The Countess (15 page)

We left on a cool bright morning, my mother bundling me into rugs for the journey in her cart, bringing with us only Darvulia, the
táltos
, and her medicinal powders and drinks. Both her talent with the healing arts and the deep friendship I felt for her meant I would not leave her behind. She helped me climb into the carriage and settled the rug across my lap while my mother spoke to the driver about the road into the mountains. Megyery came to see us off, shading his bulging frog’s eyes against the sun and wishing my health much improved. I thanked him and looked in the dark places of the courtyard, to see if there might be a young man who was sorry to see me go, but there were only servants carrying trunks, and the stable master checking the traces, and a maidservant taking the white sheets from my bed to the laundry, her eyes flicking to me and down again as she hurried past.

“Don’t look for him, miss,” Darvulia said. “He won’t be there, and it won’t look right if you get upset. You’re supposed to be ill.”

I looked down at the hands in my lap. “One might think he would come to see me off at least. We are supposed to be married next year.”

“It wasn’t the master I was speaking of, miss. You know the other does not dare come to wish you farewell when your fiancé does not.”

So she had guessed the identity of my night visitor, that crafty creature. I should have known. Nothing ever slipped past Darvulia’s notice. From that moment I knew I could trust her with anything, with my most secret self, and never again would there be anything but complete trust between Darvulia and myself.

In a moment Megyery helped my mother into the carriage. She settled herself down beside me and put the rug over her knees. The driver spoke a word to the horses, which lurched forward with one sickening motion, toward Léka, where three women could tend to the future in silence.

My mother, Darvulia, and I spent the whole of that winter by ourselves in a private wing of the expansive
vár
at Léka, a many-level keep on a hill in the mountains north of Sárvár, circled by mists coming off the river, cool even in the heat of summer. There we watched my belly expand, tending the fire ourselves, making the meals with the help of only Darvulia, since we didn’t dare bring an entire retinue of servants who were not likely to keep gossip to themselves. That part of Hungary was suffering an outbreak of smallpox, so that we had a good excuse to hide away, with little contact from the stable master and the small group of maids who came and went around the castle when it was unoccupied by the Nádasdy court. We were kept active with the endless chores necessary for daily living and didn’t speak of the business at hand, the child within me. As I felt it stretch and kick I remembered the feel of András’s weight pressing me down into the bed and wondered what would have happened if Ferenc, and not András, had come to me that night when all the lights were out.

The first pains of labor began one morning in the middle of the summer. I woke clutching my hands to my belly, afraid, remembering the sight of my sister Klára being born, the wet head and the blood and my mother’s cries. A wave of pain swept over me briefly and then went away again. I thought if I didn’t move or speak it might lessen, so I didn’t wake my mother on the other side of the bed or Darvulia from where she slept on a pallet near the window. The room was small and too warm. I kicked the rug off me and went to the window, opening it a crack. The sky bucked and wavered, and a thin trail of mist crept up from the river and into the courtyard. Below I could see a man in a blue coat and long beard leading a white horse, dancing and skittering on the paving stones. He looked up, briefly, and
waved. I waved back, wondering if I were seeing a real man and horse or an apparition.

Then my mother was beside me, pulling closed the shutter. “Don’t stand at the window,” she said. “You’ll be seen.” I looked down, but the man and the horse were gone.

My mother fetched me breakfast, bread and fruit, but I wasn’t hungry, nor did I want to sit still and listen while she read to me from her favorite bit of Calvin, or embroider the waistcoat I had been working on, or play the lute for my mother’s amusement. The pain did not return for several hours, but I was restless, and moved from the window to the bed and back like a dog circling for a place to lie down. Still I would not tell them that the pains had begun. “Erzsébet, my God,” my mother said. “Sit down before you make me dizzy.”

The truth was that I was afraid. Many women I knew had died in childbirth. I was young and strong, but so had been many others who had gone before me. I did not want to die delivering András Kanizsay’s child. I thought of the stories of the Virgin, who gave birth in a stable with only her husband to attend her. At least I wasn’t as unfortunate as she. I had good help with me, and better on the way, for several months before my mother had sent for a midwife, a woman named Birgitta whom she trusted. This midwife had borne four children herself, all of whom had died. Of sickness, my mother was quick to explain, not the delivery itself. But Birgitta had not yet arrived that morning when the pains started. She was due soon, I knew, but not yet, not yet.

