They had never left the town before; no one knew they were going, nor where they might be. Their house was empty.

Even then he had scarcely been able to believe it. He had heard stories of such trickery, to be sure, but here in Russka, beside a monastery, could such things be?

They could. As the days passed, there was no sign of the steward.

'But don't think they've all left the area,' Karp said furiously. 'That steward's about somewhere, he's hiding nearby. And if we try to leave without paying our dues, he'll appear out of nowhere with half a dozen men. You see if he doesn't. He's waiting to follow us and arrest us as runaways. Then he and our cursed landlord will take more from us than ever. I'll bet you we're being watched right now.'

He was exactly correct. The only thing that neither Mikhail nor Karp guessed was that it was their cousin Daniel the monk who was behind it all.

For Daniel, the whole thing had been a simple matter.

After the Tsar's terrifying message, it was clear that the monastery, and he in particular, would need friends wherever they could find them. The obvious first choice was the Tsar's servitor Boris.

It had not taken the cunning monk long to discover that Mikhail was quietly paying off his debts. Early that morning he had sought out Boris himself and discreetly warned him that his best peasant was planning to leave. He had also reminded him of how he could prevent him.

Boris had been duly grateful.

'I am always your lord's friend,' Daniel had said, and though Boris was not deceived by that, he nonetheless concluded that the heavily bearded monk might be useful to him.

'Very well,' he had remarked. 'Keep me informed of anything else I should know.'

So St George's Day passed. And the next day. And the next.

On the seventh day after, when he woke up a little after dawn, Mikhail was shocked, but not altogether surprised, to find that Karp and the horse had gone. On the table lay a little pile of money.

Three days later a man from a village five miles down the river arrived at the door with a message.

'Karp passed through our village the other morning. He has gone. He said he left money for the horse. He's sorry it wasn't more.'

Mikhail nodded.

'Did he say where he was going?'

'Yes. Into the wild field.'

Mikhail sighed. It was what he had suspected. Perhaps it was where, after all, his son belonged.

The wild field: the open steppe: the land where, in recent decades, other wayward young fellows like Karp had gone to join those bands of half-brigands, half-warriors who had nowadays taken to calling themselves Cossacks.

Yes, he belonged in the wild field. They would never see him again.

'He said please to look after the bear,' the fellow concluded.

It was later that day that another, chilling piece of news reached Russka.

Tsar Ivan's men had carried off the Metropolitan.

Elena kept her faith. She could still have a son.

It was Stephen who encouraged her. Though she had never spoken a word to him about Boris, the priest thought he could guess what their life must be like. He felt sorrier than ever for her, the more he knew her; yet he always advised her correctly as a priest. 'It is not by seeking for personal happiness that we are rewarded by God,' he reminded her. 'It is by denying ourselves. The meek shall inherit the earth, as Our Lord told us. Therefore we must forgive; we must suffer; and above all, we must have faith.'

Elena had faith. She had faith that, after all, God would give her a son; she had faith that, one day, her husband would turn from his path. For a time, after her father's disappearance, she had had faith that he, too, might be saved. But Boris, who had investigated the matter, informed her that he had been executed. He did not say how. It seemed to Elena that this event had shocked her husband.

Perhaps this, she hoped, would turn him back towards the paths of righteousness. So at least she prayed, though as yet in vain.

How to have a son? There was a remedy the village women used, that the priest's wife had once told her about. It consisted of rubbing the body, and especially her intimate parts, with oil and honey.

'They say it never fails,' her friend had assured her.

And so now, while the man she truly loved gave her spiritual comfort, she prepared herself, as best she could, as a sacrifice for the husband whose darkening soul it was her duty to save.

The spring of 1569 brought cold weather and the promise of another poor harvest. From the Baltic came news that the enemy had snatched a fortress town. Everyone seemed depressed.

It was in early June that Daniel the monk had another talk with Boris.

By now the monk was worried. Things at Russka were looking bad. Not that he was entirely to blame. The events of recent years the ever higher taxes for the northern war, the disruption of the Oprichnina Oprichnina and the land confiscations had hurt the Russian economy. That, with the failed harvest, was causing a grim recession. The revenues from Russka were sharply down, and the old abbot seemed to be at a loss, complaining to him one day about the shortfall, yet the next suggesting: 'Perhaps we are too harsh with our people in these difficult times.' and the land confiscations had hurt the Russian economy. That, with the failed harvest, was causing a grim recession. The revenues from Russka were sharply down, and the old abbot seemed to be at a loss, complaining to him one day about the shortfall, yet the next suggesting: 'Perhaps we are too harsh with our people in these difficult times.'

