The Countess (34 page)

In the fall of 1608, after a power struggle within the Habsburg family, Mátyás was made king of Hungary, and the next year György Thurzó elected palatine. After he was confirmed, he took eleven villages belonging to one of his lesser neighbors by force and began harassing the widow of the former palatine, István Illésházy, into giving up some of her lands to him as well. Cementing both his power in the kingdom, and his wealth, by any means necessary.

We received the news at Csejthe with equal measures of shock and disgust. Istók Soós heard it from one of the tenant farmers, who had it from some of Thurzó’s soldiers traveling the Vág road. Istók came and told me the news where I sat next to the fire, and I put down my book with the noise of the wind roaring in my ears, staring into the flames as if I could read the future there. I should have seen it coming. The way Thurzó curried favor with the Habsburgs princes, first Rudolf, then Mátyás, must have been calculated with just this design in mind. What had he promised Mátyás in regard to me, I wondered, to secure his position?

Two years earlier, when Thurzó had wed Erzsébet Czobor in Biscke, I had made sure to attend, dressing in the handsomest red velvet anyone ever saw, arriving in the most lavish carriage, so that Thurzó would know he had not broken my spirit. Thurzó gushed at the honor of having me attend his wedding. “Lady Nádasdy,” he said. “I am so glad you could join us today. You look remarkably well. Only my own bride is more beautiful.”

“She is,” I said, forcing a smile. “The most beautiful bride there ever was. Congratulations, my dear.”

The child clung to his arm, looking up at him with adoring eyes and simpering and smirking in my direction, unable to restrain her triumph. She murmured something low about hurrying the wedding night, so that Thurzó was forced to shush her in front of me and tell her to mind her company. I could barely hide my disgust. If this was what he wanted in a second wife, then truly he was better off without me. I wished them well and danced with my nephew Gábor, newly elected prince of Transylvania, or my son-in-law György Drugeth. I
spoke with all my neighbors and friends, staying long into the evening and leaving only after the bride and groom retired to the bridal chamber. I did not want to seem too anxious to leave in front of the company of nobles, most of whom, if not all, knew that Thurzó had loved me once. I must look like their happiness affected me not at all, or as Darvulia had said, I would become the thing I despised the most.

After the honeymoon, as promised, I wrote to invite Lady Thurzó to stay with me for a few weeks, thinking she would decline, and that would be the end of my obligation to her. So no one was more surprised than I when the girl wrote that she would be happy to come to Csejthe for a little while that fall, that she looked forward to making my better acquaintance. I had the house turned inside out in preparation, giving her the best rooms, the ones Ferenc himself used to sleep in whenever we visited Csejthe. For all that she smiled and gushed and said how honored she was. “My husband tells me no one in Hungary runs a better house than Lady Nádasdy,” she said, her eyes on the ground like a good submissive wife. “I hope that someday he will say the same about me. Please, I am your most devoted pupil. Teach me whatever you will.” I would sooner have strangled her, but I bid her welcome and led her into the
kastély
, where the fire was burning, and set her down before it in Ferenc’s own chair and served her a cup of wine. As she warmed herself and made small talk with Istók Soós, her face red in the firelight, I wondered what she was really doing there, what she had in mind, because I was quite certain our friendship, or lack of it, meant no more to her than it did to me.

As it turned out, Lady Thurzó had no interest in anything except playing the lute, which she was very talented at and which puffed her up with pride whenever she put her fingers to the strings. Every evening after the meal she would offer to play for us, in which enterprise I indulged her as a guest, until I realized that I could hardly get her to stop. She spurned all the other lessons her husband had asked me
to give her, showing no interest in how to keep an accounting with her tenants, how to number and mark the family valuables to avoid theft by the servants, how to look over cattle or horses for disease to make certain the sellers were not cheating her. She preferred always to sit by the fire and chatter with her own ladies, to play and sing or take naps in the afternoons. She was poor company for me, too, for without enough education to have read the great books of our time, the religious tracts of Luther and Calvin, the astronomical treatises of Kepler or Copernicus, she had very little to offer in conversation except the basest gossip—what the king’s mistress had said at court, who had worn an old dress to her wedding, who had grown so stout she had to have a trunk full of new clothes. Some days it was all I could do not to tell her to shut her useless mouth.

