Black Spring (18 page)

After Damek left, Lina moved out of the Red House and set up her household at the manse. Masko was still officially her guardian, since she was neither married nor of age, but he gave her permission to move; perhaps he was secretly ashamed of what he had done and was weary of having Lina under his roof, a constant, silent reminder of his crime. Until I arrived, she was assigned a young girl, Fatima’s great-niece, Irli, to be her maid, and lived as a recluse, seldom seen in the village except when she attended church. This was so foreign to the Lina I had known that I was astonished, but my mother insisted that womanhood had changed her and that she had become meek and biddable. I confess that, until I saw her myself, I found this impossible to believe.

The reason for my return also astonished me. Lina was to be married, and I was asked to be the housekeeper for her new household. Her troth had been given to a handsome young man, Tibor Alcahil, whom I knew only by sight but who was said to be of steady character and minor but established wealth. It was hard to imagine a greater contrast to Damek, and I thought she must be changed indeed to make such an alliance.

It was wise of Lina to distance herself from Masko, by becoming the de facto mistress of the manse; although he continued as her official guardian, her move away from the Red House gained her respect in the eyes of the villagers. In the years that he was Lord of Elbasa, Masko had succeeded in making everyone despise him; not the lowest lackey said his name but to spit. He had no shame in flaunting the women he brought up from the South in order to scandalize the northerners. He even took his whores to church, thus putting the priests and wizards in a rare unity of outrage.

The wizards and priests grudgingly tolerate each other because the king, for his own reasons, insists that they must, but it is at best a jealous truce. It is proverbial that on any given topic, one side will automatically disagree with the other. On the question of Masko’s scandalous behavior, Father Cantor and the Wizard Ezra actually made a joint representation to the king that he be divested of his property and exiled from the Plateau. I heard about it while I was still serving in the palace: it attracted much gossip, not only because such a proposition had never before been made, but also because the king refused the submission. It confirmed my belief that the king’s detestation of the Lord Kadar was so bitter that he wanted to see his estate entirely dispersed by Masko’s extravagance and mismanagement and had chosen him deliberately, knowing his character, to ensure this design. Masko of course knew of this representation, and when the king refused it, he became more arrogant than ever. But he was even then sowing the seed of his own downfall.

Y
ou might imagine with what feelings I packed my trunk and made my way home. Although it was yet early in the year, it was an unpleasant journey: the heat was excessive, and a storm was building. On the final day of my journey, bruise-colored clouds began to pile in the sky, and the air became ever closer and more sultry, so that the sweat trickled down my back underneath my corset. To make matters worse, I was tormented by midges that swarmed in hosts out of the grasses and which bit any exposed skin. Both the carter and myself were anxious to arrive in Elbasa before the storm broke over our heads. To my inexpressible relief, we reached the Red House just as the first fat raindrops began to fall in the dust.

My mother was glad to see me, although without any demonstration that others might have thought appropriate for close family members who were now reunited after a sundering of seven years. She embraced me briefly and commented that I had grown tall. She was as shy and awkward as I was: when my mother had last seen me, I had still been a girl scarce out of childhood, and now I was a grown woman. I was shocked by how much she had aged: during my absence, she had become old. Her hair was now completely white. Her arms, which had been strong and capable, were grown thin and knotty, and deep, bitter lines ran from her nose to her mouth, writing her unhappiness on her face. We met almost as strangers, and although we both felt moved by our meeting, we were equally unable to express our feelings.

We sat for a time in the kitchen, and she brewed me a tisane as the storm broke over the village and began to hammer the roofs and howl about the trees. It was clearly impossible for me to go up to the manse that night, and gradually, as she answered my questions about what had happened in the village in my absence, the atmosphere between us thawed.

She told me of the major events since I had left, which I have recounted so far as they related to Lina and Damek, but there was much other news as well. She spoke of new marriages, and of births and deaths (there were many more deaths, as the vendetta still burned its slow fatality through Elbasa and Skip). These events, which had once been my first concerns, now seemed to have no relation to my life. This grieved and surprised me; I hadn’t realized until then how much my absence had changed me. I attempted to tell her about my years in the palace, and of Zef, who was foremost in my thoughts, but she showed little beyond polite interest, and I soon dropped the subject. I went to sleep that night with an oppressed heart, wondering whether I would always feel like a stranger in the place I had thought of as my home.

The following morning, the storm had passed, and I made my way on foot to the manse. My trunk was to be sent on later, and after the dust and discomfort of the previous day’s journey, I was glad of the chance to walk in the cool air, which was cleansed and fresh after the night rains, and to look about the village I had not seen for so many years. It was a melancholy journey: because I was used to the grand halls and fine outbuildings of the palace, Elbasa seemed smaller and meaner than I remembered, and I noticed how many houses, like Fatima’s, were deserted and falling into ruin.

Lina was waiting for me at the manse and embraced me with a far warmer emotion than my mother had. “Oh, Anna!” she said at last as she stood back and studied my face, blinking tears from her eyes. “How glad I am you’re home. I was trembling that the king would not permit it. He never would before! And how grown up you are now!”

