The Countess

by Rebecca Johns

  By midwinter my husband knew the worst was upon him and asked for his secretary to write a letter to Thurzó: Take care of my wife and children. For the sake of our old friendship, look after them when I am gone.

  He named Thurzó your official guardian, Pál, and Imre Megyery your tutor and caretaker. A man must do these offices, I knew, and yet I was bitter that Ferenc had not asked me whom I would prefer, since it was a decision I would have to live with. Anyone but Megyery, I would have told him. But it was done, and afterward there was nothing I could do to change it.

  Ferenc could not lift the pen to sign the letter himself but had the secretary do so for him. I nearly wept to see him so reduced. I kissed his brow and asked him if there was anything I could do to help him, to give him comfort.

  “Yes,” he said. “Stay with me, Erzsébet. Put your arms around my neck and stroke my hair. Yes, like that. You remember when you did that, the night I came to you after so many years of foolishness?”

  “I do remember. I remember it well. You said you were glad after all that our parents matched us. That we were more alike than different.”

  “It is true. We were both stubborn and didn’t want to be married at first. But are you glad now? Are you sorry that you’ve spent your life with me?”

  “No, dearest. Not sorry at all.”

  “I’m glad of it. I want you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Marry again. Don’t let your beauty go with me to the grave. You should have a companion for your middle years.”

  “No one could take your place, my dearest,” I said.

  He seemed not to hear this, or heed it. “Don’t let Pál grow up without a father. Marry again. Marry Thurzó, if you could have anyone. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He would be good to you, and to Pál and the girls. He will protect you and the children.”

  “Don’t talk so,” I said. The thought of Thurzó as a husband—sad-eyed, gray-faced Thurzó—did not appeal to me in the least. “Rest, and in the morning you’ll feel better.”

  I stroked his hair and fell asleep on the bed beside him. The next morning, when I opened my eyes, he was cold in my arms.

  Carefully, so as not to disturb his body, I slid out from beneath him and called the servants to come. I stood and went to the window, where the morning light was coming in. Outside the air was clean with the scent of coming snow. I had Darvulia brew me a cup of strong tea and sat watching the stable boys muck out the stalls, the kitchen maids with the morning’s fresh milk, and I wandered down to the kitchen to watch the scullery maids polishing the copper pots that would hold the butter and the bread, the way the light in the center of the bowl caught and sent a beam back toward the wall. The cat in the corner, seeing the spot of light, stopped licking herself and went to chase it, batting at something that she could never catch. In a few moments I would have to tell the children their father was dead, and I would have to begin my letters to Ferenc’s friends and family—György Thurzó, István Bocskai—as well as a letter to the king himself. “Ferenc Nádasdy is dead.” I would write it over and over again, as if to constantly remind myself, as if to burn it into my memory. But for that moment in the kitchen I was content to watch the cat at her game, and breathe the quiet of my first hours as a widow, the innocent domesticity, the cautious looks of the servants. The start of the second part of my life.

  A few weeks later we buried him in the churchyard at Sárvár. The priest praised Ferenc as the kindest lord and master, the greatest general and count, a nobleman of the highest order. The great families of Hungary assembled at the service wished for my family’s health and safety, kissing me and wishing me well. Their eyes didn’t find mine. I saw them looking behind me, looking around at the graceful high-ceilinged halls of Sárvár, the silver and the silk, the fields and vineyards and orchards. I saw the greed in their eyes. Now that Ferenc was gone and you, my son, were still a child, they coveted what Ferenc and I had built together, and I began to fear for it, and for you.

  It would be up to me to protect myself and my family now that Ferenc was gone. A woman who does not marry is at the mercy of the world, my mother had told me, but a wealthy widow with a very young son, a son too young to take up his father’s arms and titles, has nearly as much to lose. Greedy relatives or neighbors might try to wrest the estates from me, marching on Léka, on Keresztúr, on Csejthe, even Sárvár itself. The other nobles might be scandalized, but no one would lift a finger to help me. Even my husband’s closest friends—Zrínyi, Thurzó—might get greedy enough to turn their eyes to my lands before you were grown. I did not want to end up like my cousin Griseldis, with the shaved head and frostbitten feet of a mendicant, locked up and forgotten while her sons-in-law and neighbors divided up her clothes and jewels, her lands and houses. Nothing terrified me more than the idea of the nunnery, locked up and forgotten by all the world, with nothing to occupy me but prayers and tears. A half-life, a living death. If I were to keep what was mine, I would need powerful friends on my side, a protector among my friends of rank and situation, and soon.

  I would go to Bécs. I would go to Thurzó.

  7

  The two days on the road to Bécs from Sárvár were an agony, a combination of a bone-rattling carriage ride and mindless arguments between two of the young seamstresses I had brought along for company for myself and my daughter. The girls, like most of my servants, were distant relations to either my late husband or myself whose mothers had sent them to me in the hopes of arranging for them dowries and decent husbands, or in the absence of husbands at least a useful profession. The wars with the Turks had depleted the ranks of marriageable young men so significantly that many young women who came to me would never marry. Yet still their mothers sent them, and still they hoped.

