The Countess (13 page)

So that day I told Darvulia that Judit, who had stolen another girl’s clothes, could go without her own until the evening meal, and do her work in the courtyard where everyone would see her.

Judit laughed. “Who will listen to you?” she said. “You aren’t mistress here. The master doesn’t even look at you.”

I regarded the other maidservants in the sewing room, the seamstresses, the cook’s assistant whose little girl was always underfoot. Poor women all, with few skills to recommend them, no education, no dowries. They had all come to the manor in years past, when Orsolya was mistress, it was true. Still, it would be I who saw to the future of Sárvár, I to whom they must now show allegiance. “Perhaps I’m not mistress yet,” I said. “But I will be before long, and I will remember who was loyal and who was not. Anyone who thinks I’m being unfair is free to find a situation somewhere else.” The servants looked at one another, but no one moved. I turned to Darvulia. “Undress her and send her into the courtyard for the remainder of the day.”

When Darvulia started forward to undo the ties of the blouse around Judit’s neck, all the fight went out of the girl. She began to cry, falling at my feet and begging me not to subject her to such humiliation, but I stood firm. A couple of the older seamstresses stripped
her forcibly and sent her out of the house with her pieces of sewing to sit on a stone bench in the hot sun and make up her sheets blubbering and shaking. The understewards and stable boys came out to laugh at her and call out rude things in her direction, but the other maidservants would not look at her when they passed by with their buckets of soap, their bundles of clean laundry. I was rather pleased with myself for coming up with a fair punishment for both her thievery and her insolence, though I thought her reaction a bit overwrought, since she didn’t do her penance for more than a single day and suffered nothing more than shame and sunburn. At the end of the day I had her brought back inside and sent Darvulia with some cream for her skin, which peeled and crisped along the pale blades of her shoulders and across the tops of her breasts. I had one of the maidservants take her a piece of roast chicken and some wine and said that she could be excused from her duties the next morning to rest, but that by afternoon I expected her back in the sewing room. She would be all right in a day or two, I knew.

Judit did not come weeping and begging my forgiveness the way my mother’s maidservants had done, but the next morning the skirt magically reappeared in the trunk of the girl who had lost it, the one who had lodged the original complaint, and for many months afterward there was no trouble among the maidservants at Sárvár. A triumph, Megyery told me afterward, for now all the servants knew I was an evenhanded mistress with fairness and honesty in mind. That I would keep the peace in the house when Ferenc was gone and see to the health and well-being of everyone on the estate, as a respectable wife must. When Ferenc returned, it would be to a well-run house, and me in the center of it, ready to take my place by his side.

That autumn Sárvár was set to host an event that Orsolya had planned long before my arrival there, the party celebrating the engagement of the palatine’s son to the daughter of the house of Báthory. Although the ink on the official documents had been dry for several years, it was only now that family and friends would come together to witness Ferenc put the ring on my finger and acknowledge openly what before had been merely understood.

Now that I had gained a measure of his respect, Megyery sought my advice in helping him arrange the household for the arrival of Ferenc and his retinue. It was I who oversaw the turning out of the rooms and the refreshing of the linens, had the courtyard replanted with new trees and the walls given a fresh coat of whitewash before my fiancé’s arrival from the Habsburg court. More and more I tried to feel that I belonged at Sárvár, that it now was my true home. All that remained was for Ferenc Nádasdy to love me, and rejoice in our friendship and upcoming marriage.

On the afternoon they arrived I was attending Megyery in his room, receiving his last instructions regarding the furnishing in the guest quarters and how the cook should make the soup, when I heard the servants coming down the hall to announce the men’s arrival. “Go, go,” said the tutor, waving me off. “Don’t keep him waiting. He should be pleased to see you, and how much you have improved these last months, in beauty and disposition.” I hoped rather than believed this to be true as I went through the halls of Sárvár toward my future.

