The Countess

by Rebecca Johns

  I was still more awake than asleep long after midnight when my door opened a crack, revealing faintly a darker shape against the wall, the shadow of someone coming into the room. The ropes holding my mattress creaked beneath me. I was sitting up in bed. “Darvulia?” I asked.

  “Hardly,” said a male voice. Then he was inside, and the door was shut. We were alone in the darkness, a little moonlight coming through the shutters turning the shapes in the room to monstrous forms, the lion-backed chair to a beast with dripping jaws, the table in the corner to a catafalque. The rugs on the bed lay on my limbs like earth on a new grave, but I was afraid to throw them off. The room tilted and then righted itself, the liquor still buzzing in my veins. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out again with a little sigh, the only sound either of us made in that space, that wet ephemeral darkness while his steps on the floor came toward me.

  “You must be lonely in here by yourself,” said András Kanizsay.

  I pulled the cloth closer around me. I was afraid of him, afraid of myself with him. I had a strange desire to ask him to stay, to wrap my arms around his neck and press my mouth to the warm skin there, though I knew that was impossible. “Go away,” I hissed.

  “I don’t think you mean that at all. I think you want me here.”

  “Go back to your own room, András. I do mean it.” This time my voice was firmer, more sure of itself, more mindful of the danger I was in.

  He was standing next to the bed, so close I could smell the pálinká on his breath, sweet and coppery and full of sugar. I knew I should have called for the guards, but he was already in my room—the taint of him would be on me no matter what I did. We were already guilty by association. No one would believe me if I said that nothing had happened. No one would believe him if he said he did not force himself on me.

  The room was stifling in the October heat, and when he came and sat on the edge of the bed, the oily sweat of his skin mingled with my own, and the slightly acrid smell of his armpits, the sweeter scent of his hair, mixed with the sugar of his breath. I held myself entirely still, listening to the blood rush in my ears. Despite my mother’s tutoring in the wifely arts, I did not know what I should do. I was not yet a wife. Any movement, I felt, would endanger us both further. A faint outline of him was visible in the weak light coming through the window. The wryness was gone, replaced by a sad kind of drunken earnestness that made me pity him a little. The insignificant cousin, made significant for a moment.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said.

  “Ferenc doesn’t think so.”

  “Ferenc doesn’t see you. I see you. If I had been the palatine’s son, if I had been a count with enough estates for a kingdom, I could have been your husband.”

  “Stop talking about things that will never happen. Ferenc is going to be my husband.”

  “Not yet he isn’t.” He came closer, pressing me down into the mattress. “From the first moment I saw you, when you tumbled out of the carriage into my arms, I knew you were for me.”

  That made me laugh. “I thought I was a child, with a chest as flat as a boy’s, a serious little nun who would plague your cousin into his grave.”

  “You don’t have a boy’s chest now. I see you looking at me. Ferenc doesn’t know you. He has his swordplay and his horses and his great name to live up to. And his maidservants, and his friends. He doesn’t have time for his lovely little fiancée.”

  His hands were rougher than I would have thought, calloused from holding the sword and the reins, and they pressed down on my wrists, down into the softness of the bed. “I’ll scream,” I said, but the words were weightless, like a sigh.

  “No, you won’t. You want me here as much as I want to be here. You’ll be sweet and good, and let me be your husband tonight.”

  If I had wanted, I might have fought him off. Even then I could have kicked and slapped and overturned the furniture, called for the guards, called for Ferenc. Perhaps I should have. But Ferenc did not want me, and András did. Here was pleasure and friendship, instead of loneliness and resentment. Here was a man who would love me not for my dowry and family connections, not for my future children, but for myself.

  If I had known then the kind of man András really was, if I had known how he would turn his back on me, I would have sent him away at once. But that night, God help me, I wanted him there, his weight pressing down the bed, his hands in my hair. His attentions had always pleased me more than they should have, and now, in darkness, I was sure I loved him. With a child’s innocence, I thought if I could not have the man who was supposed to want me, I would have the other instead.

  His hands were on my shift, pulling it up, and I was nowhere, I was darkness. From someplace I felt a sharp pain, and he was nothing but a shadow over me, insubstantial, like a spirit I dreamed into being. It was already too late to send him away. Willingly then I put my arms around his neck and my hands into his hair, fine and soft and smelling of woodsmoke, but the place where his whiskers burned against my face left it raw and red, so that in the morning Darvulia, who said nothing about my appearance, had to bring me some ointment for the soft parts of me, slashed, burning, an occupied country.

  14

  Thus are the seeds of trouble sown. I have often thought of that night, Pál, the girl I was then, the little fool who thought she was in love, who thought she had chosen for herself a man who would love her. Who nearly ruined everything over a moment of despair.

