The Countess (25 page)

We were all out of spirits, shriveling in the winter cool. Darvulia too seemed especially pale. Her features, which had never been beautiful, seemed more shrunken, her eyes more tired, with the faint bluish-white haze that announced the oncoming failure of eyesight. The whiskers on her chin had gone from black to white. Suddenly my friend looked very much like the most ancient of old crones, wizened beyond the span of ordinary mortals. It had never occurred to me before that I might lose her sometime, that she might actually be subject to the same process of growing old as everyone else. “Are you all right, dearest?” I asked, and she said she was, but I did not believe her in the least. She was to go right to bed when we arrived in the city, I said, and no arguments, though of course she tried to argue with me anyway, saying that I needed her help in setting up the house, for she thought always of my comfort before her own. “Go to bed, Darvulia,” I said. “Surely you’ve earned the right to rest when you’re ill, if anyone has. Let the others take on some of your duties for a change.”

“All right, madam,” she said, but I could tell she indulged me. They all did.

That second day we pushed hard for the north, and as the sun was sinking in the west and the sky turning a soft shade of gold, we passed around a hill and beheld the walls of Bécs. The icy Duna snaked around the edge of the city, the zigzag tiled roof and brown spire of the Stephansdom rising from the center like the trunk of a lightning-struck tree, while inside the new walls clusters of red-tiled roofs caught the last of the sunlight and turned the heart of the city to ocher. Outside the walls the plane trees and willows deepened to black in the far distance, the farms and fields fading into darkness one by one. The carriage wheels rattled beneath us when the horses came to the drawbridge and drew us into the city, through the great southern gate and up into the streets, where people and animals and the smell of both crowded in close. As we passed, the locals strained to look inside the carriages as if the king himself might be passing through, though Rudolf had moved his capital to Prága after ascending the throne, surrounding himself with artists and mathematicians, botching his relations with Hungary and Transylvania so much that my old friend István Bocskai led an insurrection against the Catholic Rudolf and his attempt to deny the Hungarian Protestants their religious freedom. Word came that Rudolf was ill, and his power was failing. Because Rudolf had no legitimate children, all the empire, Bécs included, drew in its breath to wait.

Beside me Dorka made a small noise in her throat and leaned out the window to gape. It was her first visit to the city. “My God,” she said—she who had lived all her life in the small towns of Transdanubia—“it’s like Jerusalem itself.”

“I certainly hope so,” I said, for I was thinking of salvation—my own, and my children’s. To protect them now that Ferenc was dead, I would have to take my petition directly to the king’s own brother, Mátyás. The archduke’s power in Bécs, Ferenc had said, grew with every day Rudolf was absent. I was depending on it.

In the weeks since I buried my husband I had not been able
to stomach the view of the world from Sárvár, with nothing but work and solitude to look forward to. The period of my mourning stretched before me like a year of winters, and even my children could not make the spring come for me in those first days, when we all settled into life without our husband and father. Anna was gone to her mother-in-law’s house, but even Kata snapped at you, and hid your tin soldiers in order to make you cry. You, Pál, who had always been such an active, high-spirited boy—jumping onto the back of your pony from a low wall, attacking your cousins with your little wooden sword with glee—were so listless that you often spent whole days under the shadow of my arm, avoiding the tutelage of Megyery, the old steward, whom you and I both disliked but who at least kept you at home in Sárvár instead of away at Prága in the king’s court like so many other noble sons. You would run away and hide in corners of the house the way I had done as a child, curling up for a nap under a table or in the hollow of a crumbling wall, laughing at Megyery whenever he tried to get you to mind your lessons. But it was your father’s wish that you study Latin and German, become a learned man the way he had been, so I relented. Once you were handed into Megyery’s keeping I resolved to take your sister with me and spend some time at our house on Lobkowitz Square. Despite the impropriety of appearing at Mátyás’s court while I was in mourning, I had business to discuss with the archduke, which provided ample excuse for escape.

