“Probably at her hotel. Hurry.”
ōSHIMA’S WAITING ACROSS the road as I emerge, his collar up and his rain-spotted porkpie hat angled low. He points with a jerk of his head in the Park Avenue direction, subsaying, I guess we failed the interview.
I recognize Holly from behind by her long black coat and head-wrap. My fault. I told her that Jacko was older than Jesus. I step aside for a skateboarder. More urgently, D’Arnoq was just in touch, I subreply, to say that a cell has been sent to pick her up for scansioning. I put up my rainbow umbrella as a shield and we set off, ōshima matching my pace and position on the south side of the street, me on the north.
Remind me, subsays ōshima, why we don’t just suasion her into a nice deep sleep and then go in subhollering for Esther?
One, it’s against the Codex. Two, she is chakra-latent, so she may react badly to scansion and redact her own memories, unraveling anyone who is in residence. Three … Well, that’s enough for now. But we’ll need her goodwill, and should only suasion her as a last resort.
The green man flashes as Holly reaches Park Avenue, so ōshima and I rush, dodge traffic, and get honked at to avoid being stranded on the island in the middle. We lengthen our strides and get to within twenty paces of Holly. ōshima asks, Do we have a strategy here, Marinus, or are we just following her like a pair of stalkers?
Between here and her hotel, let’s just secure her some head space to let her consider what she’s just learned. New leaves and old trees drip, gutters slosh, drains gargle. With luck, the park will work its magic on her. If not, we may have to use ours. A doorman peers up at the rain from under an awning. We reach Madison, where Holly waits in the drizzle while I stand in the doorway of a boutique, watching that dog walker, those Hasidic Jews, the Arab-looking businessman over there. A couple of cabs slow down, hoping to lure a fare, but Holly is gazing into the small green rectangle of Central Park at the far end of the block. Her mind must be in turmoil. To write a memoir in which psychic events irrupt occasionally is one thing, but for psychic events to dreamseed you, serve you Irish tea, and spin you a whole cosmology, that’s another. Maybe ōshima’s right; maybe I should suasion her back to 119A. A metalife of 1,400 years is no guarantee that you always know the right thing to do.
DON’T WALK turns to WALK and I miss my chance. Crossing Madison, I taste paranoia, and glance at people in the waiting vehicles, half expecting to see Pfenninger or Constantin staring back with hunters’ eyes. The last block to the park is busier with foot traffic so I’m even jumpier. Is that iShaded jogger with the baby stroller really a jogger? Didn’t that curtain twitch as Holly passed by? Why would a young surveyor with his tripod watch a gaunt woman in her fifties so closely? He eyes me up as well, so maybe he’s just not fussy. ōshima keeps pace on the pavement opposite, blending into the morning bustle far better than me. We pass Saint James’s Church, whose red-brick steeple once towered above this rural neighborhood of Manhattan. Yu Leon Marinus attended a wedding here in 1968. The bride and groom will be in their eighties now, if they’re still alive.
On Fifth Avenue traffic is lumbering and foul-tempered. Holly stands behind a cluster of Chinese tourists. They’re agreeing in loud Cantonese how New York is smaller, tattier, and crappier than they’d expected. Across the road, ōshima is leaning casually against the corner of the Frick Collection, his face hooded. A bus passes with a digital ad for the newly released movie of Crispin Hershey’s Echo Must Die, but Holly is staring blankly at the park. I calm down. My instinct says we’re safe from the enemy until we reach her hotel on Broadway. If she hasn’t turned around by then, I’ll have to ignore my scruples and perform an Act of Suasion on Holly for her own safety. The Anchorites won’t try anything rash. The fallout from public assassinations is too messy. Reality on Fifth Avenue this drizzly morning is exactly as it appears.
A CHUNKY NYPD 4×4 pulls up onto the pavement, and a young black female officer swings out onto the sidewalk, holding her ID. “Ma’am? Are you Holly Sykes?”
Holly is yanked back to the here and now: “Yes, I—yes, is—”
“And you are the mother of Aoife Brubeck?”
I look for ōshima, who’s already crossing the street. A large male officer has joined his colleague. “Holly Sykes?”