  The two girls, new to my household and both nearly grown at fourteen years old, sat together on the bench opposite Darvulia and Kata and myself, where instead of working at their sewing they persisted in elbowing each other. The younger one, a pretty blonde with cheekbones like two round yellow apples, complained that the other was taking up too much of her part of the bench with her fat behind. The other, a large slow-witted girl named Doricza who had been with me only a few months, pushed back whenever her companion’s elbow jostled her, saying that the little blonde’s bony elbows made her rib cage black and blue. More than once I told them to keep their mouths shut if they had nothing pleasant to say, and they would be quiet for a few minutes, at least until one or the other of them started complaining again.

  We were all uncomfortable in the cramped space inside the carriage, in the bumps and stones along the road that jolted the carriage frame, but neither Darvulia nor Kata nor myself went on and on in such a tiresome fashion about the ache in our bones, the need to share the carriage bench, the water we had to hold until the horses took their next rest. I was sorry I had asked for the girls to ride in my own carriage and wished thin-faced Ilona Jó, the old wet nurse whom I had kept on for her loyalty, or beetle-browed Dorottya Szentes were there instead. After many years in my service, they had gained my trust, and if Darvulia was occupied, I often sought out their company before the fire or at meals in the evenings, inviting them to dine with me at my table when no one else was home. They, at least, knew how to hold their tongues in their mistress’s presence.

  At one point Darvulia brought out a little food, some bread and bitter dark-brown beer, a little cheese, and passed it around the carriage. We ate in silence for a while, and then the little blonde began to whine again. How uncomfortable it was, she said, when another person’s flesh pressed so closely up against your own. “Maybe I should take your lunch, Doricza,” she said, smirking, “since you have clearly eaten enough for two people already.”

  It was then that I reached over, grabbed the needle out of the bit of lace she’d been sewing, and jabbed it into the girl’s pink finger, in the soft pad at the tip where her dirty jagged fingernail ended. The little twit howled and asked why I treated he
r thus. I said I would not listen to one more minute of her nattering, that she had best remember where she was and whom she was with. She cried out and snatched her hand back, her eyes filling with tears, but after that, at least, we were able to eat our small meal in relative peace.

  The next day, when we continued on our way, the two girls sat on their bench and did their work without complaining. In fact they were so quiet that they made poor company, and when we stopped to change the horses I switched them around so Ilona Jó and Dorka could ride in the carriage with myself and Kata and Darvulia, and the two young seamstresses went in back with a couple of chambermaids and young Ficzkó, an orphan boy of fifteen whom I had taken in as my personal factotum and who liked to look at the pretty girls, to pick which of them to flirt with. The two older servants were better company, chatting more amiably about the sights along the road, about the problems of husbands and raising good children, about the pain and infirmities of growing older. If there were any complaints from the rear carriage, at least I would no longer have to listen to them.

  The rolling hills of the western kingdom that year were covered with old bits of snow and damp patches of mud, the detritus of last year’s failed harvest, for the weather had been so cool and damp the previous summer that nothing had ripened. Oats had rotted in the fields, and tomatoes had blackened on the vine. Blight had affected the fields far and wide. The end of the war had made us all look forward to a peaceful harvest, but it had not come, and the tenant farmers had not been able to pay their due once again. I had to let servants go at Sárvár, at Csejthe, and still the Nádasdy coffers grew thin. There would be no way to raise Kata’s dowry this year, or the next or the next, if the king did not repay his debt. At nearly eleven years old, she would need that dowry all too soon. I put an arm around her shoulder and clutched her to me, my dear daughter, who might have to go without a husband if the king would not hear me.

  We were all out of spirits, shriveling in the winter cool. Darvulia too seemed especially pale. Her features, which had never been beautiful, seemed more shrunken, her eyes more tired, with the faint bluish-white haze that announced the oncoming failure of eyesight. The whiskers on her chin had gone from black to white. Suddenly my friend looked very much like the most ancient of old crones, wizened beyond the span of ordinary mortals. It had never occurred to me before that I might lose her sometime, that she might actually be subject to the same process of growing old as everyone else. “Are you all right, dearest?” I asked, and she said she was, but I did not believe her in the least. She was to go right to bed when we arrived in the city, I said, and no arguments, though of course she tried to argue with me anyway, saying that I needed her help in setting up the house, for she thought always of my comfort before her own. “Go to bed, Darvulia,” I said. “Surely you’ve earned the right to rest when you’re ill, if anyone has. Let the others take on some of your duties for a change.”

  “All right, madam,” she said, but I could tell she indulged me. They all did.

