The Countess (14 page)

In the light of my single candle, which did little to dispel the darkness in that part of the house, I felt myself more lonely than ever. Ferenc would marry me, and I would become his property, that much was clear. My name and dowry, my very self, would all belong to the house of Nádasdy, but your father’s heart, Pál, was something I could not hope to touch, not then. Around me the house went dim
and still, and I heard the night noises of Ferenc’s valet speaking to him in a low hum, the distant murmur of the young men still in the main hall, drinking by the light of the fire, the skirts of the maidservants as they swished to and fro combining with the hot shameful beating of my own heart. For a moment I raised my hand as if to pound on Ferenc’s door, and then dropped it again and stood trembling in the dark, unsure where to go or what to do next.

Below there was a noise, a shuffling as of feet on wooden boards. Where the candle shone faintly through the doorway, I could see a dark figure—András Kanizsay, trying to hide in the shadows. His face was turned up to me, and for a moment I thought I saw a look of pleasure curling the corners of his mouth. What he was doing there I couldn’t imagine. In a moment I heard his footsteps retreating, saw his back turning away. That he should have seen my humiliation was intolerable, and I sprinted down the opposite hall to my own bedchamber, where the white bed waited with its rugs and curtains, its cushions and down mattress, a nest fit for an empress, but one who would sleep, as always, alone.

My ladies undid the laces of my gown, took down the combs and pearls from my hair. Darvulia came in with a concoction of figs soaked in brandy that she said would help me sleep. I threw myself into her arms and wept. She said nothing about what had transpired in the hall, though I didn’t doubt that somehow word was already making its way around Sárvár, to the maidservants who laughed and smirked whenever I passed, to the men down in the hall with their wine and their singing. I drank her cup dry and closed my eyes while she brushed out all my long dark-brown hair, falling afterward into a restless half sleep in which I was always seeing the change of Ferenc’s countenance, his expression turning over and over to fear and revulsion. The room spun from the brandy, the strong drink.

I was still more awake than asleep long after midnight when my door opened a crack, revealing faintly a darker shape against the wall, the shadow of someone coming into the room. The ropes holding
my mattress creaked beneath me. I was sitting up in bed. “Darvulia?” I asked.

“Hardly,” said a male voice. Then he was inside, and the door was shut. We were alone in the darkness, a little moonlight coming through the shutters turning the shapes in the room to monstrous forms, the lion-backed chair to a beast with dripping jaws, the table in the corner to a catafalque. The rugs on the bed lay on my limbs like earth on a new grave, but I was afraid to throw them off. The room tilted and then righted itself, the liquor still buzzing in my veins. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out again with a little sigh, the only sound either of us made in that space, that wet ephemeral darkness while his steps on the floor came toward me.

“You must be lonely in here by yourself,” said András Kanizsay.

I pulled the cloth closer around me. I was afraid of him, afraid of myself with him. I had a strange desire to ask him to stay, to wrap my arms around his neck and press my mouth to the warm skin there, though I knew that was impossible. “Go away,” I hissed.

“I don’t think you mean that at all. I think you want me here.”

“Go back to your own room, András. I do mean it.” This time my voice was firmer, more sure of itself, more mindful of the danger I was in.

He was standing next to the bed, so close I could smell the
pálinká
on his breath, sweet and coppery and full of sugar. I knew I should have called for the guards, but he was already in my room—the taint of him would be on me no matter what I did. We were already guilty by association. No one would believe me if I said that nothing had happened. No one would believe him if he said he did not force himself on me.

The room was stifling in the October heat, and when he came and sat on the edge of the bed, the oily sweat of his skin mingled with my own, and the slightly acrid smell of his armpits, the sweeter scent of his hair, mixed with the sugar of his breath. I held myself entirely still, listening to the blood rush in my ears. Despite my mother’s
tutoring in the wifely arts, I did not know what I should do. I was not yet a wife. Any movement, I felt, would endanger us both further. A faint outline of him was visible in the weak light coming through the window. The wryness was gone, replaced by a sad kind of drunken earnestness that made me pity him a little. The insignificant cousin, made significant for a moment.