“Yes.” Holly’s hand goes to her mouth. “Is Aoife okay?”
“Ms. Sykes,” says the female officer in rapid-fire speech, “our precinct had a call earlier from the British consular office asking for us to put out an all-unit alert for you—we missed you by minutes at your hotel earlier. I’m afraid your daughter was involved in an auto collision in Athens last night. She’s undergone surgery, she’s stable for now, but you’re being asked to fly home on the next plane. Ms. Sykes? You hearing me?”
“Athens?” Holly supports herself on the hood of the patrol car. “But Aoife’s on an island … What … How badly—”
“Ma’am, we really don’t have any details, but we’ll drive you to the Empire Hotel so you can pack. Then we’ll take you to the airport.”
I step forward to do I don’t know what, but ōshima pulls me back: I’m sensing intense psychovoltage in the car; if it’s a high Anchorite and we engage in full combat on Fifth Avenue, every hippocampus within a fifty-meter radius’ll get shredded, including Holly’s. Feds, Homeland Security, who knows who’ll be scouring footage of us, looking suspicious as all hell, tracking Holly from 119A?
ōshima’s right, but: We can’t just let them take her.
Meanwhile Holly’s being half coaxed, half herded into the squad car. She’s trying to ask more questions, but she’s had a mind-bending morning and is scared into passivity. Perhaps she’s being suasioned, too. In an agony of indecision, I watch the door slam shut and the vehicle pull off into the traffic, surging over the intersection just before the lights turn red. The windows are blacked out so I can’t see who or what numbers we’re dealing with. The sign says WALK and the pedestrians begin to cross. Sixty seconds was all it took to drop and smash our Second Mission.
ōSHIMA LEADS ME over the crossing. “I’ll do the transversing.”
“No, ōshima, it was my error of judgment so—”
“Strap on your horsehair shirt later. I’m the better transverser, and I’m just nastier. You know I am.” There’s no time to argue. We step over the low wall of the park by the Hunt Monument, where we sit on a damp bench. He grips one arm of the bench with one hand, and my hand with the other. Cord yourself into my stream, ōshima subsuggests. I’ll need your advice, like as not.
“Whatever that’s worth. But I’ll be with you.”
He squeezes my hand, shuts his eyes, and his body slumps a little as his soul egresses through his chakra-eye. Even to psychosoterics, the soul is on the edge of what’s visible, like a clear glass marble in a jar of water, and ōshima’s soul is lost in a second as it transverses upwards between the dripping twigs and the weather-stained old monument. I pull ōshima’s hat down to hide his face and shield both of us under my umbrella. A vacated body looks like a medical emergency, and at various points across my metalife I’ve ingressed myself only to find smelling salts up my nose, an artery being bled, or a stranger with halitosis administering inept CPR. Moreover, as I sync up our hand-chakras, ōshima and I resemble a pair of lovers. Even by New York’s laissez-faire standards, we would be worth a gawp.
I connect with ōshima’s cord …
… and images from ōshima’s soul stream directly into my mind. He’s gliding through a Cubist kaleidoscope of brake lights, roof racks, the tops of cars, branches, and budding leaves. Down we swoop, passing through the rear door of a van, between pig carcasses swinging on hooks, through the driver’s tarry lung, then out through the windscreen, arcing over a United Parcels van, and still higher, scaring a collared pigeon off its streetlight perch. ōshima hangs for a moment, searching for the squad car: Are you with me, Marinus?
I’m here, I subreply.
Can you see the squad car?
No. A garbage truck edges forward and I see the yellow of the school bus: Try near that school bus.
ōshima flies down, through the back window of the bus, along the aisle, between forty children arguing, talking, clustered round a 3D slate, staring into space, and out past the driver and …
… the klaxon and lights of the police car, shunting along slowly. ōshima enters through the rear windscreen and hovers for a moment, circling, to stream me a view of what we’re dealing with. To Holly’s left sits the female cop—or alleged cop. The driver is the burly male who helped hustle Holly into the car. Sitting on Holly’s right is a man wearing a suit and a Samsung wraparound that half hides his face, but we know him. Drummond Brzycki, substates ōshima.
