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21

Chapter Two

Ordeals and Confessions
    and the false nurse shall be burnéd,
on the fire there close by.
    â€˜Long Lankyn’
, traditional English folk song
    John Ficzkó’s confession ~ techniques of torture ~ the evidence of the accomplices ~ proclamations by the Byt č a court ~ thirteen further testimonies ~ the sentencing and the punishment ~ a public burning
    The authorities who had detained Countess Báthory knew who else they were looking for. After being privately tortured and publicly confronted with two of their supposed victims in Č achtice, four members of her staff, three elderly women and one young man, were taken under guard to the town of Byt č a to be put on trial. The four were examined again immediately after their arrival there and the same set of eleven questions was put to each of them in turn. We should pay especially close attention to the answers they gave since the accused, although they may have had much to hide and good reasons to lie, hadbeen identified as the most intimate companions of their mistress and among the very few people in a position to describe the workings of the private inner court that operated wherever the Countess was in residence.
    The trusted servants whom Thurzó’s henchmen imprisoned and tortured were a former wetnurse, Ilona (Helena) Jó, whose surname (literally ‘good’) is a common one, but might also have referred to her vocation, Dorottya (Dorothy) Szentes, known familiarly as ‘Dorkó’, who oversaw the female servants, and Katalin (Katherine) Benecká or Beniczky, called ‘Kata’, a laundrywoman. Also accused was János (John) Újváry, known to everyone as ‘Ficzkó’, either a manservant or a humbler
Johannes Factotum
(a jack of all trades or odd-job man), who was the first to be brought before the court.
    The evidence regarding Ficzkó, like the others, is given in the third person in the form ‘he said . . .’, but the third person pronoun ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ is the same in Hungarian. This leads to great ambiguity in all the accounts given, because it is not always clear which of the protagonists is being referred to. Likewise the word
asszony,
denoting a married woman, so ‘Mistress’, ‘woman’ or ‘lady’, cannot always be ascribed accurately either to Elisabeth Báthory or to one of her female servants. Strange gaps and illogical links in the text may be due to the inarticulacy of the witness, compounded by editing or even wholesale reconstructing by the scribe. In inquisitorial procedures at that time, the quantity of evidence, so long as it went to support the charges laid, was more important than its quality, so inconsistencies were often not picked up and blatant untruths were sometimes allowed to pass unquestioned. It is implied in the original trial documents that there was at least one other version of the confessions, kept in another place, and the copies that survived in the Thurzó archive in Byt č a, in the Erd ő ’]dy archive in Galgóc and in the National Archives in Budapest differ in significant details.
    Ficzkó’s responses are set down here just as they appear in the records, with some comments inserted, but no attempt has been made to improve the style or impose this author’s interpretation. (In the other testimonies which will be considered, some repetitions, irrelevancies and obvious errors have been removed for the sake of brevity.)
    The preface of the ‘protocol’ or first draft summary of the servants’ interrogation reads: ‘This is the confessions of persons of low rank against Mistress Nádasdy, Elisabeth Báthory, on the Second of Januaryin 1611 in the county town of Byt č a. First János Újváry, otherwise known as Ficzkó, gave the following confession to the questions in order.’ 1
    First question: How long has he lived with the