[53] O hear me, master of the silver bow

Her bedroom has stone walls, a ceiling lost in shadow, two high windows without curtains. A tall, well-stuffed bookcase and one soft day bed with a lamp. A huge bed. Everything is comfortable – it just doesn’t look that way.

‘Freddie never enters,’ she says. ‘In fact, there’s never been a man in here. When I want a man badly enough, I go out for one. We’re the same size and shape – I’m touched.’ She hands me a pair of pants from a drawer, and a camisole, both the same white as I’d been wearing, until … but these are silk. ‘Never been worn,’ she says. ‘A couple of whips, aren’t we. Dresses – I’ve got nothing to suit you, so let’s not try. I know – Paul will think this is funny. Have you worn breeches? Pull these on – button to front.’

She hands me a pair of white twills, tight ones. Only after I pull them on do I realize they’re half of a fencing costume. Then she hands me the top, the same white, the same tightness, with a quilted breastplate and a high stiff neck. She comes up behind me and lifts my hair from the collar, pillows it out with light, quick fingers.

‘Look in the mirror,’ she says.

I like what I see. I’ve never looked like a man before. Even the Flöge sisters, with all their forward ways, make clothes that are mostly about attracting men. If I never cared in my life what I looked like, I’d want to look like this some of the time.

‘I do know this time what you’re thinking,’ she says. ‘Your face, your hair, your colour, it explodes out when you’re dressed like that. Clothes for women who don’t need them. That’s you, that’s me. We could be sisters, except look, grey already.’ She parts her crown. ‘I give myself grey hair. No one else knows how. It’s hard work, being me.’ Laugh, one. ‘I love to look at myself. How about you? At your age, you’re still your own favourite subject, I think.’

‘That’s something you don’t know anything about.’

‘Call me Charlotte. And tell me whatever you like, or don’t. I’ve met most of Paul’s lovers. I’m how he gets rid of them. We’ve been pimping lovers back and forth since we were children. Shocked? Haven’t you heard that word before? Lovers?’

‘He isn’t done with me yet,’ I tell her.

‘Not afraid of much, are you? You are young, aren’t you? Where did your innocence go? Innocence and fear are the same thing, when you think about it. And they both take too much energy. I hope you like a game breakfast. There will be plenty of it, but it’s all we do here. In case you’re curious …’

We stand on the minstrel’s balcony and look down at the deserted ballroom, the hut-sized fireplace with the insignia above it.

‘Listen, Paul’s fresh one … Freddie and I are morganatic, and he hates it. His family doesn’t have two groschen to tap together. They have a title a thousand years old, and land, plenty of it, and a castle per acre, but all’s mortgaged seven times. Everything you see is Karsch Steelworks, family trust. That’s what he married, not me, and I get to be the Countess Charlotte of Györ and Örmullö. So he keeps quiet and spends what I give him. There’s nothing else he can do. Oh yes, and he hasn’t spoken a word to Paul since the day they met. Thinks he’s an artist so he must be a traitor to his class, which is true enough. He isn’t going to like you at all. And he’ll be rude to me too, to be consistent. He’s a very consistent man.’

Down a spiral staircase, down a long stone hallway, which opens onto a flagstoned glasshouse, crowded around the edges with struggling orange and lemon trees. A solid oak refectory table runs down the centre, covered with pewter plates, linen napkins, and monogrammed silver: mounds of smoking meat, tureens of creamed potatoes and shallots, decanters of dark wine and steaming coffee. Footmen hover. Count Freddie is standing at the head of the table dressed in jodhpurs and black leather boots and a sky-blue tunic, surveying his bounty, and Paul is at the other end, but to one side, his plate heaped with charred boar, steaming pheasant, a breakfast chop, a lake of red wine in a crystal goblet. Some things he can’t help, so it seems. Good manners, for one. This time of day, after a hard sleep, he stands up and pulls out my chair. The Count strides forward to greet me.

‘This is Emma,’ Charlotte tells him. And when he takes my hand and bends to give it a kiss: ‘She’s a Jew.’

I feel his mustaches curl and his hand grow stiff, but he clicks his heels despite himself, from the momentum, before he strides to his end of the table.

‘Nothing’s kosher here, Emma,’ Charlotte tells me, when she sits down across from me and Paul.

‘We never kept it,’ I tell her. ‘Only my grandfather.’

‘I was just telling Freddie,’ Paul says, ‘that when we change ourselves, we change the world.’

‘Let us praise Hungarians instead,’ Charlotte says.

‘That’s easy, too,’ Paul says, and he raises his glass. ‘To a proud and ancient people.’

‘Ancient and proud,’ Charlotte agrees. ‘Both, actually, but which came first? That’s what Freddie will never tell us.’

Freddie whips his napkin open like a cannon shot. Charlotte waits out his glare at her, then shrugs defiantly.

‘That’s the mists of history, Charlotte,’ Paul says. ‘He probably wasn’t born yet. Freddie, are you sure the past has already started? Because I didn’t see it yesterday.’

‘The past is always just over,’ Charlotte tells us.

‘The past is whatever you tell yourself it is,’ I tell them.

We think for a minute, except for Freddie, who glowers at my voice and saws at a shank of wild boar.

‘That’s a good one,’ Charlotte says. ‘Paul, remind her sometimes she said that. You’ve seen the Iron Ring, Emma?’

‘I don’t care,’ I tell her. Actually, I do, but I’m not going to admit it in front of the count.

‘I showed it to her already,’ Paul says. ‘The thing is, you know, Freddie’s just a sweet old guy. Harmless.’

We all stare at Freddie.

‘You don’t know how harmless,’ Charlotte tells me. ‘His gang’s not into clubbing and bashing – they wouldn’t dirty their hands. Deportation – that’s the plan. Palestine isn’t the place for you – much too close. Now they’re looking for an island to send you. Madagascar’s too big, but at least it’s far away. What’s the other one, Freddie?’

The count gives Charlotte a boiling stare, the same one he gives me.

‘The Americans already own Hawaii,’ she says. ‘so that’s out. And the British own Tonga, and the French own Tahiti. Now they’re thinking that the Dutch East Indies are the place. Maybe Sumatra. The Dutch aren’t going to complain much – they’ve got too many, too, according to Freddie, and more islands than they know what to do with. So that’s a solution.’

‘You should come watch a meeting sometime,’ Paul tells me. ‘Once a month they get together in a half-circle under the insignia and stand in front of the fireplace, chanting oaths to Christ. Heavy Catholics, those guys. Men only, sorry.’

‘What do you mean?’ Charlotte says. ‘I’m there. Watching, at least, from the gallery. It isn’t the little ones you have to worry about, Emma. Not the street shufflers. It’s the ones who can buy more power than they’ve already got.’

‘We don’t hate Jews, Charlotte and me,’ Paul says. ‘But we had to learn not to. The Franciscans, you know.’

‘The Carmelites, me,’ Charlotte says. ‘What’s to hate? What’s to like? If you have to divide the world in two, men and women is the only way. Really … As if that chasm isn’t broad enough. How was Emma, by the way?’

‘What you see,’ Paul says, and he gazes me up and down. Red hair, green eyes, white uniform. That’s me. Wear something like this tonight and he’ll run me through again, and I can already tell.

This is the second day we’ve met, but it could be ten days or ten years later. As if we already have a whole life to look back on, as if the one before that one has stopped counting for as long as we stay within a stare of each other, like now.

‘My God, Paul,’ Charlotte gasps. ‘Are you in love or something? What’s that like?’