The Countess

by Rebecca Johns

  Later I would laugh over her theatrics. Were we, I said to Thurzó, ever so young and wretched, threatening to kill ourselves for love? He laughed, and said he hoped not. But I watched Kata and Drugeth dancing together one evening at a party at Thurzó’s house and saw the utter adoration my daughter lavished on the boy. He reminded me of András Kanizsay when I first knew him—wry, self-possessed, fully aware that every woman in the room looked up when he entered, and most of the men, too. I worried about marrying my dearest Kata to a boy who was already in love with himself, but at least her choice had some tangible merits: young Drugeth had money and position as well as youth and good looks. Thurzó opposed the match, wanting to join Kata to one of the Forgách boys to whom he was related by marriage, but in this matter I would not put my daughter’s feelings aside: I signed the papers that summer and wrote to Megyery to dispose of Lendva, one of the smaller estates, to pay the dowry. I was still angry that the king would not honor his debt, since it was from your pocket, Pál, he was stealing, but at least Kata would not have to go without.

  At every moment I felt the precarious nature of my situation, how easily the peace and prosperity I had built, the future I had planned for myself and my children, could come flying apart. I had finally come into my own authority as a noblewoman, now with no husband to whose wishes I had to bow, but without a husband I would be vulnerable still, and thus you would as well, Pál. At balls and parties where I met my friends among the nobility, the statesmen of Hungary and their wives, I watched for plots, for schemes, listening around corners, catching the eyes of the jealous, the ambitious, wondering who of my friends I could trust still. Would my friend Countess Zrínyi be the one to turn me out of Sárvár, if her husband set his sights on taking it? Would Margit Choron, my husband’s aunt, use her family claims against me? Would Thurzó decide to annex Keresztúr, so close to his own estate at Tokaj? I did not know whom to trust. I knew only I must do everything in my power to see that your inheritance would still be there when you came of age, that I would have failed you as your mother, Pál, if I lost any part of what your father had gained for you.

  Thurzó and I continued to spend most of our evenings together—discreetly, of course, to keep the servants’ gossip to a minimum. After our quiet evening meals at his house or mine, we would say good night and pretend to go our separate ways, but then he would come to my rooms, or I to his, and we would enjoy each other under cover of darkness, rising to leave before the dawn broke and the house began to stir. In our shared bed he would whisper his plans for the future, how we would meet again at Csejthe or Bicske during the summer months for secret trysts. He talked of wedding you to his younger daughter, Borbála, though I thought she was too old to be a good match for you. Thurzó pushed at the subject continually. The joining of the house of Nádasdy to the house of Thurzó would be a great honor on both of us, he said, and though I tried to put him off the topic for your sake, since you were only seven years old and very far from being ready for a betrothal, I began to wonder in all seriousness if it was ourselves he was thinking of rather than our children. If he had his eye on a second wife, a second marriage to live out his remaining days, he could have found no one more willing than me. The thought of being Thurzó’s wife pleased me, for even though he was one of the ugliest men I had ever met, his companionship was beyond compare. I could even say I loved him. He was a shrewd politician, more so than Ferenc had been, and more cautious with his loyalties—unlikely to bed the maidservants, or to flaunt them in front of me if he did. We were well suited to each other, György Thurzó and myself, in age and temper. Too old to be foolish, too young to be alone. The remainder of my life opened up before me like a great door into a new house, brightly lit and full of possibility.

  When the hot weather was upon us and the roads dry, I began making preparations for the journey north to Csejthe with Kata and my ladies, where I planned to escape the summer miasmas of the city. The night before we left Thurzó and I dined together one last time at his house in town, in his private dining room, where he pressed me repeatedly to make certain that I would not make an enemy of Mátyás by demanding too much, or too often, during the time I was away, so that I wondered what Mátyás must have said to him after our meeting to make him worry so. It amused me that the archduke’s nose was out of joint. So was mine, after all—he owed me a fortune. But I knew better than to say so to Thurzó.

  He too was about to embark on his summer trip to Biscke, and then south to deal with the trouble with István Bocskai, but he promised he would be back in Bécs in November when I arrived for the winter. The few months we would spend apart, he said, would merely serve to strengthen the new bond between us. He leaned over to press his lips into my hair and said he had no desire to be so long away from me, but that the continuing trouble with Bocskai put him in a terrible position. His job was to convince his old friend to stand down his war against the Habsburgs—or in the absence of that, to meet him on the battlefield. Thurzó was facing many months on horseback between Bécs and Transylvania, many months of dust and heat. I was surprised that the king held Thurzó in such high esteem that he would trust him with something this important, putting an end to the rebellion, and even more surprised that Thurzó would agree to it. I had known that they were friends and held each other in high regard, but not that Thurzó was so deeply ingrained with the Austrians that he would serve as their instrument against the rebellion led by his old friend István Bocskai.

