Lajos was laughing silently beside me. Wonderingly, I gazed up at him, and in the midst of the triumphant tumult surrounding us, he threw one arm around my waist, hugging me close to his side. He didn’t speak, but I suddenly knew the depths of his relief. More than most, he had a stake in the revolution which Jelacic would have squashed. Apart from the shattering of his hopes, I realized with an echo of fear, not only his freedom but his very life had depended on the Croat defeat.
“Where are the Croats now?” he shouted to the youths who had brought the news.
“On their way home, via Austria, with Moga snapping at their heels!”
That raised another cheer. “Give us a toast, Lajos!” someone shouted, and as people’s attention, including Mattias’s, turned our way, I became uncomfortably aware of Lajos’s arm resting so warmly around my waist.
Unobtrusively, I moved away as Lajos retorted, “Can’t you think of your own toasts at a time like this?” But he snatched up his cup from the table and raised it high. “To liberty! And the confusion of tyranny everywhere!”
“Liberty!” they echoed, and, “To hell with tyranny!”
Lajos almost threw his cup down. “I’m off to see Petöfi, in case he hasn’t heard — will you come?”
“Yes,” I said at once, although I knew I shouldn’t. I excused myself with the reminder that I hadn’t yet carried out Katalin’s request.
Mattias had definitely seen my indecorous stance with Lajos by the pillar. I think he put it down correctly to understandably high spirits, but he was not entirely happy when I told him I was going with Lajos to visit friends. I was irritated, perhaps unreasonably, but it was Lajos who spoke, a challenge as well as mockery in his glinting eyes.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me to look after your niece?”
“Not this niece, no,” said Mattias bluntly.
“You can come with us if you like.”
“No thank you!” said Mattias indignantly. “I’m not getting involved in any more of your hair-brained schemes, even if the old man’s not here to pillory me for it! And if you take my advice, Katie, you won’t either!”
“It’s sound advice,” I confessed, my irritation melting away. “But I have already agreed. I’ll be home in time for dinner.”
Outside, I could feel my exhilaration growing. I didn’t care about the unwisdom of being with Lajos, only about the pleasure of his company, and my freedom to enjoy it. Escaping with him like this reminded me inevitably of the evening of the fifteenth of March, but today I was determined to shut the past out and live only in the glorious present.
“What did he mean?” Lajos interrupted my exalted thoughts. “About being pilloried by the old man on account of my schemes?”
We were walking fast, and almost without knowing it, my hand was in his arm.
“Didn’t you know? We were found out, about the trip to Nagyzseben. My grandfather almost raised the roof — in fact, I helped him. I’m surprised you didn’t hear us in the village. I was still trying to apologise to him when...” I broke off abruptly.
“When he died,” Lajos finished calmly.
“Yes.” I cast a fleeting glance up at him. “I said some awful things to him. I didn’t wish them to be the last...”
“They weren’t,” Lajos said, touching my cheek in a quick, gentle caress, causing my eyes to fly back again to his, and this time he held them. “He would have known you helped him; he heard your voice when he was dying.”
“I told him not to die.” How arrogant, and how useless.
“I think that said everything to him, don’t you?”
I smiled a little hazily. “Perhaps,” I murmured, and surreptitiously winked away a tear. For the first time, a little warmth about my grandfather’s memory was seeping into my heart.
Petöfi himself opened the door to us, and we could see at once that he had heard the news. He was exuberant and delighted to have someone else to discuss it with, to gloat with. The victory of the inferior Hungarian army largely made up of peasants defending their homeland, had made a profound impact upon his imagination.
Julia Petöfi and Jókai were discovered in the sitting-room. The talk was at first all about the victory at Pakozd. But at last Lajos looked quizzically at Jókai.
“I have hardly seen you since you came back. How was your trip with Kossuth?”
Jókai smiled and Julia explained to me, “He and some of the other youths accompanied Kossuth on his recruiting trip to the Plains — as an armed escort.”
