The Countess (20 page)

He leaned over and pressed his mouth on mine, his soft red mouth with the taste of the wine on it still. His hand moved over my hair, down to my collarbone and toward my breast. He sighed and said that he had been glad after all that our parents had matched us—that we were more alike than different, but it had taken him this long to realize it. “I did not know,” he said, “that you were a woman of so much passion, that you had feelings like my own. I thought you wanted me only for my name and position, my title, and I did not think I could love you. Can you forgive me?”

In answer I raised the blankets and took him to me. At last my husband’s love would be enough to shelter me, a love fine enough and large enough to protect me from anything the future might bring—wars, illness, even death itself.

June 21, 1612

Outside my tower the world turns the green and gold of summer, the hills and valleys echoing with the calls of sheep sent out to graze and the rattle of farm carts traveling the Vág road toward Buda. More than a year I have been in my prison, and though the air at my window is sweet and soft as eiderdown, the inside of my room remains stale. The straw in my mattress needs to be changed, the floor swept. Mice visit me at night to take away the crumbs they find along the cracks in the floor, and zephyrs stir the long-cold ashes of the fire. Rev. Ponikenus, who once denounced me in public, comes to visit me sometimes, sitting outside my door and trying to gauge the state of my immortal soul, but only my letters from you and your sisters, Pál, give me any kind of joy. I am always pleased to know how well you do with your studies, how your German and Latin have improved since I saw you last. I have worked hard and suffered much to ensure that your education is even broader and more complete than my own. Gratefully I read the book you sent me describing the movement of the Mediciean stars, those bodies in orbit around Jupiter. As a girl I read Aristotle’s
De Caelo
and studied the movement of his crystalline spheres, but this mathematician, this Galilei, says the existence of these new bodies proves that there are many stars in the heavens that are all in motion around each other. That the sun is the center of the universe, and not the earth. I would like to see that with my own eyes, I think—to peer through the mathematician’s glass and look on other worlds, other heavens.

This morning the wheezy old steward, Benedict Deseő, came up to the tower nearly an hour past his usual breakfast visit, so that my stomach was groaning. He set down the tray with its crusts of bread,
its cup of cooked fruit, out of breath and heaving like a plow ox. “At last,” I said. “Where have you been?”

“There are important visitors in Csejthe. The palatine and his wife are here.”

My hand found my throat. “Where?” I asked.

“In the courtyard, even now.”

Now this was remarkable news. That Thurzó would condescend to come to Csejthe now was no small matter. Eighteen months I have been in my tower, and I have not been able to convince the palatine to do so much as answer a letter. What game was he playing at? Surely he would not make the journey from Bicske without at least stopping to see me, either out of curiosity or triumph. Or perhaps he thought that now I was a prisoner, any notice of me was beneath him.

He didn’t think so before. He loved me once, and I him.

His voice trembling with outrage or fear, Deseő told me that Erzsébet Czobor, the palatine’s young wife, had come up to Csejthe
vár
that morning and demanded that he open the treasury to her. In addition to my wedding gown and jewels, which I had said in my will that I wanted to keep during my lifetime, the treasury holds a small amount of gold for the purchase of food and supplies, for the pay of the few servants who remain. The little thief had her servants pack everything up and load the treasure into her own carriage. Apparently she then went down to the
kastély
and did the same thing there, going through the trunks and chests that remained behind during my imprisonment. With the wedding of her stepdaughter Borbála approaching, she must have thought my fine jewels would suit her own neck. “The guards would not stop her, madam,” said the servant. “She laughed at me when I said she had no authority to take them away.”

“And what did she tell you in return?”

“I don’t wish to say.”

“Please,” I said, though the word was like ash in my mouth, “I have no other way of learning what has passed.”

