11. Isadora
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ISADORA
Calliope comes to my room before the yacht meeting.
I have not yet met her, not properly. I have seen her at three dinners, seen the small gold dragon at her throat, seen her speak to Theron in the low easy shorthand of a wife among her husband’s cousins.
She holds twelve percent of Drakos Maritime in her own name.
And once, at the second dinner, when Adrian turned his charm on her a degree too warm, she looked at him until he changed the subject, which no file of my father’s ever recorded anyone doing.
She knocks.
I open the door. She is holding a small velvet box in her hand.
“I am Calliope. Theron’s wife. May I come in?”
“Sure.”
She comes in and closes the door behind her. She crosses to the small desk by the window, sets the velvet box on it, then turns. She gives me her own story, unasked.
“I was brought to Kalydon eight months ago to sign away an inheritance I did not know I held, but I did not sign. The man who brought me here was the guardian my father chose for me when I was ten. The vow he made to my father, that he would protect me, kept him out of every room I was in for thirteen years. Then he broke the vow on the seventh night. I made him break it. I am the daughter of his best friend. And now I am his wife.”
Longer than it needed to be, and every sentence load-bearing. She lifts the velvet box and opens it.
Inside is a thin gold chain, and at the end of it a small gold dragon, the same dragon she wears, fine and old-fashioned in the working, the size of the nail of my smallest finger.
“This was made by the jeweler in Athens who has made every Drakos chain since 1962,” she says.
“Konstantine ordered it three days ago and asked me to bring it to you before the yacht meeting, to fasten it at your throat in his place. He is in the south office preparing his statement. He will not be in the chamber when you sit down, and he did not want you to sit down without the chain.”
I look at her, at the chain, at her again.
“Why has he asked you, and not waited?”
“Because he does not know if he will still hold the cargo arm by sundown, and he was not going to let you walk into that room unmarked as his. I am the only woman in this house he trusts to do it right. Daphne, Nikos’s wife, is on the mainland with the boys.
She will come for the wedding. She is sorry she is not here for this, and she told me to tell you so. ”
No protocol, then. A man breaking his own rule because there might not be time left to keep it.
“Will you allow me to?” she says.
I was raised in seclusion and I have never had a woman friend in my life.
Girls at the convent were kept in silence; the house in Patras was men, the wives of men, the silences between them.
Since I was nine, when my older sister left for the convent in Italy and took the last of my childhood’s company with her, I have not been in a room alone with a woman my own age.
Calliope is twenty-three. I am twenty-two.
She has just told me the entire shape of her marriage in eight sentences, and she is holding out a piece of armor that women have worn in this house for sixty years.
I lift my hair from the back of my neck, and I turn.
She fastens the chain. Her fingers are quick and sure at my nape. She does the work of a woman handing armor to another woman before a meeting, which is a kind of tenderness I did not know existed until this morning, and which I find I can bear better than the other kinds.
For one moment, in the glass of the window, I see the two of us, black dresses, gold at both our throats, and something climbs into the back of my eyes that has no business there before a council.
I swallow it. Calliope watches me, then looks politely out the window, saying nothing.
I understand that this too is part of the protocol.
She steps back.
“I have one thing to say to you, Isadora.”
“I’m listening.”
“The cousins know what your father did. They will not raise it at the meeting. They will not raise it ever, the cousins do not bring old grief to the table. You will sit at the table and speak your words. And you will not be alone in the chamber. I will be there. Theron will be there, Stavros, Adrian. But Konstantine will not. He asked me to tell you why.”
“Tell me.”
“Because if he is in the chamber when you speak, your brothers will believe you speak because of him. He has told Stavros he will be in the south office with the door open. He will hear every word. But he will not be in the room, because he wants your brothers to know that you speak of your own.”
I look at the velvet box, empty now on the desk, then at the small dragon at her throat, the twin of the one settling its slight new weight against my skin.
“Calliope. Thank you.”
“You are not the first woman to walk into a Drakos chamber in this kind of dress, Isadora. You will not be the last. We are an old set, the women of this house, and we are getting older together. I will be at the table behind you. Look once if you need to. I will be there.”
She turns and leaves. She does not look back, because looking back would make it a performance, and nothing this woman does is a performance.
I stand at the window of the south wing at ten in the morning, my hair down my back, a chain from a jeweler in Athens at my throat.
I lift the chain in my fingers and tighten my grip on it once, the way you test a rope before you climb.
Then I leave the room and walk down to the chamber alone, which is, I understand now, the entire point of everything this morning has given me.