Russka (81 page)

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.