Countess Dracula (18 page)

O, that it were possible
We might but hold some two days' conference
With the dead!

John Webster,
The Duchess of Malfi

Two letters from Lady Nádasdy ~ customs and duties ~ the Hungarian table ~ pastimes for noble ladies ~ the death and burial of Count Francis Nádasdy ~ the widow's correspondence and some purchases ~ love and lust ~ health, healing and wise women ~ pictures of the past

Standing in the cool, quiet halls of Sárvár castle, in the museum ambience that fills them today, it is almost impossible to re-create in the mind the noises and smells and the subtler sensations that invested the place in the days when the Nádasdys held court there. We do not know if the household, only a day's hard ride from the war front, was a fraught, manic environment of bustle and suppressed hysteria, or a haven of ordered calm, an asylum for the warrior-lord and his senior aides when they returned from the fighting.

Like all other Hungarian ladies of her age, Elizabeth Báthory was forced to adapt to the almost constant absence of her husband during the years of skirmishes and military manoeuvres, which were followed by the fifteen years of continuous war against the Turks. Between 1591 and 1604, during her years of motherhood and maturity, Elisabeth would have seen her lord and his retinue for only brief moments, if at all, in the campaigning season from February to late November, and would have attended him dutifully once he had put his official tasks aside for the Christmas period. It was customary for the great ladies to send to Vienna for special delicacies, then turn their head cooks out of the kitchens at the return of their menfolk and prepare an extravagant meal with their own hands. Even while at war, the men were not incommunicado, and Francis could still decide important family matters and transmit his judgements in local disputes. But Elisabeth's responsibilities were hugely enlarged when he was away. There were retainers left on the estates to take care of the collection of tithes, the buying and selling of produce, harvesting and husbandry, and staff to carry out administration in the houses and farms. But the Lady was now the authority to whom they all reported, and it was she who was entrusted with the patronage of the local church, the education of scholars, the direction of repairs and the hiring and dismissing of officials and artisans.

The fact that Countess Báthory coped so well with her extra burden is another proof that she was not the weak-minded degenerate that some history and some fiction has suggested. Francis and Elisabeth's marriage was outwardly exemplary and, if the private reality was otherwise, the option of divorce was available to a Protestant couple. There is absolutely no evidence to support the literary accounts of her infidelity and his whoring during the many months they spent apart.

If there was no verifiable scandal attached to the marriage, nor were there any external signs of anything more than dutiful commitment. Elisabeth sent news of the childrens' health in May 1596: ‘I can write to your lordship of Anna and Orsik [the pet name for their daughter Ursula, named after Elisabeth's mother-in-law] that they are in good health. But Kate is in misery with her mouth because that rot has appeared, and the rot is even in the bone of her jaw. The barber-surgeon went in with his iron up to the middle of her tooth, and says that she will be fortunate if she does not lose some teeth. Of myself, I can say that I am better than formerly.'
¹
In July the same year she writes: ‘Anna,
thank God, is in good health. Ursula's eyes are quite painful, but as for Kate, again she has a rot [it was probably trench mouth or gingivitis, which was endemic] in her mouth. I am well, thank God, only my eyes pain me.'
²

Writers have taken these scraps of domesticity and from them deduced that Elisabeth was a neglectful mother, that the family were afflicted with inherited defects and that Elisabeth was suffering from epilepsy, but they are surely no more or less than the banalities that would fill a letter to an absent father in our own time. If news of health is given prominence, it is because a desperation to cling to one's own life and protect one's dependants was uppermost in everybody's thoughts in an age when some women had lost ten children by the time they were thirty years old.

Letters were of two types: those written privately, in the certain knowledge that they would not be intercepted, and those written on the assumption that they might be examined by enemies. The latter were particularly important in Transylvania, where one's neighbour might well belong to the rival political faction. Sensitive diplomatic correspondence was written in numerical code, while other important messages were conveyed orally by servants in the wake of a note naming the person and indicating their time of arrival. Many of Elisabeth's letters were in her own hand and were articulate, forceful, contrasting with the clumsy conversational style of Thurzó's wife Elisabeth Czobor.

