“Not me,” she said, and staring straight ahead, she fell silent.

“Are those chestnuts?” Jessie asked, looking at a bowl on a small table by the woman’s chair.

Békesi nodded.

“Could I have one? I feel so rude asking, but I know you just roasted those, ’cause this whole place of yours smells like it, and it’s just making my mouth water.”

Békesi glanced at the bowl and nodded. “They’re still hot,” she said approvingly.

“Makes me think of my grandma somehow—we’d come to her house and she’d roast us some chestnuts … .” She beamed at the memory. “And it made every day seem like Christmas.” Jessie peeled a chestnut and ate it greedily. “This is perfect. Just a perfect chestnut. This alone was worth the five-hour drive.”

The old woman nodded, her manner noticeably less aloof. “They get too dry when you over-roast them.”

“And too hard when you don’t roast them long enough,” Jessie put in. “But you got it down to a science.”

A small, contented smile settled on the old woman’s face.

“Do all your visitors beg you for ’em?” Jessie asked.

“I get no visitors.”

“None at all? Can’t hardly believe that.”

“Very few. Very, very few.”

Jessie nodded. “And how do you handle the nosy ones?”

“Some years ago, a young journalist from England came here,” the old woman said, looking off. “So many questions he had. He was writing something about Hungary during the war and after.”

“Is that right?” Janson asked, his eyes intent. “I’d love to read what he wrote.”

The crone snorted. “He never wrote anything. Just a couple of days after his visit, he was killed in an accident in Budapest. The accident rates are terrible there, everyone says so.”

The temperature seemed to drop in the room as she spoke.

“But I always wondered,” the old woman said.

“He ask about this count, too?” Jessie prompted.

“Have another chestnut,” the old woman said.

“Could I really? You don’t mind?”

The old woman nodded, pleased. After a while she said, “He was our count. You could not live in Molnár and not know the count. The land you worked was his land, or once had been. One of the very old families—he traced his ancestry back to one of the seven tribes that formed the Hungarian nation in the year 1000. His ancestral estate was here, even though he spent a great deal of time in the capital.” She lifted her small dark eyes toward the ceiling. “They say I am an old woman who lives in the past. Perhaps it is so. Such a troubled land we lived in. Ferenczi-Novak understood that better than most.”

“Did he, now?” Jessie said.

She regarded her quietly for a moment. “Perhaps you will join me in a small glass of pálinka.”

“I’m fine, ma’am.”

Gitta Békesi stared ahead stonily and said nothing, evidently offended.