The Countess

by Rebecca Johns

  The wind banged the shutters against the walls of the vár, and the kites called to each other, lonely cries as they hunted mice in the fields. Deseő said my name, but when I did not answer, he stole away quietly and left me to my solitary grief, where I think only of you, Pál, and how far away you seem to me, how orphaned and defenseless. Be careful whom you love, my dearest. There is no cure for deceit, not in Hungary or anywhere in this old and broken world.

  2

  All through the long years when I was busy tending our fortune, seeing to the management and upkeep of the Nádasdy estates, your father was away at war with Thurzó and Bocskai and his other comrades-in-arms, building a wall of Christian soldiers against the Turkish skirmishes that continued to threaten Hungary’s borders, preparing for the war that everyone knew was coming. When it arrived at long last, the combined forces of my uncle Zsigmond Báthory, prince of Transylvania, and the Habsburg king Rudolf would recapture the strongholds of Esztergom and Győr from the sultan’s forces, and many more besides. Through it all Ferenc Nádasdy won praise from the king in Bécs and respect from the Turks, who nicknamed him the Black Bey of Hungary. Each victory brought both of us more esteem in the king’s eye, and when Ferenc considered whether to lend the royal treasury a vast sum—more than thirty thousand forints for the war effort—I encouraged him, despite the strain it put on our personal finances, the improvements that had to be put off, the fields that had to lie fallow. I wrote him: It is always useful to have a king in your debt. Rudolf will remember his friends when the time comes.

  It did not seem out of the question that your father could be palatine himself someday, if he lived long enough and kept the king’s favor. The thought of being a palatine’s wife pleased me, especially since I had won Ferenc’s affection at last and would not have to endure the taunts of insolent maids, since I had taken my proper place in your father’s heart. I often wondered how proud my mother would have been if she had seen how well the match she had made suited us, once we had reconciled ourselves to it.

  Yet there were regrets, too, because for the first ten years of our marriage we had no children, and until there were children, all our victories were temporary. Your father did not blame me the way many husbands do, but I felt his desperation. Time and again I endured disappointment as five years turned to seven, then nine. The few times every year that Ferenc was able to get away from the war, anxious to share my bed, nothing came of it. He took me to a doctor in Bécs who poked and prodded me with sharp instruments and cold hands, tying me to the bed to keep me still as he threaded long needles inside me, trying to push my body open with awls and pieces of pig iron so that it would admit the seeds that would make a child. Afterward I would bleed for days and days, so much I could barely rise from my bed. Ferenc even sent to Padua for the doctor who had helped his own mother and father conceive, who was by then an old man. He treated me more gently, but he spent several months with us without success. Ferenc felt guilty afterward and said he would no longer send doctors to me, though he did write to Prága and even as far away as Paris for special potions that were supposed to improve my chances at conceiving, and which Darvulia coaxed me into drinking morning and evening through my tears and objections.

  I feared the only real remedy was to have Ferenc home more often by my side and told him so, though I was careful not to weep, not to make myself ridiculous with tears the way some wives did. He must never think, even then, that his absence could undo me, or I would be in his power rather than he in mine. He must come home three, four times a year at least, I said.

  “I wish I could,” he said. “Nothing would make me happier. But the king depends on me.”

  “The king does not need you as much as I do.”

  “Thurzó has not been home to his wife more than four times in the last three years, and Zrínyi even less. You’ve seen me more often than that.”

  “Thurzó and Zrínyi have children already. Four daughters and a son between them.”

  “We will have our children, don’t fret,” he said, but I could tell he was trying to convince me of something he didn’t quite believe himself. “Perhaps Darvulia could help. She knows every herb and charm in these lands.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. I didn’t tell him that Darvulia had already given me several of her remedies, but none of them had worked. Pomegranates squeezed for their juice. Puncture-vine drunk in a tea, then ground into a paste and spread on that dark opening in my body. The sight of a cat licking itself clean while I recited a prayer to the Virgin.

  “I want you to have your children, my dear. I will move heaven and earth for you. I swear it.” He brushed my hair from my face and touched my hand most tenderly. But then he would leave again, and I would not see him for many months at a time, months of much waiting and little hope.

