The Countess (31 page)

For the rest of that day and into the night, I waited. I sat in my room and read, or answered letters, or fussed over some little piece of embroidery I meant to give to Kata. Thurzó did not join me at supper but sent word that he preferred to eat alone in his room, that he would attend me afterward. I sent back word through Ilona Jó that I would wait on him if he were ill, but she returned with the message that he was quite well, but only had some matters of business that required his immediate attention.

So I waited. I waited until the house was asleep, and only the light of my single candle burned in the dark of the house.

After midnight, dozing, I heard a knock on my door, Thurzó whispering my name through the cracks. I let him in, standing back from the door while he slipped inside. He had not brought even a candle, so careful he was—I thought—to keep our secret still from the many guests in my house. I was about to embrace him when he held up his arm and told me it was not on bedroom matters he had come to me that night.

“What is it?” I asked. “György, are you feeling well?”

“Well enough. I have something delicate to discuss with you, Erzsébet. Some bit of trouble with the servants.”

Again with the servants. I had half a mind to send them all out into the wilderness and let them fend for themselves. But I composed my face and only asked what they had done, had someone displeased him?

“No, no,” he said. “But there have been reports of trouble among your servants. The maidservants especially. Megyery has written to
the palatine and told him that maidservants by the dozens have been disappearing into your house for some months now, since Ferenc’s death.”

“I’ve been hiring girls to help at the wedding. Everyone knows that.”

“What I mean is that he says the girls are dying. That there’s hardly a family in Csejthe or Varannó who hasn’t lost a daughter in your employ. How can I say this to you?” He coughed and raised his eyes to me, their expression unreadable. “He says you’re murdering them, or your ladies are. He says you bury them in secret, without the Christian rites.”

I stood back and folded my arms across my breasts, feeling my skin grow cold. What was Megyery up to? Trying to get himself declared master of the Nádasdy estates now that he had such enormous influence over my son? And now to be questioned by Thurzó was intolerable. This was not the Thurzó I wanted to see, in his shirt with the tails hanging loose and his feet in slippers, repeating the basest gossip imaginable. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I want to know if it’s true. I wanted to ask you myself, and see the truth of it.”

I protested my innocence. “Sometimes the maids have to be punished,” I said, “but I am no murderer. You have your own house to run, György. You know how difficult it is to keep the servants in line when they steal, and get themselves with child, and disrupt everything and everyone around them. Sometimes they have to be beaten. There’s hardly a noblewoman in the country who doesn’t beat a servant now and then, and no one thinks the less of her. But to think I could murder with my own hands? How could you believe it?”

“Megyery is making a lot of noise. I wanted to warn you, Erzsébet. There is talk.”

“There is always talk,” I said, putting my arms around his neck, for I was ready to be done with this discussion. “The only thing that
matters is what you believe. Do you believe it? That I am a murderer?” For a long time I waited for him to lean forward and kiss me, as he used to. I would have pressed my lips to the bags under his eyes and murmured my love for him as I did more than a year before. I would remind him how much pleasure we once knew of each other, and could again. “Come to bed. It’s been too long.”

But he peeled my arms off him and stood back a little, my two small hands clamped together in his own. “I wish I could. I have letters to write before the morning, and important business to attend to.” He looked away from me, toward the door. “I hope you will be more careful. If there’s trouble, I won’t be able to protect you.” He dropped my hands and went to leave, checking that the hallway was clear, and then let himself out, shutting the door behind him while I cursed Imre Megyery, the palatine, Thurzó himself, who dared to question me like a witness in a murder trial.

I won’t be able to protect you
, he’d said. Or was it,
I won’t protect you?

To this day, I’m not quite sure.

On the appointed day of the wedding there was a sudden downpour, a rush of thunder and wind that turned the dusty courtyard to a slough of mud and hay and sent a curtain of rain in through the open window of Kata’s bedchamber, soaking her wedding gown. On silk the deep blue color of cornflowers a large brown water mark appeared. Dorka brought the servant girl who had left the window open down to the laundry and beat her soundly, ten or twelve blows with a stick until her back was blue and green. Afterward, remembering Thurzó’s admonition, I had her kept in the cellars to recover until
the guests were gone. The dress was still ruined. We decided to delay the wedding a day until the weather cleared to allow time for the mud to dry. The seamstresses were called back, whipping together a new gown, of Brussels lace and Venetian silk, in a frenzy of sewing that lasted until long after dark.

