The Countess

by Rebecca Johns

  “The midwife isn’t here, Mother.”

  “Darvulia and I can deliver you if we must.”

  “The midwife isn’t here. The baby can’t come until the midwife arrives.”

  “Erzsébet, get into bed, my love. It’s time.”

  A gush of green fluid fell from my body, splashing along the wooden boards and staining my shift, my feet. There was so much of it I thought at first that Darvulia had spilled a bucket of water across the floor. But my belly tightened, and I could feel the outlines of the child under my skin. Moving.

  “Green,” Darvulia said. “We have to be especially careful.”

  My mother looked grim. I didn’t know what the green water meant, but I stood still while Darvulia pulled the shift off me and helped me into bed. My mother readied the birthing chair in the corner, a wooden stool with a hole in the middle on which I would have to squat. My mother had explained everything to me already, but I still felt completely unprepared as I climbed into bed, as the pains grew in frequency and the room around me closed in tighter and tighter, until there was nothing but myself and the color of pain, bright red, and a pressing, gasping need that moved lower and lower into my belly as the day wore on.

  At one point I heard a new voice in the room: the midwife had arrived, come rushing up the stairs with her cloak still on, barking directions at the two women in the room and at me, her face lined and dark but kind. She helped me from the bed to the birthing chair, which was hard-backed and stiff as a confessional. She knelt before me and gave me orders. Push now. Push now, Erzsébet, or the child will die. Push.

  Save me.

  I curled around my belly and pushed and pushed, and then there was a popping and a release, and then the child slid free of me, a healthy girl with a shock of dark hair like my own, with my own great dark eyes and long, distinctive Báthory nose. The midwife cleaned out her mouth and nose with a swift and efficient finger, and then I heard her cry, a wail that circled round my head as Darvulia wiped my face and waited for the afterbirth, which she carried away like a dead child into the bowels of the castle. What she did with it I didn’t know, nor did I want to know. She was a táltos and had her own way of doing things.

  My mother put the baby briefly into my arms. She was so light after the heaviness I had felt in my belly all those months, her limbs pink and white and so warm it was like she had been taken from inside a hot oven. “Her name will be Erzsébet, after her mother,” said my mother, “but that is all the inheritance she will receive from you.” Then she took the child from me and gave her to the midwife, who cooed and spoke to my daughter in a strange tongue I did not understand. To this Birgitta my mother also handed over a great deal of gold, enough for a pasha’s ransom, on the condition that she take the child away and never return to Hungary in this life, or contact the Báthory or Nádasdy families again. The midwife agreed. While I wept and struggled to rise from my bed, while I slapped at the hands that tried to restrain me and swore that I hated my mother and would never forgive her, that it was too much to bear, Birgitta put on her cloak and carried my baby from the castle of Léka, disappearing back to her native land, and I never saw either of them again.

  My mother watched over me for several more weeks, until I was well recovered, and then she arranged to have me sent back to Sárvár with Darvulia as my chaperone. She kissed me before putting me in the carriage, a cold dry kiss on my cheek that I did not return. I would not thank her. I would show her no love for what had been done to me and my child for the sake of her ambitions. “Ferenc Nádasdy is a good man,” she said, her voice weary. “He is only young and will learn in time what love is. Do your best to make him love you, and you will both be happy.” I did not tell her how little hope I had of his love, nor how little desire to marry him, not when my heart was still full of András Kanizsay. Then my mother stood back to let the horses pull me away to my new life, all evidence of my sin washed as clean as if it had never been. She would be dead a few weeks later of the smallpox that was ravaging the villages of Upper Hungary, her face scarred and unrecognizable at the last by the pustules that marked that terrible disease, and afterward Darvulia and I alone would be left witness to what had passed in my rooms at Léká.

  Years later I would forgive my mother, understanding that none of us who were present that day had any choice in the matter. Just as my mother had sent me to my future, I sent my secret daughter to hers, wishing that whatever joy she might find in this life would be hers, that she would have the ability to choose it for herself, and the courage to take it.

