Countess Dracula (43 page)

After the events of January 1611 the little community had settled back into its usual seasonal routines, though this was not a return to the recent past, it was a new kind of normality, for the place was quieter, more serene than it had been for more than a decade. A great catharsis had come and gone, as when the witch is at last taken out of the village, chained in a cart.

After Elisabeth had become invisible, she began to merge in the dreams of the local people and in the musings of scholars with other creatures from legend: witches, fairies, empresses. In time she became part of the topography too, infused into the cellars and underground passages where dark water and wine and blood were indistinguishable.

By 1614 Pastor Ponikenus was gone, promoted to superintendent of the whole region, Zvonari
ć
had been made a bishop. Records examined now for the first time show that the
Č
achtice estate was shunned by the senior family members after Elisabeth's death.
¹
Her son Paul visited the village only rarely to negotiate the transfer of parcels of land, and it was a handful of his servants who posted guards in the empty castle and sat down to dine in the manor-house in the years before it was finally destroyed by fire. In the list of retainers employed between 1623 and 1625, three names are of particular interest: Stephen Vágy, Imre Ocskai and Balint Jelen were still in the service of the
Nádasdys. All three had testified against their mistress in the hearings of 1611.

Their testimonies and the others had started cautiously. Then, when it became clear that Countess Báthory was doomed, there came a great release of tension, a flood of denunciations. The things they said were not ‘true', but were the symbolic representation of their memories of living in and around her court, years spent in awe and in fear of her when she was there, in terror of her assistants when she was not. As the horrible allegations accumulated, it became less and less important whether they were truthful or not. The Palatine had the evidence he needed to make a hostage of her. The little people of the estates, assured that they were safe from the last Báthorys and promised by Imre Megyery that they would be forgiven by the Nádasdy family, were encouraged to say what they liked, allowed their own moment of triumph over their oppressor.

While she was free Elisabeth had moved regally through two different sealed worlds, each bound by strict conventions. She stalked through the hot-house below stairs and perhaps she indulged her curiosity, experimenting with the help of her assistants with healing methods and magical procedures. At the same time she attended the nobles' festivities, slightly outside the throng, watching the great game with its hundred or so players, all known to one another, all aware of the rules, jostling for land, arranging weddings of mutual convenience, plotting to dispossess a neighbour or ruin a family member.

She had been a creature of her time, but an extraordinary woman, who was generous (‘like a mother I was to you . . . from the smallest to the highest . . .') and strong (‘You will feel our anger!'), but who thought too much of herself and demanded too much of those who attended her. In their turn her servants feared her and tried clumsily to emulate her, substituting brutal force for the authority that had been bred into her.

The Palatine, Thurzó, could be content that he had done what was necessary, even though neither he nor Lady Czobor would ever be certain of what had really gone on in the Widow Nádasdy's court. His own feelings about the woman were probably ambivalent until the end. He had admired her strength and been in awe of her self-assurance, but he had grown up with the darker rumours that clung to her family: on the shelves of the family library when he was a pious, impressionable boy was the history by his stepfather's kinsman, the humanist Bishop
Ferenc Forgách, in which Lady Klára Báthory's spectacular vices had been catalogued in more than disinterested detail.

Girls died – perhaps more in Elisabeth Báthory's court than in any other, given the severity of her regime. Dozens or even scores may have died over the years, but it was not the deaths so much as the disdain with which she treated curious relatives and bereaved parents and meddlesome priests that incensed outsiders, just as her Báthory pride ruffled the feathers of the other nobles. Men in particular were snubbed; it was galling for Bicsérdy, Szilvássy and the other courtiers to be overruled, sidelined, while she continued on her despotic course, dispensing gifts, issuing her instructions, conferring with her wise-woman, confounding her enemies, answerable to nobody at all.

If the way in which she was treated by her male enemies was not unique but part of a larger consistency, her own actions can be seen as part of another pattern. ‘You will find a man in me!' she warned, more than a century before women retreated into a pose of fluttering defencelessness. Her sarcasm, unsettling in a woman, and her splendid cruelties were talked about in awed whispers on both sides of the Danube, and she drew like the men on an ancient tradition, the peculiarly Hungarian delight in
káröröm,
in the ingenious, even witty, exercise of grotesque cruelty, a mingling of the tragic and the hilarious.

We cannot finally know if she was guilty – of mutilating and murdering with her own hands – but we can see that she was responsible, solely and absolutely, for what happened in her courts. The blood-fetishist, the insatiable lesbian dominatrix and the serial murderess are constructs of our time, anachronisms. But so, too, is the proud lady in the tower waiting with sad dignity for history to restore her tarnished reputation. From the little hard evidence available, we cannot say for sure that Countess Elisabeth Báthory was not a uniquely prolific killer, literally a she-devil, but it was not necessary that she should be these things in order to preside over multiple deaths. If they believed that she was a depraved torturer who littered the countryside with corpses, why did the churches (the Catholics in the years before her grandson Francis converted, the banished Lutherans thereafter) remain silent and miss the opportunity to preach and propagandise?

Up by the castle in the night, it becomes more and more difficult to concentrate on the questions that remain. Individual humans, named and dated, seem impossibly distant, irrelevant, neither their misdeeds
nor their suffering are easy to evoke. Just before setting off down the path through the trees and past the gypsy houses to the Slovak village, the words of the English elegy return to mind:

We are all one
She sees the clouds scud by, she breathes your air, pities the past and those who settled there.

The
Č
achtice portrait of Elisabeth Báthory (unknown date), stolen from the village museum in 1990

The Budapest portrait of Elisabeth Báthory, thought to date from the 17th century

Count Francis Nádasdy, the ‘Black Bey', Elisabeth's husband (1555–1604)

The castle of Sárvár in the 16th century

The castle of Varannó – the scene of Elisabeth's wedding to Francis Nádasdy in 1575

Count George Thurzó, Palatine of Hungary (1564–1616)

The obtaining of confessions: techniques of torture in the 16th century