Yet for three weeks I did my best to teach the girl as her husband had asked, coaxing her to read the books in my library, to be present when I disputed with a tenant or spoke to the maidservants or the stable boys. She was all honey to my face, but in her letters home to Thurzó—which Istók Soós intercepted and opened for me before sending them on to Bicske—she complained that I was often cross with her. Once, she tattled, I had even slapped her fingers when she reached for a book on my shelf. My mother’s copy of the Bible, actually, which I did not want the little twit touching with her ink-stained hands. She wrote Thurzó that I was a shrew, a cold, calculating woman who sported with the lowest of her menservants and whose inner circle consisted only of the basest commoners, former nurses and washerwomen, instead of the more refined ladies any other noblewoman would prefer.
Lady Nádasdy has a well-run house, as you always told me, my dearest, but it comes at a great price. The younger servants hate her and grumble about their treatment at her hands, and at the hands of the old women and the boy, the cruel one they call Ficzkó, who leers at me whenever the lady of the house is absent. They lord over the younger servants and abuse them, and the lady listens only to them, because they flatter her vanity, and tell her lies. Please
,
my only heart, let me come home again soon. I cannot bear to be even two days’ journey from you and from our dear home at Bicske, where I truly belong
.

I did not see what admonishment Thurzó wrote to her in return, for Istok did not manage to get his hands on it, though the next letter she wrote her husband clearly showed that he had cautioned her about being so free with her accusations, at least in writing.
My most beloved, I was sorry to have displeased you and will be more careful in the future. We will speak more on my coming home about the old women, and the lady here. I will ask her to send me home in a day or two, since I am so missing you, and then I can tell you more in person, for I have learned much in my time away
.

It was no wonder I preferred the servants to noblewomen for my companions, with such friends as she. I should have known that the imbecile would betray the many kindnesses I showed her by tattling to her husband about my punishment of the servants, but I had no idea at the time she would turn on me so completely that in only three years’ time Thurzó could believe me a witch, a vampire—the most appalling abominations imaginable. Dorka and Ilona Jó would never have betrayed me the way she did, either out of fear or because they could not write much more than their own names.

After less than three weeks’ company I granted Erzsébet Czobor’s wish and sent her home to her husband, to be rid of the very sight of her. I kissed her good-bye in the courtyard and bade her a safe journey home to Bicske. “Give my love to your husband,” I said, and she smirked and said she would, and that was the last I had to endure the company of the new Countess Thurzó.

In the fall of 1610, Anna and Miklós came to visit, bringing their household with them, their servants and retainers, their horses and hunting dogs, trunks and carts and carriages, since I had decided to stay in Csejthe for the winter, in my own house. My
kastély
in Csejthe had never been large compared with the grander estates at Sárvár and the big house at Keresztúr, so we were all a bit crowded. To make some space, I had some of my maidservants and the younger men—including Istók Soós, who must not be seen to be too familiar with me while my daughter was visiting—sent up the hill to stay at the
vár
. It was only for a few weeks, until Anna and Miklós left to return home to Croatia and took their traveling staff with them. Istók grumbled about the decision, but he did not dare argue with me. I kissed him and told him I needed him there to make certain there was no trouble among the women. No one else, I said, would I trust with this most important task. He pursed his large red lips and said he would be glad to serve me however he may.

