The Countess (10 page)

Orsolya took me up to my room, saying how eager Ferenc was to meet me, how anxious were his letters asking about my arrival. She gushed with pleasure over the details she and Megyery had arranged for me, the bed of carved wood, the candlesticks and tables and ornate trunks. One chair had a carved lion’s-head back, and the candlesticks suddenly curled themselves into the shapes of dragons. The room was bright, covered in fresh white plaster—I could still smell the sting of the lime—and large, with a stone fireplace so tall I could
stand inside it. The night was growing cooler, so she had a small fire built for me, and sent up a servant with a tray of hot pork and spiced apples, and a cool clean glass of well water perfumed with bits of mint. It was a welcome even my own mother would have been proud to offer, and if I had been given any choice in my coming there I might have found a reason to be happy in my new surroundings, in a beautiful house on an island in the middle of a river, where a lonely old woman had decided to take me in and make me her daughter. But that night and for a long time afterward I saw nothing but walls of plaster and stone to shut me in—the finest prison in all the land, to be sure, but a prison nonetheless.

May 13, 1611

It is spring in Csejthe now. The sun at the window softens and warms like a stewed apricot, and the nights are shorter, the stars clearer. The change in constellations is one of the few delights I’m still afforded by the view from my tower. I have watched as Orion has disappeared, taking his warlike club with him, to be replaced by the maiden Virgo with her golden shaft of wheat. She is sometimes called Artemis, sometimes Demeter, although I like to think of her as Persephone, who was snatched from her mother to live with Hades in the underworld, and who returns only long enough each year to see the spring come round again. Such sorrow, and such joy, are things I know only too well.

These past months in my prison—more than four, by my count—have been more difficult than any I have known before. The trial of my servants has come and gone, with no hint of what my own fate might
be. The old steward, Deseő, came to tell me how the palatine had Dorka and Ilona Jó burned at the stake like common witches, their fingers pulled off with hot pincers. My little man, Ficzkó, the palatine had beheaded, and then his body too went on the fire. It was a terrible spectacle, Deseő said. The women were brought out in a little wooden cart, their hands and feet bound in chains as the local people, the palatine’s servants and tenants, gathered in the fields outside Bicske
vár
and shouted insults and curses and heaped ignominy on my poor servants as the flames licked at their feet, their clothes. The local people threw their own bundles of wood on the fire, to have their part in the event. Afterward the ashes were taken away in jars like souvenirs. Only Katalin Benecká, the old washerwoman, still lives. She is being kept alive in the prison at Bicske, at least until the palatine is through humiliating her. A year, maybe two, and it’s likely he will let her go home again. God only knows what her children had to promise the palatine to spare her life. God only knows what you, my dearest, must have promised to spare mine.

Meanwhile my own name has been dragged through more filth than I can imagine. They say I have eaten pieces of the maidens in my employ, beating them with my own hands until I was covered in their blood, using spells and potions against the palatine and Megyery to try to murder them. They have turned me into a human vampire, an abomination. A useful legend to use against a political enemy, and one sure to keep me here in my tower for a long time to come. Surely you must know that Thurzó and Mátyás and Megyery have much to gain by keeping me prisoner. Money, lands, power. It is your cousin Gábor they fear, and how we might help him unite the Hungarians against the Habsburgs. They think my disgrace will cause you and your sisters to fall in line to protect yourselves, your lands and position. That is why I write these pages for you. If the palatine decides to reverse his sentence and call for my head, if he continues to refuse to let me testify on my own behalf in open court, there will be no way for me to explain that I did nothing wrong, that my actions, such as they were, were within my rights as a noblewoman and landowner.
The girls who died were whores and thieves, an ulcerous cancer in my house. I had every right to punish them as I saw fit. Was I to allow licentiousness and thievery to continue under my very nose and do nothing to stop it? Should I have looked away as they stole not only my possessions but your inheritance, until we were all as destitute as a bunch of beggars? I could not. I would not.

