Juniper & Thorn(59)

His newly peaceable attitude extended even to me. When he saw the mess of his bedroom, I blushed deeply and told him that a monster had broken inside. It was a terrible lie, but Papa pretended to believe it. He said that I looked hungry. He took me downstairs and fed me pork varenyky and black juice. I could hardly taste any of it, and it all sat in my belly afterward with the heft of a stone. I wanted to release it all, but I didn’t dare to, after Papa’s dire warning.

And what of Dr. Bakay? When he came into our house with those first three suitors, Papa greeted him happily, as if they were two old friends. He scarcely even looked at me. After they’d shaken hands, Dr. Bakay said, “I heard about your competition, Zmiy. I read it on the posters, and then the penny presses picked it up.”

Papa scoffed. “The only true story they’ll ever print. Don’t tell me you’re here to compete yourself.”

“No, sadly not,” Dr. Bakay said. His eyes glimmered merrily behind his spectacles. I did not remember him ever wearing spectacles, but they must have been all the better to see me with. “I hoped you would simply let me observe the goings-on—as a scientific inquiry. Many of these men have been my clients before, and I am quite interested to see how they are faring now. To see if the predictions I made were correct. I can pay you for your hospitality, of course.”

And that was that. Papa smiled hugely and took a bag of rubles from Dr. Bakay, who hung up his coat and hat on our rack.

I stood there in the foyer, in the long shadow of the grandfather clock, and the years fell on me like snow. A white deluge compressed the space between the girl I had been at sixteen and the woman I was now; it was as if my own ghost were possessing me. She moved my body toward the stairs, our twin hearts beating crookedly.

Before I could make it there, Dr. Bakay turned.

“Dear Marlinchen,” he said. “I almost didn’t notice you—quiet as a mouse, just the way I remember, though I could swear you’ve grown taller.”

Then he crushed me into an embrace, fist pressed to the small of my back. The girl that I was squeaked out a greeting, her ghost manipulating my mouth and tongue.

As soon as he let go I slipped out again, up the stairs. Quiet as a mouse.

I did not sleep that night, and barred my door with the chair that usually sat in front of my boudoir. Of all the doors in our house, mine alone had no lock. Dr. Bakay was sleeping in one of the rooms in the disused servants’ quarters, on the first floor. I wondered if he was awake, too, his breath curling up toward the ceiling that separated us.

There were fifteen other men downstairs, folded on couches and the chaise longue or splayed out on the floor, using their own balled-up jackets as pillows. And then next door, on either side, were my sisters. I wasn’t sure if they could manage to sleep until I heard Undine’s soft snores feathering through the wall.

Her words stitched themselves once more through my mind, mean and familiar. People want to ruin things that are clean and new. It’s no fun stamping through old dirty snow. That part, at least, I could swallow. I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t know most people found joy in making beautiful things ugly. I had seen enough belching gray factories rise up out of the steppe grass to understand that.

He can’t stand the idea of anyone spoiling us but him. That was the part that rang in me like a wrong note. Undine didn’t know what had gone on between Dr. Bakay and me when the sitting-room door was closed; she couldn’t see the scars his knife had left. So maybe my cruel sister was mistaken.

But then, I supposed, I had only been ruined at Papa’s orchestration, only when he had Dr. Bakay’s rubles in hand. When the grandfather clock gonged seven, I went downstairs and ate three honey cakes the size of my fist, stomach churning like a river at ice melt.

Then I went into the sitting room. Most of the men were already awake, and when they saw me they sat up straight, smoothing their sleep-mussed hair and stammering out perfunctory good mornings. They seemed too sad to be afraid of.

I had become friendly with one man who was not much older than me, with scrubby blond hair like steppe grass and the wide, tired eyes of an old hound. He had an ordinary mortal name, but in my mind I christened him Sobaka, like the sweet, mopey dog he reminded me of.

Sobaka was perched on the very edge of the chaise longue, some crumpled paper in his hand. I peered over his shoulder and asked, “What is that?”

“Just one of the penny presses, ma’am,” he said, cheeks pinking. “This one’s old news, now.”

The front page was crowded with daguerreotypes and exclamatory headlines. The gradonalchik’s wife was having an affair with her carriage driver. A restaurant on Kanatchikov Street was found to be using rat meat in their varenyky. My gaze wandered down the page, to a smaller headline, accompanied by a daguerreotype of a solemn-looking man in spectacles. I recognized him as I squinted closer.

It was the broker from Fisherovich & Symyrenko. The one who had bought Mama’s charm bracelet. The one whose card I had found in Papa’s pocket. The headline said that he’d been missing for three days.

Something very cold slid through my veins. I thought about the charm bracelet in the drawer of my boudoir, burning with its bad magic. I tried to count how many days it had been since we had sold all of our things, since that broker had been at our house. My memory felt like termite-eaten wood, porous with black spaces. Hours were swallowed up by some strange, murky darkness.