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The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series

R >> Rafael Sabatini >> The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series




Such, in brief, was the story with which Demetrius convinced the
court of Poland, and not a few who had known the boy at Uglich
came forward now to identify with him the grown man, who carried
in his face so strong a resemblance to Ivan the Terrible. That
story which Boris now heard was soon heard by all Russia, and
Boris realized that something must be done to refute it.

But something more than assurances--his own assurances--were
necessary if the Muscovites were to believe him. And so at last
Boris bethought him of the Tsarina Maria, the mother of the
murdered boy. He had her fetched to Moscow from her convent, and
told her of this pretender who was setting up a claim to the
throne of Russia, supported by the King of Poland.

She listened impassively, standing before him in the black robes
and conventual coif which his tyranny had imposed upon her. When
he had done, a faint smile swept over the face that had grown so
hard in these last twelve years since that day when her boy had
been slain almost under her very eyes.

"It is a circumstantial tale," she said. "It is perhaps true. It
is probably true."

"True!" He bounded from his seat. "True? What are you saying,
woman? Yourself you saw the boy dead."

"I did, and I know who killed him."

"But you saw him. You recognized him for your own, since you set
the people on to kill those whom you believed had slain him."

"Yes," she answered. And added the question: "What do you want of
me now?"

"What do I want?" He was amazed that she should ask, exasperated.
Had the conventual confinement turned her head? "I want your
testimony. I want you to denounce this fellow for the impostor
that he is. The people will believe you."

"You think they will?" Interest had kindled in her glance.

"What else? Are you not the mother of Demetrius, and shall not a
mother know her own son?"

"You forget. He was ten years of age then--a child. Now he is a
grown man of three-and-twenty. How can I be sure? How can I be
sure of anything?"

He swore a full round oath at her. "Because you saw him dead."

"Yet I may have been mistaken. I thought I knew the agents of
yours who killed him. Yet you made me swear--as the price of my
brothers' lives--that I was mistaken. Perhaps I was more mistaken
than we thought. Perhaps my little Demetrius was not slain at
all. Perhaps this man's tale is true."

"Perhaps . . ." He broke off to stare at her, mistrustfully,
searchingly. "What do you mean?" he asked her sharply.

Again that wan smile crossed the hard, sharp-featured face that
once had been so lovely. "I mean that if the devil came out of
hell and called himself my son, I should acknowledge him to your
undoing."

Thus the pent-up hate and bitterness of years of brooding upon
her wrongs broke forth. Taken aback, he quailed before it. His
jaw dropped foolishly, and he stared at her with wide, unblinking
eyes.

"The people will believe me, you say--they will believe that a
mother should know her own son. Then are your hours of usurpation
numbered."

If for a moment it appalled him, yet in the end, forewarned, he
was forearmed. It was foolish of her to let him look upon the
weapon with which she could destroy him. The result of it was
that she went back to her convent under close guard, and was
thereafter confined with greater rigour than hitherto.

Desperately Boris heard how the belief in Demetrius was gaining
ground in Russia with the people. The nobles might still be
sceptical, but Boris knew that he could not trust them, since
they had no cause to love him. He began perhaps to realize that
it is not good to rule by fear.

And then at last came Smirnoy Otrepiev back from Cracow, where he
had been sent by Basmanov to obtain with his own eyes confirmation
of the rumour which had reached the boyar on the score of the
pretender's real identity.

The rumour, he declared, was right. The false Demetrius was none
other than his own nephew, Grishka Otrepiev, who had once been a
monk, but, unfrocked, had embraced the Roman heresy, and had
abandoned himself to licentious ways. You realize now why Smirnoy
had been chosen by Basmanov for this particular mission.

The news heartened Boris. At last he could denounce the impostor
in proper terms, and denounce him he did. He sent an envoy to
Sigismund III. to proclaim the fellow's true identity, and to
demand his expulsion from the Kingdom of Poland; and his
denunciation was supported by a solemn excommunication pronounced
by the Patriarch of Moscow against the unfrocked monk, Grishka
Otrepiev, who now falsely called himself Demetrius Ivanovitch.

But the denunciation did not carry the conviction that Boris
expected. It was reported that the Tsarevitch was a courtly,
accomplished man, speaking Polish and Latin, as well as Russian,
skilled in horsemanship and in the use of arms, and it was asked
how an unfrocked monk had come by these accomplishments.
Moreover, although Boris, fore-warned, had prevented the Tsarina
Maria from supporting the pretender out of motives of revenge, he
had forgotten her two brothers; he had not foreseen that,
actuated by the same motives, they might do that which he had
prevented her from doing. This was what occurred. The brothers
Nagoy repaired to Cracow publicly to acknowledge Demetrius their
nephew, and to enrol themselves under his banner.

