The bier on which my father lay was strewn with pine boughs and mistletoe and sprinkled with droplets of fragrant oils to cover the smell that was beginning to emanate from it, a smell somehow sweet and sickening, like an uncured animal skin left too long in the sun. I couldn’t connect the smell or the frozen corpse on the bier to my father, the man who had danced with my mother the night of the gypsy ball. I half expected him to come up behind me and lift me under the arms and place me on his shoulders as he used to do when he felt jolly or had been drinking, or both. It was a mistake, I felt, to have his funeral without him.
I kept looking to István, to see what he would do, but I was seated behind him, since he was my father’s heir and my mother’s confidant, and I could not see his face nor gauge what he was thinking while the service was beginning. In the days since my father’s death I had rarely seen my brother, not even in passing in the halls or at mealtimes. My family was becoming alien to me, strange without my father there at its center to hold us all together. That morning the back of my brother’s head and the shoulders of his black fur-trimmed cloak were damp with melting snow, and I could smell his familiar scent of hay and warm skin, but I felt as far from him as I did from the dead man on the bier. Suddenly my father was dead and my brother was the lord of Ecsed, in title if not in authority. Already I could see how my mother had started to depend on him, asking his advice on the funeral service and conferring with him for long hours over the eulogy and burial. He grew more solemn than usual, spent hours on his knees in prayers in the chapel of the estate, or behind the locked door of his room, scribbling away on bits of paper. At sixteen he was five years older than me and had reached his majority. He would assume my father’s titles, and leave the children’s court to me and to the little girls to become a real lord and master rather than a play one, and no amount of begging would persuade him otherwise. István was taking our father’s place, and I my mother’s, as the guardian and protector of the little girls and the myriad younger cousins who tumbled in and out of the house at Ecsed. István and I were children no longer. What my mother had said long ago was true, that the fate of the family belonged to us now.
I willed my brother to turn around, to turn and look at me, to smile or speak a word of comfort as he had always done. But his back was straight, his narrow shoulders even. He could not read my thoughts, no matter how much I wished it.
The pastor was saying that my father was a man of tremendous learning and nobility, a great lord and statesman, that Hungary had lost one of its most valuable treasures and the Báthory family its greatest hero. “His name will ring for a thousand generations,” the pastor said, his face appropriately grave. At one point István looked back at me and rolled his eyes, and for that moment he was still the István I remembered and loved. I had to suppress the laugh that came up, covering my face with my hands as if to hide my tears, my shoulders shaking, and then I was ashamed, because I had loved my father and wanted to mourn him properly. Zsofía crowded in close to comfort me, and I let her. In the front row, next to István, my mother’s back was as straight as a poker and just as unyielding, though I knew she had spent most of the last month prostrate with mourning. When the service was over, István, the new lord of the manor, took her arm and led her back to the sled, the little girls and I following close behind. My mother’s feet left deep prints in the snow, and as I walked I stepped into them one by one, to make the going easier.
6
A few weeks after my father’s death, Orsolya Kanizsay wrote to my mother asking if I might be sent to her house at Sárvár, where she would welcome me into the family as a daughter and finish my education as I adjusted to life among the Nádasdys. At eleven years old I would be sent away to be raised as a proper young lady, a highborn wife for Countess Nádasdy’s only child. My mother called me into her room one evening to give me Orsolya’s letter to read. The greeting alone took up nearly an entire page:
My good sister Anna, may the eternal, almighty Lord first strengthen us in the true religion by His holy faithfulness and promise, that all error be kept far from us, that we may be at one with the Christian Holy Mother Church in soul and body, and that we may walk in the true faith and in mutual love; and that He may cause you, my friend, to prosper greatly, for which I hope, and trust and believe that it will be so, and I believe of a certainty that He will wish to raise you up for trust in Him alone, amen.