I wish you would come to Csejthe so that I may tell you these things in person. I wish for one minute Megyery would loosen your reins, so that I may see you again, that I may kiss you and take your hand through the gap in my stone wall. You must be taller by now, I think, with maybe some of your father’s breadth of shoulder, some of his height and good looks. I wish you had known him better. If your father were alive, the palatine and the king would never have dared imprison me. If your father were alive, you would be here with me now instead of miles away, under the guardianship of a man I have never trusted nor loved. We would be a family still. But God had different plans for us, it seems, and so we must endure the present as best we can, with all of his good grace.

Regardless of my mother-in-law’s assurances that her son was eager to meet me, it was half a year and more that I lived in the Nádasdy household before I laid eyes on your father for the first time, when he traveled home for his Christmas vacation. In all that time Orsolya rarely left me alone. Every day there was something else of great importance she had to ask me—a manner of dress, perhaps, or a letter of thanks to write to this or that relative I had never met for some gift she had sent for me. Her instruction in childrearing was especially humorous given that my mother-in-law had raised only
the one child while I myself had cared for both my little sisters and several cousins at Ecsed without much in the way of help from my mother, who had counted on my maturity from a very young age. But nothing I did was beneath Orsolya’s attention. She would come into my room at all hours of the night with this or that question about how would I like the design for my new skirt, and should she have the cook make more bread for the week, and did I think she should invite this or that relative to Sárvár for a feast? In my head I was always screaming, I don’t care! I don’t care! But I had determined from that first day that I would be a credit to my family’s honor and never speak those words aloud, though they rang often in my head those first months when Orsolya made me her pet.

By All Saints, Ferenc wrote with news of his intention to come to Sárvár for his school vacation, and his mother was so overjoyed that her interest in me grew even more intrusive. For several weeks ahead of his promised arrival Orsolya made certain to take special care with me, so that my appearance, my manners, my mode of address might be pleasing to my future husband on our first meeting. She gave instructions on my clothing and hair, my meals, even the types of pillows that adorned my bed so that I might sleep more soundly, for she often observed that I seemed tired and out of spirits in the mornings and asked whether or not I spent the nights tossing and turning or if my evenings were restful. No, I always said. I’ve never slept so well in my life. I never raised my voice or laughed at her, at least within her hearing, and I had the servants take her favorite glass of wine to her each evening to help her sleep, and I propped up her pillows with my own hand. Orsolya would love me, so much that, unlike my own mother, she would never send me away.

It was not only fear that inspired me. By showing duty and honor I hoped to gain a modicum of independence in my life with the widow Nádasdy and her son, the boy I was to marry. A boy whom, as my first Christmas in the Nádasdy household approached, I was finally going to meet.

It happened in November, before the first snows came. Orsolya’s
estate at Sárvár was her favored home because it had been her husband’s favored home, only a few days’ journey south of Bécs, at the far western edge of Hungary where it meets Habsburg Austria. The old palatine had built a white tower in the fortress to house the family apartments, as well as several impressive high-ceilinged halls, and it was here Orsolya chose to spend her comfortable winters, entertaining friends when she felt well and convalescing in the thermal baths when she didn’t, for she suffered at times from weakness, from nausea, from frequent headaches that seemed nothing more than the ordinary complaints of advancing age. Yet she was determined every day to go to the baths, to be in better health and spirits when Ferenc arrived home. We were all expected to be at our best for Ferenc’s visit, his mother included.

My fiancé arrived from Bécs one night so late in the evening that the whole house had gone to bed and didn’t learn of his coming until the next day. I myself was unaware of it until Darvulia came in to stoke the fire in my room and help me get dressed. I had slept too little that night, had in fact stayed up late reading the very books Orsolya didn’t want to see in my hands evenings when we sat together before her fire—Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy. Bent on turning me from my mother’s Calvinism, she preferred that I read her some passages from a recent treatise by Father Bíró, the Lutheran, whose work she greatly admired and who had been three times a guest at Sárvár. I always obliged her in her reading, knowing my place. But afterward when I returned to my own chamber, I read as much of the ancient philosophers as I liked, squinting at the words by the faint light of the candles until long after midnight, the only time in the whole of the day when I might have some peace.

