The Countess (37 page)

At the doors of the sanctuary Ponikenus himself waited to greet us, bowing and uttering something polite and bland in his awkward Hungarian, taking the free arm I offered him to lead us into the sanctuary. Our eyes needed a moment to adjust to the inside dark. Beside me, you stumbled and nearly took me down with you onto the stones. The priest caught my other arm. “Thank you, Ponicky,” I said.

He frowned. “Please, more care, my lady.”

Ponikenus led us to the place of honor at the front of the church, where the carved wooden pulpit looked out over the gathering congregation of faithful, where lit candles and fragrant boughs of fir and pine made me remember, for a moment, the death of my father, and how much I had longed for my elder brother to turn and look at me, for my mother to take me in her arms. How long ago that was, and yet so deeply did my limbs remember that mother ache that for a moment the light in the room blurred and dimmed. “Are you all right, Mama?” you asked. “Did I hurt you?”

“Not at all, my love,” I said, and touched your soft black hair.

When the bells stopped their ringing, the service began, the
readings from the Gospels of how the Virgin had bowed her head in submission to the will of God and conceived a child. How the sacred family went down to Bethlehem, to the city of David, where the Virgin gave birth in the stables of an inn, among the donkeys and sheep and cattle. How the greatest of all was born in the humblest of circumstances to be the light of the world, how kings and potentates from the east came to bring him rich gifts and pay homage to the newest star in the firmament, the one that named him King of All. Dorka translated for me, since Ponicky spoke not in Hungarian but the local dialect, the only language most of the people there understood.

When he was finished reading, his voice like an avalanche, Ponikenus stood at the carved and gilded pulpit and looked for a moment out before the congregation of townspeople from Csejthe, from Felsövisnyó. It was a long pause, long enough to hear the cough of an old woman from the back and a small child crying until its mother shushed it. Beside me Dorka shifted in her seat. He was a fan of theatrics, was Ponicky. He was looking directly at me, and I was about to ask Dorka what was taking so long when at last he began the day’s sermon. He talked of the beauty of the Christ child’s humility in allowing himself to be born in a stable, in the lowliest of the lowly places in the world, how if he had chosen it for himself he could have come to us all clothed in silks and satins, in spun gold, but that the corruption of material things mattered so little to him that he shunned them all even from the moment of his birth. How the greatest king of all lived like a beggar and a pauper among the great nations, even in the time of Caesar, to be an example and a vision for all to follow. Ponikenus paused and took a breath, his eyes still on me. Then he began anew, with a new note in his voice, brass instead of silver. He said how the corruption of wealth and power had turned Hungarians into slaves of the Habsburgs, of the Turks, of their own ambitions and greed. How money and power turned good people to evil, forgetting their brothers and sisters, demanding only more and more.

A murmur went through the crowd, a ripple of fear and anticipation, and one by one the people stopped and looked at the place where my family and I sat. Dorka had stopped translating, her eyes flashing anger at the priest.

“What else does he say?”

Her voice was choked with anger. “I don’t wish to repeat it. He tells the filthiest lies.”

“What else does he say?” I demanded again.

He says, she told me, that the humility of Christ cannot touch those who are corrupted with wealth and power, who forget their duty to the widow and the orphan, the sick and injured. Who take and take and never give a thought for those they take from. Who murder the low ones and hide their sins in plain sight.

It was me he was speaking of—denouncing me in public, on Christmas, in view of my family and friends, and all the ones I loved. I who had taken him in and given him a position on my estate, who had brought into my house widows and orphans, who had given them food and clothing and shelter, a dowry, an education. I whom he named a murderess and a criminal, in hearing of all the townspeople of Csejthe. It was, I thought then, an outrageous act by a scheming little toad puffed up with his own self-importance. I didn’t realize then it was the opening shot of the battle that would be waged against me, that it was the beginning of trouble, rather than the end.

