Stories of Aleksandr Borodin...

ArUlric

Trained as a lawyer, negotiator, document drafter, scribe, Aleksandr has been part involved in the legal and representational side of the Borodin family’s trading interests for the past twenty years. He is the second son of Usevolod Borodin – brother to Igor – and now the sole surviving child of his father, due to the mysterious disappearance of his mercantile brother, Pyotr.

Long, tall and immeasurably lean, with his pale skin and his dusty black suit, Aleksandr radiates a lugubrious, skeletal air. This orderly dustiness, however, is curiously compelling, and in conversation or in business matters, is frequently decisive. Quick-minded, he is used to dealing with sensitive situations, and has inherited something of the Borodin talent for manipulation. His legal knowledge, however, ensures that such strategic legerdemain as he employs is within the ambit of strict legality – or at least couldn’t be proved one way or the other. It is in oratory, however, where he particularly excels, his dry manner, arid sense of humour and air of authority lending his advocacy particular rhetorical power.

However, Aleksandr’s seems to be frittering away his gifts – and he has not made a proper court appearance in many months. He seems sunken, unhappy, and not infrequently overly-brandied. To some his choice to abandon the more genteel Dancing Mermaid – and sup with the sailors in the Lucky Ferret – could be regarded as sad testimony to his degradation, however sniffily he insists on a clean glass and only the finest imported liqueurs.

According to informed and elevated rumour, he has a distinctly antipathetic attitude towards his niece, the formidable scarlet-clad enchantress Vlanna Borodin, although he smoothly conceals any feelings he might have in her presence, playing up his dogged orderliness and lawyerly rectitude._

ArUlric

The long dead roll of Borodins crept across the inset of the calf’s hide tome like the searching legs of a spider, trailing an inky web.

From the lofty head of the page, script swirling and self-consciously refined, one could trace the dreary figuration of Baron Borodin’s blood as it dripped stickily through the succeeding generations. Aleksandr’s blanched, sinewy digit took in the familiar names, caught like knotted flies in the cunning, crooked-backed script –

…Yvan begot Pavel begot Igor begot Grigor begot Stanislav...

Beside the last name - scratched in some twenty years later in watery-eyed ink - read Ylanna Borodin. The same late hand had recorded the untimely death of Lannita Borodin (née D’Arneau, told the dry and helpful document), crispy citing the year her body had been found in the Peltarchian gutter, torn and without a breath of life still in her. The writing was spare, strictly geometric, paying its final and unjudgemental compliment to the departed by giving her a complete life. Scrabbling back up the weave of dead men, Aleksandr picked out the name of his father, scratched in horizontally, third behind the formidable Igor Borodin. He had ensured that his father had been blessed with the crucial and final completeness of due record -

…Usevolod (deceased) married Cecilia Borodin (née Darnay) and begot Aleksandr and Pyotr...

Eyes fixed on the beetle-black lettering, Aleksandr felt along the elbow-smoothed oak surface of his desk, stiffly pulling back one starched cuff as his cricket-fingers closed around the familiar thinness of the goosefeather quill. Pausing for a moment, he scrabbled in one of the drawers for a scrap of paper - dry fingertips scaling the withering skin of an apple, abandoned to over ripening decay. Rolling the spent fruit aside, he impatiently snatched up the draft writ from City of Peltarch v. Sidney Smythe, folding the page into quarters, and fussily tearing down one of the seams. Aleksandr’s nostrils flared. He had always had an exquisitely keen sense of smell, and through his senses now crept the nauseatingly sugary breath of the fruit, greedily gasping at the free air of his narrow garret. Irritably, he clicked the drawer back in its place, hurriedly scratching out in his familiar, skeletal hand …

… Pyotr Borodin (deceased)

… beside which he added the date, plainly, inexpressively. Pyotr had been sixty four when he decided it was his moment to contribute to the ominous reputation of his lineage and perish in mysterious circumstances. Just yesterday. Found by his manservant sitting, quite calmly in front of a large, oval glass mirror which had been their mothers – his skin gone ashen grey, the wisps of his hair now as unyielding as granite, a strange, doubting little smile on his face reduced to an absolute and final figuration – it was grotesque. A stealing, sickening hand seemed to quest about in Aleksandr’s stomach as he imagined the final moments of his curious brother’s life, seated tidily as a matron, preening himself vainly for oblivion, before intoning the heavy words that ravishing his skin of its softness and hardened his veins to dark seams of rock. No note was left, as was typical of the man, leaving those remaining only to wonder about what reason lay inside his narrow skull or behind the mysterious little smile that curled the corners of his lips with its look of drab triumph.

