The Countess (3 page)

“Teší ma,”
I answered.
Pleased to meet you
.

I was about to see if my guess was true and ask him his age when the father reached up and slapped the boy hard across the face, saying something rushed and angry. I recognized only one word:
škrata
. Witch. The father pointed at the stairs and barked an order, and young Luki took his leather strap back down the stairs, tears wetting his cheeks. Were it not for the palatine’s guards, I would have slapped the mason’s ugly red face myself to exact revenge for that unnecessary blow. Instead I clenched and unclenched my hands and looked away as if I had noticed nothing. I would bide my time. I am not some madwoman who does not know when and how to act, no matter what the palatine and Megyery and Ponikenus say about me. I retreated into the new darkness of my bedchamber, where I waited for my solitude to begin. The walls they lay will harden like my heart.

Then the mason’s son was back with his load of stones, and the father set them tight and true. The man is a master craftsman, and
the door should hold until they take it down to let me out, or else to carry me out. A gap in the stones about the span of two outstretched hands will allow the servant to pass me food and drink and take away the night jar, but otherwise I am completely without help or comfort. I am left to wash my own clothes, and clean my own room, and make up my own hair. I will not be allowed to attend church, to walk in my vineyard, to meet you or your sisters in your far-flung homes, to hear a word of kindness spoken. In a sudden rage I cursed the guards, the palatine, the mason, picking up bits of smoldering charcoal from the fire and flinging them through what was left of the door, my mouth tasting of copper. “Now, now, madam,” said the winestained guard, speaking as one speaks to a bad-tempered horse, “you cannot do us any harm out here.”

Looking around my room for a weapon, for anything, I grasped a burning branch from the fire, holding it out toward the straw mattress. My hand was steady and strong. “I can set the house alight,” I said.

“You would not.” His lips formed a thin line.

“I would. Better to burn than remain your prisoner.” My limbs seemed to move without my consent, as if I were looking at myself from the outside. The flames leapt off the branch and spun away in the cold air, but the guard did not move from his post. He must have been weighing the seriousness of my threat against the lies he heard about me: that I am a whore, a witch, a vampire who bathes in the blood of maidens. After a moment he simply shrugged and smiled, turning away to speak a low word to his companion. He no longer saw me standing there with the burning branch in my hand. I dropped my arm. I am used to many reactions from many people—some pleasant, some unpleasant—but disregard is not one of them. I am not used to being invisible.

Tears stung at the edges of my vision, but I would not cry. The guards would be elated, I suppose, if I burned the castle down, for then they could go home and forget all about me, tell their drinking
companions in the taverns of Bicske about the time they saw the Beast of Csejthe immolate herself out of spite. The actions of a madwoman and a criminal. As I’m a sane woman after all, I placed the branch back on the fire. I will not give the guards, or the palatine, the satisfaction of being rid of me. Not yet.

Instead I sat at my table and with shaking hands began writing these pages to you, Pál, so that you may know something of your mother besides the lies the palatine and the king and your tutor tell you. So you may know that even now, your mother thinks of you and prays for you. That she hopes you may become a better man than those she has known, and loved, during her own life.

Now I can see little but the mason’s hands at work, bits of his clothing through the stone gap. I can no longer hear what the guard says in his low voice to the boy and his father, who are packing up their tools, their footsteps growing fainter as they walk back down the stairs of my tower, into the open air. The flames of the fire ebb and flicker. I will not have another. My poor servants will no doubt be submitted to torture, forced to condemn me to save themselves, because the palatine will not be merciful. He has not a drop of pity in him. He has damned me to prison for the remainder of my days—this tower, these walls, these few books, this bed. And myself, a woman alone, with nothing to do but contemplate her life.

I have done nothing that was not my right by blood and title, not to the palatine, not to anyone else. Erzsébet Báthory, widow of Ferenc Nádasdy, daughter of the most ancient noble house in Hungary, is not a witch or a madwoman, a murderess or a criminal. She has no intention of quietly accepting her fate.

The palatine, when he laid down his sentence on me, said our family was cursed with more than its share of lunatics and madmen—an unfair characterization, to say the least, and hypocritical besides, since whatever madness exists in our blood never stopped him from courting Báthory support for his political ambitions, or from loving me when it suited him. Our family has no more odd characters than anyone else’s, the palatine’s included.

