‘How are you, Marta? I’d say you’re back to full health now,’ she said, her gaze searching my face. I nodded, forcing back fearful tears. I did not want to leave this place. I had had no idea that any family as friendly and welcoming as the Glucks even existed. It couldn’t be easy for a kind woman such as this one to turn me out.
‘You have been with us for almost four months. What are your plans, Marta?’ she asked.
‘I’ll have to look for work, I suppose,’ I said, swallowing my tears and steadying my voice.
‘Ernst tells me you have neither friends nor family in Marienburg. This is no time for a young woman to be on her own. You are a good, hardworking maid. Why don’t you stay with us?’
I sat bolt upright.
She laughed. ‘You should always keep yourself so straight, Marta. You have nothing to hide. Do you want to stay with us, take care of Agneta and keep the house and the church tidy? You don’t have to cook, but you can do the shopping. Your bargaining skills have saved me money,’ she said, smiling. ‘You’ll get room and board and a small salary. And when our ways part, I’ll give you a good recommendation. ’
I threw myself on my knees, kissing Caroline’s fingertips, but she hastily pulled away her hands. ‘You are more Russian than I thought. Then we have reached an accord? I am happy for you to stay.’
I nodded so forcefully that my bun came loose. ‘Of course I want to stay.’
‘Good. But let me tell you two things.’
‘Yes?’ I looked at her in surprise, hearing a new note in her voice.
‘I suffer neither lies nor fornication in my house.’
I shrank back, shocked by the openness of her warning, but she patted my hand. ‘That’s just a general rule, no offence intended. Everyone’s heart has its secrets and God has spared me from the sin of curiosity. But if you speak, it has to be the truth. And I see how the young men on the street ogle you. It’s not your fault, but I would not suffer an unmarried, pregnant maid. And my Ernst, too, is but a man.’
My cheeks burnt like fire, but I swore to myself to live up to her standards.
‘Off you go now. There is a lot to do.’ Caroline took up her accounts book again. ‘Tell the cook we’ll have fish pie and bread for supper. No beer, just water and chai.’
I left her to her numbers. The rectory was the first house built of stone I had ever set foot in, and the cold of the granite seeped into my bones when I knelt on the floor beneath the simple wooden cross hanging on the chalk-washed wall. I botched the Pater Noster, which I had heard again and again in the past few weeks, but had never learnt properly. My God had sold me to Vassily, but the Glucks’ God had saved my life and, more importantly, given me a home and a purpose.
I believed that I could live like this forever.
14
My time with the Glucks was as busy as it was happy. Agneta, an afterthought in the marriage, was spoilt, but I was happy to indulge her. I hardly saw Anton and Frederic; they were a bit older than me and both handsome boys – Anton especially with his curly, honey-coloured hair and bright blue eyes. The girls who’d marry them would be lucky, I thought. The priest taught them, together with the sons of the town’s many well-to-do burghers, in a cold room on the upper floor of the vicarage where they scratched on slates with styles and leafed through the many books in his library.
Sometimes I’d linger outside the door to listen: how could a single man know as much as he did? Every day he received a dozen or so letters, and when I cleaned the room, I spotted scroll upon scroll filled with his tiny, neat handwriting. The sheer number of books on his shelves made me despair; by the time I had finished dusting them, they were ready for me to start all over again. He knew about every other country in the world. He taught his pupils history and they spoke, wrote and read in German, Swedish, Russian, Greek and Latin. The priest’s true passion, though, was mathematics. Handsome Anton seemed to have taken after him, as he once calculated the number of litres in my bucket with no effort.
Of the many amazing things in Reverend Gluck’s schoolroom, the most notable was the drawing of a man displayed on one wall. He wore no clothes and so I had avoided looking at him to begin with, embarrassed. But one day while cleaning the room, since there was no one else there, I stood right in front of the drawing and stared. He looked nothing like our saints but had several pairs of arms and legs outspread like wings; his body looked as sheer as a veil. He seemed ready to fly. I could see everything inside him, everything I had never known: the picture had been drawn by a master who lived in Italy, one of the countries Gluck had told me about. It didn’t sound real; apparently the sun always shone there and the air smelt of honey. I was stunned by the drawing: were we all like this on the inside, veins, heart and brain, blood flowing and muscles bulging?
