Touch (31 page)

I sleep.

It is a fitful process.

There is one bed in this tiny room, and though it’s a double, Coyle is sprawled diagonally across it, and even if the smell of sweat weren’t enough to set my delicate nose twitching, the blood seeps into the sheets.

I sleep on the floor, waking in awkward positions, one hand high, one hand squashed. Though the room is hot, I am cold, grateful that my muscles are already worn out, annoyed I haven’t more flesh to keep in the heat.

I slip in and out of half-remembered dreams.

Dreams of

Janus. Two-faced god, who was beautiful as she lay down beside me in an apartment in Miami, sapphires in her hair. Who danced naked around the room, slapping his behind and exclaiming I love it. I love it I love it I love it. That had been when he was young, and handsome, and Michael Peter Morgan, who used to do tae kwon do, and would one day meet his perfect wife.

Janus-who-was-Marcel, melted lips and withered fingers, skin the colour of rotten tomato laced with maggoty worms, do you like what you see?

Dreams of Galileo.

He’s mine.

He’s beautiful.

He’s mine.

Do you like what you see?

And I wake and for a moment cannot remember where I am, or who, and I feel sick, and sit on the edge of the toilet bowl, clutching it for a while, knowing I will not puke and wishing this body would.

The hotel is too cheap to provide toothpaste and my teeth are starting to ache.

Coyle sleeps soundly.

I have four euros left.

In the hotel lobby I wait on a low couch opposite the vending machine and flick through the newspapers.

When the chubby man with the blue shirt comes along, I put down my paper, get up and approach him, smiling.

“Excuse me,” I say as he reaches for the wallet in his pocket. “Do you have the time?”

He looks up, bewildered, and as he does, my fingers brush his own.

I place my wallet on top of the vending machine, push it back just out of sight, before catching the wrist of Irena Skarbek again and,

still smiling, thanking the man for his assistance,

I sit back down and carry on reading the newspaper.

His dizziness passes. The man examines his hands, his pockets, the inside of his shirt, the floor around him and finally me. He looks me up and down, takes in my cleaner’s uniform, wonders for a moment if I might be a thief but, seeing no evidence of the same, shakes himself and heads back upstairs.

Perhaps he left it in the bathroom, he thinks to himself. Or maybe beside the bed.

Funny, he could have sworn he had it when he came downstairs.

I wait until he is gone and retrieve his wallet from on top of the vending machine.

I have seventy-four euros, and my day is picking up.

I remember my first meeting with Galileo.

She was Tasha… or possibly Tulia.

I was Antonina Baryskina; I was young and beautiful, and for six months I played the cello and charmed the men of Moscow.

And when it was done, I was

(the names are hard to remember now)

Josef Brun, the grand duke’s most trusted manservant. I wore a high-necked black tunic, tight black trousers, had a beard turning gently grey and was still recovering, I realised upon the instant of my arrival, from a stomach bug that I hadn’t made known. Servants didn’t get ill in 1912. It wasn’t part of their job description.

I stood beside Antonina’s chair as she swayed, dizzy and confused, then opened her eyes. It was the same chair, in the same room, at the same time of day when I had first met her, wearing this self-same body, so that it might appear to her that she had blinked, and nothing had changed. Her clothes were those she had worn that first time, her hair done in the same style, though six months had passed, and the sunlight had turned from autumn to spring.

Then her father said, “Antonina, we need to talk,” and I bowed once and withdrew from the room.

The house echoed with her shrieking for three days.

I stayed, as a courtesy, in the gently aching body of Josef Brun. I did not do my servant’s tasks, nor were they expected of me, but resided in the outhouse, away from the eyes of my peers, and now faked the stomach infection from which Josef had only just recovered. I read books, took a few discreet walks through the grounds, played chess against my shadow and lamented that I no longer had access to the music room of the house.

On the fourth night the grand old duke came to me and took the seat on the other side of the chess board.

Do you? he asked.

I did.