Elisabeth Báthory had been taught to read Greek and Latin by her tutors at Ecsed, understood classical models of structure, in short wrote as well as any man, but without the long-windedness, pomposities or poetic flights to which men were prone. There were no spontaneous intimacies in Elisabeth's letters, only the prescribed and respectful forms of address – ‘your loving wife', ‘your servant'. The letters from Elisabeth's father-in-law, Thomas Nádasdy, to his young wife Ursula contain jesting allusions to their age differences – he calls himself ‘your old grey vulture' – and are full of phrases such as ‘the arrival of your letter caused me to rejoice', whereas Elisabeth's to Francis are businesslike and dry (though this, not her parents-in-law's playful intimacy, was the norm in those days). ‘I commend my service to your mercy. They have brought some letters to me which I include in my letter to you. May the Good Lord keep you in good health . . .' is typical of the conventional style she employs.
³

Apart from her articulacy, there were other signs that Francis
Nádasdy's wife was not a passive partner in the relationship. Also in 1596 she upbraided her husband, saying, ‘I understand from your lordship's writing that you were almost sent to Transylvania, and everyone wonders at this since you can enjoy no good from Transylvania and the soil from which you take all good things is this soil. We are at a loss to understand this news which I heard first from a friend who wrote of it to me and I have suffered bitterly of this . . .'
⁴
From the correspondence of fellow-nobles we learn that Elisabeth accompanied Francis when he was required to attend the Diet in Bratislava. Francis's comrade at arms, George Thurzó, reported to his own wife, the unsophisticated Lady Czobor, that he envied the other lords ‘who have their loving wives with them in Pozsony, like Mistress Nádasdy'. At this time Thurzó, the man who would later seek to destroy her, seems to have had a special admiration for Elisabeth Báthory, and may have seen her as a model for his gauche partner to emulate. ‘When Mistress Nádasdy journeys to Ecsed by way of Byt
č
a, send, my dear heart, to her and ask her to visit you that you might have an opportunity to know her better, if you do not already . . .'
⁵

Only the humble local squires were able to live, except for their hunting expeditions and displays of horsemanship, a lazy, sedentary life among their vineyards and orchards. The senior lords were preoccupied with their duties, which involved attendance at court, dealing with the affairs of local government, inspecting their own estates and either making war or preparing for it. In most noble families in post-Reformation Hungary the strict education they had been given by their tutors and parents had instilled in the boys a sense of public responsibility: the fifteen-year-old Lord John Révay wrote to his parents in a mixture of pride and some distress that his mind was preoccupied with public matters both day and night.
⁶

For the elite class, Hungary was very much part of Europe: aristocratic boys studied in Wittenberg, the Low Countries, Vienna, Padua or France; future politicians were sent to be formed in Vienna. In their everyday habits Turkish and Balkan manners did have some effect on the Hungarians, but in terms of conscious behaviour the orientation was towards Germany and the Netherlands, and to a slightly lesser extent Italy, whence came artistic, decorative and literary influences, as well as, some said, a familiarity with the more recondite arts of the bedchamber.

The paragon Lord Francis Nádasdy was, apart from his high-sounding
official titles – Comes of the County, Master of the King's Horse, sometime Captain-General of the Danubian Army – a living embodiment of a cult of heroic savagery and a way of life that found its fulfilment in bloodletting and blood-sports. It was the nineteenth-century Austrian writer von Elsberg, an Imperial patriot and a man who knew the soldier's life well, who linked Francis' triumphs on the battlefields with Elisabeth's campaigns conducted in the privacy of her own houses. Von Elsberg speculated that the brutalities of war must have infiltrated the home life of the family and even affected the womenfolk from the early days (the only real evidence, gleaned from the investigations and trial, that he and others cite is that Francis showed his wife the technique, presumably learned while at war, for reviving an unconscious person by lighting paper between their fingers and toes).
⁷
This is not wholly convincing, but the family members did live surrounded by active soldiers and pensioned-off veterans and could not have separated the two worlds entirely.