An odd choice. Brzycki’s the newest and weakest Anchorite.
Maybe they’re not expecting trouble, guesses ōshima.
Maybe he’s a canary in a coal mine, I subreply.
I’ll ingress the woman, subsays ōshima, and see if I can find out her orders. He enters the female officer’s chakra-eye and I now have access to her sensory input. “All we know, honey,” she’s telling Holly, “is what I already told ya. If I knew more I’d tell ya. I’m achin’ for ya, honey, I am. I’m a mom too. Two little ones.”
“But is Aoife’s spine okay? How—how serious is the—”
“Don’t distress yourself, Ms. Sykes.” Drummond Brzycki flips up his wraparounds. Brzycki has Mediterranean-goalkeeper good looks, lush black hair, and a nasal voice, like a wasp trapped in a wineglass. “The consul’s out of his meeting at ten. We’ll device him direct, so whatever facts he has, you’ll get from the horse’s mouth. Okay?”
The squad car stops at a red light, and pedestrians stream across. “Maybe I can find the hospital’s number,” Holly says, getting her device from her handbag. “Athens isn’t such a big—”
“If you speak Greek,” says Brzycki, “go ahead, and good luck. Otherwise I’d keep your device free for incoming news. Don’t jump to the bleakest conclusions. We’ll use the emergency lane to get you on the eleven forty-five flight to Athens. You’ll be with Aoife soon.”
Holly puts her device back into her bag. “The police at home would never go to such trouble.” A cycle courier zips by and the traffic lurches forward. “How on earth did you find me, Officer?”
“Detective Marr,” says Brzycki. “Needles in haystacks really do get found. The precinct put out a Code Fifteen and although ‘slimbuilt female Caucasian in her fifties in a knee-length black raincoat’ hardly cuts the field down on a rainy day in Manhattan, your guardian angels were working overtime. Actually—it’s maybe not appropriate to say this at this time—but Sergeant Lewis up front there, he’s a big fan of yours. He was giving me a lift back from Ninety-eighth down to Columbus Circle, and Lewis said, ‘My God, it’s her!’ Isn’t that right, Tony?”
“Sure is. I saw you speak at Symphony Space, Ms. Sykes, when The Radio People was out,” says the driver. “After my wife died, your book was a light in the darkness. It saved me.”
“Oh, I’m …” Holly is in such a state that this rheumatic story passes muster, “… glad it helped.” The meat truck draws up alongside. “And I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks for saying so, Ms. Sykes. Truly.”
After a few seconds, Holly menus her device. “I’ll device Sharon, my sister. She’s in England, but perhaps she can find out more about Aoife from there.”
The stream flickers and dims. The cord’s thinning, I subwarn ōshima. What have you found out about our host?
Her name’s Nancy, hates mice, she’s killed eight times, comes the delayed answer. A child soldier in South Sudan. This is her first job for Brzycki … Marinus, what’s “curarequinoline”?
Bad news. A toxin. One milligram can trigger a pulmonary collapse in ten seconds. Coroners never test for it. Why?
Nancy here and Brzycki have curarequinoline in their tranq guns. We can conclude it isn’t for self-defense.
“I’ll call my office again,” says Brzycki, helpfully. “See if they can’t get the name of your daughter’s hospital in Athens. Then at least you’ll have a direct line.”
“I can’t thank you enough.” Holly’s pale and sick-looking.
Brzycki flips down his wraparounds. “Anchor Two? Unit twenty-eight, you copying, Anchor Two?”
Unexpectedly, the earpiece in Nancy’s helmet comes to life, and through it I hear Immaculée Constantin. “Clear as a bell. All things considered, let’s play safe. Eliminate your guest.”
Shock boils up but I rally myself: ōshima, get her out! But my only reply is a blast of blizzard down the overstretched cord. ōshima can’t hear me, or he can’t respond, or both.