Beside me you and Miklós Zrínyi were standing up to leave, pulling me after them. Zrínyi said the priest had gone too far. “We won’t sit here another minute and listen to his filth,” he said. He led us out of the church—Anna and you and myself—back down to the
kastély
, the coins in my purse jangling because I had not given them out to the townspeople. From behind me I heard a woman’s voice hiss “murderer!” But when I turned to look, I could see nothing but a blur of faces, none of them recognizable as the speaker of such an abomination. My head was filled with red light, and I would have thrown myself on them all in a fury, would have screamed the place down, but Zrínyi had me by the elbow, Zrínyi was dragging me
away from the scene of my humiliation, and I nearly stumbled trying to keep up with him. “He has not heard the last of this,” said my son-in-law. “Can you send him away? Complain to his superiors?”

“How can he say such lies about me?” I said when I could speak. “I never harmed him or denied him anything he’s asked of me.”

“He must know that you cannot let the incident stand,” said Megyery.

“I most certainly will not,” I said, taking off my cloak, but my hands were shaking with anger. To denounce me in front of the entire congregation, and at Christmas, too—either Ponikenus had taken leave of his senses, or he had found a new patron, someone else to stuff his coffers. That it could have been Thurzó did not occur to me, not even then.

Before dinner I sent Zrínyi and Drugeth and Megyery together to speak with Ponikenus about what had transpired at the church, to warn the little toad that he was treading on the most dangerous ground. Anna and Kata and you and I ate a cobbled-together lunch of lukewarm soup and yesterday’s bread while we waited for them to return, and Dorka kept coming in with questions from the cook, who was wondering how long I would keep dinner waiting. Since the church was hard against the walls of the
kastély
, I couldn’t imagine what was keeping the men so long, and as dusk began to fall gray and lonely and a thin snow began to fall, I was about to send Ficzkó out after them when they arrived back at the door, stamping snow from their boots and brushing it out of their mustaches. “I have spoken with the priest, madam,” Zrínyi said. “He will join us shortly before dinner to offer his apologies.”

“That’s not enough,” I said. “He will denounce the remarks he made today in the church and publish his disgrace to the neighborhood the way he published his lies.”

“He will,” said Drugeth. “He promises that Sunday next he’ll retract every word.”

“Sunday is still five days away. Until then he’s not to set foot in this house,” I said, turning to old Deseő. “Do you understand?”

“I do. What shall I tell him when he arrives?” asked the steward.

“He can make his apologies out in the snow. I will listen from the doorway and forgive him, if he’s sincere. But until he’s restored my good name in the neighborhood, I cannot forget what passed today.”

Deseő went out to relay my instructions to the rest of the servants not to let Ponicky through the door.

We sat down to an uneasy supper of dressed game birds and dumplings and bread hot from the oven, still on its baking stone. Kata and her husband had learned what had passed in the church and sat close to me, my daughter reaching out every once in a while to pat my hand and say that old Ponicky could not have meant what he said, that there must have been some mistake. Anna looked pale. The servants rushed in and out of the dining hall with their plates and cups, pouring wine and taking the dirty dishes in utmost silence, as if to speak would break the glass under which we found ourselves. The clink of silver on gilt, the sounds of wine being sipped, were broken only when you dropped your glass and shattered it on the floor. “Oh!” you said, apologizing to me over and over, although I kept telling you it was unnecessary.

All that night I hardly spoke, but the girls kept up their end of the chatter so that it did not get too quiet. My family seemed to have lost its appetite, and much of the food, so carefully prepared, went uneaten. When the final courses arrived—fruit dressed with honey, or dipped in brandy and set afire—you and Drugeth took little bites, but the rest of us sat looking at the platters with our stomachs full of lead. I had the servant girl, Doricza, come in and take them out
again, and not long after, I stood and announced I would retire for the evening. The truth was that I had had quite enough of everyone, and I wanted nothing more than to be alone for a little while.

Ilona Jó came and helped me get undressed and into bed. Outside the dogs were barking, and we paused for a moment, thinking that it might be Ponikenus approaching the house, but then they stopped and paced, whining, outside the fence. “Probably just an old cat,” Ilona said, undoing the tight laces of my waistcoat. When they were loose, I took a deep breath, the first of the day. The candlelight chiseled her angular jaw into less severe relief. It appeared that Ponikenus would not come that day for his apology.