He shifted from one foot to another as if preparing to flee. “She
said, ‘Tell your mistress that my authority comes from God, who hates all sinners.’ ”

Stunned at the malice of Thurzó’s wife, at her pettiness and spite, I paced back and forth across my cell. Her husband’s design in having me locked away was brazen and calculated, with as many personal incentives as political, but that Lady Thurzó should behave with so little charity, so much cruelty toward me and my children, was nothing less than unforgivable. And after her husband had urged me, with all tenderness, to make her my friend, and which I had done for his sake! Someday she too could be a wealthy widow at the mercy of her neighbors and relatives, the subject of vicious rumors and speculation, with no husband or grown sons to take up her cause. I know it was she who poisoned the palatine against me, who whispered the malicious gossip in his ear that he has chosen to believe. Perhaps she knows that her husband loved me once, and hates me for it.

In a rage I cursed her name and prayed to the devil to plague her and the palatine with sickness, with death. To let me out of my tower for only a moment, to place my hands around her lying, thieving, scheming little throat.

I stood on a chair and tried to look out my window. The courtyard was invisible to me below, but for a moment I thought I heard a voice—Thurzó’s—speaking to someone, a higher voice answering. “Tell the palatine I wish to speak with him,” I said. “Tell him I have an urgent commission for him, something he alone can manage. Ask him in the name of the friendship we once shared.”

When the servant was gone, I looked around my room. There were no weapons, nothing but a quill and some paper, my own two hands. My fingernails were broken and jagged, the quill dulled with my writing and stained black with ink, but it could serve well enough. Breaking it in half, I hid the sharpened end in my palm. If the palatine came close enough to my stone gap, if he put his face down to speak with me, I could sink it into an eye, or perhaps even his throat, before the guards would have a chance to cut me down. That would be one way of escaping my tower, at least.

Deseő came back up the stairs, out of breath, alone. The palatine would not come. He and Lady Thurzó were preparing to leave Csejthe. “He said there is no request you can make that he would now grant.”

No request I could make, he said. So I had ceased to exist after all.

A sharp pain sliced my hand, the blunt end of the quill biting into my palm. Blood flowed, staining my shift. With my other hand I took it out again and sank to the floor, put my face in my hands, smearing gore on my cheeks. A moment later the faint noise of hooves on cobblestone reached me, the creak of a carriage. The palatine and his ignorant little wife were leaving just as they chose, without so much as a word to the mistress of the house. Singing like pirates, too, probably.

The wind banged the shutters against the walls of the
vár
, and the kites called to each other, lonely cries as they hunted mice in the fields. Deseő said my name, but when I did not answer, he stole away quietly and left me to my solitary grief, where I think only of you, Pál, and how far away you seem to me, how orphaned and defenseless. Be careful whom you love, my dearest. There is no cure for deceit, not in Hungary or anywhere in this old and broken world.

All through the long years when I was busy tending our fortune, seeing to the management and upkeep of the Nádasdy estates, your father was away at war with Thurzó and Bocskai and his other comrades-in-arms, building a wall of Christian soldiers against the Turkish skirmishes that continued to threaten Hungary’s borders, preparing for the war that everyone knew was coming. When it arrived at long last, the combined forces of my uncle Zsigmond
Báthory, prince of Transylvania, and the Habsburg king Rudolf would recapture the strongholds of Esztergom and Győr from the sultan’s forces, and many more besides. Through it all Ferenc Nádasdy won praise from the king in Bécs and respect from the Turks, who nicknamed him the Black Bey of Hungary. Each victory brought both of us more esteem in the king’s eye, and when Ferenc considered whether to lend the royal treasury a vast sum—more than thirty thousand forints for the war effort—I encouraged him, despite the strain it put on our personal finances, the improvements that had to be put off, the fields that had to lie fallow. I wrote him:
It is always useful to have a king in your debt. Rudolf will remember his friends when the time comes
.

It did not seem out of the question that your father could be palatine himself someday, if he lived long enough and kept the king’s favor. The thought of being a palatine’s wife pleased me, especially since I had won Ferenc’s affection at last and would not have to endure the taunts of insolent maids, since I had taken my proper place in your father’s heart. I often wondered how proud my mother would have been if she had seen how well the match she had made suited us, once we had reconciled ourselves to it.