At Ecsed I had been used to sleeping until dawn broke, but Orsolya, whose piety awoke her before the sun, thought dawn was too late for highborn ladies and had begun a campaign of waking me an hour before the first pink light was growing over the walls of Sárvár. So when Anna Darvulia came into the room that morning and stoked the fire and lit the candles, pulling back the curtains around
my bed and turning the darkness of my chamber into a semblance of daylight, I thought it was merely another of Orsolya’s attempts to make me a respectable little copy of herself. I groaned and pulled the blanket over my head. Darvulia pulled it back down again.

“The mistress requests you get up and get dressed,” she said. She held out a robe for me to wear, and wearily I climbed out of bed to put it on.

I assumed my mother-in-law had more lessons for me. Besides instruction on the Bible and the teachings of her favorite scholars and priests, Orsolya filled my days with what she saw as talents necessary to women’s lot—dancing, drawing, music, embroidery. The rhythms of Latin and long unbroken strings of German, the latest treatises of astronomy and physiognomy, the discoveries from the explorers combing the New World that I had learned from Leopold were all unknown at Sárvár—pursuits best saved for men, according to my mother-in-law. Instead we were to sit and sew all day. To me all these delicate occupations were an absurd waste of time. “What?” I asked Darvulia. “More embroidery? Will the kingdom fall if I do not finish another cushion?”

The servant smiled, for she was accustomed by then to my saucy tongue. She never tattled on me to the lady of the house the way the other ladies sometimes did to gain the countess’s favor. She was respectful when she spoke to me and silent if she had nothing to say, which was often, but sometimes when she had a free moment she would sneak me a pomegranate or a bowl of dates, or sit and brush my hair over and over because she knew I liked it, and listen to me talk about my family and friends far away in Ecsed, or what I was reading in the evenings by candlelight, or complain about the countess’s constant and unrelenting attentions. Darvulia had become, over my short time in the Nádasdy house, a kind of second mother, attentive and kind, and the only person to whom I dared show my true feelings.

Now she shook out a clean skirt for me to wear. “Your fiancé has arrived,” she said. “He came very late last night. My lady asks that
you join them for the evening meal. I’m to dress you for your meeting with him.”

I sat up straight in front of my mirror. Darvulia would not meet my eyes, keeping her back to me as she placed the breakfast tray on my table and kicked the bearskin rug back into place on the floor. She must have known something of young Ferenc Nádasdy, having spent a few years in the countess’s household, and many times I had asked her what kind of boy he was, was he handsome, was he kind? What did she know of him that she could tell me? “Nothing, miss,” she always said, “except that he is a fine young man, and you will be lucky to wed him.” A good diplomatic answer befitting a good diplomatic servant. And I always let the matter go, not wanting to anger the one friend I had made at Sárvár.

But that morning, when I asked her the question again and she gave the same answer—he’s a fine man, you are lucky to be marrying him—I snapped at her. “Good God, Darvulia,” I said at last. “I’m a servant here as much as you are, so let’s have some honesty between us, shall we?”

She laughed aloud, a quick bell-like sound such as I never thought to escape from a mouth such as hers. “Yes, miss,” she said. “All right then. Get dressed, and I will tell you what I know.”

She dressed my hair and then bound me inside a gown of fine red Florentine silk with a pattern of stripes that I had chosen as my favorite because it brought out the color of my eyes. No more heavy brown velvet for me—I was determined the embarrassing spectacle that had happened with András Kanizsay the night I arrived at Sárvár would not repeat itself with Ferenc Nádasdy. Darvulia dressed my hair with some pearls, fine and white against the dark brown tresses, and while she worked she told me about the boy who was to become my husband. How he could read and write Hungarian at only five years old, how instead of going at once to Bécs for his schooling he had stayed with tutors at the family estate in Sárvár after his father’s death and only a few years ago been sent with his
cousin András Kanizsay to be educated at the king’s court, where he lived with György Bocskai’s family. How István Bocskai, György’s son, was his dear friend and traveling companion. My future husband, it seemed, was a favorite of the Habsburg king, a golden youth marked for greatness, already named Captain of the Horse when he was eight years old in honor of his father’s service to the country. A fortunate alliance, my mother would have said, whispering in my ear, if she had been witness to our conversation.