Countess Dracula (9 page)

The methods of torture did not depend on sadism or arbitrary cruelty on the part of the torturers. Nevertheless it was well known that the quality of evidence produced in this way was likely to be inferior, and it was probably George Thurzó himself who struck out the words ‘et tortura' in the draft of the report sent to the King about the executions of Elisabeth's accomplices, presumably to lend more credibility to their forced confessions.

The skill of eliciting such confessions entailed more than causing physical pain. By Elisabeth's day the inquisitorial process had undergone 200 years of refinement, culminating in handbooks for inquisitors which instructed them in exactly what should be asked, and what responses could be expected in a prescribed sequence of interrogation. In a telling precedent the Knights Templar – members of a hardened and supremely disciplined chivalrous order – had been forced in the fourteenth century to submit to interrogation. At first these warrior-monks proudly rejected all the accusations made against them, but once the torturer's expertise was brought to bear they confessed at length; in their delirium they scoured their imaginations for the most elaborate blasphemies and abominations to admit to. If paragons of knighthood were helpless before the rack, how much less resistant would a loutish young manservant and three elderly women have been?

The expert in charge of the torturing, usually the local executioner,
would be a professional, rewarded for his services, typically by a fixed cash payment for each instrument applied.
⁵
Executioners lived well, but were local pariahs – the word executioner,
hóhér,
was a term of abuse (applied by her judges to Elisabeth Báthory and later by Lady Listhius to her despised husband) and even their touch was regarded as a cause of lifelong shame. The chief torturer would begin by displaying the instruments of torture to the subject, who would have been stripped naked and restrained: this in itself might prompt a first confession. The standard panoply included wooden wall- and floor-stocks, iron vices serving as finger-screws, iron collars spiked on the inside, the boot – a wooden or metal cylinder with studs on the inside that could be tightened by the driving in of wedges. There were also two-foot-long metal pincers and flails consisting of slender barbed chains attached to a wooden handle. Next, some of the array of torture devices would be placed on the victim's body. The mere touch of the thumbscrews or the iron boot would concentrate the subject's mind, but, if this was not enough, the various tools were put to work, starting with the agonies of crushed fingers and legs and proceeding if necessary through lighted matches under the finger- and toenails via the rack (either an upright bench or ladder on which the suspect was stretched with the aid of weights or a rectangular frame from which the subject was suspended) and the strappado to scourging, burning, branding, boiling and whatever local refinements were in vogue.
⁶

In the twentieth century Hungary has a particular tradition of relishing the romantic barbarism of the exotic past in its popular fiction:

But the real days of celebration were those when to cheer up the folk, to excite their fighting spirit, the
magister torturarum,
imported especially for the task, prepared and laid out his instruments of practice. This was the time for the hoisting up, the scorching with slow fire, the crushing of bones. This was a most effective method for quickening the lazy blood that was turning to whey in the veins. It was gaudy amusement, cruel amusement.
⁷

After Ficzkó had replied to the interrogators' questions, it was the turn of the women – they are invariably described in the literary sources as
‘crones', but we know nothing of their appearance or manner, only that they were all three elderly.

The next ‘accomplice' to confess was the woman Helena Jó, widow of a certain Stephen Nagy. She informed the investigators that she had served the Lady for ten years (either the information was wrongly recorded or she was minimising her involvement – she must have been with Báthory for eighteen or nineteen years at least) and had acted as wetnurse to the Lady's two daughters and to her son Paul (she did not mention Andrew and Ursula, the other boy and girl born to Elisabeth, which suggests that they had died almost at birth). She knew that the crimes that her employer had committed had begun before she arrived, but during her service her mistress had killed many girls – perhaps more than fifty, but she could not be sure. She did not know whose children they were, but could remember some instances: a girl named Zichy murdered in Ecsed, George Jánosy's younger sister, a well-born girl from Pol'any, the two Sittkey women.

