by Sarah Rayne
At once there was a sizzling spitting, and the unmistakable scent of roasting meat filled the dungeon. Thurzo’s stomach rose and he felt his mouth fill with bile. She is cooking her! Dear God, the evil monster is cooking her victim’s flesh!
He bent over, retching violently, and there was the shameful sound of his own vomit spattering wetly on the floor. When at last he straightened up, wiping his mouth with his hand, he saw Elizabeth regarding him with amusement through the greasy smoke spiralling from the brazier.
The nausea vanished at once, and hot fury replaced it. Thurzo moved forward, knocking the knife and the pan from the Countess’s hand, hearing it fall with a sharp clatter to the floor.
‘Do what you can for the wounded ones,’ he said tersely to Ponikenus. ‘The King’s people will be waiting on the mountainside.’
‘Yes. Very well.’
‘But you, Madame,’ said Thurzo, turning back to Elizabeth and regarding her coldly, ‘you will come with me.’
‘Yes? What do you intend to do with me?’
‘That,’ said Thurzo, ‘is in God’s hands – or the devil’s.’ He glanced at the serving women. ‘A wrap – a robe for your mistress?’
The pastor was bending over the huddled figure of the first girl, and Elizabeth watched him. Thurzo thought: she is not the smallest bit afraid. And with a sudden fear: it is as if she knows herself protected, he thought, and with the thought, there was an oily coalescing of the shadows. For a brief instant, it was as if something else was in the dungeon with them. Something that went cloaked in a mantle of darkness, and that prowled the forests on cloven hoofs, not on all fours but upright, like men . . . Thurzo shook his head impatiently and the image vanished. He looked back at the slender figure of the Countess, wrapped now in a crimson velvet robe, the shivering serving women at her side.
‘You are ready to accompany me?’ he said, with icy courtesy.
‘Certainly. And my servants?’ She indicated the two women.
‘They will come with us to be questioned.’ Thurzo saw the sly flicker of the women’s eyes, and understood that they knew a very great deal about their mistress and that they were afraid. He said, ‘As for you, Madame, I shall lock you in your own bedchamber until His Majesty’s men arrive to place you under armed guard.’
Elizabeth smiled, ‘As you will,’ she said. ‘But when all is done, Gyorgy Thurzo, you will be more surprised than I at what is ahead.’
Thurzo could not be fought physically, that was plain. He was no longer young – he had been born elderly, that one – and he was flabby and jowly. But in a struggle he would easily overpower her. And there was the weasel, Ponikenus. The sly, snooping worshipper of the pallid Christ-god, who was still bending over the milked bodies of the two girls who had given such good yield, as if he thought he could bring them back to life, as his posturing Jesus-god had pretended to do. In another few minutes, the pretty birds would have crossed death’s threshhold and there would have been the last embrace, the sensation of the lungs emptying . . . What the physicians and the apothecaries called the tidal breath. Marvellous and sensuous and fulfilling beyond all words. Elizabeth’s fingers crooked into claws and scarlet anger pounded through her head at the thought of Ponikenus. A weasel, a jackel. All of those years he had lived at her expense, preaching his puling sermons to the villagers, taking her benefices. And all the time he had been sneaking about prying and spying, red-faced with righteous disapproval. There would be a reckoning for this treachery.
She allowed Thurzo to conduct her to her bedchamber and lock the door. Once alone, she flew to the secret drawer where the caul lay, her hands going with sureness to the corner. Only let her get the caul into her grasp, let her murmur the incantation and feel the worn-smooth surface beneath her hands, and she would know herself safe. She would know herself in the keeping of the forest gods, the deities who walked the night with cloven hoofs and three-cornered faces . . . Meilliki of the forest and the devil, Ordog, waited on by witches . . . Delibab the noon-fairy, and the weird sisters who came on the winds from the Tunders, combing their eldritch hair and keening into the storm . . . And Isten himself, who ruled the trees and the earth and the birds . . . ‘Isten protect Elizabeth . . . Keep me from harm . . .’
