by Ann Swinfen
Robert was literal minded. ‘Probably not the same men. They will return to St Nicholas. We will have a different crew after Kolmogory.’
‘You said, “If the Dvina is still not frozen”. Is it likely to freeze soon?’
‘It will not be long now,’ Pyotr said. ‘Remember, I spent my first fifteen years in this region. Frost comes earlier inland than at St Nicholas, even though we are a little further south. It may be that after Master Holme finishes his business in Kolmogory the river will be frozen, and the ground too.’
‘So we will travel by land?’ I asked, full of hope.
He nodded. ‘Much faster. By sleigh. Robert may say that no one in Muscovy is in a hurry. It is merely that we have adapted ourselves to live according to the climate and the seasons of the year.’
I sensed that he was offended by what Robert had said. Moreover, by using ‘we’, consciously or not, he was regarding himself as Russian, whereas before we reached the country he had striven to give the impression that he was a loyal Englishman. I had thought him a simple soul at first. Now I was not so sure. His loyalties might be more complex that I had supposed.
It was fortunate that Robert and the other stipendiary, John Upton, were accustomed to the long, unrewarding hours of travel in Muscovy. They had come provided with means of entertainment – playing cards, a set of chess and a backgammon board. Without them, I think we might have gone mad on that journey. I also took advantage of the long, slow hours to urge Pyotr to more and more lessons in Russian. If there was to be no other profit from this time aboard the barge, I was determined to become as fluent as possible in the language. I made no attempt to read or write it, but as the days passed I found I could express myself reasonably well.
It must have been about the beginning of the second week that we woke to a fine crust of frost lying on the surface of the deck and sparkling on every blade of grass. When we clambered ashore for the morning ritual of lighting a fire and preparing a meal, our boots crunched on the frozen turf. I had brought one of the furs with me and kept it wrapped round my shoulders, despite its somewhat rancid smell. Although I had the hood of my cloak up, my head ached with the cold, filling me with dread, for if this was just the beginning of the cold weather, what would the true depths of winter be like?
When we had tied up here the previous night, the boatmen had dragged some fallen tree trunks for us the sit on, so I perched on one now, taking care to ensure there was a layer of the fur between me and the icy bark. Bear skin, I think it was, that fur. At least it was the shape and colour of a brown bear, only roughly dressed, which was probably why it smelled rancid. Other furs provided in the cabin were wolf, and several types I could not identify. I had been told about white bear skins, but had seen none. It seemed they were particularly prized.
Despite the fur, I could not stop my teeth chattering, even after the men managed to get a fire going. The flames seemed pitiful in that vast uninhabited wilderness. We were surrounded on three sides by dark forests of pine and birch. On the fourth side the Dvina was flowing fast, a wide grey snake of a river. I think I have never been anywhere so desolate.
The boatmen were cooking up a kind of thick porridge they made every morning. Sweetened with honey, it was bearable and sustained us until we stopped again in the evening for a meal of fish caught in the river and fried over the fire, but after the first week I was heartily sick of it. During the day we did not stop, but nibbled at dried rounds of a kind of flat rye bread, which was almost black, topped with lumps of hard cheese. So hard, you could break a tooth on it. There was always plenty to drink, of course. The Muscovites had an enormous capacity for strong drink. In the long, dark winters I supposed they probably had nothing better to do than drink themselves senseless.
‘Here, take this.’ Pyotr was holding out a wooden cup from which steam rose, mingling with the cloud of steam from his breath.
‘What is it?’
‘Hot mead. It will warm you.’
As soon as it had cooled enough not to burn my mouth, I sipped it gladly. I would have preferred it spiced, like the spiced ale I prepared over my own little fire at home, but I was grateful for the heat in my stomach, though I found mead over sweet. I even ate the mess of porridge with some enthusiasm, thinking its warmth might also help to disperse the dreadful cold.