Finally I plucked up the courage to tell the priest that I had studied the drawing and something bothered me. ‘But where is the soul, Pastor Gluck?’
He looked at me in surprise. ‘I can’t tell you how often I have thought that myself, Marta. The soul is God’s masterpiece. We have it but on loan; it belongs to Him in eternity. Be careful with it; it’s fragile and invaluable, the one thing that makes a man a man. Nothing is more valuable.’
‘Nothing? Not even the truth?’
He hesitated. ‘Telling the truth might not always save you. But maiming your soul will destroy you for sure. What good is it to conquer the world if in so doing you damage your soul? I can spot such a man from a hundred yards away.’
In my second summer with the Glucks, Tsar Peter of All the Russias together with Augustus the Strong of Saxony declared war on mighty Sweden. I remembered the puppet show I had watched at the last Spring Fair, about a soldier refusing the Tsar entry to the fortress of Riga: Peter used that slight as his pretext for war. He also claimed that he wanted to free the Baltics, provinces of ‘olden Russian lands’, from the Swedish yoke, which Reverend Gluck said felt like mocking us all, as the Tsar’s words were based neither on recognised history, religion nor language. ‘We are but pawns,’ he said at the dining table one day when further news of the conflict reached us. ‘Our peace is broken without waging a direct war. I have heard that Peter has tens of thousands of men in his army. Who over time can oppose such power?’
His words worried us and we prayed longer than usual before dinner that night, thanking God for his provision for us and asking for renewed peace and prosperity. For as long as I could remember, people from Russia, Poland, Sweden and the Baltics had lived together and gone about their business peacefully. Was the world as we knew it coming to an end?
At first, our lives didn’t really change. The harvest had been good and barns and pantries were filled, ready for the long winter. Merchants, minstrels and roving tradesmen and handymen were out and about, as they had always been. But the news they brought to Marienburg was worrying. The skirmishing had spread and was said to have reached the mir where my family lived.
In late October, shortly before the big autumn storms were unleashed, Charles of Sweden, the warrior king, crossed the Bay of Riga and set foot on Baltic soil. We heard that he jumped from the prow of his ship into the spray of the shoreline to claim our countries for good. By late November his army had reached Narva, a Swedish stronghold, which had been under siege by the Russian army for over a month, as Ernst told me while pointing out the city on the map.
Forty thousand Russians massed outside its high, thick walls, I heard, but was unable to imagine such a horde or what it meant for Narva. The men were exhausted from the long march there; they were short of ammunition, and food was as scarce as clean drinking water. Every izba or mir on their route had been plundered and the village people had fled, hiding their livestock in the deep forests. Supplies and reinforcements promised from Novgorod never arrived and the generals were at odds with each other. There were drunken brawls every night and the troops’ morale was at an all-time low when their cannons, apparently cast from thin, cheap metal, exploded in their faces once
they tried to fire them.
King Charles arrived with nine thousand men, a force a fraction the size of the Russian army, but nature was his ally: a thick fog drifted in from the sea, followed by a heavy snowstorm, shielding his men and horses from the enemy’s sight. The Russian soldiers ran onto the Swedish bayonets like crazed deer. The Tsar only survived because he was in Novgorod on the day of the battle. The Swedes scornfully minted a coin showing a crying Peter sitting outside Narva, his crown slipping from his head and the words He sat in the snow and sobbed like a child engraved underneath. Ernst showed it to me, laughing despite his admiration for the young Tsar. ‘Look at his face! It’s so well done. The poor man – the very picture of thwarted ambition.’ The following Sunday, he held a special service to give thanks that the order of things as we knew them was preserved. We thought the war was over. In truth, it hadn’t even started.
