Cranky Ladies of History

by Tehani Wessely

  “Recognise that?” he asked. “The undershirt you wore on my last visit. After my entourage left, I understand you slew three serving girls in a rage while wearing that shirt.”

  Erzsébet kept her face blank.

  “Szuzanna also tells me she has seen a register you keep on your desk. A list of the dead, written in your own hand.”

  “Was Szuzanna intended as your spy?”

  Thurzó ignored her. “I’ve sent a man for the register—”

  “Into my private chambers?” Erzsébet snapped.

  But Anna would hide the register. Anna would do that for her.

  Besides, Anna was too far implicated not to.

  “What would you put the death count at?” he asked. “Four hundred? Two hundred?”

  “None.”

  “Fifty?” Thurzó continued, almost to himself. “Thirty? How many is enough?”

  He sounded calm. Perhaps, if he was calm, she had a chance. Perhaps he was only acting on orders from their greedy king.

  She shivered. Thurzó must have seen the movement, because he leaned forward with the glass. When she made to wave it away, he snatched her hand and pressed the glass to her palm so hard the crystal dug into her cold skin.

  “Take it,” he said. “The good Lord knows there’ll be few enough drinks for you after tonight.”

  He rose and returned to the sideboard. Erzsébet sipped at the wine. It had turned bitter in the frozen room.

  “You’ll want sustenance after your ride, Lord Palatine. Perhaps—”

  “If you think I’ll consume any foodstuffs served by you, Erzsébet Nádasdy, you’re deluded.” Thurzó said without turning.

  “I meant only to be hospitable. You are my guest.”

  She emphasised the last word. Thurzó slouched back to the lounge, shaking dried mud into the fine weave of her furniture. “I heard what you did to Reverend Ponikenusz. You and your mad woman from the village. Erzsi, was it? You poisoned cake and then called out the evil spirits of—what was it? —cats to attack him. Of all things!”

  “Ridiculous!”

  “Isn’t it?” Thurzó agreed with equanimity. “And yet, your sister was a witch and your mother-in-law was a witch. And so, I suppose, are you.”

  “We are all witches when you want to destroy us. All women.”

  Thurzó raised his glass in a kind of salute. “The priest refuses all contact with you. He trembled as much as that frightened girl, Szuzanna, when I called for him.”

  “You made a promise to my husband—”

  “Ah, the Black Knight of Hungary! I wondered how long it would take you to mention him.”

  “—on his deathbed,” she continued, enraged by his casual disregard, “that you would protect me from the king!”

  “And I am!” he roared. “The king wants you hanged, naked, from a gallows in the centre of court. The whole village knows about you, Erzsébet. In fact, the whole country! The Lutheran pastors at Sárvár, the ones your husband silenced eight years ago with his extravagant and absurd donations, even they would speak against you now, I think.”

  “They would not!”

  “And the Catholic brethren at the Viennese cathedral on Augustinerstrasse. They used to throw their pots at the wall to cover the noise of your girls crying out for mercy. They will make for convincing witnesses, too, when it comes to that.”

  “Convincing for a Catholic king,” she replied bitterly.

  “Yes, a Catholic king. One rumoured to be the next Holy Emperor of Rome.”

  “A Habsburg Emperor?” she spat. “Their ambition is as limitless as the Turks’! So the King sends you, good Lord Palatine, to ensure I cause no embarrassment in this ridiculous crusade of his. If this is about the crown’s debt to me—”

  “Oh, it’s far too late for that.”

  “My husband held the Turks from our borders when King Matthias did nothing. The armies were starving and dying in their beds, and the king did nothing. No soldiers, no roads, no medicine. No schools! We did that. All of it. The nobility of Hungary has been protecting its people for decades.”

  Thurzó grunted. His face was in darkness.

  She rose and he leaned forward to stop her leaving.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To ask for someone to light the fire,” she replied.

  “Light it yourself. You have no servants, not anymore. After tonight, you won’t even have a title.”

  Erzsébet hesitated. “What are you saying?”