All the others were now wearing fur hats, with flaps which hung down to protect their ears from frostbite. Even Christopher Holme had one of these hats, although his looked a little tattered and moth-eaten. He must have kept it from the time when he had lived in Muscovy before. I realised the hood of my cloak was poor protection against the cold and wondered whether I would be able to purchase one of these hats in Kolmogory.
As if he could read my thoughts, Master Holme said, ‘We must find you better clothes for the Muscovy climate, Dr Alvarez. Your English garments will not do.’
I nodded, and remembered Rowland Heyward’s promise that the Company would provide me with clothes. I had not taken him seriously at the time.
‘I certainly need a hat,’ I said. ‘And my legs are cold too. I cannot always walk about clutching a bear skin.’
Like every well-dressed Englishman, I wore knitted hose that covered my legs and were laced to my doublet, with short padded breeches reaching about halfway down my thighs. From thigh to ankle my legs were beginning to grow numb. I would have been much colder had my hose been of silk, like a courtier’s, but mine were of fine wool. On this freezing morning, however, they gave no protection at all from the cutting wind. The other passengers had donned long tunics which came to their ankles. The boatmen, who wore knee-length tunics, protected their legs with baggy woollen trousers.
None of use wanted to linger on shore. The men put out the fire, heaping shovelled earth over it until it was quite smothered, for an unattended fire so close to a pine forest could cause a disaster. They had some difficulty digging up the earth. Clearly the ground was beginning to freeze, which I took as a good omen. However, there was no hope that we could transfer to sleighs until we reached Kolmogory, for where would we find a sleigh in this uninhabited land?
Once we were back on board and underway, I rummaged in my knapsack for the peculiar garment Goodwife Maynard had knitted for me. Confronted by the first inkling of a Russian winter, I did not find it quite so ridiculous. How to wear it? It was too bulky to wear under my shirt. If I wore it over my shirt but under my doublet, I doubted I would be able to button my doublet. In the end, I simply pulled it on over my doublet, then slung my cloak over my shoulders. I probably looked like something fit to scare the birds from the cornfield, but I was past caring. I felt the increased warmth at once.
I regarded my fellow passengers defiantly when I joined them in the outer cabin, daring them to mock me, but Master Holme merely said, ‘Good, that will keep you a little warmer. When we reach the Company station at Kolmogory, we will fit you out with appropriate clothes for winter. I should have remembered when we were at Rose Island. You could not be expected to come fully prepared for the weather here.’
Altogether, the river journey took us over three weeks. I did not believe Christopher Holme’s assertion that it was six hundred miles, but it was a considerable distance. As we neared the end of the journey, we woke each morning to find ice had enclosed the barge, holding us fast against the land, so that the bargemen were forced to smash us free with their oars. All along the river, ice was forming, especially by the banks, and this tended to impede our progress. Lumps of ice also came swimming down the river toward us. Not large enough to do us harm. Not yet. But I began to be anxious. What if the river should freeze over before we reached Kolmogory?
When I mentioned this fear to Pyotr, he laughed.
‘There is no need to worry. If the river should freeze that hard – and I do not expect it will – then the men will simply drag the barge along on the ice. It will slow us down, but will not stop us. We call the frozen rivers “winter roads”.’
We had lost sight of th
e other barges long since, the ones carrying the cargo brought from England by the Company fleet, but I supposed they were still following doggedly behind. They were more likely than we to be forced to move over the ice. I commented on this to Pyotr, who nodded.
‘They will arrive eventually. We are making faster progress than the cargo barges. We have more men to tow us. Master Holme is an important man, the new chief agent. It would not do for him to be delayed by a slow journey.’
I kept my tongue behind my teeth. My sharp comment about the slowness of the journey would not have been welcome.
Some days later, as the evening was drawing it – which it did more noticeably with every passing day – we could see that the men towing us were looking for a suitable place to moor for the night. This stretch of the river bank was not very promising, for it rose in a rocky cliff, over which the bargemen had difficulty scrambling. Suddenly there was a sound of slithering rock, a scream and a loud splash. We had been huddling inside the cabin, but rushed out to the deck.
