I had chosen my least ruined dress, a pale pink gown that was too snug in the waist and had one of its corset bones snapped. Undine was right; it mattered little how I looked. Papa swept right past me without even a glance. He was standing with his arms drawn over his distended belly, staring out the window.
The charm bracelet was curled in my pocket and the card was folded tightly and tucked between my breasts. I felt as though if I removed either from my person they would vanish, like there was some spell cast over the house that would instantly obliterate anything that Papa might want to keep hidden. But I could feel them both there, the weight of the bracelet and the paper poking into my skin, ink slurring as it mixed with my sweat.
I wanted to pull it out and hold it up to him and demand the truth. I wanted to see him stammer and flush and try to explain it. Courage mounted in me with each passing moment, courage and insatiable hunger. All my fear and good sense once again forgotten—what did I have to lose now? Papa would be furious the moment he walked into his room and saw the ruin I’d made of it. I might as well try to eat the truth out of him too.
It was not just the card or the charm bracelet or the strange filling that had appeared in the icebox the same day Mama had vanished. It was every scream I had swallowed for so many years. If I opened my mouth now, those cries would pour out of me with no way to stop them.
And perhaps the walls around me would begin to show small cracks at last. If there was power in keeping a secret, surely there was power in revealing it too.
But I couldn’t quite manage the feat of such a great thing, no matter my heart-pounding bluster. I thought of Sevas and clenched my fist so tightly that my knuckle split open and bled.
All four of us were silent for a very long time, the grandfather clock ticking away the seconds. I opened my mouth and then closed it again, skin chilled with nervous anticipation. And then, before any of us could speak, Papa raised his hand and pointed out the window, toward the gate. “Look.”
A trio of men were loping down the road. Their sweat-slicked faces were halved by the angle of the sunset, one side cast in a lucent orange; the other side pale as an egg. The eyes touched by the light gleamed like kopeks in a fountain, bright but bleary, trapped by water.
Day laborers—I could tell by the way hunger and work had whittled down their boyish cheeks. They paused in front of the gate and curled their bony fingers around it, pressing their fists between the bars.
Papa’s smile was exuberant.
“And they are only the first of many,” he said, looking over at my sisters and me. “Turn up your frowns. Those may very well be your future husbands at the door.”
Undine made a derisive, disgusted sound in the back of her throat, and Rose’s eyes slid briefly shut. The low, bubbling anger in me surged up and I reached for the paper folded inside my bodice, but as I did, Papa spoke again.
“Well, Marlinchen.” He puffed out his chest like a mating dove and grasped me firmly by the shoulders and pivoted me toward the window, all while my mind reeled with mute protestations. “Perhaps I was wrong. A man has come for you after all.”
I peered through the glass, over the heads of the day laborers rattling the gate. There was a man who had silver hair and high, narrow shoulders, watching with tepid interest as the suitors squabbled. A noise came out of me, but it was wordless, choked. I felt like someone had thrust my head down into a tub of cold bathwater, everything suddenly muffled and blurred.
When the haze cleared again, I almost laughed at my own stupid brazenness, my own doomed conviction. The girl of a second ago who had believed she had nothing more to lose—she was a fool, and I hated her. My throat closed in slow, aching increments as I watched one of the day laborers get the gate unlatched. He strode into the garden, followed by his companions.
And Dr. Bakay walked nonchalantly after them.
Chapter Nine
Here is what I know about Dr. Bakay.
He was educated at a medical college in Askoldir and he was a physician, which meant that he treated only the Diseases of the Body, and only the parts of the body you could feel and see, for surgeons took care of the rest. He carried in his doctor’s bag tiny black vials of laudanum and pots of leeches, arsenic in porcelain urns. He wrote out prescriptions on rough slips of paper that curled around your fingers like a cat’s tongue, and if you went to a drugstore and they saw Dr. Bakay’s signature and looping script the pharmacist would smile and smile as he handed you a tin of cherry-flavored opium tablets. They all liked Dr. Bakay so much that they liked his clients by association.