Against this Boris realized that mere words were useless. The
sword of Nemesis was drawn indeed. His sins had found him out.
Nothing remained him but to arm and go forth to meet the
impostor, who was advancing upon Moscow with a great host of
Poles and Cossacks.

He appraised the support of the Nagoys at its right value. They,
too, had been at Uglich, and had seen the dead boy, almost seen
him slain. Vengeance upon himself was their sole motive. But was
it possible that Sigismund of Poland was really deceived, as well
as the Palatine of Sandomir, whose daughter was betrothed to the
adventurer, Prince Adam Wisniowiecki, in whose house the false
Demetrius had first made his appearance, and all those Polish
nobles who flocked to his banner? Or were they, too, moved by
some ulterior motive which he could not fathom?

That was the riddle that plagued Boris Godunov what time--in the
winter of 1604--he sent his armies to meet the invader. He sent
them because, crippled now by gout, even the satisfaction of
leading them was denied him. He was forced to stay at home in the
gloomy apartments of the Kremlin, fretted by care, with the
ghosts of his evil past to keep him company, and assure him that
the hour of judgment was at hand.

With deepening rage he heard how town after town capitulated to
the adventurer, and mistrusting Basmanov, who was in command, he
sent Shuiski to replace him. In January of 1605 the armies met at
Dobrinichi, and Demetrius suffered a severe defeat, which
compelled him to fall back on Putioli. He lost all his infantry,
and every Russian taken in arms on the pretender's side was
remorselessly hanged as Boris had directed.

Hope began to revive in the heart of Boris; but as months passed
and no decision came, those hopes faded again, and the canker of
the past gnawed at his vitals and sapped his strength. And then
there was ever present to his mind the nightmare riddle of the
pretender's identity. At last, one evening in April, he sent for
Smirnoy Otrepiev to question him again concerning that nephew of
his. Otrepiev came in fear this time. It is not good to be the
uncle of a man who is giving so much trouble to a great prince.

Boris glared at him from blood-injected eyes. His round, white
face was haggard, his cheeks sagged, and his fleshly body had
lost all its erstwhile firm vigour.

"I have sent for you to question you again," he said, "touching
this lewd nephew of yours, this Grishka Otrepiev, this unfrocked
monk, who claims to be Tsar of Muscovy. Are you sure, man, that
you have made no mistake--are you sure?"

Otrepiev was shaken by the Tsar's manner, by the ferocity of his
mien. But he made answer: "Alas, Highness! I could not be
mistaken. I am sure."

Boris grunted, and moved his body irritably in his chair. His
terrible eyes watched Otrepiev mistrustfully. He had reached the
mental stage in which he mistrusted everything and everybody.

"You lie, you dog," he snarled savagely.

"Highness, I swear . . ."

"Lies!" Boris roared him down. "And here's the proof. Would
Sigismund of Poland have acknowledged him had he been what you
say? When I denounced him the unfrocked monk Grishka Otrepiev,
would not Sigismund have verified the statement had it been
true?"

"The brothers Nagoy, the uncles of the dead Demetrius . . ."
Otrepiev was beginning, when again Boris interrupted him.

"Their acknowledgment of him came after Sigismund's, after--long
after--my denunciation." He broke into oaths. "I say you lie.
Will you stand there and pelter with me, man? Will you wait until
the rack pulls you joint from joint before you speak the truth?"

"Highness!" cried Otrepiev, "I have served you faithfully these
years."

"The truth, man; as you hope for life," thundered the Tsar, "the
whole truth of this foul nephew of yours, if so be he is your
nephew."

And Otrepiev spoke the whole truth at last in his great dread.
"He is not my nephew."

"Not?" It was a roar of rage. "You dared lie to me?"

Otrepiev's knees were loosened by terror, and he went down upon
them before the irate Tsar.

"I did not lie--not altogether. I told you a half-truth,
Highness. His name is Grishka Otrepiev; it is the name by which
he always has been known, and he is an unfrocked monk, all as I
said, and the son of my brother's wife."

"Then . . . then . . ." Boris was bewildered. Suddenly he
understood. "And his father?"

