“What...?” I began.
“Hush,” she breathed. “I think there is someone outside.”
“I’ll fetch József,” I whispered, but already it was too late. The window casement was pushed up with a quiet rush, and instinctively, Elisabeth and I drew together again. I still don’t know why one of us did not scream — paralysis seemed to have grasped us both.
A boot, a soldier’s boot, came over the sill; the blue of the honvéd cavalry danced before my eyes, and for a moment I could not quite believe it was Lajos.
CHAPTER FIFTY
I was across the room before his name had moved from my brain to my lips, and his arm was around me, wonderfully hard and real and strong, and I was clutching him as if I could never bear to let him go. For a moment all I felt was a relief so powerful that everything else was blotted out. I was dizzy with it; and then I realized that he was only holding me with one arm, and that the other was just hanging at his side. His sleeve was stained dark, even through the mud and dirt.
“Lajos?” I said fearfully.
“Scratches,” he said, but mechanically, for over my head he had seen Elisabeth; but he did not release me, only moved with me towards her. “Madame,” he said civilly.
“I suppose it is a silly question,” Elisabeth drawled, “but what is wrong with the door?”
“Nothing — at least when I last used it. I thought the window would be quicker and quieter — and unlocked. I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“While we, on the other hand, have been expecting you any time these last ten hours.” It was her usual, social voice, languid and slightly amused.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” said Lajos drily. “By ‘we’, I take it István is here too? If he is waiting to fight with me, I beg you will take him away again before he finds out I am here. I’m heartily sick of fighting.”
“You, Lajos?” she mocked. “Surely not.”
“Oh, I shan’t retire for good,” he said vaguely. His eyes had drifted down to me again for I was searching his face anxiously. It was etched with fatigue, the black shadows indistinguishable from the streaks of dirt and blood. Under the mud, I had the impression of deathly pallor, heightened by the flickering candle-light, and I couldn’t tell whether the agony I could see behind the darkness of his eyes and in the tight, drawn line of his mouth was physical or spiritual. Under my probing, frightened gaze, his face softened slightly; his lips even twitched upwards in a semblance of the old smile so that I wanted to hug him to me in pity and gladness.
“Well,” Elisabeth said drily, “I am going to bed.”
Lajos was roused to glance at her. “We should go early tomorrow — first light. Even then I suspect we shall be barely ahead of them.”
“Ahead of whom?”
He shrugged. “Cossacks. Austrians. Romanians. They’re all out there. Sleep well.”
“What a comfort you are to us all, Lajos. Good night.”
“Good night,” I said, already drawing Lajos to the sofa by the fire. I fetched him wine and the remains of our supper. He drank the wine in a convulsive gulp, but the food he barely picked at. By then I had seen the rough bandage under his hat, wound around his forehead, as bloody as the one on his arm which daunted me when I helped him out of his coat.
I forced myself to ask calmly, “How badly hurt are you?”
“My arm is pretty useless — there’s a rifle ball lodged in it somewhere. This on my head is only a shallow sabre cut, but it bled so much that I couldn’t see until I wrapped it up.” Again came that awful effort to smile. “I was lucky.”
I looked at him steadily. “Some soldiers were here. They said it was a massacre.”
“Yes.” He was staring over my head, while I knelt at his feet. “It’s the end, now. Transylvania is lost; Hungary itself is only a matter of time.”
I reached up and touched his shadowed, unshaven cheek. “And we are going to London.”
This time, the smile managed to touch his eyes. “So we are.” Then the light died again. I took the glass from his nerveless fingers, laying it on the floor beside me.
“What else, Lajos?” I said quietly. “What else happened?”
His lips parted, and closed again. There was another pause, and then he said, “Petöfi is dead.”
Not Petöfi. Surely not Petöfi too... Unthinkable that he should be no more... And yet was it not symbolic that he should die with the last hope of the revolution he had personified for so many? Was it not he who had made the first call, “Arise, Hungarians...”?
