Traveling until long after dark, we rode farther downstream to find a Hungarian ferryman, one who was only too glad to take my gold and pull us across despite the late hour, but even when we were on the other side of the Duna I would not dare approach the fortress at Dévény. The burghers would be watching for me, for their master Rudolf—or was it Mátyás?—to reward them for denying me.
The Hungarian ferryman was amiable and garrulous, chatting the whole time about the news from abroad and showing a great deal of respect when he learned the name of the lady he ferried, lavishing praise on my dead husband, on my noble family name. “I served with your husband at the siege of Esztergom,” said the ferryman. He had a scar through the meat of one cheek, and when I looked more closely, I could see he was missing several fingers on one hand. “A great man, a handsome and kind man, the best soldier I ever saw. Like one of the saints come to earth.” The ferryman was still talking about poor Ferenc. “I grieved like I lost my own father when I heard that he died.”
I rewarded him with the purse I would have used to bribe the German ferryman farther upstream, and he wept and said he would pray for me for a seat in heaven. Still, for a long time I could not remove the bitterness in my mouth over the encounter at Dévény, even as we passed into the empty plains, the miles and miles of grassland that had once—before Mohács, before the Turkish occupation, before the world had gone upside down—been the breadbasket of Europe, fields of wheat and barley and rye, uncounted fields from the Duna to the Carpathians. Nothing that had once been remained, and what was to come, I could not yet see.
12
After the trouble at the ferry at Pozsony, I traveled on to my own house at Csejthe, where I had first come as a young bride myself thirty years before. We spent a quiet summer there, in the calm that builds before a great storm, with a hushed sense of expectation and hurry toward the eventual release. I sent several angry letters to the king and some private, less strident ones to Thurzó, asking him to intervene in the matter of Dévény castle on my behalf, and he wrote me back that he would do what he could for me, but that I must listen to him for once and not anger the king further. Remember your friends and your place, he wrote, and all will turn out right in the end.
My place, I wrote back, is with you. When are you coming?
Soon, he wrote. Soon, I promise you.
Summer turned to autumn, and autumn to winter, but Thurzó did not come. I put aside my plans to return to Bécs for the winter, since Thurzó said he would not be able to return to the city that year to see me. Once a month or so he wrote to me, always saying the trouble with Bocskai was keeping him away, that the king had urgent commissions for him that took him far from his estate at Biscke, which was only a two-day trip from my own house at Csejthe. For my part I did my best to be accept his reasons for staying away, even as I looked forward to his company at Varannó that coming September, at the wedding of my daughter to young Drugeth. Come early, I wrote to him, as my dearest friend and companion. Every day is a year until I see you again.
I will come as soon as I may, he wrote back. You can depend on it.
So more than a year after our last meeting, still missing Thurzó, I made the trek across Hungary from Csejthe to Varannó to prepare for my daughter’s wedding. Guests would begin arriving even in August, although the festivities didn’t actually begin until September. As always I enjoyed playing hostess, seeing to the lavishness of the arrangements as once my mother and father had done at Ecsed, entertaining my many friends and relatives. Afternoons my ladies and I would ride in the countryside or organize fishing expeditions to the banks of the Vág, out of the earshot of men where we could wade in the river’s edge with our skirts pulled up and eat cold chicken and cakes sweetened with honey. How pleasant it was in the afternoons when the sounds of bullfrogs and the feel of the cool water around my ankles gave refuge from the ordinary problems of minding my many estates, answering letters to this or that relative or friend.
Always, always, the need to keep the peace in my house necessitated the punishment of the maidservants, who had grown even more worthless in the time since my husband’s death. That year I spent many grueling hours in the cellars of Varannó with the butt of a whip or the handle of a cudgel in my hand, seeing to the lazy, the insolent. One especially troubling week not long before the first guests arrived, I went every evening to the cellars, my arms sore from wielding my stick and my clothes ruined with blood. The young boy, Ficzkó, had to carry me up to bed because I could no longer walk from exhaustion. And every night Ilona Jó and Dorka brought more girls to me for punishment, mostly the ones who had shirked their chores or been caught stealing, but also ones who rutted with the stable boys, who had talked back to one or the other of the old women. The prettiest and most admired were also the most trouble. They thought beauty was their privilege, and it was up to me to disabuse them. Beauty was a curse to be borne, not a blessing.