Your grandmother, Anna, was a Báthory from the Somlyó branch of the family. When I was fifteen, her brother István, then prince of Transylvania, was elected king of Poland, where he distinguished himself as a military leader and statesman. Her other male relatives—brothers, nephews—were all distinguished leaders of men. My cousin Zsigmond Báthory, married to a Habsburg princess, was four times prince of Transylvania, and my cousin András, before he was murdered and cut into pieces, was a cardinal of the Roman church as well as prince of Transylvania and grand master of the Order of the Dragon. My father, György Báthory, was a distant cousin from the Ecsed branch of the family, a great landowner and brother to András Bonaventura Báthory, another prince of Transylvania. It was my father who owned the ladder-like fortress in the marsh where Vitus, with his lance, killed the dragon that was terrorizing the countryside and afterward was given the title
bátor
, the “bold hero.” From him come our family’s name and the root of our family’s honor. For a thousand years Báthory sons have defended Hungary against foreign sultans and pretender kings, and Báthory daughters have bent their heads in marriage and their backs in childbearing, all in the name of national pride and filial duty. No one, myself included, has been free from the yoke of the power and glory, the servitude, of the Báthory name.

My mother was a learned woman, an early convert to the Calvinist faith who read and wrote Latin, who founded a school with her first husband and after his death continued the management of his estate at Erdőd, in Szathmár, championing the liberal political and religious ideals they had shared. My mother didn’t long wait to marry her second husband, or, when he died quite suddenly, to succumb to the advances of her third husband, my father. She was a dedicated wife, a woman who, like many women I have known, was only happy in the marriage bed. Once, when I was six or seven years old and just learning about the future that lay in wait for me, she pressed my hands between hers and, bending down, put her face very close to mine. “You must not tell this to your sister, who is not as beautiful as you,” she said, “but you will have to protect her, Erzsébet, when I’m gone. A woman who does not marry is at the mercy of the world, and your sister may never have a husband of her own. But your beauty is your blessing and your curse. You will have any man you want, so it is on you that your sister will depend. Do not forget.”

For a long time I was shocked by the idea that the fate of the family would fall on me, that my little sister Zsofía would depend on me to find a husband who would love me and protect her for my sake. I could not imagine that any man would love me as my father loved my mother. I spent hours studying myself in my mother’s silver-backed mirror, my great dark-brown eyes not lively enough—too much like a cow’s—my forehead too high, my nose too long, my mouth too pale, twisted with wryness or mischief—not serious enough, not clever or obedient, nor supple or sensual like my mother’s. Altogether I felt cloddish and awkward, crudely made, and wondered if we would all be ruined as a result—my mother and father, my brother, Zsofía, myself. We would be at the mercy of the Turks, the invaders, if I could not secure a husband with an army at his disposal and enough love to shelter us all, love like a strong roof to keep out the wind and the rain and the snow.

Later, after I had begun to grow into my looks and began to understand the uses beauty has to a woman, I overheard my mother talking
to Zsofía in the garden, where they were picking herbs. All the noblewomen of my acquaintance have been familiar with the herbalist’s art, and my mother was an especially gifted healing woman who had undertaken to teach me and my little sister what she knew. I was sneaking out of the house to take my pony for a ride, hiding amid the bushes at the edge of the kitchen garden, and so my mother did not know I was present when she began to tell Zsofía that she was the family’s one great beauty, its only hope against destitution, for women who did not marry were objects of ridicule, without protection in a world made for men. “Your sister may never marry, Zsofía,” she said, “so you must protect her. Beauty such as yours will gain the attention of every man in the kingdom. When you have a husband, you must use your wealth and position to help your family.” Little Zsofía had nodded solemnly, her lip trembling. As for myself, I waited until they had gone back inside, and then I made my way to the stables and kicked my pony into a hot lather, astonished at my mother’s calculation and cunning.

For a long time before that, though, I had believed that my mother truly had placed all her hopes on me alone, and I had felt both privileged and terrified to be the object of her affection. Her love made me reckless. I would sometimes throw myself on her with great washes of tears, begging her to take me in her arms and stroke my hair, to reassure me that I was worthy of her affection; or else I would resent her hopes and run away and hide in the stables, or pinch my little sister until the skin on her arms turned red, or light the tails of my father’s hunting dogs with a burning branch from the fireplace. When I was naughty, my mother would find me and draw me out again from inside the stable, or from under a bench, or from the confines of my bed, sighing and running her hands over my hair, and I would wrap my arms around her ribs and listen to the thudding of her heart until I was calm again and the fit had passed. Erzsébet, Erzsébet, she would say, you must not upset yourself so much. You must learn to control your passions better, my love, and save your miseries for the privacy of your own heart.

