“Master Horvath?” I call out, knocking on the frame. “May I come in?”
A long-suffering sigh billows out, followed by a begrudging “Go on, then.” I step gingerly into his chambers, musty and windowless, the walls lined with towering shelves of books. The magistrate sits behind an imposing desk, massaging the wattle beneath his chin and peering at me narrowly through lopsided spectacles. He has gray hair in kinky curls, clumsily clubbed back, and the florid look of someone given to gout.
“But you’re only a girl!” he half bellows incredulously, gawping at me. “Have you no father with you? No chaperone?”
I shake my head stiffly, dipping into a quick curtsy. “No, master. It’s just me.”
A bushy eyebrow shoots up over the spectacles’ frame, and he twists his lips from side to the side. “And what grievance have you to report?”
“Murder, sir,” I say, taking a deep, shaking breath. “More than one. And torture, and witchcraft. I . . . I have a great deal to tell.”
His face blanches into a grayish pallor, like a decomposing mushroom. “More than one, you say,” he replies faintly, gesturing me to the chair across from his desk. “In that case, I suppose you’d better sit.”
Half an hour later, I finally catch my first proper breath. Master Horvath hunches over Elizabeth’s black journal, running his stubby thumb down the pages. He listened impassively, barely twitching his tufty brows, while I described Elizabeth’s atrocities, all the deaths I witnessed at her hand. I told him of the demonic banquet before Ferenc died, the girls that succumbed to arsenic, and the ones she bled dry for her rituals.
The ominous blandness of his regard makes me feel like a vole scurrying across a field, with the shadow of a bird of prey circling above.
“To recap,” he says crisply, smacking his lips with obvious skepticism. “You claim the countess—that is the Lady Báthory, so that we are clear—is not only a poisoner, sadist, the devil’s own consort, and an adulteress who bore a peasant’s child, but that she murdered her own husband as well?”
“Yes, sir,” I reply, swallowing hard. I left out my own part in Ferenc’s death, fearing to muddy the waters by implicating myself. “She, she had him poisoned.”
“And these entries . . .” He looks up at me, fixing me with a gimlet gaze. “According to you, they are somehow proof of your outlandish claims? The records of some unnatural experiment?”
“The countess wishes to preserve her youth and beauty at any price,” I explain, moistening my lips. “She was testing an elixir on these women, one that she wished to eventually take herself. What you are reading is the record of her failures, the pain she inflicted in pursuit of that folly.”
“The folly of a poisonous elixir you helped her devise,” he rumbles, eyes narrowing even further. “By your own admission.”
“I had no choice in the matter,” I protest. “She was my mistress. And I’m a midwife’s daughter, with some knowledge of herbs and medicine. That was why she enlisted my help in that endeavor.”
“A midwife’s daughter,” he repeats, his eyes sharpening into twin bores. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Anna Darvulia, sir,” I supply, heart suddenly knocking against my ribs. Shouldn’t my name be of the least interest, in comparison to everything else I’ve told him?
“Anna Darvulia,” he mutters. “Not a common name, yet a familiar one. Tell me, what cause would I have to know it?”
“I’m—I’m not sure, sir,” I stumble, taken aback. “I have been the lady’s chambermaid for nearly a year, both here and back home in Sarvar. Always by her side. Everything that she has done, I have witnessed. And she . . .” My courage deserts me, and suddenly I feel like no more than what I am. Just a sixteen-year-old girl without anyone to help her. “Sir, she has my sister. Unless you do something, she plans to kill her—along with the daughters of nobles, a dozen girls she has lured to the keep. She is a monster, a black-hearted devil, she must be stopped—”
“Yes, yes, I think I have the gist,” he says abruptly, rising and maneuvering his ungainly bulk around the desk. “Why don’t you wait here? I must consult . . . one of my colleagues on the protocol, see how justice might best be served. The countess is a powerful woman. This matter is sure to be a delicate one.”
A clamor of hope rises up inside me like a belling chorus, and I clutch the chair arms with bloodless fingers. “Oh, thank you, sir! I am so grateful, I—”
He waves off my thanks irritably, bustling out the door behind me. I am so engorged with the possibility of Klara’s freedom and Elizabeth’s demise that it takes a few moments for the metallic rattle behind me to sink in.
“What . . .” I whisper to myself, rising and rushing to the door. The handle will not give under my hand, and when I tug at it the door does not budge an inch.
Despair cinches my throat like a drawstring purse. The bastard of a magistrate has locked me in.
I fall upon the door, beating it with my fists. “Let me out, God damn you,” I sob, pressing my cheek against the wood. “Let me go, I have done nothing . . .”
Though I pound and beg until I exhaust myself, my entreaties are met by nothing but echoing silence. When the door finally opens some time later, it reveals the magistrate, flanked by two grim-faced men. And I understand at once what is happening. I can practically hear Elizabeth’s derisive laughter, swooping about some hidden belfry in my mind, flapping and squeaking like a horde of maddened bats.
The magistrate knew my name. Which means that this trap, too, she has devised for me. Perhaps this is what Thorko meant, when he stayed her hand from killing me, cautioning her that she might need me even beyond my skill for herbs. And she has been calling me a witch where others could hear since I tended to her son—could she truly have been plotting even then to cast the blame for her misdeeds on me?
Of course she could have.
Of course she has.
“No,” I whisper, shying back. “Please . . .”
“Anna Darvulia,” he intones as the men surge forward and wrest me between them, dragging me out into the hall while the magistrate keeps pace. “Also known as Anna the Cunning, the witch of Sarvar. You are hereby under arrest, for the foul, unnatural murder of Lord Ferenc Nadasdy.”
“Please,” I cry as they drag me down the hall. “Please, at least go see for yourself! Ask the remaining servants, search the orchards! There are bodies everywhere!”
“Do not presume to tell us our work, you murderess!” he roars at me, spittle flying. “You shall await your trial in gaol with the rest of the scum, and we will investigate in due course—as we see fit.”
They will find nothing, I think bitterly as I am dragged along, so violently that my toes barely graze the floor. Because they will hardly bother to look.
Why investigate a highborn lady, one of the most powerful nobles in the land, when you can burn a common witch in her stead?
Chapter Twenty-two
The Gaol and the Stratagem
By the time Peter comes to visit me, I have been moldering in my gaol cell for nearly a month.