  But that night, with the candles throwing a yellow glow over the room, and the smell of the lavender oil my ladies had used to dress my hair, Thurzó told me it was me, and not István Bocskai, who occupied his thoughts, and the long separation ahead of us. “You will forget me before we meet again,” he said, sighing with such sad conviction that for a moment I believed him. “A woman like you will have many suitors.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, for I didn’t want to let him think I was easily won over, nor that I believed him entirely sincere, “but perhaps I prefer you to any other.”

  “I hope you will still, when we meet again,” he said. “I have half a mind to take a new wife, you see.”

  “Only half a mind?”

  “The other half says she might not be worth the trouble, if she does not learn to hold her tongue.”

  “I thought it was my tongue you liked best. Now will you kiss me before you go, or will you keep talking like this all night?”

  He laughed and wrapped me in his arms, planting a fervent kiss on my mouth. His breath tasted of wine, his skin of cloves. When his mouth moved to my neck, I tipped back my head and sighed with pleasure. It would be too long before we would meet again.

  11

  My ladies and I left Bécs the next morning by the Duna road, making the trek south toward the Hungarian capital at Pozsony, which the Germans who lived in that city called Pressburg. In the still-dark hours we tramped out of the house and into the waiting carriages. Darvulia, moving slowly and using always the cane that she had adopted since we had arrived in Bécs, climbed in beside me, and I settled the blanket across her knees myself. Next came Kata, glowing now that she was betrothed, and after her the fat Doricza took her place and her sewing without so much as a grunt when she settled her haunches on the bench.

  Next came Gizela Modl, a German girl who had come to Sárvár with her mother looking for work a few years back. We were short of girls then, and I had taken her in because her mother talked so tearfully about the family’s poverty that I feared she would have half her children on my doorstep unless I took in Gizela, the eldest of a family that included nine girls and three boys.

  From the first the Modl girl’s looks gave me pause. Her apricot-skin complexion, her large brown eyes fringed by deep black lashes, made her seem both vulnerable and steely, like the blade of a knife bent almost to breaking. She was slender and fragile about the wrists and neck but with a womanly bosom that seemed always on display under soft white blouses and too-tight bodices. She had not been in my h
ouse more than a week before the stable boys were neglecting their chores to watch her beat the rugs in the courtyard, and even my husband’s former valet smiled and flirted with her, doing sword tricks and inflating his service to my husband in the Turkish wars to make himself seem braver than the ten-year-old squire he had been at the time. It hardly mattered—Gizela Modl batted her eyelashes at all of them.

  Yet there was an iron core in her that revealed itself once she had established herself in my house and that the young men who fawned over her rarely got to see. She knew very little Hungarian except curse words and vulgarities, which she sprinkled liberally in her speech even in front of my children, damning this and that, even the stones in the floor, the sheets on the bed. In my presence she wore a perpetual smirk, so that most often I wanted to slap her and send her crying from my sight. I restrained myself from doing so only as long as she did her work well, which was not often. After a month or two of this behavior, Darvulia had been obliged to find her new employment in the laundry to keep her out of trouble. In the time since then she had been quiet and hardworking, and I had heard so little of her from Darvulia or Dorka or the other maids that it seemed she had amended her ways, and I promptly forgot all about her.

  As we were leaving the house in Bécs, however, I decided, seeing her modest expression, her downcast eyes, to reward the Modl girl with a little bit of company while we drove across the countryside, and so she climbed in the carriage and took her place opposite Darvulia with all the meekness of a trussed lamb.

  Before us went a set of smartly dressed soldiers, and behind three or four more carriages bearing ladies, and trunks full of supplies bought to take with us to the summer house at Csejthe. Behind them went the rest of the company of soldiers who regularly traveled with me, in light armor and with swords gleaming. It was an impressive sight, the procession we made as we passed back through the gates of Bécs and out into the countryside, kicking up dust as we went.

  Often in the carriage I would read to my ladies from the books I carried, or teach them their letters on a piece of slate to pass the time. Only a few men of my acquaintance were truly educated—Ferenc and Thurzó were the most notable examples—and even fewer of the women. Maidservants especially often had little chance of an education, and although there had been some young ladies who rolled their eyes at my attempts to make them write A, and Á, and B, most were glad for the chance and paid attention long enough to at least learn to write their own names. Any woman, I told them, needed to know that much, no matter her station in life, her marriage status. Doricza and the Modl girl kept their eyes on their lessons or made chitchat about the scenery as we passed but said little else, and in that way we had a pleasant journey along the Duna road, with the river on our left and the whole of Hungary before us, on our way to the fortress at Dévény, where I had business.

  My brother had left me a few of his properties in his will, including the vár at Dévény, just north of the capital at Pozsony. The castle perched on a high outcropping of white limestone, a single tower rising dramatically from the naked rock, turreted and alone, so that it looked like one of the old gods perched on the lip of Olympus and scowling at its demesne below. It was a highly valuable and strategically placed property, situated as it was between Pozsony and Bécs at the confluence of the Duna and the Morva rivers, and I intended to look it over with my ladies and my retainers, introducing myself to the steward and spending a few nights as the new owner, to see what was needed for the upkeep of the place. Letters had gone ahead of us so that the servants could prepare for our coming.

