The Countess Read online

  The Countess

  Published: 2010

  Rating: ★★★

  Tags: Fiction, Countesses, General, Historical, Hungary, Women serial murderers, Nobility

  Fictionttt Countessesttt Generalttt Historicalttt Hungaryttt Women serial murderersttt Nobilityttt

  * * *

  SUMMARY:

  A tale inspired by one of history's most prolific female serial killers recreates her rebellion against her arranged marriage, her suffering at the hands of the man she loved and the descent into mental illness that prompted the murders of dozens of servants. By the PEN/Hemingway finalist author of Icebergs. 40,000 first printing.

  Also by Rebecca Johns

  ICEBERGS

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Rebecca Johns

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johns, Rebecca, 1971–

  The countess : a novel / by Rebecca Johns.

  p. cm.

  1. Báthory, Erzsébet, 1560-1614—Fiction. 2. Countesses—Fiction. 3. Women serial murderers—Fiction. 4. Nobility—Hungary—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.O29C68 2010

  813′.6—dc22 2010018031

  eISBN: 978-0-307-58847-0

  v3.1

  For Brandon, my ideal reader

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dramatis Personae

  Epigraph

  Part One - Extra Hungariam Non Est Vita

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Two - Sidereus Nuncius

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  In the countess’s native language, the surname appears first, so she would have called herself Báthory Erzsébet. In this work the characters’ names are given in the order more familiar to English speakers but otherwise approximate the spelling and pronunciation the countess herself would likely have used in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Likewise, the names of cities and towns use the Hungarian variant, including Vienna (Bécs), Prague (Prága), Bratislava (Pozsony), and Alba Iulia (Gyulafehérvár).

  Pronunciation of Hungarian names puts a stronger emphasis on the vowel, as indicated by the accent mark, and softens the consonants, especially in combination: “Csejthe” thus is pronounced CHEY-tee, “Bicske” is BICH-ke, and “Pozsony” is po-ZHONYE. “Keresztúr” is ker-es-TUUR and “Sárvár” is SHAR-var, with a roll of the “r.” More difficult for English speakers is “gy,” which is pronounced with a soft dju, as in “adjulation.”

  Erzsébet Báthory (er-ZHAY-bet BAAH-tor-ee): a wealthy noblewoman of the kingdom of Hungary

  György Thurzó (djuordj tuur-ZO): the palatine of Upper Hungary (1609–1616), the king’s appointed representative to the Hungarian people, such as a prime minister

  Anna (AHN-nah) Báthory: the countess’s mother, sister to the king of Poland

  György Báthory: the countess’s father

  István (isht-VAAN) Báthory: the countess’s older brother

  Zsofía (zho-FEE-a) Báthory: the countess’s younger sister

  Klára (KLAAR-a) Báthory: the countess’s youngest sister

  Ferenc Nádasdy (fer-ENTS NAA-dash-dee): the countess’s husband

  Orsolya Kanizsay (or-SHOY-yah kan-i-ZHAY): the countess’s mother-in-law

  Tamás (tam-AASH) Nádasdy: the countess’s father-in-law, palatine of Hungary from 1559 to 1562

  Imre Megyery (IM-ray mejd-YER-ee): steward of Sárvár and later Pál Nádasdy’s tutor

  Griseldis Bánffy: the countess’s young cousin

  András (AHN-drahsh) Kanizsay: a cousin of Ferenc Nádasdy

  István Bocskai (BOTCH-kai): a noble companion to Ferenc Nádasdy, later prince of Transylvania and leader of the Bocskai Rebellion (1604–6)

  Rudolf II: Holy Roman Emperor (1576–1612) and King of Hungary (1572–1608)

  Mátyás (MAH-tyash) II: Rudolf’s brother, later Holy Roman Emperor (1612–1619) and King of Hungary (1608–1619)

  Anna Nádasdy: the countess’s elder daughter

  Katalin (Kata) Nádasdy: the countess’s younger daughter

  Pál (paal) Nádasdy: the countess’s son

  Gábor (GAAH-bore) Báthory: the countess’s nephew, prince of Transylvania

  Miklós Zrínyi (meek-LOSH ZREEN-yee): grandson of the Hungarian/Croatian war hero of the same name, married to the countess’s daughter Anna

  György Hommonai Drugeth (DROO-get): a wealthy nobleman married to the countess’s younger daughter Katalin

  Erzsébet Czobor (TSO-bore): Thurzó’s second wife

  Anna Darvulia: a wisewoman and healer, a servant in the Nádasdy household

  Ilona Jó (ee-LOH-na jo): a confidential servant

  Dorottya Szentes (dor-OTT-tee-ya SEN-tesh), known as “Dorka”: a confidential servant

  Katalin Benecká (ben-ets-KAH): a washerwoman

  Erzsi Majorosné (er-ZHEE my-or-osh-NAY): the countess’s healing woman

  Ficzkó (FITS-ko): the countess’s personal manservant

  Istók Soós (ish-TOCK sho-USH): a steward

  Doricza (DOR-ee-tsa): a maidservant

  Benedict Deseő (desh-ay-OO): a steward

  István Magyari: the Lutheran pastor of Sárvár

  Rev. Ponikenus: the pastor of the Lutheran church at Csejthe

  Rev. Zacharias: the pastor of Lešetice sent to hear the countess’s confession during her imprisonment

  One day when the queen asked her mirror: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?” it answered: “You, my queen, are fair; it is true. But Snow-White is a thousand times fairer than you.”