  Rarely did I allow myself to think of my vanished daughter, taken off by the midwife. I could not search for them, having no idea where the midwife came from or where she had taken the child. Poor thing, to be born a girl. If she had been a son, I might have dared to tell Ferenc and hoped that in time he might accept the child, tell people it was his. But a girl was a burden unless she had a family name and a dowry to protect her. My baby, born in secret, could have neither. My daughter would never know me, or know of me.

  Her father, who knew of her existence, showed no interest in what had happened to the child, in what had happened to me in bearing his child. During those brief interludes when I would see András Kanizsay at court gatherings, family holidays, I would think of our daughter. Still handsome, still elegant and humorous to his companions, András was always barely civil in my presence, as if ashamed now of the intimacies we had shared, our secret past. I could not engage him in any kind of pleasant conversation, not on the subject of his upcoming marriage or his plans for the new estate he would inherit when he and Griseldis were wed—anything. András did not seem to notice when I lavished Ferenc with affection, or hear me when I invited him and Griseldis to Sárvár at Christmas for the luxurious parties we always held there, for a chance for good wine and fine company. He would always look through me and find someone else who needed his attention, somewhere else he needed to be. Excuse me, Countess, I hear someone calling me, he would say, and then I would hear the sound of his footsteps retreating down the dark passageways, away from me, while I burned with hatred for him, for what had been done to me for the sake of his petty jealousy. As the years wore on, it became obvious that all his love for me was now at an end. At his wedding in Bécs, which I attended with Ferenc and many of our friends and family, the rapt look on his face as he stood before the priest and promised to be faithful only to Griseldis nearly made me weep, for I could see that he loved her, that he thought only of her in that moment and not of me at all.

  András married Griseldis, and then he fathered children with her. His fine masculine form and Griseldis’s golden beauty made for lovely children—downy-limbed, jewel-eyed children, five daughters in eight years, all healthy, all living. God’s blessing on their union, everyone said. Everyone except me. Whenever I saw my cousin with her gaggle of unruly brats, I searched their faces for a hint of my own vanished little one, wondering what she would look like now, and their small faces would seem to turn into hers, though I knew it was preposterous. My baby had had my darker coloring, my distinctive Báthory nose. She would not look like these half siblings at all. She was mine in memory, mine in beauty and temperament, and there she would remain.

  So when your sister Anna was born at last, in the fall of 1585, on a bright warm day, it was as if the sun had come out on all our hopes. A child would guarantee our futures, your father’s and mine, and let us forget the regrets of the past.

  The labor was difficult—I had been ill for much of my pregnancy, and my strength was sapped to the end—but Darvulia sat by my side along with the doctor Ferenc had brought from Grác to tend to me. When the babe’s strong wail broke the heat, your father burst into the room and clasped it to his breast, st
ill wet and waxy. “A girl,” he said. To mask his disappointment he declared her the most beautiful child who had ever been born, a future queen, the comfort of our old age. He touched one fingertip to her downy lip and handed her immediately back to me. He was not unkind, but bewildered, as if he did not know what to do with her. “As for a son,” he said, “we can always try again later.”

  The night my sister Klára had been born, my father had sat in the hall and put his head in his hands and wept. Now I cradled my own child in my arms. Our little daughter had my mother’s black-and-white beauty, as if my dead mother were staring back at me, softly blinking. The baby turned her head and nuzzled me, and when I didn’t immediately open my shift and put her to my breast, she opened her small pink rosebud of a mouth and emitted a piercing scream. I handed her to the wet nurse, a widow named Ilona Jó whom I had brought to tend the child. She was my own age, twenty-five, but already she was old in spirit, a thin, humorless woman in gray homespun who spooked like a feral cat whenever I spoke to her. Her husband had died of cholera the previous winter, and her own baby daughter, recently weaned, lived now with her grandmother in a small village outside Thurzó’s estate at Tokaj. Thurzó’s wife, Zsofía Forgách—whom I counted as a dear friend, my companion at balls and parties in Pozsony, in Bécs—had sent her highly recommended.