"Was Stephen Bathory, King of Poland. Grishka Otrepiev is King
Stephen's natural son."

Boris seemed to fight for breath for a moment.

"This is true?" he asked, and himself answered the question. "Of
course it is true. It is the light at last . . . at last. You may
go."

Otrepiev stumbled out, thankful, surprised to escape so lightly.
He could not know of how little account to Boris was the
deception he had practiced in comparison with the truth he had
now revealed, a truth that shed a fearful, dazzling light upon
the dark mystery of the false Demetrius. The problem that so long
had plagued the Tsar was solved at last.

This pretended Demetrius, this unfrocked monk, was a natural son
of Stephen Bathory, and a Roman Catholic. Such men as Sigismund
of Poland and the Voyvode of Sandomir were not deceived on the
score of his identity. They, and no doubt other of the leading
nobles of Poland, knew the man for what he was, and because of it
supported him, using the fiction of his being Demetrius
Ivanovitch to impose upon the masses, and facilitate the
pretenders occupation of the throne of Russia. And the object of
it was to set up in Muscovy a ruler who should be a Pole and a
Roman Catholic. Boris knew the bigotry of Sigismund, who already
had sacrificed a throne--that of Sweden--to his devout conscience,
and he saw clearly to the heart of this intrigue. Had he not
heard that a Papal Nuncio had been at Cracow, and that this
Nuncio had been a stout supporter of the pretender's claim?
What could be the Pope's concern in the Muscovite succession? Why
should a Roman priest support the claim of a prince to the throne
of a country devoted to the Greek faith?

At last all was clear indeed to Boris. Rome was at the bottom of
this business, whose true aim was the Romanization of Russia; and
Sigismund had fetched Rome into it, had set Rome on. Himself an
elected King of Poland, Sigismund may have seen in the ambitious
son of Stephen Bathory one who might perhaps supplant him on the
Polish throne. To divert his ambition into another channel he had
fathered--if he had not invented--this fiction that the pretender
was the dead Demetrius.

Had that fool Smirnoy Otrepiev but dealt frankly with him from
the first, what months of annoyance might he not have been
spared; how easy it might have been to prick this bubble of
imposture. But better late than never. To-morrow he would publish
the true facts, and all the world should know the truth; and it
was a truth that must give pause to those fools in this
superstitious Russia, so devoted to the Orthodox Greek Church,
who favoured the pretender. They should see the trap that was
being baited for them.

There was a banquet in the Kremlin that night to certain foreign
envoys, and Boris came to table in better spirits than he had
been for many a day. He was heartened by the thought of what was
now to do, by the conviction that he held the false Demetrius in
the hollow of his hand. There to those envoys he would announce
to-night what to-morrow he would announce to all Russia--tell
them of the discovery he had made, and reveal to his subjects the
peril in which they stood. Towards the close of the banquet he
rose to address his guests, announcing that he had an important
communication for them. In silence they waited for him to speak.
And then, abruptly, with no word yet spoken, he sank back into
his chair, fighting for breath, clawing the air, his face
empurpling until suddenly the blood gushed copiously from his
mouth and nostrils.

He was vouchsafed time in which to strip off his splendid apparel
and wrap himself in a monk's robe, thus symbolizing the putting
aside of earthly vanities, and then he expired.

It has been now and then suggested that he was poisoned. His
death was certainly most opportune to Demetrius. But there is
nothing in the manner of it to justify the opinion that it
resulted from anything other than an apoplexy.

His death brought the sinister opportunist Shuiski back to Moscow
to place Boris's son Feodor on the throne. But the reign of this
lad of sixteen was very brief. Basmanov, who had gone back to the
army, being now inspired by jealousy and fear of the ambitious
Shuiski, went over at once to the pretender, and proclaimed him
Tsar of Russia. Thereafter events moved swiftly. Basmanov marched
on Moscow, entered it in triumph, and again proclaimed Demetrius,
whereupon the people rose in revolt against the son of the
usurper Boris, stormed the Kremlin, and strangled the boy and his
mother.

Basil Shuiski would have shared their fate had he not bought his
life at the price of betrayal. Publicly he declared to the
Muscovites that the boy whose body he had seen at Uglich was not
that of Demetrius, but of a peasant's son, who had been murdered
in his stead.

That statement cleared the last obstacle from the pretender's
path, and he advanced now to take possession of his throne. Yet
before he occupied it, he showed the real principles that
actuated him, proved how true had been Boris's conclusion. He
ordered the arrest and degradation of the Patriarch who had
denounced and excommunicated him, and in his place appointed
Ignatius, Bishop of Riazan, a man suspected of belonging to the
Roman communion.