“You are so beautiful,” he said.

“Ferenc doesn’t think so.”

“Ferenc doesn’t see you.
I
see you. If I had been the palatine’s son, if I had been a count with enough estates for a kingdom, I could have been your husband.”

“Stop talking about things that will never happen. Ferenc is going to be my husband.”

“Not yet he isn’t.” He came closer, pressing me down into the mattress. “From the first moment I saw you, when you tumbled out of the carriage into my arms, I knew you were for me.”

That made me laugh. “I thought I was a child, with a chest as flat as a boy’s, a serious little nun who would plague your cousin into his grave.”

“You don’t have a boy’s chest now. I see you looking at me. Ferenc doesn’t know you. He has his swordplay and his horses and his great name to live up to. And his maidservants, and his friends. He doesn’t have time for his lovely little fiancée.”

His hands were rougher than I would have thought, calloused from holding the sword and the reins, and they pressed down on my wrists, down into the softness of the bed. “I’ll scream,” I said, but the words were weightless, like a sigh.

“No, you won’t. You want me here as much as I want to be here. You’ll be sweet and good, and let me be your husband tonight.”

If I had wanted, I might have fought him off. Even then I could have kicked and slapped and overturned the furniture, called for the guards, called for Ferenc. Perhaps I should have. But Ferenc did not want me, and András did. Here was pleasure and friendship, instead of loneliness and resentment. Here was a man who would love me
not for my dowry and family connections, not for my future children, but for myself.

If I had known then the kind of man András really was, if I had known how he would turn his back on me, I would have sent him away at once. But that night, God help me, I wanted him there, his weight pressing down the bed, his hands in my hair. His attentions had always pleased me more than they should have, and now, in darkness, I was sure I loved him. With a child’s innocence, I thought if I could not have the man who was supposed to want me, I would have the other instead.

His hands were on my shift, pulling it up, and I was nowhere, I was darkness. From someplace I felt a sharp pain, and he was nothing but a shadow over me, insubstantial, like a spirit I dreamed into being. It was already too late to send him away. Willingly then I put my arms around his neck and my hands into his hair, fine and soft and smelling of woodsmoke, but the place where his whiskers burned against my face left it raw and red, so that in the morning Darvulia, who said nothing about my appearance, had to bring me some ointment for the soft parts of me, slashed, burning, an occupied country.

Thus are the seeds of trouble sown. I have often thought of that night, Pál, the girl I was then, the little fool who thought she was in love, who thought she had chosen for herself a man who would love her. Who nearly ruined everything over a moment of despair.

When Ferenc and I stood in front of our friends and family for the engagement ceremony, when I held up my hand in front of our friends and family and let him put on it the ring of gold and ruby that
had once belonged to his mother, my belly was already full of András Kanizsay’s child. The red dress my mother and Darvulia had bound me into that morning felt so tight across my ribs I thought I would faint, and I was so pale and green that Ferenc asked in my ear if I wouldn’t like to delay a day or so until I felt better. “Of course not,” I said, more sharply than I should have, and for the rest of the day he scowled, saying nothing to me, not even “good night” at the end of the evening. Instead I danced with István Bocskai, Ferenc’s friend from the imperial court and an ally to my own Báthory uncles in Transylvania, his arm around my waist as he spun me around to the lively strains of a
palotás
. The eyes of everyone in the room were on us, including those of my András, who did not ask me to dance.

Instead he watched, and drank, and teased his cousin about me, all as he had before. His coldness frightened me, made me think that perhaps our night together had been a single moment only, a drunken mistake that in the light of day he meant to deny. I tried to convince myself that I no longer cared for him, that his love or lack of it meant nothing to me, but I could not stop the warmth that came over me whenever I caught his eye, the sudden twist in my entrails that felt like love. He said nothing more to me than “Good evening, miss,” all night, and I went to bed that evening puzzling over the way he smiled whenever he caught me staring.