In Bécs, too, there were friends who might help me in my cause. Thurzó had told me at Ferenc’s funeral ceremony that he planned to spend much of the spring at court, for he was a confidant of both Rudolf and Mátyás, a Habsburg man through and through. If anyone could help me convince the king to repay the money owed us, it would be Thurzó. Perhaps, too, he would be a friend to me now that my husband was dead, and we both of us were the loneliest creatures in the world.

At last we arrived at Lobkowitz Square, at the house on the corner where Ferenc had lived as a young man studying at court,
where he and I always stayed when we came into Austria. It was an elegant building of three stories built in the Italian style with stone arches around a central courtyard, in the middle of which stood a plane tree with a twisted trunk, covered now with snow in the last part of winter. Above rose two tiers of glass windows that looked down into the courtyard, so that at the sound of carriage wheels on cobblestones every member of the household could look out to see who had arrived. The manor had been built by my father-in-law, the old palatine, for his own stays in the city, so it was quite near the Hofburg, and several times a day companies of soldiers on muscular white Lipician horses would clatter between the manor and the practice ring in Josefplatz a few blocks away. An Augustinian church and monastery stood hard against the walls of the manor, and sometimes very early in the morning or late at night we could hear the chanting of the monks at their prayers, a low sonorous moan that permeated the walls and kept me up nights. The monks, whenever I and my ladies passed by on the street, eyed us warily, as if we might suddenly place our arms around their necks and plant tempting kisses on their faces. I admit the thought did cross my mind at times, never more so than the first night I arrived as a widow and saw them scurrying away from the carriage like the Hebrews out of Egypt.

In the house the servants had thrown open the shutters, aired out the rooms, put fresh linens on the beds, polished the silver, set torches and candles alight in the passageways, uncorked the wine. Here and there were reminders of Ferenc—the gleaming swords hanging on one wall, the chair he had liked to sit in by the fire after dinner, a bundle of letters he had left behind—but each time I lighted on something that conjured my dead husband I would have one of the servants remove it, and afterward I stood at the open window and breathed in the night air. Outside a servant emptied a night jar, and a horse in harness pissed insistently on the street. Somewhere distant there were voices arguing, and the lamplighters came along the street with their torches, but a hint of snow tinged the cool night air, and from my hair came a strong scent of the lavender oil that
Dorka had use to dress it that morning. With the majority of the royal court removed to Prága, the city was quieter than it might have been, but there would still be friends to see, and dinners and balls to attend with this or that noble family, and wives and daughters to wait on in the afternoons, and very little time to sit on my hands. In Bécs, unlike Sárvár, no one would think of me as the poor, pitied widow locked behind her castle walls and dressed eternally in black, pining for her lost husband. In Bécs I was still a woman worth noticing.

Late that night, not long after most of the house had gone to bed, there was an argument in the servants’ quarters. The little blonde and Doricza were having at it again, this time over a forint I had given the fat Doricza for finishing twenty pieces of lace on the journey, for I always rewarded industriousness in my servants. The blonde said she should share in the coin, since she claimed to have done some of the work, and so she had taken the coin from Doricza’s pocket and hidden it in a hollow of her heel. Doricza found it, of course, and started a row. Dorka and Ilona Jó were holding them apart when I arrived in the servants’ quarters, called by the noise from my soft warm bed. “Now look what you’ve done,” said Ilona Jó, her thin face so sour I could nearly taste it. “You’ve woken the mistress and upset the whole house.”

Peace among the servant girls, even in good times, came rarely. Ferenc had taught me well after the incident with Amália so many years ago, not only how to revive an unconscious girl by “star-kicking” but how to administer a beating so that the beaten one could still perform her duties afterward, even how to hide the marks of a beating so that no outward evidence would show, even to a lover. The punishment of Amália had been the making of our marriage, the first time Ferenc had looked at me as someone with whom he might share more than a roof. I had proven a willing student for the techniques he wished to teach me, and he entirely trusting to let me employ them as I saw fit. Never once did he interfere with my running of the house, not even when my stick fell on the back of one of his favorites. It was, I think, his way of showing his respect for me.
After I had punished his most recent favorite, he would find a new one, and I a reason to send the offending girl away—a new house that needed a servant, or marriage to a poor relation with a minor dowry. Peace would return, for a while at least, until the new favorite forgot her place and had the audacity to flaunt my husband’s favor in front of the others. Then I would again have to make an example of her, to remind them all that while Ferenc might bed them, it was I who ran the household, I upon whom their livelihoods depended. What was I to do—allow their insolence to proliferate? To let myself become a laughingstock in my own house? If they dared to bed my husband and then have the cheek to parade it in front of me, I would make certain they did not do so twice. It was my right as a noblewoman, as a wife.

