The Countess (24 page)

“The count has fallen,” said my old friend, “and I can’t lift him. He won’t let me call for the valet.”

“Where is he?”

“In his bedchamber.”

I found him in the middle of the floor with sweat on his brow and a wild expression in his black eyes that made him look like a calf about to be branded. In a corner of the room a young thing not even
as old as my own daughter Anna with breasts as small as honeysuckle buds pulled her shift close to her. There was a moment when I paused to consider whether to have Darvulia take the girl to the cellars and have her horsewhipped. If the maidservants were going to debase themselves with my husband, they could at least have the good taste to hide it from me. But at the moment I had other, more pressing matters to attend to. “What are you standing there for?” I asked. “Go back to your own bed. I’ll find you in the morning.” I heard her running away in her bare feet, loud enough to wake the entire house.

At my feet Ferenc panted and strained. I had never seen my husband look so helpless—Ferenc Nádasdy, the Black Bey of Hungary, could not stand on his own two feet. “I need your help, Erzsébet,” he said. “I cannot bear for the menservants to see me like this. Will you help me kneel so that I can relieve myself? My bladder is about to burst.”

I brought him the chamberpot and knelt beside him, moved and frightened that he would ask me for help, since he would never have asked if he could have managed it without me. He pulled himself upright, and when he finished, Darvulia and I helped him stand and half carried him to the bed. When he was in bed once more, I covered him with a bearskin, for he said the cold was so terrible it burned him, and called for Darvulia to bring her bag of herbs, her powders and potions. She and I sat with him all night and tended him until his fever broke. Only then did I see to the girl who had been so stupid as to allow herself to be caught in the count’s bedroom in the middle of the night. I made certain she would not make the same mistake again.

Ferenc spent several weeks in bed that winter. By the spring the illness seemed to go away gradually, though there would be days when he would feel poorly again and spend time in bed with his legs propped on a great tower of cushions. He was again in good health for Anna’s wedding and feasted and danced as much as anyone,
proud of the match he’d made between his daughter and the son of his friend. He and old Zrínyi and Thurzó spent most of the celebration in a corner, outdoing themselves with wine and
pálinká
the way only old friends can do. They told stories and reenacted several battles scenes, complete with sounds of cannon fire, and Zrínyi’s wife and I laughed and rolled our eyes, having heard these stories many times before. Each time the number of heads they took, the number of enemy, increased at least threefold. But no one dared correct them when they were enjoying themselves so much.

But the following winter, after another brutal summer riding across the kingdom to see to the king’s business and our many estates, Ferenc came home suffering more pain than ever. His black hair seemed suddenly streaked with more gray, his eyes sunk into dull red pits like stones in a cherry. I feared, when I met him in the courtyard to welcome him home, that he would fall off his horse; when he embraced me, I could sense how thin he had grown, frail even, for a man who had once stood so tall and broad that two of me could have fit inside his frame. I could count his ribs through his waistcoat. I made certain his bed was ready and took him to it straightaway, telling the valet I would see to my husband myself, please, on this, the first night of his return.

Ferenc tried to rally, even coming down to dinner that evening—saying that he could not refuse the quality of my hospitality, and remembering the night I peppered his food with mistletoe, I smiled a moment—but he went up again to his own chamber sooner than usual and spent a good part of the next several days on his back, eating little, sleeping much. His legs hurt him, he said, and when I removed his breeches I could feel that they were ice cold to the touch, pale as death. Below the knees he said he had no feeling at all. As the weeks wore on, the numbness and cold crept up to his hips, and his hands too felt the effects of it. He could hardly hold a pen to write and had to have his secretary compose his letters, and a new will that now seemed to be a dire necessity. Through it all Ferenc
sat propped up with pillows, a servant rubbing his cold hands, his numb legs, with pepper and cloves to try to stimulate the blood to flow through them again. Darvulia brought him herbs from the fields to dress the bedsores that festered and oozed all along his limbs, and pine boughs to help drive the smell of death from the room, a smell that deepened and grew worse no matter what we did to stave it off.

By midwinter my husband knew the worst was upon him and asked for his secretary to write a letter to Thurzó:
Take care of my wife and children. For the sake of our old friendship, look after them when I am gone
.