Isten would vent his wrath on the miserable weasel pastor and the flabby Palatine outside her door. Isten would send a hundred cats to bite out their hearts, and a thousand claw-footed demons to tear out their brains. Her breathing slowed and the red mist cleared from her vision as she felt for the caul, the bloodied fragment that had once veiled the soft unformed skull and the wizened blind face of a murdered baby.
The caul had gone. She jerked the drawer out frenziedly, and tipped it up, scattering lavender sachets and haresfoot brushes and unguents. There was no mistaking it. The caul had vanished.
Elizabeth flung open garderobes and presses and chests, her mind awash with panic, tumbling gowns and cloaks and jewels over the bed and on to the floor.
Nothing. Her touchstone magic, the gruesome scrap that had provided her with an armour against a stupid world with stupid laws, had gone. A terrible cry rent the air as Elizabeth sank on to the floor, her arms wound about her body, moaning and rocking to and fro in anguish.
The caul had vanished and without it she was at the mercy of Thurzo and the King.
Hilary had waited until later in the morning before looking properly at the remarkable document Reverend Mother had given her in the library.
Elizabeth Bathory’s trial. The record of the investigation into the strange evil creature who had lived in this house and who had walked through the dark old castle in the mountains. The ancestress of the corpse-creatures.
Eternal life and undying beauty. Hilary did not believe it, and yet there the thing had been.
The convent was still in turmoil from Ladislas Bathory’s attack: it was very nearly possible to actually see the great jagged tear that the violence had made in the ordered life. Like a wound on the air.
Sister Thérèse’s body had been taken to the police mortuary, which the nuns had found the most shocking thing yet. Reverend Mother had told them after breakfast and there had been a quickly stifled gasp. Sister Clothilde had said, ‘But Reverend Mother, we have to prepare our sister for the requiem Mass and burial.’ She had not quite said: We cannot let her be pawed by policemen, but Hilary had felt her thinking it and she had felt them all thinking it. Death was something to be regarded without sadness or bitterness in here, of course: the soul had gone on its joyful journey to God, and the devout Sister Thérèse would surely not have to stop off to pay many debts in purgatory en route. Hilary wished she could be as sure of her own reservation in heaven. But Thérèse’s death had been something so far outside the nuns’ experience that they were having difficulty in accepting it; they would have found comfort in the tried and trusted routine of death: washing the body and dressing it for burial; making a vigil on the night before the requiem Mass, and then celebrating the Mass itself. All the time concentrating their thoughts and their love about their departed sister. Hilary thought that some of them might even have prayed for Thérèse’s killer, whom they would see as a sinner who must be reclaimed. Yes, there would undoubtedly be a few prayers for Ladislas. How good they all are, thought Hilary, looking round the refectory at the nuns, some of whom she had come to know quite well, others with whom she had only exchanged good-mornings or goodnights. How good and how innocent and how trusting they all were. They would see her feelings for Michael as very clear-cut indeed: avoid him completely, they would have said. Cut him out of your life, avoid all occasion for sin and pray for strength. The trouble was it was not that clear. It was not God versus Michael; it never had been. The problem had begun eight years ago when Hilary had entered St Luke’s for all the wrong reasons.
It was a relief to be able to concentrate on something else. Hilary’s mind had been on a treadmill since Ladislas Bathory’s attack: Michael storming CrnPrag, Ladislas himself climbing through the trapdoor, Catherine insid
e CrnPrag. And then back to Michael. All roads led there.
She frowned and went quietly to the library and stood for a moment at the latticed windows, looking out. Most of the houses in Vienna’s Old Quarter had been preserved in their original states, and Hilary thought that the Blutgasse would not have changed so very much since Elizabeth Bathory’s time. It was a rather eerie thought, and she turned determinedly to the electric switches. Warm amber swathes of light bathed the room which was dark, even in the middle of the morning.
Hilary sat down and considered the task ahead of her. Reverend Mother had thought it would help her to know more of Elizabeth, which had seemed a bit odd at the time. But Hilary trusted Reverend Mother and she would do her best to read the ancient book. It was not so very thick: what the Victorians would have called a novella. Perhaps the thickness and length of a doctorate thesis.
