Mihai shook his head. “I bring sad news. My dear sister died in childbirth. She did feel envy of your beautiful three, when she could have none. I’m sorry she no longer wrote to you. Perhaps hearing about your girls and their accomplishments became harder and harder as her years passed fruitlessly.”
“And yet you said she was with child. What joy that must have brought.”
“Ah,” he said.
“So sad that she should pass in the same manner as your wife,” Phillip said.
“Ah,” Mihai said, and Julia wondered at his eyes, how they shifted about, not wanting to focus, and how he smiled nervously, and how his hands shook.
“Your father is a clever man. My house is something to see,” he said, as the pudding was served, as if they hadn’t seen it five dozen times. As if every meal hadn’t been dominated by talk of this house.
“You’ve certainly changed the way things look,” Eliza said.
“My philosophy; take something to its basics and rebuild it. Hair will grow back differently on a shaved head.” Eliza thought he was dashing when he first visited, his hair a golden yellow, his shoulders broad.
“But hair grows back easily enough. By its very nature it is meant to fall.”
“Your house is certainly sturdy, if not very beautiful,” Phillip said. He had made many suggestions of design, all rebuffed.
“You know of the tulip?” Mihai said. “It grows weaker the more beautiful. There is little to be said for beauty, much for strength,” Mihai said. “You are the strongest, Amara. That is clear.”
Eliza well remembered the two-hundred-year-old house he’d had torn down to build his home.
He had bade her stand there in the rubble. She was flattered, a young wife with babies; you’d think she’d lost all of her allure. But no, Mihai, the brother of her dear friend (and, if she would only admit it, she had made up stories about him at school, when her friend spoke of him and his dashing ways) asking her to grace his home or the foundation of his home. “Stand there,” he said, and bade his man mark where her shadow fell. That was where the foundation stone was laid.
“And now you must prepare,” he had told her.
“For what, Mihai?”
“For your passing forty days from now.”
She had known of this curse but had forgotten. He seemed gleeful about the death.
“It’s a blessing to you. Knowing when you’ll die gives you every chance to make amends, say goodbye, indulge your desires.”
“I have no desires,” but she did, of course. Small, sustaining dreams.
“And yet you are not dead,” Mihai said in the present as she relayed this story and he roared with laughter. “My blessing failed.”
“But look at my daughters. They are the true blessing. Magdala wouldn’t be here, and who knows what sort of young women Julia and Amara would have been, raised by their father and hired women.”
“What do you know of hired women?” Mihai said, and he gave Phillip such a look. He led him to the drawing room but the girls weren’t going to miss out. Julia crept into the room next door, the little-used storage space and heard such things as made her sick to the stomach.
“There is a house of whores,” Mihai said, “Whose skin is dyed blue. Glorious. Like the naked bodies taken out of plague houses, a sight I’ve seen and never anything so beautiful.”
Julia wondered, How old is this man? Unless there was a plague more recently in Romania?
“These whores hold the same tinge and even more, as the blue fades it begins to look like bruising. Also beautiful.”
Julia noticed her mother kept them all close and allowed them no time alone. She was ever so protective, but not it seemed as if she offered a barrier between the girls and this charismatic man, as she saw him. The girls were not so inclined.
“You could do worse than that man,” Phillip said afterwards, but what his four ladies said in return burned his ears and made him shrink into his collar.
“Are we going to have to poison you to stop you marrying our girls off to awful men?” Eliza said.
The maid listened in. She always listened.
“He’s not so bad,” Amara said.
“But look at him! Like a monster!”
It was soon after this they traveled for dinner at Mihai’s mansion.
Outside was solid gray brick, with very few windows. “You see how I save money on the window tax? Your father chose his materials well,” Mihai had said, though Phillip had little choice in the matter. Inside, all was gray, muted.
He said, “It will be named for you, Phillip. Your name in brass, over the door.”
Phillip was embarrassed by this. An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work was all he asked for, and a good life for his girls and for his wife to be happy, because her happiness brought joy to his own life.
“No need for that,” he said.
“One of your daughters, then. Julia, Amara, Magdalena. Which one?” and he rubbed his great beard, eyeing them off. Only Julia understood he was teasing.
“More wine,” Mihai said. “More food.” The girls and their mother fell asleep as the two men finished bottle after bottle.
It was after midnight when Mihai arranged a carriage to take them home. Their father groaned and whimpered all the way, filling them all with irritation. Silly drunk man. He wasn’t amusing at all, just dull and odorous.
It was the last carriage ride the family would take together.
The next morning Phillip did not rise. He was never a lazy man, always up with the dawn, even on the nights he was up well past midnight. But after the amount he drank it wasn’t surprising that he was still not risen by noon.
“Silly fidget,” their mother said. “He’s poisoned himself with wine.”
“Mother!” Julia said. The maid stifled a smile; she was always far too free with ears and eyes, Julia thought and true; it was she who whispered so loud that Mihai came to visit.
“What’s this I hear? A house of women left unattended?” he roared.
“He is wine-ill, nothing else,” Eliza said. “He deserves a small amount of suffering for the noise he made last night.”
The maid heard this as well.
“Real men don’t suffer from the drink, and this is a man who can build a magnificent house. Leave me with him.”
Not knowing why, they did leave, even the maid.
In there, Mihai roused Phillip. He gave him a draught and when the man bent over double in pain he said, “I think that woman’s poisoned you. That wife of yours.”
The maid gave evidence at Eliza’s trial for attempted murder. “Oh yes,” she said, “I heard them talking about poisoning him.”
With their father weak and ill, their mother incarcerated, the girls had no one to watch over them.
Mihai made an arrangement with Phillip. If the three girls went into servitude for him, he would ask for mercy for Eliza using his influence. His wealth. He would ask the authorities not to put her to death. “I won’t work your girls hard,” he said. “Think of it as finishing school.”
The father had never physically recovered, nor mentally. He agreed.
It was not what they imagined. Even in their worst nightmares they couldn’t imagine what Mihai had in store for them.
Mihai’s closest companion was a cruel, weak man called Cyril. He was the mayor of a town far away who never seemed to be at home for his duties.
Cyril and Mihai drank great goblets of wine, but the girls were given crystal glasses of blue water.
“Isn’t it a beautiful hue? Indigo water. A rare thing, rare indeed but fitting for these beautiful tulip flowers I have before me.”
Later, in the lavatory, Amara would scream in terror and the older girls laugh to see how their water had turned blue.