In what remained of Royal Hungary, Countess Bathory owned more lands than the House of Habsburg itself.
Betsy checked the two castles her mother had mentioned in the e-mail: Čachtice and Beckov, both reduced to ruins. They were less than fifty kilometers from Bratislava and about fifteen kilometers from each other.
Why hadn’t she mentioned that she was researching Bathory, when she normally stuck to the Habsburg kings? Rudolf II and his younger brother Matthias, in their fraternal struggle for the crown, were usually her focus. Why, suddenly, this Bathory woman?
Betsy clicked on travel articles and excerpts of books. Most of the write-ups described the ruins of Čachtice, at the foot of the Little Carpathian Mountains.
Then she read:
BLOODY LIZ WAS RUMORED TO HAVE TORTURED AND KILLED PEASANT GIRLS DURING HER MURDEROUS REIGN. SHE IS ACCUSED OF BATHING IN THE BLOOD OF BEAUTIFUL YOUNG VIRGINS IN ORDER TO KEEP HER YOUTHFUL APPEARANCE ETERNAL. COUNTESS BATHORY, ALONG WITH HER ANCESTOR, VLAD THE IMPALER, WAS THE BASIS OF BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA.
Betsy realized she had stopped breathing. She drew a deep breath, filling her lungs to capacity, and tried to quiet her mind.
What twisted psychological condition did this woman have? Preying on girls, obsessed with their blood! Was it a genetic predisposition for psychosis, passed down through generations of inbreeding among the aristocracy?
A dog barked in the neighborhood. Ringo growled. She glanced up at the windows, but the paper shades were lowered. No one could see her. She turned back to the glow of the computer screen.
There were no hotels near Čachtice, not even a bed-and-breakfast. This was a tiny village at the foot of the mountains. The closest hotels were about thirteen kilometers away in the spa town of Piestany. Betsy couldn’t picture her mother staying anywhere fancy, so she began e-mailing every small hotel and B & B she could find in the Piestany area. She couldn’t think of what else to do. And the repetitive act of copying and pasting the same brief query about a sixty-five-year-old university professor, traveling alone, gave her something to occupy her mind. Command-V, command-V—paste, paste, paste.
Why would her mother be interested in a murderous psychopathic countess?
Betsy searched through her file cabinet. She had gone through the Ps three times already, each time more carefully.
She stopped, thinking. Of course!
Under M, for Mom.
Betsy found the file. Her mother had granted one session with her daughter, and one session only. It was a kind of graduation present to Betsy, to share the one dream Grace had ever remembered.
It was a dream Grace had had the night Betsy was born.
“Don’t you dare analyze me, Betsy. I’m only sharing this because I never, ever dream. It must have been provoked by indigestion or the first spasms of childbirth.”
It was clear that she wanted her daughter to hear this dream. Grace was such a left-brained academic, systematic and almost scientific in her meticulous research in history. She was so unlike Betsy or her husband, their Jungian world of dream interpretation dismissed as “malarkey.”
Once Grace started talking, her words flowed.
I dream I am floating through a dense cloudbank that hugs mountain walls. The air clears and it is a winter day in a river valley.
There is a village below me. A fairytale village, dusted with snow. I see a tall church steeple and wooden cottages with straw-thatched roofs. Rosy-cheeked children play in the streets, though I can’t hear them. They wear rustic clothes of long ago: the boys in wool caps and breeches, the girls with white kerchiefs and long aprons.
I feel that it is Eastern Europe, but I hear no voices, no accents to confirm this. It is a soundless dream.
I veer away to a pond. White steam rises from the water and ice clings to the bare branches of the weeping willows. Frost outlines the bark eyes of the birch trees, staring solemnly.
Everything glitters as the sun’s rays filter through the fog coming off the water in gentle waves, ghosts gliding over the pond.
A brittle shelf of ice lines the shore, a jagged silver plane on the dark water. Ducks float peacefully beyond, occasionally plunging to pull at strands of grass below the surface. They seem oblivious to the cold, their fat bottoms tipped up to the winter sky.
I feel at peace in a world of winter beauty.
Then I see her: a girl, submerged, coated in ice, her eyes open, blue and clear. She stares blindly, her long hair sparkling with frost. I have the impression she has tried to tear off her clothes, there is a rip in her bodice. A rose-colored mark blooms just above her breast, contrasting sharply with her flawless white skin.
Everything about her is beautiful. Except that she is dead.
Betsy shuddered and closed her eyes.
Where are you now, Mom?