Most endured their punishment well, recovering after a few days and returning to their duties with renewed humility, but sometimes there would be a sickly girl who would fall ill afterward and need to go to the churchyard. I did not pity them, since they saved me the time and expense of nursing them back to health. As before, I arranged the funeral rites and the singers, too, to send them to the next world. No one could accuse me of neglecting my Christian duty, though István Magyari, the longtime Nádasdy family pastor, had the audacity to threaten to go to the authorities if I kept up my nighttime activities. Desist, he said, or risk offending God. I told him he had better not risk offending me first. I made certain a few extra coins went into his coffers, and afterward I had the servants take our dead girls elsewhere for burial, where they would not fall under Magyari’s watchful eye.
All this I had to endure without the help of my dear Darvulia, who that summer was afflicted with the onset of paralysis, a sudden attack one morning that left half her body limp, unable to walk or even stand. She took to her bed, and the others—Ilona Jó, Dorka, and Ficzkó—took over most of her duties. Every day I visited her and brought her the flowers she asked for from the fields and forests around Varannó, which she crushed and drank in a tea, though nothing improved her affliction. The skin on her face drooped soddenly toward her chin, like a cloth soaked with water, and her tongue too moved so slowly that she had trouble speaking. Only her inky eyes moved still the way they always had, making me think that at any moment she would shed this illness like an old cloak, just another disguise she had worn to confound the devil. She didn’t know her age, but I had known the táltos for more than thirty years and guessed she had to be nearing sixty at least, as ancient a crone as I had ever set eyes upon. For weeks I pressed her old, gnarled hands to my chest and begged her to get better, but she only smiled and said there was no cure for what ailed her. “I will go to God soon enough,” she said again and again, “and I’m not afraid of what he will say to me.” Every day when I opened my eyes I expected someone to rouse me with the news that she had died in the night, tarnishing all the joyous preparations going on around us with a coating of dread. My happiness could not be happiness at all if Anna Darvulia could not have a share in it.
There was trouble with the servants once it became clear that Darvulia was not likely to recover, including a time when one of the little Sittkey girls, as scattered and flighty as any little bird, was caught in flagrante delicto with one of the stable boys, her skirts flung up around her ears. Dorka had the other girls gather stinging nettles from the fields and forced the Sittkey girl to sit on them, naked, in the courtyard for an afternoon, while she squirmed and wept and the stable boys laughed at her, even the one whose advances had caused all the trouble in the first place. I rewarded Dorka by placing her in charge of the servants during Darvulia’s illness, and the servants soon began to respect and fear Dorka as they had once done Darvulia.
At Varannó I saw to the wedding preparations, hiring more than twenty wedding stewards, including the services of one Istók Soós, a thick-necke
d bull of a man whose job it was to spend the nearly ten thousand forints I gave him on capons and game birds and fish, butter and wine and cheese, oranges and citrons from Florence, cherries and dates from the orchards around my many estates. He did his job well. Wagonfuls of delicacies came daily. Artists came from Italy to paint the wedding hall with heroic murals of the groom, György Homonnai Drugeth, and of Ferenc Nádasdy. The softest new carpets were laid on the floor for the guests. All of Hungary was invited. The king would send his regrets from Prága, of course, but Báthorys and Nádasdys, Drugeths and Forgáchs, Zrínyis and Batthyánys from all over the old kingdom would be there. And, of course, György Thurzó, the man who loved me.
