The Countess (39 page)

A rough hand spins me around until I am looking into the red face of Ficzkó, bending toward me, shouting. I cannot hear him. My ears are full of water. He shakes me once, then again, harder. “Countess!” he says, urgent, almost fearful. “The palatine is here. He’s come for us. We must leave now, or else.” He pulls on my arm but my feet are rooted to the ground like old trees, deep into the underground of Csejthe, my home.

In a moment he is gone, Ficzkó, back down the tunnels we came from, toward the manor house, where the palatine’s men are already waiting for him. From the
vár
above come the voices, deep and drowned, the cries of my servants and the girls in the room and the smell of death everywhere. I have never felt so alone. There are soldiers, the shine of metal, and dimly, in the lamplight, I recognize the face of young Zrínyi, the face of young Drugeth, the face of Megyery.

They have betrayed me, then. The face of Thurzó himself coming toward me, swimming toward me, his deep-set eyes, his unhandsome, disloyal mouth, ordering his men to unchain the girls. How could I ever have loved him? How could I have shared my bed with him, he who loved no one except himself?

Arrest her, he says, pointing at me, and the guards come closer with their hands on their swords, and I drop my whip—my hands are numb—and the men are coming toward me, shouting, but the palatine stands back in the darkness, away from me, he will not look at me, but on his face—I will swear it to my dying day—I see his mouth turn up in a smile.

August 20, 1614

Outside my tower walls Csejthe has stilled in the heat of another summer, the hawks turning slowly in the air to search for mice in the fields, long black snakes sunning themselves on bare rock below, curled there like question marks. There are tracks in the dust outside my tower, the cloven footprint of the devil himself, whose stamping impatient feet I hear again and again beyond my door. I will meet him soon enough. The guards bring me my daily tray of food, and whatever letters come to me from the world outside, and complain that the rooms are too close and too hot, though I am always cold. “Look,” I tell them. “Look how chill my hands are. Look at how I freeze.” They only shrug and go away again.

More than three years I have traced the patterns of light on the walls as spring turns to summer, summer to winter. The summer solstice has passed, but these are still among the shortest nights of the year. The air coming through my window turns sodden with the scent of rain, but still I can see little outside except the hills that roll away from me, toward Poland, toward Moravia, toward the world I will never see again.

Once a week the guards bring me fresh clothes, and each time I beg them for a mirror. A little piece of mirror, I ask, so that I might look on a friendly face at least once before I die. Today one of them brought me a broken shard with jagged edges, a fragment left behind in some corner of the keep. The weight of the mirror in my hand makes me a bit calmer. I often found something soothing in a mirror, in the lines of my countenance, which changed throughout a long lifetime from the round, pink-cheeked flush of youth to the firm clear lines of maturity. My visage has been my constant companion these
many years, even as family and friends have failed me, or love turned to disappointment.

When I look in the mirror now my hair is wild and streaked through with more gray than I remember, especially at the temples. Unbound, without the pearls I always wore in it, it falls in waves to my waist, looking heavy and rough as a horse’s tangled mane. My normally pale skin is marred by dark, ashen pockets that have sprung up under my eyes and in the hollows at my temples, and between my brows a crease has developed from sleeplessness and worry. At the corners of my eyes webs of lines grow deeper, making me look like an ancient crone who has spent her life herding goats in the hot sun instead of a noblewoman of fifty-four who has cared for her beauty like a monk with a cherished icon. How quickly beauty spoils, how final is its demise. I put the mirror away again carefully, shaking my head. I do not want to weep, not here, in front of my jailers. There will be plenty of time for that later.

I undress. Exposed, my body is a thing I do not recognize. The skin at my belly, stretched from the pregnancies and births of six children, hangs under my navel, webbed with white stretch marks and so loose I can gather it in my two hands. My breasts hang limp and empty as wineskins, and the flesh at my neck is crumpled, mottled red and brown, my feet calloused and tough. Up and down my legs are spidery veins, blue and green, that divide my new self from the old like borders drawn on old maps, conquered by time and indifference.

I put on the clean clothes, but they hang loose from my shoulders and gape open at my wrists. I have grown thin in the past three years, fed on porridge and fatty meat, bits of undercooked pork or overaged cheese, the sour wine left behind in the cellars. It is as difficult to take pleasure in food as it is to take pleasure in breathing. It is just as well you do not come to me. I wish you could see me as I once was, Pál—my cheeks pink and blooming, my bosom plump over the tightly laced waistcoat, my hair glossy with health, my smile as sure
of a man’s love as any woman ever was. Now my skirt hangs about my waist because there are no ladies to tie the cords, nor are there ladies to iron the lace frills of a new collar into stiff little points, to serve my face upon it like a platter, as my mother’s ladies once did for her. I do the best I can with the ties but still nothing fits properly. I push the sleeves up my wrists, bunch the blouse under the waistcoat. When I am dressed, I take a moment to rub sweet almond oil into my hands, my face. A little berry juice on my lips and cheeks gives them a little of the old life back, rose and cream. A few drops of ink help to cover the streaks of gray at my temples. When I look in the mirror again, I see a little of the Erzsébet who arrived at the house in Sárvár as a new bride, who danced with Thurzó in the moonlit halls of Bécs. I touch my face, feeling the old bones under the flesh. I once laughed at the vanity of women of forty and fifty who wore cosmetics to balls and parties, who whitened their ruddy old skin with lead, but now I know such salves are not disguises for old crones who wish to catch a young husband. Instead they are only a mask we wear so that we can, for a little while, still recognize ourselves.

Now that my nephew Gábor is dead—murdered in Transylvania by his own men—the palatine will no longer have any reason to think of me at all. I am no more use to him now in my prison tower, just another old woman with failing health, hands that ache from cold even in the hottest days of summer. What my mother said to me long ago was true, that a woman who does not marry is at the mercy of the world, but equally powerless is a widow with a young son, a widow hidden away in a forgotten corner of the house, a relic from an earlier age. When you are a man, when you are old enough to understand what I have written in these pages, I hope you will remember your old mother and how she loved you, Pál, what she sacrificed for you.

Kata has promised to visit soon, but she is expecting again, and naturally she is afraid to travel far in her condition. It does not seem likely I will see her before the snow flies in the winter, and if not
then, then not until the roads between Pozsony and Csejthe clear in the spring. The worst news, however, is that after her latest miscarriage, Anna has taken to her bed, and though the doctors come to her again and again nothing seems to improve her spirits. Miklós writes to let me know how she is doing, for the poor girl cannot even hold a pen herself. I know that if I could only go to her, I could nurse her to health again. I worry for her. She is still young and could be happy, but the death of the child has blighted her spirit, and she withers as much as her old mother does in her prison tower. I fear I have not been fair to Anna and left her without the resources she might have needed to weather this storm. But there is no turning back now, nor, perhaps, should there be. The sins of one’s youth need only be repented once, as my guest Rev. Zacharias tells me during his visits. “For God’s mercy is everlasting,” he says. I don’t tell him that even if God forgives you, you do not forgive yourself. You live in your sorrow like a room of mirrors that reflects on and on to eternity.

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.

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).