The Countess Read Online Free PDF Page B

and feet and transported him into the storage rooms of the cellar, the bowels of the castle, to wait for the police.
    It was near dawn, and the sky was lightening little by little in the east. When he was gone, my father and his guests went back up tobed, and the rest of the gypsies were sent out of the house to sleep in the fields surrounding the marsh.
    When the local magistrate was brought in to preside over the trial the next morning, the accused man claimed the Turks had stolen his daughter, that he would never have sold her off. The police said they found a large amount of gold in his pockets and that the accused man had not been able to tell them where he had come by it. At first he said it was payment he’d received for selling several goats, then that he’d found it in a hollow tree along the road from Pozsony. None of it was true, of course. Saying that the man’s crime could not go unpunished, and by way of making him an example to the local populace, my father asked the magistrate to sentence the gypsy to die outside the walls of the estate the next day. “For the sake of that poor girl,” said my father afterward, embracing my mother as he came into her room, “there must be justice.” The set of his jaw and the coldness in his expression made me shiver, for there was nothing in him in that moment of the father I knew and loved, only the great lord and landowner who was responsible for upholding the law in the village and all the surrounding lands. That my father could have more than one life—that he could be both my father and this stern authority figure, this great nobleman, at the same time—had never occurred to me before. He was father not just to me but to everyone who lived on his lands, including the wretched girl whose own flesh and blood had sold her off like a piece of livestock.
    The gypsy was kept in the stables that night, locked in a stall and guarded by twelve men with guns. For long hours I could hear the condemned man standing at his window, crying and begging for mercy, his voice rising and building with wave upon wave of grief. Because I could not sleep, I stood at my windows and listened.
Save me, great lord, have pity on me
, he said in his strange accent, his voice breaking with emotion.
    What would it be like, I wondered, to know you were going to die, and to know the death would not be a good one? I pictured thecondemned man waiting in his cell, watching the moonlight move across the floor, marking the minutes of his last night on this earth. I pictured him alone, weeping and afraid, as I heard him calling out his despair.
Save me
. More often, though, I thought of his daughter. What might she be suffering now, if she even lived still? Her own father had handed her over to the invaders, listened with indifference as she begged him not to abandon her.
Save me
. What kind of callousness would it take for a man to accept his payment and turn away to leave with his own child crying out for him? It rent my heart. I, who was so beloved of my mother and father, could not imagine a fate worse than being made a slave, a whore, my virginity stolen, my body beaten. I tried to imagine what punishment would be fit for a man who had treated his own flesh with so much disdain. Would he have his eyes plucked out, his
heregolyó
removed with hot pincers? Would he be roasted alive atop a throne of iron, the way the rebel György Dósza had been after the peasant revolt? Nothing seemed like justice enough. I trembled with rage under my blankets, and that morning while my nurse was still asleep I slipped out of my rooms once again and down to the gate.
    It was a soft misty morning in June, and the gray stone walls of the battlements were alive with bunches of greening lichen and strands of flowering ivy. Bits of white fog hovered over the house, over the wooden bridge that led away from the inner fortress. The revelers were still on the estate, and some of them had tumbled out onto the grass of the