Free Countess Dracula by Tony Thorne Page B

from?
    Response: Even when the Master was alive she had been torturing girls, but in those days she did not kill them as she now did. The poor Master complained about this and he disapproved, but she did not care about the warning. But then after Mistress Anna Darvulia arrived, that one [presumably Darvulia] started to kill the girls, and after that the Mistress herself became more and more cruel and wicked. With the help of a tiny box with a little mirror set in it, she was beseeching. The wife of the
Majoros
[the tenant farmer] in Myjava prepared some water and at about four o’clock brought this water and had the woman bathed in a bread-pan. She poured the water out into the brook, and from the second mixture in the pan they wanted to bake a sort of bread which they wanted the King, my Lord Palatine and also Imre Megyery to eat and thus poison them. But these lords recognised this [enchantment] and moved against the woman, because as they ate from the first baking, they complained of their stomachs, and she then did not dare arrange the second baking.
    What we know for sure about the real Ficzkó is little more than his name: he is mentioned in many of the accusations collected during Thurzó’s inquiry, but the stories told by witnesses hostile to him were not all necessarily accurate. In the literature that grew up around the persona of the Blood Countess, Ficzkó features prominently; his precise age was not specified at the trial, although his youth was referred to in the judgement and in separate documents. George Thurzó and the pastor of Č achtice, Ponikenus, call him ‘the young man’. This, coupled with his nickname, which can be translated as ‘the Lad’ or ‘Boy’, is significant as it helps to explain his transformation in fiction. Some writers, puzzled that an adult had kept this childish sobriquet, decided that it referred to his size or the fact that he was treated as a plaything. By the nineteenth century a French source was referring to him as ‘Filsko [sic], nain de sa cour’ (‘her court dwarf), 2 a hundredyears later he is ‘a kind of idiot hunchback gnome, very vicious, but at the same time docile’. 3 Just as Elisabeth herself seems to have provided a character for gothic romances, Ficzkó may be a precursor of a stock figure still to be seen in debased form in cartoons and video games, the evil and misshapen retainer.
    There are several points in Ficzkó’s confession which deserve attention. First and foremost, the way he frames his answers to the first four questions coupled with the ambiguity inbuilt in his native language mean that he may be accusing Dorkó rather than Elisabeth. Later, however, he does seem to be implicating the Countess herself.
    There are some curious passages; for instance, Ficzkó says that as a very young boy and presumably an orphan he ‘was taken by force’ from ‘the wife of a student’
(deák,
the Hungarian word, often also denoted an educated person or clerk). Although women were sometimes lured into service and homeless children were occasionally adopted by noblewomen, it was very rare for them to be abducted. Perhaps the comment is an error by the transcriber, or perhaps the accused is trying to emphasise his helplessness in the affair.
    When Ficzkó reacts to the second question, he may be trying to impress the court with his truthfulness, or possibly it is a hint of bravado, or else simply the literal response of an unsophisticated person. Later, though, his testimony does seem questionable as he claims not to know any details of the girls who died, yet remembers the names and even addresses of the women who procured them.
    Two other significant details are the mention – one of only two among the hundreds who testified – of a girl escaping from the clutches of the Countess, and the reference to magic. Ficzkó describes his mistress using her mirror to