‘What is it?’ Christopher Holme shaded his eyes from the low lying sun which almost blinded us.
‘It’s one of the men,’ Pyotr shouted, ‘he’s fallen in the river.’
‘His harness is still attached to the barge,’ I cried. ‘We can pull him in.’
I ran forward along the side of the cabin to the point where the tow ropes were tethered to the bow. The steersman, abandoning the tiller, was there before me, a large dagger in his hand. He began to saw at the fallen man’s tow rope, to cut him away from the boat.
‘Nay!’ I shouted. ‘Nyet! We must pull him in! Stop!.’
He paid me no heed, but went on slicing through the rope. It was severed halfway.
I struck his hand from the rope and the dagger flew away, sliding along the deck, which was already beginning to glaze over with the night-time frost.
Leaning over the gunwale, I seized hold of the rope below the point where it was half severed, and tried to haul it in, but the drag of the man borne away by the current nearly pulled me overboard.
‘Help me!’ I shouted. ‘Pyotr! Robert! John! I can’t . . .’ I gasped, my breath forced from my lungs by the edge of gunwale. ‘He’s too heavy for me.’
But it was Christopher Holme whose hand grabbed the rope next to mine, then the others were there, hauling the man over the gunwale to lie in a pool of icy water at our feet. The steersman shrugged and picked up his dagger, before returning to the tiller.
‘He will die anyway,’ he shouted over his shoulder.
‘Oh, God help us,’ Pyotr said. ‘He is probably right.’
‘Get him into the cabin,’ Holme said curtly.
The men were not normally permitted to enter the cabin. At night they erected a sort of tent in the stern of the barge and sheltered there, but this was no time for the niceties.
‘Strip his wet clothes off first,’ I said to Robert and John. ‘We need to get him warm and dry as quickly as possible, or he will die. And we don’t want that cold water in the cabin. I have something that will stimulate his heart. The danger is that the cold and shock will stop it. Pyotr, bring some of the mead. I wish we could heat it.’
‘We could warm it a little over our candle lamp,’ Holme said. ‘It won’t be much, but–’
‘Aye, a good idea.’
The two stipendiaries worked quickly and carried the naked man into the cabin. As we wrapped him in layer upon layer of furs, I saw that his chest was covered with bruises from the cruel pressure of the towing harness. He was unconscious and flaccid with the cold. I might be too late to save him. I rummaged in my satchel for my phial containing tincture of digitalis, though my hands were shaking so much I nearly dropped it.
Christopher Holme had lit the candle lamp and was attempting to warm some of the mead Pyotr had brought, which he had poured into a pewter cup.
‘Don’t burn yourself,’ I said absently, and he held up a handkerchief to show that he had thought of that.
Digitalis is a tricky drug. It can be effective in treatment of the heart, but too much will kill a man. I knew nothing of the bargeman’s state of health, so I would simply need to guess. Already his pulse was faint and his breathing shallow. I must act now or lose him.
‘Robert, prop him up. I need to give him this. John, can you force his mouth open, so I can get a spoon between his lips? Squeeze his jaw between your fingers. Have you ever given medicine to a dog? Aye, like that.’
I had taken a spoon from my satchel. Now I pulled the cork from the phial with my teeth and poured the tincture of digitalis into the spoon. How much? In the end I decided to give him a full spoonful and pray that I had made the right decision.
John managed to force the man’s mouth open, though I could see his jaw was rigid with the cold. I slipped the spoon in and the throat muscles moved automatically as he swallowed.
‘Now the mead,’ I said, reaching out for the cup. Holme passed it to me.
‘It is not too hot,’ he said. ‘I have only warmed it a little and put it in a wooden cup. Perhaps I should–’
‘It will be fine, if we can just get him to drink it.’
I forced a little of the mead between the man’s lips while John held his mouth open, though some of it dribbled away down his chin. I sat back on my heels. I did not want to risk making him choke.
