Read Online Countess Dracula by Tony Thorne - Free Book Online

the Roman general MarcusAurelius still towers intact over the plague column, the hangman’s house and the many churches in the streets below. Further along the riverside road – another hard day’s ride for a traveller on horseback – lies George Thurzó’s former fiefdom of Byt č a, today a market town of 12,000 people. On a damp winter’s day in the late 1990s, Byt č a is a rather sullen place, its many featureless factories apparently deserted and the streets empty of all but a handful of expressionless passers-by. There is a market square of burghers’ houses, once prosperous but now with shabby façades, and near by a crumbling synagogue, quite abandoned and ignored, on the edge of a small stream which links the moat of Byt č a’s castle to the river. The turreted castle too is grey and somewhat forlorn, but is undergoing a leisurely restoration to the splendid white-walled, red-roofed landmark, rising from the water-meadows and dwarfing the little settlement outside its walls, that is shown in the sixteenth-century woodcut panoramas.
    The castle was built in the Renaissance style by the Milanese Giovanni Kilian for Count George Thurzó’s father. In 1601 the famous wedding palace, decorated with frescoes of abundant fruits and fabulous animals, which still stands, was erected by George Thurzó just outside the castle proper, which at that time contained a school, a library and archive, a pharmacy and a prison. The Byt č a estate was a centre of prosperity, enlightenment and entertainment for the aristocracy and their retainers, and was renowned for the lavish marriage feasts that the Thurzós regularly staged. For the peasants who lived in the surrounding countryside the court could be a source of largesse when the great families gathered there; at other times it was the fearful place from which unquestioned and absolute power was exercised.
    On 27 December 1610 the young wife of the Count Palatine of Hungary sent a private message from Byt č a to her husband, whom she had left behind two days’ ride south of Č achtice in the capital, Bratislava. The note, which survives, from Elisabeth Czobor to her husband George Thurzó, is fragmentary and mysterious, in part because it was at the heart of a secret conspiracy, in part because the writer was an
ingénue
who had been taught the alphabet by her husband, but who knew nothing of written style and committed her unpunctuated thoughts to paper just as they occurred to her:
    My dearest, beautiful spirit . . .
    As you bade me, I have also sent my estate manager and theold woman. They say that she [or ‘he’ – there is no gender in Hungarian] still says, but whether it is true or not only God knows. Those who do not obey the [first] commandment and act against it, then it is very likely that after this will do so easily [or ‘after that would act contrary to the others, too’], and it is possible that those persons will bear false witness against their fellows. That one who is in the castle, they say that she says that with her hand she beat them, and if she feels herself to be involved and had she known for certain, would have been investigated thoroughly as your lordship ordered.
    I am going to attend to these things as well as I am able. My beautiful beloved spirit and my lord. 19
    This insight into the unedited thoughts of one of those who was intimately involved in the Báthory case is unique. The impression that emerges from Lady Czobor’s letter is of a rather garrulous, childlike woman (the terms of endearment are saccharine; the handwriting shows a mounting excitement as the note progresses) who is anxious to please her husband and to show herself as a clever adviser. Although she seems to be involved in the Palatine’s secret plans, we cannot know whether she was really playing an important role or whether her husband is indulging her. We do know that George confided