The Countess (7 page)

Over the years I would come to see the cruelty in this decree, the jealousy and servitude. If my father had allowed her to keep her children, my mother might have rallied and found a new husband as well as some hope for what was left of her life. Instead my mother took to her bed. She ran the affairs of the estate as best she could with her head propped up against the pillows and her hair undone around her shoulders, her eyes shadowed with crying and sleeplessness as she wrote her letters or spoke to the servants. Her jewels and fine clothes began to gather dust, her body falling abruptly into old age. She was a changed creature, hollow-eyed, her legs and arms too thin, the bones showing through her skin and her voice growing small, far away, as if it could not reach the tremendous heights of her mouth. Some women, like Orsolya, dressed in black to show the world their loss at the death of a husband. For my mother, it would be as if her spirit had cloaked itself in widow’s weeds instead.

During the daylight hours she remained distant from the children who loved her so, impatient with our antics and the too-quick (to her mind) healing of our hearts over our father’s death, but nights she would call to one of us to sleep with her in her bed, and even István, who was sixteen when our father died and far too old to be crawling in bed with his mother, would oblige her, wrapping his arms around her neck and letting her sleep against his shoulder. At first we went hoping for a return of the mother we knew, a brief glimpse of love, but then she would frighten us with the sounds she made in her sleep and we would steal away again and find our way to our own beds once more. Eventually we began to resent these requests, to avoid them even. István and I would bargain with each other over whose turn it was supposed to be. If he spent the night with Mother for me, I said, I would copy the verses of the Bible our tutor had given us to memorize. If I went for him, he said, he would watch
Klára and Zsofía two whole afternoons so I could take my pony outside the walls of the estate. Thus my mother’s charms had worn off with her mourning, so that even her own children bribed each other to avoid her company.

Since our father’s death Klára especially preferred to sleep with me, whimpering and clinging to me whenever our mother requested her presence at night, but I would take her to our mother and pull the blankets over her and whisper in her small seashell of an ear that as soon as Mother fell asleep, Klára could slide from her grasp and slip back to the bed we shared. I would kiss her and go. In the middle of the night my sister would push her small dark head under my elbow until I made way for her and took her in my arms, and then she would fall into a deep and dreamless sleep, her sweet breath on my face and her hands curled in my hair. Klára did not understand why her mother needed her so, how the loss of love can warp the spirit, and I suppose I did not blame her for preferring me. I was glad, having lost my mother to this hollow-eyed ghost, this phantom, to have another human creature to cling to.

The promised delay of my departure relieved me, though for several weeks afterward it seemed I couldn’t stop hearing the name Nádasdy. It was on the lips of every servant in the house, of my brother and sisters. Zsofía clamored to know how far away the countess lived, what she looked like, how large a carriage she would send for me when the time came. The Nádasdys were there when I bathed or when I ate, when I slept or dressed or bent over my lessons. From the beginning of my engagement I had tried to shut out thoughts of Sárvár, tried not to imagine the different foods they might serve there, the different smells of the woods and streams in the far western edge of the country, on the borders with Habsburg Austria. I had been to Bécs once with my mother and father when I was small, but other than that I knew little of the part of the country in which my future family lived. Orsolya’s estates at Keresztúr and Sárvár would be nothing like Bécs, so busy and crowded that one could hardly walk through the streets and squares. My new home at
Sárvár would be considerably smaller than Bécs but less remote than the marsh fortress at Ecsed. The old palatine, my betrothed’s father, had brought intellectuals and musicians from as far away as Padua and Amsterdam to live and entertain at his court when he had been palatine. I hoped that Ferenc Nádasdy would be natural and outgoing and free, not stern and formal and reclusive like my brother, István, who was the same age as my husband-to-be but more than ever was becoming strange to me. I hoped Ferenc would love me enough to protect my family for my sake, that his love would be like a strong roof to keep out the rain and the wind and the snow.