I saw the cramped, uncertain hand of a woman who had come to her education late in life, after her marriage, the awkwardly formal inflections and errors in grammar and thought that even at eleven years old I knew were the mark of an inferior mind. The words seemed kindly at least, thanking my mother in warm tones for the generosity of the dowry and for the honor of joining the house of Báthory to the house of Nádasdy, a union that would benefit both families and the country, and so on and so on. If my mother agreed to the arrangements, she wrote, she would send a carriage for me within the month.
I handed the letter back to my mother, assuming she would not consider sending me away so soon after my father’s death. Girls in those days usually did not marry until fifteen or sixteen, and I had thought, after the documents were signed at the time of the gypsy ball, I would have at least five or six years at home still with my mother and father, my brother, and my little sisters before my marriage to the Nádasdy boy, in the far western part of the kingdom where I was unlikely to see them often. Though it was not unusual for girls to be sent to their mothers-in-law long before the wedding, I had always assumed that my own mother would not want me so far away from her, that I would be permitted to remain home for a while longer still.
When I said this to my mother—that I was honored, but preferred to remain home for the intervening years between that moment and the actual date of the marriage—she looked away. “Very well,” she said. “I will write to her and tell her you wish to stay at home for a little while longer.” Then she lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes, asking me to shut the door as I went out.
This I did, reluctantly. My mother had never taken well to my father’s absences, when he would travel on matters of business or politics, and after my father’s death she spent her life in bed, rarely sleeping or eating but unable to rise and face the world. She was not made for widowhood. Where other women might see the freedom that comes with the death of a husband—the release from duty and possession, the authority that comes from being a powerful widow and a landowner in her own right—my mother saw only the end of everything. It was as if she had died along with my father, for she was not the same afterward, rarely lighthearted or smiling, and the parties and balls that she and my father had so often hosted at Ecsed came to an abrupt end. She still had her immense wealth and beauty, but my father had written his will such that if she did remarry, she would lose the right to raise her children, a not-uncommon practice among the nobility of my father’s acquaintance and temper but a difficult one to stomach for a woman like my mother. He did not want to see his children subjected to the whims of a stepfather, perhaps, or maybe he simply knew my mother’s nature and wanted to keep her in thrall to his memory—to keep her his, body and soul, until the end of her life. Whatever his reasons, my mother was not permitted to remarry. György Báthory’s widow she was, and György Báthory’s widow she would remain.
Over the years I would come to see the cruelty in this decree, the jealousy and servitude. If my father had allowed her to keep her children, my mother might have rallied and found a new husband as well as some hope for what was left of her life. Instead my mother took to her bed. She ran the affairs of the estate as best she could with her head propped up against the pillows and her hair undone around her shoulders, her eyes shadowed with crying and sleeplessness as she wrote her letters or spoke to the servants. Her jewels and fine clothes began to gather dust, her body falling abruptly into old age. She was a changed creature, hollow-eyed, her legs and arms too thin, the bones showing through her skin and her voice growing small, far away, a
s if it could not reach the tremendous heights of her mouth. Some women, like Orsolya, dressed in black to show the world their loss at the death of a husband. For my mother, it would be as if her spirit had cloaked itself in widow’s weeds instead.
During the daylight hours she remained distant from the children who loved her so, impatient with our antics and the too-quick (to her mind) healing of our hearts over our father’s death, but nights she would call to one of us to sleep with her in her bed, and even István, who was sixteen when our father died and far too old to be crawling in bed with his mother, would oblige her, wrapping his arms around her neck and letting her sleep against his shoulder. At first we went hoping for a return of the mother we knew, a brief glimpse of love, but then she would frighten us with the sounds she made in her sleep and we would steal away again and find our way to our own beds once more. Eventually we began to resent these requests, to avoid them even. István and I would bargain with each other over whose turn it was supposed to be. If he spent the night with Mother for me, I said, I would copy the verses of the Bible our tutor had given us to memorize. If I went for him, he said, he would watch Klára and Zsofía two whole afternoons so I could take my pony outside the walls of the estate. Thus my mother’s charms had worn off with her mourning, so that even her own children bribed each other to avoid her company.