  The queen took fright and turned yellow and green with envy. From that hour on whenever she looked at Snow-White her heart turned over inside her body, so great was her hatred for the girl. The envy and pride grew ever greater, like a weed in her heart, until she had no peace day and night.

  Then she summoned a huntsman and said to him, “Take Snow-White out into the woods. I never want to see her again. Kill her, an
d as proof that she is dead bring her lungs and her liver back to me.”

  The huntsman obeyed and took Snow-White into the woods. He took out his hunting knife and was about to stab it into her innocent heart when she began to cry, saying, “Oh, dear huntsman, let me live. I will run into the wild woods and never come back.”

  Because she was so beautiful the huntsman took pity on her, and he said, “Run away, you poor child.” He thought, “The wild animals will soon devour you anyway,” but still it was as if a stone had fallen from his heart, for he would not have to kill her.

  Just then a young boar came running by. He killed it, cut out its lungs and liver, and took them back to the queen as proof of Snow-White’s death. The cook had to boil them with salt, and the wicked woman ate them, supposing that she had eaten Snow-White’s lungs and liver.

  —THE BROTHERS GRIMM

  22 August 1614

  Csejthe, Upper Hungary

  To the Reverend Eliáš Láni, Žilina

  Dominus vobiscum

  It is with profound regret that I must tell you that the widow Nádasdy died last evening unrepentant and unabsolved of her crimes, despite the best efforts of myself and Rev. Ponikenus to extract her confession. At your request I have been attending that infamous lady for the past several weeks, sitting outside her door in the tower where she was a prisoner and speaking to her of the state of her immortal soul. I asked repeatedly if she felt any sorrow for the dead ones, if she knew the harm she had caused the many families that had once been under her protection, the harm she had caused her own children, but she insisted that her imprisonment was a political one engineered by the king and the palatine to steal her wealth and keep her family’s influence in check. Repeatedly she contended that she had done nothing to merit the accusations against her, though she said nothing that would contradict the palatine’s account of her, nor explain the presence of the dead girls found in her house at Christmastime. I knew it was your wish that she might be turned at last to the consolations of Jesus Christ, and a great victory it would have been for our cause in Hungary if she had done so, but even in the last few days, when she knew her health was failing, she would not unburden herself to me and repeatedly sent me away in the middle of my prayers. Perhaps such a woman is incapable of repentance, but I cannot help but take responsibility for the failure and hope that in the future your faith in me may be better rewarded.

  Rev. Ponikenus and I were not with her when she died, so we did not hear her final words, though the guards say she was complaining of cold in her limbs and asking for her children. They heard the clattering of hooves on the tower stairs just before they found her, they say, as if the devil himself were coming to collect her. By the time the steward brought her evening bread she was already cold.

  You may be assured that the countess was every bit as intelligent and abject as your earlier reports had suggested. I often found myself bewildered by her dark wit, the breadth of her education, and the peculiar turns of her mind. I will be relieved to return to my ministry in Lešetice and leave the cold confines of the countess’s household behind me. Even now I find her influence hangs over Csejthe like a cloud. The villagers whisper and stare and cross the street when I approach, as if I have been marked or marred after sitting so many hours with that dejected lady. One man, a local farmer with his cart of vegetables, stopped this morning to tell me I was not safe in the village, that the hills around the castle are still full of her followers, including an old witch named Darvulia who haunts the catacombs beneath the castle with ninety-nine cats, and who comes out at night still to conjure the countess’s soul back from the realm of the dead. Much of this, I’m certain, is nothing more than local folklore, meant to frighten me away by a population who mistrusts outsiders, but nevertheless hostility hangs over the very hills, the wind, and the water. Her son-in-law Count Zríyni is making plans to return the lady to her birthplace in Ecsed, in the east, to be buried in her family vault, for her grave will surely not be safe here, where the local people have such long memories of her misdeeds.

