The Countess (18 page)

Ferenc and I had spent many difficult months together after our marriage, putting on a show for our friends and relations as we traveled from Varannó to Csejthe, Csejthe to Sárvár, but it was clear that marriage had not warmed Ferenc to me. He would take my hand in public or kiss my cheek at the teasing of his friends, but in private he was indifferent to me, more given to drinking and falling into his own bed in his own room long after I’d blown out my lamp. Even the night of our wedding, when Darvulia had dressed me in a white linen shift and armed me with a small vial of oxblood to mask my missing virginity, Ferenc could hardly bring himself to touch me. After all the feasting and dancing, he had come in that night to the bawdy cheers of his friends outside the door, staggering a little from the effects of the wine, smiled at me where I sat on the edge of the bed with my arms crossed over my breasts and ordered that I lie back to accept what God and country, duty and honor demanded of both of us. When it was over, he fell asleep as soon as he touched the pillow and never noticed the vial of blood I tipped out onto the bedclothes. I spent that night at the far edge of the bed, unable to get any rest due to the sound of my new husband’s bone-rattling snore, and in the morning my ladies displayed the bloody sheet as proof of my maidenhood. No one who knew the truth would dare betray it now, Darvulia for the sake of our friendship, András for the sake of his profitable betrothal. He was a lucky man with a small fortune
and a lovely young bride awaiting him. Even the day of the wedding he said nothing more than “congratulations” to me, his eyes never meeting mine, and then he moved away to laugh and joke with his companions about his incredible luck at finding a beauty with a good dowry and a mother eager for her grandchildren to bear the illustrious Kanizsay name. I watched him turn my cousin around and around the floor in a dance, no longer envious of his cousin’s marriage and fortune, perhaps, now that he had defiled both. If I had been the palatine’s son, he’d once said to me, I could have been your husband, Erzsébet. At the time I had thought he was only speaking of love. That night, his triumph complete, András forgot all about me. He and Griseldis were all secret smiles and public modesty, he proud, she blushing as he took her hand, bowing to his betrothed and asking her for a dance, while I sat on the dais in my gown of gold-shot silk and thought I might rip myself apart from bitterness.

After the return to Sárvár and Ferenc’s removal to court life, I settled into the routine of life as the new mistress of the many Nádasdy estates. There was always a great deal of business to attend to—servants to manage, furnishings to repair, livestock to breed, crops to sow. Like many women of my station I cared for all the family holdings while my husband was away, though I had far more properties to see to than they. The larger estates at Keresztúr, Varannó, Léka, Sárvár, and my own Csejthe required constant vigilance and attention in those warlike times. Scarcely a day went by when I didn’t have a letter to answer to some relative or other, or a tenant who refused to pay his tithe, a dispute with a neighbor over this or that border. Sometimes a poorer neighbor, thinking me vulnerable with my husband away, would occupy one of my husband’s estates, and I would have to send soldiers to throw off the squatters and restore the house to order. I was no weak-willed wife sitting at home and waiting for the men to come back and rescue me. It was I who protected what marriage and blood had bought, I who was master and mistress both.

For three years I wrote to Ferenc to let him know the business
at hand, both for his approval and so that he would never feel I was overstepping my role as mistress of the house. It was a careful game I played. My husband wrote me back on occasion with an answer to a question or a bit of praise for how I had handled a dispute or tended a sick relation, but for the most part he was much engaged with politics and didn’t come home if he could help it. I saw him mostly at Christmas, when he returned with his friends for the winter, and occasionally in the heat of summer, but only when the wars brought him within a day or two of Sárvár’s whitewashed walls. Whenever Ferenc came home he slept in his rooms, and I in mine. Seldom did he try to pretend that my presence in his house was anything more than a political decision made for us by our ambitious families. He went to his bed always alone, and if he found companionship among the ladies of the house or my maidservants, I did not know nor want to know.