  Thurzó had tried to caution me against stopping there, saying it would only anger the king and Mátyás at a difficult time between Austria and Hungary. My brother, before his death, had been an ardent supporter of our friend István Bocskai and his revolt against the Habsburgs, a believer in a Hungary reunited against both the Turks and the Habsburgs, and Mátyás knew I was friendly still to both Bocskai and our friends and family in Transylvania, despite my close relationship to Thurzó. My nephew Gábor, whose support inside Transylvania was growing, also supported Bocskai’s efforts against the repression of the Habsburgs. Thurzó said it was a mistake to make a show of ownership over Dévény when so many of my family ties were anti-Habsburg, and my own personal loyalties unknown. But I was determined to stop at Dévény before heading north to Csejthe and make myself known there among the servants as the new mistress of the place.

  As we followed the river road, the blurred shapes and purple hills in the distance settled into clearer objects, the stone cliffs and trees of the town of Dévény, and soon we could see the fortress itself, the white outcropping of stone shaped like a clenched fist where from Roman times lookouts had been posted for enemy on the march. After the Turks had occupied the center of the old kingdom all the way to Buda and Eger, Dévény had become more significant than ever to keeping the peace, and now that Bocskai was on the move and my nephew Gábor was cementing his power in Transylvania, it would be so again. I was thoroughly gratified that István had thought to give it to me, because I planned to give it to you, Pál, a jewel in the crown of your inheritance.

  As we approached the ferry crossing on the near shore, the ferryman’s house and stable came into view, the horses that pulled the massive ropes and heavy boats across the water, the white stucco garrison house where the soldiers slept. On the far bank of the Duna huddled a few old men, burghers in somber black, bolstered by a not-insignificant number of soldiers in light armor. At first I wondered if the burghers of the city had come out to welcome my arrival the way the children had followed behind the carriage when, as a young bride, I had ridden across Hungary to my mother-in-law’s house. But as we came closer I could see the grim looks on their faces, the way they rustled and shuffled their feet like priests at a funeral. It was clear that something here was out of order. Perhaps Mátyás had decided I had been asking too much in demanding the return of the money owed me by the royal treasury and now wanted to make an example of me. Or perhaps the city burghers, to show their loyalty to Mátyás, chose now to stand against me and my claim on Dévény. I swore under my breath. Thurzó would hear of this. The minute we arrived in Csejthe, I planned to write him to complain of it. What good was my friendship with Thurzó if his friend the king used his men against me, to keep me from my own property?

  At the edge of the river, where the road turned and grew broad and flat and the smell of river water and reeds grew thick, we paused while the captain of my soldiers spoke to the ferryman whose job it was to take me across. From my place in the carriage I could see my man calmly sitting his horse, offering a fat purse he had been given for just this purpose, saw the ferryman shake his head and gesture at the river as if the river were the thing to blame. After a moment my man came back and said the ferryman was under strict instructions not to let us cross. “The city fathers are here to make certain he does so,” said the soldier, a gray-haired veteran who had been the captain of my personal guard for years in honor of his service to my husband. His face betrayed a mixture of anxiety and weariness, as if I might ask him to fight the garrison stationed at the ferry, to battle and bully my way across. Instead I told him to stand his men down while I sent Gizela Modl to speak to the ferryman. Gizela, I thought, would be just the thing to convince the ferryman to let us pass. “Offer him double his usual fee,” I told Gizela, handing her a second small purse filled with gold, a fortune to a man in his position. She would use all that ruthless charm on him, and if the money didn’t sway him, Gizela would.

  She spoke with him for many long minutes and then returned to the carriage with the purse still in her hand, the ferryman trailing behind her. “He says there is no price you can offer that he would accept.”

  I cursed the ferryman, his insolence, the burghers and the king. It was not I who had begun the rebellion, I said, nor supported it when it did begin. I had spent the winter in Bécs with Mátyás and Thurzó. I was a loyal subject to the king and to Hungary, and I had
a right to my property. Did the rule of law no longer apply? I asked. Was it all to be set aside at the whim of a dictator? Perhaps Bocskai was right to take up arms against a king who thought nothing of the people he ruled, I said. Perhaps Bocskai should be king, and then we would all be better off.

  A disagreeable-looking fellow with chipped yellow teeth and a jacket stained with river water and stinking of creosote, the ferryman had rough hands from holding the reins of the horses that pulled the rope across the Duna, but he looked so miserable as he glanced sidelong at Gizela that I thought he might let the carriage cross on his own back if the burghers weren’t watching. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I would lose my head if I let you cross.”

  That the burghers would be so brazen as to deny me my rights as owner of the property was the highest possible offense. “The king will hear of this,” I said, and with as much dignity as I could manage I opened the carriage door to reclaim Gizela. As we drove away I could see the city fathers retreating on the far side of the Duna, a scattering of the Habsburgs’ dung beetles running back into their safe little holes.