He had several times seen the old man looking appealingly at Stephen after these conversations. Something had to be done.

And then there had been the business with the Tsar the previous spring. That had not helped Daniel's reputation either.

For instead of agreeing to or refusing their request for land, Ivan had sent a strange but insulting message. It was an oxhide: no more, no less. The messenger who brought it, a young black-shirt, obviously following the Tsar's instructions to the letter, threw this object derisively at the old abbot's feet, in front of all the monks, and cried out: 'The Tsar says to you: "Lay this hide upon the ground and the land within it he will give you."'

'Is that all?' the terrified abbot had asked.

'No. The Tsar himself promises to visit you and give you the land you have chosen, and anything else you deserve.'

'It is you, Daniel, who have brought this upon us,' the abbot sadly remarked, after the messenger had gone. 'As for this oxhide,' he sighed, 'I suppose we shall have to keep it.'

The hide had remained, ever since, in the abbot's room an uncomfortable reminder that Ivan would be coming to see them one day.

The first task for Daniel, therefore, was to put Stephen in his place. It was not difficult.

'I think you should know,' he told Boris, 'that the priest spends more time at your house, now that his wife has died.' And for good measure he added: 'You once told me he was a heretic. I saw him taking something from that Englishman you brought here. The English are all Protestants, I hear, and this was a piece of paper.'

It was enough. He was sure of it. Boris had said not a word; but he was sure it was enough.

Already for Boris it was a year of evil portent. In the north, there was doubt about the loyalty of the cities of Novgorod and Pskov. Far in the south, in the Crimea, the Ottoman Turks with the Crimean Tatars were reported to be preparing an offensive against the lower reaches of the Volga. And now, this summer, word had come that the two powers of Poland and Lithuania, though they had acted together for generations, were being formally unified into one kingdom, ruled by a Catholic Polish King.

'And that means one thing,' he had told Elena. 'It means that we shall have Catholics from Kiev to Smolensk right at our doors.'

And now the monk was telling him that his wife might be unfaithful with the priest. He said nothing, but for long hours he brooded about it.

He hardly knew what to think. Part of him was filled with rage and with a loathing of both the heretic priest, whom he had never liked, and his wife. Yet if Daniel had thought that this was a good way to get Stephen disgraced, or at least banned from Russka, he was to be disappointed.

For Boris decided to take no action for the present, except to have the two of them discreetly watched.

There were two reasons for this. The first was that, having mastered the first wave of his jealousy, his intelligence told him that the suspicion might not be true. The fact that the priest saw his wife was hardly proof of anything. The second was a more devious thought: for if he could prove she was unfaithful, he could, with good conscience, divorce her.

Look at Tsar Ivan, he thought. He had married again and had had sons by both marriages. The Tsar had an heir. Perhaps with another wife, who did not secretly shrink from him ...

And so began a new phase in his marriage.

Elena was entirely unaware of the pattern of his thoughts. How could she guess, when he was always something of a stranger to her? The idea that she might be unfaithful both hurt and enraged him; and yet, at the same time, it made her seem more desirable so that he found himself completely torn between the desire to keep her a contaminated woman at a distance, and the desire to possess her.

And poor Elena could only think: He suffers his black moods and yet, after all, he sometimes finds me attractive.

Sometimes, lying beside her, enclosed in this, the armour of his secret rejection of her, he would even, scarcely knowing that he did so, will her to be unfaithful. Though whether it was to be free of her, or to satisfy some deep, destructive tendency in his own nature, he himself would have been quite incapable of analyzing.

In this way he passed the month of June.

The weather had been changeable after late frosts in the spring. The harvest would be ruined.

On a hot and unusually sultry afternoon in late July, when even the breeze had stopped, as though realizing the futility of doing anything, Boris had ridden back from Dirty Place to Russka; and he had just come into the dusty little square when he saw, a hundred yards away, Stephen the priest slowly coming down the staircase from the upper floor of his house. He must have been seeing Elena.

His heart missed a beat.

The square was empty. The wooden houses around it and the stone church seemed to be held in a kind of empty stasis, as if they were awaiting a breath of wind that, with its gentle kiss, might bring them back to life.

