16
December 31, 1613
Winter is upon me once more, and once more I feel the cold so deep that it reaches my bones. Three years now I have been in my tower, three years of loneliness and decrepitude, and this morning of all days I heard the halting notes of Ponikenus’s voice outside my stone gap, the jumble of Hungarian and Latin and Slovak with which he tries to communicate with me. The pastor of Csejthe must think of these visits as his Christian duty, for otherwise he would not dare to show his face here. His real name is not Ponikenus at all but Jan Ponicky, which he changed to affect more importance than he is otherwise entitled to. This time he did not come alone, bringing with him a fellow pastor from Lešetice to witness what I could only imagine was a spectacle of great humor to them both: Countess Báthory in a cage. What the visitor wanted I could not guess, unless it was my immortal soul. They pulled up chairs before my stone gap so that their faces were visible to me and in thickly accented, halting Hungarian asked if my health was good, since they had heard I was ill. When I said my health was fine, they went on, exclaiming what a pleasure it was to wait upon me in my tower, how great was their honor that they could be of service to me. I laughed and said they may well think so, since they were the reason for my imprisonment.
“My lady,” said Ponikenus, placing his hand oh-so-reverently over his heart, “you cannot think I did anything to harm you.”
“We have never been friends, Ponicky, and I will not pretend otherwise. I know you went crawling to the palatine with your lies.”
He said it was not true, that he always held me in high esteem. I know he flatters himself that he might be useful to me in my present distress, as if I would want help from the likes of him, but I knew I must be careful. Anything I said to him would be likely to get back to Thurzó, to the court. The visitor from Lešetice—one of Thurzó’s minions, surely—said he bore me no ill will, that he too had heard of the greatness of the widow Nádasdy and only wished to serve me in my hour of need. His hands clutched at his shirt, plucking the fabric like the strings of a lute. A sudden weariness overtook me. I said I had misspoken, that I knew it was not the pastor of Lešetice who had sent me here. “But the pastor of Csejthe knows his guilt,” I said, “since he used his pulpit to rail against me.”
“I never did,” said Ponikenus, searching for the right words. I would ask him to use Latin, but his vocabulary in that language is even more absurd than his Hungarian, and my Slovak is not up to the task of arguing with him. He said, “I preached the gospel. I preached humility and kindness. I never mentioned you by name. If your mind was troubled by what I said, perhaps I bit a little too close to your conscience.”
Conscience, indeed. “It doesn’t take much imagination to know that when you speak of the corruption of the nobility in the church of Csejthe, you are speaking against the family who owns these lands. Be careful, Ponicky. I have witnesses I can call when the time comes, and powerful friends still who will aid me.”
He shook his head as if he did not understand, but I have known him to pretend to be ignorant of my language when it suits his purpose. I saw the tightening along the soft part of his jaw, the way he mashed his teeth together. He was not entirely certain of his position here. He wondered if my children or my friends would now be his enemies and remove him from his position at the church in Csejthe. Or something worse.
Then he controlled his expression and changed the subject, asking after the state of my soul. Did I pray, he wanted to know, and how often? He had spoken to the guards and heard that I sobbed in my cell at night, that I cursed God and begged for death when I thought I was alone. He felt it was his lot as pastor of Csejthe to protect me from temptation.
“Are you under the impression,” I asked, “that I intend to murder myself?”
“Many prisoners have been tempted by the idea.”
How exasperating is the tongue of any man inflated with self-importance, none more so than a man of God. “I could not even do the deed if I wanted to,” I said. “Thurzó didn’t leave me so much as a darning needle so that I might repair tears in my dress or a knife to sharpen my quills. The guards make certain my servants bring me nothing without their permission.”
“You might find something else. Your dress for a noose, perhaps.”
