The Countess (21 page)

András married Griseldis, and then he fathered children with her.
His fine masculine form and Griseldis’s golden beauty made for lovely children—downy-limbed, jewel-eyed children, five daughters in eight years, all healthy, all living. God’s blessing on their union, everyone said. Everyone except me. Whenever I saw my cousin with her gaggle of unruly brats, I searched their faces for a hint of my own vanished little one, wondering what she would look like now, and their small faces would seem to turn into hers, though I knew it was preposterous. My baby had had my darker coloring, my distinctive Báthory nose. She would not look like these half siblings at all. She was mine in memory, mine in beauty and temperament, and there she would remain.

So when your sister Anna was born at last, in the fall of 1585, on a bright warm day, it was as if the sun had come out on all our hopes. A child would guarantee our futures, your father’s and mine, and let us forget the regrets of the past.

The labor was difficult—I had been ill for much of my pregnancy, and my strength was sapped to the end—but Darvulia sat by my side along with the doctor Ferenc had brought from Grác to tend to me. When the babe’s strong wail broke the heat, your father burst into the room and clasped it to his breast, still wet and waxy. “A girl,” he said. To mask his disappointment he declared her the most beautiful child who had ever been born, a future queen, the comfort of our old age. He touched one fingertip to her downy lip and handed her immediately back to me. He was not unkind, but bewildered, as if he did not know what to do with her. “As for a son,” he said, “we can always try again later.”

The night my sister Klára had been born, my father had sat in the hall and put his head in his hands and wept. Now I cradled my own child in my arms. Our little daughter had my mother’s black-and-white beauty, as if my dead mother were staring back at me, softly blinking. The baby turned her head and nuzzled me, and when I didn’t immediately open my shift and put her to my breast, she opened her small pink rosebud of a mouth and emitted a piercing scream. I handed her to the wet nurse, a widow named Ilona Jó whom I had brought to tend the child. She was my own age, twenty-five, but already she was old in
spirit, a thin, humorless woman in gray homespun who spooked like a feral cat whenever I spoke to her. Her husband had died of cholera the previous winter, and her own baby daughter, recently weaned, lived now with her grandmother in a small village outside Thurzó’s estate at Tokaj. Thurzó’s wife, Zsofía Forgách—whom I counted as a dear friend, my companion at balls and parties in Pozsony, in Bécs—had sent her highly recommended.

Ilona Jó—bone thin from nursing, but with thick heavy wrists like a man’s—opened her blouse and set the child to her breast. The baby latched on and began to suck, her strong little mouth taking in the milk greedily. “Her name is Anna,” said Ferenc, “for your mother.” I watched her suckle at the breast of the nurse, her little hands kneading at the other woman’s bare skin, and felt a strong fist of grief squeeze the air from me. No noblewoman of my rank would stoop to nursing her child, but I could not help but feel sorrow that once again I had given my daughter away at the moment of her birth, even if it was only to a wet nurse, and a dour and ugly one at that. I began to weep, a slow, steady rolling that divided my face, separating me from myself. Ferenc sat on the bed and embraced me. “Don’t worry, my love,” he said, and kissed my brow. “You did well. You will do even better the next time.” I didn’t tell him I hardly dared to hope for a next time, that I felt I was cursed to lose all my children as punishment for the one whom I had given away.

After Anna we had Orsika, then Katalin, a passel of beautiful daughters who filled up our house and our days with their bright voices, their small hands, and their swift little feet. Anna, whose looks continued to favor my mother as she grew up, was a quick learner and
walked before her first birthday, though she was a wary child who would cling to Ilona Jó even after she had been weaned, gazing at me with distrust in her lovely little black eyes, especially when I would not give her the toy she asked for or the special sweet she thought she deserved. I often had the feeling that she had judged me and found me wanting, as I myself felt I was wanting. I was hurt that she didn’t love me as I had loved my own mother, so unconditionally, but did not know what I could do to earn it.