Since our father’s death Klára especially preferred to sleep with me, whimpering and clinging to me whenever our mother requested her presence at night, but I would take her to our mother and pull the blankets over her and whisper in her small seashell of an ear that as soon as Mother fell asleep, Klára could slide from her grasp and slip back to the bed we shared. I would kiss her and go. In the middle of the night my sister would push her small dark head under my elbow until I made way for her and took her in my arms, and then she would fall into a deep and dreamless sleep, her sweet breath on my face and her hands curled in my hair. Klára did not understand why her mother needed her so, how the loss of love can warp the spirit, and I suppose I did not blame her for preferring me. I was glad, having lost my mother to this hollow-eyed ghost, this phantom, to have another human creature to cling to.
The promised delay of my departure relieved me, though for several weeks afterward it seemed I couldn’t stop hearing the name Nádasdy. It was on the lips of every servant in the house, of my brother and sisters. Zsofía clamored to know how far away the countess lived, what she looked like, how large a carriage she would send for me when the time came. The Nádasdys were there when I bathed or when I ate, when I slept or dressed or bent over my lessons. From the beginning of my engagement I had tried to shut out thoughts of Sárvár, tried not to imagine the different foods they might serve there, the different smells of the woods and streams in the far western edge of the country, on the borders with Habsburg Austria. I had been to Bécs once with my mother and father when I was small, but other than that I knew little of the part of the country in which my future family lived. Orsolya’s estates at Keresztúr and Sárvár would be nothing like Bécs, so busy and crowded that one could hardly walk through the streets and squares. My new home at Sárvár would be considerably smaller than Bécs but less remote than the marsh fortress at Ecsed. The old palatine, my betrothed’s father, had brought intellectuals and musicians from as far away as Padua and Amsterdam to live and entertain at his court when he had been palatine. I hoped that Ferenc Nádasdy would be natural and outgoing and free, not stern and formal and reclusive like my brother, István, who was the same age as my husband-to-be but more than ever was becoming strange to me. I hoped Ferenc would love me enough to protect my family for my sake, that his love would be like a strong roof to keep out the rain and the wind and the snow.
Once I asked my mother to tell what she knew of the Nádasdy family that she had not already said. She had known Orsolya Kanizsay through her first husband, and they had talked many times at balls and dinners in Bécs or Pozsony. We were in my mother’s room, and I was sitting on the edge of her bed staring at the shape of her feet moving underneath the blankets, like two moles disturbing a fresh grave. “Do not worry, my love,” she said. “You will be married, and you will be happy. You will be as happy as I was with your father. Ferenc Nádasdy will be a powerful man, and a powerful man always needs a powerful woman by his side.”
She didn’t mention love, nor the fact that her own first husband had been her personal choice, a love match, and so had the second, and the third. She opened her arms for an embrace, and I went to her, because I didn’t know what else to do then or how to disappoint her. The truth was that the idea of being a wife terrified me, if it meant ending up like my mother, this miserable woman, this three-time widow. I would rather have raced my pony across the fens or taken my little sisters to gather robins’ eggs in the woods. I would rather have run away to Bécs, to Prága, to Paris, to dissolute Venice or sunny Rome or even cold, faraway London, where the queen who shared my name remained unmarried, a virgin still and beholden to no man.
Instead I waited until my mother released me, kissed my brow, and sent me out again. Afterward I ran out of the house to the stables, clambering up to hide in the hayloft with a book, staying there so long that I fell asleep and forgot to eat my evening meal, but it was the only place where I would not have to hear the name Ferenc Nádasdy, or think of the life that was lying in wait for me.
