“I never even got a chance to say goodbye properly,” I confess. “I meant to return for a full farewell, once I secured my position here. But the lady did not grant me leave.”
“’Course she didn’t,” Krisztina mutters sourly, her face tightening. “She thinks you’re hers now, like as not. Bought and paid for. You’re lucky she didn’t make you chop off all that pretty hair.”
“Chop off my hair?” I exclaim, brow wrinkling with confusion. “Why would she do that?”
“It’s one of her ladyship’s most favored punishments,” old Katalin croaks from the shadows. I’d marked her for her unusual age; most scullery maids advance to higher stations or succumb to illness caused by backbreaking toil long before they reach such years. Her pallet is the farthest from the door, so distant from the spare light that filters in that she may as well be living with the earthworms. The tiny spiders down here are so plentiful and persistent she doesn’t even bother to clear the cobwebs that gather in her corner, where the low ceiling slopes right above her nose. I can see them shifting with her breath as she speaks, their strands glimmering in the candlelight. The sight of them so close to her face makes the hair on my neck prickle with revulsion. “Vex her when she’s feeling a bit tetchy? Or maybe her breakfast’s sitting wrong when you cross her path? Off with your hair, little besom!”
She cackles so wildly I shoot Ilona a disconcerted look. She shrugs at me, rolling her eyes minutely as if to tell me to pay the old woman no mind.
“Sometimes she does it just because she’s jealous, I reckon,” Krisztina adds, lowering her voice. “It’s taken me ages to grow mine back. She had it cut the first day she clapped eyes on me. It’d be distracting for the castle’s men-folk, she said.” She snorts again, shaking her head. “More like, it pricked her right in her envious eye. Now I keep it braided and wound so tight under my cap that it looks shorn.”
“Surely she wouldn’t do such a thing for no good reason,” I say cautiously, taken aback by how scathingly they speak of the lady that puts a roof over their heads. And I consider the stable boy’s advances; maybe the countess has all our best interests at heart, and they are simply fortunate enough not to know it. “I’ve seen her be very kind.”
“Kind?!” Krisztina hisses, eyes widening with disbelief as she leans closer to me. “You must be mad, or jesting. That snake wouldn’t know the milk of kindness if it bit her on her narrow arse. I had a friend that worked here, as the lady’s seamstress. The nimblest fingers on her that you ever did see. But she didn’t sew fast enough for the ladyship’s liking—so the bloody bitch made her stitch her own fingers together as punishment. Can you imagine?”
My eyes dart to Ilona’s, wide with disbelief. “Surely not. That’s—that is mad.”
“We could hear her pitiful caterwauling all the way down here, pet,” Katalin drones. “You couldn’t mistake the clamor for aught but agony.”
“Was Lord Nadasdy here when it happened, by any chance?” I ask, another vile possibility occurring to me. I still remember the force with which he grabbed the countess’s wrist in the carriage on their wedding day, the look of implacable command in his eyes, barely restrained ferocity. What these women think to be the lady’s cruelty may very well be her husband’s doing, masquerading as her own.
Krisztina squinches up her freckled face in thought. “Far as I know, the lord’s away at war more often than not, but he comes home for visits, so he may have been? Why?”
“He doesn’t seem like a . . . kindhearted man,” I offer warily, reluctant to antagonize her. “I’m only wondering if these punishments might be at his bidding.”
“It’s possible, sure,” she concedes with a spindly shrug, pulling a dubious face. “Makes little enough difference, if you ask me. If she’s the one carrying them out.”
“And what if the lady has no choice in the matter?” I forge ahead, suddenly vehement, heedless of what Krisztina might think of me. “My father—he’s dead now, but he wasn’t a good man. My mother, sister, and I, we did everything we could to dodge his ire, and still we rarely managed to avoid his blows. It can turn you hateful, living like that. I wonder if such is the lady’s lot as well.”
Krisztina appraises me quietly, her shrewd green gaze shifting between my eyes. “You’ve a tender heart, chickadee,” she concludes, squeezing my shoulder. “You don’t look it, not with those cold eyes, but I see you do. Mayhap it makes you more willing to trust than you should be. But I’ll say this much—you weren’t there when she made Marta stitch her own skin.”
“And were you there?” I demand. “I mean, did you see it for yourself?”
She pauses, chewing on the inside of her lip. “Marta was gone before the morning,” she admits finally. “But I heard it from Judit, one of the lady’s own chambermaids. She’s a cousin—the reason I found work here in the first place.”
“And is Judit so honest?” I drill down, thinking of the countess’s smug triptych of maids, their poncey little faces. I remember the lady calling her chambermaids baby vipers when we first met. “Is she kind?”
“No,” Ilona chimes in softly, looking so tormented that I wonder what those uppity prigs have done to her. “Not always.”
“Well, then.” I lean back a little, vindicated, crossing my legs under my nightgown to warm them beneath my behind. “We have no idea what really happens behind her doors, do we?”
“I suppose we don’t,” Krisztina concedes shortly, with a jittery little shudder. “But I know what I’ve heard. And I’ve no wish to witness her ghoulish work firsthand.”
She rises from my pallet, flicking me a small smile to let me know there’s no ill will between us, then rejoins her chattering flock. Ilona resumes brushing my hair, then plaits it loosely for me. “There,” she says, her little voice so low it’s barely more than a whisper. “This way it won’t tug on you while you sleep, give you nightmares. You need proper rest.”
Her kindness draws tears to my eyes for the second time today. I need to watch myself, lest I become a fretful ninny weeping at every passing breeze, but I can’t help but be moved. Something in her sweet, self-effacing manner puts me in mind of Klara, though they look nothing alike and Ilona is much closer to my age.
“Thank you,” I say, impulsively brushing a light kiss over her cheek. “You’ve made me feel at home. I won’t soon forget it.”
“Oh, it was no trouble!” she responds, looking so star-struck I finally understand—she’s beguiled by my face, as if it somehow elevates me to a much higher station than the one to which I was born. “I was—I was glad to do it. May your dreams be sweet, Anna.”
I doubt they will be, I think as I settle onto my creaking pallet. I can still hear the others gossiping about the countess, spinning tall tales of her depravities. It seems she slapped one girl so hard her cheekbone cracked, forced another to play the lute until her fingers bled, had a third mercilessly lashed for breaking a plate. I listen because I cannot help but hear, but I do not believe a word. From the sound of it, our mistress simply does not countenance sloth or clumsiness, and I can find no fault with that.