  Ilona Jó—bone thin from nursing, but with thick heavy wrists like a man’s—opened her blouse and set the child to her breast. The baby latched on and began to suck, her strong little mouth taking in the milk greedily. “Her name is Anna,” said Ferenc, “for your mother.” I watched her suckle at the breast of the nurse, her little hands kneading at the other woman’s bare skin, and felt a strong fist of grief squeeze the air from me. No noblewoman of my rank would stoop to nursing her child, but I could not help but feel sorrow that once again I had given my daughter away at the moment of her birth, even if it was only to a wet nurse, and a dour and ugly one at that. I began to weep, a slow, steady rolling that divided my face, separating me from myself. Ferenc sat on the bed and embraced me. “Don’t worry, my love,” he said, and kissed my brow. “You did well. You will do even better the next time.” I didn’t tell him I hardly dared to hope for a next time, that I felt I was cursed to lose all my children as punishment for the one whom I had given away.

  3

  After Anna we had Orsika, then Katalin, a passel of beautiful daughters who filled up our house and our days with their bright voices, their small hands, and their swift little feet. Anna, whose looks continued to favor my mother as she grew up, was a quick learner and walked before her first birthday, though she was a wary child who would cling to Ilona Jó even after she had been weaned, gazing at me with distrust in her lovely little black eyes, especially when I would not give her the toy she asked for or the special sweet she thought she deserved. I often had the feeling that she had judged me and found me wanting, as I myself felt I was wanting. I was hurt that she didn’t love me as I had loved my own mother, so unconditionally, but did not know what I could do to earn it.

  Orsika looked like her namesake, my mother-in-law, her little bow of a mouth and her arching eyebrows giving her a look of permanent surprise, but she was an active, affectionate child who would climb into my lap or her father’s as easily as the wet nurse’s. Even Darvulia, whom the other children feared, she treated like a favorite aunt. Outgoing, with a natural charm that her older sister could never possess, Orsika was followed two years later by Katalin, the sickly one, whose constant toothaches and colds meant long nights for myself and Darvulia as we treated this or that illness with philters down her throat and poultices on her chest. She often needed to see the surgeon for a rotting tooth and clung to me like the devil when he drew near, clawing at my neck when the old man brought his burning iron into her mouth to cauterize the wound. I hated to hold her down to let him do his work, because it reminded me of my own days with the doctors who had tried to cure me of childlessness, but I tried to soothe her with kisses and promises beforehand and tears and medicine afterward, giving her a bit of brandy so she would not suffer so greatly. Perhaps as a result of this constant attention, Kata was the most loving of my daughters, the most likely to call for me in the middle of the night or climb into my bed. I used to call her my little parasite, since I could barely walk down the halls of Sárvár or Csejthe without her clinging to my leg, begging to be picked up. She was always in my things—my mirrors and brushes, my clothes and books. The love I sometimes had trouble feeling for her older sister, the mistrustful child, I had no problem lavishing on little Kata.

  Yet after all these blessings, still your father hoped for a boy. At every visit home he came to my bed to try for an heir who would bear the Nádasdy name. At the birth of each daughter he did his best to rejoice, but I could always sense the hole in the middle of his happiness. Ferenc would cradle each child and declare her even more beautiful than the last, while saying there was always the next time. His hope was so deeply felt, so rooted within the man he was, that nothing I said would dissuade him. I would do my best to give him a son.

  In the winter of our twentieth year of marriage, when I was already thirty-five, I felt the signs of impending motherhood in me once more—the listlessness, the need for sleep, the hatred of food and strong light and unusual smells. I let Darvulia fuss and fret over me for months while the child grew within me, taking her teas for my stomach, her lotions to keep my skin supple while it stretched taut as a fermenting wineskin. Ferenc was away those months commanding his army and didn’t see me during the whole of my pregnancy, though he wrote often to inquire how I was feeling and if I needed doctors sent to me to be certain the new child came safely into the world. As a veteran of four labors I didn’t fear childbirth and settled in to wait for the child’s arrival with the greatest anticipation that this time Ferenc would have his longed-for son.