Clarity returns. “Copy that, Anchor Two,” Brzycki is saying, “but our present location is Fifth and East Sixty-eighth, where the traffic’s still at a dead halt. Might I advise that we postpone the last order as per—”
“Give the Sykes woman a tranq in each arm,” orders Constantin in her soft voice. “No postponement. Do it.”
I subshout hard, ōshima, get her out get her out!
But no answer comes either from his soul or his inert body, propped up by mine on the bench, a block from the police car. All I can do is watch via the cord as an innocent woman, whom I lassoed into our War, is killed. I can’t transverse this distance, and even if I could I’d arrive too late.
“Understood, Anchor Two, will proceed as advised.” Brzycki nods at Lewis in the mirror, and at Nancy.
Holly asks, “Any luck with the hospital number, Detective Marr?”
“Our secretary’s on it.” Brzycki unholsters his tranq gun and flicks off the safety catch, while left-handed Nancy, through whose viewpoint I must watch, does the same.
“Why,” Holly’s voice changes, “do you need your guns?”
On reflex, I try to suasion Nancy to stop, but one cannot suasion down a cord and I just watch in horror as Nancy fires the tranq—at Brzycki’s throat, where a tiny red dot appears, on his Adam’s apple. The Anchorite touches it, astonished, then looks at the red dab on his fingers, looks at Nancy, utters, “What the …”
Brzycki slumps, dead. Lewis is shouting, as if under water, “Nancy, you outta your fuckin’ MIND?” or that’s what Nancy thinks she hears, as she finds herself taking Brzycki’s gun and firing it point-blank into Lewis’s cheek. Lewis huffs out a falsetto vowel of disbelief. Nancy, whom ōshima is suasioning ruthlessly, then finds herself clambering over Holly and onto the passenger seat as Lewis gibbers his last breath. She now cuffs herself to the steering wheel and unlocks the rear doors. As a parting gift, ōshima redacts a broad swath of Nancy’s present perfect and induces unconsciousness before egressing her and ingressing the traumatized Holly. ōshima psychosedates his new host immediately, and I watch Holly in the first person as she puts on her sunglasses, checks her head-wrap, climbs out of the squad car, and calmly walks back up Park Avenue toward the Frick. With a rip of corded feedback ōshima’s voice returns: Marinus, can you hear me?
I dare feel relief. Breathtaking, ōshima.
War, subreplies the old warrior, and now, logistics. We have a retired author in distinctive headgear leaving a patrol car containing two dead fake cops and one living fake cop. Ideas?
Get Holly back here and rejoin your body, I subadvise ōshima. While you’re doing that, I’ll call L’Ohkna and ask for a catastrophic wipeout of all street cameras on the Upper East Side.
ōshima-in-Holly strides along. Can that dope fiend do that?
If a way exists, he’ll find it. If no way exists, he’ll make one.
Then what? 119A evidently isn’t the fortress it once was.
Agreed. We’ll go to earth at Unalaq’s. I’ll ask her to come and rescue us. I’m uncording now, see you soon. I open my eyes. My umbrella is still half hiding ōshima’s body and me, but a gray squirrel is sniffing my boot with curiosity. I swivel my foot. The squirrel is gone.
“HOME,” ANNOUNCES UNALAQ. She stops the car level with her front door, next to the Three Lives Bookstore on the corner of Waverly Place and West Tenth Street. Unalaq leaves the hazard lights on and helps me as I guide Holly across the pavement while ōshima stands guard like a monk-assassin. Holly’s still doped from the psychosedation, and we’ve drawn the attention of a tall thin man with a beard and wire-framed glasses. “Hey, Unalaq, is everything okay?”
“All good, Toby,” says Unalaq. “My friend just flew in from Dublin, but she’s terrified of flying, so she took a sleeping pill to knock her out. It worked a bit too well.”
“Sure did. She’s still cruising at twenty thousand feet.”
“Next time she’ll stick with the glass of white, I think.”
“Call down to the shop later. Your books on Sanskrit are in.”
“Will do, Toby, thanks.” Unalaq’s found her keys but Inez has already opened the door. Her face is taut with worry, as if her partner, Unalaq, is the breakable mortal and not her. Inez nods at ōshima and me and peers at Holly’s face with concern.
