The Countess (11 page)

“You know more than this, surely,” I said at last. “I have heard some of these reports already from Orsolya. You told me you have lived in this house for nearly ten years.”

She was silent for a moment, and I wondered what game she was playing. The creases in her brow deepened as she looked at me. “I did wonder,” she said, “if you meant what you said, that I should feel free to speak my mind.”

“So you were testing me?”

She shrugged. “Noble ladies sometimes say they want honesty when really they want someone to flatter them, tell them how important their men are, and by extension themselves. I wasn’t sure which you might be.”

Impatiently I flung a piece of hair out of my eyes. “I’m meeting Ferenc for the first time, and I would like to know, in truth, what kind of man he is. Let the others flatter my vanity.”

“All right then,” she said, and began again.

She said that Ferenc was an honest man, a fine soldier and horseman, and more learned than most gave him credit for, given his penchant for horses and soldiering. He was known to be proud and could seem haughty at first, especially to ladies. Even his mother’s company was sometimes too much for him. Orsolya would fuss and fawn over him, and he would endure it, but only just.

“She does seem to dote on him, even when he’s not here,” I said. “But my own mother was the same with my brother. After my father died, she hardly spoke to anyone else. I think that’s only natural with mothers and sons. What is the servants’ gossip?”

“Gossip?”

“I know the servants laugh about us when they think we don’t notice. What do they think of Ferenc?”

She paused as if to consider what I’d said, as if weighing the worth of what she knew on some internal scale. “Some of the young ladies,” she said, “have bragged in my hearing of having bedded Ferenc on various occasions. One even claims to have got a child by him, though she says she miscarried.”

“Which one?”

“Judit, the seamstress.”

I knew this Judit, who did the sewing in a room at the back of the house with four or five other girls of equal birth and stupidity. I had seen her smirk in my direction on more than one occasion and had wondered what I had done to offend her. Now it made sense—the laughter that had risen from the maidservants the night of my arrival, how András Kanizsay had raised a hand to shush them. “Do you think these stories have any truth to them?” I asked.

She shrugged again, doubting, but it was not with enough certainty to ease my misgivings. “They could. But he is handsome, so it may be a way for them to soothe their own hurt feelings if he shows no inclination for them.”

“I wonder if he will show any inclination for me.”

“I’m sure he will. Any young man would be glad to have a lovely young lady like you for his bride. With your wealth and education, too, you will be more than a pretty face to him. A true companion.” She picked up a brush to smooth out the tangles in my hair, wrapped an arm around my shoulders, and said, “I could not be more proud if you were my own daughter.” Suffused with the warmth of her affection, I closed my eyes, enjoying the strokes of the brush as she bound my hair and tucked a fortune in pearls into the design.

Inside, though, I was busy turning over and over the things she’d told me. That the servants in Orsolya’s employ would dare to spread such spiteful gossip about Ferenc was intolerable. I wanted to punish the offending girls, but I did not dare. I was not the mistress of the house
yet. If Orsolya chose to surround herself with such maliciousness and dishonesty, that was her prerogative. But I began to wonder what those same servants might be saying about me. Everywhere I went in the house I seemed to come across this or that insolent maidservant smirking in my direction, her cheeks pink and her eyes full of mischief. I could hardly exit a room without peals of girlish laughter following me out the door. Did they think that Ferenc would never love me, that he would reject me and send me home to Ecsed? I could not understand why Orsolya surrounded herself with imbeciles, why she would trust her sewing or her meals or the scrubbing of her floors to giggling fools without an ounce of brains. But then some women preferred to surround themselves with stupidity, either out of pity or else because it made them feel more accomplished. I began, after a time, to wonder if Orsolya was not of the latter kind—a fool, wanting to appear learned by comparison.

Either way I began to be aware of the gossip in the court, and how the servants seemed to fear no one. Not Orsolya, not me. Only Darvulia commanded their respect, for they would cease their incessant laughter when she came into the room and remain silent, at least until that fearsome creature left them once more to their own devices. Then the chatter would begin anew, a sound that grated on my nerves more and more every day.

