“I’m sure you do; but for what you did to Katie, Lázár, I’ll kill you first!”
Another leg was hacked off, and another, just as the door opened and our landlady stuck her amiable head into the room and screamed.
“Fetch help,” I cried to her. “Fetch the soldiers!”
Lajos was laughing breathlessly. “Katie, we are soldiers,” he said, leaping for safety over the sofa. Avenheim followed him, crashing the sofa on to its back as he went. The whole scene was insane; it would have been hilarious had it not been for the deadly blood-lust in the Colonel’s eyes.
I could only think wildly how unfair it would be if Lajos were to be killed like this, for nothing. Angry now, I followed them, catching Avenheim by the arm — just as he hacked off the whole back of Lajos’s chair.
“Colonel, stop it! What do you imagine he has done to me?”
His answer was a cry of pain and rage as he shook me off and went after Lajos. I tried to explain, to bring him back to reality, but he was beyond understanding or even listening. In no time, it seemed, he had backed Lajos into the corner and raised his sword to strike. I looked desperately around for a weapon, and seized the first thing that came to hand. It happened to be a vase of flowers — thoughtfully provided by my landlady to welcome Lajos back. I advanced purposefully, just as the door flew open and the landlady and Petöfi fell precipitately into the room, and Lajos, an expression of resignation on his face, hit the distracted Avenheim over the head with the wooden seat of his chair.
There was an instant of total silence. Then the sword fell out of Avenheim’s hand and he slid easily to the floor. Lajos met my gaze.
“For the Colonel?” he enquired breathlessly, indicating the vase in my hands. “How useful — we can use the water to bring him round. Don’t you ever knock, Petöfi?”
“Ungrateful lout,” said the poet without heat. He still looked rather pale and ill. “You wouldn’t have heard me if I had knocked. What on Earth are you doing? Besides not welcoming me back.”
“Oh, fighting the good fight,” said Lajos vaguely. “Madame, I’m sorry about the chair. I’ll pay for it, of course.” He had stepped over the recumbent Austrian, and now, under my fascinated eyes, he and Petöfi were setting the sofa back on its feet. Then Lajos walked towards me and took the vase out of my still hands, replacing it firmly on the table.
I swallowed. “I thought we were to bring him round with the water?”
“There is no hurry,” Lajos said, looking significantly at the landlady, who gulped twice and fled. He turned his repelling gaze next upon Petöfi, but his friend, immune to it, threw himself on to the sofa.
“Not I,” he said resolutely. “I want to know what’s going on.”
“So,” Lajos said, “do I. Katie, why should the good Colonel feel so obliged suddenly to spill my blood?”
“He wanted to marry me once. I turned him down at Szelényi. You were in Buda-Pest at the time.”
“I thought so.” He sighed. “Ah well, so much for friendship with the enemy. Where’s that vase?”
“Hold on,” Petöfi interrupted. “I don’t see what right the fellow has to try and kill you just because Katie preferred to marry you rather than him.”
“Haven’t you worked it out, Petöfi?”
Petöfi stared.
“I am not married to anyone,” I said calmly.
“The Colonel chose to take moral exception,” Lajos added.
“I don’t blame him,” said Petöfi frankly. “It’s none of my business, Lajos, but Katie deserves better than that.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I couldn’t have better. I came to Lajos for protection and that is what he has given me, that is why he pretended to be my husband. But I love him, and I shall stay with him, whatever anyone thinks.”
Calmly, I picked the flowers out of the vase and lifted it, moving towards the prone figure on the floor.
“I’m not sure either that you deserve her,” Petöfi remarked.
“I don’t,” Lajos said, and I heard the smile in his voice. “But I shall keep her just the same.”
I knelt by the Colonel, picking up the fallen sword and handing it to Lajos who stood looking down at me enigmatically. After a moment, I dipped my hand in the vase and splashed the water on Avenheim’s face. He groaned, so I repeated the process and his eyes opened. They focused on mine, bewildered. I waited until intelligence — and anger — began to show in them, and then I spoke.