The Jesuit Father had apparently been quite learned, which meant that the text might be difficult to translate. Hilary’s Latin was not good: the nuns in her own convent school had taught it fairly well but there had been a strong emphasis on Latin as a religious tongue rather than as a means to decipher historical documents. Hilary could recite with accuracy upwards of twenty prayers in perfect Latin, along with the entire Mass without thinking very much about any of it, but she had long since forgotten the mechanics of the language. She would be hard put to it to decline a verb, and it was going to be uphill work to translate Father Turoczi’s monograph. She scanned the shelves for help and was rewarded with a small, somewhat foxed Latin grammar, clearly dating back at least fifty years, but perfectly readable. This would be an enormous assistance; the age did not matter because, whatever else Latin did, it most certainly did not date. Was there a vocabulary at the back? Yes, praise the saints.
Father Turoczi’s manuscript was foxed as well, and there was the damp, musty smell of extreme age about it, which Hilary rather liked. All scents were evocative, of course, but it was curious how widely different were the scents of very new books and very old ones. This one smelt of old houses and dead centuries and forgotten ways of life. It was a pity you could not open up the long-ago centuries along with the books.
She set the grammar on the table where it would be close to her hand, and turned back the first page of Turoczi’s book. It had been properly printed and rather nicely bound in what Hilary thought was thin calf – probably originally rich green or brown, but faded by the decades to an indeterminate grey. It was important to be extremely careful with turning the pages, which were brittle with age and already cracking at the edges. She took up a thin embossed paper-knife and tried sliding it under each page as she went. Even with immense care there was a shower of tiny dry snowflakes as each page was touched. The whole thing ought to be under glass in a museum somewhere.
Turoczi set his scene with unexpectedly vivid imagery, describing the trial of Elizabeth Bathory – Countess Nádasdy, he called her – which had taken place in the castle of the Grand Palatine of Hungary, Gyorgy Thurzo, at a place called Bicse.
There had been twenty judges and the witnesses had almost all been Elizabeth’s own household. Twenty judges seemed so many that Hilary reread this and checked the dictionary to be sure she had got it right. But twenty there had been, under the auspice of the Judge of the Royal Supreme Court, Theodosius Syrmiensis de Szulo. A mental image of today’s High Court judges rose before her eyes. Even today they were robed in scarlet and wigged in white, and if the present casual world adhered so faithfully to tradition, how must those twenty judges have looked in the violent, vivid seventeenth century? Sixteen hundred and something, had this been? It was suddenly important to know every detail, and Hilary turned back to the start of Turoczi’s work. The trial had been in January 1611. The depths of winter in the Carpathian Mountains. She remembered the bleak loneliness of Csejthe and shivered.
Elizabeth had not been taken to Bicse; she had been arrested and placed under guard in Csejthe. So she had not been present at her own trial? This again seemed so remarkable that Hilary read it three times and resorted to the Latin grammar again. But there was no mistake. Why had Elizabeth not been present? Because they had feared her and forbidden it? Or because she had simply disdained to attend? Hilary thought this was entirely likely. It was remarkable how Elizabeth came across the centuries, so that you could almost see her and feel her arrogance. Let the peasants get on with it, she might have said, and however much she had cared about the trial’s outcome, she would not have shown it. Hilary turned another page and read on, referring to the vocabulary at intervals, struggling with the Latin syntax which was so different from English and French, but managing to get the sense of it.
The Countess’s servants had been questioned by this dazzling array of justice. The two women who had served her and were reputed to have assisted in her gruesome rituals, Dorko and Illona, appeared to have played star parts in the trial. Hilary had the sense of them enjoying the brief notoriety, as if neither of them had entirely grasped the severity of what was happening. Hadn’t they understood the danger they stood in? It sounded as if they had not. Hilary read on, finding it easier as she went, feeling the dark, bloody days of Elizabeth Bathory fold about her. Yes, these two women had admitted to everything, openly and frankly. They had been almost exultant and very nearly smug.
