“You could have asked for me,” said Zuzana, looking down at the river.
“If I had asked, everyone would know there was a connection between us. The castle is a nest of spies.” Zuzana looked away, biting her lip. “And I do not trust the Countess with any information.”
Zuzana looked up at him sharply. “You must never speak ill of the Countess!”
“Why?”
“Because—she is too dangerous, too powerful. You must know that!”
“How can you bear to work with such a cruel mistress?”
Zuzana frowned, rubbing her muddy fingertips together.
“I have no choice,” she said, her blue eyes glittering. “She picked me years ago to serve her.”
“Are rumors true about her? Does she torture innocent girls?”
Zuzana stared at him, her eyes filling with tears.
“Does she murder them?” Janos was insistent.
Zuzana closed her eyes. She clapped her hands over her ears. Janos stretched his hand around her shoulders.
“Is it true?” said Janos, shaking her hard.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I have never seen it, but I hear screams in the night.”
Chapter 35
SOMEWHERE IN SLOVAKIA
DECEMBER 21, 2010
The Count’s voice resonated in the library. He spoke as if he were addressing a large audience.
“Over the years, we have weeded out the illegitimate descendants of the Bathory line, isolating them. Those bastards of peasant stock who sullied the lineage have been, shall we say, dealt with. In some cases, there have been those so bold as to lay claim to the Bathory fortunes. While they were bothersome, they stood no chance of inheriting. Everything was nicely taken care of—until your husband started meddling.”
Grace’s face creased in defiance.
“My husband?”
“He was tracing the descendants of families whose daughters had been eliminated during the Countess’s reign—and he planned to pay retribution. He had to be stopped.”
Grace looked down at her left hand, at her gold wedding band.
“Ceslav was admitted to the Hungarian State Archives in Budapest. He argued that his Slovak heritage gave him a right to view papers taken from Slovak lands, and his mother was Hungarian. And—”
“And what?”
“And he was presented with hundreds of pages of documents from the early seventeenth century. Record keeping was fastidious in the Nadasdy households. Weekly entries of purchases, salaries, debts.”
“Why would any of that interest him?”
“Apparently among the stacks was a ledger the Countess kept in her own hand—a sort of diary. A diary that allegedly documented her…activities. I think your husband stole that ledger from the Archives. On those pages were the names of six hundred women. Six hundred twelve to be exact. Depositions were also written.”
“Six hundred twelve women. Women that she murdered? My God!”
The Count’s eyes focused coldly on the gray-haired woman.
“Your husband,” said the Count, his nostrils pinched up as if there were an evil smell in the air, “took it upon himself to start the Bathory Reparation Project—to track down the descendants of the families of the women who were…dispatched.”
“I never knew—”
“Of course you did not. You lived in blissful ignorance. Ceslav was ashamed. Instead of being proud of his Hungarian heritage, of having noble blood in his veins from a family that once ruled Eastern Europe for almost a thousand years, he disguised his roots.”
“Ceslav? What ‘noble blood’?”
“Dr. Path—your name should rightly be Dr. Bathory. Even the great Ferenc Nadasdy changed his name to Nadasdy-Bathory when he married the Countess.”
“Bathory? No!”
“Your husband was a direct descendant of the first child of the fourteen-year-old countess. She was a bastard child, but still a true Bathory. Your husband’s grandfather changed the family name from Bathory to Path when he moved from Budapest to Bratislava.”
“I don’t believe you. You are inventing things, just like this insane nonsense of the vampires. You are delusional!”
“The Bathory name is still revered in Hungary and Poland—the surname of kings, palatines, and conquerors. But Slovaks—Slovaks detest the name.”
Grace shook her head vehemently.
“My husband was a psychiatrist in the asylum. He practiced in Vienna before moving to America. Why would he involve himself in this?”
The Count stared at her, a sudden darkness obscuring the light his eyes. She could feel the chill emanating from him.
Just as suddenly, the shadow lifted, as he regained his composure.
“Yes, well, that question is moot. The Bathory Reparations would require all descendants of Erzsebet Bathory to pay retribution to her victims’ families’ descendants. Perhaps ten percent of his income—he called it a ‘tithe’—pledged for five years would not amount to much.”