In answer to the fourth question Helena Jó supplied a list of those who had assisted in procuring girls, including three women from Sárvár, the wife of John Bársony, John Liptay's wife, and the wives of Stephen Szabó and Balthazar Horváth; she herself had accompanied Daniel Vas in the search for victims and had brought two girls, one of whom was dead and the other, ‘the little Csegleí', was still alive. The latest victims from the
Č
achtice surrounds had been recruited to serve the Lady's daughter during her wedding celebrations. Helena explained that her mistress threatened some women who brought her serving-girls and rewarded others with gifts of clothing. For whatever reason, women continued to supply girls even though they knew that they were going to their deaths.

Helena Jó admitted assisting the Countess in torturing victims, but said she was forced to do so. She named Dorothy Szentes and Katherine Benecká as others who had tormented the maidservants, the former sometimes cutting the girls' swollen flesh with pincers (in another version they are scissors); Ficzkó would also slap the girls' faces whenever he was told to, but the cruellest was Anna Darvulia, who beat the girls when she had the strength to do so, but also forced them to stand in freezing water and poured more cold water over them. Darvulia had later become paralysed and, later still, blind, whereupon the other assistants had had to take over the tasks of punishment. The Countess had learned the techniques of torture from Darvulia, who was
her intimate companion. Often the mistress herself would torture the girls unassisted, heating up keys and pressing them on to the girls' flesh, a technique which she repeated with coins if girls stole or concealed money they had found. Years before in the summer at Sárvár the Lady's husband had come upon a young girl bound and naked in the open air; she had been smeared with honey and left for a day and a night in the palace grounds to be bitten by ants, wasps, bees and flies. This girl who was a relation, she said (presumably of the Nádasdys), had fainted away in her agony. When that happened, said Jó, there was a method of revival that Lord Francis Nádasdy had taught his wife, which was to place coils of paper dipped in oil between the fingers or toes of the unconscious person and light them: the shock of the burning would jerk the victim back to their senses.

Helena told of the great volume of blood that was spilt around the Countess – so much that the Lady was forced frequently to change her saturated clothes and have the walls and floors of her rooms washed down. When the naked female servants were beaten by Dorkó in the Lady's presence (presumably
en masse
in their sleeping quarters), the blood around their beds was so thick that ashes or cinders had to be spread about to soak it up. At other times the Lady had used candles to burn the genitals of the maidens and needles (or knives) and even her own teeth to lacerate them. In a much quoted sequence, this witness gave evidence that when Elisabeth Báthory was in residence in her townhouse in the centre of Vienna, the cries of her victims were so loud and incessant that the monks living next door (the houses adjoined, probably on the corner of the Lobkowitz Square and Augustinerstrasse) used to throw their clay pots against her walls in protest.

When others were beating the girls, Helena stated, the Lady (or it might be ‘the woman') would urge them on, shouting
‘Üsd, üsd, jobban!
' (‘Beat, beat, harder!')

Dorothy Szentes, known as Dorkó, the widow of Benedict Szöcs, was the third member of Elisabeth's entourage to be questioned. She said that Helena Jó had recruited her into the service of Countess Báthory and that she had been employed for only five years. She did not know when her mistress had begun to practise her cruel crimes; she was aware of about thirty-six maidens' deaths, but did not know the victims' names or their families or where their homes were located, only that they had been engaged as seamstresses and servants and had come from many different places. Szentes told her interrogators that she had
helped her mistress to torture girls because she had been ordered to do it. If she did not beat the girls, the Lady would do it herself, and would also pierce the girls' lips with needles, burn them with spoons and with irons on the soles of their feet and pinch their flesh with tongs. Once when the Lady was too sick to punish the girls, she was ordered to take them to her bedside, whereupon the Lady bit lumps of flesh from her victim's face or shoulders. On one occasion at
Č
achtice five girls died in the space of ten days as a result of torture. Szentes also implicated Katherine (Benecká), referring to her concealing corpses in Les
ě
tice.

