The Veils of the Budapest Palace (Darke of Night Book 3) (15 page)

It was one of the well-cared-for rooms in the house. The books were neatly arranged on the shelves and well dusted, although there was little in the way of frivolous reading matter and very little of any description in English. It couldn’t hold my attention.

Inevitably, I left again and, after the smallest hesitation, let myself be drawn on to the music room, and the other apartments once occupied by Zsigmund’s parents. Here seemed the right place to sit down and think about what Gizella had said to me in the carriage.

I sat on the piano stool, drawing one finger idly over the keys from one end to the other. I could accept that Zsigmund was more desperate for love than most. God knew he’d have found little enough in this house as even Gizella admitted. He himself had told me about some of the unsuitable people he’d fallen in love with. I knew he’d been young, a child, when his parents had died, and I could imagine him running wild, unchecked, alternately ignored, punished, and indulged until he was stubborn, rebellious, and arrogant, seeking attention and affection wherever he could, no doubt the more unsuitable the better.

I didn’t mind that. I would have given him love, boundless and unconditional, if only he hadn’t hunted me for my money so dishonestly. If only he hadn’t made me care anyhow. It seemed I did have conditions after all.

Sounding a sudden discord, I rose restlessly and prowled around the room. Every moment of our whirlwind courtship crowded in on me: dancing with him, walking with him, kissing him...his dazzling smile and uninhibited laughter, the way his eyes would suddenly glaze with sadness or sparkle with some enthusiasm, for he was equally intense in pursuit of fun and arguments and passion...

Zsigmund’s passion. How could I live without it now that I’d known it?

I walked faster, throwing open the double doors to the drawing room beyond.

God help me, this pain was about more than passion, more than humiliation. Sheer lust might have drawn me to him, but there had always been more.

Impatiently, I tugged the dusty cover off a sofa and threw it aside before sinking onto the sofa and seizing a cushion for comfort.

“I do love you,” I whispered. “Oh I do.” And it
was
unconditional. It didn’t matter what he’d done or said; I couldn’t stop loving him. But he didn’t have to know that. I needed pride to see me through the pain and it could make no real difference to him.

I could live well enough on half my income. He could have the other half and be independent from his family. It was the best I could do for both of us. And maybe one day...

I smiled, dashing my hand across my eyes. I had no need of illusions.

Wiping my damp fingers on the velvet of the sofa, I imagined Ilona, Zsigmund’s mother, doing the same thing, weeping perhaps over her husband’s death—if they didn’t die together—or over some earlier unhappiness.

Were you happy here?
I wondered.

I thought she was, mostly. These were happy rooms. I was sure Barbara would tell me the same thing. They felt full of life and love. Which was an odd way to view the empty, neglected rooms of two people who’d died tragically young.

Some movement at the corner of my eye attracted my attention, though by the time I actually looked that way, it had vanished. Unless it was one of those wisps of air...

Air didn’t travel in
wisps
. That was silly...

Don’t cry.

I didn’t know where the words came from. More forceful than my inner self, they seemed to come from outside me and yet sound straight into my mind. Although I looked wildly around for the speaker, I knew in my heart no one was there. Just those impossible wisps of air.

“Stupid imagination,” I said aloud and stood, wandering on towards the bedroom. The young mother of the man I couldn’t help loving must have walked this way hundreds of times. I could almost imagine a tiny Zsigmund galloping along at her side. My side. He would rush in, perhaps leap onto the bed to wake his father, to be rolled and tickled and hugged.

I knew what it was to lose a mother. Mine had died in childbirth when I was five years old, so my memory of her was blurred. But I’d been close to my father, at least before his marriage to the Dowager Countess of Alnwick which had given me a gaggle of stepbrothers and stepsisters. I wondered if she’d have stopped my father pushing me into marriage with Neil. I’d have avoided that if I could, and yet I couldn’t regret the years with him.

Did I regret marrying Zsigmund? I didn’t know. I just knew he’d made me feel alive, forced me to experience more intense happiness and wild grief than I could ever remember.