Slowly, while the disjointed, flickering thoughts spun through my head, I reached up and put my arms around Lajos’s neck.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “So very sorry.”
His sound arm held me. His bowed head was buried in my neck. This was the unkindest cut of all, and it would be open and bleeding long after the others had healed. There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do to compensate him for the loss of such a friend.
My throat ached for his grief, and they were my tears, not his — for he was beyond them then — which rolled down his face. They made him lift his head.
He said, “That is why I was so long — I was looking for him in the rout. He shouldn’t even have been there — Bem was trying to protect him, to keep him away from the battle and possible capture, but he came anyhow. I met a doctor later on who had seen him, fled with him. He told me Petöfi didn’t even have a horse. There is no way he could have escaped from there without one... The Cossacks cut him down...”
My grip tightened; then, after a pause, I asked, “Did Bem escape?”
“Yes; his luck held that far. He told me to get out of the country — I must be the only licensed deserter in Europe.” He stopped for a moment, looking at me without seeing me, then added with something cold and terrible in his voice, “I think Drényi made it, too, but Jászi is dead, and Király and any number of our men — even Zrinyi, though I had thought he was indestructible. Too many. Too many lives snuffed out... and it seems it wasn’t worth it after all.”
“Lajos, don’t think that.” The words tumbled out of me in a distressed whisper. I would grieve for the dead later, when I had time. “Please don’t ever think that...”
His hand cupped my cheek. His eyes were still fathomless, intense, but something had altered; the awful grimness had faded a little, leaving them strangely glowing.
“My Katie...” he murmured softly. “Do you know what I thought of when I was on the battlefield, when I ran from it, when I was searching for Petöfi? I thought of you being here for me when I returned.”
I swallowed, holding his hand against my face. “I can’t compensate, Lajos, but I’ll always be here...”
But he was shaking his head, almost impatiently. “No, Katie, you’re not ‘compensation’ — that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Politics, revolution, ideals — they have always taken up such a large part of my life. They were what I lived for, and the people I cared for lived for them too...”
I hadn’t expected this to be quite so painful. I hadn’t thought my heart could hurt so much and still be with him.
With desperate, hopeless honesty, I said, “I can’t care for abstracts, Lajos; I never could...”
“I don’t want you to.” He sounded surprised. His hand was behind my head now, holding me still as his eyes gazed down at my confusion, willing me to understand. “I just want you as you are. Revolutions come and go, governments rise and fall and change — we’ve seen it all in the last two years; but in the end, it is you who are still here, Katie. It’s you I want to be here, not just to come back to, but to be with me...”
I stared at him, still a little bewildered, and afraid to take him seriously.
“That’s battle fatigue,” I said with a catch in my voice. “You’ll feel differently in the morning. You know revolution is the breath of life for you.”
His fingers touched my lips. “It won’t go away,” he conceded, “and I don’t think I want it
to; but perhaps my — priorities have changed. I’m sorry it took so long, Katie — not to feel, because I always did, but to know.”
For a moment I listened to the steady beat of my heart. I was afraid of disappointment, but I could live with it.
I asked, “Know what, Lajos?”
“That I love you. Beyond everyone and everything I have ever known; beyond life itself, I love you.”
Despite all that had passed between us, I still tried to hide the intensity of my feeling, bowing my head on to his lap. But he knew me. Lifting my head, holding it still, he forced me to meet his eyes, and then he bent and kissed me, gently, sweetly. For a time, the world receded; and then I remembered his wounds and his exhaustion and his grief. I stood up, drawing him with me, and led him upstairs to bed.
* * * *
It wasn’t quite light when I woke, but Lajos was already drawing back the blanket to get up.
“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.
“Nothing, but we should make an early start.” I watched his naked back as he walked to the window and looked out on the misty dawn. Suddenly I didn’t want to go anywhere. Glancing back at me, he caught my expression, and his lip quirked. “Oh no. If I come near you, we won’t leave for hours.”
