Read Online Garden of Venus by Eva Stachniak - Free Book Online

dagger.
    ‘Don’t be shy, my precious,’ the Princess says.
    Sophie raises her eyes. There is a flash of defiance, though she is trying to disguise it.
    ‘My name is Sophie,’ she says. ‘It means wisdom.’
    She watches how, with one gesture of dismissal, her mother is made to leave the room, the purse of gold cekins in her hands. How she takes one more look at her daughter, a look of such pain and despair that Sophie wants to run toward her and throw her hands around her neck. ‘I’ve failed you after all,’ Mana’s eyes say. ‘I have not kept you from danger. Forgive me.’
    The doors close after her, silently, like the doors of a tomb.
Rosalia
    Only a week had passed, even if the memory of the journey seemed already faded and oddly remote, as if whole weeks separated them from the grimy inns and the jostling carriage.
    In the first days of October, morning took a long time to arrive. With curtains drawn, the only light in the grand salon was a votive lamp underneath the icon of St Nicholas. In the twilight, the red reflections on the Saint’s bearded face made the holy image waver and float.
    The countess was awake already. She tried to lift herself up, but the task was too strenuous and she fell back on the pillow.
    ‘Don’t look at me, Rosalia,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to remember me like that.’
    Blood stained her clothes, seeped through the sheets, the blankets. They should be soaked in cold water right away. The mattress would have to be burned. The maids have to stop gossiping in the kitchen and clean more carefully. Rosalia could see the patches missed by the duster, the trails of neglect.
One cannot rejoice at this constant lowering of your station in life
, Aunt Antonia had written, hinting once again at the
disastrous but perhaps foreseeable consequences
of her father’s Jacobin dreams, the true cause of all her misfortunes. She herself was far from supporting tyranny or injustice, but all this talk of freeing the serfs or making Poland a republic frightened her. Like everything else in life, equality too had its limits.
Your place is here
, her letters to Rosalia invariably ended,
at my side
.
    An operation would take place right in this room. A mattress could go on a table. She did warn Frau Kohl that one might be needed at short notice. A fairly big one, with sturdy legs.
    Since their arrival in Berlin, breakfast meant a fewmorsels of bread dipped in red wine to strengthen blood and on a better morning a few sips of consommé the cook prepared fresh every day. Dr Bolecki always came around ten o’clock and, after a short examination of the countess, insisted that Rosalia escorted him downstairs. This was the only time, he said, they could exchange their observations about the patient, only they never did.
    On the first day Dr Bolecki told her that his father had fought in the Kosciuszko Insurrection; that he, Dr Bolecki, trained in Paris, thanks to Napoleon’s insatiable need for army surgeons; and that the French doctor who was coming from Paris could amputate a limb in under two minutes. On the following day she learned that Dr Bolecki’s beloved wife died of consumption and his only daughter was a Carmelite nun, in Rome. He had to take her there himself, in January last year. On a day so cold that he couldn’t stop thinking of Napoleon’s Russian campaign. ‘Was it really that terrible?’ Rosalia asked, out of politeness. ‘I mean the campaign,’ she added quickly lest he thought she was prying into his life. He hesitated for a moment, and said that the most eerie was the silence before the Moscow fires started. ‘A void,’ he said, ‘awaiting human screams.’ Of the march back he refused to speak at all. ‘It’s better for you not to know,’ he said. But then, even though Rosalia did not insist on returning to the subject, he added that death from cold was kind. ‘The worst,’ he said, ‘always comes from a human hand.’
    ‘I think him very pleasant,’