In the courts of the Nádasdys and Thurzós the household would begin to stir just before dawn when the lord and lady would rise and wash their hands and faces in a basin brought into their chamber, before dressing or being dressed. A small breakfast would then be served, consisting mainly of an invigorating drink: men favoured bitter-sweet wine or brandy, women might take cinnamon-water or a concoction of honey, figs and raisins dipped in brandy and set alight. They ate bacon or health-giving titbits of ginger and lemon or other fruits.
⁸

The tasks of the morning had to be completed by ten o'clock when the cup-bearer would set the table for a lunch that might last for two hours. Dinner was usually taken at six or seven o'clock in the evening in summer, sometimes earlier in winter, and all but the watchmen would retire not long after night had fallen.

The diet of the privileged was heavy and included far too much meat. When the senior aristocrats travelled across the country, one or more kitchen wagons would accompany them, hung with whole carcasses of venison, game and sides of beef and pork; in a noble household an average meal for the senior members would consist of eight courses, and the more abstemious men would drink around a third of a litre of wine with each one. Over-indulgence was one of the main causes of illness: gout, of which George Thurzó is thought to have died, was prevalent, and digestive disorders and poisoning from eating tainted food were a commonplace. The rich suffered from a lack of ascorbic
acid and vitamins whereas the poor, who mainly subsisted on grain and vegetables, lacked protein. Water was not potable, and had to be drunk boiled with herbs, so Hungarians of all classes constantly drank the wines which were produced all over the Kingdom: cloudy brown beer, brewed by the Saxons in Žilina and elsewhere, was an occasional alternative for those living in the north and east.

The great families were unrestrained in their feasting, not only on special occasions but every day that the lord or lady was in residence. A Friday diet of fish was the rule, but dishes of grouse and veal were slipped in among as many as twenty different preparations of the freshwater fish (great and small sturgeon, pike, loach and catfish were the favourites, and the prehistoric
fogas,
the pike-perch which is found only in Lake Balaton, was also prized), which were cheap and plentiful.

While the humbler maidservants practised the skills of sewing as they repaired and adapted clothing and linen, the noblewomen of all ages would pass a great deal of their time in needlecraft: sewing, knitting, crochet and embroidery. Women competed to excel in these crafts as well as spinning and weaving, using models and methods from Italy, Spain, Poland and the Low Countries and Turkey as well as Hungary itself.

Women of the aristocracy passed their time also in hunting, nearly always in the company of their menfolk. Riding was also a popular recreation, and so, more surprisingly, was fishing. The ladies would organise outings to fish without the company of the men of the household and would combine the excursion with elaborate picnics. When bad weather or delicate health did not permit the genteel outdoor pursuits, women would read (edifying literature was recommended by husbands and priests, and more entertaining works were exchanged privately between ladies) and indulge in letter-writing, which in the sixteenth century began for the first time to be a literary art or hobby for the most cultivated families as well as the main means of communication.

Unfortunately, very few of these personal letters have survived; most private notes were not thought important enough to preserve in family archives, and many of those which were collected were lost in the upheavals that racked Hungary over the next 300 years. (One result of this is that when a noble line died out or fell from grace, its collected papers might be destroyed or scattered: there is no ‘Báthory archive', as there is for the Thurzó, Nádasdy, Zrínyi or Drugeth families.)

This means that there are two areas of the lives of these inhabitants of the past, the women in particular, that have been frustratingly closed to us, areas which bear directly upon the crucial mysteries of Elisabeth Báthory's story. The first concerns the mundane minutiae of everyday life: the interplay of social relations within the household, the pattern of duties and tasks and the quarrels and reconciliations and petty transgressions that attended them together with the transient thoughts and feelings of the players in the domestic drama of the castle or the manor-house or the village. There was no need to objectify these things, no outsider to describe them to; everyone from the Great Lady to the serf was living inside this reality and was utterly familiar with it. To try to reconstruct it we must fall back upon wedding lists, menus, payrolls and contracts, together with the few oblique references to the trivialities of life that we find in more important communications such as official notices of births and deaths.