Orsika looked like her namesake, my mother-in-law, her little bow of a mouth and her arching eyebrows giving her a look of permanent surprise, but she was an active, affectionate child who would climb into my lap or her father’s as easily as the wet nurse’s. Even Darvulia, whom the other children feared, she treated like a favorite aunt. Outgoing, with a natural charm that her older sister could never possess, Orsika was followed two years later by Katalin, the sickly one, whose constant toothaches and colds meant long nights for myself and Darvulia as we treated this or that illness with philters down her throat and poultices on her chest. She often needed to see the surgeon for a rotting tooth and clung to me like the devil when he drew near, clawing at my neck when the old man brought his burning iron into her mouth to cauterize the wound. I hated to hold her down to let him do his work, because it reminded me of my own days with the doctors who had tried to cure me of childlessness, but I tried to soothe her with kisses and promises beforehand and tears and medicine afterward, giving her a bit of brandy so she would not suffer so greatly. Perhaps as a result of this constant attention, Kata was the most loving of my daughters, the most likely to call for me in the middle of the night or climb into my bed. I used to call her my little parasite, since I could barely walk down the halls of Sárvár or Csejthe without her clinging to my leg, begging to be picked up. She was always in my things—my mirrors and brushes, my clothes and books. The love I sometimes had trouble feeling for her older sister, the mistrustful child, I had no problem lavishing on little Kata.

Yet after all these blessings, still your father hoped for a boy. At
every visit home he came to my bed to try for an heir who would bear the Nádasdy name. At the birth of each daughter he did his best to rejoice, but I could always sense the hole in the middle of his happiness. Ferenc would cradle each child and declare her even more beautiful than the last, while saying there was always the next time. His hope was so deeply felt, so rooted within the man he was, that nothing I said would dissuade him. I would do my best to give him a son.

In the winter of our twentieth year of marriage, when I was already thirty-five, I felt the signs of impending motherhood in me once more—the listlessness, the need for sleep, the hatred of food and strong light and unusual smells. I let Darvulia fuss and fret over me for months while the child grew within me, taking her teas for my stomach, her lotions to keep my skin supple while it stretched taut as a fermenting wineskin. Ferenc was away those months commanding his army and didn’t see me during the whole of my pregnancy, though he wrote often to inquire how I was feeling and if I needed doctors sent to me to be certain the new child came safely into the world. As a veteran of four labors I didn’t fear childbirth and settled in to wait for the child’s arrival with the greatest anticipation that this time Ferenc would have his longed-for son.

By my calculation the child was due in mid-September, but my pains began one night in early August, in the midst of a drought that wilted the crops in the fields and the grapes on the vine. It was a terrible time in Sárvár. A hot wind was blowing that year from Constantinople, bringing with it the news of war as well as the stinking breath of the plague. Some of the servants had caught the disease, and though Darvulia had them quarantined in a storeroom outside the walls of the estate, it was too late to keep it out of Sárvár entirely. During a few bad weeks in July and August, the bells of the church tolled endlessly for the victims of the contagion. The burning of bodies went on day and night, the wind blowing the stench into the windows and walls no matter how tightly we nailed the shutters closed. I put Darvulia in charge of managing the estate for me, which she did
tolerably well, though once or twice she had to take the whip to this or that maidservant who shirked her duty, or send away some blubbering fool who had got herself with child. For myself, I kept to my bed, so hot and uncomfortable as the child moved within me that I could not sleep day or night.

The baby arrived on a night of thunder and hot rain, and when Darvulia caught him and told me we had our son at last, I cradled him in my arms and wept for joy. Ferenc had written that if the child were a boy, he should be named after his paternal grandfather, and so this is what I did. Tamás was small, smaller than any of his sisters had been, a little scrawny thing with yellowish skin and delicate features, frail little arms and legs like green willow twigs, but I was relieved still. Everything we had would be safe now that there was a Nádasdy boy to protect it—his sisters, myself.

The babe did well at first, sucking his milk greedily, his skin growing pinker every day. His sister Orsika especially loved to hold him and would beg to be allowed to cradle him for a few minutes, stroking his soft cheek with one of her tiny fingers. The child lifted all our spirits.

