was changed in a day: a new and tremendous Russia was arising. And Europe, having laughed, was now afraid.

For the Ukraine, too, it changed everything. From now on, Peter pursued a new and ruthless policy. The old south was to be Russianized. Big Russian landowners, especially Menshikov, appeared. Cossack districts were headed by Russians. Even the Ukrainian presses were censored, to ensure they printed nothing that disagreed with Great Russian publications. And soon, instead of a stream of Cossack soldiers going north, there came dismal lines of conscripts, by the thousand, to work on the Tsar’s building projects.

For Peter meant to be firm. As he told his advisers, he intended to model the subjugation of the Ukraine on the pattern set by the Englishman Cromwell, in Ireland.

In a way, Pavlo had been lucky. Had he not been stricken with a fever, he would have ridden with his patron Mazeppa. Had he done so, he would either have fled in exile to Sweden, or else been hung if taken captive.

But in his case, when the inspecting officers found him at Pereiaslav, there was doubt. His case was referred to Peter himself. The answer was brief and to the point:

And now, with a hundred others, he was digging a trench. While Procopy Bobrov went to look for him.

And what the devil will I do if I find him? he wondered.

It was a ticklish situation. He could, of course, have ignored the girl when she begged for his help. But no – their families had been friends and… well, there it was, he was ashamed. But what could he do – ask the Tsar for clemency? He dare not. Peter could forgive many things, but never treachery. Even the name Mazeppa was enough to make him burst out in fury.

Perhaps Procopy could bribe the fellow in charge of Pavlo? That was risky, though and besides, the Cossack knew too much about his family and the Raskolniki.

He didn’t know what he’d do, but he was sure he didn’t want the girl to see him not doing it!

Ah, here was the place. He gazed down into the trench, scanned the faces he saw. But he could not say any of them resembled Pavlo.

He called the foreman over and did his best to describe the Cossack. The foreman nodded.

‘Yes, sir, indeed, we had such a fellow. I had to thrash him yesterday, as a matter of fact.’

‘Why?’

‘I saw him talking to strangers. A girl.’

‘Ah, yes. He’s not here today?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Tomorrow, perhaps?’

‘Don’t think so, sir.’

Procopy looked at him carefully.

‘He must’ve been weaker’n I thought,’ the foreman mumbled.

‘You mean he’s dead?’

‘’Fraid so, sir. Is that all right?’

Oh, yes. It was all right.

Indeed, it would hardly be noticed. For though history is uncertain how many workers died of disease, fatigue and starvation in the building of St Petersburg, it was certainly tens, some say hundreds, of thousands.

Another morning, rather warmer, two days later.

There was a light breeze stirring the waters of the Neva, like those of the sea beyond, into short, choppy waves.

Maryushka was leaving at last. In a way, the news about Pavlo seemed to sever her last link with the past. She knew she must only look forward now. But to what exactly? For herself, to happiness with her husband, she hoped. Yet what did that happiness mean, in this huge land of Russia?

The clouds were high in the sky. The whole day was filled with a strange, bright greyness. Further east, beyond the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, and high above the waters, three seagulls were soaring and swerving in the sky. As they turned, one after another, their bodies seemed to glow with an unearthly luminous light.

She allowed her gaze to run along the Neva. At that moment, for some reason, she suddenly felt her father’s presence with her. Old Daniel. At the thought of him she smiled.

But then her smile disappeared. For as the wind caught her face, and as she stared at the huge, harsh geometry of that mighty place, it was as if another presence was emerging from that city to face her father – something frightening, grim as a Mongol Khan from ancient times.

And then she saw it.

It was a vast sun, hurtful to the eye – yet cold as ice. It was rising, implacably, from the northern sea into the endless Russian sky. It would, she sensed, dry the very blood from her body with its terrible rays.

And by this vision she, too, understood that, as her father had told her, the awful days of the Apocalypse had come.

And the name of the Antichrist was Peter.

In 1718, after conspiring against his father, the Tsarevich Alexis was foolish enough to be lured from exile back to Russia by promises of forgiveness from his father.

He was persuaded to do so by an elderly and cunning diplomat: Peter Tolstoy.

Soon afterwards the Tsarevich Alexis, after torture, died in the St Peter and St Paul Fortress.

It did not matter. There were other heirs.

In 1721, by the Treaty of Nystadt, the Baltic lands, including those known as Latvia and Estonia, were formally recognized as belonging to Russia. They would remain in her hands for two centuries, until 1918.

For this the newly created Russian Senate gave Tsar Peter the grandiose tides of Pater patriae, Imperator, Maximus: Father of his country, Emperor, The Great.

In 1722, after the unexpected death of Procopy Bobrov, his son decided to revive a village of his, called Dirty Place, near the little town of Russka. So he transferred half the population of another of his villages to the place.

Amongst the villagers was a woman with three fine children. Her name was Maryushka.