He played competently, but moved too fast, his impatience showing in reckless attacks and careless defences. I told myself I would play with mercy, but it is not a game where good intentions last, and soon his pieces were scattered across the board.

“You are leaving us tomorrow?” Casually, his fingers on a bishop, a thing that hardly mattered.

“Yes.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’m not yet certain. South, perhaps. The western borders seem a little too… unsteady for my inclination.”

“You fear war?”

“I consider it a possibility.”

“Could you not spend such a conflict as… a general’s wife? A minister’s daughter? Some position away from the front lines?”

“I could. But in my experience war comes to us all, even – if not especially – the wives, sisters and mothers of those who fight. Womanhood is no protection from conflict. You wait for the news that comes. You dread, powerless and alone, forbidden to do what you would and fight for those you love.”

“And who do you love, Josef?” he asked softly. “Who do you really love?”

I leaned back from the board, went to fold my arms, remembered my body, its station, and instead laid them on my lap. “If I am wife, then I love my husband. If I am sister, then I love my brother. If I am soldier, then I love my men. My privilege, if you will, is that I may choose to enter any life I please. Why would I be a man in a callous home? Why would I be a mother whose children I did not adore? I love my kin, otherwise I would not keep them. I love everyone that I am, otherwise I would not be them.”

His eyes were fixed on the board, his eyebrows knotted together. “Are you not tempted to be me? Does my dukedom not attract you?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

I licked my lips, saw small eyes in his drooping face, noted the yellow spots on his hands, the stiff tendons about his neck, the curvature at the base of his spine where posture fought with age. He saw my speculation, blurted, “My age repulses you.”

“No, sir. Not that, although age, if you do not have the opportunity to grow into it easily, can be a shock. You have power and the respect of your peers, and health, but I do not think you are… beautiful. You lack that joy, or that love, which makes beauty more than the flesh that owns it.” A muscle twitched in a cheek, a tiny movement, but enough. I pressed my hands together in apology. “I have spoken… out of turn.”

“No,” he replied, more sharply than I think he meant, and then, softer, “No. You have spoken your mind. Very few do that around me. My daughter… spits in my face, wishes me dead. Do you think I did the right thing in commissioning you? Do you think I acted with… love?”

Silence.

“Come, sir, come.” He tutted. “I have congratulated you on the liberty of your speech. Do not betray that compliment now.”

“I believe you acted from love when you commissioned me to be your daughter. I believe you wish her well and through my intervention sought to give her that security in life which her own nature would not provide.”

“But?” he grunted. “Get on with it.”

“Sir… this understanding has been of great benefit to both of us. But the question I must ask is this: if the security you wished for your daughter required another to achieve it, then do you not force that which is opposite to her nature upon her? Or perhaps I may put it like this: is the daughter you love the daughter you in fact have?”

His eyes upon the board, though he no longer saw the pieces.

“You did not say as much when you agreed to this contract.”

“Nor was it in my interest to do so. But our arrangement is concluded, and you have asked for my thoughts, and there they are.”

His finger settled on a pawn, moved it for the sake of moving, an irrelevant gesture in an already concluded game.

“My wife believes my daughter to be ill.”

I waited, studied the board, leaning forward, enjoying the freedom of a man’s clothes, which did not restrict me to polite straight backs and the little breaths of a corset.

“She believes the illness to be of the mind. She has said it for many years. Sometimes Antonina… has episodes. She will… cry out against people who are not there, name fancies which cannot be believed, tell tales. As a child I hoped it was merely a trick of her growing, some spark of her personality which might, one day, be almost charming. Now she is a young woman, and that hope diminishes. Before you came… she lay with a peasant boy. He was fourteen, she one year older, and when they were done she came running back to the house, still… unclean, and shrieked of the deed that she had done. I do not mean to say that she lamented it, but rather she danced around the room, laughed in our faces, hitched up her skirts to show us the dirt and nakedness of her act, spat in her mother’s eye and told us she was free now. Free and blessed in the eyes of the Lord. I beat her that night. I beat her until even my wife, her child’s spittle dry on her face, begged me to stop. I told no one. We waited for her wounds to heal before letting any living soul near the house – near her. I had hoped that your presence would heal our household, redeem my daughter’s name, and do not think I have complaint. Your behaviour has been exemplary. Perhaps too much so. For these last few months I have almost at times forgotten that you are not my daughter. I watched her dance, laugh and smile. I heard her tell little jokes, bow to gentlemen of whom I approved, politely dismiss those whose spirits were too high. She has been appropriate with the servants, generous with her friends, welcoming to strangers, careful of her dignity. These last months my daughter has been everything I wanted her to be, and now… you are gone, and she returns, and I realise that it was not – nor was it ever – for my daughter’s sake that I sought your services, but for mine. For a few months with the child I thought I had deserved. I do not know what to do.”

