Part 1 – Saints
Theodora
inside my chest, and my father holds the key.
It’s always that way when he’s around, although he’s not around much. I see him maybe once or twice every few years. He’s a busy man, and he lives in Russia. He’s involved in politics, though I’m sure he’s not a politician. I don’t know because he never talks about work. He never talks about much at all.
And since I’m being educated in England, where I live with my mother and grandmother in their ancestral home, my father and I rarely see each other.
Sometimes, I wish I saw him more often. Part of me is just a little girl who wishes her dad would spend time with her and hold her when she’s sad or scared.
Most of the time, I wish I never saw him at all.
When he comes to visit, my father always brings gifts. Perfect gifts for perfect little girls. Dolls, dresses, jewellery, all packaged beautifully in pastel paper the colour of sugared almonds, bound with thick satin ribbons.
The receiving of the gifts is a ritual: I must take the box and thank him, I must sit at his feet in the parlour and slowly pull on the ribbon to undo the bow. I must lift the lid and delicately set it aside, then push aside the tissue paper, which crinkles like desiccated skin underneath my fingertips.
Finally, I must lift the gift from its pastel coffin and widen my eyes and say, “Thank you, Papa.”
That’s the hardest part. Because during the entire ritual, my voice is a marble egg in my throat, suffocating me.
It happens every time my father is near, and his dark eyes are fixed on me, and his hard face is set in that permanent scowl of his. All it would take is a smile from him for the egg to melt and my voice to become my own again.
But my father never smiles.
So I swallow and swallow, trying to shift the marble egg—it doesn’t. It never does. When I speak, my voice comes out strangled and warbling, like I’m about to cry.
Except that crying isn’t allowed. Crying would draw my father’s wrath as suddenly as the awakening of an angry god. Crying would shatter the ritual, which would end suddenly.
“I must accept that God did not give me a son,” my father would say. “But I refuse to accept that God would give me such a weak child.”
There lies the key to my father’s dissatisfaction. He only ever had one child with my mother, and he’s a pious man, too pious for divorce or affairs—so I am his only child.
Not a son, strong and bold and proud. But a scared, weak little girl who can hardly bring herself to speak without weeping.
If I don’t cry, and manage to thank him without the trembling of my voice breaking into a sob or a whimper, then my father looks at me and gives a tyrant’s nod.
It’s how he signals that the ritual is over, that my performance was good enough, and that I may retreat. I carefully replace the gift in its box, pick it up, stand and leave, walking calmly when I would prefer to run.
When I get back to my bedroom, I open the closet set into the wall and place the new present on top of the old ones where they live, all untouched in the darkness.
My father’s anger spins a web of fear around me, a mantle I can never shake off. It makes talking in front of him difficult, it makes my stomach squirm with nausea when he’s near, and it fills my sleep with dark nightmares.
But it teaches me things, too. How to appear like the perfect daughter, how to turn myself to ice so that no emotion can seep through.
How to lock my tears up deep inside and never, ever let them out.
and the summer is almost over. My father came from Russia to visit my new school with me. He has a list of demands and rules he wishes the headteacher to know before I start my secondary education.
In Russia, my father is surrounded by staff: cleaners and cooks and drivers and bodyguards and secretaries and accountants. They do whatever he says. When he comes to England, my father thinks everybody is staff.
Even people that don’t work for him, like waiters in restaurants and police officers and teachers. Even, apparently, headmasters.
Spearcrest Academy—my new school—is like a place from a storybook. I hold my breath when I first see it, eyes wide, like Alice arriving in Wonderland or like a Pevensie entering Narnia.
I try to take it all in—the sight of it, the feel of it. Red bricks and façades feathered with ivy. Pines and firs and spires, all pointing straight into the blue sky—siniy blue—the blue of the Russian flag.
