The Countess (8 page)

I could not speak for fear of weeping. Somehow the servant girls got me dressed in a new skirt and blouse, picking the straw out of my hair and rebraiding it, but all I could see was poor little Klára who sat on a chair with her dark eyes brimming, asking if the man was coming to take me away. I stood up and kissed her. “Yes, my love,” I said. “But not right away. We still have a few days together.”

My little sister collapsed in a fit of tears, at which my mother threw up her hands and declared me impossible. “Why would you tell her such things, when you know it will only make her cry?”

A few minutes later I joined my mother and brother in the courtyard of the house and waited for the door to the carriage to open. The horses heaved and sweated in the sunlight, but the inside of the carriage remained shadowed, so that I could not see clearly who was inside. Imre Megyery would not officially arrive until I stood there myself to welcome him. Finally I took my place, and at some appointed signal the door opened.

“Erzsébet Báthory?”

“I am Erzsébet.”

A tall gentleman, pale and froglike, with enormous bulging eyes and long, tapering fingers with small pads of fat at the tips, stepped through the door of the carriage and planted his feet like a sultan in the grassy courtyard. He was young, perhaps no more than twenty-five, but his reddish-blond hair was thin on his head already, and his beard was thick and coarse, a darker red than the hair on his head, as if his face and his scalp were competing for ugliness. I could hardly have said what I was expecting, except that it was not this reptile. He reached out one of his white hands to stroke my hair and my cheek. “She is indeed a pretty child,” he said, to no one in particular, and I had to keep myself from recoiling. “I am Imre Megyery, Count Nádasdy’s cousin, come to welcome you to my mistress’s house.”

“But we aren’t yet in your mistress’s house,” I said, “we are in my father’s. I welcome you to Ecsed and hope you will enjoy the break in your long journey while you are with us.”

“Well said,” Megyery answered. “My mistress will be glad to welcome you to her family.”

My mother smiled at the exchange of formalities, relieved that I didn’t embarrass her at this most crucial moment, that I remembered my place and fell into the role appointed for me. I have always known the role I was meant to play and could play it when it suited me, or when I knew I must, such as I did that day when I followed my brother and Megyery into the mouth of the castle at Ecsed, my home for only a few days more.

I watched the countess’s man closely over those few days, trying to surmise what I could of my future husband’s demeanor from his cousin’s face. Megyery was known as “the Red” due to the distinctive color of his beard, my mother had told me, but such a name suited a warrior, not this tadpole bowing and scraping to do the countess’s bidding. He was much reviled by my mother’s female servants, who deemed him too ugly even to sleep with. “So ugly,” said one, in a whisper that did not take my presence into account, “that even the vultures would spit him back out.” I too had to suppress the urge to laugh at his stiff and formal demeanor when we sat at supper, or walked in the garden, or read in the evenings by candlelight. He was interested in everything I touched—what I was reading, what I was wearing, how I tended to the younger children—and had comments for me on all of them.

Once he was present when Klára came to me begging for something to eat, some little thing to quiet her stomach until suppertime. Our suppers had been later since Megyery’s arrival, on account of the elaborate nature of the meals my mother had ordered. Klára, who was not yet four, had found it especially difficult waiting an extra hour or so until the cooks had finished, so when she came to me that afternoon I went out to the kitchen and found her some dried dates, which she stuffed in her mouth until she could barely talk.
Megyery, who had been reading by himself in my father’s leather chair, frowned at what he must have seen as my indulgence of my sister’s whims.

“Is something the matter?” I asked.

“No, my dear,” he said, with the barest hint of kindness, and for a moment he seemed to go back to his reading. Then he looked up again, setting the book on his knee. “I was thinking that a little hunger wouldn’t harm the child. Countess Nádasdy never gave Ferenc a sweet so soon before dinner. She would say it might spoil his appetite.”

His hand was settled still on the book, as if he expected me to thank him for his officiousness in telling me how to manage my charges. “The countess sounds like a very wise lady,” I said, biting off every word. “I only hope that someday I can be as learned as she.”

At this he brightened at once, picking up his book and going back to his reading. “I’m sure you will be.”

