The Countess (6 page)

My father, who loved me above all his children, first insisted that I was too young to be betrothed to anyone. “She should be at least twelve before we decide,” he said, and cut a pleading look at his wife. But my mother, who knew that the young Nádasdy boy was heir not only of his father’s name and title and political goodwill but his mother’s vast Kanizsay fortune, took my father aside. The deal should be struck, she told him, before the groom’s eye—or more important, his mother’s—roamed elsewhere. So while my mother took me back upstairs, confused and relieved, Orsolya and my father struck a rich bargain: his daughter for her son, and a dowry of so much gold it could hardly be counted, so many castles and villages they could hardly be named, from one end of Upper Hungary to the
other. The Báthorys and the Nádasdys would be united in marriage, in name and in blood. It would be, they thought, the beginning of a new dynasty, one that would rival the Habsburgs themselves. For two families with aspirations to independence—to a new line that would free Hungary of the Habsburgs in the west, of the Turks in the east—nothing could have been sweeter.

For myself, I understood little of what was happening in the library that afternoon. It was only later that my strange audience with Orsolya made sense to me, and I wondered again and again what would have happened that day if I had refused to climb out of bed when my mother came in that morning, if I had spoken to Orsolya like a fishwife and not the respectful daughter of a nobleman. After what my mother had told me about finding a husband to love me for my beauty, I never imagined that it would be my dowry that made the bargain, my family name and connections, my good manners and potential children. I knew only that I had passed some kind of test, and I was pleased because my mother was pleased with me. That night Orsolya and my parents toasted to the bargain, holding up glasses of my father’s best wine and signing their names to the paper that decided my fate, while upstairs in my bed I dreamed of gypsy music, of moonlight, of a great red jewel that hung low in the sky, always just out of my reach.

The bad luck the gypsy promised did not come until a few years afterward, but when it did, it did its work swiftly and left my family forever changed. What happened was that my father died suddenly, of a heart seizure that took him while he was dining with my mother in the evening, late, not long after Christmas. He had only picked at
his food all night, complaining of heartburn, and was standing up to go to his bed when he slumped forward and hit his head on the table with such force that my mother, for many years afterward, insisted it was this injury that killed him and not the seizing of his old and soft heart. When he hit the floor—I heard the old steward swear it, the one who witnessed the whole thing—he was already dead.

I was reading to the little girls in another part of the house and heard my mother’s cry, a sharp sound like the one the pigs made when their throats were slit. I went running toward it. Klára asked, “What was that, Erzsébet? What?” as she grabbed at my skirts, but I was already ahead of her, rushing away.

I reached my mother before anyone else, saw her slumped across my father’s body on the floor, an overturned wineglass dripping red onto her white sleeves. I threw myself on her, thinking she had been hurt. I could not yet see my father’s face, but my mother’s eyes were closed, her mouth open as if she were trying to speak. The house was in an uproar, servants coming from everywhere to witness the commotion or to try to help, my mother’s ladies swarming, the ancient steward helplessly picking at the bits of glass that had spread across the floor. With a greater strength than I had ever possessed I pulled my mother off my father and pinched her face, her hands, trying to get her to see me. Her skin in my fingers was cold and clammy.
“Anyu!”
I cried, calling for my mother even as the servants dragged me back, my legs beating at the air.

Finally it was my brother, István—appearing slowly on the scene as if he had known, even then, that he was already the lord of the manor—who told me at last to stop acting like a madwoman, that our mother was fine but our father was beyond our help. “He’s dead,” said my brother, poking our father’s body with one long finger as if testing the temperature of an undesirable dish on the dinner table. “Look.”

I stopped crying and gathered myself, brushing off the hands of the servants who were restraining me, breathing slowly until I felt calm again. It was true—all the color had drained from my father’s
large pink face, his eyes wide open and staring as if at an apparition that had come for him in the last moment, and I wondered if there could not be any peace in death, despite what the priests and my mother and father had so often insisted, no reunion of the dead with the dead, and for many nights afterward I could not sleep, thinking of the look on my father’s face, thinking that perhaps there was no heaven waiting for us at all, nor hell either, but only other spirits, neither good nor evil, that came in the last moments to carry our souls away.

The old women said they would take care of my mother and father, carry my mother to her bed and my father to the winding-sheet. “Take the little ones up to bed,” they said, so that was what I did. I gathered Klára and Zsofía to me, the three of us huddled on top of the blankets all night, waiting for our mother to come in, to comfort us in our sorrow. My sisters’ small damp hands kept touching my face all through the night, as if making sure I lived and breathed.

We buried him a month later in the family vault, on a cold bright morning after a heavy snow, our breath stolen from us as we walked behind his corpse to the church, so that it looked like our souls, too, were being torn away. My mother had been forcibly dressed and removed from her bed by her ladies. She could barely walk and had to be supported by István, clutching at his jacket and wrapping her arms around his neck. Her hair kept straggling out of its net, and her fine pale skin was blotchy and haggard. I thought she was making a terrible spectacle of herself and shrank in embarrassment for all the guests and other mourners to see her so undone, so undignified.

Before long the procession made it inside the church. I had been told by the nurse that it was my job to keep the little girls quiet at least through the service. Think of your father, she said, and how you would want him remembered. I did as she bade me. As we took our seats I fingered the hidden sweets in my pockets—sugared dates, Klára’s favorite treat, swiped from the kitchen that morning. At eight years old, Zsofía was really too old to bribe, old enough to behave herself in church at least, but at only three years old Klára could not
be trusted to be quiet and would need to be paid off in sugar. Zsofía would whine if she saw Klára get something she herself did not, so I had brought enough for both of them. I could hear them chewing as the priest began his service.

