I must show her what it is to be gently loved. To be treated with tenderness and care as she deserves.
I must be soft with her even when she acts out, when she channels the echo of her husband’s brute violence through the conduit of her own misdeeds. It is like my brothers, who learned their wildness at my father’s knee—only worse, because while they merely watched his blows rain down on me, Klara, and our mother, Elizabeth suffers Ferenc’s assaults herself. His cruelty seeps below her skin and festers there until the only way she knows to rid herself of it is to lance it open—by slicing into someone else.
But there is another way out, through gentleness. And I will guide her to it.
The strength of my assurance calms me, and I hum my mother’s favorite folk songs to her as I dab her crusted lip with water, apply the healing salve to her cheek. I’ve asked Margareta to fetch me ice from the cool house, and when she brings it I crush it with a mallet and wrap it in linen, then press it to Elizabeth’s face.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” she sighs, slumping against me. “So much better already. What a miracle you are, my little sage. Such a comfort in the bleakest times.”
Once I’ve cleaned and poulticed her, I tip lukewarm broth between her lips, followed by a citron tonic designed to heal her from within. She does everything I tell her, pliable as a child. “Will you hold me?” she whispers, curling onto her side. “I am so damnably cold, Anna.”
“Of course,” I whisper back through trembling lips as I slide under the covers and clasp my body around hers, cupping her in my warmth as Klara used to do to me.
“Could you stay while I sleep?” she murmurs faintly, nestling closer against me. I rest my chin on her shoulder and tip my forehead into her hair, which still smells faintly of her fine soap, plumeria and musk. “No one has ever taken such good care of me as you.”
“You know that I will,” I murmur back, tightening my arm around her waist. She reaches down to thread her icy hand through mine. Though the circumstances are dire, I cannot deny the searing thrill of being chosen to be so close to her, to give her what comfort I am able. “As long as you need me.”
“How fortunate am I,” she whispers, even as she begins slipping into sleep. “To have you by my side.”
It takes over a fortnight to bring Elizabeth back to her feet. But I persevere, keeping up her strength with a steady stream of porridge and broth, tending to her face every few hours. Nursing her, at what feels a creeping pace, steadily back to health.
And holding her as she sleeps. By the time she is ready to rise, I feel that my body has been turned to clay and bonded to hers, remolded to fit the contours of her silhouette.
“Let us have air!” Elizabeth demands as she dashes to the window in her nightgown and flings it open, though I see she will still not risk her skin by drawing the heavy damask curtains. They hang before the window like limp tongues, thwarting most of the breeze. Desperate as I am for fresh air and sunshine after two weeks of dismal torpor, I am so grateful to find her face unscarred by her ordeal that I do not have the heart to press her. “And merriment, and play! I feel as though I have been disinterred from an early grave—rescued by your own fair hand, Anna.” She turns to cast an elated smile at me over her shoulder. “And I intend to make the very most of my freedom!”
“Perhaps we start with a bath,” I interrupt mildly. “You should not overtax yourself, Elizabeth. Your body is still on the mend.”
“Hang my body, and any leftover weakness it may yet harbor!” she says cheerfully. “I feel quite myself again, all thanks to you. And I wish to celebrate!”
Still, I have Judit draw her a bath to wash off the sweat from her confinement. True to her word, she fairly frolics in it, splashing around and dipping beneath the surface like an otter. Giddily exuberant now that she is hale again.
“I wish you could join me.” She pouts, settling down into the steaming heat. The water in the tub grows so still it offers wavering replicas of the candelabras I’ve lit for her, down to the flickering points of their flames. I can even see the rippling path her breath takes when it skates across the surface. “It seems I’ve become accustomed to having you always with me.”
She dips lower, until her mouth is submerged, then her nose. Finally only her eyes remain above the surface, candlelight reflecting like diffuse pearls within them.
“I doubt there would be room for the both of us,” I demur, though my skin tingles at the thought of our legs entwined, the soapy length of her limbs silken against mine. It unsettles me, tips me off balance, how easily I can imagine the sensation. The thought of it brings an unfamiliar pulse to life at my very center, a sweetly aching throb. “Maybe once we procure you a larger tub.”
Both sets of her gleaming eyes, the true and the reflected, watch me unblinking. “Fine,” she grouses playfully, breaching the water. “But fetch my book, then, the Balassi. And come sit behind me.”
I drop the book into her damp hands, and she reads her favorite poems to me aloud while I reach around her, between stanzas, to tip a goblet of herbed white wine to her lips.
“‘Precious fortress, fastness dearest,’” she recites, a smile spreading like a sunrise in her voice. “Listen, Anna—it is as if Balassi’s Julia was to him just as you are to me. ‘Crimson rose of perfume rarest, violet daintiest and fairest, long be the life thou, Julia, bearest!’”
I tip my temple against hers. “You flatter me, Elizabeth. I am no dainty flower.”
“If anything, it doesn’t do you justice. Perhaps I will take up a quill and write one of my own. An ode to my steadfast sage, loyal above all others.” She tips her head back and forth, considering. “Though you are neither violet nor rose. Both are entirely too common, when you are something far more elegant and rare.”
“Marigold, maybe, or snakeroot,” I suggest, my cheeks simmering with heat. “Something meant to heal rather than please the eye.”
“But why not both?” she asks breathlessly. The water sloshes as she squirms around in the tub, coming face-to-face with me. The lighthearted humor between us dissipates, and something smokier, more dangerous, wreathes up to take its place. “You certainly do heal as though your touch were magic. But you know full well that you are also very pleasing to the eye.”
Before I can utter a word she reaches out, trails wet fingers over my cheek with agonizing languor. When I do not shy back, her fingertips sink lower, down my chin, over the curve of my throat and the sharp jut of my collarbones, creeping beneath my work dress’s neckline. Scoring me lightly with her long nails. Everywhere she touches bursts into stippled goose bumps until my skin feels as though it surges from within, lit by the heat of my own blood.
While I kneel as if hypnotized, barely able to spur my lungs into breath, she curls her fingers around the hem and tugs me forward—until I’m so close her dark eyes blur into one, her breath rushing sweet over my lips.
“Elizabeth,” I manage to half gasp. My heart gallops as though it might buck straight through my chest, pulverize my ribs. “What . . . This isn’t . . .”
“Be quiet, Anna,” she murmurs in a throaty whisper, forbidden and enticing as a crossroads promise. Her other hand rises from the water, dripping, and snakes through my hair to cup my nape. She grips me so tightly it nearly hurts, yet I would have happily died before I ever thought to pull away.