The Countess (30 page)

There was trouble with the servants once it became clear that Darvulia was not likely to recover, including a time when one of the little Sittkey girls, as scattered and flighty as any little bird, was caught
in flagrante delicto
with one of the stable boys, her skirts flung up around her ears. Dorka had the other girls gather stinging nettles from the fields and forced the Sittkey girl to sit on them, naked, in the courtyard for an afternoon, while she squirmed and wept and the stable boys laughed at her, even the one whose advances had caused all the trouble in the first place. I rewarded Dorka by placing her in charge of the servants during Darvulia’s illness, and the servants soon began to respect and fear Dorka as they had once done Darvulia.

At Varannó I saw to the wedding preparations, hiring more than twenty wedding stewards, including the services of one Istók Soós, a thick-necked bull of a man whose job it was to spend the nearly ten thousand forints I gave him on capons and game birds and fish, butter and wine and cheese, oranges and citrons from Florence, cherries and dates from the orchards around my many estates. He did his job well. Wagonfuls of delicacies came daily. Artists came from Italy to paint the wedding hall with heroic murals of the groom, György Homonnai Drugeth, and of Ferenc Nádasdy. The softest new carpets were laid on the floor for the guests. All of Hungary was invited. The king would send his regrets from Prága, of course, but Báthorys and Nádasdys, Drugeths and Forgáchs, Zrínyis and Batthyánys from all over the old kingdom would be there. And, of course, György Thurzó, the man who loved me.

That summer I was forty-six, past the end of my childbearing and a widow of less than two years’ duration, but I had begun to think that a marriage to Thurzó, which Ferenc had encouraged me to consider before his death and which I had resisted at first, might be something worth pursuing after all. Ferenc’s will would not permit a stepfather to have control of his son’s inheritance, of course, but the loss of status I might have to endure in giving up the management of the Nádasdy estates would be worth the protection of being Thurzó’s wife. His love for me might be the comfort of my later years, and I awaited his visit with as much, or even more, anticipation as I had once done Ferenc. The master of the house—the master of my heart—would arrive any day now.

Certainly my friend had not been as discreet in his attentions as he might have been, for it was well known to the servants and retainers around Sárvár and Csejthe and Varannó that Thurzó and I were more than usually close, so that smiles and knowing glances accompanied any mention of his name. If I told the servants to prepare rooms for Thurzó’s arrival, they gave each other sidelong glances. If I mentioned that he was planning to arrive on such and such a date, the maidservants giggled over their sewing, and even when I threatened to give them all a good beating if they didn’t mind their work, the whispering continued wherever I went. The gossips would be watching everything we did, reporting back to noble houses all over Upper Hungary how Countess Báthory and Count Thurzó doted on each other. With his power on the rise in the kingdom, I relished the thought of walking into the wedding hall of Varannó on Thurzó’s arm as I had once done with Ferenc Nádasdy. My enemies would fear and respect me then, that was certain.

In anticipation of Thurzó’s arrival I expended many long, dull hours on my toilette. In the summer heat, unable to so much as slap a mosquito on my arm, sweat pouring down the back of my neck even as my ladies fanned me with little silk fans, I stood still as a madonna while the seamstresses pinned the fabric of new gowns on me, silk and velvet and brocade. Ilona Jó and Dorka stood on chairs to look through the hairs on my head, their fingers searching for errant strands of silver to pluck. I must look my best when Thurzó saw me again after an absence of many months, and that meant no gray hairs, no dry red skin. I refused the more dramatic cosmetics, having no need of such drastic gestures, but my ladies brought creams and unguents made with rose oil to rub into the skin of my face and hands, and perfume of honeysuckle to dress my hair, and mint for the dark bags under my eyes that came with the trouble of so great and public a celebration. There were new shoes of leather—red and yellow—and slippers of satin and velvet. The goldsmith made for me a necklace set with a large emerald brought
from the Habsburg lands in the New World. Thurzó should not see me in anything I had worn before. Everything must be new again, everything startling and fresh. Only the bride herself would be permitted to be more beautiful, more admired.

