Countess Dracula by Tony Thorne Page A

from the right direction, the stench of the pyre could disperse along the valley. The condemned were usually brought out in carts early in the morning as bells tolled. They would be standing or sitting in an open cart, restrained by chains or a sort of scold’s collar: a wooden yoke with a line of holes for the head and the two wrists held one before the other.
    In death by burning it was thought that the forces of nature were annihilating the guilty, and not just the hand of man; it was one of the longest-drawn-out and most painful forms of capital punishment, usually reserved for witches or heretics. Hanging was considered to be the most shameful form of death and beheading the most noble in the prescribed range of capital punishment.
    In Hungary, as in the rest of Europe, the moments before the act of execution could be a confused, sordid and shaming experience, or they could provide the chance for the condemned to enjoy, fleetingly, an audience before which he or she could repent, ask forgiveness and vouchsafe a few words for posterity. No account of the executions at Byt č a has survived, so we do not know how Ficzkó and the women faced their deaths. In a comparable case in Engand, there would havebeen pamphlets printed and doggerel rhymes and songs composed, but Byt č a was Thurzó’s fiefdom, the few printing presses were all in the hands of the nobles and dissent was not tolerated, so any public response could only have been oral and transitory.
    So died the human instruments of Elisabeth Báthory’s cruelty, if the evidence and the verdict can be trusted. Apart from her, they were perhaps the only individuals who knew the truth about the deaths of so many innocents, and they could no longer be brought back to fill in the many gaps in their testimonies or alter their stories to exonerate the woman they served. Whether or not they deserved to die, the speed with which these lackeys had been condemned and the sentence carried out was unusual and irregular, but they were, with the exception of Benecká, who was spared, people of absolutely no consequence in society and therefore expendable.
    The judgement pronounced on the three servants who had suffered the death penalty was proclaimed publicly in all the areas where Elisabeth’s family had landholdings. Shame was a powerful weapon in the early modern period, and the potentates of the late Renaissance were experts in black propaganda: the ‘facts’ that had been revealed brought ignominy on Countess Báthory and by extension upon her late husband, but did so without smearing any other high-born individuals.
    Of the ultimate fate of Katherine Benecká, the only one of the inner circle of servants to escape immediate execution, we know nothing at all. Arbitrary justice could work both ways; unexpectedly merciful treatment was almost as likely as disproportionate harshness, and Benecká, especially if she had relatives from the gentry to agitate on her behalf, may have walked free once a decent interval had passed (there were two men of the same family name recorded in documents of 1612 as living in the Byt č a area and owing allegiance to the Thurzó family). Unluckier prisoners – war captives who could not be ransomed, minor miscreants without friends of substance, or victims of embarrassing miscarriages of justice – were generally left, literally, to rot.
    There was one more gruesome entertainment for the citizens of Byt č a that January. On the 24th of the month the stake was raised again in the meadow outside the town and the kindling and faggots piled around it. Without ceremony and without, it seems, any formal trial, the other named confidante of the Lady of Č achtice, the old woman Erzsi ‘Majorosné’ (the name translates as Beth ‘the Farmer’sWife’), the witch of Myjava, who had, it was said, helped the Countess to bake her magic cake with which to kill her enemies, was