“She’ll be fine after a few hours’ sleep,” I say.
Inez’s expression says, I hope you’re right, and she goes to park the car in a nearby underground lot. Unalaq ushers us up the steps, inside, down the hallway, and into the tiny elevator. There’s not enough space for ōshima, who lopes up the stairs. I press up.
A dollar for your thoughts, subsays Unalaq.
One’s thoughts cost only a penny when I was Yu Leon.
Inflation, shrugs Unalaq, and her hair goes boing. Could Esther really be alive somewhere inside this head?
I look at Holly’s lined, taut, ergonomic face. She groans like a harried dreamer who can’t wake. I hope so, Unalaq. If Esther interpreted the Script correctly, then maybe. But I don’t know if I believe in the Script. Or the Counterscript. I don’t know why Constantin wants Holly dead. Or if Elijah D’Arnoq’s for real. Or if our handling of the Sadaqat issue is wrongheaded. “Truly, I don’t know anything,” I tell my five-hundred-year-old friend.
“At least,” Unalaq blows the end of a strand of copper hair from her nostril, “the Anchorites can’t exploit your overconfidence.”
HOLLY’S ASLEEP, ōSHIMA’S watching The Godfather Part II, Unalaq’s preparing a salad, and Inez has invited me to play her Steinway upright, as the piano tuner came yesterday. There’s a fine view of Waverly Place from the piano’s attic, and the small room is scented with the oranges and limes that Inez’s mother sends in crates from Florida. A photograph of Inez and Unalaq sits atop the Steinway. They’re posing in skiwear on a snowy peak, like intrepid explorers. Unalaq won’t have discussed the Second Mission with her partner, but Inez is no fool and must sense that something major is afoot. Being a Temporal who loves an Atemporal is surely as thorny a fate as being an Atemporal who loves a Temporal. It’s not just Horology’s future that my decisions this week will shape, but the lives of loved ones, colleagues, and patients who will get scarred if my companions and I never come back, just as Holly’s life was scarred by Xi Lo–in–Jacko’s death on the First Mission. If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.
So I leaf through Inez’s sheet music and choose Shostakovich’s puckish Preludes and Fugues. It’s fiendish but rewarding. Then I perform William Byrd’s Hughe Ashton’s Ground as a palate cleanser, and a handful of Jan Johannson’s Swedish folk songs, just because. From memory I play Scarlatti’s K32, K212, and K9. The Italian’s sonatas are an Ariadne’s thread that connects Iris Marinus-Fenby, Yu Leon Marinus, Jamini Marinus Choudary, Pablo Antay Marinus, Klara Marinus Koskov, and Lucas Marinus, the first among my selves to discover Scarlatti, back in his Japanese days. I traded the sheet music off de Zoet, I recall, and was playing K9 just hours before my death in July 1811. I’d felt my death approaching for several weeks, and had put my affairs in order, as they used to say. My friend Eelattu cut me adrift with a phial of morphine I’d reserved for the occasion. I felt my soul sinking up from the Light of Day, up onto the High Ridge, and wondered where I’d be resurrected. In a wigwam or a palace or an igloo, in a jungle or tundra or a four-poster bed, in the body of a princess or a hangman’s daughter or a scullery maid, forty-nine spins of the earth later …
… in a nest of rags and rotten straw, in the body of a girl burning with fever. Mosquitoes fed on her, she was crawling with lice, and weakened by an intestinal parasite. Measles had dispatched the soul of Klara, my new body’s previous inhabitant, and it was three days before I could psychoheal myself sufficiently to take proper stock of my surroundings. Klara was the eight-year-old property of Kiril Andreyevich Berenovsky, an absentee landlord whose estate was bounded by a pendulous loop in the Kama River, Oborino County, Perm Province, the Russian Empire. Berenovsky returned to his ancestral lands only once a year to bully the local officials, hunt, bed virgins, and exhort his bailiff to bleed the estate even whiter than last year. Happiness did not enter feudal childhoods, and Klara’s was miserable even by the standards of the day. Her father had been killed by a bull, and her mother was crushed by a life of childbearing, farmwork, and a peasant moonshine known as rvota, or “puke.” Klara was the last and least of nine siblings. Three of her sisters had died in infancy, two others had gone to a factory in Ekaterinburg to settle a debt of Berenovsky’s, and her three brothers had been sent to the Imperial Army just in time to be butchered at the Battle of Eylau. Klara’s recovery from death was greeted with joyless fatalism. It was a long fall indeed from Lucas Marinus’s life as a surgeonscholar to Klara’s dog-eat-dog squalor, and it was going to be a long, fitful, fretful climb back up the social ladder, especially in a female body in the early nineteenth century. I did not yet possess any psychosoteric methods to speed this ascent. All Klara had was the Russian Orthodox Church.