For all this sewing—new dresses for myself, my daughter, and my ladies, fresh uniforms for my soldiers and retainers—Ilona Jó and Dorka scoured the countryside for seamstresses, bringing girls from Pozsony, from Kassa, wagons full of fresh-faced farm girls. They came with their sisters and their mothers on foot or by carriage, all following the whiff of necessity blowing from Varannó. They came with letters recommending their excellent skills and dispositions, their lively tempers, their modest charms. We took in cooks and chambermaids, laundresses and seamstresses by the dozens, often the younger daughters of lesser branches of the Báthory family, the Nádasdy family, relatives from every corner of the kingdom. As always, I did my duty and looked after them like they were my own daughters. I housed them and fed them, gave them rich clothing and good food, the chance for a little education and some decent society. It was my duty as a member of the senior nobility to be a mother to my people.

Soon the wedding stewards had the rooms ready, and the castle painted white inside and out. Kata glowed through the fittings for her dresses, the unpacking of the lavish jewels I had made for her, even finer and more costly than my own, the arrival of her friends and cousins who would be her bridesmaids and ladies now that she was to be a married woman. She had transformed, seemingly overnight, from the awkwardness of adolescence into the full bloom of womanhood, her gangly arms and legs growing rounder, softer, sweet and powdery as the down on a flower’s stamen, and I wished at almost every moment to press my nose to her, breathe in her scent, as if, at the moment of her leaving me, I might retain a trace of her to wear into my future life. Unlike my Anna, who had seemed embarrassed by all the fuss and attention when it had been her turn, Kata smiled more easily than I had ever seen and threw her arms around my neck
with as much affection as she had as a small child, when I would pick her up from her cradle in the early morning hours and rock her in my own arms.

In late summer the guests began arriving. My cousin Griseldis, still cloistered in her nunnery, sent me a letter with her remorse at not being able to attend. How could she, she wrote, when she had no carriage, no horses, no money to travel? The nuns forced her to eat the same poor food they did, and live in their frigid little cells, and clean and cook and sew all day long the way they did. How unfair was her treatment at the hands of her neighbors and the young men her two eldest daughters had married. How bitter was her old age. She said hardly a word about my Kata’s own excellent match. When her daughters came to Varannó in their finery, with new slippers peeking out from their satin dresses, their mother’s golden beauty and insincerity shining from their faces, I told them how sorry I was over the death of their father, how much his friendship had meant to my own dear husband. Of their mother I said nothing except that I hoped her health was good in her new circumstances. “She is the happiest she has ever been,” said the eldest, and I expressed my gratitude to hear so. Then I sent them off with the steward, whose job it was to give them the smallest, most cramped quarters Varannó could boast. A petty revenge, perhaps, but satisfying all the same.

My friends came too—Margit Choron, Countess Zrínyi, my sister-in-law Fruzsina Drugeth in her widow’s black, bringing her children with her from Ecsed. Each of them I embraced in turn, taking them to the fine rooms I had set aside for them, glowing under the lavishness of their praise for the house, the arrangements. It was a wedding, they said, the entire kingdom would envy. “And you, Erzsébet,” said Countess Zrínyi, “look positively radiant yourself. One would almost think you were pregnant.”

At this the other ladies laughed, for we were, all of us, beyond childbearing. But then Margit Choron sidled a glance at me and said, “Or else she’s in love.”

Silence then, and a significant one, too, as we went down the passage toward the guest quarters. Behind me Fruzsina Drugeth tittered like a bridesmaid herself. My friends did not need to ask the name of my suitor. No one did.

The best rooms, as always, I set aside for you, Pál, as you came from Sárvár accompanied by Imre Megyery and a few servants. I called out the household to welcome you. The servants lined up in rows, men on one side and women on the other, dressed smartly in their fresh new uniforms, and Kata and I went down to see you step out of the carriage. Do you remember? The door opened and a boy of eight, dressed in scarlet, stepped from the carriage onto the square of soft carpet I had asked the servants to lay out in the middle of the dusty yard. How much like your father you were, so serious and proper. You were handsome, too, with Ferenc’s black brows and broad forehead, and my fine pale skin, my wayward mouth. I expected you to rush to me and throw your arms around me, as you always had done before, but this time you came forward with several shy steps to greet me as if I were a stranger. “Thank you for this warm welcome, Mother,” you said, and bowed, so that I knew Megyery had been coaching you, probably all the way from Sárvár. Such formality from such a little one! When I scooped you up into my arms to kiss you, you blushed a furious red up into your hair, so that your suit and your face were all single a color.

