Zuzana did not hesitate.
“Of course, Madame, your beauty takes the breath from anyone who gazes at you. You are the fairest woman in Hungary!”
The Countess cast a look of scorn, her arched brows diving together above her thin nose. More words tumbled from Zuzana’s mouth. “—and of the Holy Roman Empire and beyond, Madame. More beautiful than the youngest maiden in Christendom, and far beyond to the Oriental kingdoms, I am certain.”
The Countess’s face softened and she gazed at herself again in the glass. Her blood-red lips broke into a smile, exposing her even white teeth. Zuzana felt a cold chill clutch her spine.
“But I am two and a half score,” the Countess replied, studying her reflection.
“Ah, but Countess! Not in the looking glass. See the white skin and blazing eyes! How they beseech your admirers to embrace your beauty.”
The girl took up the silver brush, gleaming in the torchlight. She softened the boar bristles in the palm of her hand, bending the stiff hairs back and forth until they were supple.
“With your permission, Countess.”
Her mistress lifted her chin, almost imperceptibly. Zuzana stroked the long auburn hair, taking care not to tug at any errant tangle.
Erzsebet Bathory closed her eyes and moaned, her long, pale fingers twisting together in her lap.
“Ah, Zuzana,” she whispered. “If you were only beautiful…like your brother.”
Beautiful? Her words sent another shiver up the girl’s spine. The Countess noticed a small tremor in the stroke of the brush and looked up at the girl’s pox-scarred face.
Zuzana was no beauty now, God be praised.
Chapter 3
CARBONDALE, COLORADO
NOVEMBER 19, 2010
I’m looking forward to our session,” Betsy said. “Did you bring your dream notebook?”
Daisy’s eyes seemed glassy and unfocused. She said nothing.
The psychologist held her breath. Not again, she thought.
Daisy entered the office like a sleepwalker. Then she saw Ringo, the mongrel shepherd curled up on a hooked rug, warming himself by the stove. It was the first time in months that Betsy had brought him downstairs to the office.
The girl’s body relaxed, light returned to her eyes, dimples creasing her white makeup.
“What a gorgeous dog!” she said, her hand extended for him to sniff. “May I pet him?”
“Of course,” Betsy said, marveling at the transformation. “He’s a big baby.”
Ringo licked the girl’s hand. Although sweet and gentle, he wasn’t a licker, and Betsy’s forehead puckered in astonishment.
He thumped his tail hard, as if he recognized Daisy.
Then he licked her white face. Betsy felt a stab of jealousy.
“He never licks anyone on the face. Not even me.”
Daisy extended her neck as Ringo sat up, still intent on licking her.
“This is strange. It’s almost as if he knows you,” said Betsy.
Daisy buried her face in his fur. Betsy noticed tears glistening in her eyes, as she stroked Ringo’s ears flat against his head.
They started the session talking about dogs and went on from there. It was by far the longest conversation patient and doctor had ever had.
“I had a German shepherd when we lived back in New York,” Daisy said. “We had several dogs, but Rosco was mine. He slept in my bed and ran alongside my horse on trail rides.”
“Tell me about riding.”
“I used to ride. A lot. I rode competitively, three-day eventing, horse shows.”
“But not now?”
“I don’t have a horse here and I—I’ve lost interest. It’s not my world now,” she said, turning away. She looked longingly back at Ringo.
“What is your world now, Daisy?”
“Goth.” She answered, her voice losing its softness. A pinched look took over the youthfulness that for a few minutes had shone through the white makeup.
Betsy called Ringo over. He laid his head in his mistress’s lap and she stroked his ears.
“What is Goth exactly?”
Daisy moved in the armchair, shifting her weight. “It depends who’s defining it.”
“How about you? How do you define it?”
“There’s the music. I’m not big into that, except Jim Morrison and the Doors, old stuff. The heavy metal, forget it. But it’s a scene for Goths.”
“What else?”
“Black clothes, edgy hair, makeup. All that. But the real thing is shunning the superficial world, trying to see past the surface. Embracing the shadow world, not shutting the portal like most humans do.”
The psychologist held her pen poised in the air.
“The shadow world?”
Daisy wound a strand of dyed black hair tight around her finger, just the way Betsy often did.
