‘But please,’ relented Porfiry. ‘By all means, you may sit down.’ He watched her solicitously for a few moments. ‘You are not well, Marfa Timofyevna? May we fetch you a glass of water?’
‘Thank you, no. That won’t be necessary. I am a little fatigued, that is all.’ She dabbed her eyes with a minuscule, lace-trimmed handkerchief.
Porfiry and Virginsky both felt awkward standing over the girl. Nodding simultaneously, they settled down on either side of her.
‘I could not help noticing,’ began Porfiry gently, ‘that when we were talking to Princess Dolgorukaya, you left the room in something of a hurry.’
‘Yes.’ Marfa Timofyevna gave a self-mocking smile that entirely won Porfiry over. He could not say which was more touching, its bravery or its fragility.
‘The reason, if I am not mistaken, has something to do with her rejection of her son, Prince Dolgoruky.’
‘I owe everything to Princess Dolgorukaya,’ said Marfa Timofyevna, hotly.
‘Yes, of course. I understand. That makes it very difficult for you to say anything against her.’
‘Is Konstantin Arsenevich in trouble?’
‘No. I merely wish to speak to him about a friend of his. Did he ever introduce you to any of his friends?’
Marfa Timofyevna shook her head quickly, almost violently. For the first time, she turned her eyes directly on Porfiry. ‘It is not what you think.’ She looked away sharply, as soon as she had confided this.
‘Ah, it is interesting that you should say so, as I am not sure what I think.’ Porfiry smiled.
Marfa Timofyevna’s tone darkened. ‘You think that Konstantin Arsenevich seduced me.’
‘And that is not what happened?’
‘I. .’ Marfa Timofyevna bit her lower lip and closed her eyes. She could not bring herself to say any more.
‘Yes, I think I understand,’ said Porfiry, softly. ‘And so, perhaps, you hold yourself responsible for the Prince’s exile from his family home?’
Marfa Timofyevna seemed shocked by the suggestion. ‘No, I. .! Why do you say that?’
‘Then, forgive me, I do not understand. Except that I understand how painful and delicate these affairs are. And that the truth of the matter is often very different to the way it is vulgarly represented. What is left out — quite often — are the feelings. How the heart is stirred. Noble, beautiful — and above all delicate — feelings. But if you take those away, what are you left with? For they are the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Without allowing for those feelings, then you are only dealing with a travesty of the truth. A lie, in other words.’
Marfa Timofyevna’s mouth was open in a wondering O. She studied Porfiry’s eyes carefully. ‘I knew what was said about him,’ she said at last. ‘The rumours.’
‘Which were?’ Porfiry asked the question a little too eagerly.
Marfa Timofyevna shook her head impatiently. ‘Oh, that he had seduced many women. That he kept three apartments, with a separate mistress in each. That he had committed crimes.’
‘Crimes?’
‘Yes. And blasphemies.’
‘You knew all this,’ stated Porfiry, his tone confirmatory.
‘I had heard all the rumours. The very worst. I heard them all from him, you see.’
‘From Konstantin Arsenevich?’
‘Yes. He often said such things against himself, as if to frighten me. But I would not be deterred. And so, he arranged for the printing of a manifesto in which he accused himself — and condemned himself — of the vilest crimes. He brought it willingly to me.’
‘How extraordinary.’
‘He told me that every word in it was true. He told me to read it carefully, and if, at the end of reading it, I still loved him, then he would be mine, mine alone, for ever.’
‘And so?’
Marfa Timofyevna gave a sudden startling sob that convulsed her whole body. ‘I was not good enough!’ she gasped.
‘You could not love him,’ said Porfiry flatly.
Marfa Timofyevna squeezed her eyelids tight.
‘May I see this document?’
‘I don’t. . have it. . anymore.’ Marfa Timofyevna’s eyes were glistening. ‘I realise now that he is gone, that I do, I can, I must love him. It is his only hope. And mine.’
‘And what of Princess Dolgorukaya? Does she know of this document? Had she read it? Is that the true reason why she cast him out?’
‘I. .’ Marfa Timofyevna’s eyes widened in recollection of the single most appalling act of her young life. ‘I took it to her.’
‘What has become of it now, do you know?’
‘She destroyed it, of course.’
Porfiry absorbed the news with a flutter of blinking. ‘Can you remember any of the charges that the Prince laid against himself?’
‘You will not hear them from me. You may torture me all you want, but I will not say a word of what was printed on that paper.’
‘My dear young lady — please! — be assured that I have no intention of torturing you!’
‘They were lies anyhow. I realise that now. Lies he had made up to test me. And I failed. Oh, how I failed!’
Porfiry laid a hand consolingly across one of hers. She looked up, startled by his touch. Her eyes implored him for some consoling word. Her face trembled with anguish and despair.
‘If you have a message for him, I will happily convey it,’ Porfiry offered.
Marfa Timofyevna breathed in deeply, drawing herself up fully, only to collapse in defeat on the exhalation. She hung her head and waited for them to go.
A Russian Byron
For a small consideration, Alexey Yegorovich escorted them across a series of courtyards, each muddier than the last. He pointed out a squalid entrance and left them to it. The door was rotten and looked as if it were about to fall off its hinges. A dark stairway led down to the basement. They were at the very rear of what was essentially the same sprawling building that housed the lavish apartments of the Dolgoruky family. It was here where one found the filthy garrets and cellars, and the dingy rooms sublet into ‘corners,’ into which multiple families and individuals were crammed.
Prince Dolgoruky had merely moved from the front of the building to the rear, and yet he might as well have crossed an entire continent. If the apartment building was a microcosm of Russia, he had been cast into its Siberia.
An old woman came through a door as they reached the bottom of the stairs. She regarded them suspiciously out of the gloom, holding herself stock-still. When Porfiry announced that they were looking for Prince Dolgoruky, her manner became highly animated and almost coquettish. She smiled an entirely toothless grin.
The old coquette led them into a large room hung with washing lines. The drying clothes served as informal partitions, dividing the space into its various living areas. Small windows set high in the walls, at ground level on the outside, let in a meagre light.
She pointed to a shabby curtain that was strung across one corner of the room. ‘You had better knock first!’ she recommended with a knowing leer.
As they approached the curtain, they could hear the sounds of laughter coming from behind it; more specifically, the laughter of two people, one as unmistakably male as the other was female. The sounds had an intimate tinge, as if the two people making them believed themselves to be utterly alone. The curtain sealed them off in the universe of their mutual abandon.
Porfiry cleared his throat loudly. ‘Prince Dolgoruky? Prince Konstantin Arsenevich Dolgoruky?’
A strained silence descended on the couple on the other side of the curtain. However, after a moment or two, a fit of giggling burst from the female.
‘Who wishes to speak to him?’ The male voice was charged with aristocratic hauteur.
‘My name is Porfiry Petrovich. I am an investigating magistrate. I wish to talk to Konstantin Arsenevich about the journalist Kozodavlev.’