“Before we go any further, Colonel, you should understand that I am here willingly, through my own choice. It was I who came to Lajos in my trouble, and to protect me he agreed to pretend we were married. But I have never been happier in my life, and if you think Lajos should die for making me happy, then I suggest you are given other lodgings. On the other hand, if you accept that our lives are our own business, then I am delighted to see you again.”
The deliberate, matter-of-fact calmness of my voice seemed to have an effect. The unnatural fury began to fade from his face. He stirred.
“That is quite a speech,” he said, struggling to sit up. I helped him. As he looked at me the bitterness began to die out of his eyes, leaving only a sadness which I recognized all to easily. Then his eyes were veiled by a kind of rueful amusement that I thought was not all pretence. “I believe I should stay somewhere else, but to be honest, Lázár, you’re fiendishly heavy-handed. My head is splitting.”
Without a word, Lajos examined the cut; and suddenly I heard Petöfi laugh.
“Oh God, I’m leaving this madhouse!” he said, springing to his feet. “Lajos, good luck. Katie, I salute you! And sir — whoever you are — I shall really take it amiss if you put a period to my friend’s life. I should be confoundedly dull without him.”
“A masterly exit,” Lajos approved, as the door closed behind the poet who, I remembered irrelevantly, had once been an actor.
“Who is the puppy?” Avenheim demanded.
“Sándor Petöfi.”
“That bloodthirsty, Jacobin scribbler?”
“You,” said Lajos, “are too free with your criticisms, especially when you are at my mercy. Katie, can you find some fresh water?”
* * * *
We left the still bemused Colonel von Avenheim behind us in Beszterce a few days later, and travelled southwards.
Petöfi caught up with us again at Kolozsvár, breezing into our lodgings one evening and looking much more his old self than he had at Beszterce. On the other hand, he was wearing civilian clothes, his eyes were glittering and his movements were restless with dissatisfaction. Dropping into the rather rickety chair I offered him, he thrust a piece of paper under Lajos’s nose.
“Here, read this,” he commanded. Lajos took the paper, quickly perusing it. I saw amusement tug at his lips and demanded to know what it was.
“I suspect,” said Lajos, “that it is Petöfi’s disrespectful reply to Mészáros’s request that he wear a necktie with his uniform.”
“Precisely,” Petöfi said approvingly, “though why I should be respectful towards that silly old windbag...!”
“He is the Minister for War,” I said with mock severity.
“Minister for neckties! I ran into him in Debrecen, and he had the gall to censure me for being improperly dressed, implying that I had no right to wear my captain’s uniform without it! Naturally, I preferred to resign my right to the uniform than bow to such tyranny.”
“You didn’t,” I said positively, but Lajos knew him better.
“He did,” he corrected me, and turned back to Petöfi. “Couldn’t you have been satisfied with this?” He waved the paper in the air till I stood up and plucked it from his fingers.
“No,” said Petöfi uncompromisingly while I read his latest poem, a withering verse called The Necktie which ridiculed Mészáros’s insistence on proper dress and ended with the lines: ‘If you have no tie, stay off the battlefield. Long live Mészáros, and long live the necktie!’
“Oh dear,” I said faintly,
and Petöfi grinned at me. Lajos balanced his hip on the arm of Petöfi’s chair, regarding his friend with a mixture of affection and irritation.
“Why do you let this sort of thing upset you? No one would have been any the wiser if you had been polite to Mészáros and still left off your tie. It makes no difference to world liberty, you know.”
“Someone has to make a stand over their nonsense!”
“At the expense of wasting your talents as a private soldier?”
“If that is what it takes. I’ve been one before, after all.”
“You’re mad,” said Lajos without emphasis. He stood up again. “Still, I’m sure it’s only a temporary demotion — Bem will return you to your old rank before you can blink.”
“I expect he will,” Petöfi said complacently, for a strange friendship had grown up between himself and the Polish General, based on Petöfi’s rather surprising but quite immovable hero-worship, and Bem’s fatherly affection.