That summer I was forty-six, past the end of my childbearing and a widow of less than two years’ duration, but I had begun to think that a marriage to Thurzó, which Ferenc had encouraged me to consider before his death and which I had resisted at first, might be something worth pursuing after all. Ferenc’s will would not permit a stepfather to have control of his son’s inheritance, of course, but the loss of status I might have to endure in giving up the management of the Nádasdy estates would be worth the protection of being Thurzó’s wife. His love for me might be the comfort of my later years, and I awaited his visit with as much, or even more, anticipation as I had once done Ferenc. The master of the house—the master of my heart—would arrive any day now.
Certainly my friend had not been as discreet in his attentions as he might have been, for it was well known to the servants and retainers around Sárvár and Csejthe and Varannó that Thurzó and I were more than usually close, so that smiles and knowing glances accompanied any mention of his name. If I told the servants to prepare rooms for Thurzó’s arrival, they gave each other sidelong glances. If I mentioned that he was planning to arrive on such and such a date, the maidservants giggled over their sewing, and even when I threatened to give them all a good beating if they didn’t mind their work, the whispering continued wherever I went. The gossips would be watching everything we did, reporting back to noble houses all over Upper Hungary how Countess Báthory and Count Thurzó doted on each other. With his power on the rise in the kingdom, I relished the thought of walking into the wedding hall of Varannó on Thurzó’s arm as I had once done with Ferenc Nádasdy. My enemies would fear and respect me then, that was certain.
In anticipation of Thurzó’s arrival I expended many long, dull hours on my toilette. In the summer heat, unable to so much as slap a mosquito on my arm, sweat pouring down the back of my neck even as my ladies fanned me with little silk fans, I stood still as a madonna while the seamstresses pinned the fabric of new gowns on me, silk and velvet and brocade. Ilona Jó and Dorka stood on chairs to look through the hairs on my head, their fingers searching for errant strands of silver to pluck. I must look my best when Thurzó saw me again after an absence of many months, and that meant no gray hairs, no dry red skin. I refused the more dramatic cosmetics, having no need of such drastic gestures, but my ladies brought creams and unguents made with rose oil to rub into the skin of my face and hands, and perfume of honeysuckle to dress my hair, and mint for the dark bags under my eyes that came with the trouble of so great and public a celebration. There were new shoes of leather—red and yellow—and slippers of satin and velvet. The goldsmith made for me a necklace set with a large emerald brought from the Habsburg lands in the New World. Thurzó should not see me in anything I had worn before. Everything must be new again, everything startling and fresh. Only the bride herself would be permitted to be more beautiful, more admired.
For all this sewing—new dresses for myself, my daughter, and my ladies, fresh uniforms for my soldiers and retainers—Ilona Jó and Dorka scoured the countryside for seamstresses, bringing girls from Pozsony, from Kassa, wagons full of fresh-faced farm girls. They came with their sisters and their mothers on foot or by carriage, all following the whiff of necessity blowing from Varannó. They came with letters recommending their excellent skills and dispositions, their lively tempers, their modest charms. We took in cooks and chambermaids, laundresses and seamstresses by the dozens, often the younger daughters of lesser branches of the Báthory family, the Nádasdy family, relatives from every corner of the kingdom. As always, I did my duty and looked after them like they were my own daughters. I housed them and fed them, gave them rich clothing and good food, the chance for a little education and some decent society. It was my duty as a member of the senior nobility to be a mother to my people.
Soon the wedding stewards had the rooms ready, and the castle painted white inside and out. Kata glowed through the fittings for her dresses, the unpacking of the lavish jewels I had made for her, even finer and more costly than my own, the arrival of her friends and cousins who would be her bridesmaids and ladies now that she was to be a married woman. She had transformed, seemingly overnight, from the awkwardness of adolescence into the full bloom of womanhood, her gangly arms and legs growing rounder, softer, sweet and powdery as the down on a flower’s stamen, and I wished at almost every moment to press my nose to her, breathe in her scent, as if, at the moment of her leaving me, I might retain a trace of her to wear into my future life. Unlike my Anna, who had seemed embarrassed by all the fuss and attention when it had been her turn, Kata smiled more easily than I had ever seen and threw her arms around my neck with as much affection as she had as a small child, when I would pick her up from her cradle in the early morning hours and rock her in my own arms.