Don’t regret.
Perhaps it really was my inner self speaking. Certainly, I wouldn’t regret. I would move on.

“Did
you
regret?” I whispered to Ilona, Zsigmund’s mother.

So much. I did such terrible things...

“What did you do?”

Silence.

Surreptitiously, I looked around me. I was sitting on the bed, talking to myself, asking questions of a ghost I couldn’t even see. Barbara would have been proud of me. Except, of course, that it wasn’t real. There was no ghost.

Pulling myself together, I stood and walked through all the rooms once more. After a brief hesitation, I didn’t bother replacing the cover on the yellow sofa. It felt like defiance, a blow for brightness in the criminal neglect of these beautiful rooms.

Since the family seemed so reluctant to speak of it, I wondered where else I could find out about the tragedy of Zsigmund’s dead parents. Wouldn’t Zsigmund himself have kept something? Returning to his room, which was still empty, I began a thorough search.

I went through all the drawers and shelves in both the bedroom and the dressing room and found nothing—until I looked under the bed and discovered a small trunk. Triumphantly, I pulled it out, and then, kneeling beside it on the floor, I hesitated.

Coming across something by accident was one thing. Deliberately prying was another. Especially when I was planning to leave. What need did I have to understand him or his late parents now? I was still trying to excuse him. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t love me and I didn’t really believe that at heart he was a bad man. He and his family just needed money. He couldn’t have expected me to take that so personally... In which case, why the intense courtship that had given me such hopes of love? That was the dishonesty I couldn’t forgive.

And if I was being honest myself, I was not going to push that trunk back under the bed without looking. Why even try to talk myself out of it? I reached out and lifted the lid.

It was his childhood in a box. A brightly coloured ball, a spinning top with a broken string, a couple of children’s books in Hungarian and German—fairy tales or other folktales, judging by the rather beautiful illustrations—and a child-sized mandolin with a broken string.

For some reason, my throat closed up. I lifted out the instrument. Touching it, I could imagine him playing it in that room with the young woman I’d envisioned as his mother. I could even hear the gypsy tune.

Beneath the mandolin was another book. A diary? My heart beating fast, I balanced the mandolin on my knee and picked up the book. It was bound in beautiful, soft red leather. I ran my fingers over it and opened it. There were fine, marbled end papers, followed by an inscription page written in elegant, flowing script. My grasp of Hungarian wasn’t good enough to read it all, but I recognised his name at the beginning: Andrassy Zsigmund, and the words
szeretettel
—with love—and
anya
—mother.

I skimmed my fingertips over the page, as if it would bring me closer to the dead woman, or to the child Zsigmund had been. Although I knew any of his writings would be in Hungarian too, I turned the page.

Here, in a very different, childish hand, I read his name again, and his age, six, at the top of a short paragraph of Hungarian I couldn’t understand. I turned to the next page. Both were blank, apart from two small, loose newspaper clippings which had been pressed between the pages. The date on each was 1832. They looked like obituaries. Certainly I saw the names Andrassy Matthias and on the other, Ilona.

I shivered. There was something terrible in a seven-year-old child preserving the announcements of his parents’ deaths. I turned through some more pages, each with a newspaper cutting, some longer than others. In all of them, whether in Hungarian or German, I read the names of his parents but little else. One showed a portrait of Count Matthias. And then, between the next pages, I found myself gazing at the woman I’d imagined in the music room. Big, smiling dark eyes and black hair, delicate, even features apart from the hint of a turned-up nose. I blinked. It seemed my imagination had been bizarrely close to the truth.

Dragging my gaze away from Countess Ilona, it was a moment before I registered that I could read what was written underneath. It was in French.

As I read, my hand crept up from my stomach to my heart.

No wonder her ghost seemed to haunt this house. No wonder Zsigmund was just a little...damaged. Friends and family apparently said she’d blamed herself for her husband’s death.
I have so many regrets...
Had I really dredged that up from my imagination?

She’d hanged herself in her bedroom. Worse, her seven-year-old son had been the one to discover her body.

I
was already dressed for dinner and placing the final pin in my hair when Zsigmund came in. He didn’t speak, although his stormy presence permeated the whole room.