  When Ferenc and I stood in front of our friends and family for the engagement ceremony, when I held up my hand in front of our friends and family and let him put on it the ring of gold and ruby that had once belonged to his mother, my belly was already full of András Kanizsay’s child. The red dress my mother and Darvulia had bound me into that morning felt so tight across my ribs I thought I would faint, and I was so pale and green that Ferenc asked in my ear if I wouldn’t like to delay a day or so until I felt better. “Of course not,” I said, more sharply than I should have, and for the rest of the day he scowled, saying nothing to me, not even “good night” at the end of the evening. Instead I danced with István Bocskai, Ferenc’s friend from the imperial court and an ally to my own Báthory uncles in Transylvania, his arm around my waist as he spun me around to the lively strains of a palotás. The eyes of everyone in the room were on us, including those of my András, who did not ask me to dance.

  Instead he watched, and drank, and teased his cousin about me, all as he had before. His coldness frightened me, made me think that perhaps our night together had been a single moment only, a drunken mistake that in the light of day he meant to deny. I tried to convince myself that I no longer cared for him, that his love or lack of it meant nothing to me, but I could not stop the warmth that came over me whenever I caught his eye, the sudden twist in my entrails that felt like love. He said nothing more to me than “Good evening, miss,” all night, and I went to bed that evening puzzling over the way he smiled whenever he caught me staring.

  I had nearly made up my mind to forget about him, to shut the door to him forever, when he came to my room once more under cover of darkness, swearing that his actions that evening had been for my protection. “I must be aloof in public,” he said, “or else I will have to declare my love for you in front of everyone, and give us both away.” Awash in relief, I believed him. I wept and covered him with kisses, begged him never to turn his back on me, and once again showed him the love that his cousin would not or could not accept.

  In company András and I continued much as we had before—I pretending to annoyance, András keeping up what appeared to be his usual good-natured teasing. No one looked closely enough to see that my annoyance now hid a kernel of fear that someone would discover our secret, or that his teasing masked what I thought were his more tender feelings. He made no more comments about my bosom or my age, at least, either in front of Ferenc or privately to me. He came to my bed two or three more times that month, when it seemed like it would be safe to do so, murmu
ring endearments and bringing me such little presents as he could afford—a comb for my hair, a bit of ribbon he’d bought in the market. I made sure, every evening, to leave the door unlocked for him and pretended surprise whenever I woke to find his sweet breath crushing against my mouth, thrilling at having a secret of my own to keep, at having someone of my own choosing to love. He would stay an hour, maybe two, and slip out again before Darvulia came in with my breakfast each morning. We thought we were being so clever. In public we might be good and honorable, but the night, he said, was ours alone. No one would ever know our secret.

  It was two months or more before I noticed my monthlies had ceased. They had always been infrequent, and I too young to miss them. But I did notice how smells changed: the honeysuckle so sweet and cloying under my window that I asked the gardener to chop it down, the smell of baking bread as strong as the scent of manure in the stables. After a few weeks, food became so disagreeable I could keep nothing down except broth and a little pale beer. I hardly left my room at all, claiming an infectious fever. There was so much sickness in the country then that no one suspected, or if they did they knew better, at least, than to say anything to me.

  More than once I thought of telling András, wondering what he would say, if he would be proud, if he would be frightened. If he would denounce me, let my secret slip in a moment of drunkenness or fear. If he would ask me to come away with him, take what money and possessions we could and disappear. We could go to Venice, to Rome, to the Habsburg lands in Spain, even to the New World if we chose. I imagined a flight in the dark, changing our names, the bucking decks of ships at sea, a new life in unknown lands.

  All this I dreamed, but when I told him at last, when I gathered my courage one night and told him that I was expecting his child, he laughed and said he had been wondering. I looked so green all the time. Did I not know how to prevent a child? he asked. Did my mother teach me nothing useful?

  Of course she did, I said, though she had done nothing of the kind. My mother must have thought any child I bore would be from my noble marriage and not a tryst with a lesser-born cousin. That there were ways to prevent a child, and that András knew about them while I did not, disturbed me even more than his indifference to my condition. For the first time I wondered if I could not trust him. He kissed me with as much warmth as ever, but he went away that night without making any of the promises or plans I hoped for—no carriages or ships, no desperate flights through the darkness toward an unknown fate.

  A few days later, when my mother demanded the truth, and I knew I would not be able to hide it from her much longer, I told her privately that I had given myself to László Bende, the butcher’s son whom I had reprimanded for fighting, a boy to whom I had spoken no more than eight or ten words in my life. No one could know the real identity of the man I had loved, not if I was to protect him. My brother was furious, saying I had debased myself and threatened a match that would be the making of all of us, but he promised to keep my secret, and to help me make arrangements to get out of Sárvár until the child was born. In the strictest secrecy my mother made plans to take me away to the Nádasdy house at Léka under the pretense of tending my illness herself, with a mother’s loving attention. We dared not return home to Ecsed, where the truth would not stay hidden for long. Léka, with its healthful mountain air, its remoteness, would make an excellent place to hide my shame. I was not without hope even then. Perhaps after an absence András would reconsider his options and decide to come for me and the child. Perhaps my removal would make him remember that he loved me, and that my shame was his as well.

