Read Online The Countess by Rebecca Johns - Free Book Online

remained unmarried, a virgin still and beholden to no man.
    Instead I waited until my mother released me, kissed my brow, and sent me out again. Afterward I ran out of the house to the stables, clambering up to hide in the hayloft with a book, staying thereso long that I fell asleep and forgot to eat my evening meal, but it was the only place where I would not have to hear the name Ferenc Nádasdy, or think of the life that was lying in wait for me.

7

    My mother had seen to my formal education from an early age, bringing the best instructors from the school on her first husband’s estate to stay with us. With our brother, my sisters and I learned to read the works of Herodotus, of Thomas Aquinas, of Paracelsus, learned the formal inflections of Hungarian, German, Greek, and Latin at the knees of our tutor, Leopold, a stern and ugly German who was fond of beating his young charges with a green willow stick, leaving a pattern of narrow red welts on our buttocks and the backs of our legs if we didn’t recite our lessons swiftly enough or in their proper order—a punishment our parents put a stop to when they learned of it, but not until I had at least three times felt the sting of Leopold’s whip.
    I was not a good student at first, so easily distracted by little things—a swallow that flew down the chimney into the house, or my father’s hunting dogs birthing a litter of pups, or the first breaking of the sun on a cloudy day—that it was no surprise I didn’t enjoy my studies. Whenever Leopold would turn his back, I would run to the stables and take my pony for a ride or hide in a corner of the kitchen, on top of the place where the linens were stored, to take an afternoon nap. Later, when I could read and write more easily, when I learned that the books I had been reluctant to open contained an escape so true, so complete that not even the tutor could prevent me from flying beyond the walls of the house, I began to appreciate what he was trying to teach me. I read—I read by firelight, by candlelight.I read in the stables and at the table at supper, read science and astronomy, especially the works of Copernicus and the treatises of Tycho Brahe, about the order and movements of the heavens. My mother, before she was a widow, used to say I would ruin my eyes with so much reading. “You will develop a squint,” she would say, kneeling down to take the volume out of my hands and set it aside. “What will you do then? No man will have you.” This idea gave me pause for some little bit of time until I realized that she was teasing me and that she herself had read every book I put my hand on. Then she would laugh and give me the book back again.
    After my father’s death, my mother began a new instruction for me, lessons on the duties and arts of a wife that seemed often to me to be more about her own heart than mine. “Your husband will desire you,” she told me, “and you must take care to keep his desire from being ever fully satisfied. Never make yourself too available to him, but always hold yourself back a little. Never tell him all the secrets of your heart, for then you will be in his power, rather than he in yours.” This last was said with a little smile.
    I wondered at her words, if this indeed was the philosophy of love by which she had ensnared not only one but three husbands, and I began to feel a measure of pity for my poor father, whose mind and body had been in thrall to the fierce charms of this woman, my mother.
    She taught me about my monthlies, how they would come and go with the cycles of the moon until I was married and took my new husband into my bed and opened myself to him. Then I would be able to expect a child. When I gave him a son, my husband would value me above all the land in the kingdom. You will be his greatest treasure, she said, and cupped my chin in her soft hand, and for a long time I believed it.
    Each day after she was done with my instruction, my mother would allow me to