We all watched him in silence. Would the steersman be proved right? Perhaps it would have been kinder to let him drown at once. I pushed the thought away. Even if he died now, he was warm and surrounded by people who wished him well. Surely that was better than a lonely death in a half-frozen river.
As I was forcing more of the mead into his mouth, there was a jarring as the barge hit the bank. The remaining men must have found a place to moor for the night. That meant hot food.
The bargeman moaned and muttered something. I could not understand his guttural accent. ‘What does he say?’ I asked Pyotr.
‘He thinks he has died.’
Pyotr reached down and squeezed the man’s shoulder, then said something in the same thick accent. The man made a choking noise which sounded almost like a laugh.
‘What did you tell him?’ Christopher Howe asked.
‘I told him he wasn’t ready for Heaven yet. He’d more time to spend on this shitty earth.’
We all laughed at that.
‘If we can keep him warm,’ I said, ‘if we can feed him some hot food, if he is allowed to rest for a day or two, then I think we may keep him from Heaven yet awhile.’
That night we took it in turn to keep a watch on the bargeman, whose name was Sergei. He had eaten a little fish in the evening, but remained very weak and shaken. I did not allow him to go ashore, but insisted he should stay in the cabin, wrapped in furs. His clothes were still sodden, and like all the bargemen he had no others, wearing the same things day and night. It would be a long time before they were dry, for it had now grown bitterly cold. They would probably freeze first. It was not yet the dry cold of full winter, which Pyotr said would come soon. Instead a layer of freezing fog hung over the river, which is probably the nastiest weather ever known to man. Even the rest of us, who had not taken that near fatal plunge into the river, began to feel the insidious damp cold creeping into our very bones.
The cabin contained a small brazier, which the bargemen were very reluctant to light, for fear of fire. Apparently it was intended to be used only in extreme emergencies, but Master Holme now asserted his authority and said that we would light it. There was an abundance of firewood lying about in the edges of the forest, so we soon had a plentiful supply. Pyotr – who was inclined to take the bargemen’s part in the argument over the brazier – insisted that we should keep two buckets of water always ready next to the brazier, in case of accidents.
‘At least,’ I remarked dryly, ‘that means we will have water instead of ice to wash with in the mornings.’
For the previous few days the water on board had frozen during the night. All the men had abandoned any attem
pt to shave, and were growing beards like the Muscovites. I feared it might draw attention to my beardless state, although I knew several men of my age in London who remained beardless. Simon was one. John, the younger of the two stipendiaries, had no more than a soft down on his chin. I threw out a casual remark that the men in my family had never grown much facial hair, and hoped my story would be believed. Fortunately, we had other matters on our minds.
I took the first watch over our patient that night, and was relieved by Christopher Holme around midnight.
‘How does he fare?’ he whispered, as he came through from the sleeping room to where I sat on one of the benches, trying to read by the flickering flames of the brazier. I feared if I did not read I might fall asleep myself.
‘Well enough,’ I said. ‘His breathing is regular and his heart beat is stronger than it was. It was fortunate that he fell into the Dvina and not the Thames. This river is clean, while the Thames is an open sewer, tainted with God only knows what filth. Anyone who gulps down a dose of Thames water has a choice of several diseases from which he may die.’
‘If he is resting well and recovering,’ he said, standing near the brazier and rubbing his hands together to warm them, ‘you should try to get some rest.’
I stood up and stretched, cramped from sitting still on the hard bench so long.
‘Aye. I will so.’ I tucked my book of poetry under my arm. ‘They are a brutal people, these Muscovites. The steersman was going to send Sergei to his death without a qualm. He made no attempt to save him.’
Holme sat down on the bench I had vacated and picked up a fur to wrap round himself.
‘Do not judge him too harshly, Dr Alvarez. He would have thought that the extra weight might have pulled the other men into the river, then we should all have been lost. Stranded here, without the means to move forward, we would have perished in the cold.’
‘Perhaps,’ I conceded. ‘But he could have called to us for help. We had no great difficulty in hauling Sergei aboard.’