The longer he made me wait, the worse it would be for him.

I was settling into my chair to have Ilona Jó brush out my hair when Dorka came into the room, muttering and shaking out a skirt I had torn that morning in all the excitement and that one of the seamstresses had just repaired. She handed it to me without looking at me, so that I had to stop her and find out what was the matter, why she was so agitated. “Doricza, my lady,” she said. “I just caught her in the servants’ quarters with the dish of spiced pears, the ones that were left from dinner this evening, handing them out to the maids. I asked the cook, and she said she’d set them aside and thought I’d taken them. I told her, I said, if I had taken them, you would’ve known about it. She stole them, just took them eager as you please, and the plate, too.”

Stealing on Christmas, of all days—how could she do such a thing, and with my daughters and son in the house too? The cow. If she had asked me for the pears I would gladly have given them to her, but simply to take them for herself was out of the question. At every turn I was surrounded with incompetence, every day of the year, every year of my life. Since I was a young girl I had never had a moment’s peace with my servants, not a single day in which there was not some kind of trouble that needed my attention. What I wouldn’t do to rid myself of every last one of them, their nattering voices, their insolence, their greed.

In a moment I was out of my chair and moving down the hall
under the torchlight toward the dining hall where the steward and some of the menservants were still at their supper, and across to the servants’ quarters in the half dark, where I could hear the maids chattering and laughing as I went toward them, and my feet on the stones were loud so that as I drew close a hush fell over the room, the maids sitting on their beds in a half circle of candlelight. The smell of cinnamon and cardamom and nutmeg was thick in the room, the plate of pears Doricza stole hastily pushed under the bed, glinting a little in the light, the gold and silver gleam of the tray that held them, about as long as my arm and twice as thick, with scrolls of lions and birds worked into the metal. My inheritance, that tray, a gift from my mother when I left for Sárvár as a new bride long ago. Not only pears, then, but something more valuable. She was a thief, a lazy little wretch. More than once she’d been punished for gluttony, for taking others’ bread, and for lechery. I had tolerated her slow lazy way with her chores, her mute anger, her clumsy shuffling walk. I had taken her to Bécs, to Pöstyén, had taught her letters in my carriage, and given her coins as presents, and this was how she repaid me—with thievery.

The fat girl’s eyes went wide, shimmering with unshed tears. I pulled the treasure out from under the bed, spilling the pears and the sticky sauce all over the bed, and held the tray over her head, so that she crouched and cowered and covered her belly with her hands—her belly that was more than fat.

“Who,” I asked, letting the tray fall, “is the father of your child?”

Immediately she dropped her hands, but I had already seen. “I’m not with child, mistress.”

“Tell me, or it will be worse on you, I swear.”

“I—” she began. I could see her weighing her answer. Truth versus fiction. At last she said, “The steward, madam.”

“Old Deseő?” I asked. “You’re joking.”

“No, madam. The other, the wedding steward.” Istók Soós, then.

I looked down at the girl from all my height, from a distance that seemed to grow and stretch. The longer I looked at her, the
uglier she became, her pink skin taking on the hue of a sow’s, her mute eyes damp and comprehending. Laziness and greed and thievery and licentiousness, all in one awful package. If she had been loyal, I would have gladly given the tray to her. I would have given her a fortune in new clothes and treasure for a dowry and found her a husband. But she was fat and stupid and useless, more useless than an old cow, who at least could be slaughtered for our supper. I would not even be able to marry her off now.

The room was dimly lit and full of faces, faces that seemed always to be mocking me, laughing at my misfortunes, searching out ways to rob, to lie. Dishonesty and deceit were the only virtues among the people whom I had tried always to help. I had offered them employment, education, the refinements of good food and good company, a chance to distinguish themselves, but not one of my maidservants had proven herself worthy, not in all my long years. Whores and bandits,
hajdúks
in my midst. Their excuses and apologies seemed to reach me as if from a long way off, and their tears were the tears of actors, of the most abject liars and cheats. I put my hands over my ears and would not listen. I would not listen, I said, to another filthy lying word.