  By my calculation the child was due in mid-September, but my pains began one night in early August, in the midst of a drought that wilted the crops in the fields and the grapes on the vine. It was a terrible time in Sárvár. A hot wind was blowing that year from Constantinople, bringing with it the news of war as well as the stinking breath of the plague. Some of the servants had caught the disease, and though Darvulia had them quarantined in a storeroom outside the walls of the estate, it was too late to keep it out of Sárvár entirely. During a few bad weeks in July and August, the bells of the church tolled endlessly for the victims of the contagion. The burning of bodies went on day and night, the wind blowing the stench into the windows and walls no matter how tightly we nailed the shutters closed. I put Darvulia in charge of managing the estate for me, which she did tolerably well, though once or twice she had to take the whip to this or that maidservant who shirked her duty, or send away some blubbering fool who had got herself with child. For myself, I kept to my bed, so hot and uncomfortable as the child moved within me that I could not sleep day or night.

  The baby arrived on a night of thunder and hot rain, and when Darvulia caught him and told me we had our son at last, I cradled him in my arms and wept for joy. Ferenc had written that if the child were a boy, he should be named after his paternal grandfather, and so this is what I did. Tamás was small, smaller than any of his sisters had been, a little scrawny thing with yellowish skin and delicate features, frail little arms and legs like green willow twigs, but I was relieved still. Everything we had would be safe now that there was a Nádasdy boy to protect it—his sisters, myself.

  The babe did well at first, sucking his milk greedily, his skin growing pinker every day. His sister Orsika especially loved to hold him and would beg to be allowed to cradle him for a few minutes, stroking his soft cheek with one of her tiny fingers. The child lifted all our spirits.

  Eventually the closeness and confinement began to wear on all of us. Ilona Jó and the dry nurse who tended the older children, an enormous brute of a woman named Dorottya Szentes, were always angling for my favor, snapping at each other over which of them wo
uld get to place a cool cloth on my head, which would massage my swollen feet. Both were afraid of Darvulia. Whenever my friend came into the room, the other two women would find employment in sewing or cleaning, in distracting the children or changing the baby. I knew they respected me as the lady of the house, but Darvulia they feared. They feared the creak of the wood under her soles, the low rich notes of her voice, so like a man’s. The long black-and-silver hairs that fell sometimes from the tangle she kept at the back of her head, and which would sometimes pop up on pieces of clothing or blankets, they would scoop up and throw into the fire like a couple of superstitious old witches. But little Tamás was doing well, and my strength was returning. We expected the contagion to pass any day, so I decided to say nothing of their ignorance when we were all so close and hot and tired of looking at one another.

  One day the baby was fussing more than usual, so that I thought he had soiled himself, but when I opened the diaper I saw it—a hard little bump in his groin announcing the beginning of the plague. In a day or two his face was black with it. Darvulia gave him a drink of something that smelled vile and which she said might halt the advancement of the disease, but a few hours later he was dead. Little Orsika—the one who had so loved her brother and doted on him—followed a few days later, her beautiful pale skin bruised a terrible black. I held her in my arms when she took her last rattling breaths and cursed God that ever I had been born a woman. Only Darvulia could pry the child from my hands and take her stiff little body to the cellars to dress her for the grave.

  The other two—Ilona Jó, Dorka—whispered that Darvulia had something to do with their deaths, that she had put a spell on the children. I saw them with their heads together and heard their whispers. Darvulia did it, they said. The mistress should send her away before she kills the other children. Those crones, clawing at my own children like two wolves with a flock of lambs—how hateful they were to me, how coarse and vulgar, how much I hated them in that moment, when they turned on Darvulia. I flew at them in a fury, my hands like birds’ talons. No one, I said, was to speak ill of Darvulia in my presence, Darvulia who for years had been my closest companion, Darvulia whom I loved as much as ever I loved my own mother. She had done everything she could to save my poor babies, I said, and the other two would do well to remember it. Get out of my sight, I said. The women went muttering from my presence, throwing distrustful glances behind them at Darvulia, at me. When they were gone, it was quiet, at least.