These crosses were all fastened by golden chains to the cupolas, and many were hung with discs, orbs, and stars that swung and glittered with every changing wind or shifting sunbeam.
Despite the splendor of the churches there was something dull, colorless, and melancholy about this prospect.
The Kremlin (a city in itself) was also gloomy; when Peter turned from looking over the city he could see, across the sandy, weed-grown courtyard, the whole of the citadel; the golden domes rising above walls disfigured and neglected, the three old cathedrals where the Czars were crowned, married, and buried, the great tower built by Boris Godunof, and behind all the red structure of the palace and fortress.
Peter was never pleased when his glance fell on these three churches that crowded round his royal residence; they reminded him too forcibly of the position assumed by the Church.
Peter meant to deprive the Patriarch of much of his power, and to vest in himself the religious as well as the temporal prerogatives of Aristocrat of All the Russias.
He began pacing up and down the terrace again, and presently took from the skirt pocket of his uniform a little letter which he read while the evening breeze fluttered it in his hand.
It was an appeal from his sister, miserably confined in the convent of Novo-Devichi, for a slightly better treatment; she was very ill, she said, having grown too stout and being covered with ulcers, and she begged for a little air and exercise.
Peter read the appeal with unmoved serenity; Sophia had inspired the late rebellion and could never be forgiven.
“A pity,” thought Peter, “for she is clever and might have been useful to me.”
He considered that he had been extremely generous in allowing her her life; the heads of her supporters still rotted on the battlements of Moscow; his wife, Eudoxia, suspected of favoring the rebels, was enclosed in a convent with a shaven head that last day of September, in the Krasnoi Ploshtshad, Peter had executed with his own hand several of the wretched rebels already broken by torture, and had himself shaved the beards the nobility wore as a sign of their adherence to ancient custom; on the first day alone of the executions, two hundred persons had been ferociously put to death in the presence of their frantic wives and children; in the seven days’ vengeance more than a thousand had perished; the bleeding members of the rebellious Strelitz had been nailed to the bars of Sophia’s prison; every square in Moscow, every corner of the battlements of the Kremlin, had been hung with corpses.