The Countess (2 page)

Rev. Ponikenus and I were not with her when she died, so we did not hear her final words, though the guards say she was complaining of cold in her limbs and asking for her children. They heard the clattering of hooves on the tower stairs just before they found her, they say, as if the devil himself were coming to collect her. By the time the steward brought her evening bread she was already cold
.

You may be assured that the countess was every bit as intelligent and abject as your earlier reports had suggested. I often found myself bewildered by her dark wit, the breadth of her education, and the peculiar turns of her mind. I will be relieved to return to my ministry in Lešetice and leave the cold confines of the countess’s household behind me. Even now I find her influence hangs over Csejthe like a cloud. The villagers whisper and stare and cross the street when I approach, as if I have been marked or marred after sitting so many hours with that dejected lady. One man, a local farmer with his cart of vegetables, stopped this morning to tell me I was not safe in the village, that the hills around the castle are still full of her followers, including an old witch named Darvulia who haunts the catacombs beneath the castle with ninety-nine cats, and who comes out at night still to conjure the countess’s soul back from the realm of the dead. Much of this, I’m certain, is nothing more than local folklore, meant to frighten me away by a population who mistrusts outsiders, but nevertheless hostility hangs over the very hills, the wind, and the water. Her son-in-law Count Zríyni is making plans to return the lady to her birthplace in Ecsed, in the east, to be buried in her family vault, for her grave will surely not be safe here, where the local people have such long memories of her misdeeds
.

With this letter I am sending ahead some papers found among the lady’s things giving an account of her life. They were discovered clasped to her breast with a note stating that in the event of her death, they were to be sent to her son at the family seat at Sárvár. I took them to read last evening, hoping they might reveal something of her that I had not already discovered, and I send them now to you that they may serve as a record of her crimes and the depth of her depravity, and of my own true and faithful efforts to bring her at last to Christ. You will notice that they become more difficult to read nearer the end, where her handwriting begins to degenerate with the onset of illness and where her cruelty becomes more apparent with every passing day. Her protestations of innocence are preposterous, and the blame she puts on the palatine, the king, and even Rev. Ponikenus for her imprisonment is nothing short of treason and blasphemy. Yet how often did I find myself, as I read, pitying that lady in her loneliness, in her disappointed hopes and plans; how often did my heart break for her! Quite honestly I was torn about what
to do with the account. The current Count Nádasdy is still a youth of sixteen who has not seen his mother in the three years since her imprisonment, so adamant was his guardian that he should not visit her for fear of sullying his name with his mother’s sins. It did cross my mind to burn these pages and protect the boy from the truth, or to send them to the palatine to enter into the record against her, but I have decided to leave the sending of them to your discretion and greater experience, once you have had a chance to read them
.

If it is true that Satan walks the earth wearing the most human, the most seductive of disguises, then he could find none better than Countess Báthory. I mourn for her and for the poor girls she murdered, the named and unnamed, the lowborn and the high, and for all whose lives she has blackened with her touch
.

    Crux sancta sit mihi lux, non draco sit mihi dux

Rev. Nicolas Zacharias

January 1, 1611

The boy and his father came at dawn to shut me in, arriving from the village below the castle with their donkey and their cart and their load of tools. I was awake some hours, watching the light at the window go from black to faintly blue, so I heard them making their way across the snowy courtyard below the tower, a couple of dark figures with their heads together, whispering and shivering as they looked up toward my windows as if I were some kind of monster for men to cross themselves against.

The father spoke to the boy in words too soft to hear, but their breath, heavy from exertion or dread, lifted from their faces and spun away in the winter cold. I stood back in the darkness and did not let them see me, for I wanted no one to know I had been watching. I refused to be afraid. I paced from the window to the door and back, warming my hands by the fire and then, growing too warm, moving to the window again for a breath of cool air. When I looked again they were gone. Two lines of footprints marked the path they took—one large, for the father, and a smaller one for the boy. The patient donkey stood in his traces and stamped his small hooves, a puff of white breath rising from his mouth as well, just another of God’s miserable creatures.

How every waking moment pains me until I may see you once more, Pál, speak to you once more. It grieves me that I do not have even a drawing of you or your sisters to keep me company in my prison, for the walls of my chamber are bare, having been stripped of their paintings and mirrors and weavings, any small luxury, by the palatine’s soldiers when they brought me up to the castle from my house, my
kastély
, in Csejthe village two days ago. In the tower of
the
vár
there is now only the bare plaster thick with frost, a rough wooden table and chairs set with a single candle, a straw mattress on the floor for a bed. Altogether the place feels and smells of a stable. A piece of stale bread sits untouched on the floor, waiting for the servant to come up and fetch it back again. I do not sleep. I try to read but am restless and pace the small space of my room instead, listening for footfalls on the stair outside my door. If only I had some embroidery, some bright bit of cloth, I might find an easier way to pass the time, but the palatine ordered the guards to take my pins and needles, my blades and scissors, as well as the mirrors and any bit of glass they could find, saying he would leave me no easy way out of my prison.

