When Ferenc came in that evening from town, dismounting in the creeping dusk, he passed the girl in the courtyard and stopped for a moment to look. By then she was a quivering lump, red from the sun and covered with welts and stings, her lips parched with thirst, the honey on her breasts and arms thick with dust and trapped insects. An ugly thing, twisted by vanity. What a spectacle she must have made as my husband came inside the house for the evening, her face unrecognizable, her beauty burned away so that Ferenc would have to have asked one of the servants who she was. I was nearly ready to send Darvulia out to have the girl brought in and washed, and her stings and bites treated, when Ferenc came into my room and asked what she had done. I thought he meant to reprimand me for taking aim at his current favorite and was prepared to defend my actions. “She was tormenting the other girls over the gift I gave her, a little silver mirror,” I said. “There was a quarrel, and none of the maids were doing their work.” I added, “And she was spreading some malicious gossip around the house.”
“About you?”
“And—about you as well.”
“I see.” Ferenc seemed to consider a moment, though he didn’t ask what she said. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he knew precisely. “She will certainly think twice before doing so again. And did she cry, and scratch, and try to protect herself from the insects?”
“She made a terrible noise. It’s been distracting the other servants from their work all day.”
“Next time,” Ferenc said, “have her chained in the courtyard. There are shackles for use around the fetlocks of the horses when they are being treated for illness. Use those. If she cries, you should bind her mouth as well. She should endure the punishment she’s earned, not make everyone else in the house suffer as well.”
“I will remember that.”
“And Erzsébet?”
“Yes?”
“Well done, my dear. A general could not have done better.”
“Thank you.”
He smiled, his hawklike expression growing ever more predatory, and considered me for a moment, as if he were deciding just how much he might be able to tell me, how much he might trust me to understand. As if I might be more than a name and an alliance with whom he had to share a house, but a friend and companion. A wife. “If you’d like, I can show you a few tricks that may come in useful in the future, battlefield techniques I have found very instructive.”
“What techniques are those?”
“I will revive her for you. Watch.” He took a slip of paper from his pocket, tore it in several pieces, and dipped them in oil. Then he went outside to the courtyard, and leaning down, set the oiled paper between the girl’s toes. He took a twig from the ground, lit it on a torch, and set it to the pieces of paper, which went up in quick orange bursts of flame. Even in her half-conscious state the girl jumped to her feet with a little yelp of pain and shook her feet to dislodge the papers. She looked around like a horse that had stepped on a snake.
“There,” he said, and looked at me with more pleasure than I had ever before seen on his face—his dark-bearded, dark-eyed, handsome face. My husband. “You see? It is called ‘star-kicking.’ Now she can walk inside under her own power, and spare the backs of those who would have to carry her. Or she could endure further punishment, if you think she’s not had enough.”
In the darkening space of the courtyard, with the tang of burning oil in my nostrils, I felt something in him open up to me, to the possibility of me. “Tell me more,” I said.
19
Afterward Ferenc began to take more notice of me. It was as if before I had been a shadow in his eyes, and only now did I take on solid form and substance, when he discovered we had a common interest—he the war abroad, I the battle at home, both of us equally dedicated to victory. Several times over the next few days I caught my husband staring at me with a kind of delight over the supper table in the evenings, over cards before the fire. If I spoke harshly to the cook over the roast or slapped the face of the girl who dropped a bottle of wine, shattering it all over the rug, I would look up and see him watching me, judging all my actions anew. I could not tell if it were the heat of summer or something more delicious that lit the coals in his eyes, but I remembered my mother’s advice to me, that husbands desire their wives, but that wives must take care to keep those desires from being ever fully satisfied. They must never be too ready to please, she’d said, but remain a mystery their husbands long to solve. Perhaps after the punishment of Amália, Ferenc had decided that my mysteries were something he wanted, at long last, to unravel himself.
One night I decided to prepare a special meal for my husband, sending the cook out of the house and preparing everything myself—the game birds dressed with cloves and stuffed with onions, the platters of sugary beets and vinegary olives, the loaves of bread studded with rye seeds, the candied citrons and cherries. For an entire day I worked in the hot kitchen until I could hardly stand, and when Ferenc and his friends Bocskai and Thurzó came in that night and sat at our table under candelabra polished to a blinding brightness, I served him from dishes I carried myself to show my pleasure at his visit, bustling in and out of the kitchen with a pot of butter in a silver bowl, a gilded plate with sliced beef and dumplings in dark gravy speckled with herbs. He ate it all with relish and leaned back after each course to pat his stomach and compliment the cooking. “Perhaps I should come home more often,” he said.