“Darling,” I said, “you look peaked. Are you well?”

“Very well, thank you,” you said, your little-boy voice stiffened with shyness.

Your sister bent and kissed you on both cheeks. “It would not be a celebration without you, my dear little brother,” she said, and you blushed again, as scarlet as the carpet you stood upon, and taking two steps back you retreated from us. Where had my little soldier gone? Where was the boy who jumped upon the back of his horse, who played soldiers in the yard with the other boys? In his place was a courtly little lad out of whom all the light had gone—a shy boy with white hands, more comfortable with books than his
own family, pale and trembling like Megyery himself. My heart ached for you.

Over your shoulder I could see the tadpole, older now and more self-satisfied, his red mustache curling up around the corners of his mouth, smiling with condescension at my motherly affection. In a moment he, too, was before me, bowing and complimenting the mother of his young charge, saying how wonderful it was to see me again, how great was his honor, not a word of which I believed. Megyery bent to you and said that you mustn’t forget to compliment a lady whenever you came upon one, even your own mother.

“His mother,” I said, “finds her son’s company the greatest compliment. She needs no other.”

“Apologies, madam,” said the tutor. “I meant no offense.”

“Apologies, Mother,” you said. “Megyery did not mean to offend. He only wants me to mind my manners, you see.”

Suddenly the balance of authority had shifted, and I felt my hold on you, my only son, slipping away. A little more than a year in Imre’s hands, and you felt like a stranger to me, no longer the happy little boy I had left in Sárvár after Ferenc’s death. Your father had made the gravest of mistakes in choosing Megyery for your tutor, for the tadpole was making you in his own image, not your father’s. It was a mistake I meant to rectify. Thurzó, to whose care Ferenc had entrusted me and all our children before he died, would find you a better tutor than old Imre. A more warlike man—less scholar, more soldier—would be better than old, dull, obsequious Megyery. I decided I would speak to Thurzó about it when he arrived. If anyone could make a man out of you, I thought, it was György Thurzó.

You bowed again and—oh, my heart!—stood back to let Megyery go before you. As if he were your father, instead of Ferenc Nádasdy. I stared daggers at the back of the tadpole’s head as we went inside the house.

Thurzó himself arrived on the day of the fall equinox, when the length of the days and nights are equal—a good omen, I thought, for discourse between the sexes. He arrived on horseback, followed by a great entourage of carriages and servants. He was three years away from his election to palatine still, but one would never know it from the lavishness of his carriages, painted with gold and upholstered in red velvet, the gleaming black coats of his horses, or the great honor I did him in curtsying to him on his arrival in the full view of my servants and ladies. He returned the respect I offered him, bowing as if he were in the court of Rudolf himself. Crooking his arm, he escorted me inside the palace doors while his valets scurried upstairs with the trunks and carpets, the gifts of food and wine he had brought from Bicske. He had enough servants for a pasha, I thought, watching the men in their colorful finery scurrying through the halls of my
kastély
. Szulejmán himself had not brought so many men to the mouth of Buda.

We were momentarily hidden from the eyes of the house. “If you wanted to occupy my house as a conqueror,” I said, tweaking a spot of softness near his belly, “you needed only to ask.”

He laughed and brushed my hand away. “I will keep that in mind,” he said. “For now, however, let us be at peace. I am glad to see you again. And when you have a moment, I would like to speak with you on a matter of great importance.”

“Is there anything wrong?”

“No. That is, I hope not.”

So he did have marriage on his mind still. I was sure of it.

Staying with him to settle him into his rooms myself, I waited for him to dismiss his servants so that we might have that moment
alone. Again and again his thin-faced pikestaff of a valet came in with some question about the placement of this or that trunk, or when his lordship would like a glass of wine, or how his lordship wanted his bedclothes folded back. So many times the valet came back, in fact, that I shook my head in amusement and told Thurzó I would try to see him when he was less busy. He laughed and said he would come to me shortly, after he was settled into his rooms.