In late summer the guests began arriving. My cousin Griseldis, still cloistered in her nunnery, sent me a letter with her remorse at not being able to attend. How could she, she wrote, when she had no carriage, no horses, no money to travel? The nuns forced her to eat the same poor food they did, and live in their frigid little cells, and clean and cook and sew all day long the way they did. How unfair was her treatment at the hands of her neighbors and the young men her two eldest daughters had married. How bitter was her old age. She said hardly a word about my Kata’s own excellent match. When her daughters came to Varannó in their finery, with new slippers peeking out from their satin dresses, their mother’s golden beauty and insincerity shining from their faces, I told them how sorry I was over the death of their father, how much his friendship had meant to my own dear husband. Of their mother I said nothing except that I hoped her health was good in her new circumstances. “She is the happiest she has ever been,” said the eldest, and I expressed my gratitude to hear so. Then I sent them off with the steward, whose job it was to give them the smallest, most cramped quarters Varannó could boast. A petty revenge, perhaps, but satisfying all the same.
My friends came too—Margit Choron, Countess Zrínyi, my sister-in-law Fruzsina Drugeth in her widow’s black, bringing her children with her from Ecsed. Each of them I embraced in turn, taking them to the fine rooms I had set aside for them, glowing under the lavishness of their praise for the house, the arrangements. It was a wedding, they said, the entire kingdom would envy. “And you, Erzsébet,” said Countess Zrínyi, “look positively radiant yourself. One would almost think you were pregnant.”
At this the other ladies laughed, for we were, all of us, beyond childbearing. But then Margit Choron sidled a glance at me and said, “Or else she’s in love.”
Silence then, and a significant one, too, as we went down the passage toward the guest quarters. Behind me Fruzsina Drugeth tittered like a bridesmaid herself. My friends did not need to ask the name of my suitor. No one did.
The best rooms, as always, I set aside for you, Pál, as you came from Sárvár accompanied by Imre Megyery and a few servants. I called out the household to welcome you. The servants lined up in rows, men on one side and women on the other, dressed smartly in their fresh new uniforms, and Kata and I went down to see you step out of the carriage. Do you remember? The door opened and a boy of eight, dressed in scarlet, stepped from the carriage onto the square of soft carpet I had asked the servants to lay out in the middle of the dusty yard. How much like your father you w
ere, so serious and proper. You were handsome, too, with Ferenc’s black brows and broad forehead, and my fine pale skin, my wayward mouth. I expected you to rush to me and throw your arms around me, as you always had done before, but this time you came forward with several shy steps to greet me as if I were a stranger. “Thank you for this warm welcome, Mother,” you said, and bowed, so that I knew Megyery had been coaching you, probably all the way from Sárvár. Such formality from such a little one! When I scooped you up into my arms to kiss you, you blushed a furious red up into your hair, so that your suit and your face were all single a color.
“Darling,” I said, “you look peaked. Are you well?”
“Very well, thank you,” you said, your little-boy voice stiffened with shyness.
Your sister bent and kissed you on both cheeks. “It would not be a celebration without you, my dear little brother,” she said, and you blushed again, as scarlet as the carpet you stood upon, and taking two steps back you retreated from us. Where had my little soldier gone? Where was the boy who jumped upon the back of his horse, who played soldiers in the yard with the other boys? In his place was a courtly little lad out of whom all the light had gone—a shy boy with white hands, more comfortable with books than his own family, pale and trembling like Megyery himself. My heart ached for you.
Over your shoulder I could see the tadpole, older now and more self-satisfied, his red mustache curling up around the corners of his mouth, smiling with condescension at my motherly affection. In a moment he, too, was before me, bowing and complimenting the mother of his young charge, saying how wonderful it was to see me again, how great was his honor, not a word of which I believed. Megyery bent to you and said that you mustn’t forget to compliment a lady whenever you came upon one, even your own mother.
The Countess Page 23