The Countess by Rebecca Johns Read Free Book Online

out of my hair with a comb, tears starting from my eyes with each tug. István, passing by the door, must have seen the expression of pain on my face, for he stopped to laugh at my expense, so angry was he that I had left him alone in the children’s court while I snuck down to the party. My mother caught sight of him enjoying my misery and said, “Go check on your cousins, István, for God’s sake. Make yourself useful.” And she closed the door on his antics until I was dressed and ready for my interview with Countess Nádasdy.
    When I was dressed, we hurried downstairs to my father’s library, where he sat across the table from a grand lady with silvered dark hair and a dress of deepest black. A widow’s dress. I had seen her at the party, of course, and knew who she was, since my mother had taken special trouble to introduce me to her the night she arrived, but I did not know what was so important that now I was summoned to speak with her and my parents alone, while the other guests were gathering for the midday meal.
    I curtsyed, waiting to be spoken to as my mother had taught me,and stood back. Lead cream whitened Orsolya’s spotted cheeks, giving her a waxen, carved kind of look, her reddened mouth in a round
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, her eyebrows plucked and arched into permanent surprise. I did not like her cosmetics, having heard my mother say often that women who whitened their skin and blooded their lips were nothing but ridiculous old crones who wished to catch a young husband. Around her neck she wore a great jewel, a ruby as large as my nine-year-old fist surrounded by a circlet of gold bent into the shape of a rose. My fingers itched to stroke the delicate metalwork, the polished red surface of the ruby. Countess Nádasdy is the most important person at the party, my mother had said, and when I looked at that jewel I knew that it must be so. I curled my fingers into my palms. Without knowing entirely why, I smiled and bowed and said what an honor it was to meet her, that I had heard of the greatness of Countess Nádasdy and wished to serve her however I may. “Please,” I said to my shoes, “be as one of our own family during your stay.”
    The countess bent and cupped my chin in her cool whitened hand. “My goodness, Anna,” she said, “what a silver tongue this one has. You must be terribly proud of her. And such a face! Ferenc will love her fine dark eyes, her pretty little mouth. No, I do not think he could do any better.”
    My father, who loved me above all his children, first insisted that I was too young to be betrothed to anyone. “She should be at least twelve before we decide,” he said, and cut a pleading look at his wife. But my mother, who knew that the young Nádasdy boy was heir not only of his father’s name and title and political goodwill but his mother’s vast Kanizsay fortune, took my father aside. The deal should be struck, she told him, before the groom’s eye—or more important, his mother’s—roamed elsewhere. So while my mother took me back upstairs, confused and relieved, Orsolya and my father struck a rich bargain: his daughter for her son, and a dowry of so much gold it could hardly be counted, so many castles and villages they could hardly be named, from one end of Upper Hungary to theother. The Báthorys and the Nádasdys would be united in marriage, in name and in blood. It would be, they thought, the beginning of a new dynasty, one that would rival the Habsburgs themselves. For two families with aspirations to independence—to a new line that would free Hungary of the Habsburgs in the west, of the Turks in the east—nothing could have been sweeter.
    For myself, I understood little of what was happening in the library that afternoon. It was only later that my strange audience with Orsolya made sense to me, and I wondered again and again what would have happened that day if I had refused to climb out of bed when my mother came in that morning, if I had spoken to Orsolya like a