They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy Read Free Book Online

as daughters of the family, they would have to be ready to greet their guests when they arrived. They had not even glanced in his direction, but then perhaps it had not occurred to them that they would know anyone in a hired cab.
    The second chaise was driven by Farkas, the eldest Alvinczy with, beside him, the third Laczok girl, Liszka. As they sped past, Balint saw that the man behind, sitting with the uniformed coachman, was his cousin Laszlo Gyeroffy. He called out and Laszlo waved and called back, but the chaise kept up its headlong pace. Obviously they were racing each other – all the more wildly as there were girls present – both the young men eager to outdo the other, to stay in front and show who was best. They were so engrossed that the race might have been a matter of life or death.
    Balint was pleased and surprised to discover that Laszlo would be at Siklod. It would be good to see again his only real friend from childhood, from their days together at school and afterwards , before Laszlo had moved to Budapest for his two years at the university. From that time they had not seen each other often. A few times they had been invited at the same time by Laszlo’s aunts for partridge or pheasant shoots in Hungary and, sometimes , by chance, they had seen each other in Transylvania. But their bonds of friendship, the stronger for reaching back to their adolescence, had never weakened. It was these, rather than their blood relationship, that were close, since Laszlo’s grandmother had been old Peter Abady’s sister, which bound them together. There were other ties too, deep and unconscious, similar traits of character and the fact that they were both orphans; for though Balint still had a mother and a home to return to in the summer holidays, Laszlo had lost both his parents when he was only three. His mother, beautiful and talented, a painter and sculptress, bolted with another man, and shortly afterwards Count Gyeroffy was found dead in his woods, shot by his own gun. It was put out that there had been an accident. The family would accept no other explanation, but this vague and uncertain story had cast a dark cloud over young Laszlo’s childhood. As he no longer had a home he had been taken by his grandmother, but she in turn died after only a few years and, since then, his school holidays would be spent with his aunts. Until he came of age he would have no home of his own and so he was always a guest, sometimes with cousins in Transylvania, but more often in west Hungary, in Budapest, where his older aunt was married to Prince Kollonich and the younger to Count Antal Szent-Gyorgyi.
    Balint leant out of the fiacre to look at the rapidly disappearing chaise. Through the billowing clouds of dust he could just make out the figure of Laszlo waving to him. He waved back, but dust from another passing car soon removed him from sight.
    Two men sat in a half-covered victoria. On the right was old Sandor Kendy, who had two nicknames in Transylvania. To his face they called him ‘Vajda’, after his notorious ancestor, a wilful and violent-tempered nobleman whose misdeeds and arrogance had finally brought him to the scaffold. Behind his back they called him ‘Crookface’, not out of malice but because whenever he spoke or smiled – which happened seldom – his mouth pulled to one side. An old sabre scar, by no means concealed by a luxuriant moustache, made his expression seem even more ferocious.
    Nearly all the Kendys had nicknames, which were needed to distinguish those with the same first name. Apart from Crookface there were two other Sandors: ‘Frantic’, so-named for his restless, changeable character; and ‘Zindi’, called after a now-forgotten bandit whom he was thought to resemble.
    Next to Crookface in the open two-wheeler sat Ambrus Kendy, ten years younger who, though only a distant cousin, had a marked resemblance to the older man. So it was with all the Kendys. Prolific as the family was, they