He named Thurzó your official guardian, Pál, and Imre Megyery your tutor and caretaker. A man must do these offices, I knew, and yet I was bitter that Ferenc had not asked me whom I would prefer, since it was a decision I would have to live with. Anyone but Megyery, I would have told him. But it was done, and afterward there was nothing I could do to change it.

Ferenc could not lift the pen to sign the letter himself but had the secretary do so for him. I nearly wept to see him so reduced. I kissed his brow and asked him if there was anything I could do to help him, to give him comfort.

“Yes,” he said. “Stay with me, Erzsébet. Put your arms around my neck and stroke my hair. Yes, like that. You remember when you did that, the night I came to you after so many years of foolishness?”

“I do remember. I remember it well. You said you were glad after all that our parents matched us. That we were more alike than different.”

“It is true. We were both stubborn and didn’t want to be married at first. But are you glad now? Are you sorry that you’ve spent your life with me?”

“No, dearest. Not sorry at all.”

“I’m glad of it. I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“Marry again. Don’t let your beauty go with me to the grave. You should have a companion for your middle years.”

“No one could take your place, my dearest,” I said.

He seemed not to hear this, or heed it. “Don’t let Pál grow up without a father. Marry again. Marry Thurzó, if you could have anyone. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He would be good to you, and to Pál and the girls. He will protect you and the children.”

“Don’t talk so,” I said. The thought of Thurzó as a husband—sad-eyed, gray-faced Thurzó—did not appeal to me in the least. “Rest, and in the morning you’ll feel better.”

I stroked his hair and fell asleep on the bed beside him. The next morning, when I opened my eyes, he was cold in my arms.

Carefully, so as not to disturb his body, I slid out from beneath him and called the servants to come. I stood and went to the window, where the morning light was coming in. Outside the air was clean with the scent of coming snow. I had Darvulia brew me a cup of strong tea and sat watching the stable boys muck out the stalls, the kitchen maids with the morning’s fresh milk, and I wandered down to the kitchen to watch the scullery maids polishing the copper pots that would hold the butter and the bread, the way the light in the center of the bowl caught and sent a beam back toward the wall. The cat in the corner, seeing the spot of light, stopped licking herself and went to chase it, batting at something that she could never catch. In a few moments I would have to tell the children their father was dead, and I would have to begin my letters to Ferenc’s friends and family—György Thurzó, István Bocskai—as well as a letter to the king himself. “Ferenc Nádasdy is dead.” I would write it over and over again, as if to constantly remind myself, as if to burn it into my memory. But for that moment in the kitchen I was content to watch the cat at her game, and breathe the quiet of my first hours as a widow, the innocent domesticity, the cautious looks of the servants. The start of the second part of my life.

A few weeks later we buried him in the churchyard at Sárvár.
The priest praised Ferenc as the kindest lord and master, the greatest general and count, a nobleman of the highest order. The great families of Hungary assembled at the service wished for my family’s health and safety, kissing me and wishing me well. Their eyes didn’t find mine. I saw them looking behind me, looking around at the graceful high-ceilinged halls of Sárvár, the silver and the silk, the fields and vineyards and orchards. I saw the greed in their eyes. Now that Ferenc was gone and you, my son, were still a child, they coveted what Ferenc and I had built together, and I began to fear for it, and for you.

It would be up to me to protect myself and my family now that Ferenc was gone. A woman who does not marry is at the mercy of the world, my mother had told me, but a wealthy widow with a very young son, a son too young to take up his father’s arms and titles, has nearly as much to lose. Greedy relatives or neighbors might try to wrest the estates from me, marching on Léka, on Keresztúr, on Csejthe, even Sárvár itself. The other nobles might be scandalized, but no one would lift a finger to help me. Even my husband’s closest friends—Zrínyi, Thurzó—might get greedy enough to turn their eyes to my lands before you were grown. I did not want to end up like my cousin Griseldis, with the shaved head and frostbitten feet of a mendicant, locked up and forgotten while her sons-in-law and neighbors divided up her clothes and jewels, her lands and houses. Nothing terrified me more than the idea of the nunnery, locked up and forgotten by all the world, with nothing to occupy me but prayers and tears. A half-life, a living death. If I were to keep what was mine, I would need powerful friends on my side, a protector among my friends of rank and situation, and soon.