As they had thirty-one years before at my own wedding, farmers and merchants from villages all over the north of the kingdom gathered in the fields outside the walls of Varannó with no thought for the weather. They drank and sang by the light and heat of their fires the same as they would have at home, in front of their own hearths. The wedding stewards sent out pigs and cattle to roast over great open pits, and barrels of inexpensive but plentiful wine, and at each a rousing cheer went up from the crowd, toasting the Nádasdys, the Drugeths, the Báthorys. The people gathered were waiting to catch a glimpse of the faces of the noble families of Hungary, the warriors and statesmen whose names were known all across the kingdom. From my window I could see the lights of their fires and torches like a path of golden stars. From somewhere below the high, sweet voice of a young boy cut through the cold rain:
“Júlia is my two eyes / my unextinguishable fire / my infinite Love …”

“Balassi,” I said. “The old rogue. He was with my uncle when he was crowned king in Poland.”

“Beautiful,” said Kata, from where she sat next to her aunt, Fruzsina Drugeth, who was braiding her hair. “But who is Júlia?”

“We are all Júlia,” I said. “Or at least we deserve to be, at least once in our lives.”

A chant arose from the crowd demanding a glimpse of the bride, and I sent Kata to the window to wave and throw kisses at them, which they received with great cheers of approval. Kata said she did not understand why it was that the people were so eager to see a girl on the verge of marriage, what it was that they longed for. “They want a glimpse of the divine on earth,” I said. “Today that is you. You may as well indulge them while it lasts, for tomorrow it will be someone else’s turn.” I urged her once again to raise her hand, and from the
outside the sounds of cheers rose on the plains, and Kata blushed with pleasure to find herself, that day, like the Virgin being heralded by angels.

Inside the house there was enough merriment for a feast day. The gentlemen used the delay and the weather as a chance to get drunk, and the groom and his friends were up until long after dark, sending the servants scurrying for extra barrels of the good Tokaji wine that Thurzó had brought from his estate as a gift to me. I could hear them singing—not the romantic strains of Balassi, but old war songs—from the dining hall and knew they were linking arms, and telling stories, and that in the morning it would be all the servants could do to rouse them for the wedding ceremony.

The ladies gathered together to look at the wedding gifts, the cups of silver and gold, the carpets, the paintings. To my friends I gave fine gifts of clothing, of pieces of jewelry. My better friends linked arms with me and gave their most sincere compliments, but among the other ladies I could see a jealous countenance here and there—an older woman with a spinster daughter, or a poor relation from the east who had fallen on hard times. Did they believe the stories about me, the talk of dying girls and secret burials? They would turn on me when the time came, rejoice in my disgrace, but at the time all I saw was their envy at our good fortune. The greatest estates in the kingdom. Two daughters married, and my son nearing manhood. How close I came, in those moments, to perfect happiness.

At one point that night—do you remember?—you crept into my room, Pál, because you could not sleep, and asked me if you could go down to see the gentlemen. “Not yet, my love,” I said. “You are still a child.”

You seemed so crestfallen I almost relented. “But I am Count Nádasdy now, aren’t I?” you asked.

“Not yet. Soon you will be a man, and then the gentlemen will come to you. You will be a great warrior like your father, or a great
statesman like your uncle Thurzó, and your grandfather the palatine. But you must be patient until then.”

“Perhaps I will be both,” you told me, your black brows knitting together to form a single dark line. “A great warrior
and
a great statesman.”

I laughed and kissed the top of your head, the sweet place where the bones had long since grown together. “Your father would like that very much.”

Even with the delay, still Thurzó did not appear again at my door. He tried several times to speak with me at dinner in the evening or before the fire, but always someone interrupted us, a servant with some detail that needed attending to, a friend with a bit of news from far away. Thurzó would smile, but his face was grayish cast and ill-looking, I thought. I wondered if it were his digestion upsetting him and sent the new herbalist to him later that evening, but he sent her away again, saying he felt perfectly well. A lie. Something was troubling him.