“Still,” Lajos said thoughtfully, taking the piece of paper back from me, “it’s a very good poem.”
“I was rather pleased with it,” Petöfi said modestly, “especially the bit about Mészáros’s men running away — which they did! — but all wearing their neckties.”
“Well, let’s hope he doesn’t run into you again.”
“Amen,” said the poet devoutly.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
At the end of that month, I finally rode into Debrecen. Transylvania was quiet at last, and Bem had chosen to send Lajos with his latest despatches.
“Why you?” I had asked discontentedly.
“Apparently,” Lajos had replied thoughtfully, “because Kossuth requested it.”
I had looked at him suspiciously. “Why should Kossuth want to see you?”
“I don’t know. Shall we go and find out?”
I had been quick to pounce on the ‘we’. “You mean I may come too?” My discontent had vanished like a spring shower in sunshine. Lajos had watched me with some amusement.
“Of course. I can’t leave you here on your own, can I? Besides, I thought you might like to see your family.” His eyes had been rather guarded then. I wondered, incredibly, if he had actually imagined that they could turn me against him.
For some reason, I had expected Debrecen to resemble Buda-Pest, but I could not have been more wrong. It was just like a huge village, without pavements or street-lights or, judging by the smell, proper sewers. Many of the houses were little more than mud cottages.
As our horses slowly picked their way through streets running with mud, my mind boggled at the thought of my aristocratic relatives living in this comparative squalor, and I said so to Lajos, who only smiled faintly. His eyes were resting on a figure wading along the side of the road ahead of us.
Eventually, he called out, “Hallo! Jókai!” and the figure turned quickly, narrowly avoiding crashing into a large citizen with a ridiculously long beard. His eyes searched wildly, and when they eventually found Lajos they lit up with instant pleasure.
“Lajos!” He plunged heedlessly into the road, splashing mud everywhere, and Lajos leaned down from the saddle to shake his hand. “How are you? You look the same as ever! And Miss Katie!” He shook my hand too. “But what are you doing here?”
“Messenger-boy,” said Lajos disparagingly. “But since we have run into you, perhaps you can point us in the direction of reasonable lodgings?”
Jókai did not appear to be in the least surprised to find us together, from which I presumed that he had heard something of our situation from Petöfi. When he led us to a decent inn, I left him and Lajos alone and went up to my room, where I washed and changed into the gown I had made so badly that Lajos had laughed and taken it himself to a dressmaker in Beszterce to be remade. It now looked quite unexceptionable, and the deep wine colour I thought was quite becoming. I brushed and re-pinned my hair, and then doubtfully satisfied, I rejoined Lajos and Jókai downstairs.
“Well yes,” Jókai was saying uncomfortably. “The Society still meets, but to be honest, there isn’t much point with the war still going on. And since this trouble with Madarász...”
“What trouble is that?” I asked, sitting down beside Lajos.
“The ‘Diamond Affair’,” Jókai said contemptuously. “A chest full of jewels and money, confiscated from a traitorous nobleman called Zichy, was in Madarász’s keeping, since he is Police Minister. Now they’re accusing him of having embezzled the diamonds for his own purposes. It’s all rubbish, of course, but mud, as they say, sticks. I suppose he should have been more careful to account for everything.”
“I heard that the Peace Party was out to get rid of him,” Lajos said casually, and Jókai began to look unaccountably uncomfortable. “I heard that Pál Nyári had gone over to the Peace Party — and that you had gone with him.”
Jókai met the mild but watchful gaze of his friend rather defiantly. “Yes, I want peace. Nothing can be more damaging to the country than this kind of war and uncertainty.”
“You would go back to the old ways? After March?” Lajos’s voice was still quiet. He had never spoken of this to me before, and I still had no way of telling how he regarded Jókai’s defection.
Jókai said jerkily, “March — the April Laws — may be salvaged. We need peace more than anything, Lajos.”
“I dislike the war as much as you — more, probably. But I don’t like the idea of peace at any price either.”
“Neither do I!”
