If confession and confinement could bring forgetfulness, like drinking the water of the Lethe, then how fervently would I fall once more to my knees and lay bare my soul to the Almighty and grow to love these narrow walls. What relief it would be to feel even a moment’s peace. Writing down my sad memories has only made them bolder, more vivid. It brings back the faces of my lost loved ones, my mother and father, especially when I have no fresher faces before me. István, Zsofía, Klára. Darvulia, Ferenc. I have outlived them all, and two of my own children besides. The Greeks claimed they would call no man happy until he was dead, for until then he was not happy, only lucky. I have lived fifty-four years in this old world, enough to see my hair turn gray and my beauty fade, enough to bury my husband and my friends, my mother and father and sisters and brother, my children, and I know that I’m the unluckiest person left on this earth. Death alone will be my consolation, when it comes, and yet I dread it. I dread what waits for me on the other side of the curtain, what new heaven, or new earth, is in store for me.
At times I think of the girls who died, the ones who bore the brunt of my anger and jealousy. Judit, Amália. Gizela, Éva, Doricza. All the ones whose names I never knew. There are times when I think I would give back every one of their lives, every lash or blow, to see you again, my son. All of them together are not worth the loss of you.
If I could have one wish for my old age, besides to walk out of this tower and ride away from the cold heights of Csejthe vár, it would be to return one more time to the marsh at the family seat in Ecsed where my brother and sisters and I played as children among the lichen-covered stones of the fortress, where my mother and father, my family, were once so happy together. Perhaps I would stand at the window in the moonlight and hear again the voice of the gypsy man condemned for selling his little daughter, the way his strange accent cracked on the Hungarian words like a hammer on stone. Save me, he said. Perhaps there I might be visited by the ghosts of all my dead ones, my parents and siblings, my husband, my children, my friends, all the dead Báthorys and Nádasdys who have gone before me. And the others, the ones who died at my hands, whose faces I see now always coming in through the cracks of my walls, the stone gap at my door. Was I wrong to treat them thus? Was it not my right, as the mistress of the house, to punish them as I saw fit? I have lost my children in payment, my fortune, my good name—everything. Their lives did not seem worth much to me, but I would give them all back, every one, for one more day with you, Pál, with your sisters. Save me, they said, but I would not. It will not be long now before I join them.
Soon they will take the wall down and carry me out into the light. They will carry me down the hill of the vár to the vault in the church at Csejthe, far from my family crypt in Nyírbátor, far from your father’s resting place in Sárvár. I will watch over you then, my son and daughters in their different corners of the kingdom. Anna, Kata, Pál. My other daughter, the vanished one. I will touch your cheek with my hand that will not be my hand. I wonder if you will hear me call your name.
I keep my trunks packed, so that when you or your sisters come to tell me I am free, I will be ready.
I watch the horizon for the sun to rise. Every day, I watch and wait.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Richard Abate, Suzanne O’Neill, Emily Timberlake, Louise Quayle, Ray Ventre, Catherine Knepper, Michelle Falkoff, Colette Sartor, Stacey Shrontz, Aubrey Ryan, Melissa Cottenham, and all my family and friends, as well as my colleagues in the English departments at Northern Michigan University and DePaul University for their invaluable support during the writing of this book. Special thanks also to Amy Hickey for help on the spelling and pronunciation of Hungarian words and names, and to Chet DeFonso for pointing me in her direction.
For research on the life of Erzsébet Báthory and the world she lived in, I am deeply indebted to Tony Thorne’s Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of Elisabeth Báthory, The Blood Countess (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) and Katalin Péter’s Beloved Children: History of Aristocratic Childhood in Hungary in the Early Modern Age (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001).
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Epigraph
Part One - Extra Hungariam Non Est Vita
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Two - Sidereus Nuncius
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
The Countess Page 31