Father Dmitry Nikolayevich Koskov was a native of Saint Petersburg who baptized, preached to, wed, and buried the four hundred serfs on the Berenovksy estate, as well as the three dozen freeborn workers who lived and worked there. Dmitry and his wife, Vasilisa, lived in a rickety cottage overlooking the river. The Koskovs had arrived in Oborino County ten years before, full of youth and a philanthropic zeal to improve the lives of the rural peasantry. Long before I-in-Klara entered their lives, that zeal had been killed by the drudgery and bestiality of life in the Wild East. Vasilisa Koskov suffered from severe depression and a conviction that the world was laughing at her childlessness behind her back. Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen. Dmitry Koskov’s ennui matched his wife’s and he cursed himself, daily if not hourly, for having forfeited the prospects of clerical life in Saint Petersburg, where his wife and his career could have blossomed. His yearly petitions to the church authorities for a pulpit closer to civilization proved fruitless. He was, as we’d say now, seriously Out of the Loop. Dmitry had God, but why God had condemned him and Vasilisa to sink in a bog of superstition and spite and sin like Oborino County for a landlord like Berenovsky, who showed more concern for his hounds than his serfs, the Almighty did not share.
To me-in-Klara, the Koskovs were perfect.
ONE OF KLARA’S chores, as soon as she was well again, was to deliver eggs to the bailiff, the blacksmith, and the priest. One morning in 1812, as I handed Vasilisa Koskov her basket of eggs at the kitchen door, I asked her shyly if it was really true I’d meet my dead sisters in heaven. The priest’s wife was taken aback, both that the near-mute serf girl had spoken, and that I’d asked such a rudimentary question. Didn’t I listen to Father Koskov in church every Sunday? I explained that the boys pinched my arm and tugged my hair to stop me listening to God’s Word, so although I wanted to hear about Jesus, I couldn’t. Yes, I was mawkishly, hawkishly manipulating a lonely woman for my own gain, but the alternative was a life of bovine labor, piggish servitude, and bile-freezing winters. Vasilisa brought me into her kitchen, sat me down, and taught me how Jesus Christ had come to earth in the body of a man to allow us sinners to go to heaven after we died, so long as we said our prayers and behaved as good Christians.
I nodded gravely, thanked her, then asked if it was true the Koskovs were from Petersburg. Soon Vasilisa was reminiscing about the operas, the Anichkov Theater, the balls at this archduke’s name day, the fireworks at that countess’s ball. I told her I had to go, because my mother would beat me for taking too long, but the next time I delivered the eggs, Vasilisa served me real tea from her samovar sweetened with a spoonful of apricot jam. Nectar! Soon the melancholic priest’s melancholic wife found herself discussing her private disappointments. The little serf listened with wisdom far beyond her eight years. One fine day, I took a gamble and told Vasilisa about a dream I’d had. There was a lady with a blue veil, milky skin, and a kind smile. She had appeared in the hut I shared with my mother, and told me to learn to read and write, so that I could take her son’s message to serfs. Stranger still, the kind lady had spoken strange words in a language I didn’t understand, but they had stayed glowing in my memory, just the same.
What could it possibly mean, Mrs. Vasilisa Koskov?