7
My mother had seen to my formal education from an early age, bringing the best instructors from the school on her first husband’s estate to stay with us. With our brother, my sisters and I learned to read the works of Herodotus, of Thomas Aquinas, of Paracelsus, learned the formal inflections of Hungarian, German, Greek, and Latin at the knees of our tutor, Leopold, a stern and ugly German who was fond of beating his young charges with a green willow stick, leaving a pattern of narrow red welts on our buttocks and the backs of our legs if we didn’t recite our lessons swiftly enough or in their proper order—a punishment our parents put a stop to when they learned of it, but not until I had at least three times felt the sting of Leopold’s whip.
I was not a good student at first, so easily distracted by little things—a swallow that flew down the chimney into the house, or my father’s hunting dogs birthing a litter of pups, or the first breaking of the sun on a cloudy day—that it was no surprise I didn’t enjoy my studies. Whenever Leopold would turn his back, I would run to the stables and take my pony for a ride or hide in a corner of the kitchen, on top of the place where the linens were stored, to take an afternoon nap. Later, when I could read and write more easily, when I learned that the books I had been reluctant to open contained an escape so true, so complete that not even the tutor could prevent me from flying beyond the walls of the house, I began to appreciate what he was trying to teach me. I read—I read by firelight, by candlelight. I read in the stables and at the table at supper, read science and astronomy, especially the works of Copernicus and the treatises of Tycho Brahe, about the order and movements of the heavens. My mother, before she was a widow, used to say I would ruin my eyes with so much reading. “You will develop a squint,” she would say, kneeling down to take the volume out of my hands and set it aside. “What will you do then? No man will have you.” This idea gave me pause for some little bit of time until I realized that she was teasing me and that she herself had read every book I put my hand on. Then she would laugh and give me the book back again.
After my father’s death, my mother began a new instruction for me, lessons on the duties and arts of a wife that seemed often to me to be more about her own heart than mine. “Your husband will desire you,” she told me, “and you must take care to keep his desire from being ever fully satisfied. Never make yourself too available to him, but always hold yourself back a little. Never tell him all the secrets of your heart, for then you will be in his power, rather than he in yours.” This last was said with a little smile.
I wondered at her words, if this indeed was the philosophy of love by which she had ensnar
ed not only one but three husbands, and I began to feel a measure of pity for my poor father, whose mind and body had been in thrall to the fierce charms of this woman, my mother.
She taught me about my monthlies, how they would come and go with the cycles of the moon until I was married and took my new husband into my bed and opened myself to him. Then I would be able to expect a child. When I gave him a son, my husband would value me above all the land in the kingdom. You will be his greatest treasure, she said, and cupped my chin in her soft hand, and for a long time I believed it.
Each day after she was done with my instruction, my mother would allow me to choose a book for my own. Despite my dislike of my lessons in the wifely arts, I thrilled in this reward and spent many hours poring over the books to pick the most beautiful or most interesting. I chose among others an ancient copy of Aristotle’s Poetics in Latin, the first to be printed in Europe, and a beautiful illuminated bible that had once belonged to her own mother and that I loved because the pictures of Mary, adorning the story of the birth of the Christ child, bore a striking resemblance to me. Each book I chose was a memento to take into my future life, a future I still believed was years away.
Yet it happened that only a month after the arrival of her letter, my future mother-in-law sent word that her steward Imre Megyery, her late husband’s cousin and her most trusted adviser, was coming to Ecsed as my escort on her behalf, as her letter had originally stated. When I demanded that my mother hold to her promise to let me stay at home a little longer, she simply sighed and asked me to be on my best behavior and offered no explanation for her betrayal. “Please, Erzsébet,” she said. “Be grateful. Your match with the Nádasdy boy is the envy of every girl in the land. The countess has asked for you, and I have no reason to deny her. She will be your family now, and you must do everything you can to please her.” So Megyery was to fetch me and bring me back to my mother-in-law’s estate in western Hungary, far from the comforts and familiarity of everything I had ever known, and that was the end of the discussion.
The Countess Page 5