I said nothing else. Megyery was Orsolya’s man, and she would surely hear reports of everything I said and did. My brother and mother had both taken the trouble to warn me that if I got off on the wrong foot with Orsolya my life at Sárvár would be a difficult one. Considering the man whom she had sent to me as her representative, I didn’t doubt them at all. So I held my tongue and pulled Klára out of the room after me, where we might continue unseen by Megyery until suppertime.

When the day came for my departure, the courtyard filled with servants and friends and family to see me off. My small cousins were there, and my sisters. The little girls wept. My mother was there, too, her heart-shaped face shining with tears at the solemnity of this event, the leaving of her eldest daughter. The sight of her standing in the courtyard in her elegant black mourning dress trimmed in gold braid, her hair piled on her head and fastened with pearl-encrusted combs for the occasion, sobered me immediately, for I knew she thought we might never see each other again, and it was this image she was presenting to me to remember her by. Truly I was leaving
Ecsed forever. She embraced me, and I received her blessing, her hands resting on top of my hair. “Be a kind and dutiful daughter to Countess Nádasdy,” she said, not missing one last opportunity for a lesson. “Give her no reason to send you home again.” Then I kissed the little girls good-bye, and my brother. I put my arms around István’s neck, and he embraced me too, kissing me like he had the day he played the pasha and I the pasha’s harem, his expression curious, as if he were seeing me for the first time. The little girls cried and begged to go with me. I wondered when, or if, I would see any of them again.

I felt very alone as the countess’s steward helped me up into the carriage before him and ordered the horses to start. Then I was waving good-bye to Ecsed, to the marsh where the dragon had roared, to the herons and frogs, to the litter of puppies barking in the straw, to my pony with its braided mane. I was moving forward, into my new life, into my future as a wife, a mother, a countess. The willow trees swayed in the wind as we passed, and a few tears fell onto the lap of my skirt. I vowed to try to love the countess and her son, but I would not let them change me or transform me into someone I was not. The hills and trees moved past me, the green tops of the wheat swaying in the wind. I would not be like the wheat, bending to any little breeze. I would be like the rocks and the hills, firm and unyielding in all things, even if I never saw my mother or my brother or my sisters again, even if I forgot my home, my language, my upbringing, the love of my mother and father, the beating of my own heart. I would live my life among strangers, and I would remember myself. I would never let them alter me.

There is a saying I learned as a child:
Extra Hungariam non est vita et si est vita, non est ita
, which means, “Beyond Hungary there is no life, and if there is life, it is not the same.” To me, the familiar world of Ecsed was all of Hungary that existed.

In the carriage I dried my tears. The life I was driving toward would be mine, my own life on my own terms, even if it was not the same as the one I had known.

It took almost two weeks to reach my mother-in-law’s house at Sárvár by carriage, weeks in which we sometimes climbed over mountain passes and had to get out and walk to spare the horses, or through low marshes where the wheels often stuck in the mud and needed to be pulled free, but most often through valleys of cultivated fields—fields of wheat and rye, of grapevines, of hay stacked to dry in the sun in two-legged bundles. We passed through ancient villages where statues of the madonna and child still stood in public squares, their feet strewn with flowers, villages where children came out to watch the procession of carriages wind through the center of town, shouting and chasing us for a little way. Sometimes I leaned out of the window to wave like an empress while they clapped and cheered, despite Megyery’s stern disapproval.

Because of the possibility of impropriety in sending a man to escort her future daughter to the house at Sárvár, my mother-in-law had in addition sent a woman named Anna Darvulia, a servant, as my chaperone. She was a tiny creature, fearsome despite her simple clothing, with small glittering black eyes and a few white chin whiskers that gave her a fierce, badgerish look. She wore her impressive tangle of thick black hair in a knot bound at the base of her neck and spoke only when spoken to, in a voice as deep as a man’s. On the first day of our journey I asked her how old she was, and she fixed me with those strange animal eyes and said she guessed at least twenty-three. “No one knows for certain,” she said. “My mother never told me.” What had happened to her mother? I was afraid to ask. Perhaps Darvulia was a gypsy or a Turk in disguise, or at the very least a
táltos
, a shaman born with six fingers or a full set of teeth. I kept trying to get a clear look at her hands, but I could see no hint of
extra fingers. She had a way of holding herself, when she chose, that gave the impression of great strength and fortitude, as if she were waiting for the right time to throw off the roughness of her disguise and reveal the spellbound princess trapped within, although I had also seen her on several occasions stoop and deliberately make herself look sickly and old, a useful skill when asking for help from one of the soldiers in lifting a heavy trunk or buying bread from women in a rural village. Unlike Megyery, she seemed not at all interested in what I was reading or wearing or doing. After our first conversation, I worried for a time I had said something to offend her and racked my memory for what it could be, though except for asking her her age, I had said nothing other than hello the day we left on the road to Sárvár. For some reason, I very much wanted her to like me.

