V.
Letter from Zsófia Perényi to Count Árpád Perényi, 1586
To my honourable and noble husband, your wife sends greetings,
I regret that I have cut short my visit to our cousin Erzsébet. I made announcement of news from you that requires my attendance at your side with all haste, and am sending this missive ahead of me so that you will know what must be said if questioned, for I fear the lady of this house has means of hearing rumour from afar and sifting it for any grain of truth that might offer insult to the name of Báthory.
I know you desired to make a closer alliance with Ferenc Nádasdy. This alliance is not to be effected by way of becoming a confidante of Erzsébet. I no longer wish to share walls with her, kin though she may be.
Ferenc himself was not present. I understand he had barely seen the birth of his first daughter before he returned to his military duties, which caused Erzsébet some irritation. Nonetheless, she dotes on the child, Anna, with a mother’s proper love, but that is the one fond thing I will write in connection with her.
Matters started uneventfully enough. I had heard that she was a harsh mistress to her servants, but you and I have both had cause to discipline our staff in our time. In the first few days of my guesting I was incited to see a girl whipped, and though Erzsébet took distinct joy in the act, a proper order must be maintained in every household. Later, while I and several others were at talk, Erzsébet suggested we watch her servants perform a traditional dance of Sárvár Castle, which we readily consented to. She called in a girl who could not have been older than thirteen, and had papers placed between the child’s toes by a brutish, unshaven dwarf she keeps close to her. These were then lit on fire, forcing the screeching creature to cavort about the room in a display not devoid of humour. Seeing my amusement, Erzsébet leant close and suggested that she would have more choice entertainment later on that night, fit only for those of a certain temperament. At the time, seeking to woo her to us, I feigned enthusiasm and agreed.
That night I was sent for, and advised to have my people dress me for the coldest weather, since the snow was falling thick. I was led beyond the castle walls by certain low-born women whom Erzsébet appears to give an untoward authority, and there our cousin was with the same servant girl, quite naked in the drifts. ‘First fire, now ice,’ she said, and her people proceeded to pour icy water upon the wretch as she pleaded and cried out to God. This continued long enough for the chill to work its way through my furs, but by the midnight bell the girl had expired. In truth it was not the glee that Erzsébet took in the death that so unsettled me, as comments I overheard by her peasant women that, with a cold death, ‘the blood would keep for longer.’ I cannot put any interpretation on these words that does not affright me severely.
Worse was to come when we returned within the walls to find that, without precedent, little Anna had become sick. Some malady had touched her so that she seemed very weak and pale, and although I well know what realms of illness the youngest are subject to, Erzsébet appeared to fear some specific complaint that drove her into a frenzy of fear and rage. I caught the older of her peasant women eyeing me with disturbing manner and she commented to her associate about the pedigree of the Perényi line and the purity of our blood. The predatory way she spoke convinced me to make my excuses immediately the next morning, before Erzsébet had arisen. I will not count myself safe until I have met with you again.
Written on this xii January Anno Domini 1586 by your loyal and penitent
Zsófia
Csejte, 1586
THE WOMAN WAS the least appealing example of Hungary peasant stock Erzsébet had ever set eyes on. She makes even Dorottya look like a fine lady. “Did you hear the story of the Lithuanian Jew who made a man from clay?” she asked idly, circling the creature. “I imagine the thing must have looked much like this. Why do you bring me here to see it?”
The lumpen woman’s heavy-jawed head swung to stare at Erzsébet, and for a moment she felt a frisson of fear that those huge heavy arms would reach for her, brutal as an ape’s. Instead she just looked down with coal black eyes from a height that would have put Ferenc in her shadow.
Dorottya was in the corner of the room, reckoning something on the stones of a rosary. “They call her Katarína Benická,” she explained. “I found her chained in the cellar of a church. She’s a murderess, by law, but in such circumstances that they were still debating it when I found her.”
“What is it to us?”
“Katarína, tell the great lady what you did,” Dorottya prompted.
The burly peasant woman turned that flinty stare on her, then shrugged hugely.
“It was only I was hungry,” she said thickly.
Erzsébet felt her patience slipping. “Dorottya—”
The witch held up a hand. “She was a taverner’s wife. Her hunger took itself out on their guests, and her husband, when he found out. She wasn’t subtle about it. When they came to take her, a neighbour put a pitchfork through her gut. A militiaman put a crossbow bolt through her, and the local butcher, a cleaver between neck and shoulder. All of it she lived through. They say God touched her, to make her well enough to stand trial, but I have studied her and I have seen her at her trencher. She is a clear channel for the vital essence, and no wonder she hungers for it.”
“This… thing?” Erzsébet demanded. Again that dull black stare turned its disinterest on her, and Dorottya was nodding fiercely.
“We need more subjects, Countess. We don’t have much time before he finds us here. We need subjects, and we need to study how Katarína is able to master the vitae as we have never been able to.”
“Is she one of his?” Erzsébet wondered.