“I would like that very much,” I said, and smiled, to try to show that I was sincere, that there was no sarcasm in the sentiment. When I came around the table again, he touched the hem of my skirt as I paused beside him, rubbing the fabric between his fingers, and the smell of him—new sweat, old horse, damp hair and lye—rose up and combined with the rich brown smell of the food. My eyes swam. It had been too long since any man had looked at me with affection, much less love. All through the night his enjoyment seemed to increase, his compliments growing in lavishness and his manners warming to me. His eyes followed my movements around the table, the intensity of his gaze increasing so much that when I came at last to the table with the platter of capon to offer him the first piece, he caught me by the wrist. I could feel the warmth from his body through his waistcoat, the heat from the palm of his hand encircling my arm. “Erzsébet,” he said in a low voice, so that only I heard him. “My Erzsébet.”
He was drunk—the bottle of dark wine I had brought to him when he first sat down was already half empty—but only a little. He would need to drink a great deal more before he would be lost in his drunkenness. Instead his cheeks were flushed, and he tipped his head back to look up into my face, where I stood over his chair. My husband was noticing me. I nodded to him to let him know that I understood, and then set the platter down and gave him a piece of the meat, dripping with juices and small green bits of the mistletoe that my mother had said would excite a man’s desire. I had been right to follow her advice from long ago, as well as the herb lore she had imparted to me. At last my humiliation would be at an end.
All that evening I watched him watching me.
He wore a dark red waistcoat and breeches, his black boots polished to a glossy sheen that matched his black hair and eyes, his white cheeks flushed with red warmth. Across my neck and under my blouse a warm bloom began like the first days of summer, so that I wondered if the herbs had had an effect on me as well, but later I would know it was simply the desire that comes from being desired oneself.
His eyes under their heavy black brows moved like an animal’s, finding my face and then holding it, as if daring me to make a move, to slip away. His mouth and tongue were stained a rich red from the wine. Sometimes Thurzó, sensing Ferenc’s attention was diverted away from him, would tell a joke and make my husband laugh, but then Ferenc would find my face again and hold my eyes, and for the first time in my life I felt myself blush, a creeping warmth that grew up my neck, across my face and into the dark roots of my hair.
Later in the evening, when the men were boisterous and
pounding the table in a lively argument, I announced I was tired. I left to go up to my room as usual, glancing back only once to see if his eyes were following me. His look—face lowered, eyes raised—pierced me from across the room. I felt a little relief when I slipped into the cool air of the darkened stairwell, like I had been close to smothering and could breathe freely once more.
In my room Darvulia helped me undress and undo the braids in my hair, brushing it out in long, dark waves, framing the pale skin of my face, the tops of my breasts. I sat in bed with a book and read a little by candlelight, expecting at any moment for Ferenc to come to me. I read one page, then read it again, realizing I had not retained a word of what I was seeing. Still he didn’t come. I wondered if I had been mistaken in his looks, his intentions. It was only when I gave up and blew out the candle that I heard the door to my chamber open and saw the dark figure of my husband come in from the hallway outside. “Erzsébet?” he said.
“Here,” I said. “Here, follow my voice.”
In the dark he stumbled into a chest of drawers, a wooden chair with a carved dragon’s head, and cried out. “And here I thought I would surprise you.”
“You do.” I had been careful to drink little that night, retaining full control of my faculties, and now I chose my words as carefully, for the slightest misstep would ruin everything. He needed to trust me. “I have never been so surprised.”
“So you are glad that I’m here?”
There was an uncertainty in his voice I recognized as shyness, as fear that I might send him away. He was still a new husband, after all, twenty-two years old, still learning what a wife could offer. His uncertainty, his shyness, warmed my heart toward him. “I have been waiting for this since we first met, when I thought you the handsomest man in the kingdom.”
“You flatter me.” Sullen now. He thought I teased him.
I took a breath and relaxed back into the pillows, weighing my words carefully. “I flatter only myself, as the wife of such a man,” I said. “Will you stay?”
He leaned over and pressed his mouth on mine, his soft red mouth with the taste of the wine on it still. His hand moved over my hair, down to my collarbone and toward my breast. He sighed and said that he had been glad after all that our parents had matched us—that we were more alike than different, but it had taken him this long to realize it. “I did not know,” he said, “that you were a woman of so much passion, that you had feelings like my own. I thought you wanted me only for my name and position, my title, and I did not think I could love you. Can you forgive me?”
In answer I raised the blankets and took him to me. At last my husband’s love would be enough to shelter me, a love fine enough and large enough to protect me from anything the future might bring—wars, illness, even death itself.
