After some haggling I agreed to dine with the top ten most eligible and wealthy bachelors my father could find. I dismissed four on the first encounter for behaviours ranging from the boorish to the barbaric, while retaining the other six at the end of a very long social leash. In time my father came to respect my judgment and, for a few brief moments, would almost forget that it was I, not his daughter, who he addressed.
“You are aware,” I said one day, “that when my tenancy expires, the individual these gentlemen have come to admire will be replaced by, if you don’t mind me saying, your daughter.”
“My daughter desires only one thing in this world–to be adored,” replied my father as we sat in the gloom of his swaddled coach, bouncing its way over the Moscow cobbles at the gorging hour of night. “As it was, that need made her a thoroughly unadorable creature. It is my hope that, once she realises that she is already adored, thanks to your groundwork, she will settle down and become rather more manageable. Even if she does not, it is satisfactory for now that her reputation has been salvaged, and perhaps in a few years, when we have beaten the demon out of her, she can return and reclaim the reputation you have made.”
“You are not concerned by the… unorthodox nature of our relationship?”
“To which relationship do you refer?”
“To mine and your daughter’s, perhaps,” I murmured. “And pursuant to that, my relationship to you and yours to your child.”
He was silent a while as we rattled through the chittering night-time streets. At last: “On accepting this commission, it was necessary that you acquainted yourself with my family’s history. Did you do so?”
“Of course.”
“Then you have done more than my daughter,” he grunted. “Whatever your motives may have been. You will be aware that my family has a long history of military service, My father, in particular, fought in the Crimea and was applauded for gallantry.”
“I have read the same.”
“Lies,” he replied flatly. “My father did not fight in the Crimea. His body was in attendance and by all accounts warred gallantly, yet of the battles engaged, the foes struck down, I assure you my father had not one memory. He could not bear the sight of blood but is famed to this day as a mighty warrior. Can you conceive of how this situation came to pass?”
“Yes,” I breathed. “I rather think I can.”
He straightened, half-nodding at a purpose unseen. “You wonder why I would permit–forgive me, that is not the word–why I would invite you to assume the role of my daughter. You consider it unfit for a father? I would answer to you this: that if you were to have a gangrenous leg cut off, or to stand before a lover and declare that your love is dead; that if the necessity of your position commanded you to kill a friend, to stick a knife into the throat of a man who has ever been loyal–what would you give not to do it? And what would you give for it to be done?”
“What makes you think another would do what you cannot?”
“Because it is not your lover you destroy, yet they, in looking on you, are destroyed as truly. My daughter derides her birth and damns her family, and yes. This is better.”
The halt of the carriage came with a two-three of rocking bodies and the stamp of horses’ hooves by the kerb. For a moment my father did not move. Then, “There is a question I would ask.”
“Please.”
“When we met, you wore my servant’s body, and said, call me Josef, the name of the man you wore. Now you wear my daughter, and say, call me Antonina and you… speak alone with men, and wash yourself before the mirror and… engage in those personal acts of womanhood that I would rather not consider too deeply. Here is my question: who are you? When you are neither Antonina nor Josef, who are you when you lay my daughter’s head down to sleep?”
I considered this problem. “I am a well-bred daughter of Russia. I am a cellist with a love for a bay mare that I spoil greatly. I am polite at the dinner table, charming with those who merit my attention and dismissive to those young gentlemen whose intentions are inclined only towards my modesty or my wealth. All this is true. What else matters?”
He shifted, readying himself to speak, so I reached out with my gloved fingers, resting them on his liver-spotted hand. “Did your father ask who it was who slew his way across the Crimea?” I breathed. “Did he want to know?”
“No. I don’t believe he did. There were rumours of… some vile things permitted in my father’s body, and yet I suppose in war vile things are accepted.”
“Then ask yourself this–do you want to know who it is you have permitted into your daughter’s flesh?”
I saw his Adam’s apple rise and sink in the half-gloom of the carriage, Then, with a brighter bark he exclaimed, “Well, what is it we are seeing tonight, Antonina?”
What we were seeing was a show of minimal merit, and that night as the curtain fell I applauded the actors and smiled at the audience, and a reasonable percentage of the audience applauded me, for I was beautiful and wealthy, the perfect picture of who Antonina should be.
And then in the crowd that swirled beneath the chandelier of the lobby–for no one of society came to the theatre just for the play–a chubby finger prodded my elbow and a small voice said, “I know who you are.”
I looked down and beheld a little girl, her hair done up in dolllike curls. Her tiny dress of pink silk clung to an undeveloped chest, yet she wore rouge on her cheeks and as her fingers brushed my arm, I felt a buzzing in my teeth like a wasps’ nest doused in smoke.
“Do you?” I murmured, studying the face that studied mine.
“Yes. I love your dress.”
“Thank you, Miss…?”
“Senyavin. I’m… oh!” A tiny hand went to her mouth, holding back a giggle. “Am I Tulia or Tasha? We look so alike, I can’t always tell, and mummy calls us both ‘angel’.”
I drew further into the candle-washed gloom of the theatre, pulling my cape tight across my thin shoulders. “And how long has your mummy called you that?”
“All my life, I suppose,” replied the child, “But it’s only been two weeks.” Her head tipped to one side, staring at me crookedly. “I burned Tulia’s dolls’ house. Or maybe Tasha’s. The rooms were painted in pink, and I wanted them blue, and they said no. So I burned it. What do you do?”
“I salvage the reputations of young women too naïve to realise what a good reputation is worth,” I replied. “But in two weeks’ time, I imagine I’ll be someone else.”
“Only two weeks?” asked Senyavin. “I’m moving out tonight. Look.” She pointed across the room, a chubby finger lancing a man in a bright red sash and curled dark moustache, standing iron-straight in the centre of the foyer, slim glass between three fingers. “Do you like what you see? He’s beautiful, yes?”
“Very pleasant.”
The girl turned back to me, face full of concern. “I wanted to let you know,” she explained. “When I realised who you were, I wanted you to understand that he’s mine. I love him already. I love his sweat. I love his smell. His eyes smile even when his lips are still, his hair is soft and falls that way across his brow by nature, not hard work. He works to keep his hands still, but they still twitch at his side, bursting with energy, and when I kiss a woman with his lips she’ll cry out, no, I can’t, no, and then kiss me harder because she knows what I know. She knows that I am beautiful. If I could keep him for ever, I would, just like this, perfect. But people get old, flesh withers, so now–now I need to be him while he’s still perfect, before his face changes. He’s so beautiful, I thought, what if you try to move in? That couldn’t happen. Too much noise, not enough room. So I thought I’d say hello and tell you. He’s mine. I love him. Touch him and I’ll rip your eyes out and feed them to my pussy cat.”