The bier on which my father lay was strewn with pine boughs and mistletoe and sprinkled with droplets of fragrant oils to cover the smell that was beginning to emanate from it, a smell somehow sweet and sickening, like an uncured animal skin left too long in the sun. I couldn’t connect the smell or the frozen corpse on the bier to my father, the man who had danced with my mother the night of the gypsy ball. I half expected him to come up behind me and lift me under the arms and place me on his shoulders as he used to do when he felt jolly or had been drinking, or both. It was a mistake, I felt, to have his funeral without him.

I kept looking to István, to see what he would do, but I was seated behind him, since he was my father’s heir and my mother’s confidant, and I could not see his face nor gauge what he was thinking while the service was beginning. In the days since my father’s death I had rarely seen my brother, not even in passing in the halls or at mealtimes. My family was becoming alien to me, strange without my father there at its center to hold us all together. That morning the back of my brother’s head and the shoulders of his black fur-trimmed cloak were damp with melting snow, and I could smell his familiar scent of hay and warm skin, but I felt as far from him as I did from the dead man on the bier. Suddenly my father was dead and my brother was the lord of Ecsed, in title if not in authority. Already I could see how my mother had started to depend on him, asking his advice on the funeral service and conferring with him for long hours over the eulogy and burial. He grew more solemn than usual, spent hours on his knees in prayers in the chapel of the estate, or behind the locked door of his room, scribbling away on bits of paper. At sixteen he was five years older than me and had reached his majority. He would assume my father’s titles, and leave the children’s court to me and
to the little girls to become a real lord and master rather than a play one, and no amount of begging would persuade him otherwise. István was taking our father’s place, and I my mother’s, as the guardian and protector of the little girls and the myriad younger cousins who tumbled in and out of the house at Ecsed. István and I were children no longer. What my mother had said long ago was true, that the fate of the family belonged to us now.

I willed my brother to turn around, to turn and look at me, to smile or speak a word of comfort as he had always done. But his back was straight, his narrow shoulders even. He could not read my thoughts, no matter how much I wished it.

The pastor was saying that my father was a man of tremendous learning and nobility, a great lord and statesman, that Hungary had lost one of its most valuable treasures and the Báthory family its greatest hero. “His name will ring for a thousand generations,” the pastor said, his face appropriately grave. At one point István looked back at me and rolled his eyes, and for that moment he was still the István I remembered and loved. I had to suppress the laugh that came up, covering my face with my hands as if to hide my tears, my shoulders shaking, and then I was ashamed, because I had loved my father and wanted to mourn him properly. Zsofía crowded in close to comfort me, and I let her. In the front row, next to István, my mother’s back was as straight as a poker and just as unyielding, though I knew she had spent most of the last month prostrate with mourning. When the service was over, István, the new lord of the manor, took her arm and led her back to the sled, the little girls and I following close behind. My mother’s feet left deep prints in the snow, and as I walked I stepped into them one by one, to make the going easier.

A few weeks after my father’s death, Orsolya Kanizsay wrote to my mother asking if I might be sent to her house at Sárvár, where she would welcome me into the family as a daughter and finish my education as I adjusted to life among the Nádasdys. At eleven years old I would be sent away to be raised as a proper young lady, a highborn wife for Countess Nádasdy’s only child. My mother called me into her room one evening to give me Orsolya’s letter to read. The greeting alone took up nearly an entire page:

I saw the cramped, uncertain hand of a woman who had come to her education late in life, after her marriage, the awkwardly formal inflections and errors in grammar and thought that even at eleven years old I knew were the mark of an inferior mind. The words seemed kindly at least, thanking my mother in warm tones for the generosity of the dowry and for the honor of joining the house of Báthory to the house of Nádasdy, a union that would benefit both families and the country, and so on and so on. If my mother agreed to the arrangements, she wrote, she would send a carriage for me within the month.

I handed the letter back to my mother, assuming she would not consider sending me away so soon after my father’s death. Girls in those days usually did not marry until fifteen or sixteen, and I had thought, after the documents were signed at the time of the gypsy ball, I would have at least five or six years at home still with my mother and father, my brother, and my little sisters before my marriage to the Nádasdy boy, in the far western part of the kingdom where I was unlikely to see them often. Though it was not unusual for girls to be sent to their mothers-in-law long before the wedding, I had always assumed that my own mother would not want me so far away from her, that I would be permitted to remain home for a while longer still.

When I said this to my mother—that I was honored, but preferred to remain home for the intervening years between that moment and the actual date of the marriage—she looked away. “Very well,” she said. “I will write to her and tell her you wish to stay at home for a little while longer.” Then she lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes, asking me to shut the door as I went out.

This I did, reluctantly. My mother had never taken well to my father’s absences, when he would travel on matters of business or politics, and after my father’s death she spent her life in bed, rarely sleeping or eating but unable to rise and face the world. She was not made for widowhood. Where other women might see the freedom that comes with the death of a husband—the release from duty and possession, the authority that comes from being a powerful widow and a landowner in her own right—my mother saw only the end of everything. It was as if she had died along with my father, for she was not the same afterward, rarely lighthearted or smiling, and the parties and balls that she and my father had so often hosted at Ecsed came to an abrupt end. She still had her immense wealth and beauty, but my father had written his will such that if she did remarry, she would lose the right to raise her children, a not-uncommon practice among the nobility of my father’s acquaintance and temper but a difficult one to stomach for a woman like my mother. He did not want to see his children subjected to the whims of a stepfather, perhaps, or maybe he simply knew my
mother’s nature and wanted to keep her in thrall to his memory—to keep her his, body and soul, until the end of her life. Whatever his reasons, my mother was not permitted to remarry. György Báthory’s widow she was, and György Báthory’s widow she would remain.