The palatine was generous enough to leave me a few books, Meister Eckhart’s
Abgeschiedenheit
, Aristotle’s
Politics
, though I already know them by heart.

Never have these words seemed more true to me than they do now, as I sit isolated from all the world at the whim of György Thurzó, a man so clearly without virtue himself.

VIRTUE SEEMS TO BE
lacking in too many of the men I have known in my lifetime, Thurzó most especially.

It was only a few days ago, just after Christmas, when Thurzó
snuck into Csejthe
vár
in the middle of the night with a troop of King Mátyás’s guards and a scroll with King Mátyás’s stamp. In the caverns under the keep, with the servant girl still warm at my feet, the palatine ordered his soldiers to take me to the tower and didn’t seem to hear when I asked why he had turned against me, why he was giving credence to the falsehoods spread by my enemies. To think that I loved him once, that I took him into my bed! Then he ordered his soldiers to lead the servants away—the three old women and young Ficzkó—and there was a sound of crying in the dim light, the smell of blood and candlewax. I could hardly see for anger. He handed me the paper to read, the one with the king’s seal, but I crumpled it and threw it at him. Lies, I said. Without another noble witness to testify against me, neither Thurzó nor the king have the authority to imprison me, but the palatine seemed unconcerned with such niceties. “I see the rule of law no longer applies in Hungary,” I said. “What is the king giving you to turn your back on your friends?”

The gray bags under Thurzó’s eyes, which had always made him look so vulnerable, now hardened into little pillows of stone. “Our friendship is the only thing saving your life right now,” he said. “I suggest you say nothing that may make your situation worse than it already is.” Then he laid down his sentence, there in the dim caverns beneath Csejthe, condemning me
in perpetuis carceribus
. A lifetime between stones. He left a company of his own soldiers in the keep, left me here under lock and key, taking my servants off to Bicske to stand trial for my sins, as he called them. What sins are those? I asked, but he turned away and would not answer me. I heard his carriage driving away as they took me up to the tower.

This morning I waited a long time, but the boy and his father did not come. For a moment I wondered if perhaps the palatine had thought better of his decision and sent them away again, but then their voices were outside my door, greeting the guards in the local dialect. I arranged myself to receive them into my room, determined to offer them my forgiveness as one forgives the executioner before one’s head is struck off. I touched my hair, my face, did my best under
the circumstances to look presentable. In a little while there was a sound of someone working at the door, and after a few minutes they had it off its hinges and set aside. The hallway was dim. A single lamp gave off a thin yellow light, but I saw the boy and his father come forward and kneel in the doorway and stepped toward them with my hand raised in friendship. At the gesture the guards threatened me with their weapons raised and ordered me back. The bigger guard, the one with the winestain on his cheek like the slap of a great hand, growled that I was not to approach the boy or his father or to make any motion of witchcraft or incantation in their direction, or the guards would finish me where I stood. “You wouldn’t dare,” I said.

He smiled, showing all his teeth. “Who is here to stop me?” he said.

The blood rushed to my face, and I dropped my hand. Then I could see that the masons were not offering obeisance but beginning their work, mixing the mortar and sorting out the stones in little piles, the stones that will make my prison from this day forward, for my old friend the palatine tells me that I will not leave this tower alive.

The guards ordered me to sit in a chair while the masons went to work. They sealed the windows first, closing the small slits in the wall that showed me the valley of the river Vág, the villages and farms that were a gift to me from your father on our wedding day. The mason set the stones in a circle, shutting out the light little by little, working until only a small hole remains, just large enough for me to put my hand through. Through it, if I stand on a chair, I will see little but the color of the sky, the faint cold stars, a distant smudge of hills I will never cross again.

When they finished with the windows, they retreated to the hallway and began the slow work of shutting the door to my chamber, closing me in stone by stone like Antigone in her cave. I watched them at their task. They were villagers from Csejthe, the man and his son, dressed in clean linen shirts and pants and brown homespun waistcoats. The father chose each stone carefully to fit with the one
below it, frowning as if he saw something in the stone he did not like. He would not meet my gaze, though I sat not three feet away. The boy must have been ten or eleven years old, but he was a strong worker, obeying his father’s every command, fetching this or that tool, mixing the mortar in a bowl. Once in a while he peeked in my direction, as if his curiosity had gotten the better of him. He had the face of the Infant himself, straw-colored hair and long-lashed eyes, the lashes throwing small sooty shadows across his pink cheeks. He reminded me in many ways of you, my love, with your shyness and your serious face, though you have your father’s fierce brow and proud Nádasdy nose. I wiggled my fingers at the boy and smiled.
“Ako sa voláte?
” I asked in the local dialect.
What is your name?
I have learned two or three phrases of the language in my years in this part of the country, through many years of taking peasant girls and boys into my house as servants. My accent was not good, but the boy did not seem to notice. He stared at me with wide eyes, curiosity and fear mingled on his face. “Luki,” he said, his voice high as a girl’s still.