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in his wife, which means that, whether she was interfering, gossiping or had performed a vital part in the preparations for Elisabeth Báthory’s entrapment, her letter is a precious clue. If we could decode its text, we might know once and for all whether Countess Báthory was a monster or herself a victim, but the words are all ambiguous.
    â€˜I have sent . . . the old woman’ – who is this that Lady Czobor has dispatched in the company of a senior servant, and where? A spy sent to infiltrate the Báthory court, an informant who will reveal the Countess’s secrets, or a guide to lead the raiders to their victim? Next, ‘whether it is true or not only God knows’ – there seems still to be doubt in the minds of the accusers forty-eight hours before the soldiers moved in; ‘it is possible that those persons will bear false witness’ – will they lie to their judges about their own actions, or lie to implicate an innocent? ‘That one who is in the castle’ – can we be sure who is being referred to, the mistress or one of her trusted aides? ‘She says that with her hand she beat them’ – are the two ‘shes’ one and the same, or is the first the informer and the second the accused?
    On 30 December George Thurzó replied to Elisabeth Czobor, who was awaiting his news:
    My dear love ... I have arrested Madam Nádasdy and they are taking her to the castle. Those who were torturing and killing the innocent ones, those wicked females, with a young lad who was the assistant in all these cruelties, I have sent to Byt č a. And now with great care and security, they must be held in close captivity until God speeds me to the place and a court may be convened. The women may be held in the town, but the young boy placed in captivity in the castle. When our people went into the Csejthe manor, then they discovered a dead girl at that house and another one with wounds and dying from torture, and also there was a woman who had been tortured and was covered with wounds and another [or others] who was imprisoned who that damned woman was keeping for torture. I am waiting for that accursed woman to be taken up to the castle, and that they put her into her place. I have written in great haste on the Thirtieth day of December from Vág Újhely.
    Your love, who so much loves you
        Count George Thurzó 20
    â€˜. . . that damned woman . . . that accursed woman . . .’ – is there any doubt about which woman Thurzó is referring to? Lady Czobor’s letter is intimate, cryptic and scarcely penetrable; his reads like a public declaration, which in a way it was. It contained his instructions and his authorisation for her to carry them out in his absence, and she would show it if necessary to his men in the town as a token of her authority.
    When the visiting English gentleman and his companions looked over the scene of Elisabeth Báthory’s arrest and incarceration in 1836, the letters that passed between Count Thurzó and his wife were lying still undiscovered among the unsorted papers of the archives in the depths of the Palatine’s castle. Paget had only the terse narrative of the guidebooks and the legends as his inspiration:
    With this tale fresh in our minds we ascended the long hill, gained the castle, and wandered over its deserted ruins. The shades of evening were just spreading over the valley, the baregrey walls stood up against the red sky, the solemn stillness of evening reigned over the scene, and as two ravens which had made their nest on the castle’s highest towers came towards it, winging their heavy flight, and wheeling once round, each cawing a hoarse welcome to the other, alighted on their favourite turret, I could have fancied them the spirits of the two crones condemned to haunt the scene of their former crimes, while their infernal mistress was cursed by some more wretched doom.