  “It’s over for you, Erzsébet.” His voice was almost gentle.

  She resumed her chair slowly. “Impossible.”

  “Your people hate you. They are poor—”

  “We are all poor. That’s why they mock the nobles now, calling us Lord of Five Apple Trees and Mistress of Nine Pigs. We were impoverished fighting the king’s wars for him. And yet, the king leaves our fine capital of Buda in the hands of the Ottomans.”

  “The capital is Pozsony now,” Thurzó reminded her. He leaned back into the lounge where the shadows ate at him. “You complain of poverty, Erzsébet, but my wife tells me your jewels are the finest in the country. Plundered from the Turks, I understand.”

  “Gifts from my husband,” Erzsébet replied. “I will give some to your good lady wife if you let me rally my cousins in Transylvania—”

  “I shall do no such thing,” Thurzó replied. “Did you really kill all the girls in your gynaecium?”

  “No.”

  “You did, Erzsébet. After what I’ve seen tonight, I know the truth of it,” Thurzó said sadly. “It’s the complaints of their noble families that forced me back here.”

  She should have cursed all of them.

  “They are only lesser nobles, György,” Erzsébet said. “Not like you or I.”

  “Don’t call me that, as if we are friends. Don’t call me by my given name.”

  She tried to soften her voice. “It’s all lies, Lord Palatine. I have enemies—”

  “Easily three hundred people will testify to finding bodies in shallow graves around your grounds.”

  “Lies.”

  “I heard about the handmaid you killed in Predmier on the way home from my own daughter’s wedding.”

  “An accident. The girl complained she was too warm in the carriage.”

  “So you stripped her, stood her naked in a barrel and poured icy water over her until she died. In the middle of winter. In the middle of the village square, for all to see. You call that an accident?”

  Her hands were clenched around the glass he’d given her. She downed the rest of the contents in a gulp. “I have seen many maids corrected by my noble peers.”

  “And killed?”

  Erzsébet replied quietly, “Even killed, if it was needful.”

  “Needful? Needful?”

  “I gave those girls shelter and honest work! I am lady and mother to all my staff.”

  Thurzó stood restlessly. He rubbed his temple and stared at the empty glass that hung from his hand. “To think, I once told my daughter to be more pious and responsible. Like the virtuous Countess of Báthory, I said. I find your crimes hard to even comprehend.”

  “Because none of it is true. ”

  “Stop lying!”

  He threw his glass at the wall by the candle. The glass shattered. Broken shards flew through the air like a diamond rain, lit by the candle.

  “Three dead on the way to your brother’s funeral at Ecsed!”

  “I was unwell,” she offered. “The stress. The grief.”

  “Is that all it takes? My God! You have been unwell as long as I’ve known you. Always with a headache or a fit, or one of your strange little trances where you tremble and writhe in your bed.”

  “There is nothing little about my suffering!” Erzsébet snapped.

  He looked at her with a kind of grim satisfaction. As if he had been proven right in some way.

  “Was it Ferenc corrupted you?” he asked. “I would believe that. He was a v
icious man.”

  “He was a war hero,” she corrected him.

  Thurzó grunted. “Is that why you refuse to take the widow’s path, to retire and mourn your husband quietly? You hope to bask in the reflection of his so-called heroism?”

  “How dare you,” she said quietly. “I’m kept in the king’s court by the strain of his debt—”

  “Don’t try to pin this on King Matthias, Erzsébet. Would you rather adopt the religious beliefs of the Turks than take up with your own king?”

  “The king owes me.”

  “That’s the very thing. He doesn’t want to owe you.”

  “Then he should pay his debts!”

  “And that’s the other thing. He doesn’t want to pay you.”

  “Then what does he propose?” Erzsébet asked.

  “To take everything you own.” Thurzó resumed his seat. “To impress the mighty Empire of Rome.”

  He said it with sarcasm. Thurzó was not Catholic, either.

  Erzsébet felt the blood drain from her face. “He’ll never get his hands on my lands.”

