From THE COUNTESS: A Novel by Rebecca Johns

New York: Crown Publishing Group. Oct. 12, 2010. c.304 p. ISBN 9780307588456.

Prologue

22 August 1614

Csejthe, Upper Hungary

To the Rev. 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 Reverend

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.

Reverend 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, they say, just before they

found her, 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 Zriyní 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 Reverend 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 fifteen 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

Chapter One

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 from my dear little 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 pace 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 he 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 two 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?”

The gray bags under Thurzó’s eyes, which had always made him look so vulnerable, now

hardened into little pillows of stone. “Our friendship is the only thing saving your life right now,

my dear,” he said. “I suggest you say nothing that may make your situation worse than it already

is.” Then he lay down his sentence, there in the dim caverns beneath Csejthe, condemning me in
perpetuis carceribus. A lifetime between stones. He left a company of his own soldiers in the

keep, left me here under lock and key, taking my servants off to Bicske to stand trials for my

sins, as he called them. What sins are those? I asked, but he turned away and would not answer

me. I heard his carriage driving away as they took me up to the tower.

This morning I waited a long time, but the boy and his father did not come. For a

moment I wondered if perhaps the palatine had thought the better of his decision and sent them

away again, but then their voices were outside my door, greeting the guards in the local dialect. I

arranged myself to receive them into my room, determined to offer them my forgiveness as one

forgives the executioner before one’s head is struck off. I touched my hair, my face, did my best

under the circumstances to look presentable. In a little while there was a sound of someone

working at the door, and after a few minutes they had it off its hinges and set aside. The hallway

was dim. A single lamp gave off a thin yellow light, but I saw the boy and his father come

forward and kneel in the doorway and stepped toward them with my hand raised in friendship,

but at the gesture the guards threatened me with their weapons raised and ordered me back. The

bigger guard, the one with the winestain on his cheek like the slap of a great hand, growled that I

was not to approach the boy or his father or to make any motion of witchcraft or incantation in

their direction, or the guards would finish me where I stood. “You wouldn’t dare,” I said.

He smiled, showing all his teeth. “Who is here to stop me?” he said.

The blood rushed to my face, and I dropped my hand. Then I could see that the masons

were not offering obeisance but beginning their work, mixing the mortar and sorting out the

stones in little piles, the stones that will make my prison from this day forward, for my old friend

the palatine tells me that I will not leave this tower alive.
 The guards ordered me to sit in a chair while the masons went to work. They sealed the

windows first, closing the small slits in the wall that showed me the valley of the River Vág, the

villages and farms that were a gift to me from your father on our wedding day. The mason set

the stones in a circle, shutting out the light little by little, working until only a small hole

remains, just large enough for me to put my hand through. Through it, if I stand on a chair, I will

see little but the color of the sky, the faint cold stars, a distant smudge of hills I will never cross

again.

When they finished with the windows they retreated to the hallway and began the slow

work of shutting the door to my chamber, closing me in stone by stone like Antigone in her cave.

I watched them at their task. They were villagers from Csejthe, the man and his son, dressed in

clean linen shirts and pants and brown hemp waistcoats. The father chose each stone carefully to

fit with the one below it, frowning as if he saw something in the stone he did not like. He would

not meet my gaze, though I sat not three feet away. The boy must have been ten or eleven years

old, but he was a strong worker, obeying his father’s every command, fetching this or that tool,

mixing the mortar in a bowl. Once in a while he peeked in my direction, as if his curiosity had

gotten the better of him. He had the face of the Infant himself, straw-colored hair and long-

lashed eyes, the lashes throwing small sooty shadows across his pink cheeks. He reminded me in

many ways of you, my love, with your shyness and your serious face, though you have your

father’s fierce brow and proud Nádasdy nose. I wiggled my fingers at the boy and smiled. “Ako

sa voláte?” I asked in the local dialect. What is your name? I have learned two or three phrases

of the language in my years in this part of the country, through many years of taking peasant

girls and boys into my house as servants. My accent was not good, but the boy did not seem to
notice. He stared at me with wide eyes, curiosity and fear mingled on his face. “Luki,” he said,

his voice high as a girl’s still.