  With this letter I am sending ahead some papers found among the lady’s things giving an account of her life. They were discovered clasped to her breast with a note stating that in the event of her death, they were to be sent to her son at the family seat at Sárvár. I took them to read last evening, hoping they might reveal something of her that I had not already discovered, and I send them now to you that they may serve as a record of her crimes and the depth of her depravity, and of my own true and faithful efforts to bring her at last to Christ. You will notice that they become more difficult to read nearer the end, where her handwriting begins to degenerate with the onset of illness and where her cruelty becomes more apparent with every passing day. Her protestations of innocence are preposterous, and the blame she puts on the palatine, the king, and even Rev. Ponikenus for her imprisonment is nothing short of treason and blasphemy. Yet how often did I find myself, as I read, pitying that lady in her loneliness, in her disappointed hopes and plans; how often did my heart break for her! Quite honestly I was torn about what to do with the account. The current Count Nádasdy is still a youth of sixteen who has not seen his mother in the three years since her imprisonment, so adamant was his guardian that he should not visit her for fear of sullying his name with his mother’s sins. It did cross my mind to burn these pages and protect the boy from the truth, or to send them to the palatine to enter into the record against her, but I have decided to leave the sending of them to your discretion and greater experience, once you have had a chance to read them.

  If it is true that Satan walks the earth wearing the most human, the most seductive of disguises, then he could find none better than Countess Báthory. I mourn for her and for the poor girls she murdered, the named and unnamed, the lowborn and the high, and for all whose lives she has blackened with her touch.

  Crux sancta sit mihi lux, non draco sit mihi dux

  Rev. Nicolas Zacharias

  PART ONE

  EXTRA HUNGARIAM NON EST VITA

  1

  January 1, 1611

  The boy and his father came at dawn to shut me in, arriving from the village below the castle with their donkey and their cart and their load of tools. I was awake some hours, watching the light at the window go from black to faintly blue, so I heard them making their way across the snowy courtyard below the tower, a couple of dark figures with their heads together, whispering and shivering as they looked up toward my windows as if I were some kind of monster for men to cross themselves against.

  The father spoke to the boy in words too soft to hear, but their breath, heavy from exertion or dread, lifted from their faces and spun away in the winter cold. I stood back in the darkness and did not let them see me, for I wanted no one to know I had been watching. I refused to be afraid. I paced from the window to the door and back, warming my hands by the fire and then, growing too warm, moving to the window again for a breath of cool air. When I looked again they were gone. Two lines of footprints marked the path they took—one large, for the father, and a smaller one for the boy. The patient donkey stood in his traces and stamped his small hooves, a puff of white breath rising from his mouth as well, just another of God’s miserable creatures.

  How every waking moment pains me until I may see you once more, Pál, speak to you once more. It grieves me that I do not have even a drawing of you or your sisters to keep me company in my prison, for the walls of my chamber are bare, having been stripped of their paintings and mirrors and weavings, any small luxury, by the palatine’s soldiers when they brought me up to the castle from my house, my kastély, in Csejthe village two days ago. In the tower of the vár there is now only the bare plaster thick with frost, a rough wooden table and chairs set with a single candle, a straw mattress on the floor for a bed. Altogether the place feels and smells of a stable. A piece of stale bread sits untouched on the floor, waiting for the servant to come up and fetch it back again. I do not sleep. I try to read but am restless and p
ace the small space of my room instead, listening for footfalls on the stair outside my door. If only I had some embroidery, some bright bit of cloth, I might find an easier way to pass the time, but the palatine ordered the guards to take my pins and needles, my blades and scissors, as well as the mirrors and any bit of glass they could find, saying he would leave me no easy way out of my prison.

  The palatine was generous enough to leave me a few books, Meister Eckhart’s Abgeschiedenheit, Aristotle’s Politics, though I already know them by heart.

  Quemadmodum enim perfectum optimum animalium homo est, sic et segregatum deterius omnibus; gravissima enim habens arma. Homo autem non habens arma nascitur prudentie et virtuti; quibus ad contraria existentibus, pessima maxime. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with arms meant to be used by intelligence and virtue, which he may use for the worst ends.

  Never have these words seemed more true to me than they do now, as I sit isolated from all the world at the whim of György Thurzó, a man so clearly without virtue himself.

  VIRTUE SEEMS TO BE lacking in too many of the men I have known in my lifetime, Thurzó most especially.

  It was only a few days ago, just after Christmas, when Thurzó snuck into Csejthe vár in the middle of the night with a troop of King Mátyás’s guards and a scroll with King Mátyás’s stamp. In the caverns under the keep, with the servant girl still warm at my feet, the palatine ordered his soldiers to take me to the tower and didn’t seem to hear when I asked why he had turned against me, why he was giving credence to the falsehoods spread by my enemies. To think that I loved him once, that I took him into my bed! Then he ordered his soldiers to lead the servants away—the three old women and young Ficzkó—and there was a sound of crying in the dim light, the smell of blood and candlewax. I could hardly see for anger. He handed me the paper to read, the one with the king’s seal, but I crumpled it and threw it at him. Lies, I said. Without another noble witness to testify against me, neither Thurzó nor the king have the authority to imprison me, but the palatine seemed unconcerned with such niceties. “I see the rule of law no longer applies in Hungary,” I said. “What is the king giving you to turn your back on your friends?”