Free The Countess by Rebecca Johns

would spit him back out.” I too had to suppress the urge to laugh at his stiff and formal demeanor when we sat at supper, or walked in the garden, or read in the evenings by candlelight. He was interested in everything I touched—what I was reading, what I was wearing, how I tended to the younger children—and had comments for me on all of them.
    Once he was present when Klára came to me begging for something to eat, some little thing to quiet her stomach until suppertime. Our suppers had been later since Megyery’s arrival, on account of the elaborate nature of the meals my mother had ordered. Klára, who was not yet four, had found it especially difficult waiting an extra hour or so until the cooks had finished, so when she came to me that afternoon I went out to the kitchen and found her some dried dates, which she stuffed in her mouth until she could barely talk.Megyery, who had been reading by himself in my father’s leather chair, frowned at what he must have seen as my indulgence of my sister’s whims.
    “Is something the matter?” I asked.
    “No, my dear,” he said, with the barest hint of kindness, and for a moment he seemed to go back to his reading. Then he looked up again, setting the book on his knee. “I was thinking that a little hunger wouldn’t harm the child. Countess Nádasdy never gave Ferenc a sweet so soon before dinner. She would say it might spoil his appetite.”
    His hand was settled still on the book, as if he expected me to thank him for his officiousness in telling me how to manage my charges. “The countess sounds like a very wise lady,” I said, biting off every word. “I only hope that someday I can be as learned as she.”
    At this he brightened at once, picking up his book and going back to his reading. “I’m sure you will be.”
    I said nothing else. Megyery was Orsolya’s man, and she would surely hear reports of everything I said and did. My brother and mother had both taken the trouble to warn me that if I got off on the wrong foot with Orsolya my life at Sárvár would be a difficult one. Considering the man whom she had sent to me as her representative, I didn’t doubt them at all. So I held my tongue and pulled Klára out of the room after me, where we might continue unseen by Megyery until suppertime.
    When the day came for my departure, the courtyard filled with servants and friends and family to see me off. My small cousins were there, and my sisters. The little girls wept. My mother was there, too, her heart-shaped face shining with tears at the solemnity of this event, the leaving of her eldest daughter. The sight of her standing in the courtyard in her elegant black mourning dress trimmed in gold braid, her hair piled on her head and fastened with pearl-encrusted combs for the occasion, sobered me immediately, for I knew she thought we might never see each other again, and it was this image she was presenting to me to remember her by. Truly I was leavingEcsed forever. She embraced me, and I received her blessing, her hands resting on top of my hair. “Be a kind and dutiful daughter to Countess Nádasdy,” she said, not missing one last opportunity for a lesson. “Give her no reason to send you home again.” Then I kissed the little girls good-bye, and my brother. I put my arms around István’s neck, and he embraced me too, kissing me like he had the day he played the pasha and I the pasha’s harem, his expression curious, as if he were seeing me for the first time. The little girls cried and begged to go with me. I wondered when, or if, I would see any of them again.
    I felt very alone as the countess’s steward helped me up into the carriage before him and ordered the horses to start. Then I was waving good-bye to Ecsed, to the marsh where the dragon had roared, to the herons and frogs, to the litter of puppies barking in the straw, to my pony with its braided mane. I was moving forward, into my new life, into my future as a wife, a mother, a