Black Spring (27 page)

“You
are
in a bad mood, Anna!” She contemplated me for a moment and then turned back to watching the pathway. “Are you jealous?”

“Jealous?” said I. “Jealous of what?”

“I suppose you wish you had men fighting over you?”

The pure cattiness of this remark took my breath away. I addressed the back of her head — I knew she could feel my gaze, although she would not turn to face me — and let her know that envy was the least of my complaints. I was weary to the bone. Not only did I have to attend to the running of the house; I had spent nearly all my waking hours nursing her, worried sick about her health, and on top of that had been dealing with Tibor and his mother and with Damek, not to mention the wizard. And this, I said, is the thanks I get for my trouble.

I would have gone on, but Lina silenced me. Her voice was cool: she seemed not in the least agitated, and there was something in her posture that made the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

“Listen to me, Anna,” she said. “I am well. I am tired, but I think I am recovering. The birth was nothing to what I have suffered before. I feel clearer in my head today than I have for, oh, for months and months. Maybe for years. Since that first moment the pains started, I understood that my body has always been at war with itself, that I have always been at war with
myself,
but at last this morning I am at peace. And all these days I have been thinking. I am not a fool, whatever you think; I know perfectly well that bitch wants me dead. Tibor couldn’t kill me, even if that woman poisons him against me, but now that she is gone, perhaps he will think of me gently again.”

“He says that you have betrayed him in every way and that he cannot forgive you!” I said.

She made an impatient gesture, continuing her contemplation of the view outside her window. “Oh, that,” she said. “Of course he will forgive me.”

I feared, rather than wished, that she was right: the complacency with which she spoke of her husband angered me. “But what about Damek?”

“Damek will learn to respect me,” she said. “I have not had the strength to deal with him these past days, and I am glad he did not come, no matter how I long to see him! He speaks so easily of betrayal, he who abandoned me and left me alone for so many years! And he knows I am married in the sight of God, and he also knows that nothing I can do can betray the friendship between us.”

I sighed for her folly and blindness. “I doubt that Damek will see it that way,” I said.

“He will,” she said. There was a steel in her voice I had not heard before, not even when she was a young girl. “He will learn that I am not a pile of gold, to be won and held and used — for that is how he thinks of me, Anna. He has always wanted to own things! No one loves money more than Damek — Tibor’s just as bad, in his own way. I swear I am tired of men. Why can neither of them love me unless they can jingle me in their pockets? The way they both behave, they’re no better than that pig Masko.”

I listened to her in mounting astonishment. “That is the way men are,” I stammered.

“That is the way men are!” As she mocked me, I pictured her scowl. “And I suppose that is the way women are, too, and they become petty tyrants in their turn, like Mistress Alcahil, bullying their husbands and sons! And so we all chip each other to pieces, until there is nothing left save a pathetic pile of rubble, and that’s where the king puts his throne and lords it over all of us! Anna, sometimes you are so stupid. Who makes these laws that bend us out of our proper shapes? Why should men be like that? Why should I? I won’t be beholden to those laws anymore. I swear before God that from now on I will be myself, and myself only.”

She turned to face me, and I felt an unreasoning fear thrill through me, like a flood of icy water through my veins. Her eyes were blazing, and I thought that her skin was shining, so that the shadows fled the room. She laughed when she saw the expression on my face.

“Yes, Anna, I
am
a witch. At last I understand! All these years I have been so afraid of myself, and why? Because everyone wants me to be afraid, because they cannot face the pettiness in their own hearts. They have crippled me and forced me into a vise, so I am all bent over like a blasted thornbush. But there is nothing to be afraid of. I will stand up straight. I will fear no longer!”

I stared at her, not knowing what I thought, and yet despite my own fright, I cannot deny that part of me delighted to hear her say such things. It was like standing in a keen breeze that blew away cobwebs from all the secret corners of my mind. “But you can’t stay on the Plateau, then,” I said at last. “What of the Wizard Ezra?”

“He cannot hurt me,” she said. “He fears me. And rightly too. He always knew I was more powerful than him. That’s why he took away my powers, and why he doesn’t want me to have them back.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said dubiously. I reflected that if she lived openly as a witch, it wouldn’t be just Ezra out for her blood: the entire wizarding tribe would declare war on her, and the king himself would draw up her death warrant. “It would be well to be cautious, all the same.”

“Of course I’m right.” She laughed and the light inside her faded, so that she seemed shrunken, an ordinary woman sitting in the afternoon dimness. “And never fear: I will be cautious. I just wish I were not so tired. But that will pass, as everything does. And then I will live
my
life, as
I
choose.”

In that moment, such was her certainty, I almost believed her.

W
hile these events were occupying my mind to the exclusion of almost everything else, the villagers were turning their attention to the Red House. Perhaps they felt that the dramas at the manse were, at least temporarily, at a pause and could be safely left to be gossiped about another day. Also, I was careful not to feed the rumors, protecting my mistress as best I could from calumny, and the main actors had no incentive to talk freely about their private business. Beyond malicious speculation — of which, admittedly, there was no shortage — there was not much profit to be had from the tangled affairs of Lina, Tibor, and Damek. Such was not the case with Masko, whose bullying of his servants meant that he inspired no loyalty and who was, to say the least, indiscreet in his words and acts. As a result, his most private affairs were discussed over every kitchen hearth in the village.