I smiled. “Now you are trying to give me ideas. Would it please you to see me hanging naked from the rafters?” He pretended to look aghast, but I waved away the words before he began to speak again. I would not let him blather more lies about how much value he placed on my life. “I can assure you I have no plans for self-destruction. Only a guilty woman would think of it, and I am not guilty.”
Then the priest from Lešetice asked if I still believed in the divinity of Christ, in my redemption through the Crucifixion. Of course, I told him, though I refused to accept the prayer book he tried to give me through the gap in my stone door. I don’t need it, I said. I know my prayers by heart, having spoken them every day of my life. “Ask Thurzó if he remembers his,” I said.
We went on like this for some time, the two priests dancing around the salvation of my soul, the purity of my thoughts. I watched the hands of the two men perform an elaborate ballet in front of my stone gap, chopping the air for emphasis here, flopping in resignation there. Ponicky’s hands were soft and fine, stained black with ink on the inside of the second finger, the hands of a scholar, of a man in love with the sound of his own voice. What would he do, I wondered, if he were denied the privilege of preaching every Sunday? Would he curl up and die like an old woman locked in her tower? After more than an hour I was weary and impatient with their visit, ready for them to be gone. I stood up from my chair and was about to bid them leave when Ponikenus came to the point at last: Who, he wanted to know, told me he was the one who betrayed me to Thurzó? Who spoke these lies against him?
A smile crossed my face. No one told me such, I said, except that he himself admitted it by asking me so.
“I never lied about you to anyone, madam.”
“You lie to me now to deny it. I know you wrote to your superiors, who sent the letter to Thurzó. It was entered into the evidence against me. You made up stories about what happened to the Modl girl. You told people I murdered her at my daughter’s own wedding.”
“No one has seen the girl since then, my lady.”
“Because I sent her home to her mother. She was flaunting her bastard child all over my house.”
“Then why has no one heard from her since?”
“Whom would she write to, even if she knew how to write, Ponicky? You?”
“One of my priests saw her body on a cart that was headed out of Csejthe. Her face was gashed. It looked like someone had torn open her mouth.”
“Your priests have been known to drink. They see the devil, too, I understand, when they’ve had a few sips of brandy.”
“Under cover of darkness your man Ficzkó took her away toward Pozsony, with two or three others. Why would he take the bodies out in the middle of the night, if you were not trying to conceal your misdeeds?”
“The only misdeed I intend to conceal is the appointment of you as pastor in Csejthe. The Modl girl went home to her mother. The others died of the plague. The disease was all over the county in those months, and the bodies had to go out as soon as the girls died. Do you think I have enough strength to tear a girl’s face in half? Do you think you can pass judgment on me? I supported your priests, all of them, as I would have my own children. Like a mother I made certain they had their education, their food and warmth. I welcomed you here after old Barthony died and made you pastor in his stead. Your ingratitude overwhelms me. Will you turn on the palatine, too, when he has outlived his usefulness to you?”
“I have never shown you ingratitude, madam. I remember you in my prayers every day. I ask the Lord to show you mercy and forgiveness for your sins, and once again make you prosperous.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, “begging for others’ prosperity is the highest good there
is. Congratulations, Ponicky. You must be a living saint to have the Lord answer your prayers thus.”
He shook his head and spoke something low to his friend I did not understand. The Reverend Zacharias said he would come to me again, and we would speak some more. I told him not to bother, but he insisted, and afterward the two of them stood up and left. I heard their footsteps going back down the stairs.
I wonder why you do not come to me here in my tower, Pál, where I must suffer alone with priests, with fools.
