Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,37

had seemed to move, had moved, she was convinced, and for a time she’d thought she heard footsteps pausing outside her door. She had fallen asleep only after she made a promise to herself that she would leave the castle with the count in the morning.

Now, in the kitchen, she knelt and petted the cat. She tickled him under his chin, and he rolled over so that she could scratch his tummy. His name, the count told her, was Monte.

A woman came in, tying an apron around her waist. “Magdolna,” said the count. “This is Fräulein Faber.”

Magdolna smiled. “Would you like porridge? And watch that cat. He bites.”

A few minutes later the countess came in from outside and hung her sweater on a hook by the door and said she had been to the horse barn. Perhaps Vladimír was right and Trajan was on the mend. Later, she would see that the horse had some gentle exercise. She flicked a finger against the newspaper her son was reading. “Are you listening to me? You’re very inhospitable, burying your face in a newspaper. What will our guest think of you?”

The count looked at Natalia and smiled. Magdolna placed a bowl of porridge and a poached egg on toast in front of her.

The countess poured herself coffee, sat at the table beside Natalia, and asked her son: Should she hire more workers for the harvest?

“If they’re needed, then certainly hire them,” the count said.

“My brother tells me that he employs seasonal workers from Slovenia. They are good laborers, reliable, steady, and will work for nothing, for beans.”

“You must pay your workers a decent wage, Mother.” He turned a page in the newspaper and laughed and said, “Here’s something. Aleksandr Kerensky is in New York on a lecture tour. He has pronounced the Russian Revolution an abject failure. Communism, he says, will occur on Mars before it does in America.”

“You call that news?” the countess said, spooning marmalade on her toast. Magdolna wanted to know if there was something wrong with the porridge. Had it gone cold? Would Natalia like more milk? “No, thank you, everything is lovely,” Natalia said, placing her spoon in the bowl. The countess tapped a finger on the table. “You eat that,” she said. “A young girl needs nourishment.”

Katya had arrived. She nodded in the direction of the table and tied an apron around her waist before refilling the count’s coffee cup. He thanked her; she stood for a moment, smiling at him, and asked if she could get him anything else. “No, thank you,” he said. How fine he looked this morning, Natalia thought, with his rumpled hair and his newspaper and blue serge shirt open at the neck.

When, after breakfast, she encountered him in the hall, she said she appreciated the countess’s hospitality, but she would like to go to Dubrovnik. “It occurred to me,” she said, “that while you drive, I could watch for my mother and Fräulein Kuznetsova. Even in a crowd I’d be able to pick my mother out. And I know the sort of hotels where she’d be likely to stay and the shops and restaurants that would appeal to her.”

“Thank you, Fräulein Faber. But this will be a rushed, unpleasant trip. You’ll be better off here. As soon as I locate your mother and Zita, I’ll telephone or send a wire.”

She nodded, said she understood, but couldn’t hide her disappointment. He went on to say something about the car not having room on the return journey, with suitcases and so on, and then he said there would be the matter of hotels and traveling without a chaperone. At first, she didn’t understand why there was a need for a chaperone, and then she did and refused to blush. Did he think she was afraid to be alone with him? It was his mother she feared. The countess was a Medusa, a Gorgon, with her dark, probing looks and personal questions. If the count wouldn’t take her with him, she’d find a way home to Zehlendorf by herself. In the village there would be a telegraph office. She’d send a wire to Hildegard, who by now should be back from Hamburg, to say she was coming home. Later, she asked Katya if there was a bank in the village. The Hungarian National Bank had a small branch beside the shoemaker’s, Katya said, but the manager was a little potentate who opened the doors when it suited him. Natalia nodded; she would walk