The Countess by Rebecca Johns Read Free Book Online Page B

gathered Klára and Zsofía to me, the three of us huddled on top of the blankets all night, waiting for our mother to come in, to comfort us in our sorrow. My sisters’ small damp hands kept touching my face all through the night, as if making sure I lived and breathed.
    We buried him a month later in the family vault, on a cold bright morning after a heavy snow, our breath stolen from us as we walked behind his corpse to the church, so that it looked like our souls, too, were being torn away. My mother had been forcibly dressed and removed from her bed by her ladies. She could barely walk and had to be supported by István, clutching at his jacket and wrapping her arms around his neck. Her hair kept straggling out of its net, and her fine pale skin was blotchy and haggard. I thought she was making a terrible spectacle of herself and shrank in embarrassment for all the guests and other mourners to see her so undone, so undignified.
    Before long the procession made it inside the church. I had been told by the nurse that it was my job to keep the little girls quiet at least through the service. Think of your father, she said, and how you would want him remembered. I did as she bade me. As we took our seats I fingered the hidden sweets in my pockets—sugared dates, Klára’s favorite treat, swiped from the kitchen that morning. At eight years old, Zsofía was really too old to bribe, old enough to behave herself in church at least, but at only three years old Klára could notbe trusted to be quiet and would need to be paid off in sugar. Zsofía would whine if she saw Klára get something she herself did not, so I had brought enough for both of them. I could hear them chewing as the priest began his service.
    The bier on which my father lay was strewn with pine boughs and mistletoe and sprinkled with droplets of fragrant oils to cover the smell that was beginning to emanate from it, a smell somehow sweet and sickening, like an uncured animal skin left too long in the sun. I couldn’t connect the smell or the frozen corpse on the bier to my father, the man who had danced with my mother the night of the gypsy ball. I half expected him to come up behind me and lift me under the arms and place me on his shoulders as he used to do when he felt jolly or had been drinking, or both. It was a mistake, I felt, to have his funeral without him.
    I kept looking to István, to see what he would do, but I was seated behind him, since he was my father’s heir and my mother’s confidant, and I could not see his face nor gauge what he was thinking while the service was beginning. In the days since my father’s death I had rarely seen my brother, not even in passing in the halls or at mealtimes. My family was becoming alien to me, strange without my father there at its center to hold us all together. That morning the back of my brother’s head and the shoulders of his black fur-trimmed cloak were damp with melting snow, and I could smell his familiar scent of hay and warm skin, but I felt as far from him as I did from the dead man on the bier. Suddenly my father was dead and my brother was the lord of Ecsed, in title if not in authority. Already I could see how my mother had started to depend on him, asking his advice on the funeral service and conferring with him for long hours over the eulogy and burial. He grew more solemn than usual, spent hours on his knees in prayers in the chapel of the estate, or behind the locked door of his room, scribbling away on bits of paper. At sixteen he was five years older than me and had reached his majority. He would assume my father’s titles, and leave the children’s court to me andto the little girls to become a real lord and master rather than a play one, and no amount of begging would persuade him otherwise. István was taking our father’s place, and I my mother’s, as the guardian and protector of the little girls and the myriad younger cousins who tumbled in and out of the house at Ecsed.