Besides the carriage in which I rode, our entourage included several carts carrying my dowry: chests of gold forints, silver basins, gilt and silver candelabra, ancient portraits of Báthory ancestors, my fine clothes and jewels. My mother-in-law had spared no expense in hiring enough soldiers to protect the wealth traversing the countryside, and we made a great spectacle, traveling in a long dusty line. The locals must have thought, upon seeing the carriage coming toward their villages, that we were the Turks once again on the move, not an eleven-year-old bride-to-be and her escorts.

The countryside of the Carpathian foothills was lush, sometimes rolling meadowland, sometimes marshy, but it was high summer and everywhere were green and growing things—crops of barley and oats, wildflowers, grasses that murmured in the breeze. Sometimes there were copses of birch and quaking aspen and fir or dark woods of oak and underbrush so thick the soldiers who accompanied us rode with one hand on their sword hilts, watching for movement among the trees. We avoided passage through the Turkish-occupied zones of Lower Hungary, including Buda, which I had long wanted to see, but still we had to keep a close eye out and approach any garrison with caution, for although we had letters allowing our safe passage through the lands of other noblemen friendly to my family,
it was always possible to come upon a greedy officer, or an outlaw band of
hajdúks
, or gypsies who might try to fall upon the wagons and carriages and take what they could. The whole journey was conducted with the utmost of care, with the result that it took quite a long time to reach our destination, time in which I had little to do and no one for company except the redheaded tadpole Megyery, Anna Darvulia, and a few other servants.

Outside of Ecsed I knew little of the world other than what I had imagined from reading my mother’s books. I had never realized what a rich and varied country I inhabited, how vast and far-flung my family’s holdings were, for we passed through so many towns and villages and farms that were loyal in some way to the Báthorys that I could not name them all. The world was filled with sights so strange to my eyes that each day seemed to create the entire world anew: a man walking on stilts across a high river, a town wall thick with Turkish cannonballs, a group of soldiers leading a crying woman—a witch, Megyery told me—to a place of execution outside some little village. Suddenly my longing to see the canals of bawdy Venice, to travel to Rome or London seemed like nothing more than a childish fantasy. In truth, the place I most often longed to be during those days in the creaking, miserable, dusty carriage with the road ruts shaking my bones was at home in my bed with Klára and Zsofía curled up next to me, the sweet hot smell of their dark curls under my nose as they slept. On the road, when I drifted into an uneasy half sleep, I almost thought myself there again, until the carriage would jolt me back to myself and the sight of Megyery’s thin face and bulging eyes made me remember where I was, and where I was going.

On our journey Megyery filled the air with chatter about Sárvár, about the people I would meet there and the countryside around the house, but I didn’t need his blather to know where I was headed, and to whom, and why. My future husband’s family was famous and powerful and wealthy, though not so famous and powerful and wealthy as my own. The old palatine Tamás Nádasdy, who died when
I was only two years old, had been learned and liberal, my mother had explained to me, a patron of the arts and literature, a convert to the Lutheran faith who set up a printing press at Sárvár to publish bibles and other books written in Hungarian. My future husband was the child of his old age, born when Tamás was fifty-eight, the longed-for heir that he and Orsolya had nearly given up hope of conceiving after many disappointments. Orsolya was a good deal younger than her husband, fourteen to his thirty-seven when they wed, heiress to a vast fortune, a beautiful, ignorant child whose education her husband had attempted as best he could after their vows were said. Their marriage was supposedly a true love match. They had pet names for each other—she was “little Mary” and he was “your grandpa”—which I would always find odd, but then the workings of other people’s marriages have never made much sense to me. Even so, he was quite often away on this or that errand for the king, or to see to his holdings, and Orsolya often wrote to beg his return, especially after Ferenc was born, saying they were dying of loneliness without him. I suspect Orsolya was prone to exaggeration in her letters. She was prone to exaggeration in other areas too, which I was soon to find out.