The maidservants, as I had suspected, proved to be a constant source of discord. Like many other noblewomen I often took into my home the daughters of poorer relations, girls with little education and no money who might find a place in my house and my favor, and whom I would reward by arranging for them modest dowries, honorable marriages. I would teach them to sing and play, to read bible verses and write their own names. My own mother had taken in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such girls at Ecsed. Now it was my duty as mistress of all the Nádasdy estates to see to the health and well-being of everyone within my reach. As I had learned in my first days at Sárvár, however, the presence of such a large number of young women of marriageable age and little education was a route to trouble.

One such bit of trouble came in the form of a maidservant named Amália, a pretty little thing with reddish curls that hung to her waist and a lush, expectant expression that left her looking always like she had just been either kissed or slapped. Her mother was a distant cousin of Orsolya’s whose husband had emptied the family coffers for his drinking and left the women destitute. Thus she came
to me, and I took her in, glad for her companionship. Amália often attended my toilette, helping me bathe and dress, and I had favored her because she could be sweet to me and would sing in a high, clear voice like pure silver while she worked. I had given her a hand mirror, a bit of glass backed with polished brass in the shape of a dragon and his tail, because she had admired herself in it one day, turning it over and over in her pretty little hand. “You keep it,” I said. “Your face in it is lovelier than mine, at any rate, and will suit it better.”

“Oh, no, mistress,” she said, the proper answer for a girl who wished to keep her place, “I could never be as beautiful as you.” But she seemed pleased with the gift and kept it close to her. Often I would find her gazing into it, pressing her lips together to make them more plump, pinching her cheeks to give herself a blush. She was aware of her beauty and flaunted it before the other servants, turning the eyes of the handsomest boys who worked in and around Sárvár, throwing herself at the beaus of the other girls because she could. More than one young woman had come to me in tears because this or that young man had fallen prey to the allure of the red hair. I tried to intervene, tried to impress on her the importance of modesty when it came to the attentions of young men—a lesson I had learned too late, it seemed—but I could see her always looking away, looking bored, thinking, What does the mistress know about any young man? What does she know of love, when her husband spurns her bed?

At that time Ferenc came home during the summer months, riding from Bécs with some of his companions—Bocskai, Thurzó—to rest and refresh themselves after a difficult summer on the road. He had not sent word ahead that he was coming, so on the day he arrived the servants and I had much to do to see that he was comfortable, his rooms cleaned and spread with fresh bedclothes, the meals lavish and tasteful. I made a special effort to dress in a pleasing way and make up my hair in the latest fashion, but other than politeness at the evening meal he did not seek me out, nor I him.

A few days later Darvulia came early to see me where I sat writing
a letter, saying that two of the servant girls had been in an argument that morning, yanking the silver hand mirror back and forth between them, shouting curses and slapping each other. Apparently my sweet little Amália had declared in front of several other girls that she had snared the attention of Ferenc Nádasdy himself, that she visited his bed at night. Perhaps she would give the count a son, she’d said, since it appeared he showed no interest in his wife. Perhaps it would be she who would be mistress of the house someday, she said, and not Erzsébet Báthory. It had happened before. Old wives died, and new wives took their place.

One of the fellow servants to whom she made this outrageous boast was a young laundress, a plain thing with a face marked by pox and a heart scarred by jealousy, who proceeded to run to Darvulia and complain. Surely she should be punished, said the plain girl. Surely the lady of the house would be grateful to know that among her servants there was one so disloyal, with designs on my place in the household. Now Darvulia stood before me where I sat at my table, calmly asking how she should handle the disciplining of Amália, while the quill trembled in my hand and drops of ink spattered the letter I was writing to my friend Countess Zrínyi. I looked down to see the stain spreading, blotting out the words I had been writing just a moment before. Amália had betrayed me. The ink stain spread until all I could see was black.

