The Countess

The Countess by Rebecca Johns Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: The Countess by Rebecca Johns Read Free Book Online
Authors: Rebecca Johns
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical, Women serial murderers, Nobility, Hungary, Countesses
fishwife and not the respectful daughter of a nobleman. After what my mother had told me about finding a husband to love me for my beauty, I never imagined that it would be my dowry that made the bargain, my family name and connections, my good manners and potential children. I knew only that I had passed some kind of test, and I was pleased because my mother was pleased with me. That night Orsolya and my parents toasted to the bargain, holding up glasses of my father’s best wine and signing their names to the paper that decided my fate, while upstairs in my bed I dreamed of gypsy music, of moonlight, of a great red jewel that hung low in the sky, always just out of my reach.

5

    The bad luck the gypsy promised did not come until a few years afterward, but when it did, it did its work swiftly and left my family forever changed. What happened was that my father died suddenly, of a heart seizure that took him while he was dining with my mother in the evening, late, not long after Christmas. He had only picked athis food all night, complaining of heartburn, and was standing up to go to his bed when he slumped forward and hit his head on the table with such force that my mother, for many years afterward, insisted it was this injury that killed him and not the seizing of his old and soft heart. When he hit the floor—I heard the old steward swear it, the one who witnessed the whole thing—he was already dead.
    I was reading to the little girls in another part of the house and heard my mother’s cry, a sharp sound like the one the pigs made when their throats were slit. I went running toward it. Klára asked, “What was that, Erzsébet? What?” as she grabbed at my skirts, but I was already ahead of her, rushing away.
    I reached my mother before anyone else, saw her slumped across my father’s body on the floor, an overturned wineglass dripping red onto her white sleeves. I threw myself on her, thinking she had been hurt. I could not yet see my father’s face, but my mother’s eyes were closed, her mouth open as if she were trying to speak. The house was in an uproar, servants coming from everywhere to witness the commotion or to try to help, my mother’s ladies swarming, the ancient steward helplessly picking at the bits of glass that had spread across the floor. With a greater strength than I had ever possessed I pulled my mother off my father and pinched her face, her hands, trying to get her to see me. Her skin in my fingers was cold and clammy.
“Anyu!”
I cried, calling for my mother even as the servants dragged me back, my legs beating at the air.
    Finally it was my brother, István—appearing slowly on the scene as if he had known, even then, that he was already the lord of the manor—who told me at last to stop acting like a madwoman, that our mother was fine but our father was beyond our help. “He’s dead,” said my brother, poking our father’s body with one long finger as if testing the temperature of an undesirable dish on the dinner table. “Look.”
    I stopped crying and gathered myself, brushing off the hands of the servants who were restraining me, breathing slowly until I felt calm again. It was true—all the color had drained from my father’slarge pink face, his eyes wide open and staring as if at an apparition that had come for him in the last moment, and I wondered if there could not be any peace in death, despite what the priests and my mother and father had so often insisted, no reunion of the dead with the dead, and for many nights afterward I could not sleep, thinking of the look on my father’s face, thinking that perhaps there was no heaven waiting for us at all, nor hell either, but only other spirits, neither good nor evil, that came in the last moments to carry our souls away.
    The old women said they would take care of my mother and father, carry my mother to her bed and my father to the winding-sheet. “Take the little ones up to bed,” they said, so that was what I did. I

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