His chronic ill-health was common knowledge, and I was not the first to connect it with Lina’s youthful curse (which was also widely known and had been given new currency by her recent change). Much hilarity was had at Masko’s expense when one of his visiting women let slip that he was impotent, and the intimate nature of his boils was a standard joke. I had more reason to dislike Masko than most, but I could not hear these obscene speculations without discomfort and sometimes found myself feeling almost sorry for him. Even before winter came, he was almost completely alone: his gaming friends deserted him in his illness, and my mother and Kush were, in the end, the only servants who remained in his employ.

The day Young Lina was born, Masko’s health took a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse: he suffered some kind of fit at the card table. He was carried as a dead man to his bed, and the doctor was roused from his sleep to attend to him. The following day he was recovered enough to leave his bed, and he dismissed the doctor with impatience and returned to his drinking, which he claimed did him more good than any quack’s potions. I guess that alcohol served to numb his physical pain; he had always been a heavy drinker, even by the standards of his peers, but now he called for raki from the moment he awoke and drank steadily until he fell down in a stupor in the evening.

His decline from that day was alarmingly rapid. His only interest was gambling, and since Damek was now available all day, he played cards with him for as long as Damek would sit. My mother told me he would scream for Damek like a madman every morning until they sat down at the table and dealt the pack. Damek would play on until Masko fell facedown on the table, unconscious from exhaustion and raki. After each game, Damek would insist that my mother fill a basin with warm water, and he would wash his hands thoroughly with soap, as if he had been doing something filthy.

Certainly Masko was no pleasure to be around. He stank as if his body were rotting from inside and, unless he was gambling, he was in a constant rage. My mother often visited the manse simply to escape: the Red House had become a purgatory. Once I took Irli down to help with the cleaning, which was too much work for my mother alone, and as I left the house, I saw Masko for myself. I was shocked at the change in him. He had lost weight, and his skin seemed to be hanging off him in great folds and was pocked with suppurating boils.

One morning, about ten days after his fit, Masko was in the breakfast room, shouting as usual for Damek to come and play cards. My mother told me how no one could find Damek, and how Masko had worked himself into a blind fury by the time he finally appeared. Damek was dressed in black from head to foot, and such was his expression that Masko was silenced by the sight of him. It was, my mother said, as if the Devil had entered the room. Masko had in truth thought Damek was his friend: he had spent drunken nights lamenting the perfidy of others and sentimentally toasting Damek’s loyalty. Damek had played his part, never once revealing his real feelings. In that moment, Damek removed his mask, and I think that Masko recognized his fate before Damek said a single word.

Damek told Masko that he would not play with him, as he did not game with paupers. He threw down a sheaf of papers onto the table. Masko picked up the document with hands that trembled so much he could scarce hold it, and he read it and read it again, as if he didn’t understand what it said.

“You own nothing. I have won everything, even the clothes on your back, you filthy thieving slug,” Damek told him. “You own less than the poorest beggar in this village, and all that you stole is now restored. Now, get out of my house before I kick you out.”

My mother told me that Masko turned a sickly grayish green and was too shocked to say a word; and then he just burst into tears. She said that she didn’t know what to do: she loathed the man, but she couldn’t leave him like that — he was still the master, after all . . .

She tried to get him to lie on a sofa as he sobbed and shook. Damek told her to throw him out of the house, as he would not have such vermin on his carpet. When my mother ignored him, Damek irritably repeated his orders. She objected that it was not his house, and so he showed her the deed, made out to Damek, and when she protested that he could not throw a sick man out into the snow, he said that Masko should be treated with the mercy that he had shown others.

Masko heard it all but had nothing to say on his behalf: he just sat and wept. My mother swears she has never seen a man so broken. At last, at my mother’s insistence, Damek agreed to wait until the doctor arrived, and a place was found for Masko in a village house, more from the respect felt for my mother than from any compassion. That household’s hospitality was not of long duration, as Masko died that night, and everyone in the village said he had his just deserts. So he met his death, unpitied and unlamented, unless you count that impulse to common decency felt by my mother and myself. So Lina’s curse was fulfilled, and she and Damek had their revenge.

My mother — and I honor her for it — was horrified by Damek’s behavior that day and never regarded him with the same eye afterward. To pretend friendship where there was none for so long — for even she had believed Damek’s professions — and to throw a mortally sick man out into the snow, revealed a ruthlessness that transgressed her deepest principles. Masko may have deserved such a mean death, she said, but that was for God to determine, not Damek. Ever after, she believed Damek was a demon and crossed herself whenever she saw him.

Even so, it must be said that Damek’s ownership of the Red House improved my mother’s lot considerably. For all his capacity for cruelty and vengefulness, he was a fair master. The servants who had left the Red House were reinstated and others hired, and she found herself all at once the head of a substantial household. My mother’s first task was to burn all Masko’s clothes and linens, which cleansed the air considerably, and Damek’s next order was to empty the house of Masko’s belongings, which were either sold or given away. The former master’s old furniture was taken out of storage and his pictures replaced on the walls, and when next I visited, the Red House was restored to its original comfort. With the many willing hands, this took less than a week.

Once the house had been fumigated of Masko’s presence, Damek took over as master of the house and, it turned out, lord of the village. Many years later, he told me that he had taken the precaution of seeing the king before he came to Elbasa and had made sure that Masko had worn out his royal usefulness, and that Damek would not be frowned upon as a replacement. This did not surprise me: by then I had learned how cold-blooded and meticulous Damek could be in pursuit of his revenge.