The next day was clear and cool, with high, sunny blue skies and a skittering of pale clouds that blew past without a drop. The morning saw a stiff cool breeze, as it had the day of my own wedding, the banners caught high, but as if ordained by God, the wind died the moment Kata stepped into the courtyard with her ladies, all dressed in yellow silk like a carpet of buttercups. Kata’s dress shone with fat pearls, some as big as duck’s eggs, that caught and reflected the light, and lace so fine the ladies who made it complained of the cramping in their fingers. No one would know that only the day before she had planned to wear a different dress. Her rosebud of a mouth turned upward with pleasure when the groom’s men stopped to greet the assembly, and the groom himself, in a blue velvet coat and black breeches, took her hand from among her maids and led her down the rich red carpets into the wedding palace. “Here is the lady,” said young Drugeth, and Kata blushed with pleasure. Then the triumphant strains of music rose again, as the most
eligible bachelor in all the land took my daughter into the wedding pavilion.

Just behind her, you escorted me inside. Instead of the black gown and veil of a widow, I wore red, the same deep crimson as the carpets, the flash of sunset painted on the walls. You blushed when you saw me and said you had never seen me look so beautiful. Always a good boy, to remember your mother at such a moment. The woman you marry will be lucky to have you, for the way a man treats his mother is the way he will treat his wife, and you were—are—the best son any mother could hope for.

We walked slowly, with the utmost dignity, even though I could feel you squirming, pulling on my arm. I whispered to you that a gentleman does not scurry but takes his time whenever he enters a gathering, especially a large gathering. “Hold your chin up,” I said. “A gentleman does not look down at the floor, but up at his equals. Your father never looked at the floor in his life.”

“But what if I trip over a bulge in the carpet?” you asked. “Wouldn’t that be worse than looking down?”

“Be careful where you put your feet then,” I said. “Quiet now.”

Stately music played, the sweet strains of a lute strummed by an Italian in a feathered hat, and a boy of twelve or thirteen with a voice as piercing as a thrush’s sang about the promise of new love. I scanned the crowd as we entered, looking for Thurzó, but I did not see him anywhere among the hundreds of dignitaries in the lushly painted pavilion, the light streaming in the windows like the finger of God. At the front your sister Anna waited with her husband, Miklós Zrínyi, the bulge of her pregnancy hiding underneath her garments. The place I had set aside for Thurzó, just next to that of my own dear family, was empty.

The priest began to speak, and with one eye on Kata, on the pleasure in her face, I looked over the assembled guests—the senior nobility in the front, lesser gentry toward the back. Everyone had outdone themselves in finery, in the brightest colors and best
decorations—silver, gold, pearl. Most of their faces I recognized from other weddings, other celebrations, meetings of the diet at Pozsony, balls in Bécs, but here and there was someone whose face I strained to remember. A cousin, perhaps, by marriage or blood. Someone’s grown-up son or daughter. There were Révays, Forgáchs, Rákóczis. Fruzsina Drugeth sat with her adopted daughter, my niece and cousin Anna Báthory, and her brother Gábor, nearly a man now, golden-haired and handsome, with the distinctive long Báthory nose and large, wide-set eyes. There Erzsébet Czobor, cousin to the Nádasdys, stood near the painting on the wall where my Ferenc was depicted on horseback, surrounded by light, heading into battle against the Turks. I almost did not recognize her. She had been a pale and sickly looking thing when she had come to Ferenc’s funeral with her mother two winters before, and I had heard her mother say that she had been ill some months and was just recovered enough to travel. Some kind of trouble with a young man, the gossips had said, some young scion of a noble family who had rejected her for a girl with a greater fortune. Some even said young Drugeth had pursued her for a time, until learning how small her dowry was. And now here she was with roses in her cheeks, in a gown the color of honeysuckle, standing close to a middle-aged gentleman who had given her his arm. A tall gentleman with a long beard and deep bags under both eyes, dressed in a blue coat and brown breeches, his unhandsome face lit from within by some secret pleasure. György Thurzó himself.