I smiled, feeling as if I hadn’t a care in the world. He was wounded, defeated, hunted most probably, but we were escaping together. It was only the beginning of another adventure.
Yet the danger, I reminded myself, was real. I sprang out of bed and dressed quickly. I had to help Lajos, for his arm, clumsily bandaged, was useless.
“Has a doctor seen that?” I asked hurriedly.
“Lengyel — the man who spoke to Petöfi — looked at it for me. It needs the ball dug out, but we don’t have time now.” He dropped a kiss on my head. “Go and wake your ridiculous family, if they are all to come with us in cavalcade.”
I obeyed, but they were up and moving already. I thought Mattias looked slightly better for his night’s comfortable rest, and the news that Lajos had come back won a grin and a feeble cheer from him.
The reaction of the others was ambiguous. I think they actually believed that life would have been easier for me if Lajos had had the grace to die on the battlefield. Now, if we were all to stay together, they would have to cope with this peasant, this serf’s son, as a member of the family. I did not underestimate their difficulties.
He joined Katalin, Margit and me in the parlour long enough to gulp down a cup of coffee, but then, as if he was not yet ready to face the inevitable confrontation with István, he said quickly, “I’ll see to the horses,” and went towards the door. However, before he could reach it, it opened and István paused there, staring at him.
As if to forestall trouble, I went to stand beside Lajos, but neither of them seemed to notice me.
“So you’re alive,” István said neutrally, and Lajos’s lip quirked.
“Yes. I even brought you a present.”
And under everyone’s astonished gaze, he felt in his coat pocket and produced a fat pamphlet which he held out to the other man. István took it mechanically, flicking through the pages as if he didn’t know what else to do. Over his elbow, I looked too; I had never seen it before; I didn’t know where he had got it. My eyes had time to focus briefly on some words which I remember very well.
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”
“I thought,” Lajos said blandly, “you might pass it on to Acsády.”
I glanced rather anxiously at István. His eyes were on Lajos, suspicious, but Lajos was still smiling, openly inviting him to share the joke, and at last I saw his lips twitch. His breath caught in what might have been a laugh.
“You were always impossible. I care nothing for your filthy, communistic pamphlets. Will you survive the journey?”
And Lajos, unmoved by the sudden change of subject, said briefly, “Oh yes,” and went quietly out.
It was only as the door closed behind him that I realized I was holding my breath. I expelled it in a rush. They might not have been friends, but at least recent events had changed them enough to call an unarmed truce. It seemed a good omen.
A piece of bread settled my queasy stomach, though I still felt a trifle unwell. I wanted nothing else, so I accompanied József outside — just as a troop of Austrian soldiers rode down the last of the hill and into the yard.
Oh no, I thought stupidly. Not now...
“Don’t,” József said quickly, as I began to look anxiously towards the stables. Immediately, I stilled the impulse, and instead regarded the soldiers reining in before us. There appeared to be two officers, but only some twenty men. One of the officers, expertly controlling a frisky, dancing grey mare, gallantly swept off his hat and bowed to me.
“Major Conway, Madame, at your service,” he said in German, and then, indicating the other officer at his side, “Lieutenant Kohlberg.”
I inclined my head warily. “Conway does not sound a terribly German name,” I observed, because it seemed something worth remarking upon and I was desperate to appear normal.
He smiled faintly. “As a matter of fact, I’m English.”
“Are you really?” I said cordially. “I am Scottish. I didn’t know we were involved in this war.”
“Oh the British army is not, of course. I am, as you might say, a soldier of fortune. There are many of us in the Imperial Army.”
“That must be comfortable for you,” I said inanely, just as István and Katalin came out of the door, arguing. They stopped in their tracks, mouths still open, when they saw what greeted them, while I found myself performing polite introductions, and József, obscured by so much aristocracy, effaced himself, moving casually towards the stables.
“I see you are busy,” István said, looking directly at the Major. “Don’t let us keep you from your duty.”