  16

  After my confinement at Léka I was sent back to Sárvár, to my tiresome chaperonage under Imre Megyery. The men were gone, having returned to Bécs during my absence, so there was little to amuse me at the Nádasdy house. I missed András but did not dare to write him. Instead I spent those months toiling over the last of my formal lessons, enduring fittings for my trousseau, writing letters to my sisters and brother and our cousins back home at Ecsed, sharing our sorrow over my mother’s death.

  After a few months of this we left for the Nádasdy estate at Varannó, which lay at the far eastern part of the kingdom not far from my family’s house at Ecsed. There I was to be married off on the eighth of May in the year 1575, with nearly five thousand guests in attendance. Among the invited was the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II himself, as well as the greatest noble families from all over Hungary, Austria, and Transylvania: Batthyánys, Esterházys, Zrínyis, Rákóczis, Drugeths, and Pálffys would crowd into the kastély, and the Nádasdy court would fill with more gaiety than I had ever known before, or was likely to know after.

  Everything in the months leading up to the wedding itself was done with the greatest ceremony and decorum. Megyery arranged to take me from Sárvár to Varannó with a large retinue of servants, including Darvulia and some ladies, young cousins of the Báthory and Nádasdy families, crowded into carriages and chattering on and on about the young men at court, the latest gossip from Prága or Pozsony. I looked forward to the wedding not for the sake of my marriage to Ferenc but because I was certain to see András again, as well as my brother and sisters, those who really loved me and whom I loved without reservation. My life had been filled with so much solemnity of late—the birth of the child, the death of my mother—that I felt a kind of desperation for joy. I would dance until my shoes fell apart, and drink wine, and listen to endless strains of music made for my enjoyment. As we made the long trek by carriage back across Hungary Megyery told me more than once to quit fidgeting and leaning out the window like a gypsy and behave instead like a young woman on the verge of her greatest triumph. At night I would fall into Darvulia’s arms and beg her to sing to me, to soothe me against my anxiety. She attended everything I needed with the greatest care, giving me a tonic that calmed my nerves and let me sleep a little in the rocking carriage, so that I was not always irritating Megyery with my impatience.

  Everywhere we went there were sights that gave me pleasure. Farmers along the Carpathian foothills walked through the fields sowing their spring wheat in the turned earth, and in villages children chased the carriage through the streets, shouting for us to throw a few coins out the window in their direction, in which I, as the bride, obliged them. A shower of glittering fillér fell wherever we passed, scooped up by children who waved and shouted blessings in our direction as if the Virgin herself had been spotted among them.

  When we arrived at the palace of Varannó—one of the smallest and most far-flung of the Nádasdy estates, chosen to be closer to my own family’s holdings at Ecsed and Szathmár—it was already filled with people who had come to prepare for the wedding. Two dozen master chefs and more than a dozen wedding stewards were hired to manage the house and entertain the many guests who would soon arrive. Dressmakers, cooks, housemaids, and laundresses were brought in from the countryside, where the local peasantry rejoiced to have such profitable work, and musicians from Prága and Bécs, from as far away as Venice and Florence, came to
perform for the entertainment of the noble families of Hungary. The marriage of the house of Báthory to the house of Nádasdy was a state affair, something sanctioned by the king and smiled on by God himself, who in his wisdom set the nobility as the protectors and defenders of the people. Both our families knew the necessity of outshining the neighbors in the splendor of the arrangements and spent lavishly to make it possible—Ferenc, as head of his family, and my brother as head of mine.

  From my first moment at Varannó I felt myself at the center of a dance that seemed to go on whether I wanted it to or not, though I—or rather my family name and fortune, and the children I would be expected to bear on behalf of both—was the object of it all. When I stood on a box in dressmaker’s pieces in a room full of windows, faint with hunger while the ladies pinned the pieces of silk and lace, the servants scurried in and out of the house carrying flour, nutmeg, honey, eggs, oranges, lemons, figs, soft-skinned apricots, bright red pomegranates, pale plucked chickens. The butchers skinned steers and boiled hogs, and kitchen boys rolled barrels of wine and great wheels of cheese up from the cellars. All around me women young and old swept and scrubbed, kneaded and whisked, and outside young men mucked the stables and mended the livery and gave the walls a fresh coat of whitewash, so that the castle gleamed in the sunlight that rose each morning as if it had been ordered especially for me. Gypsies in colorful dress came in from the countryside to play music outside the palace walls for the local people who gathered there to join the celebration and strain for a glimpse of the Hungarian grandees coming and going, reminding me of the gypsy man I had seen executed as a child. I had the wedding stewards arrange for great pig roasts on the plains near the riverbank, where long into the night the people drank and danced by torchlight until dawn. The palace of Varannó turned for a time into a city as large and splendid as Bécs itself.