I sent Dorka up the hill as well to act as guardian over the maidservants, with strict orders that they were not to touch a drop of wine or go out of their rooms after dark. During Lady Thurzó’s visit, I also had sent some girls up to the
vár
due to crowding at the manor only to find them drunk and rutting like dogs when it came time to call them back down again. Some of the soldiers had snuck into their rooms after dark, turning the servants’ quarter into little better than a whorehouse. After Lady Thurzó’s departure, I had the girls taken to the laundry and given a sound whipping, taking the strap myself to the most unruly. Still, it was as if they forgot these punishments the minute they were out of my sight. I would find them lazing about instead of doing their work and have to beat them again, and
afterward there had been some trouble when Ponikenus told me he would no longer bury any of the girls who died in my house. He came to the
kastély
one afternoon chewing his fingernails and begging me to amend my ways, or risk my immortal soul. “If you continue to accuse your patroness of murder,” I said, “you may need to look for a new position.” He apologized, said he meant it as nothing but a testament of his concern for me, but I started having Ficzkó and the old washerwoman, Katalin Benecká, take the dead girls away for burial, bypassing Ponikenus and his puffed-up, self-important ways. He must not know too much, or have reason to interfere.

So when Count and Countess Zrínyi came to visit, I thought it best to set Dorka over the maidservants and send them up to the castle with fresh blankets and fruit, bread and cheese and wine. I said I would call for them if there was work to be done, but in the meantime they were to be good and honest girls, with no untoward activities with the soldiers at the keep. Dorka had bowed her head, coarse and red with age and hard living, and said there would be none. For a moment I wondered if it were a mistake to send her, but there was no one else whom the maids feared as much as her. I sighed. Just once I would have liked to be able to trust the women in my house. “I will hold you responsible, Dorottya,” I said, “if I find there have been any improprieties.”

Yes, madam, she said, and then I sent her out again.

When they were gone, I enjoyed the peace that descended on the house, the silence in the halls and the drawing rooms that came with the removal of the more troublesome girls, and waited for Anna and Miklós to arrive, the first I had seen them since the birth of their second child, a son to bear his father’s and grandfather’s famous name, heir to the
bán
of Croatia. The babe was home with his wet nurse, being too small to travel still, but I would be pleased to see my daughter nevertheless.

When the carriage pulled up to my door and revealed my lovely Anna, her eyes red, speaking in angry whispers to the boy she had once been so enamored of that I had worried for her virtue, I could not have
been more surprised. Now they sat apart, their eyes never touching each other, young Zrínyi so pale that I thought he had been ill. I went toward them and took them both in my arms, first my stiff-backed daughter, then my son-in-law. “Thank you for having us,” he said. There was no sense of what they had been arguing about so vehemently. My daughter smiled, all self-possession, and kissed me, and said she was feeling ill, and might she lie down for a little while, until she felt better? Of course, I said. I had the servants take her to her room straightaway, but when I stayed to ask her what was wrong, she only said, “I’m just ill, Mother, thank you,” and so I closed the door and left her alone.

Late in the evening Miklós and I had a peaceful supper alone in the hall, with a crackling fire and some good red wine. Anna was still in bed with strict instructions to my servants not to disturb her. Miklós was quiet, and even when I asked if he wanted another piece of meat, some more bread, he simply sighed and said he could not eat another thing. A few times he looked up, his lips parted as if to speak, but then he would look down again into his plate. My son-in-law had something on his mind. Young Zrínyi had never been entirely easy with me, although we had known each other most of our lives. His mother, before her death, I had counted a good friend, one with whom I had shared the aches of labor, the difficulties of motherhood. The least I could do was to ease the boy’s troubles, whatever they were. “And how do you fare lately, Miklós?” I asked. “You seem out of sorts.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t wish to be.” He sighed and swirled the dregs of the wine in his cup. Above him the horns of a deer Ferenc had slaughtered years before hung over the mantelpiece, and beneath them two polished swords—my husband’s and my father’s—hung crossed.

“No need to apologize. But you know if you have something on your mind, you need only speak it.”

“Thank you. I know.” He took the last swallow of the wine and asked for more, drained the cup in one long drink. “I have hesitated to mention it, madam, but I suppose I could use your counsel on the matter. My father’s estates have not done as well as they might have this year or last, and we find ourselves in debt.”

“There will be Anna’s inheritance as well. Some estates that she will receive upon my death.”