Despite her scheming, or perhaps because of it, I adored my
mother when I was a child. I used to pick up and stroke her hands, pressing her palms to my face, twisting her many rings and sometimes trying one on my own finger, imagining for a moment what it would be like to be her, a woman who had snared not one but three husbands. I begged to be in the room when my youngest sister, Klára, was born, wanting to be helpful to my mother and fearful of letting her out of my sight, lest something terrible happen during the birth. When the moment came, it all terrified me—my mother’s cries of pain, the wet dark head poking out from the place between her thighs, the limp baby slithering out more piglike than human, smeared with wax and blood. I hid in the corner and would not come out, not even to hold the baby I had been so desperate to see born, not even when my mother called me to her and said there was no reason to be afraid. “You too were born like this,” she said as they put Klára into her arms, but these words only frightened me more and sent me running into the hallway, where I sat on the cold boards of the wooden floor, hugging my knees to my chest and refusing to come back inside.

To my father it was upsetting for an entirely different reason. He had long been bent on producing a second son, a companion for my older brother, István, a sickly, solitary boy more given to books and prayers than statecraft or soldiering. After my father was certain that Klára and my mother were both well, he came into the hall, put his face in his hands, and wept, his head hanging and his shoulders heaving up and down. The old midwife who had overseen the birth came out and consoled him. “You should not blame yourself,” she said. “There is no accounting for why some women are blessed so often and others so little, or not at all.” He didn’t speak, but later that day when I was brave enough to reenter my mother’s room, I heard him swear to my mother that never again would she have to give birth to any child of his, boy or girl. One son, he had decided, would be enough.

My mother smiled. “Do not make promises you cannot keep, György,” she said, and put her hand on his shaggy white head. He
kissed her and the baby and went out again while my mother and sisters and I slept together in the big bed.

That night there was a great storm, endless flashes of lightning that came so close together it was impossible to tell one from the other. I lay shivering under the blankets while Zsofía whimpered next to me, wrapping her small arms around my neck. My mother and the new baby lay so still and quiet I bent down to check if they still breathed. Late into the night I heard the echoing voice of my father, drunk and singing, goading my brother into having a drink in the dining hall. “Here, boy,” I heard him say, then István’s whines of protest following. “Drink to the birth of yet another sister.”

“I don’t want to, Father. It smells too strong.”

“Drink it. Be grateful. You’ll have no brother now to share your inheritance. There, now, that wasn’t so bad. Here’s another. Drink it up. Look, even the angels applaud you tonight, the little lord of Ecsed.”

Around us, thunder rocked the house like cannon fire, and I bent down to kiss the baby, to breathe her smell of hot milk and sleep, and pray that she would be no one’s last hope, no one’s only chance for salvation.

Not long before I was born most of south-central Hungary had fallen to Szulejmán, who claimed the title “the Magnificent” but whose presence was resented in the country, as outsiders have always been resented in these battle-weary lands. He took the castle at Buda without a shot, drawing out the widowed queen and her infant son on friendly pretenses and then locking the doors of the stronghold behind them. The queen, having no other choice when surrounded
by the sultan’s army, gathered her child and her ladies into a few carts and left the country to its fate. Whole villages fled before the sultan’s janissaries, and those who had not the means or the good health to make the long journey to Habsburg lands in the west or Transylvania in the east ended up vassals of the sultan, a conquered people. The nation was left in tatters, divided into Upper Hungary, which curved along the Carpathians from the Adriatic to the borders of Transylvania, ruled by the Habsburg Ferdinand; Transylvania itself, which may have been nominally beholden to the sultan but in its heart was always wedded to Hungary; and the lower kingdom, including much of the great plains all the way north to Buda and Esztergom, which the sultan kept for himself. The conquered lands of the Alföld that had once been so rich grew deserted as the nobles fled the sultan’s rule, sometimes taking their vassals with them. Farmlands turned back to grass, villages to ghost towns.