The Sweet Girl Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Annabel Lyon

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2012.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harvard University Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from Doigenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volume I, Books 1-5, Loeb Classical Library Volume 184, translated by R. D. Hicks, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  Copyright © 1925 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Loeb Classical

  Library® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical

  Library at Harvard University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lyon, Annabel, [date]

  The sweet girl / by Annabel Lyon. —First United States edition.

  pages cm

  “Originally published in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2012.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96256-0

  1. Daughters—Fiction. 2. Aristotle—Fiction. 3. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 4. Young women—Greece—Fiction. 5. Greece—History—To 146 B.C.—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.L98S94 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2012049210

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket image: On the Terrace by Sir Edward John Poynter (detail). Walker Art Gallery,

  National Museums Liverpool / The Bridgeman Art Library / Getty Images

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  v3.1

  for Bryant,

  guardian of my solitude

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Cast of Characters

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part 3

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Acknowledgements

  A Note About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Other Books by This Author

  AND WHEN THE GIRL SHALL BE GROWN UP she shall be given in marriage to Nicanor; but if anything happen to the girl (which heaven forbid and no such thing will happen) before her marriage, or when she is married but before there are children, Nicanor shall have full powers, both with regard to the child and with regard to everything else, to administer in a manner worthy both of himself and of us.

  —Aristotle’s will

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  ARISTOTLE’S HOUSEHOLD

  Pythias, known as Pytho: Aristotle’s daughter by his dead wife, also named Pythias

  Aristotle: a philosopher

  Herpyllis: Aristotle’s concubine, formerly a servant

  Nicomachus, known as Nico: Aristotle’s son by Herpyllis

  Tycho: a slave of Aristotle

  Jason, known as Myrmex: a poor relation and adopted son of Aristotle

  Pyrrhaios: a slave of Aristotle

  Simon: a free servant of Aristotle

  Thale: a free servant of Aristotle

  Ambracis: a slave of Aristotle

  Olympios: a slave of Aristotle

  Pretty: Olympios’s daughter, a slave of Aristotle

  Philo: a slave of Aristotle

  IN ATHENS

  Akakios: a rival to Aristotle and guest at Aristotle’s symposia

  Krios: a city administrator and guest at Aristotle’s symposia

  Gaiane: a friend of Pythias

  Theophrastos: Aristotle’s successor as head of the Lyceum

  IN CHALCIS

  Thaulos: leader of the Macedonian garrison

  Plios: a magistrate

  Glycera: a widow

  Euphranor: a cavalry officer

  Demetrios: a slave of Euphranor

  A priestess of Artemis

  Meda, Obole, Aphrodisia: “daughters” of Glycera

  Clea: a midwife

  Candaules: a dog-breeder, Clea’s companion

  Dionysus: a god

  Nicanor: Pythias’s cousin

  The first time I ask to carry a knife to the temple, Daddy tells me I’m not allowed to because we’re Macedonian. Here in Athens, you have to be born an Athenian girl to carry the basket with the knife, to lead the procession to the sacrifice. The Athenians can be awfully snotty, even all these years after our army defeated their army.

  “I want to see, though,” I say. I have seven summers. “If you carry the basket, you get to watch from right up front.”

  “I know, pet.”

  The next morning he takes me to the market. Crowds part for him respectfully; Macedonian or not, he’s famous, my daddy. “Which one?” he asks.

  I take my time choosing. It’s late spring, baby season, and there are calves and piglets and trays of pullets, too. Around us, men speak of the army and when it will return; surely soon, now that the Persians are defeated and their king is on the run. I finally choose a white lamb crying for its mother and we walk it home. I hold the tether. In our courtyard, we lay out the basins and cloths and Daddy’s kit.

  “You’ll feel sad, later,” Daddy says, hesitating. “It’s all right to feel sad.”

  “Why will I?”

  He sits back on his heels, my daddy, to consider the question. He scratches his freckled forehead with a finger and smiles at me with his sad grey eyes. “Because it’s cute,” he says finally.

  He has the lamb’s neck pinned with a casual hand. Its eyeball is straining and rolling, and it’s wheezing. Its tongue is a leathery grey. I pet its head to calm it. Daddy shifts his grip to the jaw. I put my little hand over his big hand and we slit its throat quick and deep. When it’s bled out into the basin, Daddy asks me where I’d like to start.

  “The legs are in the way,” I say, so we start there.

  “What am I going to do with you?” Daddy says in the middle of the dissection, looking at my hands all bloody, at the blood streaking my face. We’ve disjointed a leg and I’m making it flex by pulling the tendon. He’s holding an eyeball between two fingers, gingerly.

  We grin at each other.

  “Little miss clever fingers,” Herpyllis says from the archway nearest the kitchen. She shifts sleeping Nico to her hip—Nico, her blood-son, my little half-brother—so she can pull a couch into the sun and watch. I remember when he was born, though Herpyllis says I was too young. I remember his wrinkly face and his grip on my finger. I remember kissing and kissing him, and crying when he cried. I would lean against Herpyllis’s knee and open the front of my dress to nurse my doll, Pretty-Head, off my speck of a nipple, while Herpyllis nursed Nico, one hand playing in my hair. I’ve been her daughter since I was four.