“Oh, we’re just rounding up the scattered foe,” Conway said, with a rather charming mixture of apology and humour. He was a handsome, dashing officer with very fine whiskers that gave him an almost piratical look. “Civilians,” he added casually, “are not our concern.”
By which I took it we were free to go. Of course Mattias was not technically a civilian, but he had not fought at Segesvár. I didn’t suppose that either of these gentlemen knew his history.
Lajos, on the other hand, was a different matter. I didn’t see how he could get out of the stables without being seen by at least one of the soldiers.
“Have you stopped for refreshment?” I enquired desperately
Conway smiled. “Hardly. We had reports that several Hungarian soldiers passed this way. We hoped to catch a few at the inn.”
“Is that not rather a lowly task for such senior officers?” I asked pleasantly.
“It depends on the soldiers,” Conway said easily. “For example, old Bem himself escaped the battlefield — he has to be somewhere. And we hear the revolutionary poet, Sándor Petöfi, was there too.”
Petöfi is dead. A wave of grief struck me so unexpectedly that I had to drop my eyes. Poor Julia. Poor little baby, who would never know his vital, intense father...
I heard myself say, “Well, if they were here, they have been very quiet. I never heard that either of those gentlemen were quiet.”
“Lajos Lázár, though, is a more subtle creature, I’m told.”
My stomach jumped unpleasantly. It was left to István to say sneeringly, “He’s not as subtle as all that.”
Conway smiled faintly again. “To be frank, sir, we hardly hoped for such a fine haul. Besides, there are still bodies on the battlefield to be identified. Still, one must be systematic.” With those words, he dismounted, signalling to the front row of men to do the same. Just as they did so, I became aware of a gentle clip-clop behind me. I didn’t dare look until Kohlberg did, and then I saw József leading a big carthorse across the yard. Oddly enough, it was saddled,
though riderless, and for the life of me, I couldn’t think why József was leading it to the back door of the inn — which was the only place, so far as I knew, it could go...
“Where’s the rascally landlord?” Conway demanded loudly, attracting Kohlberg’s attention again.
“Here, your honour!” called József morosely. “I’ll be with you directly.” He and the horse had reached the back door, which was open. József paused, petting the huge, placid animal on the nose and ears. Then, with a lugubrious and quite audible sigh, he turned the horse around and walked it back to the stables.
I felt insane laughter rumbling inside me, for I had glimpsed the shadowy figure leaping off the side of the horse and disappearing inside. It was gone in a trice, so perhaps it was not surprising that the soldiers had seen nothing. Lajos must have been balanced on one stirrup, hidden from everyone’s view as he crossed the yard. An air of unreality was settling over me.
“Now, landlord!” yelled Kohlberg over his shoulder.
“Coming, your honour.” The horse was abruptly abandoned, saddle and all, while József scurried up to the officers.
“Show us your inn,” Conway advised. “Lieutenant Kohlberg will look at your outhouses and stables.”
“Please, your honour, go right in...” But Conway was already inside — and brought up short by the breath-taking spectacle of Elisabeth smiling at him.
“Madame!” He bowed, recovering quickly. “Yet more beauty in a rustic setting!”
“Countess Szelényi,” murmured Jozsef respectfully.
“And my sister, Countess Margit,” István added sternly.
Margit barely glanced up. She was endeavouring to put a coat on a very recalcitrant Miklós, while Zsuzsa held him still.
The soldiers were swarming all over the inn, under József’s gloomy supervision. Marta came out of the kitchen, and I met her eyes questioningly. Imperceptibly, she nodded. A soldier brushed past her on his way into her domain. She bridled quite obviously and sailed back in after him.
I began to think uneasily of anything that Lajos could have left in my room, but surely he had come with nothing but what he was wearing now? I thought of his belt and sword and kerchief, but I could almost see him collecting all these things before we went downstairs. I was sure there was nothing left. In fact, it was something less solid that he had left behind.
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