Her fingers reached for the old, worn address book. She dialed a phone number that had been blurred long ago with tears.
“Hello?”
“John? It’s Betsy.”
There was an awkward pause.
“Betsy? Are you all right?”
Oh shit. Why was she calling her ex?
“No! No, I’m not all right. Mom’s missing in Slovakia, she didn’t show up for her first class after her sabbatical. The dean called me. He hasn’t heard from her—”
“Slow down, Betsy. Your mom is missing in Slovakia?”
“That’s what I said.”
A pause. Those pauses she always hated because she could feel him thinking, processing information. Being so rational, damn him!
“Maybe there is a reason.”
A reason! A reason for what? Suddenly all the poisonous currents that had flowed through her during their divorce came flooding back.
“John! There is no reason, except that something bad has happened to her.”
Another pause.
“Betsy, pull yourself together. Let’s think. What communication did she leave?”
Deep breath. “Not much. I have an e-mail saying she was going to see Countess Bathory’s castle, outside Bratislava.”
“Countess who?”
“Bathory—she was some kind of sadistic freak during the early seventeenth century.”
“Historical research. OK, that sounds right.”
So typical of John. His mathematical mind filtering out everything but the facts. Betsy could almost hear the whirring of his brain, a computer starting up from sleep mode.
“She was writing a book—she never told me about it. She’s always stuck to Habsburgs and the Hungarian-Ottoman wars. Why would she write about some psychopathic monster?”
“Psychopathic monster?”
“This Bathory woman killed hundreds of young women. Tortured many more.”
He gave a low whistle.
“Doesn’t sound like your mom’s cup of tea.”
“And now—she’s disappeared.”
“Have you called the American Embassy?”
“They were useless.”
Another silence.
“You want me to come out there?”
“To do what?”
“To—to be with you, Bets. You sound like you’re losing it.”
“I’ve got to do something.”
“What? What are you going to do?”
“I—Oh, shit, John. I don’t know.”
“Give it a day or two. And—”
“And what?”
“Let me come out and see you.”
Betsy went through the appointment calendar on her computer and began cancelling everything for the next two weeks. While she was waiting for someone to answer or listening to an answering machine, waiting to leave a message, her fingers flew over the keyboard, searching for a flight to Bratislava.
It made more sense to fly to Vienna and take the train—it ran every hour and took only fifty minutes to cross the Austrian border into the capital of Slovakia—
When Betsy reached Daisy’s name in the appointment calendar, she hesitated.
I’ll call her mother last, she thought.
Betsy’s mind worked frantically, worrying about her mother. The last thing she wanted to do was see patients today, but she reminded herself that they had their own troubles and it was her duty to work with them. The day was filled with back-to-back appointments.
By the afternoon, she was exhausted. She had checked her e-mail every thirty seconds between appointments.
Nothing. She slumped over her computer and began to cry.
“Betsy! Hey, are you OK?”
Daisy had appeared silently. Betsy hadn’t heard the door and Ringo hadn’t barked or moved. Now he began to thump his tail.
Betsy looked up, and frantically tried to put on her professional face. A patient should know as little as possible about her therapist’s private life.
“Oh, I am so sorry, Daisy. I didn’t hear you come in—aren’t you early?”
Betsy wiped her eyes on her shirtsleeve. John was right, she thought. She was losing it.
The next thing she knew, there was a silky black sleeve draping over her shoulder. It was like being hugged by Morticia of the Addams Family. Betsy smelled a perfume, something old like her grandmother wore…White Shoulders? Bellodgia?
Daisy set something down beside her on the table. Then she hugged her psychologist close again.
“It’s all right, Betsy. I don’t know what it is, but it will be all right.”
Was this the same girl who had scowled at her in stony silence just a few weeks ago?
“Is it because you are freaked out about the burglar? I’m sorry we let him get away. He, like, just disappeared after I screamed.”
“Thank you,” said Betsy. “You could have been hurt. And, no, nothing was missing as far as I could tell. But it took a long time to put everything back together.”
Betsy tried desperately to pull together her professional demeanor. Damn, damn, damn. A sobbing therapist. What a colossal failure she was! Her mind flashed on her father’s sober face, reproaching her.
Never interject your persona into therapy. You are a blank screen through which the patient focuses on himself.