“Teší ma,” I answered. Pleased to meet you.

I was about to see if my guess was true and ask him his age when the father reached up

and slapped the boy hard across the face, saying something rushed and angry. I recognized only

one word: škrata. Witch. The father pointed at the stairs and barked an order, and young Luki

took his leather strap back down the stairs, tears wetting his cheeks. Were it not for the

palatine’s guards, I would have slapped the mason’s ugly red face myself to exact revenge for

that unnecessary blow. Instead I clenched and unclenched my hands and looked away as if I had

noticed nothing. I would bide my time. I am not some madwoman who does not know when

and how to act, no matter what the palatine and Megyery and Ponikenus say about me. I

retreated into the new darkness of my bedchamber, where I waited for my solitude to begin. The

walls they lay will harden like my heart.

Then the mason’s son was back with his load of stones, and the father set them tight and

true. The man is a master craftsman, and the door should hold until they take it down to let me

out, or else to carry me out. A gap in the stones about the span of two outstretched hands will

allow the servant to pass me food and drink and take away the night-jar, but otherwise I am

completely without help or comfort. I am left to wash my own clothes, and clean my own room,

and make up my own hair. I will not be allowed to attend church, to walk in my vineyard, to

meet you or your sisters in your far-flung homes, to hear a word of kindness spoken. In a sudden

rage I cursed the guards, the palatine, the mason, picking up bits of smoldering charcoal from the

fire and flinging them through what was left of the door, my mouth tasting of copper. “Now,
now, madam,” said the winestained guard, speaking as one speaks to a bad-tempered horse, “you

cannot do us any harm out here.”

Looking around my room for a weapon, for anything, I grasped a burning branch from

the fire, holding it out toward the straw mattress. My hand was steady and strong. “I can set the

house alight,” I said.

“You would not.” His lips formed a thin line.

“I would. Better to burn than remain your prisoner.” My limbs seemed to move without

my consent, as if I were looking at myself from the outside. The flames leapt off the branch and

spun away in the cold air, but the guard did not move from his post. He must have been

weighing the seriousness of my threat against the lies he heard about me: that I am a whore, a

witch, a vampire who bathes in the blood of maidens. After a moment he simply shrugged and

smiled, turning away to speak a low word to his companion. He no longer saw me standing there

with the burning branch in my hand. I dropped my arm. I am used to many reactions from

many people—some pleasant, some unpleasant—but disregard is not one of them. I am not used

to being invisible.

Tears stung at the edges of my vision, but I would not cry. The guards would be elated, I

suppose, if I burned the castle down, for then they could go home and forget all about me, tell

their drinking companions in the taverns of Bicske about the time they saw the Beast of Csejthe

immolate herself out of spite. The actions of a madwoman and a criminal. As I’m a sane

woman after all, I placed the branch back on the fire. I will not give the guards, or the palatine,

the satisfaction of being rid of me. Not yet.

Instead I sat at my table and with shaking hands began writing these pages to you, Pál, so

that you may know something of your mother besides the lies the palatine and the king and your
tutor tell you. So you may know that even now, your mother thinks of you and prays for you.

That she hopes you may become a better man than those she has known, and loved, during her

own life.

Now I can see little but the mason’s hands at work, bits of his clothing through the stone

gap. I can no longer hear what the guard says in his low voice to the boy and his father, who are

packing up their tools, their footsteps growing fainter as they walk back down the stairs of my

tower, into the open air. The flames of the fire ebb and flicker. I will not have another. My poor

servants will no doubt be submitted to torture, forced to condemn me to save themselves,

because the palatine will not be merciful. He has not a drop of pity in him. He has damned me

to prison for the remainder of my days—this tower, these walls, these few books, this bed. And

myself, a woman alone, with nothing to do but contemplate her life.

I have done nothing that was not my right by blood and title, not to the palatine, not to

anyone else. Erzsébet Báthory, widow of Ferenc Nádasdy, daughter of the most ancient noble

house in Hungary, is not a witch or a madwoman, a murderess or a criminal. She has no

intention of quietly accepting her fate.