Yet there were regrets, too, because for the first ten years of our marriage we had no children, and until there were children, all our victories were temporary. Your father did not blame me the way many husbands do, but I felt his desperation. Time and again I endured disappointment as five years turned to seven, then nine. The few times every year that Ferenc was able to get away from the war, anxious to share my bed, nothing came of it. He took me to a doctor in Bécs who poked and prodded me with sharp instruments and cold hands, tying me to the bed to keep me still as he threaded long needles inside me, trying to push my body open with awls and pieces of pig iron so that it would admit the seeds that would make a child. Afterward I would bleed for days and days, so much I could barely rise from my bed. Ferenc even sent to Padua for the doctor who had helped his own mother and father conceive, who was by then an old
man. He treated me more gently, but he spent several months with us without success. Ferenc felt guilty afterward and said he would no longer send doctors to me, though he did write to Prága and even as far away as Paris for special potions that were supposed to improve my chances at conceiving, and which Darvulia coaxed me into drinking morning and evening through my tears and objections.

I feared the only real remedy was to have Ferenc home more often by my side and told him so, though I was careful not to weep, not to make myself ridiculous with tears the way some wives did. He must never think, even then, that his absence could undo me, or I would be in his power rather than he in mine. He must come home three, four times a year at least, I said.

“I wish I could,” he said. “Nothing would make me happier. But the king depends on me.”

“The king does not need you as much as I do.”

“Thurzó has not been home to his wife more than four times in the last three years, and Zrínyi even less. You’ve seen me more often than that.”

“Thurzó and Zrínyi have children already. Four daughters and a son between them.”

“We will have our children, don’t fret,” he said, but I could tell he was trying to convince me of something he didn’t quite believe himself. “Perhaps Darvulia could help. She knows every herb and charm in these lands.”

“Perhaps,” I said. I didn’t tell him that Darvulia had already given me several of her remedies, but none of them had worked. Pomegranates squeezed for their juice. Puncture-vine drunk in a tea, then ground into a paste and spread on that dark opening in my body. The sight of a cat licking itself clean while I recited a prayer to the Virgin.

“I want you to have your children, my dear. I will move heaven and earth for you. I swear it.” He brushed my hair from my face and touched my hand most tenderly. But then he would leave again, and I would not see him for many months at a time, months of much waiting and little hope.

Rarely did I allow myself to think of my vanished daughter, taken off by the midwife. I could not search for them, having no idea where the midwife came from or where she had taken the child. Poor thing, to be born a girl. If she had been a son, I might have dared to tell Ferenc and hoped that in time he might accept the child, tell people it was his. But a girl was a burden unless she had a family name and a dowry to protect her. My baby, born in secret, could have neither. My daughter would never know me, or know of me.

Her father, who knew of her existence, showed no interest in what had happened to the child, in what had happened to me in bearing his child. During those brief interludes when I would see András Kanizsay at court gatherings, family holidays, I would think of our daughter. Still handsome, still elegant and humorous to his companions, András was always barely civil in my presence, as if ashamed now of the intimacies we had shared, our secret past. I could not engage him in any kind of pleasant conversation, not on the subject of his upcoming marriage or his plans for the new estate he would inherit when he and Griseldis were wed—anything. András did not seem to notice when I lavished Ferenc with affection, or hear me when I invited him and Griseldis to Sárvár at Christmas for the luxurious parties we always held there, for a chance for good wine and fine company. He would always look through me and find someone else who needed his attention, somewhere else he needed to be. Excuse me, Countess, I hear someone calling me, he would say, and then I would hear the sound of his footsteps retreating down the dark passageways, away from me, while I burned with hatred for him, for what had been done to me for the sake of his petty jealousy. As the years wore on, it became obvious that all his love for me was now at an end. At his wedding in Bécs, which I attended with Ferenc and many of our friends and family, the rapt look on his face as he stood before the priest and promised to be faithful only to Griseldis nearly made me weep, for I could see that he loved her, that he thought only of her in that moment and not of me at all.