On the 30th of June of that year 1605, Demetrius made his
triumphal entry into Moscow. He went to prostrate himself before
the tomb of Ivan the Terrible, and then to visit the Tsarina
Maria, who, after a brief communion with him in private, came
forth publicly to acknowledge him as her son.

Just as Shuiski had purchased his life by a falsehood, so did she
purchase her enlargement from that convent where so long she had
been a prisoner, and restoration to the rank that was her proper
due. After all, she had cause for gratitude to Demetrius, who, in
addition to restoring her these things, had avenged her upon the
hated Boris Godunov.

His coronation followed in due season, and at last this amazing
adventurer found himself firmly seated upon the throne of Russia,
with Basmanov at his right hand to help and guide him. And at
first all went well, and the young Tsar earned a certain measure
of popularity. If his swarthy face was coarse-featured, yet his
bearing was so courtly and gracious that he won his way quickly
to the hearts of his people. For the rest he was of a tall,
graceful figure, a fine horseman, and of a knightly address at
arms.

But he soon found himself in the impossible position of having to
serve two masters. On the one hand there was Russia, and the
orthodox Russians whose tsar he was, and on the other there were
the Poles, who had made him so at a price, and who now demanded
payment. Because he saw that this payment would be difficult and
fraught with peril to himself he would--after the common wont of
princes who have attained their objects--have repudiated the
debt. And so he was disposed to ignore, or at least to evade, the
persistent reminders that reached him from the Papal Nuncio, to
whom he had promised the introduction into Russia of the Roman
faith.

But presently came a letter from Sigismund couched in different
terms. The King of Poland wrote to Demetrius that word had
reached him that Boris Godunov was still alive, and that he had
taken refuge in England, adding that he might be tempted to
restore the fugitive to the throne of Muscovy.

The threat contained in that bitter piece of sarcasm aroused
Demetrius to a sense of the responsibilities he had undertaken,
which were precisely as Boris Godunov had surmised. As a
beginning he granted the Jesuits permission to build a church
within the sacred walls of the Kremlin, whereby he gave great
scandal. Soon followed other signs that he was not a true son of
the Orthodox Greek Church; he gave offence by his indifference to
public worship, by his neglect of Russian customs, and by
surrounding himself with Roman Catholic Poles, upon whom he
conferred high offices and dignities.

And there were those at hand ready to stir up public feeling
against him, resentful boyars quick to suspect that perhaps they
had been swindled. Foremost among these was the sinister turncoat
Shuiski, who had not derived from his perjury all the profit he
expected, who resented, above all, to see Basmanov--who had ever
been his rival--invested with a power second only to that of the
Tsar himself. Shuiski, skilled in intrigue, went to work in his
underground, burrowing fashion. He wrought upon the clergy, who
in their turn wrought upon the populace, and presently all was
seething disaffection under a surface apparently calm.

The eruption came in the following May, when Maryna, the daughter
of the Palatine of Sandomir, made her splendid entry into Moscow,
the bride-elect of the young Tsar. The dazzling procession and
the feasting that followed found little favour in the eyes of the
Muscovites, who now beheld their city aswarm with heretic Poles.

The marriage was magnificently solemnized on the 18th of May,
1606. And now Shuiski applied a match to the train he had so
skilfully laid. Demetrius had caused a timber fort to be built
before the walls of Moscow for a martial spectacle which he had
planned for the entertainment of his bride. Shuiski put it abroad
that the fort was intended to serve as an engine of destruction,
and that the martial spectacle was a pretence, the real object
being that from the fort the Poles were to cast firebrands into
the city, and then proceed to the slaughter of the inhabitants.

No more was necessary to infuriate an already exasperated
populace. They flew to arms, and on the night of the 29th of May
they stormed the Kremlin, led on by the arch-traitor Shuiski
himself, to the cry of "Death to the heretic! Death to the
impostor!"

They broke into the palace, and swarmed up the stairs into the
Tsar's bedchamber, slaying the faithful Basmanov, who stood sword
in hand to bar the way and give his master time to escape. The
Tsar leapt from a balcony thirty feet to the ground, broke his
leg, and lay there helpless, to be dispatched by his enemies, who
presently discovered him.

He died firmly and fearlessly protesting that he was Demetrius
Ivanovitch. nevertheless, he was Grishka Otrepiev, the unfrocked
monk.