I was taken aback by her greeting but couldn’t help feeling pleased. “It has been seven years,” I said. “It would be strange indeed if I had not changed. But in most respects, I think I am much the same as I was.”

I didn’t speak my own thoughts, that Lina was changed almost out of recognition. I had been used to thinking of her as strong and robust, the most physically fearless of my childhood friends, and yet here stood before me a slender, pale woman who seemed almost overwhelmingly fragile. I felt that if I touched her, she would bruise, as if she were a lily grown in a glasshouse. It did her beauty no harm; the translucency of her skin made her appear almost luminous. The other strange alteration was that her eyes were no longer the vivid violet I remembered, but rather a dark blue or deep slate gray. It appeared to me that at some stage in the past few years she must have been very ill and was now in a long convalescence.

She studied me a little more and then laughed sadly and looked away. “You were always steadfast,” she said. “In truth, the major changes are in me. I am grown up now and have put away vanity and illusion. I hope you find me a better friend than I have been, Anna.”

This confused me a little; the palace had, after all, strictly taught me to observe my place. “I hope,” I said, a little primly, “that I will be a better servant than you remember.”

“I could have sought a servant anywhere, Anna,” said Lina. “It is as a friend I asked for you. I do not complain of my life — it could be much worse — but I confess it’s been lonely these last few years. And who now knows me as well as you do?”

I mumbled something noncommittal, and I briefly saw a flash of Lina’s old impatience before she turned the subject and said that she would show me the buttery and linen press and other such places that would be in my care.

As she conducted me through the house, we relaxed a little into our old intimacy. As ever when she wanted to charm, Lina was hard to resist, and she was so bound up with my childhood memories that I quickly felt at home. I knew she wasn’t lying about her loneliness: I could smell it in her skin. She was absurdly sensitive; although she didn’t say so, I could see that my initial withdrawal had hurt her. The more we talked, the more I felt pity for her; sometimes there was almost a feverish edge to her conversation. She was, for example, almost childishly eager to solicit my approval, in a way she would never have cared to before I left, and I particularly noticed that she avoided any mention of Damek. I saw too that she tired quickly, and there were other small signs of damaged health that disturbed me.

My trunk arrived during our tour, so she showed me my chamber and left me to unpack my possessions. It gave me, at last, a little space to myself in which I could think about what I had witnessed that morning. I felt uneasy; I chiefly found myself wondering about Lina’s future husband, and my future master. If he were harsh and stern, in the way of most northern men, I feared that she would not long survive marriage. And I then recognized, with a painful adult perception, what I had always known as a child: that for all her faults, I loved Lina as I would have loved a sister.

I
t took us a few days to settle into a relationship in which we both felt comfortable, one that at once observed distinction and acknowledged intimacy. It is too easy for a mistress to assume that a servant is at the beck and call of her emotional needs as much as her material requirements, and my sense of dignity demands that such friendship emerge from my own heart rather than the command of another. But these are trivial niceties which might not interest you, perhaps; I have noticed that not many people concern themselves with the self-respect of those who work for them.

I was pleased, all the same, to be Lina’s housekeeper, since it gave me high standing in the village. I was still very young, and I could not but be flattered by my appointment to the position. While the Kadar family had been based in the Red House, the manse had been the working base of the estates, but Masko’s low esteem among the villagers had shifted the locus of royal authority to the manse. I’m sure Lina was quite indifferent to this, if she even noticed it. I saw the change in attitude at once and assumed that her quiet life prompted both curiosity and sympathy; it was also clear that she had become a focus for resentment against Masko’s insolence and mismanagement. There was now much nostalgia for the “old days” and the “old master” from those who had been first to slander the Lord Kadar and his scandalous daughter, and the fact that she was supposed a witch seemed quite forgot.

She told me herself that she wasn’t a witch. “It was always a mistake,” she said. “And so unfair. The terrible things that people said about me . . . But honestly, Anna, I never felt a single twinge of magic in me, whatever everybody else thought.”

I looked at her altered eyes and bit my lip and said nothing. I had never doubted that Lina was a witch. I remembered how her powers had flung me against the kitchen wall when we were squabbling as children, and I wondered if she had truly forgotten or whether in her desire to be like the rest of us she dismissed it as a childish fancy.

She caught my glance and smiled ruefully. “I knew when I cursed Masko,” she said. “Remember that? I never meant anything more in my life. I was sure that he would drop dead at my feet! But it had not the smallest effect. I might as well have saved my breath.”

Again, I wondered and doubted. I had yet to see Masko, but I had already heard from my mother that he was much plagued with boils and that he suffered from sleeplessness and continual nightmares, which accounted for at least some of his drinking. Whatever Lina believed, my first thought had been that this was a result of her curse: he had certainly not been so afflicted when he arrived in Elbasa. But perhaps she had since lost her powers, and as she was soon to be married, and clearly wished to live a quiet and respectable life, I judged it best to stay silent. Then, because she perceived my skepticism, Lina told me that she had, two years before, consulted the Wizard Ezra, because he could tell her once and for all whether she possessed the powers of a witch.