Content with his penmanship, Aleksandr drew the book and its inset family tree closer, smoothing the page carefully flat as he picked out the details against his brother’s name. With grim flatness, he scratched the straight spine of the final letter, and laid down his hands, letting the ink dry and his mind wander back up the list of names. The script seemed to spasm before his eyes, as the melted candle which illuminated his work guttered and flared. The orderly spiderliness he had seen in the necrology seemed to shift in his imagination into a long blank, barred canvass of cages, each character constrained to its place with an almost musical necessity, the quavering beat of one life succeeding to the long, slow breve of another. He felt tired, thinned out by it all, conscious of the lines underwriting and overbearing his own life, half imagining the veined hand that would record “deceased” against his own dusty appellation, nevermore to be recalled except in the text’s dry and unheeded voice. Slapping the tome shut, Aleksander shifted out of his hard-spined chair, knees cracking as he stalked across to the sideboard, helping himself to a generous bulb of brandy from the half-empty cut crystal bottle concealed inside.

The burnt-honey liquid flared in his throat as he quickly lipped down a mouthful as he returned to his chair with its weary and eroded red leather, on which could just be traced the outlines of an open hand, flaking gold vaguely forming the ghost of a key in the palm. Hefting the tome with a groan, he tucked it particularly back in its place on the nearby shelf, which woodily echoed his complaints. With a sigh of satisfaction, he stomached more of the hot liquid, casting a suspicious eye across the tottering piles of paperwork which were regimented fastidiously across the tabletop.

Contracts, agreements, trading licences - the small matter of a drunken old sot ex-merchant uncle whose inglorious attempts to perfect the art of effective trade had earned no money but had bought the ire of Igor Borodin. Aleksandr had ensured that the boozing old queen was being packed off to some rural slum quietly to drink himself to death. Selecting the topmost sheet, Aleksandr scrutinised it, immeasurably bored. The writing seemed increasingly irrational – dead letters – tottering ponderously across the page. He didn’t care for the flourish the author assumed it was appropriate to mark her ‘y’s with, a silly, unserious style of writing. Hardly fitting. He ran the document under his aquiline nose, judiciously seeking confirmation. Hints of bergamot, he thought, with disgust, pushing the florid thing aside. His tiredness occupied his skull like an insect, slowly sending its tender, questing feet into the deepest recesses of his thoughts, where boredom lurked.

He felt the light going out of him – like clouds at dusk, needlessly dark – and each shred of paper marked with the Borodin crest tore its own strip of offal from his innards, slowly hollowing him out until only his waxy, jaded face remained, propped up on a crooked spine. Scrutinising himself in the bulbous reflection of his brandy glass, he was convinced he looked worn through, thin, greyer than the granite-hearted Pyotr who presided over the dusty Borodin vault to which he had now be consigned. Worse, he looked forty, and worse still - a sick forty. Undoubtedly pre-cancerous, he reflected, sourly emptying the lees of his glass.

He resented it all, all of these orderly piles, all of Igor Borodin’s little notes, as he so discreetly called them, instructing this, insisting on that – defend Uncle Fyodor, it isn’t reasonable to construe those circumstances as theft – he could feel himself being rotted through, as though his very bones were stuffed with mangled, half-digested parchment. What flecks of colours illuminated the pulp only spilled ink, and the private consolation of a fine important brandy in the early evening, when the cats outside were screaming.

Hoisting himself from the chair, he made for the door, stooping to scoop up his jacket and pulling the sad coloured thing over his narrow shoulders, pinching out the candle light with a serpentine hiss. Perhaps just a glass or two more, he reflected, stepping outside, stalking through the streets statuesque and darkling. The gloomy dockways were successively illuminated in the bright coronas of light spilled from the pendulously overhanging lamps, spheres of which caught the pox-cracked faces of passersby in their sprightly, clarifying lens.

Hastily moving along the lane, Aleksandr’s eyes fixed on the hanging sign of the Lucky Ferret, which creaked rhythmically in the gusty night coming off the torn and unsmiling surface of the Icelace beyond. Walking inside, he was hit by the cloying scent of old beer and of noise. The men who shouldered by smelled of boiled smoke, he noted, privately disgusted, hastily pushing his way to the bar and insisting on a clean glass.

Stealing into an unoccupied corner, he kept on his faded black suit jacket to stave off the persistent gushes of cold air flooding the room as tired fishermen returned home to their wives and old soldiers entered to acquire a little liquid friend to keep them company through the night. Privately, as he scrutinised the crowd thronging the bar, and all its busy, insect like-life, he resolved to do something – to somehow crawl out from under the rock – whatever Igor or his obnoxious niece Vlanna might have to say about it…