The scrupulous Turoczi had transcribed the actual questions asked of Illona and Dorko, which Hilary thought were not so far from questions that would be put to suspected accomplices in a murder trial today.
How long were you in the Countess’s service?
How many women did you kill? Where did they come from?
How were they killed and what tortures were used on them?
What did you do with the bodies?
She could almost see the crowded room; the solemn-faced judges and the avid faces of the watchers. It had been January, and it would have been bitterly cold, so that there would have been roaring fires and hundreds of candles to illuminate the dark, short days. There would have been a stench of stale sweat in the room.
Dorko and Illona both told how their mistress had developed a liking for young girls early in her life – unusual but not unheard of, said Illona. Hilary thought she had probably eyed the judges with irritating knowing.
And yes, the mistress had discovered that the spilling of warm, fresh young blood kept her skin white and her beauty alive. She had been quite young when this had happened, said Illona, who seemed to be more intelligent and more articulate than Dorko.
‘And so she killed for the blood?’
‘Everywhere the Mistress went, she set up torture chambers. There would be beatings until the girls bled from dozens of different wounds.’
‘She beat them to death?’
‘Some.’
‘What else?’
‘I don’t remember it all. Sometimes she bit them. If she was unwell and forced to lie on her bed, Dorko and I took the girls to stand at her bedside. She liked to bite them until they bled.’
Hilary felt the chill brush her skin. The biting. There it was, the Dracula kiss. If this account ended with Elizabeth Bathory being sentenced to have a stake hammered into her heart and her mouth stuffed with garlic, she would strongly suspect a huge, elaborate joke. She frowned and read on, achingly aware of a wish that Michael could be reading this with her.
Illona was being questioned about the forms of torture that her mistress had used, and Hilary could feel the gloating of the woman. She began to dislike her very strongly.
Illona told how at times her mistress had ordered flat-irons to be brought down to the dungeons and heated to sizzling point so that she could iron the soles of the girls’ feet.
‘Why would that be?’
‘To give them red shoes. So that they could not run away.’
Turoczi did not embellish his work with things like; ‘The witness paused and looked gloatingly around the courtroom’, or, ‘The listeners gasped’, but Hilary could fill in the gaps. She could almost see the craft
y-eyed Illona standing boastfully before the judges, glorifying in the brief notoriety, but so stupid that she did not see that she was talking herself into her own execution.
‘How long did the Countess do all this?’
‘Many years.’
‘During the Count’s life?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘But – he did not know?’ Would there have been a note of pleading in that question? Hilary had already received the strong impression of Elizabeth’s husband as a hero-figure; a soldier who had beaten back the Turks. Nobody wanted to see a hero-warrior reduced to a sordid woman-torturer.
Illona said, ‘The Master knew. But he was afraid of my mistress. Everyone was afraid of her.’ Yes, there would certainly have been a note of vicarious pride there.
‘The Count did nothing to stop his lady from committing her crimes?’
‘No.’
Hilary could almost hear the shocked gasp of the judges. The courtroom must have echoed with the sound of toppling pedestals and clay feet cracking.
Dorko, who had been the longest with Elizabeth, was questioned as thoroughly. She sounded bitter, but she confirmed Illona’s testimony, and told how, later on, other girls had been burned with tongs heated on a brazier.
‘The Mistress liked to see the pain. But not the screams. If they screamed, she made us nail their lips together. She did not like to hear them screaming, you see.’
Turoczi had certainly not written in anything about a horrified silence at this point, but Hilary thought you could take it as read.
The judges asked, ‘What happened to the bodies of these unfortunate creatures after they were dead?’
The sullenness in Dorko’s answer was impossible to miss. She told how she had always been charged with disposing of the drained bodies, and Hilary could hear her voice taking on the whining monotone of all discontents. ‘I was put upon. I did all kinds of things and never so much a word of thanks. If things went wrong, I was punished even though it wasn’t my fault. And no matter the difficulties, the bodies had to be got rid of.’