“He didn’t need one,” Jókai said simply. “The people worshipped him everywhere he went. It was incredible, Lajos, beautiful even! He spoke, and they listened, and by the end they would have lain down and died for him at once if he had asked it. Instead, they rose up, thousands of them, to save the Fatherland. And it was his words, Lajos, which made them heroes.”
“He has been like this since he came back,” Petöfi said to Lajos. “I have tried to tell him that we have all persuaded recruits to go to the front, but he insists Kossuth’s efforts were greater and holier.”
“Jókai, Jókai, you have let him blind you,” Lajos said ruefully. “I admit Kossuth has charisma, but he is not a saint! He is not worthy of your worship.”
Jókai flushed. “My worship doesn’t matter. It is the people who worship him.”
Lajos regarded him thoughtfully and not entirely sympathetically, but before he could speak, Petöfi had changed the subject, at least partially.
“Were you at the Assembly today, Lajos? Did Kossuth blame the Court for Lamberg’s murder?”
“Yes,” Lajos said, seeing his point immediately. “He certainly didn’t try to stop our street-meetings on the strength of it. Of course, he wants the murderers found.”
“Waste of time,” said Petöfi, frowning.
“That’s what Irinyi told the Assembly — that Lamberg deserved to die, only he should have been tried and sentenced first. A mistake of form, he called it.”
I felt a flush of anger rise to my face. “In a civilized country,” I snapped, “no one is sentenced to die by being beaten and stabbed by a howling mob.”
There was a short silence as everyone turned to stare at me in surprise. Lajos stirred, as if he was about to explain to them. Then he was still and said nothing.
It was Petöfi who spoke. “The people have to learn first to be civilized. Understandably, they have no great faith in present systems of justice; they are only just learning their own power.”
“You cannot think the sort of power they exhibited yesterday should be encouraged?”
“It was wild and disorganized perhaps, but it shows they are thinking for themselves, deciding who is the enemy.”
“I saw no sign of thought whatsoever,” I retorted.
“Katie saw them drag Lamberg away,” Lajos interjected at last, and that made Petöfi pause.
“Ah. Then I understand your distress. But in such matters, we must think clearly and dispassionately. The revolution, the people; these are the important things, and to save them, to strengthen them, enemies must be rooted out.”
“Does not Lamberg count as a person?” I enquired sarcastically.
“In this case, he counts as an enemy.”
“So you would execute all these so-called enemies?” In spite of myself, I was fascinated.
Lajos said, “Blood-thirsty, isn’t he? Not so long ago, he wanted to string up the entire Cabinet, including Kossuth.”
Petöfi grinned good-naturedly, an amiability I found rather frighteningly at odds with the sentiments he had just expressed. I dragged my eyes away from him, to Lajos.
“Do you think the same way?”
“I’ve told you: I don’t like violence at all.”
“Sometimes,” Julia said unexpectedly, rising to her feet. “Just occasionally, Lajos, you talk like a sensible man.” I gathered from this remark, and Lajos’s easy response, that all misunderstandings between them were over. However, I did not have long to reflect on t
he power of Lajos’s charm, for as Julia moved past me, I realized suddenly that she was with child. When I congratulated her, she told me the baby was due in December and smiled so radiantly that for the first time in my life I felt a pang of regret about my own childlessness.
It wasn’t until we left Petöfi’s that I belatedly remembered my promise to Katalin. Guiltily, I asked Lajos if he had heard from Alex recently.
He looked slightly surprised. “I hear more of him than from him. Why?”
“Katalin is anxious,” I said. “She has had no letters since he left Szelényi.”
“Ah.” His eyes rested on my face for a moment. “Alex is well,” he said at last.
“Then could he not write to tell her so?”
“To be honest, I think he is afraid to. Matters are not hopeful in Transylvania. He believes he will have to become her people’s enemy — and as such, I don’t think he knows what to say to her.”