When Darvulia finished dressing me, I observed myself in the mirror. My skin was fine and white, smooth and unspoiled by blotches or marks—I took great care to wash my face several times a day, the way my mother had taught me—and though I didn’t have her dramatic black-and-white beauty, her heart-shaped face, I did have a high clear forehead, expressive brown eyes, delicate hands that could write a fine hand in four languages or play the latest songs from Italy on the lute. I smiled, and my solemn expression transformed itself into something more lively, animated with vivacity the way my mother’s had been before my father’s death. A young man like Count Nádasdy might be happy to sit and talk with me. I touched my hands to my hair like I was making a prayer, like I was
protecting myself and all my mother’s hopes for me against what was to follow that day. All my thoughts bent toward making my husband love me, a love fine enough and large enough to protect me from anything the future might bring—wars, illness, famine. None of them would touch me if I could win Ferenc Nádasdy’s love, or at least his admiration.

That evening Darvulia led me down to the dining hall as Orsolya had bidden her. I knew very well where it was, but my mother-in-law made sure I was very rarely alone in her house. The hall was lit at both ends with a bit of gray November light, but I would not let the weather distract me. I put on my sunniest expression, my best face. Some candles had been lit to dispel the gloom, and under their light I could see the figure of András Kanizsay, the wry-mouthed and insignificant cousin, sitting with his boots in the ashes of the fire. He had returned to Bécs not long after my arrival at Sárvár and had grown a little since I had seen him last, a lengthening of leg and arm and a broadening across his shoulders, and it did seem to improve him, make him seem less boyish, less handsome, a new bit of beard tempering the insolence around his mouth. He stood and bowed when I entered. I curtsied as slightly as I could.

Next to him sat a broad-shouldered young man with a shock of black hair and intense black eyes flanking a rather prominent nose, which gave him a look I was always to think of as predatory. A hunting bird, a hawk. His clothes were expensive and yet carelessly put together, rumpled and only half buttoned, as if he could not be bothered with silly matters like dressing for company, but he was especially tall and broad, so that two of me could have fit inside his frame. Next to the smaller, fairer András he was positively ferocious. He didn’t look up when I entered but carried on speaking to Orsolya, who either did not see me enter or did not heed my presence. No one immediately made an effort to introduce us. Orsolya herself sat at the head of the table, her cheeks flushed and pink, her manner lively as she chatted and waved her hands about. I began to suspect that she had not been at all ill from any kind of physical ailment but
had languished for want of her son, and that his appearance had improved not only her spirits but her health. After a moment, she caught my eye and stood with some little bit of aloofness to introduce me to him. “Ferenc,” she said, “I am pleased to present to you Erzsébet Báthory.” Immediately I realized she would not like sharing her son’s attention with me. She was used to being the center of his world.

He greeted me with a nod of his head and a little noise—
ahmmm
—as he cleared his throat and spoke. “Hello,” he said finally. His voice was lower than most young men of his age, as deep as a full-grown man’s, but he seemed to be saddled with more shyness than other young men I’d known, for he had trouble meeting my eyes and looked from my face to the floor and back again, as if we might be expected to tumble into bed together that very moment. “It is a pleasure to meet you at last.”

I would have held out my hand, but he didn’t hold out his. “And I you.”

“I hope we will be friends.”

“I’m sure we shall.” I curtsied low the way Orsolya had taught me. It was all exhaustingly polite.

András remained at Ferenc’s side, but when it was clear that my fiancé had not much more to say to me, his cousin turned to me instead and inquired how I felt. “How is your health?” he said. “Are you likely to swoon again? I’m only asking so I can be ready. It wouldn’t do to let you hit your head on the floor.”

I frowned, trying to think of something to say in return. I didn’t like being teased and was not sure how to treat him. He was not a servant, but he was not a member of the immediate family, either, and he didn’t speak to me with the kind of respect that I was used to from my own small cousins, those from less well-off branches of the family whom I had looked after when I had lived at home. From Darvulia I had learned that András was a distant relative of my mother-in-law who had been taken in by the household after his father had died and his mother’s money had run out. He and Ferenc were being educated
together in Bécs, as was the case with so many cousins of lesser nobility. Now I asked if he didn’t think himself mightily clever, if he thought he was some kind of wit. “Sarcasm,” I said, “usually marks a lack of intellect as well as respect.”