“She is a freak,” Dorottya said, almost proudly. “Some taint of her heredity. There were darker things than he in Transylvania in the old days, and some had mortal offspring whose blood is with us yet. But most of all she is a gift to us, and we must seize it while we still have time.”
THEY HAD FLED Sárvár immediately when Anna was found shivering and weak in her crib. It had been a warning, but one intended only to sharpen Erzsébet’s fear. He had turned his attention back to her at last. He, who had been roosting like a crow at all the battlefields Ferenc had contested with the Turk, had finally grown tired of bloodshed by the sword, and recalled unfinished business.
They had gone to Csejte, even though it was practically under his shadow. For Erzsébet, the castle there was still her stronghold. Anna had wailed all the way, until she had thought she might even strangle the infant herself, but the child had lived. Ferenc and Erzsébet’s first child, and she had lived.
But he would find them, and Erzsébet knew that they were weak. They were uncovering lore from first principles that he had been steeped in two centuries gone. He had been an alchemist, a scholar, a student at the Devil’s own lectern, if the stories were to be believed. And the world had turned, since then. The Age of Reason had driven the shadows back until all Dorottya could glean were scraps and old wives’ tales, just as the Protestants were driving away the cobwebs of old Rome.
Ilona and Fickó moved through the villages in the castle’s shadow, announcing that the Countess had returned and the castle was alive again, and lucky young girls could find money and preferment in service at Csejte. Enough families were desperate or greedy, had too many daughters without dowries, that memories grew dull and the girls were volunteered. Some would indeed be maids and cleaners until other uses arose for them, or until they crossed Erzsébet’s temper. Others went straight to the cells for Dorottya and Ilona to experiment with.
And Katarína was an education. Dorottya often speculated on what twisted rusalka or leshy lurked in her heritage. She did the work of three men, and when Ilona and Fickó teased her or beat her, she took it like a stone. Her one passion was her hunger, and she could fill her belly with bread and turnip mash over and over without taking the edge off it. Only flesh filled the void in her; flesh, and human flesh most o
f all. And of that flesh she made strength, becoming yet more ogrish, heedless of the knocks and scratches of the world.
“Only under the night sky,” Dorottya concluded. “But that has always been a time for witches, even as it is his time. The sun destroys shadows, makes things clear and plain. Katarína was taken at night, at the peak of her strength. And I have found how she unlocks the doors to the vital essence, draws life from the blood.” She brandished pages of tangled diagrams and equations at Erzsébet, who waved them away.
“Dorottya, my Anna was weak in her crib when I went to her this morning. She did not cry, but stared at me with eyes not her own; with his eyes. We have no more time. Does all your paper-scratching amount to your being ready?”
Dorottya was about to make some plea—more time, more practice, more study—but she plainly saw the thunder in Erzsébet’s face, the violence in her crooked fingers. There was no safe answer but, “Yes.”
SHE WAS WAITING for the Dragon when he came, standing between the window and Anna’s crib. Erzsébet had retained one maid and the babe’s wet nurse, both kept trembling in the room’s shadowy edges, but besides them, she had her true helpers, her fellow dabblers in blood. Dorottya stood at the crib’s head, Ilona at its foot, while little Fickó and hulking Katarína were on hand to either side to ensure the servants didn’t run. Erzsébet couldn’t recall the name of the maid, or even the nurse. It wasn’t important to her.
Moonlight lay out a path across the chamber floor, turning the rugs and stone into a miniature landscape, as though Erzsébet flew high above some unknown land of forest and wastes. It was along that path he came, entering the room like a coil of darkness that writhed and fought until it had unfolded into him. The maids began screaming and even Fickó let out a bark of shock, but Erzsébet was ready.
She had seen him in the orchard on her first visit to this castle, but the memory was smeared by fright and youth. He had come to her after her wedding, seeking to make her his own, but she had been feverish and under his sway. When he had been amongst Ferenc’s officers, he had been but a shadow, a whispering knot of hatred and bloodlust spurring them on. Only now could she look at him properly.
He was tall, perhaps the tallest man she had ever seen, and very fine-featured. His skin was pale as an albino’s, save for his cheeks and lips, which shone with a rose of ersatz life. A stab of glee shot through her, to know that he had not simply strode in to feed, but that he had gone elsewhere to build his strength before trying her.
He had a long moustache but no beard, and his eyes were dark and powerful, deep wells of arrogance and power. If she had met with that face under other circumstances, she would have admired its cruel lines, the strength of purpose that burned from it, because those were the virtues of nobility. Except she knew his purpose now, and it was no more than the grave worm’s or the clutching ivy: to go on, to exist, day after day.
But she would greet him as befitted his station. “My lord, many years has my husband held out an invitation to you. I am only surprised you have left your visit so long.”