17
After Kata’s wedding, I passed a time of relative peace, traveling between the many Nádasdy estates once more to see that everything was in order—Sárvár to Bécs, Bécs to Keresztúr, Keresztúr to Csejthe. My health was sometimes poor—a lingering ague, which left me so hot that sometimes I stripped to my chemise and still I was soaked with sweat, sometimes so cold I froze in the heat of summer—but otherwise I had much with which to be content. Both my daughters were married, and you would soon be of an age to take up your father’s titles. Istók Soós, who had come to my bed for the first time the night of Kata’s wedding, remained all that time a trusted friend and confidant, useful in dealings with my tenants and menservants, especially the ones who thought me nothing more than a weak old widow, easy to defy. The other servants nicknamed him “Ironhead” because of his large skull and thick neck, and they soon set about currying his favor much as they had always done mine. He was stubborn in arguing his every advantage with them. What will you do for my lady, I often heard him ask, if I help you? I trusted him as much as the two old women and Ficzkó with the doings of the house when I was absent and rewarded him with new horses, a silver-handled dagger, fine clothes in which he swaggered like a rough little general. He did turn into a bit of a peacock, strutting in front of the others and earning himself some enmity, but under cover of darkness his soft red mouth was as sweet as any nobleman’s. I was nearing fifty and less particular, perhaps, in my company than I had been in my youth, but I was truly fond of Istók, and after the disaster that was Thurzó I had no desire to sit around pining for one of the Habsburgs’ toadies. Let Thurzó have his child bride, Erzsébet Czobor, and may they both be damned.
In the fall of 1608, after a power struggle within the Habsburg family, Mátyás was made king of Hungary, and the next year György Thurzó elected palatine. After he was confirmed, he took eleven villages belonging to one of his lesser neighbors by force and began harassing the widow of the former palatine, István Illésházy, into giving up some of her lands to him as well. Cementing both his power in the kingdom, and his wealth, by any means necessary.
We received the news at Csejthe with equal measures of shock and disgust. Istók Soós heard it from one of the tenant farmers, who had it from some of Thurzó’s soldiers traveling the Vág road. Istók came and told me the news where I sat next to the fire, and I put down my book with the noise of the wind roaring in my ears, staring into the flames as if I could read the future there. I should have seen it coming. The way Thurzó curried favor with the Habsburgs princes, first Rudolf, then Mátyás, must have been calculated with just this design in mind. What had he promised Mátyás in regard to me, I wondered, to secure his position?
Two years earlier, when Thurzó had wed Erzsébet Czobor in Biscke, I had made sure to attend, dressing in the handsomest red velvet anyone ever saw, arriving in the most lavish carriage, so that Thurzó would know he had not broken my spirit. Thurzó gushed at the honor of having me attend his wedding. “Lady Nádasdy,” he said. “I am so glad you could join us today. You look remarkably well. Only my own bride is more beautiful.”
“She is,” I said, forcing a smile. “The most beautiful bride there ever was. Congratulations, my dear.”
The child clung to his arm, looking up at him with adoring eyes and simpering and smirking in my direction, unable to restrain her triumph. She murmured something low about hurrying the wedding night, so that Thurzó was forced to shush her in front of me and tell her to mind her company. I could barely hide my disgust. If this was what he wanted in a second wife, then truly he was better off without me. I wished them well and danced with my nephew Gábor, newly elected prince of Transylvania, or my son-in-law György Drugeth. I spoke with all my neighbors and friends, staying long into the evening and leaving only after the bride and groom retired to the bridal chamber. I did not want to seem too anxious to leave in front of the company of nobles, most of whom, if not all, knew that Thurzó had loved me once. I must look like their happiness affected me not at all, or as Darvulia had said, I would become the thing I despised the most.
After the honeymoon, as promised, I wrote to invite Lady Thurzó to stay with me for a few weeks, thinking she would decline, and that would be the end of my obligation to her. So no one was more surprised than I when the girl wrote that she would be happy to come to Csejthe for a little while that fall, that she looked forward to making my better acquaintance. I had the house turned inside out in preparation, giving her the best rooms, the ones Ferenc himself used to sleep in whenever we visited Csejthe. For all that she smiled and gushed and said how honored she was. “My husband tells me no one in Hungary runs a better house than Lady Nádasdy,” she said, her eyes on the ground like a good submissive wife. “I hope that someday he will say the same about me. Please, I am your most devoted pupil. Teach me whatever you will.” I would sooner have strangled her, but I bid her welcome and led her into the kastély, where the fire was burning, and set her down before it in Ferenc’s own chair and served her a cup of wine. As she warmed herself and made small talk with Istók Soós, her face red in the firelight, I wondered what she was really doing there, what she had in mind, because I was quite certain our friendship, or lack of it, meant no more to her than it did to me.