His manner grew faux serious. “I speak only out of genuine concern for your well-being.”

“Oh, of course,” said I. “I recognized your concern the moment I entered the room. It must have been there on the back of your hand, for I saw you studying your nails when I walked through the door. Looking for a bit of horse dung, perhaps, left underneath the quick?”

“So much for your pronouncements against sarcasm.” I colored, but all wryness left his expression as he said that he was pleased to find that I was not the glum little girl who had met him in the courtyard at Sárvár half a year before but a young lady with intelligence and temper. “I had feared,” he said, “that my cousin was marrying a solemn little nun who would plague him into an early grave.”

“I’m pleased that you find me improved,” I said, with as much archness as I could muster. “I wish I could say the same.” András tilted his head and laughed.

Orsolya took her son by the arm and talked of how she had enjoyed the waters of Sárvár recently, when her health did not keep her confined to her bed. Ferenc settled her back into her chair, sitting down beside her to listen dutifully, though I sometimes caught him looking longingly out the window where the snow was beginning to fall, as if he would prefer to be somewhere else. He took no more notice of me. I felt abandoned by them both, my fiancé and my mother-in-law. My hopes, and my heart, sank.

“Don’t mind my cousin,” András said as he held out a chair for me. “Orsolya depends on him, as you can see.”

“Yes,” I answered. “She dotes on him completely.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, though the humorous expression playing around his mouth didn’t quite leave him. “Is it his part you envy, or hers?”

I sighed, feeling the mask of politeness slip a little. “Both, I suppose,” I said at last. “If I’m being truthful.”

András smiled again. “With me, I hope you will always be truthful, cousin.” He picked up my hand and bent his head over it.

I wanted to roll my eyes, thoroughly annoyed at these niceties from the dependent cousin, the sarcastic boy, but I managed to keep my face neutral once more. “Thank you,” was all I said.

All that night Orsolya plagued Ferenc with questions about his tutors and his studies and the people they knew at court, the balls and parties he attended, the friends he had there. Occasionally I would catch a name I knew and chime in with some little bit of news, hoping to impress him with my knowledge of court life and politics the way my mother had once done with her male admirers, but anytime I spoke he would stare for a moment as if I were a pig who had suddenly learned to talk, and then he would turn back to his mother without acknowledging me at all. For the most part I was forced to do nothing more than eat my soup and listen, but sometimes I spoke to András instead. He would ask me this or that question about my studies or my family back home, friends we might have in common, and sometimes he would lean over to explain to me a little background on some story Ferenc was telling his mother about the people at court—the shyness of Archduke Rudolf, lately returned from Spain, the brashness and jealousy of his younger brother, Mátyás, who thought he should have been the heir to the Habsburg throne instead of his introspective older brother. András sat so close to me that I could smell the wine on his breath, feel the warmth of his leg through the thin red silk of my skirt. He leaned in in the middle of some story about the palatine’s horse to tell me how his cousin loved the theater, how he acted in theatricals with the royal family in the Hofburg afternoons when they were done with their lessons. “You should see my cousin in a wig,” he said. “A blond curly wig. He looks like some kind of angry cherub. Like he should be shooting arrows from the roof of the Stephansdom at the sinners below.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “Shh, cousin,” I said. “I’m trying to display my good manners.”

“To the devil with manners,” he said, lifting his glass. “If you were my fiancée, I would pay you more attention, Erzsébet.”

I lowered my head, not wanting him or his cousin to see the expression on my face. He was not my fiancé, nor ever would be. It was not his place to call me by my Christian name, nor criticize anything Ferenc said or did in regard to me. Of course I wished Ferenc would speak to me, but it was not something András should have mentioned, and I couldn’t help thinking of Rudolf and Mátyás, how jealousy had colored what should have been the closeness between brothers. I turned away, sliding my chair ever so slightly away from him, and did not speak to him again for the rest of the evening.