I frowned; yet I had imagined something of the sort. “Do you know where he is? Can you send a letter to him?”
He hesitated only the briefest moment, then: “I can try.”
I opened my reticule, and by the time I held out Katalin’s letter to him, he had stopped a fiacre in the road beside us. The letter disappeared inside his coat, and then he handed me into the carriage.
“Can I take you anywhere?” I asked easily, for somewhere in the afternoon I seemed to have lost the restraint which had been between us since March.
I saw surprise flicker and vanish in his eyes, but he said regretfully, “Thank you, no. I’m going to beg my super at Petöfi’s.”
I nodded briskly, refusing to let my silly disappointment show, but as I settled back something else struck me and I leaned forward again. “What is happening in Transylvania that I don’t know about? Are you in touch with the Romanians?”
Lajos closed me in. “I’ve been corresponding with Iancu since we left Nagyzseben,” he admitted. “Meet me tomorrow and I’ll show you his last letter.”
My breath caught. If I agreed to this, I was a fool. I would be letting it start all over again.
I swallowed. “What time?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
That was the beginning of a very strange week, during which I saw Lajos every day. In a kind of desperate dream where I had forgotten the troubles of the past and the future, I existed only for the time I spent with him.
Once, I met him in the street by accident and went with him to the Pilvax. On other evenings, I went to the coffee-house with Mattias and encountered him there. Then, Julia Petöfi invited me for tea once, and of course he was there. And once, he simply sent a servant to tell me he was waiting for me, and we drove out of the city to Rákos in the cool, autumn sunshine.
All of this was, needless to say, indiscreet in the extreme. To Lajos’s radical friends, my name very quickly and easily became coupled with his, so it was inevitable that such talk should eventually reach Mattias, who nobly attempted to remonstrate with me over my unwise friendship. Finding me alone in the drawing-room one evening before dinner, he threw himself down on the sofa beside me and said a little doubtfully, “You seem to see an awful lot of Lajos Lázár these days.”
“I suppose I do,” I said calmly.
“People are talking, you know.”
“At times like these, I imagine they have far more than me to talk about.”
“Never think it! And if István hears, you...”
“Hears what?” I interrupted, looking at him directly.
He immediately grew flustered. “Lord, Katie, it’s nought to me! I spent a whole week in company with both of you, remember? But in your position — and his — you must expect people to talk, even if it’s arrant rubbish.”
“Let them talk,” I said contemptuously.
“You won’t say that when István finds out.”
As it happened, when István found out, there was no time to say anything very much at all, but for the time being the momentous events occurring around us, as well as the relative isolation which mourning conferred upon the family, seemed to be keeping me safe from hurtful gossip.
* * * *
Somewhere inside me, I had always known that this dream-life could not last very long. And in fact, it fell apart on the night of the seventh of October. By then, of course, things were looking very bad for Hungary: Count Batthyány had resigned, and the King had dissolved the Assembly, making none other than Baron Jelacic Commander-in-Chief. Under such an insult, even I, in my cocoon of false happiness, knew that Hungary would have to fight. And yet I could think only of when next I would see Lajos, for today was the first day in more than a week that I had not done so...
I had lain awake so long that when I heard the curious yet familiar crack against my bed-chamber window, I thought it was my weary mind playing tricks on me, for it was a sound I had not heard since my first visit to Szelényi Castle last year.
I closed my eyes resolutely, but it came again, and this time I sat bolt upright in bed. My heart was thumping painfully. It’s some drunken gallant, I thought, in search of one of the maids... But I couldn’t believe that. No maid slept in a room with windows the size of mine.
Without conscious volition, I got out of bed and crossed the floor swiftly and easily, for my eyes had grown quite used to the dark during my hours of wakefulness. Somewhere, I was vaguely surprised by the unsteadiness of my hands as I drew back the heavy curtain and looked down into the street.
There was no doubt as to the identity of the motionless figure standing there, gazing straight up at me. His hands were buried deep in his pockets, holding the disreputable old greatcoat closer around his body.
