Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor Page A

kingfisher to ruffle the stillness of leaves and water.
    Early in the afternoon, the river branched and I went upstream beside the Sebes (swift) Körös, until a red-shingled steeple told me I had reached the old village of Körösladány.
    The look of the Magyar word kastély —which is rather perversely pronounced ‘koshtay,’ or very nearly—suggests, like Schloss , a fortified and castellated building, but the nearest English equivalent to most of those I saw in Hungary and Transylvania would be a manor house and the term leaps to mind when I try to conjure up the memory, blurred at the edges a little by the intervening decades, of the kastély at Körösladány. Single-storeyed like a ranch but with none of the ad hoc feeling the word suggests, it was a long ochre-coloured late eighteenth-century building with convoluted and rounded baroque pediments over great gates, faded tiles and house-martins’ nests and louvred shutters hooked back to let in the late afternoon light. Leaving my things under the antlers in the hall, I was led through the open doors of several connecting rooms, meeting my hostess at the middle of a shadowy enfilade. She was charming and good-looking with straight, bobbed fair hair—I think it must have been parted in the middle for it was this, a few years later, that reminded me of her when I met Iris Tree. She wore a white linen dress and espadrilles and had a cigarette-case and a lit cigarette in her hand. “So here’s the traveller,” she said in a kind, slightly husky voice and took me through a french window to where the rest of her family, except her husband, who was due back from Budapest next day, were assembled round tea things under tall chestnut trees whose pink and white steeples were stickily bursting out. I can see them gathered like a conversationpiece by Copley or Vuillard, and can almost catch their reflection in the china and silver. They were Countess Ilona Meran, just described, a son and daughter called Hansi and Marcsi, about thirteen and fourteen, and a much smaller girl called Helli, all three of them very good-looking and nice-mannered and a little grave. There was a friend, perhaps a relation, with horn-rimmed spectacles, called Christine Esterházy, and an Austrian governess. All except the last spoke English; but I can’t remember a word that was uttered—only their appearance and the scene under the wide leaves and the charm of the hour. We sat talking until it was lighting-up time, and indoors pools of lamplight were being kindled with spills along the succession of lavender-smelling rooms. It lit the backs of bindings, pictures, furniture which had reached exactly the right pitch of faded country-house shabbiness, curtains laundered hundreds of times over and music open above the keys of a piano. What music? I can’t remember; but suddenly, sailing into my mind after all these years, there is a bowl on the piano full of enormous white and red peonies and a few petals have dropped on the polished floor.
    While getting tidy for dinner, and later, before going to bed, I looked at the pictures on the walls of my room. There was a Schloss Glanegg poised on a precipitous rock and many Almásy kinsmen of Countess Ilona and several Wenckheims in furred and scimitared glory; and there was an early nineteenth-century colour print that I was very taken by. It showed a dashing post-Regency buck—I think he was called Zichy—with twirling beard and whiskers, a blue bird’s-eye stock and an English scarlet hunting coat. He was one of those tremendous Hungarian centaurs who became famous in the Shires for the intrepid way they rode to hounds. Lounging about the lawn meet at Badminton, or in Ackermann prints of calamities at cut-and-laid fences, hounds in full cry, drawing Ranksborough Gorse, leaping the Whissendine Brook, chasing across green parishes from spire to spire, there they are; and, most