The sanguine line of his lips curved, and she saw the sharp white points behind them. “Countess Báthory.” His voice was deep, hard like stone, hollow as a cenotaph. He looked her over, as though she was staff for the hiring, some trembling village girl lured by the promise of service. “But you have changed,” he murmured. “What is this that has laid its hand so heavy upon you? What has creased your fine skin and coarsened your hair? Can it be time?” His words stole upon her, and suddenly she realised he was standing right before her, close enough to touch. “Is it five-and-twenty now?” He bent close so the words were for her alone. “Six-and-twenty? Seven? How the years pass, Countess. And yet, had your Strega slave not thrown such a muddle of blood in my path before, you might have been six-and-ten forever.”
For a moment she faltered, feeling the claws of age on her as though she withered there and then. She let his words master her. She was no longer the girl she had been, and soon there would be an old woman looking back at her from the glass, and he would be young, young forever. And so might she be, if she would just submit…
“I am Erzsébet Báthory,” she hissed, barely more than a whisper, but so full of venom! “What I desire, I take.” And she met his eyes. The act of will was almost more than she could bear, to stare into the dark void within him, but she forced herself to it. She had not bowed her head or subsumed her name to her husband, and nor would she to this. “And what you desire, you shall not have. My child is beyond your reach.”
He was a step further from her, though she had not seen him take it. His eyes blazed, lips curling back from ivory fangs. “Your child?” he spat. “A scrap of flesh for my dogs. But you I shall have. You shall kneel to me and do my will, and you will love me for it. What are you, that you dare defy the Dragon?”
Erzsébet was aware of the whimpers of the maid and nurse, the squalling of Anna, the reek of Fickó soiling himself. The air in the room seemed to bend around her and she felt his will like a vice, like a hawk’s talons clutching at her skull, like a hand at her throat.
“You speak of age and time,” she managed, through clenched teeth. “You have paid a price, to hide from them. A hollow man, I see before me, who must forever fill himself with the life of others. What is left of the man you were, the great scholar, the great soldier? What do you study now? What wars do you win, except through the feats of others?” And again she made herself meet that furious, all-consuming gaze. “When I follow your path, old man, I shall do better. It shall be Erzsébet Báthory who lives forever, and not merely her shell.”
She had gone too far. She saw the moment when his temper snapped, and then he had her by the neck, her feet off the ground, her world shrinking to his rage-twisted mask. Her thought in that moment was not of death but of lost opportunity. Here was her mirror, who knew himself master of all, who brooked no insubordination. If only we could have shared the world. But they were neither of them capable of admitting an equal, of bending the knee.
Distantly, she heard Dorottya shout for the others to do their work. Fickó already had his knife out, swarming up the maid like a monkey to plunge the blade into her throat. Katarína was more direct, taking the old nurse in her huge hands and twisting, the explosive retort of snapping bones shocking through the chamber.
That would have been the moment for betrayal, but Erzsébet had bound Dorottya to her with chains of threat and promise and sheer power of personality, and the witch and her apprentice gave unselfishly of all the strength they had harvested. Erzsébet reached out and took hold of his hand, prying at his claw fingers until her throat was free and watching him stagger back from her, his eyes wide with a fear he must not have known since his last mortal breath.
Ilona had caught the blood of the maid in a cup, and now she came to Erzsébet’s elbow, proffering the spattered vessel. The taste was salt and iron in her mouth, but most of all it was life, the life of others made to serve her own; for what else was nobility for? She felt it flood through her, lending her a strength that would not last—they were still practising their new skills, after all—but would serve for now. When she advanced, he fell back to the window, diminished to a shadow in the moonlight.
“My blood is poison to you, Count,” she told him. “Go prey on the witless and the ignorant in the shadow of your home, but know that I banish you from this place. One day I will come for you, and you will bend the knee to me, or I will destroy you.”
His lips writhed and his eyes burned, but he was a mad dog chained. He could not raise a hand against her, nor even curse her. A moment later he was gone, bursting out into the night and speeding invisibly away, darkness against darkness, and she was free.
All our work, all the blood, has come to this, she thought, and I do not need to trouble myself any more. But her eyes slipped from the night outside to the emptied vessel in her hand. It was lined, that hand, save where the blood had touched it. Time, said the Dragon and, though he had fl
ed, Time remained behind to stalk her, which would never touch him. It was not enough. She had won only a reprieve and not a victory.
“Dorottya,” she said hoarsely. “You must hire more servants. There is more work ahead of us.”
VI.
From the Day Book of Erzsébet Báthory
19th December 1591
Word from Pozsony that Anna has been asking to see her new sister. I have instructed them to tell her it is not possible. She must not be here until Orsolya has been properly ‘baptized’ as Anna herself was. No daughter of mine shall be the shadow or possession of another.
Dorottya and Ilona have returned with new recruits, although they have had to go further afield. Another four for the cells. Three are to be chilled and drained. This morning I noted the skin of my hands is losing its firmness again. Have instructed Dorottya to prepare a new bath, but each application suffers diminishing returns. Time, he said. How was he able to sever himself from Time when I am not? No matter how long I bathe, how much I drink, I am only borrowing the vital essence, denied true title to it. I must preserve my youth until I can perfect myself and follow him into that other country, and wrest lordship of it from his cold hands.
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