PART TWO
SIDEREUS NUNCIUS
1
June 21, 1612
Outside my tower the world turns the green and gold of summer, the hills and valleys echoing with the calls of sheep sent out to graze and the rattle of farm carts traveling the Vág road toward Buda. More than a year I have been in my prison, and though the air at my window is sweet and soft as eiderdown, the inside of my room remains stale. The straw in my mattress needs to be changed, the floor swept. Mice visit me at night to take away the crumbs they find along the cracks in the floor, and zephyrs stir the long-cold ashes of the fire. Rev. Ponikenus, who once denounced me in public, comes to visit me sometimes, sitting outside my door and trying to gauge the state of my immortal soul, but only my letters from you and your sisters, Pál, give me any kind of joy. I am always pleased to know how well you do with your studies, how your German and Latin have improved since I saw you last. I have worked hard and suffered much to ensure that your education is even broader and more complete than my own. Gratefully I read the book you sent me describing the movement of the Mediciean stars, those bodies in orbit around Jupiter. As a girl I read Aristotle’s De Caelo and studied the movement of his crystalline spheres, but this mathematician, this Galilei, says the existence of these new bodies proves that there are many stars in the heavens that are all in motion around each other. That the sun is the center of the universe, and not the earth. I would like to see that with my own eyes, I think—to peer through the mathematician’s glass and look on other worlds, other heavens.
This morning the wheezy old steward, Benedict Deseő, came up to the tower nearly an hour past his usual breakfast visit, so that my stomach was groaning. He set down the tray with its crusts of bread, its cup of cooked fruit, out of breath and heaving like a plow ox. “At last,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“There are important visitors in Csejthe. The palatine and his wife are here.”
My hand found my throat. “Where?” I asked.
“In the courtyard, even now.”
Now this was remarkable news. That Thurzó would condescend to come to Csejthe now was no small matter. Eighteen months I have been in my tower, and I have not been able to convince the palatine to do so much as answer a letter. What game was he playing at? Surely he would not make the journey from Bicske without at least stopping to see me, either out of curiosity or triumph. Or perhaps he thought that now I was a prisoner, any notice of me was beneath him.
He didn’t think so before. He loved me once, and I him.
His voice trembling with outrage or fear, Deseő told me that Erzsébet Czobor, the palatine’s young wife, had come up to Csejthe vár that morning and demanded that he open the treasury to her. In addition to my wedding gown and jewels, which I had said in my will that I wanted to keep during my lifetime, the treasury holds a small amount of gold for the purchase of food and supplies, for the pay of the few servants who remain. The little thief had her servants pack everything up and load the treasure into her own carriage. Apparently she then went down to the kastély and did the same thing there, going through the trunks and chests that remained behind during my imprisonment. With the wedding of her stepdaughter Borbála approaching, she must have thought my fine jewels would suit her own neck. “The guards would not stop her, madam,” said the servant. “She laughed at me when I said she had no authority to take them away.”
“And what did she tell you in return?”
“I don’t wish to say.”
“Please,” I said, though the word was like ash in my mouth, “I have no other way of learning what has passed.”
He shifted from one foot to another as if preparing to flee. “She said, ‘Tell your mistress that my authority comes from God, who hates all sinners.’ ”
Stunned at the malice of Thurzó’s wife, at her pettiness and spite, I paced back and forth across my cell. Her husband’s design in having me locked away was brazen and calculated, with as many personal incentives as political, but that Lady Thurzó should behave with so little charity, so much cruelty toward me and my children, was nothing less than unforgivable. And after her husband had urged me, with all tenderness, to make her my friend, and which I had done for his sake! Someday she too could be a wealthy widow at the mercy of her neighbors and relatives, the subject of vicious rumors and speculation, with no husband or grown sons to take up her cause. I know it was she who poisoned the palatine against me, who whispered the malicious gossip in his ear that he has chosen to believe. Perhaps she knows that her husband loved me once, and hates me for it.
In a rage I cursed her name and prayed to the devil to plague her and the palatine with sickness, with death. To let me out of my tower for only a moment, to place my hands around her lying, thieving, scheming little throat.
I stood on a chair and tried to look out my window. The courtyard was invisible to me below, but for a moment I thought I heard a voice—Thurzó’s—speaking to someone, a higher voice answering. “Tell the palatine I wish to speak with him,” I said. “Tell him I have an urgent commission for him, something he alone can manage. Ask him in the name of the friendship we once shared.”
When the servant was gone, I looked around
my room. There were no weapons, nothing but a quill and some paper, my own two hands. My fingernails were broken and jagged, the quill dulled with my writing and stained black with ink, but it could serve well enough. Breaking it in half, I hid the sharpened end in my palm. If the palatine came close enough to my stone gap, if he put his face down to speak with me, I could sink it into an eye, or perhaps even his throat, before the guards would have a chance to cut me down. That would be one way of escaping my tower, at least.
Deseő came back up the stairs, out of breath, alone. The palatine would not come. He and Lady Thurzó were preparing to leave Csejthe. “He said there is no request you can make that he would now grant.”
No request I could make, he said. So I had ceased to exist after all.
A sharp pain sliced my hand, the blunt end of the quill biting into my palm. Blood flowed, staining my shift. With my other hand I took it out again and sank to the floor, put my face in my hands, smearing gore on my cheeks. A moment later the faint noise of hooves on cobblestone reached me, the creak of a carriage. The palatine and his ignorant little wife were leaving just as they chose, without so much as a word to the mistress of the house. Singing like pirates, too, probably.
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