As Boris approached his house, Stephen was walking away from him, his head sunk in meditation. He rounded a corner and disappeared.

Quietly Boris went up the stairs and opened the door.

She was there, by the open window. She was gazing out at the street, at the place where Stephen had been a few moments before. Her fingers, he noticed, were resting on the wooden frame of the window and a shaft of sunlight fell just across them as they lay there, very still. She was wearing a simple dress of light blue silk. He, having been in the fields, was for once not in black but in a white linen smock, tied with a heavy belt, like one of his peasants.

Although his heart was pounding, he breathed very quietly; he wondered how long she would stand there, gazing after the man. He tried, without moving, to see the expression on her face. A minute passed. Then another.

At last she turned. Her face was very calm; but she started when she saw him and, when he did not speak but only looked at her, she blushed a little.

'I did not hear you come in.'

'I know.'

Had she made love to him? He looked for some tell-tale sign: a faint glow about her, perhaps; some disarrangement in her dress or in the room. He could not see anything.

He stared at her.

'You love him.'

He said it very quietly, not as a question but as a statement as though it were something they were both quite agreed upon. Then he watched her.

She blushed deeply now, swallowed hard, looked miserably confused.

'No. Not as a man. As a priest.'

'Is he not a man?'

'Of course. He is a fine man. A pious man,' she protested.

'Who makes love to you.'

'No. Never.'

He stared at her. Did he believe her?

'Liar.'

'Never!'

She had said never. She could have used other words. She might have denied that she even wished it. But she had said: 'Never.' That meant she had desired it. As to whether she had or not ... who knew? His reason told him she probably had not, but he was too proud to trust her, in case he was deceived.

Had he not wanted her to be unfaithful so that he could divorce her? Suddenly all that was forgotten as he looked at this modest, rather ordinary woman he had married, and who had committed these crimes against his pride.

She was pale now. She was trembling, afraid.

'Never! You insult me.'

Very well. It might be so. But then he saw in her eyes, a little look that he had never seen before: a flash of contempt, of anger.

He would show her. He stepped forward suddenly, swung his hand and struck her with the open palm across the face. Her head jerked violently; she cried out, gasped. Turned back to him in rage and terror. He struck her with the other hand.

'Bully!' she screamed suddenly. 'Murderer.'

It was enough.

He struck her. Again and again. Then he raped her.

He left for Moscow the next morning.

In September 1569 Tsar Ivan's second wife died. The next month his cousin Prince Vladimir, still a possible successor to the throne, was accused of conspiracy and made to drink poison. The unlucky prince's family were then killed, including his elderly mother, who lived in a convent.

But these events were followed by something far more terrible. For late in the year Ivan discovered another conspiracy: the cities of Novgorod and Pskov were planning to break away.

There may, in fact, have been some truth in it. To this day, the details are not quite clear. These once independent centres, near to the Baltic ports, may well have been tempted to escape the increasing taxation and tyranny of Muscovy by joining the newly united and formidable Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. They had always been closer to the busy Baltic shores than to the slow, deep heartland of Moscow.

Whatever the facts of the case, at the end of 1569, and accompanied by a large force of Oprichniki Oprichniki, Ivan the Terrible set out in great secrecy for Novgorod. He did not want the city to know he was coming. Even the commander of the advance guard did not know where they were going. Any passing traveller they met was immediately killed, so that no news of the advance would travel.

In January Novgorod was punished.

Exactly how many died in the torture, burning and executions that followed is not clear. They certainly numbered thousands. The city of Novgorod, so valuable to Russia over the previous centuries, was so utterly devastated that it never recovered. Having already killed most of its more important citizens on the road, Ivan only executed forty people at Pskov and burned a few priests at the stake. Then he returned to Alexandrovskaya Sloboda.

It was just after this that two small events of interest took place at Russka.

The first was the birth to Elena of a baby son. Boris had still not returned from the Novgorod campaign and so she and Stephen the priest had to choose a name. They chose Feodor, and so Stephen baptized him. That same day, the priest sent a letter to Boris to let him know what he had done.

The second event centred upon Daniel the monk. For in April 1570, still anxious to enrich the monastery, he hit upon a plan.

It concerned the oxhide that the Tsar had sent. It was so cunning, and so daring, that for centuries afterwards it would be known as 'Daniel's Ruse'.