  “I’ll remind you of this the next time you tell me you’re too clumsy to weave,” Herpyllis says.

  I slop some meat into the bowl she’s given us, spattering droplets of blood onto my dress.

  “Filthy child,” she says. “Who’s going to want to marry you?”

  “One of my students,” Daddy says promptly. “When the time comes. There won’t be a problem.”

  From all over the world, students come to Daddy’s school here in Athens, the Lyceum. Kings send their sons; our own Alexander belonged to Daddy, once. Some of them are wealthy enough to please even Herpyllis. They will see my worth, Daddy says.

  “What is her worth, exactly?” Herpyllis is irritable now. Carelessly, I’ve spattered blood on the lamb’s wool, which she wants for a tunic. She calls for water to soak it. Nico sighs dramatically in his sleep, flinging out a pudgy arm.

  Daddy sits back on his heels, considering the question. I make a face at Herpyllis, who makes one back. She tucks Nico’s arm in and he sighs again, more quietly.

  “It’s interesting.” Daddy looks at Nico. “The face of a child reflects the face of both parents. Perhaps the mind works similarly? If both parents are clever, the offspring—”

  Herpyllis harrumphs.

  “Then, too, a philosopher might encourage her interests—”

  Herpyllis yawns.

  “Or not suppress them, at any rate.”

  “I’m not getting married,” I say. Usually I’m content to listen to their conversations, but this one is irresistible.

  “Of course not, chickpea,” Herpyllis says immediately. “You’re still my baby.”

  “Not for a long, long time,” Daddy adds. They think I’m scared, and want to comfort me. “Years and years. Girls marry much too young, these days. We should emulate the Spartans. Seventeen, eighteen summers. The body must finish developing.”

  “I’m not getting married,” I say again, happily. “May I keep the skull?”

  “We’ll boil it clean,” Daddy says. “What will you do instead, then?”

  “Be a teacher, like you.”

  Gravely, Daddy and Herpyllis agree thi
s is an excellent ambition.

  Tycho, our big slave, brings the bowl of water Herpyllis called for. I smile at him and he nods. He’s my favourite. Last summer he taught me to suck mussels right from their shells, but Herpyllis reproved him. He understood: little girls reach an age when familiarity with slaves must end. She hadn’t been unkind; she’d been a servant herself until Daddy chose her, after my mother died. She was harshest with me, about my manners and appearance and behaviour, and that was because she loved me so much.

  I remember the feel of the mussels, plump and wet, and the salt tang. I sneak a lick of lamb’s blood. It’s still warm.

  “Daddy took the whole day away from his school for you,” Herpyllis tells me later that afternoon, hacking with less precision at the parts we brought to her kitchen. She isn’t displeased, though. We’ll have a feast tonight, and soup for days. “You’ll be keeping the bones, I suppose?”

  Bones are an excellent puzzle, Daddy says. I can apply myself to them and not get bored for weeks. Daddy knows I get bored. Herpyllis knows, too, but her solutions are less interesting—embroidery, crafts.

  At bedtime, Daddy comes to tuck me in. “All right, pet?” he asks.

  I ask him if we can do a bird next.

  “Of course.” He sits down next to me. “A pigeon.”

  “And a bream.”

  “A cuttlefish.”

  “A snake.”

  “Oh, a snake,” Daddy says. “I’d love to do a snake. Did you know, in Persia, they have snakes as thick as a man’s leg?”

  “On land, or in the water?”

  We chat until Herpyllis puts her head around the door frame and tells Daddy I need my beauty sleep.

  “Why?” I say. Daddy and Herpyllis laugh.

  At the door, he hesitates. “What we did today,” he says. “Even if you were allowed, the sanctuary isn’t the place for that. You understand?”

  “Why?”

  His lips quirk. “Why do you think?”

  I close my eyes and see the temple, the hush and the gloom and the long shafts of light with the dust motes turning in them, the piles of sacred offerings, the guttering flame, the smell of spice, the priest so cool and glorious in his robe. And outside, in the sanctuary, the stone face of the god, and the gangly-legged lamb led so simply to the feet of the statue.

  “Herpyllis will always let you use the kitchen,” comes my father’s voice from far away. I don’t open my eyes. In the sanctuary, the lamb’s death is an ecstasy. The bones and the blood aren’t specimens there; they’re a mystery that doesn’t need solving. I think of the sadness Daddy talked about, feel it rinse through me, but it’s not for the lamb. It’s the gods I feel sorry for. What must they think, that we opened an animal without them today? That we didn’t invite them at all? I imagine their big, beautiful faces, suffused with pain. That little girl, that one right there: doesn’t she love us? What are we going to do with her?

  “She’s crying,” I hear Herpyllis say. “You horrible man. What have you done to her?”

  Someone comes close with a lamp.