The headmaster’s office is in the largest building, down a long corridor with the floor tiled like a chessboard. The walls are lined with portraits of students in dark uniforms, their mouths proud straight lines, unsmiling arrogance. Pins glimmer on the lapels of their blazers like dragon scales.
My eyes move from portrait to portrait, and my chest swells. I picture myself in one of these frames, my mouth a straight line, my dark blazer glimmering with badges.
One day, in the far future, the headmaster will gesture to my portrait and tell another eleven-year-old girl, This is Theodora Dorokhova. During her time at Spearcrest, she was the best student. When she spoke, everybody listened because everything she said was worthy of being heard.
My father, walking ahead of me, doesn’t so much as glance at the portraits. His strides are long and imperious. I look at the back of his head, the dark, gleaming hair, the stiff neck. He wears a black coat over a dark suit. His silhouette is the silhouette of a stranger.
The headmaster, Mr Ambrose, greets my father at the door of his office. Mr Ambrose is the same height as my father, a big, imposing man, but his green-brown eyes are kind behind his gold-framed glasses, and his brown skin is deeply lined around his mouth and eyes as if his face is used to generous laughter.
He shakes my father’s hand and turns to me, asking me in a kind and soothing voice to take a seat in the waiting area outside his door. My father follows Mr Ambrose into his office without casting me another look. The door closes.
I take a seat facing away from Mr Ambrose’s office. For the first time, I notice there is somebody else sitting in the waiting area.
A boy my age.
As soon as I notice him, he takes up the full space of my attention. I couldn’t say why.
I watch him surreptitiously at first, pretending to look at the old black and white photographs of Spearcrest on the wall above his head.
He is sitting very straight—his posture is excellent. He’s wearing dark corduroy trousers and a dark jumper, even though the weather is still warm. His face is very serious, like an adult’s. He wears his frown in his thick black eyebrows and on his lips, which have the softness of flowers but the severity of stone. His hands are on his lap, fingers laced together.
I straighten in my chair. Mine is blue felt, his is green. Between our seats is a table of glossy brown wood, and there is an enormous plant in the corner, underneath a window. A ray of daylight unspools like a ribbon of pale gold from the window, making the wood shine. The daylight doesn’t touch me, but it falls fully on the boy.
In a moment of carelessness, I meet his gaze. He’s looking straight at me. Unlike me, he’s not looking by accident. He’s looking with purpose and concentration, the way one might peer at the page of a book to decipher its words. I blink and hold my breath, disconcerted.
The boy leans forward, extending his hand across the table.
“Hello. My name is Zachary Blackwood. How do you do?”
I take his hand and shake it. My father is in the room next door; he might not be here right now, but he’s too close for me to have the key to my voice. It’s balled up tight and hard, the marble egg heavy in my chest.
When I speak, my voice trembles like I’m about to cry. “Hello. My name is Theodora Dorokhova. How do you do?”
Speaking to him is difficult, but now that we are engaged in a conversation, I’m free to look at him properly.
His hair is black, his tight curls cut close to his head. His skin is smooth and brown, the warm brown of acorns in autumn, and his eyes are brown too, almost luminous, framed by thick, curly eyelashes. His features still have the softness of boyhood, but there’s a grim austerity to him that reminds me of the painted saints in my father’s house in Russia or the ones in the gilded frames inside Smolny Cathedral, where my father took me when I visited him in St Petersburg for my ninth birthday.
The saints seemed to have an intense sort of conviction that made them look both full of power and devoid of joy.
This is what Zachary Blackwood looks like.
It’s how he speaks, too. Earnest, ardent, cheerless.
When I tell him my name, he nods very seriously. We shake hands like adults and break apart, both straightening in our seats.
“I’ll be starting here in the autumn term,” Zachary Blackwood announces. “Spearcrest Academy only accepts the best of the best, so it’s a great honour.”
I nod. “I’ll be starting in the autumn term, too.”
Zachary narrows his eyes for a moment and tilts his head. He searches my face without trying to hide what he’s doing as if he’s both assessing me and wishing for me to know I’m being assessed.