It was a gray day, threatening rain. I had the household servants assembled and waiting for the men in the courtyard, where Ferenc had already dismounted and was giving instructions on stabling the
horses. He wore a fine yellow cloak that contrasted strongly with his dark coloring and tanned summer skin, and his longer hair gave him something of a careless appearance, though his eyes under their black brows looked even more fierce than I remembered. Strands of black hair stuck to his brow with sweat. “Welcome home, sir,” I said.

“Thank you, Erzsébet,” he said. It was the first time he had ever called me by my given name. He gave a curt bow and looked back toward his companions. “It’s good to be home.” He patted the flanks of his black horse and said something low to István Bocskai that was not meant for my ears, because they both laughed, a peppery sound full of private nuance and history. I was already forgotten. I turned to András Kanizsay and with as much formality as I could, I said, “Welcome, cousin. I hope your journey was not too tiresome.”

His face broke into a smile as he looked me over. “Your lady has grown since last winter, Ferenc,” he said. “And look here—see how her bosom has increased! She will make you a fine wife after all.”

I blushed, a deep red that began in my belly and spread to the very tips of my hair, but Ferenc only glanced at me and looked away again. Either he was as embarrassed as I, or else the thirteen-year-old girl in front of him was not of much interest, either her face or her mediocre excuse for a bosom. Instead he spoke at length to one of the stable boys about his horse, which he suspected had a lame foot. András lowered his eyes and in a more serious tone said, “Forgive me, cousin. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Think nothing of it.”

“It is a pleasure to see you again. No, don’t look so angry. I’ve ridden long hours from Bécs, and in all that time I have never seen anything so lovely as the sight of you.”

“Thank you, cousin. Your compliments do me great honor.”

“Then why do you sound so offended?”

“I’m not. I’m sorry. We have so little company here that I sometimes forget my manners.” I looked at Ferenc. “My lord too seems to forget himself whenever he comes home. One might receive as little as a glance from him.”

“My cousin is distracted at present with the trouble with the king. Old Maximilian has been ill lately, and it weighs on Ferenc.” He frowned. “Is everything all right, miss? Have you been crying?”

I wiped my face. “Not at all. It’s only a drop of rain.”

On the balcony ringing the inner courtyard the assembled ranks of maidservants and cooks, valets and stable boys were watching carefully to see how Ferenc would treat me after the trouble with Judit, and now I saw him look up to the rail where the girl herself stood with her chin raised, her eyes gray and hot as ash, looking from him to me. It was not quite enough to serve as a confirmation of his fondness for her, but it was enough to leave a little sliver of ice in my heart that would not melt. In the count’s eyes I was still a child, a bride who was being foisted upon him against his will, and now the servants knew it too. I wondered if Judit would be in Ferenc’s bed the moment I was out of his sight.

András relieved my misery by offering me his arm and leading me inside out of the weather. His arm, under my hands, was quite warm and pleasant, like horse’s flesh. Ferenc followed, regaling István Bocskai in a low voice with some story of a young woman of their acquaintance in Bécs, a maidservant in a noble house who had found herself with child after some friend of theirs had apparently paid her too much attention. She had been dismissed from her place, they heard, after the mistress of the house learned of the trouble. I walked in the house to the sound of their laughter, my back straight. What did they say about me, I wondered, over their cups at the end of the day? What did the maidservants of Bécs overhear about me, the child bride of Ferenc Nádasdy, in the dark of their rooms at night?

More and more I believed that our marriage would be nothing but a political match, with no joy in it for either of us. I remembered my parents’ own marriage, their fondness for each other and for their children, with increasing pangs of loneliness. I didn’t love Ferenc any more than he loved me, but I had hoped that we might be friends at least, companions who could enjoy each other’s company as well
as the power and wealth the match would bring us both. There was no one else in the Nádasdy household near my own age except for András. Darvulia was a dear friend, but I could hardly turn to the lesser servant girls for companionship—the seamstresses, the laundresses, the cooks, the housemaids, with no nobility or education to speak of. But no matter what I said or did, Ferenc never sought my company, and little by little the efforts I had begun to win his love began to seem ridiculous, even contemptible.