Eventually the closeness and confinement began to wear on all of us. Ilona Jó and the dry nurse who tended the older children, an enormous brute of a woman named Dorottya Szentes, were always angling for my favor, snapping at each other over which of them would get to place a cool cloth on my head, which would massage my swollen feet. Both were afraid of Darvulia. Whenever my friend came into the room, the other two women would find employment in sewing or cleaning, in distracting the children or changing the baby. I knew they respected me as the lady of the house, but Darvulia they feared. They feared the creak of the wood under her soles, the low rich notes of her voice, so like a man’s. The long black-and-silver hairs that fell sometimes from the tangle she kept at the back of her head, and which would sometimes pop up on pieces of clothing or blankets, they would scoop up and throw into the fire like a couple of superstitious old witches. But little Tamás was doing well, and my
strength was returning. We expected the contagion to pass any day, so I decided to say nothing of their ignorance when we were all so close and hot and tired of looking at one another.

One day the baby was fussing more than usual, so that I thought he had soiled himself, but when I opened the diaper I saw it—a hard little bump in his groin announcing the beginning of the plague. In a day or two his face was black with it. Darvulia gave him a drink of something that smelled vile and which she said might halt the advancement of the disease, but a few hours later he was dead. Little Orsika—the one who had so loved her brother and doted on him—followed a few days later, her beautiful pale skin bruised a terrible black. I held her in my arms when she took her last rattling breaths and cursed God that ever I had been born a woman. Only Darvulia could pry the child from my hands and take her stiff little body to the cellars to dress her for the grave.

The other two—Ilona Jó, Dorka—whispered that Darvulia had something to do with their deaths, that she had put a spell on the children. I saw them with their heads together and heard their whispers. Darvulia did it, they said. The mistress should send her away before she kills the other children. Those crones, clawing at my own children like two wolves with a flock of lambs—how hateful they were to me, how coarse and vulgar, how much I hated them in that moment, when they turned on Darvulia. I flew at them in a fury, my hands like birds’ talons. No one, I said, was to speak ill of Darvulia in my presence, Darvulia who for years had been my closest companion, Darvulia whom I loved as much as ever I loved my own mother. She had done everything she could to save my poor babies, I said, and the other two would do well to remember it. Get out of my sight, I said. The women went muttering from my presence, throwing distrustful glances behind them at Darvulia, at me. When they were gone, it was quiet, at least.

Like my own mother after my father’s death, I took to my bed, but I didn’t weep for my dead ones. I stared at the mirror on the far wall, at the wild-haired, squint-eyed madwoman who stared back at
me. How would I explain this to Ferenc—the plague coming into our house, and taking our son and little daughter with it, and so quickly, too? Rage and grief strained inside me, threatening always to burst free. The servant girl who left wet spots on the floor of my room, so that Kata slipped and bumped her head against a table, I thrashed with the heavy end of a candlestick, keeping my blows to the arms and legs the way Ferenc had taught me so that she might endure a longer beating. The cook who burned the fine piece of salted fish someone sent as a gift I whipped in the courtyard until her blood spattered my white blouse and I had to change into a new one. The servants shrank at the sound of my voice, rushing away at my footfalls in the halls and the courtyards, but I didn’t care. They were worse than useless, nothing but lazy whores who ate my food and gossiped about me and rutted like dogs when my back was turned, letting disease and death into my house. They cared nothing, nothing for the sufferings of me and my children. Let them all be damned, if I must be.

I had Darvulia bring my two living children in to me, as my own mother had once done, and cradled them close, whether they wanted to be with me or not. Anna especially didn’t seem to know what to make of me in my grief. She made herself small in my arms, cringing as if she blamed me for what had happened to her brother and sister and could not bear my touch. Kata, only three years old herself, seemed not to notice and went about her baby business still, bringing me items from my dressing table to play with, showing me her puppets, picking up my hands and kissing them with her little bow-shaped mouth. “Where is Orsika?” she asked, and I pulled her to me but could hardly feel her in my arms, could not smell her baby smell, for she kept turning into someone else. Orsika. Tamás. The other daughter, the vanished one. I saw strange visions of a horse on its back birthing a human child, a dark-haired child with a mustache and fear in its voice.
Save me
, it said. I clutched at Kata until she whimpered, and Anna snatched her sister away and kept her from me until Darvulia threatened to lock her in the cellars with the bats if she did not start obeying her mother, whose heart was broken. Don’t
you see your mother needs you now? she asked, and Anna came back to me, reluctant, and settled herself near me on the bed, her lovely black eyes full of distrust.