Once I asked my mother to tell what she knew of the Nádasdy family that she had not already said. She had known Orsolya Kanizsay through her first husband, and they had talked many times at balls and dinners in Bécs or Pozsony. We were in my mother’s room, and I was sitting on the edge of her bed staring at the shape of her feet moving underneath the blankets, like two moles disturbing a fresh grave. “Do not worry, my love,” she said. “You will be married, and you will be happy. You will be as happy as I was with your father. Ferenc Nádasdy will be a powerful man, and a powerful man always needs a powerful woman by his side.”

She didn’t mention love, nor the fact that her own first husband had been her personal choice, a love match, and so had the second, and the third. She opened her arms for an embrace, and I went to her, because I didn’t know what else to do then or how to disappoint her. The truth was that the idea of being a wife terrified me, if it meant ending up like my mother, this miserable woman, this three-time widow. I would rather have raced my pony across the fens or taken my little sisters to gather robins’ eggs in the woods. I would rather have run away to Bécs, to Prága, to Paris, to dissolute Venice or sunny Rome or even cold, faraway London, where the queen who shared my name remained unmarried, a virgin still and beholden to no man.

Instead I waited until my mother released me, kissed my brow, and sent me out again. Afterward I ran out of the house to the stables, clambering up to hide in the hayloft with a book, staying there
so long that I fell asleep and forgot to eat my evening meal, but it was the only place where I would not have to hear the name Ferenc Nádasdy, or think of the life that was lying in wait for me.

My mother had seen to my formal education from an early age, bringing the best instructors from the school on her first husband’s estate to stay with us. With our brother, my sisters and I learned to read the works of Herodotus, of Thomas Aquinas, of Paracelsus, learned the formal inflections of Hungarian, German, Greek, and Latin at the knees of our tutor, Leopold, a stern and ugly German who was fond of beating his young charges with a green willow stick, leaving a pattern of narrow red welts on our buttocks and the backs of our legs if we didn’t recite our lessons swiftly enough or in their proper order—a punishment our parents put a stop to when they learned of it, but not until I had at least three times felt the sting of Leopold’s whip.

I was not a good student at first, so easily distracted by little things—a swallow that flew down the chimney into the house, or my father’s hunting dogs birthing a litter of pups, or the first breaking of the sun on a cloudy day—that it was no surprise I didn’t enjoy my studies. Whenever Leopold would turn his back, I would run to the stables and take my pony for a ride or hide in a corner of the kitchen, on top of the place where the linens were stored, to take an afternoon nap. Later, when I could read and write more easily, when I learned that the books I had been reluctant to open contained an escape so true, so complete that not even the tutor could prevent me from flying beyond the walls of the house, I began to appreciate what he was trying to teach me. I read—I read by firelight, by candlelight.
I read in the stables and at the table at supper, read science and astronomy, especially the works of Copernicus and the treatises of Tycho Brahe, about the order and movements of the heavens. My mother, before she was a widow, used to say I would ruin my eyes with so much reading. “You will develop a squint,” she would say, kneeling down to take the volume out of my hands and set it aside. “What will you do then? No man will have you.” This idea gave me pause for some little bit of time until I realized that she was teasing me and that she herself had read every book I put my hand on. Then she would laugh and give me the book back again.

After my father’s death, my mother began a new instruction for me, lessons on the duties and arts of a wife that seemed often to me to be more about her own heart than mine. “Your husband will desire you,” she told me, “and you must take care to keep his desire from being ever fully satisfied. Never make yourself too available to him, but always hold yourself back a little. Never tell him all the secrets of your heart, for then you will be in his power, rather than he in yours.” This last was said with a little smile.

I wondered at her words, if this indeed was the philosophy of love by which she had ensnared not only one but three husbands, and I began to feel a measure of pity for my poor father, whose mind and body had been in thrall to the fierce charms of this woman, my mother.

She taught me about my monthlies, how they would come and go with the cycles of the moon until I was married and took my new husband into my bed and opened myself to him. Then I would be able to expect a child. When I gave him a son, my husband would value me above all the land in the kingdom. You will be his greatest treasure, she said, and cupped my chin in her soft hand, and for a long time I believed it.