15
Food became scarce shortly before the Battle of Narva as two big armies took what they thought was their due, plundering farms and stopping merchants to relieve them of their goods. Fewer and fewer travelling tradesmen dared to be out and about. In the market, I heard women have heated words or saw them even getting into fisticuffs over butchers’ bones, shrivelled-up beans, stale bread and bags of sprouting pulses. Thankfully, I did not need to take part in those squabbles as there was always a good loaf as well as a bunch of unblemished vegetables left under the counter for the pastor’s household, since all the farmers attended Gluck’s service on Sundays. The cook served us a pie of wild mushrooms and red onions for dinner, which was filling, but the difference from the bounty of summer was stark. The November mist shrouded the town and drifted into our hearts.
We bowed our heads for the table prayer. Ernst, whose family were originally from a German princedom, asked for peace and prosperity in the Baltics, for the health of both Tsar Peter and King Charles XII and for the salvation of the soldiers’ souls. Caroline sliced the pie and served the largest piece to her husband, then to her sons, Agneta and me. The last and usually smallest piece went on her own plate. We ate in silence, hearing nothing but the scratching of wooden spoons on pewter and the autumn wind whipping the empty roads of Marienburg, making the rectory’s shutters rattle.
All of a sudden Agneta looked up and said in her most solemn tone, ‘Is it true that the Tsar of Russia is a two-headed giant who eats children for supper?’
We all laughed, grateful for the lighter note, while Agneta looked confounded.
‘Yes,’ Anton said, smiling, ‘and priests’ little daughters with blonde braids and blue eyes, crispy yet tender, are his favourite.’ As he teased her, I noticed how dark his eyelashes were in comparison to his very light eyes. Yet when he looked up, I lowered my gaze.
Agneta frowned, realising she was being teased, but looked relieved by the shift in the mood and returned to eating her pie. We all glanced at the pastor. We had heard so much about the Tsar of All the Russias and his strange decrees, the ukazy, that were set to change his country, cost what it may. His subjects seemed less than happy with his reforms. For instance, despite his law of two years ago that had forced the Russians living in Walk to shave their beards, I’d still spot bearded Russians in Marienburg, who also wore the traditional long, belted gowns, sleeves dragging in puddles, that had been legislated against. Surely in Russia itself it was a different story? There, I had heard, beards were shaved off under threat of hefty fines or hard labour. At every Russian city gate, dolls showed the way men and women had to dress, with tailors taking orders for new wardrobes there and then. If the Russian weather was not conducive to tight breeches, short jackets and low-cut dresses, the Tsar didn’t care.
‘Peter wants to take the eastern Muscovy and turn it into a western Russia. One should admire him for the scope of his ambition if nothing else,’ Ernst Gluck finally said.
‘Admire? And why is that?’ Anton said, astonished, as ready as always to verbally cross swords, even with a man as learned as his father. Anton’s confidence, spirit and fire added to his looks and presence; I had noticed that Marienburg’s young maidens lingered longer after services that he attended.
‘You’d think I’d explained that often enough in my lessons,’ Ernst said with a sigh. Anton rolled his eyes. He caught me looking at him and shot me a smile. I blushed and suppressed a jolt of pleasure.
‘Anton,’ his mother scolded, but with a gentleness reserved for her favourite child.
‘No, Mother, let me speak. The Tsar is our enemy. If he gets his way we’ll be but a footnote in history, a story to scare children with at bedtime. Since when does Russia ever give up territory it has conquered? Look at the way the Kingdom of Rus has spread eastward from Kiev, crushing everything in its way. We have centuries of slavery ahead of us. What nonsense to give the fact that we were “always” Russian lands as his reason for waging war! Why doesn’t he stay in Muscovy, where he belongs? He’s got no business here in the West.’
Ernst shrugged. ‘You are right. Neither Peter nor Charles has any true claim on our lands. But without a foothold in the West, Muscovy is doomed, Anton. The Tsar needs an ice-free harbour, to trade and to fight, which Archangelsk doesn’t guarantee. Azov on the Black Sea really belongs to the Porte in Istanbul, who will get it back as soon as they can. Peter and Russia risk being crushed between the Ottoman Empire in the South-east and the Swedes in the West. No, he has to fight; and he needs the Baltics so as to breathe and to prosper. Considering Peter’s heritage, in fact, it’s no surprise that he’s looking westward.’
‘Why is that?’ I asked.