He was weeping. The old duke was weeping, his hands pressed in little fists against his eyes, tears gleaming like icicles off the whiskers on his chin. I opened my mouth to speak, and no words came. I stared down at the board, noticed that checkmate was a few moves away, and I felt no triumph at the revelation. Tiny sobs, barely more than hiccups, swallowed before they could begin, broke from him and were gasped back down – the shame, said his clenched fists, the shame.

Then the duke raised his head, eyes raw, and whispered, “Would you be my daughter? Would you be her… a little longer?”

I shook my head.

“Please. Be my daughter. Be who she ought to be.”

I reached out, laid my hands on his, pulled them gently down into his lap, spreading the fingers wide.

“No,” I replied, and jumped.

My old servant Josef swayed before my eyes. “Stay there,” I barked, and, tired bones creaking, face swollen and red from tears, I clambered to my feet. My legs ached more than I had imagined, a nerve twanged in my thigh, the duke too proud to carry the walking stick he clearly required.

The house was sleeping, the lamps turned down low as I climbed the stairs, limping, to Antonina’s door. A chubby matron sat outside, the key around her waist. I removed it without a sound, and she, snoring through her flared nose, did not stir. I slipped into the darkness of the room.

All furniture was gone. Any object by which Antonina might do herself harm had been removed. The windows were barred, the curtains drawn, but the smell of urine and faeces rose from the smeared floors, overpowering the soap and brine.

A figure stirred in the shadows, dressed in a torn white gown which offered as little warmth as it did dignity. I had looked in the mirror so often and seen that face and found it lovely; now as it rose, hair wild and eyes set in vengeance, I saw only a tempest of growling youth and hatred.

“Antonina,” I whispered. “Antonina,” I breathed again, and, one leg hardly accepting the project at all, I sank down on to my knees before her. “Forgive me,” I said. “Forgive me. I did you wrong. I have stolen time from you. I have taken your dignity, your name, your soul. I love you. Forgive me.”

She stirred from the shadows of the room, shuffled towards me, one unsteady foot at a time. I stayed where I was, head bowed, hands clasped before me. She stopped, her feet and bare lower legs filling my vision. I looked up. Her hair was tangled across her face, around her neck, as if she had tried to hang herself with her own locks. She spat in my face. I flinched, and didn’t move. She spat again. The liquid barely registered, already skin temperature, as it rolled down my forehead.

“I love you,” I said, and she shook her head, covered her ears. “I love you.” Reaching out, pressing my hands against her feet, rooting them in place. “I love you.”

Her hands turned to claws, dragging them down across her own face, and with a sudden lurch she pulled her feet free from my fingers. There were no words, no shaping except her rage, only heat and wetness on my face as she lowered her mouth to the level of my eyes and screamed, screamed and screamed until at last she had no more breath, and I caught her by the shoulders and pulled her close. She bit and scratched, tore at my beard, my face, her nails digging into my wrinkled skin as if she would pull it from my skull, but I let her fight until at last even that strength seemed to leave her, and I held her tight.

The noise could not have been ignored. The servants came, along with my lady wife, who stood in the door and gaped at the sight she beheld. I shook my head at her, sending her away, and held my daughter closer still, her breath hot in the tangle of mine, until morning.