Each day after she was done with my instruction, my mother would allow me to choose a book for my own. Despite my dislike of my lessons in the wifely arts, I thrilled in this reward and spent many hours poring over the books to pick the most beautiful or most interesting. I chose among others an ancient copy of Aristotle’s
Poetics
in
Latin, the first to be printed in Europe, and a beautiful illuminated bible that had once belonged to her own mother and that I loved because the pictures of Mary, adorning the story of the birth of the Christ child, bore a striking resemblance to me. Each book I chose was a memento to take into my future life, a future I still believed was years away.

Yet it happened that only a month after the arrival of her letter, my future mother-in-law sent word that her steward Imre Megyery, her late husband’s cousin and her most trusted adviser, was coming to Ecsed as my escort on her behalf, as her letter had originally stated. When I demanded that my mother hold to her promise to let me stay at home a little longer, she simply sighed and asked me to be on my best behavior and offered no explanation for her betrayal. “Please, Erzsébet,” she said. “Be grateful. Your match with the Nádasdy boy is the envy of every girl in the land. The countess has asked for you, and I have no reason to deny her. She will be your family now, and you must do everything you can to please her.” So Megyery was to fetch me and bring me back to my mother-in-law’s estate in western Hungary, far from the comforts and familiarity of everything I had ever known, and that was the end of the discussion.

For days ahead of time the house was in an uproar, the servants cleaning the house top to bottom, the scents of baking bread and roasting meat spilling into every hall and chamber as they had not done since before my father’s death. There were no gypsies and no music, but there was polished silver and good wine, and the light of many candles. The rooms echoed with the chatter of the girls in the sewing rooms, the lower answering voices of the household boys who stole to the door to watch them at their work. The house was alive again, and if the end of the festivities had not included my own departure, I would have been dancing in the halls in anticipation. But I didn’t want to meet Imre Megyery, or Countess Nádasdy, or her son. I didn’t want to leave my brother and my sisters, or my home. Instead, I snapped at everyone, slapped the servants, and ran away
when the younger children needed me. I spent most of that week hiding beneath tables or up trees, my hair so full of bits of branches and berries it looked like a bird’s nest. My brother, when he found me hiding in a hawthorn bush at the edge of the marsh, covered with owl’s down, said he would cut off all my long hair if I didn’t start taking care of it, like a lady should. “And if you do not start behaving like a good and grateful daughter,” he said, “I will have you locked up until it’s time for you to leave.” I was tempted for a moment to take him up on this threat, so few were my days remaining at home, but instead I chose what little freedom I had left, promising to behave and putting on a mask of civility that I didn’t feel in the least.

Imre Megyery arrived at Ecsed one afternoon when I was in the stables with the little girls. We were playing with the puppies that had recently been born, sitting in the straw and holding the bits of mewling fur in the lap of my dusty skirt, Zsofía squealing with delight as a puppy licked her face, Klára crying because one of them had scratched her with its sharp toenails. A red welt rose up in the place where the puppy had clambered too eagerly over Klára’s legs, and I was bending to rub away a spot of blood when a servant came running to the stable and asked for me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The guests are arriving, miss,” she said. “Your mother sends word that you are to dress and join her in the courtyard.”

I stood and went out into the courtyard, to the gate, and went up the steps to look out to the road beyond the marsh. In the distance a great carriage rattled, raising a line of fine brown dust. They would be at Ecsed within the hour, but I walked slowly into the house, refusing to rush. I was seized with a sudden desire to dash back into the stable, pick up the puppies, and bury my face in their soft fur, to climb into their nest of straw and hide among them. My heart sank as I knew my last days at home were upon me.

In the house my mother was rushing around and agitating the servants. “Erzsébet, my God, you are a disaster,” she said. “Put on
your good skirt, the one with the roses on it. Your mother-in-law’s representative will be here any minute. He must not think you are a wild girl, with no manners or education.”