The Countess Read Online Free PDF

there till morning.” I promised I would be right back after checking on the baby.
    Once out of sight of the other children, though, I slipped down to the banqueting hall where the adults were drinking and dancing to the strains of the gypsy music and crawled under a table to keep out of sight. In the great hall the tables were set with delicate glass plates on which the servants brought meats red with paprika, great bunches of grapes like calf’s brains, hot dumplings dripping with butter. The ladies, the Báthory cousins from Bécs and Prága, wore skirts of dark velvet and starched white blouses, and leather slippers too fine and soft to wear out of doors in the spring mud. But it was their faces I watched, the jealousy that stole across their countenances when they saw my mother, recovered by then from her confinement, her face flushed pink and her eyes alight under long dark lashes, bowing and smiling at a dozen men who crowded around her to offer their congratulations or beg to fetch her a glass of wine. Her ladies had dressed her hair in nets of pearls, stiffening the ruff at her neck and fastening it around her throat like a great white platter upon which to serve her beauty. She had a heart-shaped face, the face of love, my father called it. A tiny woman, no bigger than a half-grown girl and with a girl’s lighthearted laugh and high, lilting voice, she was the envy of every noblewoman in the country, though she did not seek the company of the other women, preferring instead to spend her evening with the men. She conversed with her admirers in Latin or German on matters of history, philosophy, even warfare, earning her their respect and admiration even as she excited their desire. When she had entertained her guests enough, my father came and took her hand himself, and the two of them danced around the floor laughing and smiling into each other’s faces. I longed to be like her, to dance and sing and be the object of everyone’s attention, man and woman.
    The nurse found me asleep under one of the tables, curled up on a bearskin, my stomach groaning. She took me up to bed, scolded meroundly, and tucked me in, but long into the night I heard the gypsies playing and the throaty cry of their singing coming in through my window. My heart thudded to the music with such happiness that I could not sleep.
    Long after midnight the party began to die down. One by one the ladies and gentlemen fell on piles of furs or else went up to the rooms my parents had prepared for them, falling against each other on the stairways and in the halls in their drunken state. The gypsies remained awake still, laughing and singing, drinking the strong apricot liquor called
pálinká
and eating the food left behind on the tables by the fat and sleeping guests.
    No one remembered afterward what started the argument. In their drunkenness two of the gypsies began to fight, shoving and cursing, knocking over the benches and waking the house, rousing the servants and the guards alike. It ended when one man accused the other of selling off his daughter to the Turks. The invaders were feared all over the land when I was a child, particularly by girls. My mother had told me stories of Turks snatching girls from their beds in villages all over the country, selling them into slavery, into brothels, taking them back to Constantinople to hold for ransom. Nothing was more terrible for a girl than the thought of being captured by the Turks, and no Hungarian subject, not even a gypsy, would be permitted to collaborate with them without the direst consequences.
    There were more shouts and accusations, and soon the gypsies were calling for the lord of the house, demanding that my father arrest the accused man then and there, have him taken in chains to the dungeon to await trial for his crime. The accused man’s friends held him fast until my father, who as the lord of Ecsed was governor of those lands, came down and sent for the guards. They bound his hands