  We left on a cool bright morning, my mother bundling me into rugs for the journey in her cart, bringing with us only Darvulia, the táltos, and her medicinal powders and drinks. Both her talent with the healing arts and the deep friendship I felt for her meant I would not leave her behind. She helped me climb into the carriage and settled the rug across my lap while my mother spoke to the driver about the road into the mountains. Megyery came to see us off, shading his bulging frog’s eyes against the sun and wishing my health much improved. I thanked him and looked in the dark places of the courtyard, to see if there might be a young man who was sorry to see me go, but there were only servants carrying trunks, and the stable master checking the traces, and a maidservant taking the white sheets from my bed to the laundry, her eyes flicking to me and down again as she hurried past.

  “Don’t look for him, miss,” Darvulia said. “He won’t be there, and it won’t look right if you get upset. You’re supposed to be ill.”

  I looked down at the hands in my lap. “One might think he would come to see me off at least. We are supposed to be married next year.”

  “It wasn’t the master I was speaking of, miss. You know the other does not dare come to wish you farewell when your fiancé does not.”

  So she had guessed the identity of my night visitor, that crafty creature. I should have known. Nothing ever slipped past Darvulia’s notice. From that moment I knew I could trust her with anything, with my most secret self, and never again would there be anything but complete trust between Darvulia and myself.

  In a moment Megyery helped my mother into the carriage. She settled herself down beside me and put the rug over her knees. The driver spoke a word to the horses, which lurched forward with one sickening motion, toward Léka, where three women could tend to the future in silence.

  15

  My mother, Darvulia, and I spent the whole of that winter by ourselves in a private wing of the expansive vár at Léka, a many-level keep on a hill in the mountains north of Sárvár, circled by mists coming off the river, cool even in the heat of summer. There we watched my belly expand, tending the fire ourselves, making the meals with the help of only Darvulia, since we didn’t dare bring an entire retinue of servants who were not likely to keep gossip to themselves. That part of Hungary was suffering an outbreak of smallpox, so that we had a good excuse to hide away, with little contact from the stable master and the small group of maids who came and went around the castle when it was unoccupied by the Nádasdy court. We were kept active with the endless chores necessary for daily living and didn’t speak of the business at hand, the child within me. As I felt it stretch and kick I remembered the feel of András’s weight pressing me down into the bed and wondered what would have happened if Ferenc, and not András, had come to me that night when all the lights were out.

  The first pains of labor began one morning in the middle of the summer. I woke clutching my hands to my belly, afraid, remembering the sight of my sister Klára being born, the wet head and the blood and my mother’s cries. A wave of pain swept over me briefly and then went away again. I thought if I didn’t move or speak it might lessen, so I didn’t wake my mother on the other side of the bed or Darvulia from where she slept on a pallet near the window. The room was small and too warm. I kicked the rug off me and went to the window, opening it a crack. The sky bucked and wavered, and a thin trail of mist crept up from the river and into the courtyard. Below I could see a man in a blue coat and long beard leading a white horse, dancing and skittering on the paving stones. He looked up, briefly, and waved. I waved back, wondering if I were seeing a real man and horse or an apparition.

  Then my mother was beside me, pulling closed the shutter. “Don’t stand at the window,” she said. “You’ll be seen.” I looked down, but the man and the horse were gone.

  My mother fetched me breakfast, bread and fruit, but I wasn’t hungry, nor did I want to sit still and listen while she read to me from her favorite bit of Calvin, or embroider the waistcoat I had been working on, or play the lute for my mother’s amusement. The pain did not return for several hours, but I was restless, and moved from the window to the bed and back like a dog circling for a place to lie down. Still I would not tell them that the pains had begun. “Erzsébet, my God,” my mother said. “Sit down before you make me dizzy.”

  The truth was that I was afraid. Many women I knew had died in childbirth. I
was young and strong, but so had been many others who had gone before me. I did not want to die delivering András Kanizsay’s child. I thought of the stories of the Virgin, who gave birth in a stable with only her husband to attend her. At least I wasn’t as unfortunate as she. I had good help with me, and better on the way, for several months before my mother had sent for a midwife, a woman named Birgitta whom she trusted. This midwife had borne four children herself, all of whom had died. Of sickness, my mother was quick to explain, not the delivery itself. But Birgitta had not yet arrived that morning when the pains started. She was due soon, I knew, but not yet, not yet.

  I got up again and went to the window. The mist was beginning to burn off, revealing the road that followed the line of the river, the opposite side where the hills mounted toward the sky, but there was no sign of the midwife’s carriage. The heaviness in my belly increased moment by moment, and another pain came. I closed my eyes. I would not cry out. If I didn’t cry, if I did not admit my suffering, the child would not come. I would be safe.

  My mother was looking at me strangely. I could feel her large black eyes over my face, her knowing eyes. Another pain came, and another.

  “It’s started,” she said. “Darvulia, get her into bed. It’s time for her confinement.”