It has been said that he was no more than an instrument in the
hands of priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly
he met his doom. But something more he was. He was an instrument
indeed, not of priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris
Godunov the hideous sins that stained his soul, and to avenge his
victims by personating one of them. In that personation he had
haunted Boris as effectively as if he had been the very ghost of
the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and tortured, and finally
broken him so that he died.

That was the part assigned him by Fate in the mysterious scheme
of human things. And that part being played, the rest mattered
little. In the nature of him and of his position it was
impossible that his imposture should be other than ephemeral.





III. THE HERMOSA FEMBRA

An Eposode of the Inquisition in Seville



Apprehension hung like a thundercloud over the city of Seville in
those early days of the year 1481. It had been growing since the
previous October, when the Cardinal of Spain and Frey Tomas de
Torquemada, acting jointly on behalf of the Sovereigns--Ferdinand
and Isabella--had appointed the first inquisitors for Castile,
ordering them to set up a Tribunal of the Faith in Seville, to
deal with the apostatizing said to be rampant among the New-
Christians, or baptized Jews, who made up so large a proportion
of the population.

Among the many oppressive Spanish enactments against the Children
of Israel, it was prescribed that all should wear the distinguishing
circlet of red cloth on the shoulder of their gabardines; that
they should reside within the walled confines of their ghettos
and never be found beyond them after nightfall, and that they
should not practice as doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, or
innkeepers. The desire to emancipate themselves from these and
other restrictions upon their commerce with Christians and from
the generally intolerable conditions of bondage and ignominy
imposed upon them, had driven many to accept baptism and embrace
Christianity.

But even such New-Christians as were sincere in their professions
of faith failed to find in this baptism the peace they sought.
Bitter racial hostility, though sometimes tempered, was never
extinguished by their conversion.

Hence the alarm with which they viewed the gloomy, funereal,
sinister pageant--the white-robed, black-mantled and hooded
inquisitors, with their attendant familiars and barefoot friars--
headed by a Dominican bearing the white Cross, which invaded the
city of Seville one day towards the end of December and took its
way to the Convent of St. Paul, there to establish the Holy
Office of the Inquisition. The fear of the New-Christians that
they were to be the object of the attentions of this dread
tribunal had sufficed to drive some thousands of them out of the
city, to seek refuge in such feudal lordships as those of the
Duke of Medina Sidonia, the Marquis of Cadiz, and the Count of
Arcos.

This exodus had led to the publication by the newly appointed
inquisitors of the edict of 2nd January, in which they set forth
that inasmuch as it had come to their knowledge that many persons
had departed out of Seville in fear of prosecution upon grounds
of heretical pravity, they commanded the nobles of the Kingdom of
Castile that within fifteen days they should make an exact return
of the persons of both sexes who had sought refuge in their
lordships or jurisdictions; that they arrest all these and lodge
them in the prison of the Inquisition in Seville, confiscating
their property, and holding it at the disposal of the inquisitors;
that none should shelter any fugitive under pain of greater
excommunication and of other penalties by law established against
abettors of heretics.

The harsh injustice that lay in this call to arrest men and women
merely because they had departed from Seville before departure
was in any way forbidden, revealed the severity with which the
inquisitors intended to proceed. It completed the consternation
of the New-Christians who had remained behind, and how numerous
these were may be gathered from the fact that in the district of
Seville alone they numbered a hundred thousand, many of them
occupying, thanks to the industry and talent characteristic of
their race, positions of great eminence. It even disquieted the
well-favoured young Don Rodrigo de Cardona, who in all his vain,
empty, pampered and rather vicious life had never yet known
perturbation. Not that he was a New-Christian. He was of a
lineage that went back to the Visigoths, of purest red Castilian
blood, untainted by any strain of that dark-hued, unclean fluid
alleged to flow in Hebrew veins. But it happened that he was in
love with the daughter of the millionaire Diego de Susan, a girl
whose beauty was so extraordinary that she was known throughout
Seville and for many a mile around as la Hermosa Fembra; and he
knew that such commerce--licit or illicitly conducted--was
disapproved by the holy fathers. His relations with the girl had
been perforce clandestine, because the disapproval of the holy
fathers was matched in thoroughness by that of Diego de Susan. It
had been vexatious enough on that account not to be able to boast
himself the favoured of the beautiful and opulent Isabella de
Susan; it was exasperating to discover now a new and more
imperative reason for this odious secrecy.

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