  At night I could hardly sleep for the sweet strains of music out the window, or for the anticipation that soon my loneliness and sorrow would end, and I would see András Kanizsay once more. The fact that I was shortly to be Ferenc Nádasdy’s bride hardly factored into my thinking at all, so centered was I on the object of my desire. Ferenc and I had to wed—it was decided for us long ago and could not be set aside without dire consequences on both sides—but my heart in those days was a thing he would not, could not touch.

  By custom my own family traveled first from Ecsed to be with me for the wedding preparations. They arrived one afternoon in the same great creaking wooden carriage that had once carried me across Hungary to Sárvár, my sisters leaning out the window as it crossed the bridge into the castle to wave at me. I came down to the courtyard to meet them, hardly able to stand still long enough to hear the rattle of the wheels on the boards of the drawbridge, much less wait for some steward to climb the stairs to my room and tell me they had arrived. In a moment the carriage door opened and my sisters tumbled out to embrace me, grown in loveliness and health in the three years since I had seen them last. Little Klára, whose birth those many years ago had frightened me so much, had inherited our mother’s tiny frame, making her look younger even than her six years. Dark-eyed Zsofía, at nearly twelve, was the image of our mother, but my sister smiled much more easily than our mother had the last time I had seen her, so that the resemblance quickly faded, along with the stab of pain at my heart. She teased me immediately on reaching up to place her arms around my neck. “Ferenc Nádasdy will have to stand on tiptoe to kiss you, sister,” she said. “Or is he really as tall as they say? A giant of a man in more than height alone?”

  I rebuked her with a glance and a word. “I see your confessors have a great deal of work before them,” I said. “Unless they have given you up already as a lost cause, a wild girl with no manners and no hope of redemption.”

  But then I touched her lovely dark hair, black as deep water, and she said, “It is good to see you again,” and it was as if no time at all had passed since we had seen each other.

  Next István stepped forward and embraced me, his shoulders hunched despite his increased height, several inches at least in the year or so since I had seen him last, the white line of his mouth pressed together. How solemn he had grown. He had always shown an inclination toward quiet contemplation and isolation, toward books and prayer, but it must have cost him a great deal of sadness to leave home so soon after the death of our mother. I had not been able to go to Ecsed for the funeral ceremony, since it was so close to my wedding date and because my mother needed to be buried swiftly after the smallpox took her, so István and I had not seen each other since I had left for Léka, to bear my illegitimate child in secrecy.

  I asked if he was well, and he kissed me with warmth and assured me he was. “I apologize,” he said. “It is only that I wish our mother were here. But I’m happy for you. We will think only of you and your marriage.” Then he took my arm and led me once more into the house. I had a sense of us grown up and grave, István in my father’s place now and I in my mother’s, and my heart broke for my poor brother, whose grief since our mother’s death must have been deep indeed.

  We had little time to dwell on our family sorrows. Soon there were numerous wedding traditions to see to, first among those being the arrival of the groom’s messengers to come greet us and tell us of Ferenc’s approach. We had a servant posted to watch out for them for several days before their expected arrival, and every rider who approached the gates stirred in me old hopes and desires, old wishes and fears, as Ferenc Nádasdy and his retinue made the long journey from Bécs to Varannó.