  “He will. He’s the king. ”

  “No! I’ve already bequeathed all my lands. Didn’t your friends the counts, my sons-in-law, mention that? My daughters and son own the properties now.”

  Thurzó looked at her thoughtfully. Then he rose and moved to the cabinet, already unsteady on her liquor.

  The candle needed trimming. It guttered, its light low, its oily smell edged with smoke. Its shadows made a mask of his face as he reached for another glass.

  “No wonder they call you the Beast of Csejte,” he said. “You are inhuman.”

  She pushed the rage down. She felt the pulse in her temple. She felt the tightness of her face, the itch of blood filling her skin.

  “They call me many things, most of them unflattering,” she said, lifting her chin. “I like to think you know me better, my good Lord Palatine.”

  He grunted, pouring more bitter wine. “I’m not sure I know you at all. Why kill girls, Erzsébet? You were seen as a champion of women. But I suppose they were easier for your old crones to subdue.”

  He returned to his seat. But where he’d been standing, she saw a kind of fire erupt, dancing along his outline as if the air still held the shape of him.

  “I never killed any girls,” she murmured.

  “Are you going to lie to me like you lied to Reverend Ponikenusz? Are you going to blame the cholera?”

  “It was not me that killed those girls.”

  “Ah! So who do you blame, if it wasn’t you?” He raised his glass.

  “The maids.”

  “The…?”

  “Anna Darvulia and the others. Dorotya Semtész and Katarína Benická. Ilona Jó Nagy was the worst. I could not stop them. I was afraid for my life.”

  Thurzó’s face went blank. He was quiet a long time.

  Then he put back his head and roared with laughter. “Merciful Mother, that’s rich! You blame the Darvulia woman?”

  Thurzó laughed some more, spilling wine across the lounge he sprawled on. “Oh, Erzsébet! Whoever digs a hole for someone else will fall in it themselves.”

  “You mock me, Lord Palatine? When I confess my greatest fear?”

  “Please. You? Afraid! Hungary’s mightiest noblewoman?” His laughter died. “I grant you, the Darvulia woman had an evil reputation. A wild beast in woman’s skin. You might have had a chance, blaming her.”

  “Had?”

  Thurzó chuckled softly.

  “Had?” Erzsébet insisted.

  “Before she died,” Thurzó replied. “But who do you blame for the deaths that have piled up since? The girls keep disappearing, their bodies—”

  “Anna has not died.”

  Thurzó’s smile dropped. “Gods, it’s true. You’re mad.”

  “She is not dead,” Erzsébet insisted. “She attended me in my bed chamber this evening.”

  “Stop it, Erzsébet,” Thurzó said.

  “Why do you say she is dead? Why do you say that?”

  “That’s enough! The fish stinks from the head. You are the Countess of Báthory. You are responsible for the actions of your people. Even those who died. Especially those, as it happens.”

  “She is. Not. Dead!”

  Thurzó blanched. “She’s been dead two years.”

  One of the guards entered the room unannounced. Erzsébet turned by habit to reprimand him.

  “We’ve found more,” the man said simply, not even looking at her. “Count de Homonnay asked me to collect you.”

  “Any alive?”

  The man nodded gravely. “The old woman the villagers spoke of. The one who was taken for hiding her daughter from the…lady. But over a dozen found dead so far.”

  The man dared to glance at Erzsébet.

  Thurzó dismissed the man at the door and got to his feet. “Come with me, Lady Nádasdy.”

  Erzsébet rose before he could manhandle her again.

  Her head was spinning. A needlepoint of pain had bloomed behind her eye. Her hands began to jerk against her sides. There was a sharp, unpleasant feeling as if her skin was peeling off. White sparks of light danced in her vision.

  She pressed her fingers to her temple, trying to stop the tingling. Trying to hold herself in. She felt stripped from her body.

  Anna could not be dead.

  She heard Thurzó from far away. “Don’t play games with me, Erzsébet. Ferenc might have believed in your trances, but I don’t.”