  “Open your eyes, Pytho,” Daddy says, but I keep them shut. I’m looking at the insides of my own eyelids now, all red and spidery. “Are you crying?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  I get a kiss on each cheek, Daddy’s whiskers and Herpyllis’s sweet scent. She stays after he leaves, sitting beside me on my bed. “You don’t have to help him if it upsets you,” she says.

  “I want to.”

  “I know,” she says.

  I open my eyes.

  “Who loves you, anyway?” she says.

  “You do,” I say.

  She snuffs the lamp but doesn’t move. We sit in the dark.

  “The poor gods,” I say, and then I bury my face in her lap and sob.

  HERPYLLIS SCOFFS AT DADDY’S WORK, Daddy’s students and the monthly symposium he hosts in our big room. His colleagues attend, plum students, politicians, artists, diplomats, magistrates, priests; Daddy’s symposia are famous throughout the city.

  The subject for this month is virtue. “Oh, virtue,” she sniffs. “Freeloaders, the lot of them. Take this, will you, baby? I’m going to drop it.”

  We’re in the kitchen, just back from the market. I take the package of honeycomb from her and set it on the table so she can unload the rest of our purchases. I’ve had a growth spurt and am a hair taller than her now, though still unripe, my chest almost as flat as a boy’s. We’ll spend the day in the kitchen with the slaves. In the evening we’ll put on our finery and sit in Herpyllis’s room, eating smaller dishes of what the men are having, and afterwards weaving. Their voices will drone through the walls, muffled, occasionally bubbling up in argument or laughter. Herpyllis will try to gossip, and I’ll shush her so I can listen. Eventually she’ll put her finger to her lips and lead me into the hall so I can hear properly. She’ll stand there examining her nails and smoothing her eyebrows while I try to understand. When we hear them rise to leave we’ll run, giggling, back to her room.

  “I wonder if dogs are virtuous.” I spill lentils out on a clean cloth and start picking them over before I put them back in the pot on the shelf. Herpyllis likes her kitchen just so. “A hunting dog, say. You could have one that’s too angry and bites everything, and one that’s too shy and won’t chase, and then—”

  “Soak some of those, will you? Enough for ten.” She pushes a strand of hair back from her forehead. “And then one in the middle that’s everything a dog should be. Yes, yes, I know. And a bean that’s too wrinkled, and a bean that’s still moist, and a bean in the middle that exemplifies everything a bean should be. Most noble, gracious, perfect bean. A virtuous bean.”

  “What!” Daddy stands in the kitchen doorway. “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Yes,” Herpyllis and I say together.

  Daddy grabs Herpyllis by the hips from behind, and nuzzles the back of her neck. “Who said you could laugh at me?”

  I slip to the doorway, trying not to look at them. The slaves have already fled. We all know they like it in the kitchen.

  “Beans, eh?” Daddy says.

  Herpyllis’s eyes are closed; she’s already melting against him. Daddy’s eyes are open. He smiles at me, and I know he’s thinking about beans.

  The guests start arriving after sundown. Tycho greets them and sees to the horses. Nico and I stand just inside the door with Herpyllis and Daddy. Nico, at eight summers, isn’t really old enough to sit with the men, but Daddy lets him so long as he doesn’t try to speak. Usually he eats too many cakes and falls asleep on the floor.

  “Shall we play tiles?” Herpyllis murmurs to me.

  “I want to play tiles,” Nico says.

  “And miss Daddy’s party?” Herpyllis says. “Silly boy. We can play tiles tomorrow.”

  Nico groans.

  “I don’t want to play, anyway,” I say, trying to help. “I want to read.”

  Another guest arrives, a colleague of Daddy’s from the other school, the Academy. Daddy went to that school himself, when he was a young man, and is always gracious to his rivals there, though afterwards he will shake his head and tell Herpyllis their best teachers are all dead and the place won’t last long.

  “It’s going to be boring!” Nico says. The rival, Akakios, grins at Daddy.

  “Very, very boring,” Daddy says.

  “I only came for the food,” Akakios says.

  “No!” Nico realizes they’re laughing at him, and stomps off.

  “He’s just a lad still,” Akakios says kindly, once Herpyllis has gone after him. “At his age, all I wanted to do was fish and climb trees.”

  “For me, it was swimming,” Daddy says.

  “And what about you, sweet?” Akakios says to me. “Puppies, is it? Kittens?”

  “All kinds of animals, really,” I say.

  Daddy’s lips twitch, as I intended. “And she’s a great help around the house,” he offers.

  Akakios waves this away. “You should hear him brag about you,” he tells me. “A better mind than many of his students, he says. Always got her nose in a book. Should have been a boy.”

  I look at Daddy, who nods, smiling, flushing a little. Yes, I said that. I flush a little myself, with pleasure.

  “Bactria, eh?” Akakios says to Daddy, changing the subject. I know that this is the latest news to arrive from the army: the king is in Bactria, at the end of the known world, calling himself Shahanshah, King of Kings, and founding city after city named after himself. Iskenderun, Iskandariya, and now Kandahar, the latest. These days, people announce the king’s exploits to Daddy as though he’s responsible. Daddy was his tutor, long ago, when I was a baby. It’s their way of reminding us we’re Macedonian and they’re not.