Eventually, I turned to find him lounging against the door, watching me, his face inscrutable and yet dark. I wished he didn’t affect me quite so intensely. It made thinking sensibly around him very difficult.

“Zsigmund,” I said, as calmly as I could. “What have you been doing all day?”

“Ravishing Elena Narinyi,” he replied promptly. “What have you been doing? Arranging your travel to England?”

“No, I went to church and read.”

“How very worthy.”

“Gizella took me to the Matthias Church. It’s very beautiful. You should come next time.”

If he noticed that I was talking as if there would be a next time, he gave no sign, merely eased his shoulder off the door and said, “I don’t go to church.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe in God.”

My breath caught painfully. Not, I confess, through fear for his immortal soul, but because of the marriage vows he’d made before God. For an instant, something flickered in his eyes; it might have been his own pain, or regret, or even shame. But it vanished almost instantly.

“Is that a revolutionary principle?” I enquired.

“A personal one. I came to escort you to dinner. If you wish it.”

“Thank you.” I took a deep breath. “Zsigmund, I don’t want to quarrel with you.”

“Yes, you do. What’s changed?”

“Nothing,” I replied, steadily meeting his searching gaze.

“I think Gizella spoke to you. I asked her to.”

“I know. I don’t think she was sure what she was supposed to say.”

His lips quirked, the faintest of smiles that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Well, I’m glad that even so, she has more influence with you than I do... Or does she?” He looked beyond me, scanning the room, and then his gaze fixed.

I followed it to the bed, under which the corner of the little trunk peeked out.
Damn...

His lips twisted. “Pity? Oh no, Caroline, don’t forgive me from pity. I’d rather you stayed angry and hurled more accusations of vile venality.”

“Do you
want
me to leave?” I demanded.
Don’t say yes, please don’t say yes...

“No,” he said, taking my hand with heavy deliberation and threading it through his arm. “I want you to stay and pay my gambling debts, repair my house, and fill it with expensive servants and knickknacks, and pay for land improvements in Orosháva. Dinner will be getting cold.”

With a deluge of relief, I didn’t believe him. He was doing what he’d done in Lescloches, tried to make me believe the worst of him, just to see if it would scare me off. Of course there was more to his feeling for me than money. Nothing was ever that simple, was it?

God, I was giving myself hope again, because what I’d read this afternoon had appalled me to the stage that I couldn’t abandon him, even for my own pride and sanity. I wanted to help him. I wanted to hope that he could love me as we grew closer. I’d promised him for better or worse, as he had promised me.

We left the bedroom and he closed the door with a decided click before he paused to smile dazzlingly into my eyes. My bones melted.

“Just joking,” he said. “I have no gambling debts. Yet. In fact, I keep winning. I used the money to buy you passage to England. It seemed the least I could do.”

The blood drained from my face so fast that I stumbled. He didn’t appear to notice. “I see,” I said hoarsely. “It isn’t a matter of my forgiving you, is it? But of you forgiving me. And you don’t. What a shame. Perhaps you’ll be so good as to have a bed set up in your dressing room until I go. I believe I can manage the stairs unaided.”

I didn’t look at him as I descended. I couldn’t. In fact, I could barely see where I was placing my feet. This was where my new understanding and sympathy had brought me. Whatever my intentions, the situation between us seemed only to get worse.

****

B
efore I retired for the night, I tried to write some letters to family and friends, but what could I say?
Further to my sudden marriage, you were quite right. I didn’t know him, and it has all turned out to be a horrible mistake. I shall be home very soon. Please don’t humiliate me further by discussing this with anyone.
Hardly.

In the end, I wrote several short letters, mostly asking after the recipients, and describing the journey from France to Buda-Pest and my brief stay with Guin. I gave a little information about the city, but not much that was personal, keeping everything humorous so that no one would notice the omissions and would just believe that I was happy. To Barbara, who could probably sniff out emotion from the paper and ink, I added that she would have a field day in this house since it was most probably haunted, at least by past tragedies if by nothing more supernatural.