  When she was a girl, a healing woman told her the trances were the result of demons arguing under her skin. The arguments brought terrible headaches and pain.

  Only Anna had taught her not to be afraid of them. That the demons were merely spirits, passing through her. She said Erzsébet should be glad for the pain. It proved the spirits had not abandoned her and never would.

  “Hungary will not stand for your treatment of me,” she murmured. She could feel the sweat on her face, despite the cold. “After all my husband has done! All I have done.”

  “Your husband was a sadistic soldier ill-suited for courtly life. As are you.”

  “How dare you! I demand the right to defend my name,” she replied.

  Thurzó’s glare hardened. “You fool. That’s exactly what the king wants. He knows what you fail to admit. No one is coming to your aid, Erzsébet. No one could withstand the embarrassment. Your uncle has practically disowned you. Your peers look the other way. Even that little neighbour of yours that you’re so fond of—Batthyány?—he won’t stand up for you. Because to defend you would be to deny the King, the entire Habsburg family and soon, the might of Rome.”

  “You cannot deny my rights. It would shame the kingdom. It would imperil every noble of this country.”

  For a moment she felt like a countess again.

  Thurzó held out a hand in summons.

  “I will go nowhere with you, not until my son arrives and the seat of Báthory is safe in his hands.”

  “Pál isn’t coming, not tonight. When we passed his retinue on the road, I suggested other lodgings this evening.” He would not meet her gaze. “I will protect your children, Erzsébet. But alas, you are lost.”

  “Thurzó,” she said, pleading. “György. Please. I’ll give you land.”

  “You have no land, remember?” Thurzó said. “Besides, land is worthless now. No one can afford to maintain it. Perhaps you could offer it instead to the Turks?”

  ◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊

  They reached the keep.

  Erzsébet had not been there in months. The stink of death was strong even for her. They had lit all the oil lamps they could find and hung them from hooks on the walls. But even their sooty stink did nothing to dampen the smell.

  The armed guards were there with her sons-in-law, hands covering their noses. The fool priest was bent to the floor, murmuring prayers.

  She hesitated on the threshold, blinking to clear her vision of the dancing, oily lights after t
he dark drawing room. “A cloth, if you will. Something for the odour.”

  No one moved to assist her. They barely looked at her. Their gazes were fixed on the mess on the floor.

  The bodies had so disintegrated they barely resembled the girls they had been. They were blackened and icy, but at least the marks of torture were harder to discern.

  Fickó was meant to bury these bodies in the forest.

  Thurzó strode grimly to the centre of the room. “Lady Widow Nádasdy, I came here intending to place you in a convent—”

  “A Catholic convent, Lord Palatine?” she spat. “For our king’s sake? I am Protestant, as you know.”

  “—but having seen your crimes for myself, I cannot, in good conscience, allow you to be free. If even the priests fear you…” He looked to where Reverend Ponikenusz kneeled. “We treated even the Turks better than this.”

  “I demand a trial,” Erzsébet said quietly.

  “I won’t let you dishonour your family’s name with a public trial,” Thurzó replied. He sounded tired. “I exercise my right as Palatine, second only to the King in Hungary, to sentence you privately. You will be walled up in this hellish castle for the rest of your life.”

  “You would have me starve?”

  “We will leave some little space for ministrations. We will feed you, clean your pots.”

  “You took an oath to my husband.”

  “Your life will be spared, Widow Nádasdy, for your family’s sake. But you will be declared legally dead. Your journals and letters will be destroyed. Your fortune stripped from you and granted to the crown.”

  “You dishonour me!”

  “Your honour is already lost. It is your family’s honour I protect now.” Thurzó was calm.

  “See reason, György. You cannot imprison a noblewoman. It would be the shame of Hungary!”

  “By court order, your name shall never be uttered in public again. You will disappear from the world, Erzsébet.”

  “This is unheard of!”

  “So are your crimes.” Thurzó told her. “Be grateful I don’t do worse. The women, your accomplices, will be tortured for their statements and their bodies burned. Even that young simpleton, Fickó, if I have my way.”