Free The Countess by Rebecca Johns Page B

carrying my dowry: chests of gold forints, silver basins, gilt and silver candelabra, ancient portraits of Báthory ancestors, my fine clothes and jewels. My mother-in-law had spared no expense in hiring enough soldiers to protect the wealth traversing the countryside, and we made a great spectacle, traveling in a long dusty line. The locals must have thought, upon seeing the carriage coming toward their villages, that we were the Turks once again on the move, not an eleven-year-old bride-to-be and her escorts.
    The countryside of the Carpathian foothills was lush, sometimes rolling meadowland, sometimes marshy, but it was high summer and everywhere were green and growing things—crops of barley and oats, wildflowers, grasses that murmured in the breeze. Sometimes there were copses of birch and quaking aspen and fir or dark woods of oak and underbrush so thick the soldiers who accompanied us rode with one hand on their sword hilts, watching for movement among the trees. We avoided passage through the Turkish-occupied zones of Lower Hungary, including Buda, which I had long wanted to see, but still we had to keep a close eye out and approach any garrison with caution, for although we had letters allowing our safe passage through the lands of other noblemen friendly to my family,it was always possible to come upon a greedy officer, or an outlaw band of
hajdúks
, or gypsies who might try to fall upon the wagons and carriages and take what they could. The whole journey was conducted with the utmost of care, with the result that it took quite a long time to reach our destination, time in which I had little to do and no one for company except the redheaded tadpole Megyery, Anna Darvulia, and a few other servants.
    Outside of Ecsed I knew little of the world other than what I had imagined from reading my mother’s books. I had never realized what a rich and varied country I inhabited, how vast and far-flung my family’s holdings were, for we passed through so many towns and villages and farms that were loyal in some way to the Báthorys that I could not name them all. The world was filled with sights so strange to my eyes that each day seemed to create the entire world anew: a man walking on stilts across a high river, a town wall thick with Turkish cannonballs, a group of soldiers leading a crying woman—a witch, Megyery told me—to a place of execution outside some little village. Suddenly my longing to see the canals of bawdy Venice, to travel to Rome or London seemed like nothing more than a childish fantasy. In truth, the place I most often longed to be during those days in the creaking, miserable, dusty carriage with the road ruts shaking my bones was at home in my bed with Klára and Zsofía curled up next to me, the sweet hot smell of their dark curls under my nose as they slept. On the road, when I drifted into an uneasy half sleep, I almost thought myself there again, until the carriage would jolt me back to myself and the sight of Megyery’s thin face and bulging eyes made me remember where I was, and where I was going.
    On our journey Megyery filled the air with chatter about Sárvár, about the people I would meet there and the countryside around the house, but I didn’t need his blather to know where I was headed, and to whom, and why. My future husband’s family was famous and powerful and wealthy, though not so famous and powerful and wealthy as my own. The old palatine Tamás Nádasdy, who died whenI was only two years old, had been learned and liberal, my mother had explained to me, a patron of the arts and literature, a convert to the Lutheran faith who set up a printing press at Sárvár to publish bibles and other books written in Hungarian. My future husband was the child of his old age, born when Tamás was fifty-eight, the longed-for heir that he and Orsolya had nearly given up hope of conceiving after many disappointments. Orsolya was a good deal younger than her husband, fourteen to his thirty-seven