  That second day we pushed hard for the north, and as the sun was sinking in the west and the sky turning a soft shade of gold, we passed around a hill and beheld the walls of Bécs. The icy Duna snaked around the edge of the city, the zigzag tiled roof and brown spire of the Stephansdom rising from the center like the trunk of a lightning-struck tree, while inside the new walls clusters of red-tiled roofs caught the last of the sunlight and turned the heart of the city to ocher. Outside the walls the plane trees and willows deepened to black in the far distance, the farms and fields fading into darkness one by one. The carriage wheels rattled beneath us when the horses came to the drawbridge and drew us into the city, through the great southern gate and up into the streets, where people and animals and the smell of both crowded in close. As we passed, the locals strained to look inside the carriages as if the king himself might be passing through, though Rudolf had moved his capital to Prága after ascending the throne, surrounding himself with artists and mathematicians, botching his relations with Hungary and Transylvania so much that my old friend István Bocskai led an insurrection against the Catholic Rudolf and his attempt to deny the Hungarian Protestants their religious freedom. Word came that Rudolf was ill, and his power was failing. Because Rudolf had no legitimate children, all the empire, Bécs included, drew in its breath to wait.

  Beside me Dorka made a small noise in her throat and leaned out the window to gape. It was her first visit to the city. “My God,” she said—she who had lived all her life in the small towns of Transdanubia—“it’s like Jerusalem itself.”

  “I certainly hope so,” I said, for I was thinking of salvation—my own, and my children’s. To protect them now that Ferenc was dead, I would have to take my petition directly to the king’s own brother, Mátyás. The archduke’s power in Bécs, Ferenc had said, grew with every day Rudolf was absent. I was depending on it.

  In the weeks since I buried my husband I had not been able to stomach the view of the world from Sárvár, with nothing but work and solitude to look forward to. The period of my mourning stretched before me like a year of winters, and even my children could not make the spring come for me in those first days, when we all settled into life without our husband and father. Anna was gone to her mother-in-law’s house, but even Kata snapped at you, and hid your tin soldiers in order to make you cry. You, Pál, who had always been such an active, high-spirited boy—jumping onto the back of your pony from a low wall, attacking your cousins with your little wooden sword with glee—were so listless that you often spent whole days under the shadow of my arm, avoiding the tutelage of Megyery, the old steward, whom you and I both disliked but who at least kept you at home in Sárvár instead of away at Prága in the king’s court like so many other noble sons. You would run away and hide in corners of the house the way I had done as a child, curling up for a nap under a table or in the hollow of a crumbling wall, laughing at Megyery whenever he tried to get you to mind your lessons. But it was your father’s wish that you study Latin and German, become a learned man the way he had been, so I relented. Once you were handed into Megyery’s keeping I resolved to take your sister with me and spend some time at our house on Lobkowitz Square. Despite the impropriety of appearing at Mátyás’s court while I was in mourning, I had business to discuss with the archduke, which provided ample excuse for escape.

  In Bécs, too, there were friends who might help me in my cause. Thurzó had told me at Ferenc’s funeral ceremony that he planned to spend much of the spring at court, for he was a confidant of both Rudolf and Mátyás, a Habsburg man through and through. If anyone could help me convince the king to repay the money owed us, it would be Thurzó. Perhaps, too, he would be a friend to me now that my husband was dead, and we both of us were the loneliest creatures in the world.

  At last we arrived at Lobkowitz Square, at the house on the corner where Ferenc had lived as a young man studying at court, where he and I always stayed when we came into Austria. It was an elegant building of three stories built in the Italian style with stone arches around a central courtyard, in the middle of which stood a plane tree with a twisted trunk, covered now with snow in the last part of winter. Above rose two tiers of glass windows that looked down into the courtyard, so that at the sound of carriage wheels on cobblestones every member of the household could look out to see who had arrived. The manor had been built by my father-in-law, the old palatine, for his own stays in the city, so it was quite near the Hofburg, and several times a day companies of soldiers on muscular white Lipician horses would clatter between the manor and the practice ring in Josefplatz a few blocks away. An Augustinian church and monastery stood hard against the walls of the manor, and sometimes very early in the morning or late at night we could hear the chanting of the monks at their prayers, a low sonorous moan that permeated the walls and kept me up nights. The monks, whenever I and my ladies passed by on the street, eyed us warily, as if we might suddenly place our arms around their necks and plant tempting kisses on their faces. I ad
mit the thought did cross my mind at times, never more so than the first night I arrived as a widow and saw them scurrying away from the carriage like the Hebrews out of Egypt.

  In the house the servants had thrown open the shutters, aired out the rooms, put fresh linens on the beds, polished the silver, set torches and candles alight in the passageways, uncorked the wine. Here and there were reminders of Ferenc—the gleaming swords hanging on one wall, the chair he had liked to sit in by the fire after dinner, a bundle of letters he had left behind—but each time I lighted on something that conjured my dead husband I would have one of the servants remove it, and afterward I stood at the open window and breathed in the night air. Outside a servant emptied a night jar, and a horse in harness pissed insistently on the street. Somewhere distant there were voices arguing, and the lamplighters came along the street with their torches, but a hint of snow tinged the cool night air, and from my hair came a strong scent of the lavender oil that Dorka had use to dress it that morning. With the majority of the royal court removed to Prága, the city was quieter than it might have been, but there would still be friends to see, and dinners and balls to attend with this or that noble family, and wives and daughters to wait on in the afternoons, and very little time to sit on my hands. In Bécs, unlike Sárvár, no one would think of me as the poor, pitied widow locked behind her castle walls and dressed eternally in black, pining for her lost husband. In Bécs I was still a woman worth noticing.