Daisy stroked Betsy’s cheek, dabbing her tears with her fingertips. The psychologist pulled away from her, humiliated.
“Daisy, I think I may be getting the flu. I’m sorry. I think—I think I’m going to have to cancel our session.”
“Oh.”
Betsy watched as the girl pulled back, rigid. She looked frightened.
“I’m sorry. Really. But I—I think I’m getting a fever.”
“Oh. Can I—can I get you some soup? I can run down to the Village Smithy and get your some of their homemade—”
“That’s sweet. I don’t. No, I don’t think so. I’ll call you later, when I feel better. OK?”
“Right. OK,” Daisy said, nodding her head like a wooden puppet. “If you’re sick, I can run errands for you.”
“No. No. I’ll call you. It’s probably just a twenty-four-hour bug.”
“Sure,” said Daisy, not moving.
“Let me walk you out,” said Betsy, rising from her chair.
As soon as she closed the door, Betsy rummaged through her desk. The tarot card with the sobbing girl lay in the shadows of the drawer.
Chapter 19
ČACHTICE CASTLE
DECEMBER 12, 1610
The Countess did not summon the horsemaster again for many days. Janos Szilvasi spent his days focused on his work, waking before dawn when the kitchen boys dragged in dry logs and kindling from the woodshed and stoked the fire to prepare the morning breakfast.
Often the predawn meal consisted of leftover root-vegetable soup and doughy dumplings from the smoke-black cauldron. Broken loaves of stale bread accompanied the meal, smeared with fat drippings: tasty or rancid, it did not matter to the cook. It was stodgy food to fill a workingman’s belly. At least the morning beer was good: dark, bitter ale, surprisingly better than the breweries in Sarvar produced.
The Countess’s horses thrived under Janos’s hand. Their wounds healed, their lameness diminished as new flesh grew in the deep hollow of their hooves. Szilvasi procured grain for the most starved and, with the help of the stable boys, filed the horses’ teeth smooth to help them chew and digest their feed.
The boys learned to rub the horses with coarse sacks until their coats shone. They collected pine resin from the forest and dabbed it into the cracks in the horses’ hooves. Their backs ached with carrying fresh water in buckets from the courtyard well.
Janos took a deep breath. After a fortnight and half, the smell of the stables had changed entirely. He drew in a lungful of the essence of sweet straw, pinesap, and the intoxicating scent of warm horse—healthy and content. Wholesome.
The next challenge would be to ride the white stallion.
Zuzana spied from the tower on the strong young Hungarian, the friend of her childhood, now a man. She pressed her cheek against the rough stone, and blinked until her eyes teared with the blustery cold that threaded through the narrow opening in the castle wall. She remained immobile for long minutes, her gaze focused below, an ear listening for the tinkling bell of her mistress.
When she pulled her face away from the stone, there was an imprint of the rough granite on her poxed face.
She rubbed her cheek to return the blood to her skin. She knew she could stare all day at Janos and never tire of him.
His manner was efficient but kind, and he quickly won the confidence of not only the horses, but of the stable boys and guards as well. And he had earned the grudging respect of Erno Kovach, who put an arm around the young horsemaster’s shoulder one day, drawing Szilvasi near as he shared a joke. It had been many months since Zuzana had seen the head guard—or any of the men—laugh; she considered the sight a minor miracle.
Zuzana was not the only pair of eyes spying on Janos Szilvasi. Small groups of handmaidens and scullery maids clustered around the edges of curtained windows throughout the castle, whispering and laughing.
“He will be mine by New Year’s!” swore Hedvika.
The other girls tittered and the whispering began again.
“Perhaps he prefers black tresses strewn across his chest,” challenged Zora, her fingers playing with her long black braid. “After all, he means to tame the wild stallion—he has dark passion pulsing in his veins.”
“Ack, with your flat bosom, what could you offer a man like that?” said Hedvika.
Zuzana had often overheard the women, their pecking and clucking no different from the speckled hens that squawked in the castle courtyard. The horsemaster was no more than a tasty grub wedged between the paving stones to them.
She had a bitter taste in her mouth, and swallowed, remembering. This was the boy who had called her lucky. She had never forgotten him.
Chapter 20
CARBONDALE, COLORADO
DECEMBER 13, 2010
Betsy knew she had one more patient appointment to cancel. She had procrastinated long enough.