I had nearly made up my mind to forget about him, to shut the door to him forever, when he came to my room once more under cover of darkness, swearing that his actions that evening had been for my protection. “I must be aloof in public,” he said, “or else I will have to declare my love for you in front of everyone, and give us both away.” Awash in relief, I believed him. I wept and covered him with kisses, begged him never to turn his back on me, and once again showed him the love that his cousin would not or could not accept.

In company András and I continued much as we had before—I pretending to annoyance, András keeping up what appeared to be his usual good-natured teasing. No one looked closely enough to see that my annoyance now hid a kernel of fear that someone would discover
our secret, or that his teasing masked what I thought were his more tender feelings. He made no more comments about my bosom or my age, at least, either in front of Ferenc or privately to me. He came to my bed two or three more times that month, when it seemed like it would be safe to do so, murmuring endearments and bringing me such little presents as he could afford—a comb for my hair, a bit of ribbon he’d bought in the market. I made sure, every evening, to leave the door unlocked for him and pretended surprise whenever I woke to find his sweet breath crushing against my mouth, thrilling at having a secret of my own to keep, at having someone of my own choosing to love. He would stay an hour, maybe two, and slip out again before Darvulia came in with my breakfast each morning. We thought we were being so clever. In public we might be good and honorable, but the night, he said, was ours alone. No one would ever know our secret.

It was two months or more before I noticed my monthlies had ceased. They had always been infrequent, and I too young to miss them. But I did notice how smells changed: the honeysuckle so sweet and cloying under my window that I asked the gardener to chop it down, the smell of baking bread as strong as the scent of manure in the stables. After a few weeks, food became so disagreeable I could keep nothing down except broth and a little pale beer. I hardly left my room at all, claiming an infectious fever. There was so much sickness in the country then that no one suspected, or if they did they knew better, at least, than to say anything to me.

More than once I thought of telling András, wondering what he would say, if he would be proud, if he would be frightened. If he would denounce me, let my secret slip in a moment of drunkenness or fear. If he would ask me to come away with him, take what money and possessions we could and disappear. We could go to Venice, to Rome, to the Habsburg lands in Spain, even to the New World if we chose. I imagined a flight in the dark, changing our names, the bucking decks of ships at sea, a new life in unknown lands.

All this I dreamed, but when I told him at last, when I gathered my courage one night and told him that I was expecting his child,
he laughed and said he had been wondering. I looked so green all the time. Did I not know how to prevent a child? he asked. Did my mother teach me nothing useful?

Of course she did, I said, though she had done nothing of the kind. My mother must have thought any child I bore would be from my noble marriage and not a tryst with a lesser-born cousin. That there were ways to prevent a child, and that András knew about them while I did not, disturbed me even more than his indifference to my condition. For the first time I wondered if I could not trust him. He kissed me with as much warmth as ever, but he went away that night without making any of the promises or plans I hoped for—no carriages or ships, no desperate flights through the darkness toward an unknown fate.

A few days later, when my mother demanded the truth, and I knew I would not be able to hide it from her much longer, I told her privately that I had given myself to László Bende, the butcher’s son whom I had reprimanded for fighting, a boy to whom I had spoken no more than eight or ten words in my life. No one could know the real identity of the man I had loved, not if I was to protect him. My brother was furious, saying I had debased myself and threatened a match that would be the making of all of us, but he promised to keep my secret, and to help me make arrangements to get out of Sárvár until the child was born. In the strictest secrecy my mother made plans to take me away to the Nádasdy house at Léka under the pretense of tending my illness herself, with a mother’s loving attention. We dared not return home to Ecsed, where the truth would not stay hidden for long. Léka, with its healthful mountain air, its remoteness, would make an excellent place to hide my shame. I was not without hope even then. Perhaps after an absence András would reconsider his options and decide to come for me and the child. Perhaps my removal would make him remember that he loved me, and that my shame was his as well.