I would go to Bécs. I would go to Thurzó.

The two days on the road to Bécs from Sárvár were an agony, a combination of a bone-rattling carriage ride and mindless arguments between two of the young seamstresses I had brought along for company for myself and my daughter. The girls, like most of my servants, were distant relations to either my late husband or myself whose mothers had sent them to me in the hopes of arranging for them dowries and decent husbands, or in the absence of husbands at least a useful profession. The wars with the Turks had depleted the ranks of marriageable young men so significantly that many young women who came to me would never marry. Yet still their mothers sent them, and still they hoped.

The two girls, new to my household and both nearly grown at fourteen years old, sat together on the bench opposite Darvulia and Kata and myself, where instead of working at their sewing they persisted in elbowing each other. The younger one, a pretty blonde with cheekbones like two round yellow apples, complained that the other was taking up too much of her part of the bench with her fat behind. The other, a large slow-witted girl named Doricza who had been with me only a few months, pushed back whenever her companion’s elbow jostled her, saying that the little blonde’s bony elbows made her rib cage black and blue. More than once I told them to keep their mouths shut if they had nothing pleasant to say, and they would be quiet for a few minutes, at least until one or the other of them started complaining again.

We were all uncomfortable in the cramped space inside the carriage, in the bumps and stones along the road that jolted the carriage frame, but neither Darvulia nor Kata nor myself went on and on in such a tiresome fashion about the ache in our bones, the need to
share the carriage bench, the water we had to hold until the horses took their next rest. I was sorry I had asked for the girls to ride in my own carriage and wished thin-faced Ilona Jó, the old wet nurse whom I had kept on for her loyalty, or beetle-browed Dorottya Szentes were there instead. After many years in my service, they had gained my trust, and if Darvulia was occupied, I often sought out their company before the fire or at meals in the evenings, inviting them to dine with me at my table when no one else was home. They, at least, knew how to hold their tongues in their mistress’s presence.

At one point Darvulia brought out a little food, some bread and bitter dark-brown beer, a little cheese, and passed it around the carriage. We ate in silence for a while, and then the little blonde began to whine again. How uncomfortable it was, she said, when another person’s flesh pressed so closely up against your own. “Maybe I should take your lunch, Doricza,” she said, smirking, “since you have clearly eaten enough for two people already.”

It was then that I reached over, grabbed the needle out of the bit of lace she’d been sewing, and jabbed it into the girl’s pink finger, in the soft pad at the tip where her dirty jagged fingernail ended. The little twit howled and asked why I treated her thus. I said I would not listen to one more minute of her nattering, that she had best remember where she was and whom she was with. She cried out and snatched her hand back, her eyes filling with tears, but after that, at least, we were able to eat our small meal in relative peace.

The next day, when we continued on our way, the two girls sat on their bench and did their work without complaining. In fact they were so quiet that they made poor company, and when we stopped to change the horses I switched them around so Ilona Jó and Dorka could ride in the carriage with myself and Kata and Darvulia, and the two young seamstresses went in back with a couple of chambermaids and young Ficzkó, an orphan boy of fifteen whom I had taken in as my personal factotum and who liked to look at the pretty girls, to pick which of them to flirt with. The two older servants were better company, chatting more amiably about the sights along the road, about
the problems of husbands and raising good children, about the pain and infirmities of growing older. If there were any complaints from the rear carriage, at least I would no longer have to listen to them.

The rolling hills of the western kingdom that year were covered with old bits of snow and damp patches of mud, the detritus of last year’s failed harvest, for the weather had been so cool and damp the previous summer that nothing had ripened. Oats had rotted in the fields, and tomatoes had blackened on the vine. Blight had affected the fields far and wide. The end of the war had made us all look forward to a peaceful harvest, but it had not come, and the tenant farmers had not been able to pay their due once again. I had to let servants go at Sárvár, at Csejthe, and still the Nádasdy coffers grew thin. There would be no way to raise Kata’s dowry this year, or the next or the next, if the king did not repay his debt. At nearly eleven years old, she would need that dowry all too soon. I put an arm around her shoulder and clutched her to me, my dear daughter, who might have to go without a husband if the king would not hear me.