‘His mother grew up in the household of an open-minded man, who corresponded freely with Western thinkers. And don’t forget when his half-sister Sophia was the Regent. She, too, looked to the West for Russia’s good.’
‘That slut,’ Frederic spat out.
His mother raised her eyebrows. ‘And why’s that? Because she wanted an education and a life for herself instead of rotting in a terem? She was a good ruler as long as Peter was too young to reign. His half-brother Ivan, God bless his soul, was frankly an idiot.’
‘What is a terem?’ I asked.
‘A part of the Russian house where the women of the family live. The only men allowed in are relatives. Women are kept there in seclusion until they marry. They receive no proper education. If they are ever allowed to leave the terem, then it is only in closed carriages and in voluminous, concealing clothes. But somehow Sophia convinced her father Tsar Alexis to allow her to study. At his death, she was the healthiest and strongest-willed of his surviving children, and thus able to seize power as Regent. Peter was but a toddler of three then, and his half-brother Ivan so ill he couldn’t keep the Tsar’s tiara on his lolling head, it was said. Sophia did good work as Ivan’s regent and then Peter’s, especially in forging diplomatic ties with the West and corresponding with rulers and thinkers. Really, compared with her, Peter can’t count to three. But she’s a woman. That’s her truly unforgivable fault.’
A woman had ruled Russia, I thought with wonder. ‘Is she still alive?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but in a convent somewhere, probably cursing every day she has left. She and her lover Prince Golitsyn ranged far and wide in their thinking, yet not far enough when they were in power.’
‘Prince Golitsyn! That . . .’ Anton stopped, unable to find an acceptable word that showed his proper contempt for Regent Sophia’s lover.
‘Be careful,’ Caroline said, covering Agneta’s ears just in case. The girl immediately wriggled free so as to hear more.
‘Think before you speak, Anton,’ his father said.
The young man threw his spoon onto his plate, rose and left the room, slamming the door. His father frowned.
‘He’s such a hothead,’ Caroline said, but not especially disapprovingly. Frederic mashed up the mushrooms on his plate, then shifted them from right to left, and Agneta looked at everyone’s faces, trying to work out what had made them so angry. The room felt darker and colder wit
hout Anton in it.
‘Prince Golitsyn,’ Caroline said, helping her husband to find the thread of his last thought. He smiled at her.
‘The prince lived with Sophia, but was far from . . . well, whatever Anton wanted to call him. He is a soldier and a diplomat. Without his groundwork and forward thinking, Peter wouldn’t have half the ideas he pursues today: the military and administrative service for the sons of his nobles, building a navy, his travels to Holland, Berlin, England and Vienna, to see life and progress in the West with his own eyes. Peter is restless and his goal is clear: he wants Russia to be a true player in politics – a global power, if you like. I bet that he is looking for a foreign bride for his son Alexey, even though it’s not usually the Romanov way.’
‘But why didn’t Sophia think far enough ahead?’ I asked, keen to return to the topic of this female ruler. Had she also been beautiful? It sounded like a fairy tale, albeit one with an unhappy ending. How awful to be sent to a convent, withering away after such a life and such a love.
‘Well, her hold on power wasn’t safe as long as Peter lived. But she never threatened him, even when he was a young boy and it would have been easy. Who knows why she didn’t? I doubt it was from love for her family. Her clan and the family of Peter’s mother were forever at odds. Perhaps she simply didn’t take him seriously.’
‘Where was he while she was the Regent?’
‘At first he lived in the Kremlin, until he set fire to it. He is said to love setting fire to things and, fortunately no doubt, even more than that, extinguishing flames. So Sophia sent him to the Nemezaja Sloboda, Moscow’s German Quarter outside the city’s gates. He lived there peacefully, playing at being a soldier, playing at being at war and playing at ruling as Tsar. That’s where it is said he met people from all over the world: tradesmen, merchants, artists, thinkers, doctors and pharmacists. This is where he is believed to have picked up his passion for all things Western. Have we ever before heard of a ruler who leaves his country for more than a year and a half just to travel and to learn? Russians usually hold foreign ways in great suspicion.’
Tsarina Page 9
