He tilts his head to the side, knuckling a stray lock out of his eyes. “Will I what, bee?”
“Will you still wish to be friends as we are now, even if—if my answer is no?”
Peter sets his jaw, but not before I see the pain skate across his face. It will grieve him sorely to lose me, the prospect of our lives together, I realize. “Of course, always. No matter what you choose to do, you have me, as a fast friend if not a husband. Promise me that you’ll never doubt as much.”
The relief is tremendous, though I should have known he would stand beside me, stalwart as an oak, keeping me safe in his steady shade. It’s not in his fine heart to abandon me only because I cannot give him exactly what he wants. Impulsively, I bring our joined hands to my lips and press a kiss to his knuckles. “I’m the midwife’s daughter, aren’t I? Privy to women’s mysteries. And you know what that means, don’t you?”
“I am only a man,” he teases back. “So why don’t you enlighten me?”
I allow myself to smile at him fully, without reservation. “It means that I know better than to doubt you.”
Chapter Four
The Web and the Tomb
On the way home, I tread through a spider’s web.
One moment, the air is brisk and pleasant over my face. The next I’m gasping with revulsion, my skin alive and crawling as I pick sticky filaments out of my lips and hair. It’s all over me, trailing down my arms and bosom, dangling to my ankles. Some of it has even gotten in my mouth, and my gorge rises until I spit by the side of the path, over and over, to clear out the foul tack of it. When I straighten, still lurching with nausea, I survey the branches. But even the closest boughs are far enough above my head that I can’t fathom how large the cobweb must have been, to drape all across the path and trap me within it.
Eventually I give up searching and strike down the path again, though my innards still quail. Disturbing a spider’s home is another forerunner of evil.
When I reach the cottage, before I even set foot across the threshold, I know—something is badly wrong. The air itself seems muffled and dense. The crudely hewn stones that form our cottage walls, remnants of a more prosperous time, suddenly seem heavy and foreboding as a tomb. And that is when it hits me; this rampant silence, the utter absence of sound, as if all the birds around our home have choked on their own breath. This silence is wrong, too abundant and unbroken. I don’t hear my mother’s humming, and my mother always hums when she works if she does not sing aloud. The boys’ cries aren’t splitting the air, and I don’t hear Klara’s sweet, warbling tones. Even Zsuzsi’s fussy yowl is lacking.
My heart shudders to panicked life. I fling the door open and spill into the front room—where what look like waxen effigies of my family have gathered around my parents’ bed.
The sight of their stillness is so uncanny it roots me where I stand, desiccating my throat and bolting me to the packed-earth floor. My mother sits on the straw tick mattress, her hands upturned in her lap like small dead animals, limp and useless, fingers feebly curled. My brothers and sister kneel by her feet, huge-eyed and vacant in expression. Zsuzsi sits curled awkwardly on my sister’s knees; she pets the kitten with mindless, spasmodic strokes. For a moment none of them acknowledge me, and it’s as if I’ve stepped through a fairy circle and encountered the changeling versions of my own family, clay-faced mimics with dead eyes.
Gooseflesh erupts all up and down my arms, and I stand like a stone, too afraid to speak.
Then my mother stirs and breaks the spell.
“Anna,” she says, vaguely petting the space next to her. Her voice is hoarse and rasping, as if she hasn’t spoken in weeks. “Come sit with me, would you.”
The twins shuffle over to make room for me as I pass, so uncharacteristically compliant I gape down at them. Klara reaches up to stroke my calf, letting out a muffled little whimper of distress. Perversely, it comforts me, a welcome contrast to this otherwise suffocating silence.
I lower myself cautiously down next to my mother, taking her hands into my lap.
“What’s happened?” I ask when she raises wide eyes to me, glassy with tears like a fancy doll’s, the pupils so wide they blacken her vivid irises into nothing. Panic bucks inside me again, and I think of tattered webs and skeletons huddled in nests. When she dips her head, silent, I suppress a wild urge to take her by the shoulders and give her a solid shake. “Mama, what is wrong, tell me!”
“Your father,” she says almost dreamily, her eyes flitting over my shoulder as if she sees something in the shadows beyond the dangling strings of peppers and herbs strung from our buckling rafters. “He is dead.”
Dead. Father, dead.
The reality, the truth of it, collides into me as though I’ve run into a tree trunk and knocked the wind straight out of myself. Though he lived only this morning, I abruptly know it’s true as I know the lines of my own face, and I feel a terrible sear of relief that we will no longer suffer his rages, the daily squalls of his temper. Then I am overcome by a conviction, like the opposite of foreboding, that precisely this was fated to pass. The entirety of this day has somehow conspired to warn me, from the death nest with its six skeletons to the spider’s web, as if I could have forestalled all of this somehow. But it’s only in hindsight that I see the signs for what they were—portents strung together by some powerful hand, leading me onward to this very moment.
I cross myself by rote, with trembling fingers. While I do not think God bothers with our pleas, I believe in the devil’s work. And right now, it feels dreadfully close at hand.
“H-how?” I ask hoarsely.
“He was shodding a horse for a passing traveler,” she says, a corner of her mouth twitching to the side as if yanked. “The horse was skittish, took a fright and kicked him. It—it crushed his skull. Struck him square in the face, burst out his eyes like jellies, it was—”
“But why?” I ask hastily, before she can describe more of the grotesquery in front of my siblings. Klara has already clapped a hand to her mouth, her eyes huge and welling above it. “Father is not—was not—a farrier. Why did he not send the man to Antal?”
“I don’t know,” she replies, just above a whisper. “Maybe the man did not wish to wait, and Istvan thought it easy coin? Andras had come home to fetch their lunch, and when he returned to the smithy . . . it was already done. The traveler stayed only long enough to tell him what had befallen Istvan, he did not even . . .” She heaves a shuddering sigh, her face collapsing like a sinkhole into grief and helpless fury. “He did not even see Andras home, though my boy could barely stand when he rushed back to fetch me!”
I look to my oldest brother, clammy-faced with a tinge of green under his eyes. Normally he would mock me for it, but he does not squirm away when I reach out and sweep his damp hair from his face as I did when he was only a babe. Instead he leans into my touch, his lips trembling. “Was it . . .” A black, terrible suspicion crawls up my throat like a spider, threatening to choke me. “Was it Janos, Andras? The man from this morning? Was it his horse that Father shod?”
Andras shakes his head, his hand rising to hover in front of his mouth. He fidgets with his bottom lip, and for a moment I wonder if he will suck his grubby thumb as he did for so many years, so long that he misaligned his two front teeth. “No,” he says, adamant, with a firm shake of his head. “This was a different man. Tall but scrawny, with a strange face.” His own screws up with bemusement, a tinge of revulsion. “Almost pretty. Like a lady’s, but not.”