As it turned out, Lady Thurzó had no interest in anything except playing the lute, which she was very talented at and which puffed her up with pride whenever she put her fingers to the strings. Every evening after the meal she would offer to play for us, in which enterprise I indulged her as a guest, until I realized that I could hardly get her to stop. She spurned all the other lessons her husband had asked me to give her, showing no interest in how to keep an accounting with her tenants, how to number and mark the family valuables to avoid theft by the servants, how to look over cattle or horses for disease to make certain the sellers were not cheating her. She preferred always to sit by the fire and chatter with her own ladies, to play and sing or take naps in the afternoons. She was poor company for me, too, for without enough education to have read the great books of our time, the religious tracts of Luther and Calvin, the astronomical treatises of Kepler or Copernicus, she had very little to offer in conversation except the basest gossip—what the king’s mistress had said at court, who had worn an old dress to her wedding, who had grown so stout she had to have a trunk full of new clothes. Some days it was all I could do not to tell her to shut her useless mouth.
Yet for three weeks I did my best to teach the girl as her husband had asked, coaxing her to read the books in my library, to be present when I disputed with a tenant or spoke to the maidservants or the stable boys. She was all honey to my face, but in her letters home to Thurzó—which Istók Soós intercepted and opened for me before sending them on to Bicske—she complained that I was often cross with her. Once, she tattled, I had even slapped her fingers when she reached for a book on my shelf. My mother’s copy of the Bible, actually, which I did not want the little twit touching with her ink-stained hands. She wrote Thurzó that I was a shrew, a cold, calculating woman who sported with the lowest of her menservants and whose inner circle consisted only of the basest commoners, former nurses and washerwomen, instead of the more refined ladies any other noblewoman would prefer. Lady Nádasdy has a well-run house, as you always told me, my dearest, but it comes at a great price. The younger servants hate her and grumble about their treatment at her hands, and at the hands of the old women and the boy, the cruel one they call Ficzkó, who leers at me when
ever the lady of the house is absent. They lord over the younger servants and abuse them, and the lady listens only to them, because they flatter her vanity, and tell her lies. Please, my only heart, let me come home again soon. I cannot bear to be even two days’ journey from you and from our dear home at Bicske, where I truly belong.
I did not see what admonishment Thurzó wrote to her in return, for Istok did not manage to get his hands on it, though the next letter she wrote her husband clearly showed that he had cautioned her about being so free with her accusations, at least in writing. My most beloved, I was sorry to have displeased you and will be more careful in the future. We will speak more on my coming home about the old women, and the lady here. I will ask her to send me home in a day or two, since I am so missing you, and then I can tell you more in person, for I have learned much in my time away.
It was no wonder I preferred the servants to noblewomen for my companions, with such friends as she. I should have known that the imbecile would betray the many kindnesses I showed her by tattling to her husband about my punishment of the servants, but I had no idea at the time she would turn on me so completely that in only three years’ time Thurzó could believe me a witch, a vampire—the most appalling abominations imaginable. Dorka and Ilona Jó would never have betrayed me the way she did, either out of fear or because they could not write much more than their own names.
After less than three weeks’ company I granted Erzsébet Czobor’s wish and sent her home to her husband, to be rid of the very sight of her. I kissed her good-bye in the courtyard and bade her a safe journey home to Bicske. “Give my love to your husband,” I said, and she smirked and said she would, and that was the last I had to endure the company of the new Countess Thurzó.
The Countess Page 26