Thievery, too, was a constant problem. I had a system in place to keep track of all our fine dishes, our clothing and paintings and coins. I kept ledgers hidden in my cask of papers and often took inventory of the household without telling anyone I was doing so. When I discovered some item missing—a candlestick, a cup—I would have the house searched until it was found again in a trunk or under a mattress. The poor dumb things did not realize until it was too late that their mistress was such a careful housekeeper, and I would have to educate them at the end of my stick, as much to make an example of them as punishment for the offense. A few minutes in the courtyard with my stick or the end of my whip and the entire household would be quiet for months afterward, with no theft, no drunkenness or fornication, just whispered gratitude and modest hard work.

Now it seemed another reminder was in order. In the servants’ quarters of my house in Lobkowitz Square I took the blonde by the wrist in front of her fellows and handed the stolen coin to Ilona Jó, asking her to heat it in the grate of the fire that burned at one end of the room. The child was little but strong, and she twisted this way and that, kicking and striking out at me to try to get away. “Don’t,” she said, “don’t.” I held her fast. When the coin was white-hot, Ilona Jó picked it up with the tongs and placed it in the girl’s outstretched
palm. Dorka and I kept her still while the flesh burned for a few seconds, her body shuddering and heaving, but we were stronger than she. At last she screamed and dropped the coin on the floor, clutching her hand to her breast, the hand that now bore the likeness of the king’s face marked in the center of her palm. Around her the other girls murmured and looked at their shoes. For the remainder of our time in Bécs, I knew the other girls, at least, would cause no more trouble.

Afterward I had Dorka and Ilona Jó take the girl down to the laundry to dress the wound. It would not do to have the injury fester and threaten the girl’s ability to do her work, and I was not so cruel that I wanted to see her suffering continue. I was not a madwoman who enjoyed the suffering of others but a fair mistress who had meted out her punishment under the eyes of everyone in the house, who had nothing to hide. “Take her and give her something for the pain,” I said to the old women, “and then wrap the burn and put her to bed.” They went, the girl still clutching her hand, her face dirty and streaked with the tracks of tears, her eyes full of anger as she passed me. I went back up to bed and tried to rest, but I was bewildered by the girl’s looks, how she seemed to blame me when it was she who had caused all the trouble to begin with. I had a feeling that she would cause more trouble before she was done.

Sometime during the night I heard her cry out once, then again. Dressing, I went down to the laundry to see what was the matter, furious that my rest had been disturbed for a second time in a single night. There I found the girl crouched in a corner, half dressed, hissing like a feral cat. “What’s this racket?” I asked. “You’re waking the whole neighborhood. If you had an ounce of brains, you would learn to keep silent. Every time I have to speak to you, you make it worse on yourself.”

“She won’t let me near her, mistress,” said Dorka, her voice tinged with no little bit of resentment. “I told her I need to dress that wound before it festers. She says she’ll write to her mother and say how we mistreat her. She threatened to go to the palatine himself to
speak against you and show him the wound. She keeps coming at me, so that I needed this to defend myself.” She held up the poker she had taken from the dead fire.

“She was beating me with it,” said the girl. “Not defending herself at all.”

“I see.” I turned to Dorka. “Is that true? Were you beating her?”

“I hit her once, but it was to keep her from scratching out my eyes, just so. She’s gone wild. See for yourself.”

So it seemed I was expected to choose sides in this argument—the girl, or Dorka. The child had just about worn out my patience. Wearily I asked her if Dorka spoke the truth: Did she say she would go to the palatine and tell him we mistreated her?