I got up again and went to the window. The mist was beginning to burn off, revealing the road that followed the line of the river, the opposite side where the hills mounted toward the sky, but there was no sign of the midwife’s carriage. The heaviness in my belly increased moment by moment, and another pain came. I closed my eyes. I would not cry out. If I didn’t cry, if I did not admit my suffering, the child would not come. I would be safe.

My mother was looking at me strangely. I could feel her large black eyes over my face, her knowing eyes. Another pain came, and another.

“It’s started,” she said. “Darvulia, get her into bed. It’s time for her confinement.”

“The midwife isn’t here, Mother.”

“Darvulia and I can deliver you if we must.”

“The midwife isn’t here. The baby can’t come until the midwife arrives.”

“Erzsébet, get into bed, my love. It’s time.”

A gush of green fluid fell from my body, splashing along the wooden boards and staining my shift, my feet. There was so much of it I thought at first that Darvulia had spilled a bucket of water across the floor. But my belly tightened, and I could feel the outlines of the child under my skin. Moving.

“Green,” Darvulia said. “We have to be especially careful.”

My mother looked grim. I didn’t know what the green water meant, but I stood still while Darvulia pulled the shift off me and helped me into bed. My mother readied the birthing chair in the corner, a wooden stool with a hole in the middle on which I would have to squat. My mother had explained everything to me already, but I still felt completely unprepared as I climbed into bed, as the pains grew in frequency and the room around me closed in tighter and tighter, until there was nothing but myself and the color of pain, bright red, and a pressing, gasping need that moved lower and lower into my belly as the day wore on.

At one point I heard a new voice in the room: the midwife had arrived, come rushing up the stairs with her cloak still on, barking directions at the two women in the room and at me, her face lined and dark but kind. She helped me from the bed to the birthing chair, which was hard-backed and stiff as a confessional. She knelt before me and gave me orders. Push now. Push now, Erzsébet, or the child will die. Push.

Save me
.

I curled around my belly and pushed and pushed, and then there was a popping and a release, and then the child slid free of me, a healthy girl with a shock of dark hair like my own, with my
own great dark eyes and long, distinctive Báthory nose. The midwife cleaned out her mouth and nose with a swift and efficient finger, and then I heard her cry, a wail that circled round my head as Darvulia wiped my face and waited for the afterbirth, which she carried away like a dead child into the bowels of the castle. What she did with it I didn’t know, nor did I want to know. She was a
táltos
and had her own way of doing things.

My mother put the baby briefly into my arms. She was so light after the heaviness I had felt in my belly all those months, her limbs pink and white and so warm it was like she had been taken from inside a hot oven. “Her name will be Erzsébet, after her mother,” said my mother, “but that is all the inheritance she will receive from you.” Then she took the child from me and gave her to the midwife, who cooed and spoke to my daughter in a strange tongue I did not understand. To this Birgitta my mother also handed over a great deal of gold, enough for a pasha’s ransom, on the condition that she take the child away and never return to Hungary in this life, or contact the Báthory or Nádasdy families again. The midwife agreed. While I wept and struggled to rise from my bed, while I slapped at the hands that tried to restrain me and swore that I hated my mother and would never forgive her, that it was too much to bear, Birgitta put on her cloak and carried my baby from the castle of Léka, disappearing back to her native land, and I never saw either of them again.

My mother watched over me for several more weeks, until I was well recovered, and then she arranged to have me sent back to Sárvár with Darvulia as my chaperone. She kissed me before putting me in the carriage, a cold dry kiss on my cheek that I did not return. I would not thank her. I would show her no love for what had been done to me and my child for the sake of her ambitions. “Ferenc Nádasdy is a good man,” she said, her voice weary. “He is only young and will learn in time what love is. Do your best to make him love you, and you will both be happy.” I did not tell her how little hope I had of his love, nor how little desire to marry him, not when my heart was still full of András Kanizsay. Then my mother stood back to let
the horses pull me away to my new life, all evidence of my sin washed as clean as if it had never been. She would be dead a few weeks later of the smallpox that was ravaging the villages of Upper Hungary, her face scarred and unrecognizable at the last by the pustules that marked that terrible disease, and afterward Darvulia and I alone would be left witness to what had passed in my rooms at Léká.