Inside the house I made certain the gentlemen had enough food and drink to last the evening, and then, bowing to show more respect than I really felt, I retired for the night, grateful for the air cooling my hot face. In the halls I stood back in the darkness to avoid the looks of the servant girls, the titters of the understewards, so that no one would have to witness my shame.

October saw the arrival of my mother and brother, along with many of our friends and relatives, nobles from all over Upper Hungary, in preparation for the engagement ceremony. I was overjoyed to see István again and dashed headlong through the halls and across the courtyard the moment I heard the familiar notes of my brother’s voice through my window. He was barely off his horse before I had my arms around his neck, and when he kissed my forehead with all tenderness, I remembered our games in the children’s court, when he had played the pasha and I the pasha’s harem, threatening violence for his love. “Erzsébet, my God,” he said. “Is it really you? You’re so tall, and a woman now.”

My mother climbed down from her carriage. She was much changed in the year and a half since I had seen her last, gray around
the temples and ashen in her complexion, but she embraced me for a long time, and I waited until she let me go. “Look at you,” she said. “Every woman in the country will be envious of your beauty.” It was the greatest praise she could offer. I beamed and let her kiss me, and then I led them up and into the house.

We were suffering all that week under the oppression of a late heat wave, in which the crops turned brown and the rivers receded more than usual from their grassy banks, exposing stinking pools of dying fish and cracking mud. Every day the men went out into the town, first to visit the baths and then across the river where they might find a house where they could drink and play cards to escape the heat. I was glad to be without them, without the sorrow of Ferenc, the annoyance of András, though their excursions did take my brother, István, away from me also. Then came those hot, still evenings during which the whole world seemed to arrest its movement and the wandering stars to stop moving through the firmament, while the insects whirred in the grasses outside and the frogs croaked in the ditches to protest the heat. My mother and Darvulia and I, escaping to one of the lower sitting rooms where it was cooler, pulled our skirts up over our knees and fanned ourselves and sucked pieces of ice that the servants brought up from the cool house, little bits of chill winter saved in sawdust for these most uncomfortable days. I ordered a number of the candles blown out to reduce the heat as well, so the rooms were dimmer than usual, and little more than the dark head of Darvulia was visible to me across the room as we waited for Ferenc and András and my brother to come home.

The men came back well after midnight, drunk and singing, and I went down to them to wish them good evening and make certain they had everything they needed before I went off to bed. Ferenc followed me, as he did every night, I playing hostess and leading him by the light of my single candle to the door of his room. At no moment did we speak to each other, but I think he was aware, as I was, that it would not be much longer before he and I would be master and
mistress of this house. He was an orphan, I nearly so, and far from the watchful eyes of our chaperones. Alone, for the present.

I stopped at the door and would have bade him good night with all politeness, as usual, but when I looked into his black eyes, his handsome rapacious face, I put my hand on his arm and leaned in more closely, speaking in a private voice that, until then, I had not known I possessed. “Good night,” I said. Under my hand his skin was hot. It was the first time I had ever touched him. It was more pleasant than I had imagined, warm and close and full of expectation. “I hope your sleep is restful.”

He took a step back, his face all over crimson and angry. “What are you doing?” he said. “Go back to your room, miss, and remember who and where you are.” Now I was
miss
again, not Erzsébet. His face was half shadowed and stern in the dim light, the hawk-faced look of a priest reprimanding a harlot. If he encouraged wantonness in his maidservants, it appeared he would have none in his bride-to-be. To him I was to be only chaste, obedient, and modest, my eyes lowered always like those old statues of the Virgin hidden in chests and cupboards and cellars wherever the new faith had supplanted the old. There was no husband in those images, I realized now—only mother and child. No earthly love, but only submission to the will of God.

He took another step and another, opening the door as the candlelight grew and stretched between us, lengthening our shadows there. In a moment Ferenc closed the door to his chamber behind him. I could hear the click of the lock, and then I was alone on the stairs of the tower.