Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,44
gaping mouths and dark eyeholes. She stood with her back to the wall, near the door. The candle sputtered. To be left in darkness, Natalia thought. She would die. Perhaps the countess wanted that. Wanted to inter her with the bones. She breathed through her mouth, trying not to smell the rats, the decay.
Rozalia brushed dust off her hands and said she had discovered the ossuary when she first came to the castle as a bride. Her husband had been furious. It was the first time he was angry with her, and the last. Can’t you keep out of anything? he’d said. Must you go looking for trouble? He’d wanted to have the skeletons taken away and buried in a communal grave dug in the forest, but Rozalia said the dead were the spirits of the house and had a right to rest in peace.
“They don’t seem dead, do they? You can hear their breathing, if you listen. Some died in the days of the great Magyar ruler King Árpád, or at the time of the blessed Sanctus Stephanus. They died in the civil war and in the Ottoman invasions, when half the population of Hungary perished. They died here, on our land. It says in the Bible, ‘Thy nobles shall dwell in the dust; thy people is scattered upon the mountain, and no man gathereth them.’ But my husband’s ancestors gathered up the bones. Magyar, Turk, Greek, Frenchman, and Italian alike. Men, women, and children. Christian, Jew, and Muslim.”
The candlelight made something macabre of the countess’s face. Natalia looked away. She saw an inscription in Greek on the wall and asked what it meant. The countess interpreted: “The gods cannot count and know nothing of arithmetic. Aristotle. It means you are on your own. You have to be stronger than your enemies. Do what you have to do, because life doesn’t wait around for you.
“I brought that Russian girl, Zita, here,” the countess went on. “Godless though she believed herself to be, she was trembling; she had to lean against the wall, and it was cold and damp, and that unnerved her still more. I said to her, don’t people die in Russia? Don’t Bolsheviks die? She and I did not get along. I will tell you this: if my son thinks she will marry him, he is mistaken.”
They went out of the ossuary. Rozalia turned the key in the lock and hung it on its hook. In the wine cellar she chose wine for dinner and gave the bottle to Natalia to carry up to the kitchen. When Magdolna took the wine from her, she berated the countess for taking Natalia to the ossuary. “Yes, but she wasn’t frightened, were you, Natalia?” the countess said. “She’s a brave girl. Tomorrow I will show her something nice, to atone.”
Atonement took the form of a room along a corridor from the kitchen. A room with white walls and windows that looked out on a garden of neglected topiary and stone urns. At one end of a long pine table there was a stack of accounting ledgers, and against another wall there were three filing cabinets and an escritoire. Rozalia opened a drawer in the escritoire, took out a sandalwood box, set it on the table, and lifted the lid. She removed a deck of cards wrapped in a square of green silk. “Sit,” she said. “I will read the tarot for you.”
Natalia was the querent, she said, and must ask a question of the cards.
Natalia said she was Catholic; she didn’t believe in superstition.
“I am Catholic,” Rozalia said, “and I am superstitious.
“The priest at Saint Stephen’s, Father István, would come every week to visit me. He would consume my plum brandy as if it was spring water, and then he’d fidget a while before asking, as he invariably did, to see the tarot deck. He pretended to have an anthropological or antiquarian interest, but I could see, from the way his hands trembled, that he believed in the cards. You will believe too, Natalia. You were brave in the ossuary; you can’t be frightened of a deck of cards, can you? These cards are agreeable, they wish you well.” She laughed and began placing them on the table in the shape of a cross.
“But it is necromancy,” Natalia protested.
“The tarot is not necromancy,” the countess said. “It is not communicating with the dead. That’s something else altogether. I am very fond of these cards and I will tell you why.”