“His naming day was the first Saturday in October 1937. Such a beautiful boy. So handsome and so clever. You could tell he was meant to be a remarkable human being.”

“Was he, now?”

“I can picture him still, walking up and down the long mirrored hallway in his Peter Pan collar and his little plus fours and his sailor’s cap. He loved to watch his reflection reflected back and forth between two facing mirrors, multiplying forever, smaller and smaller.” Her smile drew with it a trellis of wrinkles. “And his parents were so devoted to him. You could understand that. He was their only child. The birth was a difficult one, and it left the countess unable to conceive.” The old woman was in another place, another world: if it was a lost world, it was not lost to her. “One day, just after lunch, he ate some pastries the cook had made for tea, like a naughty little boy, and the cook berated him. Well, Countess Illana happened to overhear. Don’t you ever talk that way to our child, she told her. And just the way she said it—little icicles hung off her words. Bettina, she was the cook, her cheeks flamed, but she didn’t say anything. She understood. We all did. He was … unlike other boys. But not spoiled, you must understand. Sunny as the first of July, as we Hungarians say. When something pleased him, he’d smile so hard you’d think his face would split. Blessed, that child was. Magical. He could have been anything. Anything at all.”

“Peter must have been everything to them,” Jessie said.

The old woman stroked her dog’s flank again, rhythmically. “Such a perfect little boy.” Her eyes lit up, briefly, as if she were seeing the boy in front of her, seeing him in his knickerbockers and sailor’s cap swanning in front of the mirrors on both sides of the hall, his reflections trailing off into an infinite regress.

The crone’s eyelids fluttered and she closed them hard, trying to halt the pictures in her mind. “The fevers were terrible, he was like a kettle, tossing in bed and retching. It was a cholera epidemic, you know. So hot to the touch. And then so cold. I was one of those who attended him on his sickbed, you see.” She put both her hands on her dog’s face, gaining comfort from the creature’s steadfast strength. “I can never forget that morning—finding his body, so cold, those lips so pale, his cheeks like wax. It was heartbreaking when it happened. He was just five years old. Could anything be sadder? Dead, before he truly had a chance to live.”

A heaving sense of vertigo, of utter disorientation, overcame Janson. Peter Novak had died as a child? How could that be? Was there some mistake—was this another family the old woman was describing, another Peter?