I had known in my heart since I had heard the first stone strike the glass that it was Lajos. Yet now that I saw him there, I was filled with panic. I knew there had to be something wrong.
Letting the curtain fall back, I sprinted across the room, not even pausing to snatch up a dressing gown or my spectacles before I left. I flew through the darkness, running noiselessly down stairs towards the pale light which burned in the front hall, wondering desperately if he was ill or injured or even in need of rescue from the law — though surely those days were long past now...?
My hands felt clumsy on the large bolts. The front door was heavy as I drew it open. Lajos slipped through when the opening was barely more than a crack, quickly taking the handle from me and closing the door softly. Then he turned to face me in the dim light.
Sick with fear, I searched his face short-sightedly for signs of illness or distress, but all I saw there was tiredness, and perhaps a hint of excitement in his eyes. I felt a puzzled frown contract my brow.
“What is it?” I whispered. His lip quirked slightly, and he moved towards me, taking my hand in one of his while with the other he picked up the lamp, nodding towards the room on the right, where once Alex had waited for me and Katalin, and leading me there. There was a peculiar dream-like quality to this nocturnal meeting. Dazed, I watched Lajos lay the lamp down on a table and straighten, turning to face me again.
“What is it?” I repeated. “What is wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said calmly, taking my other hand and gazing down at me. “I came to say good-bye — I’m leaving at dawn.”
“Leaving?” I said stupidly. “Why, where are you going?”
But I knew before he answered. His coat had fallen open and beneath it I could see blue and gold and silver. The colours of the honvéd cavalry.
The blood sang in my ears. Lajos had always said he would fight for the revolution. I had always known that he would. Only I had not expected it to be now...
In the distance, I was aware of his voice saying, “To join Moga on the Austrian border. I’m sorry. I thought there would be more time...”
More time, more time. I had done it again, stupidly assumed that he felt as I did, when if I had troubled to think at all this last week, I would have known that he did not, could not. The feeling was all mine. Again.
&nb
sp; Lajos was saying, “It seemed the right moment: the Viennese have begun another revolution, partly in protest against the Court’s treatment of Hungary, and our army is on the way to Austria. I’ve done all I can here. The revolution can’t progress until we have made safe what we’ve won so far — and how better to do that than by helping the Viennese? Who knows? They might just keep the reactionaries out this time and save us a few battles if we can help them now.”
This time, I was determined he would not know.
Drawing my limp hands free, I said coolly, “Do you believe that?” And dared to look at him at last. His eyes were unblinkingly on mine, and I saw there a strange, sad smile.
Instead of answering me, he said, “Katie, don’t shut me out again. This is hard enough.”
And abruptly, I was ashamed. My heart was breaking, but he was going to war, where the risks were unthinkable... Desperately, I forced the fear out of my mind, allowing him to take my hands again. I even smiled, tremulously, and felt him relax as if in relief.
“You must make a very smart hussar.” My voice hardly shook at all.
“You always said I should find another tailor.” His eyes were smiling properly now as his hands slid up my arms to my shoulders. I became suddenly aware of how little I was wearing, and the breath caught in my throat for reasons quite other than fear.
He said softly, “I wonder if you know how beautiful you are like this?”
My whole body began to flush. I didn’t know if it was with embarrassment or pleasure, but I recognized the delicious ache that spread through me when his thumbs began lightly to caress my shoulders. I had thought of a clever reply, but now it flew out of my head. He moved one hand, gently pushing my loose hair back from my neck, his eyes all the while holding mine.
“Tell me the truth this time, Katie,” he murmured. “Will you not miss me, even a little?”
I miss you every moment you are away from me. I cannot bear it if you go... But I didn’t want to speak those words, and no others would come. I gazed up at him mutely. I suppose he read my answer in my eyes, while his clever, sensitive fingers were tenderly stroking the side of my neck.
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