  I had not seen András Kanizsay since the end of the previous fall, since before my mother had taken me off to Léka with his child in my belly. I remembered how after I told him about the child his attitude toward me had changed utterly. He no longer teased Ferenc for his lack of interest in me, or me for the change from girlhood to young woman, all as he had before. He hardly looked at me, speaking to me rarely, finding excuses to leave whenever I entered the room. He had justified his behavior at the time by telling me we needed to give no hints or clues that would make anyone suspect what had passed between us, but now I was not so sure. How would he be when he saw me again? Would he be glad to see me? Would he be cold, and laugh at me as he had the night I told him about the child? He had not written to me during my absence, nor I to him, despite the anguish I felt at our separation. I wrote to Ferenc once or twice, as expected, but my letters were all politeness, containing as little of my heart as possible—my studies, my travels, the sickness stalking the woods and fields around Léka, my own health, as well as the expected formal expressions of joy at the prospect of our upcoming union. I mentioned András in my letters not at all, except to have Ferenc wish his friends and family well for me in my absence, as uninterested a pose as I could manage. Ferenc wrote to me to tell me he was well, that life in Bécs continued to be busy and amusing, but he never mentioned András in his letters to me. That the wedding would allow me a chance to see András once more filled me with far more apprehension than my upcoming marriage vows to Ferenc Nádasdy.

  On the day the servant came and said the groom’s heralds had been spotted on the road to Varannó, I sent for István to go down to greet them as the head of the family and waited in my rooms for the steward to come up to fetch me. I picked up some bits of embroidery to hide the fact that my hands were shaking and felt a little throb of gratitude toward Orsolya, whose patience I had tried by deriding embroidery as nothing more than a pursuit for uneducated ladies, but now I saw it kept the hands and eyes busy and the outward demeanor calm while the mind was free to travel elsewhere. I pictured András riding toward Varannó and did not know if I would be able to sit still.

  My impatient sisters went to the window again and again to report the progress of the riders toward the chateau, calling news over their shoulders and looking at me to see if I blushed. The chance to meet friends of Ferenc, young men of a marriageable age and situation, made them bold. Now they were at the edge of the village, Klára said,
now approaching the river, now riding up the castle hill and across the drawbridge, now dismounting their horses and slapping the dust from their thighs. “I cannot see who they are from here,” she said. “But they are both young men.”

  “Thank heavens,” answered Zsofía, standing up to look. “At least Nádasdy didn’t send us two old grandpas without teeth.” She was already engaged by then to András Fígedy and thus felt free to indulge in speculation over the identities of the two messengers without embarrassment. She said they were handsome, at least from several stories up. Would I come to the window and see?

  No, I said, but I managed to smile at their teasing. I didn’t dare go to the window but kept at the embroidery, pretending not to care in the least about the identity of the messengers. With my needle I made a stab of blue into the white cloth of a handkerchief, but my hand shook and I missed my spot, making a dent in the side of a cornflower. I had to pull it back out again and start afresh, but missed again and stuck the needle into my own finger. “Look how nervous she is,” said Zsofía. “I have never seen you so lacking in composure, Erzsébet. You must be afraid of the wedding night.”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “I hear it is not as terrible as everyone says. That with the right man it could even be pleasurable.”

  “Just watch the window, little sister,” I said, sucking the blood from my finger. “Perhaps you will see your own future husband there, unless he thinks the better of it upon catching sight of you, and runs away again.”

  After a decent interval, a servant came up to fetch us, and I was able to put the embroidery aside. I paused to smooth a hand over my hair at the mirror and compose my face, as I had the day I arrived at Sárvár and learned that the young man with my mother-in-law was not Ferenc Nádasdy but his cousin. I went slowly down the stairs though I wanted to fly, followed by my own entourage of ladies, who flanked my back and my sides as we entered the great hall at Varannó. The two gentlemen were already there waiting for us, changed into clean clothes, speaking quietly but with evident pleasure to my brother, István, who seemed to know them. My heart lifted for a moment. Then they turned, and quickly I arranged my face to hide my disappointment. I recognized István Bocskai, Ferenc’s closest friend from Bécs, who was as pleasant as Ferenc was cold. He seemed taller than he had since we danced at the engagement ceremony, quite well grown, and I composed my expression into a look of pleasure, bowed, and said how genuinely happy I was to see him again after my winter away from the court. “We missed you at Christmas at Sárvár this year,” he said. “Ferenc was quite bereft without you.”