I saw Lajos’s lip quirk. “Join us tonight, if you care to, and we’ll fight it out.”
There was relief as well as pleasure in Jókai’s smile. “Of course! And now, Miss Katie, I have been asked to escort you to the Szelényi residence.”
Startled, I looked at Lajos.
“I thought you would like to go at once,” he remarked. “And I have to go to the City Hall to see Kossuth. Jókai knows where they are.”
They lived, it seemed, in a large, comfortable house. It was not quite the Szelényi Palace, but neither was it a mud hut. My heart was beating uncomfortably fast as I thanked Jókai for his escort and knocked nervously on the door.
Of course, it was a strange servant who answered, and when I asked for any of the family, he only admitted me grudgingly to the hall, enquiring my name almost as an afterthought. I didn’t know whether to be amused by his ill-manners, or outraged. In the end I just stood meekly in the hall and waited — but not for long.
I heard them before I saw them, louder than I remembered and running on the stairs faster than they should have been allowed. I began to smile, for I knew the game they were playing. They skidded almost together around the corner at the foot of the stairs, and came to an abrupt halt, staring at me.
There was a tiny moment of amazement, but I did not even have time to register my fear of rejection before Miklós roared, “Katie!” and Anna squealed, casting herself upon me with what I can only describe as glee. Miklós was not far behind her, and I realized suddenly how much and how badly I had missed them.
As a result, when I emerged from their crushing embrace and straightened, my vision was a little hazy; but then, vaguely seeing the still figure of a woman at the foot of the stairs, I quickly brushed my fingers across my eyes, and smiled uncertainly.
“Katalin.”
“Katie...?” A couple of hesitant steps and then a rush towards me, and she too was hugging me convulsively. “Dear God, Katie, where have you been? How we have missed you!” she pushed me away, crying unashamedly even while she smiled till I thought her lips would split. “And you look so well and happy, you wretch!”
“I am happy,” I said shakily. “And so glad to see you again... Oh dear, I hate emotional scenes...”
Laughter gurgled up from within her and she threw her arms round me again. “Oh I have missed you! But, Katie, is it really true that you have married Lajos Lázár?”
At that crucial moment, the slovenly servant returned, announcing reluctantly that the Countess wou
ld receive me.
“Of course she will, bubble-head!” Katalin cried indignantly. “This is our niece, and she will always be received!” With which she swept me upstairs, and I entered the Countess’s drawing-room with a laughing, chattering, wildly excited escort.
I saw at once that both Elisabeth and Margit were there, and felt a surge of relief. I had really feared that Margit might have died after that dreadful journey eastward from Buda-Pest. However, it was Elisabeth who first drew my full attention. She stood facing me, pale but erect in a heavily flounced gown of sky blue silk. She looked as calm and composed as she ever had, so it was something of a shock to hear the hesitance in her voice.
“So it is you ... I, I could not quite believe it ... Are you, are you — well?”
“I am very well,” I said gently. “Did you not get my letter?”
“Letter!” Katalin exploded, with her first sign of anger against me. “A pathetic, distant little note!”
“I’m sorry,” I said ruefully. “I didn’t really know what to say — or what you would want to hear.” I looked at Elisabeth. “To be honest, I didn’t know if you would be prepared to receive me.”
“We be prepared to receive you?”There was a rare flash of honest feeling in Elisabeth’s voice and in her suddenly flushed face. “Dear God, Katie, we pushed you into the road in a strange country on a freezing cold night and lost you! Is it not you who should hate us?”
“No,” I said, distressed. “No.”
“It was István,” Katalin reminded everyone, “who pushed her into the road. It was ages, Katie before we could even make him listen to us, and then we could not find you, though we scoured the road over and over till morning...”
“I know. I bumped my head when I fell — I don’t know how long I lay unconscious; and then I stumbled around blindly in the dark instead of standing still and waiting for you...” My eyes were on Margit, still sitting by the fire, staring at me as if stunned. Quickly, I crossed the room to her, and saw the tears streaming down her face.
“I thought you were gone. I thought you had gone too...”
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