PLEASED AS VASILISA’S husband was by the improvement in his wife’s nerves, Dmitry Nikolay was anxious about her being suckered yet again by yet another wily peasant. So the cleric interviewed me in the empty church. I wore a shy bewilderment at being noticed, let alone spoken to, by so august a figure, even as I nudged Dmitry towards a belief that here was a child destined for a higher purpose, a purpose that he, Father Dmitry Koskov, had been chosen to oversee. He asked me about my dream. Could I describe the lady I had seen? I could. She had dark brown hair, a lovely smile, a blue veil, no, not white, not red, but blue, blue like the sky in summer. Father Dmitry asked me to repeat the “strange words” the lady had told me. Little Klara frowned, and very shyly confessed that the words didn’t sound like Russian words. Yes, yes, said Father Dmitry, his wife had said as much; but what were these words? Could I remember any? Klara shut her eyes and quoted, in Greek, Matthew 19:14: But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for such is of the kingdom of heaven.
The priest’s eyes and mouth opened and stayed open.
Trembling, I said I hoped the words meant nothing bad.
My conscience was clean. I was an epiphyte, not a parasite.
A few days later, Father Dmitry approached Sigorsky, the estate bailiff, to propose that Klara be allowed to live in their house, in order for his wife to train the girl as a servant for the Berenovksy house and give her a rudimentary schooling. Sigorsky granted this unusual request as pro bono payment for Father Dmitry averting his priestly gaze from the bailiff’s assorted scams. I had no goods to bring with me to the Koskovs’ cottage but a sackcloth dress, clogs, and a filthy sheepskin coat. That night Vasilisa gave me the first hot bath I’d enjoyed since my death in Japan, a clean frock, and a woolen blanket. Progress. While I was bathing, Klara’s mother appeared, demanding a rouble “for compensation.” Dmitry paid, on the understanding that she would never ask for another. I saw her around the estate, but she never acknowledged me, and the following winter, she fell drunk into a frozen ditch at night and never woke up.
Even a benign Atemporal cannot save everyone.
THE CLAIM IS immodest, but as a de facto if not a de jure daughter, I’d brought purpose and love back into the Koskovs’ life. Vasilisa set up a class in the church to teach the peasant children their ABBs, basic numeracy, and scripture, and found time in the evening to teach me French. Lucas Marinus had spoken the language in my previous life, so I made a gratifyingly quick-learning student. Five years passed, I grew tall and strong, but every summer when Berenovksy visited, I dreaded his noticing me in church, and asking why his serf was being given airs above her natural station. In order to protect my gains and carry on climbing, my benefactors needed a benefactor.
Dmitry’s uncle, Pyotr Ivanovich Chernenko, was the obvious, indeed the only, candidate. Nowadays he would be fêted as a self-made entrepreneur, with a gossip-magazine private life, but as a young man in nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg he had caused a scandal by eloping with and, even worse, marrying an actress five years his senior. Dissipation and disgrace had been gleefully predicted, but Pyotr Ivanovich instead had made first one fortune by trading with the British against the continental blockade, and was now making another by introducing Prussian smelters to foundries throughout the Urals. His love marriage had stayed strong, and the two Chernenko sons were students in Gothenburg. I persuaded Vasilisa that Uncle Pyotr must be invited to our cottage to inspect her estate school when he was next in Perm on business.
He arrived one morning in autumn. I ensured I shone. Uncle Pyotr and I spoke for an hour on metallurgy alone. Pyotr Ivanovich Chernenko was a shrewd man who had seen and learned a lot from his five decades of life, but he was beguiled by a serf girl who was so conversant on such manly concerns as commerce and smelting. Vasilisa said that the angels must whisper things in my ears as I slept. How else could I have acquired German and French so quickly, or known how to set a broken bone, or have grasped the principles of algebra? I blushed and mumbled about books and my elders and betters.
That night as I lay in bed I heard Uncle Pyotr Ivanovich tell Dmitry, “One bad-tempered whim of that ass Berenovksy, nephew, is all it needs to condemn the poor girl to a life of planting turnips in frozen mud and the spousal bed of a tusked hog. Something must be done! Something shall be done!” Uncle Pyotr left the next day in never-ending rain-spring and autumn alike are muddy hell in Russia-telling Dmitry that we had rotted away in this backwater for far too long already …
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