“You must be quite clever then, I suppose,” he says finally.
I want to tell him I am, but I have a feeling Zachary won’t believe me unless I offer up some sort of evidence.
“I achieved the highest scores in the eleven-plus exams in my school,” I tell him.
He nods. He sits very straight and very still. I’m impressed by the way he doesn’t bounce his leg or pick at his fingers or tap his armrest. It took me years to learn to sit well, to avoid fidgeting. Stop wriggling like a little worm on a hook, my mother would say with a tut. Did Zachary have to learn, too, or was he born calm and still and already perfect?
“You must read a lot, I suppose?” he says. It sounds like both a statement and a question at the same time.
“It’s my favourite thing to do.”
We stare at each other. Zachary Blackwood. The significance of his name is changing with every passing moment.
At first, it was Zachary Blackwood—a name that meant a mysterious boy with a serious face.
Now, it’s Zachary Blackwood—a name that means a challenge.
Because Zachary’s face is still very serious and calm, but there is a new shadow in his frown. He’s measuring me, weighing me up, placing me across him on a scale.
Just like the black and white tiles on the floor, Zachary has a chessboard in his mind. He is figuring out which piece I am. A pawn that won’t make it through the game? A clever knight who slips and slides across the board? Or a useless king who must be toppled?
I’ve already worked him out.
He is the white rook. White, because he made the first move. I never play the white side anyway—starting first puts you at an advantage, but it forces you to be assertive, make more decisions, take more risks. The black side is the dark horse—you’re always on the back foot, but your moves are also more informed.
Rook, because he moves directly and powerfully. A major piece—but not quite a queen. He’s too straightforward.
“Well, I’ve just finished Animal Farm,” Zachary declares. “Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
“I liked it well enough,” I answer. “It was the shortest book I read last year.”
Zachary’s eyebrows quirk slightly upwards. He doesn’t look surprised—he looks offended.
“Short? Just because it’s short doesn’t mean it’s not an important book.”
“I know very well how important this book is.”
“Are you sure? Maybe you’ve not heard about the Russian Revolution.”
My hands curl into fists. I feel my voice go icy and hard, the way it does when I’m debating in class against a student who is resorting to dirty tricks to scrape a victory. “I didn’t read the book thinking it was just about animals if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
Zachary gives a stiff shrug. “I just thought your comment about the book being too short maybe suggested that you didn’t quite understand the writer’s message.”
“I never said it was too short,” I reply in my frostiest tone. “I just said it was the shortest book I read last year.”
“Well, I suppose when you think about it, most books are longer than Animal Farm,” Zachary concedes with no grace whatsoever. “Even a book like Peter Pan is longer.”
“What do you mean by ‘even a book like Peter Pan’?” I ask with narrowed eyes. “What’s a book like Peter Pan?”
Zachary gestures with one hand. “Oh, you know. Children’s books.”
“What’s wrong with children’s books?”
He lets out a short laugh. “For one, that they are for children.”
“Children shouldn’t read?”
“Everybody should read.”
I raise my eyebrows and ask in a dry tone, “But five-year-olds should read books for adults?”
Zachary is quiet for a moment, watching me with the intense, solemn expression of the saints in Smolny Cathedral.
“I apologise if I offended you,” he says with almost over-the-top politeness. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You’ve not offended me,” I snap.
We stare at each other. There’s a little smile at the corner of his mouth. I immediately understand why.
Zachary Blackwood’s apology, like his questions, is just another way of testing me. He’s still measuring himself against me, and one thing is clear.
His apology was an attack; my angry response was the blow he landed.
Now, he thinks he knows there’s a chink in my armour—he thinks he knows where he can strike to hit.
But I learn fast. Any chink in my armour Zachary finds once, he won’t find a second time.
That’s my promise to myself and the first rule I set for the long chess game we are going to play over the next few years.