Years later I would forgive my mother, understanding that none of us who were present that day had any choice in the matter. Just as my mother had sent me to my future, I sent my secret daughter to hers, wishing that whatever joy she might find in this life would be hers, that she would have the ability to choose it for herself, and the courage to take it.

After my confinement at Léka I was sent back to Sárvár, to my tiresome chaperonage under Imre Megyery. The men were gone, having returned to Bécs during my absence, so there was little to amuse me at the Nádasdy house. I missed András but did not dare to write him. Instead I spent those months toiling over the last of my formal lessons, enduring fittings for my trousseau, writing letters to my sisters and brother and our cousins back home at Ecsed, sharing our sorrow over my mother’s death.

After a few months of this we left for the Nádasdy estate at Varannó, which lay at the far eastern part of the kingdom not far from my family’s house at Ecsed. There I was to be married off on the eighth of May in the year 1575, with nearly five thousand guests in attendance. Among the invited was the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II himself, as well as the greatest noble families from all over Hungary, Austria, and Transylvania: Batthyánys, Esterházys, Zrínyis,
Rákóczis, Drugeths, and Pálffys would crowd into the
kastély
, and the Nádasdy court would fill with more gaiety than I had ever known before, or was likely to know after.

Everything in the months leading up to the wedding itself was done with the greatest ceremony and decorum. Megyery arranged to take me from Sárvár to Varannó with a large retinue of servants, including Darvulia and some ladies, young cousins of the Báthory and Nádasdy families, crowded into carriages and chattering on and on about the young men at court, the latest gossip from Prága or Pozsony. I looked forward to the wedding not for the sake of my marriage to Ferenc but because I was certain to see András again, as well as my brother and sisters, those who really loved me and whom I loved without reservation. My life had been filled with so much solemnity of late—the birth of the child, the death of my mother—that I felt a kind of desperation for joy. I would dance until my shoes fell apart, and drink wine, and listen to endless strains of music made for my enjoyment. As we made the long trek by carriage back across Hungary Megyery told me more than once to quit fidgeting and leaning out the window like a gypsy and behave instead like a young woman on the verge of her greatest triumph. At night I would fall into Darvulia’s arms and beg her to sing to me, to soothe me against my anxiety. She attended everything I needed with the greatest care, giving me a tonic that calmed my nerves and let me sleep a little in the rocking carriage, so that I was not always irritating Megyery with my impatience.

Everywhere we went there were sights that gave me pleasure. Farmers along the Carpathian foothills walked through the fields sowing their spring wheat in the turned earth, and in villages children chased the carriage through the streets, shouting for us to throw a few coins out the window in their direction, in which I, as the bride, obliged them. A shower of glittering
fillér
fell wherever we passed, scooped up by children who waved and shouted blessings in our direction as if the Virgin herself had been spotted among them.

When we arrived at the palace of Varannó—one of the smallest
and most far-flung of the Nádasdy estates, chosen to be closer to my own family’s holdings at Ecsed and Szathmár—it was already filled with people who had come to prepare for the wedding. Two dozen master chefs and more than a dozen wedding stewards were hired to manage the house and entertain the many guests who would soon arrive. Dressmakers, cooks, housemaids, and laundresses were brought in from the countryside, where the local peasantry rejoiced to have such profitable work, and musicians from Prága and Bécs, from as far away as Venice and Florence, came to perform for the entertainment of the noble families of Hungary. The marriage of the house of Báthory to the house of Nádasdy was a state affair, something sanctioned by the king and smiled on by God himself, who in his wisdom set the nobility as the protectors and defenders of the people. Both our families knew the necessity of outshining the neighbors in the splendor of the arrangements and spent lavishly to make it possible—Ferenc, as head of his family, and my brother as head of mine.