“Shining a light into the past—” she replied, the sheer effort of speaking seeming to torture her. She coughed, but struggled to finish her sentence. “—into the black tunnel. The darkness beyond, who we truly are. Who we may have been before.”
Betsy made herself look down at her notebook. She had expected to hear a tirade against the mainstream culture, a defense of an alternative lifestyle. Rebellion.
“Do you think you do it to annoy your mother?” Betsy asked.
Daisy smiled slowly, her tongue searching mischievously for that rebellious tooth. Ringo stood up and left his mistress for her patient’s outstretched hand.
“Not really.” Then she shrugged. “Well maybe, but that’s not the point. I’m just trying to concentrate.”
“Concentrate on what?”
Daisy dropped her hand from Ringo’s chest. He groaned as he made three circles, finally lowering his body and curling up by her feet.
“On murmurs, voices that have lived before. To hear ripples of the past. And…,” she said, the muscles in her jaw straining, “the search for my soul.”
Betsy nodded. Her heart was racing. Daisy sounded as if she were quoting Carl Jung himself.
Betsy made two cups of ginger tea with honey. Daisy drank quietly, looking around the room.
“Oh, I need to tell you that I have an upcoming trip. I’ll miss a week’s session with you, but we can try for two sessions the week before I leave or when I get back. I’ll take a look at my schedule.”
Daisy cast her an anxious look.
“You are going away?” she said, picking at her cuticles.
“Just for a few days,” said Betsy, noticing the effect her words had on her patient.
Daisy nodded, her movements stiff. Her eyes fixed on the cream-colored bookshelves, from floor to ceiling.
“You have a lot of books. Have you read them all?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“They look really old,” said Daisy. She stood up and ran her finger along the spines, inspecting the cracked leather with her fingernail.
Betsy winced, but didn’t interfere.
“Leather. Really dusty. Like these are ancient. Where did you get them?”
“I inherited them,” Betsy said, looking out the window at the trembling aspen branches.
Daisy tilted her head to the side to read the titles. She stopped at a slim, cloth-covered book. She began to pull it from the shelf and then stopped.
“Jung?”
Betsy nodded.
Daisy tried to read the title on the spine, but stumbled badly. “Synchronizitat…Akausalitat…What the fu—?”
“In English it translates to ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.’ We had a first edition of it once. But it disappeared.”
“What does that mean?” Daisy asked, pushing the book back on the shelf.
Betsy knew she had to redirect the conversation, but she didn’t want to risk having her patient shut down, reverting to moody silences.
“Synchronicity was a theory of Jung’s. It is the idea of two or more events that are apparently unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.”
The girl wrinkled her white-painted forehead. “What does that mean?”
“OK. Let’s say you hear your cell phone ring four times in the morning, but no one is on the line when you answer. And then later in the day, you hit four stoplights, all turning green, right in a row, and that has never happened to you before. At school, there is a lottery and you pick the number 4444 and you win. There is no causal relation, but there may be a deeper meaning.”
“Goth,” Daisy said, rolling her kohl-lined eyes. “Totally.”
“It is interesting you would say that—”
Daisy turned back to the shelves of books. “You inherited them? From who?”
“My father.” Betsy swallowed hard. Why was she answering all the questions now?
Daisy’s hand halted in midair. It fluttered down again to her side. She stared over her shoulder at Betsy.
“Your dad was a shrink too?”
Betsy touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth, making herself hesitate. She wanted to answer: My father was a renowned psychiatrist. He was the real thing, a graduate of the CG Jung Institute in Zurich and a faculty member of the Jung Institute in Vienna. He treated some of the world’s most prominent families. He worked with patients with serious psychosis, behind the locked doors of an asylum.
He was a genius, she wanted to say.
“Yes, he worked in the field of psychology. Daisy, please. We need to talk about you.”
“OK. OK.”
Daisy collapsed in her chair, heaving a sigh. She picked up her cup of tea. She studied its depths and tipped it up to her mouth, obscuring her face. Betsy could see the gleam of white skin shining through the part of her dyed jet-black hair.
“What kind of relationship do you and your mother have?”
Daisy looked over the brim of her cup, her eyes hardening.
“What do you think? You’ve seen us. We fight like cats and dogs.”
“Which is your mother? A cat or a dog?”
“Oh, definitely a cat,” she said, nodding. “Oh, yes. A cat.”