I had often left the choice of punishment to Darvulia, whom the servant girls respected and feared as women had always feared that imposing creature. She had an ability with a pair of scissors across the palm of a thief or with the sharp prick of a pin through the finger of a girl who dawdled at her sewing. Leaving the punishment to Darvulia allowed me some distance from day-to-day trouble while still maintaining the order necessary among a gaggle of unruly, uneducated girls, and I had grown to trust her to handle it most of the time without interference from me. But this time one of them had gone too far, threatening not just the happiness of a servant girl but the stability of the entire household. My position, my pride. Laughing at
me, and wishing for my demise, and putting her own ignorant little behind in my place. Let her see what it means to be a countess, then, if she were so intent on being a nobleman’s wife. I told Darvulia I would see to her myself.

She seemed surprised, but only asked, “What will you do?”

I remembered Judit, how the vanished skirt had reappeared after she had borne her humiliation in the courtyard. There could be no restitution of a stolen item this time, for what was taken was my husband’s affection, my own good name and reputation. “I will know when I see her,” I said.

“You must not be too soft on her,” Darvulia said. “If they think you are threatened by her, you will lose the ability to manage them. They will say whatever they like about you to anyone who will listen.”

“Don’t fear. She will know who her mistress is.”

The house was unusually quiet as I crossed the courtyard to the servants’ quarters. The men were out hunting for the day, and so the servants, sensing the oncoming quarrel, followed me through the house and into the sewing room, where Amália and her fellows were gathered. A half circle of maidservants waited for me there, seamstresses, scullery maids, even the pockmarked little brat who had caused all the trouble in the first place with her tattling. They were speaking in sharp angry voices—I could hear them as I came down the hall—but a hush preceded me into the room, as if the house itself were drawing in its breath.

I spoke, keeping my voice as free from emotion as I could. “Amália,” I said, “I understand you have been visiting the count at night since he’s been home. That you think you might give him a son, if his wife will not. I understand you openly wished for my death, so that you might take my place.”

“I never said so, madam. The others lie about me.” She colored.

“Perhaps they do,” I said, looking at Amália’s accuser, at her face full of scars, at her sallow complexion and crooked teeth, a poor creature unlikely ever to leave the laundry, who probably couldn’t even
get the stable boys to look at her. It was always possible she had made up a lie about Amália, that she had invented the whole story as a matter of revenge, but even if she had I could not let the story spread, could not let it linger unattended like an unwelcome houseguest, or more would come after. The laundress would not look at anyone in the room. Having caused all the trouble, she had sense at least to act ashamed of herself, studying her shoes.

Amália, however, looked me full in the face, defiant, the mirror still in her hand. “You do think too much of yourself,” I said. “I blame myself for encouraging your vanity. Why don’t you give me the mirror?”

“It was a gift, mistress.” She clutched it to her bosom. “You gave it to me.”

“Since it was mine to begin with,” I said, more demanding now, “it is mine to take back again.”

She shot one or two of the other girls a pleading look, as if asking them to step forward and defend her, or else to join her in defying my will. For a moment I thought they might do so: to hit at me and slap me, to rend my clothes and scratch at my eyes, to take my jewels and fine possessions. There were many of them and only one of me. They could have done it, I knew. I waited, meeting their eyes, saying nothing. One by one the other girls in the room looked at their shoes, at the windows or the walls. Somewhere a candle flickered, and from outside came the sound of men laughing, telling stories. No one looked at Amália where she stood opposite me. She was not there; she did not exist. The servants valued my favor, perhaps, or perhaps they simply knew what would happen to them if any of them raised a hand against a noblewoman. Their will was weak, but mine was strong. In a moment they would know how strong.

At last Amália held out the mirror in front of her, and I took it and smashed it on the stone floor, shattering the glass and breaking the silver handle from the frame. A general gasp went up from among the servant girls, and one of them, the plain one who had coveted it
in the first place, began to cry. “This is what comes from vanity and braggadocio,” I said. “The next hour you boast of the count’s love for you will be your last in this house.”

Amália herself didn’t cry or fall on her knees to beg for forgiveness, as I thought she might have done, but instead coiled into a rage—mouth pursed in a thin line, eyes burning. So there was a viper in her after all. “Mistress,” she said, very slowly, “I never said such a thing. I would never mean to offend you.”