Szentes is said at times to ‘declare as the others said' or ‘agree with the previous witness', which might be a device by the scribes to avoid the tiresome transcribing of similar statements, or may demonstrate that the accused were giving evidence in each other's presence. Whatever the case, there was a consensus that local women had conspired with Elisabeth and her accomplices to supply the court with girls, that torture and murder had taken place over many years wherever the Countess was in residence, and that other members of the estate households, including the steward Benedict Dese
ő
, the stablemaster Daniel Vas, the estate manager Jacob Szilvássy and others named as Balthasar Poky, Stephen Vágy (both of whom had testified at the earlier secret hearings in April 1610) and a certain Kozma had been aware of what was happening. All the confessions named the late Anna Darvulia, who had served Elisabeth and her husband at his court of Sárvár, as the instigator of the earliest and worst cruelties.

The last of the inner circle to be interrogated was Katherine Benecká or Beniczky, a woman whose name suggests a rank in the lesser gentry and whose husband, John Boda, and two daughters were still living at the time. She said that the wife of Bálint Varga, the mother of the present priest of Sárvár, had invited her to Elisabeth Báthory's court, where she had worked as a laundrywoman. She did not know how many young women had been killed, but thought that the number was around fifty. She herself had not recruited girls for the court, so she could not say where they had come from. She said that Dorothy Szentes had supplied the largest number of girls, including those who had died in the recent past. Helena Jó had also assisted the Countess on many occasions and joined her in her cruelty as she was an especially close confidante of the Lady, but Helena was no longer able to use her own hands in the beating (perhaps due
to rheumatism or arthritis); nevertheless she was the most ruthless in supervising punishments. When Katherine Benecká had refused to help she had herself been beaten and had to stay in bed for a month to recover. Dorkó had deprived the girls imprisoned at
Č
achtice of food and drink and she and Elisabeth Báthory had tortured girls together, on one occasion killing five by beating them. The five corpses were stuffed under a bed and she (Benecká, or it may have been Dorkó or even the Lady) had continued to bring them food (another version has ‘talk about them') as if they were still alive. The smell of decomposition had filled the manor-house so that everyone became aware of it. Then the Lady departed for Sárvár after ordering Katherine to scour the floor and conceal the bodies, but she had not been strong enough to move them and so, with the help of two women named Kate and Barbara, she dragged them to a grain pit, later burying them with Dorothy Szentes' help in an orchard (or, in another version, in a ditch). The Mistress had killed eight maidens within a short space of time and had tortured the daughter of Helena Herz or Harczy in Vienna. Benecká had also taken bodies to be buried in the graveyard at Lešetice.

Benecká also described how Anna Darvulia, originally the most adept at devising tortures, had been struck blind, after which the other women had learned to take her place. She also related how, when her mistress's daughter Anna, the wife of Count Zrínyi, was visiting
Č
achtice, the Countess cleared her servants out of the manor-house to make way for her, dispatching them all to the castle on the hill under Dorothy Szentes' supervision. Szentes kept the serving maids under lock and key without food or drink, doused them with cold water and made them stand stark naked overnight, deprived of sleep. She cursed and threatened anyone who thought of giving them food. When the Lady wanted to depart with her daughter to Piešt'any to take the waters, she sent Benecká to summon maidservants to accompany them, but Benecká found that the maids were in a pitiable state and not one of them was strong enough to travel. The Lady was furious with Dorkó, and the elderly Katherine had to accompany the group herself.

There are discrepancies in the surviving versions of the evidence, different documents ascribing the same statement to different witnesses. Variant versions of proper names and the confusion over pronouns and verb forms makes it difficult to decide exactly who is acting and who is being acted upon. Nevertheless it is possible to reconstruct a general summary of the testimonies of the four defendants which contains
themes and incidents echoed in the evidence given by others before and after their indictment. All the accused agreed on the methods of ill-treatment: beating, piercing, cutting, burning, biting and freezing with water and snow. All said that girls had been buried, some with and some without proper ceremony, in village cemeteries near the Báthory estates, sometimes with the help of local priests.