Peter was not the first to pass the test.
A Russian apprentice noticed that a fastening in the foreign plans had been calculated for wood of a different density. Instead of copying the joint, he proposed changing the angle. The master demanded proof. The apprentice built a small model, put it under load and endured the mockery of men who believed Russians capable only of buying other people's hands.
The model did not crack. The master handed the apprentice the tool he himself had used until then.
Might rose only after the Russian apprentice altered the plans on his own and proved himself right by putting them to the test.
That same day a letter arrived from Russia. Several streltsy units had left their assigned posts and set out for Moscow. Sophia Alexeyevna's name appeared again and again in the reports.
Peter did not finish the letter. He remembered the first line: his return, the inquiry, the confessions, the gallows, the bodies by the monastery walls. Memory gave him a culprit before the evidence.
The embassy had to be cut short. Peter left at once, but ordered the interpreters and apprentices to complete their contracts and return by separate routes. In this way the tsar's hurried departure did not interrupt the training already under way. Peter travelled faster than the papers and grew ever more certain that this time he knew whom he had to stop.
Sophia received the accusation under guard in her house. She did not ask her brother to believe her. She demanded that the letter said to contain her command be laid before witnesses, together with her earlier writings. Then she provided a specimen of her seal.
The impression on the letter was cruder than the genuine seal. Several turns of phrase copied her old messages, but the form used to address her was one Sophia herself had not employed since her removal from power.
"If my name is enough for them, why do they need my command?" she asked.
The specimen seal destroyed the convenient version of events. Some of Sophia's supporters drew away from her after she publicly refused to acknowledge the letter. For Peter, this did not amount to reconciliation. His living sister remained the centre of other people's hopes even when she refused to command them.
A brief entry appeared on the page of the Book: "The faces have changed. The causes remain."
Fyodor Romodanovsky proposed reaching the truth by the usual means. He named several men who ought to be questioned until they confessed, after which the words obtained from them could be confirmed by further confessions. Ivan Naryshkin brought a longer list: the ringleaders, their kin and guarantors, Sophia's close supporters and their couriers. The confiscated property would have been enough to pay the new regiments.
Peter asked the Book how the rebellious units could be left without leaders before dawn.
The Book named the quickest move: execute every named ringleader. Before dawn they would lead no one else. Debt would open at once, and the Book did not know what would follow.
In his other life Peter would have carried out that answer before he had even finished putting the question. Now he saw what he had not asked: why the men had followed the ringleaders, who had committed a crime and who had merely lost his nerve after taking the first step. His only concern had been how to decapitate the rising before morning.
Afanasy Naryshkin reminded him of the Kremlin porch steps. In 1682 the crowd had taken rumour for proof and thrown men onto pikes. If the sovereign now made a confession obtained by pain the sole evidence, the new power would repeat the act of the old.
Peter tore up Ivan Naryshkin's long list. He permitted a sentence only where independent testimony, physical evidence and proven action all agreed. Torture could not create the sole piece of evidence, though some at court regarded this restriction as weakness. While the cases were being heard, several couriers escaped, and one detachment agreed to lay down its arms only after being promised that each man's case would be considered.
There was no long line of condemned men beside the scaffold. Most of the rank and file were examined separately: some were returned to the new regiments, some transferred to distant garrisons, some assigned to work crews. The old force was disbanded all the same, and its families resettled. Refusing a mass execution did not give people their old lives back.
Only those whose actions had been proved stood by the scaffold. Fedot Lapin walked along the short line with his father's schedule under his caftan. The paper had worn through at the folds, but the empty line for pay remained white.
At the third post he saw Stepan Lapin.
His father seemed smaller than Fedot remembered. He had no belt or hat, and his hands were bound in front of him. The inquiry had proved that he passed on information, gathered men and knew about the movement of an armed unit. One statement against him had been discarded as the product of torture. What remained was a letter, two witnesses and a man whom Stepan himself had told where they were to assemble.
Fedot pushed closer. A guard stopped him with the shaft of his weapon.
Peter stood at the table with the sentences. The schedule reminded him of the boy who, sixteen years before, had demanded not mercy but his father's pay.
Stepan asked for the sentence to be read in full.
Peter began with the name. Then he stated the proven actions, the rejected testimony, the witnesses and the punishment. He did not extend Stepan's guilt to the whole regiment.
When the reading was over, Fedot asked whether a just sentence would return the money whose absence had first made his father believe the agitators.
"No," Peter answered.
He could have added that he had saved hundreds of others. He could have said that Stepan had made his own choice. He could have explained why the state could not survive an armed march on its capital. Not one of those phrases was an answer to Fedot.
The sentence was carried out.
Fedot did not cry out. He merely took out the schedule and held it as though his father might still be paid what he was owed. The paper was no lighter after the execution. Peter did not approach him with consolation or ask for gratitude because the list had been limited.
Fedot's family was sent to Astrakhan. The order specified a new post, maintenance and the right to present the old schedule when the account was settled. For the Moscow chancery, the case was closed. Fedot took the old schedule with him.
Later Anna Mons asked Peter why Sophia had been allowed to prove she had given no command, while Evdokia had to disappear because she was an inconvenience in his life.
Peter replied that the marriage had long been dead and the monastery would merely confirm the truth. Anna reminded him that Evdokia had not chosen that truth.
"I did not make you a stopgap until someone else came along," Peter said.
"No. I was the one who did not let you."
Anna left not because of Martha, whom she did not know, nor out of jealousy towards his wife. She left because Peter was once again trying to turn another person's refusal into a convenient part of his own decision.
Evdokia Lopukhina refused to enter a monastery voluntarily. Peter had already seen how a name without a command could become evidence, and still he ordered her resistance broken. The coercion dragged on. The following year she was forced to take the veil.
Eight-year-old Alexei Petrovich asked his father when his mother would return. Peter answered that she would pray for him. The boy asked whether she herself had chosen to pray in that particular place.
Peter did not answer.
The Book opened two accounts. In the first, Alexei lost his mother against his will. In the second, taking the veil served as a means of getting rid of a wife. Peter had left his sister a voice and taken Evdokia's away.
After 1698 the Book showed new figures. Might: thirty-five. Trust: twenty-six. Debt: fifty-six.
The line remained murky. Names changed; causes returned.
On the western frontier the new regiments awaited war. Peter laid out the coming battle of Narva hour by hour and decided that this defeat, at least, he remembered well enough.
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