Armed in Her Fashion Read online

  Saved him?

  “Stay back,” hissed Mother. “How did you find us here? Do we draw our revenants with us when we leave our homes behind?”

  He shook his head. “We go to the places we lived, we look for our loved ones there. I never would have found you had Beatrix not called me here.”

  “What?” Mother snapped.

  Beatrix shook her head.

  “I did not call him, Mother.”

  Did she? Could she have called him to her just by thinking of him? If you speak of the devil, Grandfather used to say, the devil will appear. She thought of the fireflies. And then she shook her head again. She had thought of Baltazar countless times in the last month. She had spent whole hours thinking only of him, under the covers. Why should she be able to call him tonight, of all nights?

  She remembered the fireflies.

  “Mother, how could I, we have been together the whole time,” Beatrix muttered, talking to Mother but looking now at Baltazar as if she could ask him a question without a word. “Mother, I have not left your side. How could I have called him here? What am I, a sorceress that I can call the dead?”

  Mother frowned. “Why do you say she called you, then? Are you lying? Are you lying to me?”

  He turned his head, oddly, and looked at Mother.

  “All I know is I felt myself drawn here. More powerfully even than I was drawn to our home in Bruges.”

  “Well, then,” Mother huffed. “Don’t slander my daughter if you know nothing about it.”

  “I have no reason to lie,” he said. “I have left all that behind. I am saved.”

  Saved. His face hurt her gaze, his face so much the same, and so changed. She focused on his hand, his left hand, resting at his side as if he were a living man. How strange that the dead should act like the living, should move their hands, like any living man. Like any living man. Yet there was something about him, about the way he looked at her. As if his desires were not his own, but only moved through him like water through a wheel.

  “Won’t you stay with me, Baltazar?” she whispered to him, dropping the distaff and holding out her hands for him to take.

  “Beatrix!” Mother hissed.

  Her husband looked down at her hands, as if they were an animal that had come begging, an animal with sores and fleas.

  Beatrix snatched her hands back. Her throat closed up. This, this thing that had been done to her husband, was worse than death.

  She swallowed. “What are you? What are the revenants?”

  He stared just over her shoulder.

  “Some people call us wanderers; have you heard that? Strange, because in fact we cannot wander. We always have a destination. We go either to our homes, to call the people who loved us in life, or we go like moths to Hell. I have come for you, Beatrix. And together we will go. Your Father is but a little way ahead of us. We can join him.”

  He stood tall as a birch tree but he leaned a little, as if the wind swayed him.

  “Father!”

  “Where is Willem?” Mother asked, still brandishing the knife.

  He stared. No smile crossed his lips and there was nothing in those brown eyes, nothing but the memory of desire, something so sundered now from his thoughts and his soul that it was wordless instinct, like the trotting a dog after its master.

  She had called him, or so he said. If she could call him, she could draw him.

  “Lead us toward him, Baltazar,” she said.

  He stared. He made no move.

  What, then? She had thought—she had been sure that the fireflies went where she pointed the distaff. And she had been holding the distaff when she thought of her husband, wished him near.

  Beatrix did not think. If she thought about it, it wouldn’t work. She grabbed the distaff off the ground and she pointed it at her dead husband and said, “Walk. Walk toward the revenant that was my father.”

  He walked.

  There are always ways in to a tent. Claude snuck along the back of a row of tents behind the carts and jumbles. He loosened a peg and wriggled in between the tent wall and the ground, into the darkness. The ground was damp; the kirtle would be filthy. Oh well.

  Firelight filtered through the tent walls, weak and red. He stayed down on the ground until his breath eased.

  Then he went up on his knees and tried to get his bearings in the dark.

  There was one person sleeping on a pallet. A chimera, although of what shape and kind Claude could not tell. Someone important, to have his own tent. At the door, silhouetted by firelight, a guard stood, shuffling. Someone very important, then, or someone guarding something very important. It was hard to tell what sort of chimera it was, from a shape under a blanket. He breathed so softly Claude could not hear him, but the blanket rose and fell.

  Claude’s hand went to his knife. He had no reason to think the chimera was pretending to be asleep, but if someone wriggled into Claude’s tent late at night, that’s what he would have done, biding time until the moment of attack.

  With the sleeping chimera in the edges of his vision, he stepped to the side, to a small table. Under the table lay a long chest, locked, with half a loaf of bread upon it.

  He knelt beside the chest, as though he were praying, and held the padlock, letting it rest on the palm of his weakened right hand while he fiddled with it with the fingers of his left. The night was chilly and the metal felt damp against his skin.

  Claude thrust the point of his knife between the iron hasp and the wood of the lid. He prised it with all his force until the dagger snapped and the padlock banged against the chest. God’s teeth.

  The chimera stirred and Claude turned his face back to him, trying to breathe in silence. There was a rustle at the tent flap and Claude shrank back into the shadow. For a few breaths he waited but the guard did not come in and the chimera did not stir under the blanket.

  Was the hasp loose enough now that Claude could pull it? He rested the padlock in his withered right hand gently, so it would not bang, and with his left he tried to find purchase under the lid.

  In his right hand, the black iron padlock stirred, as if it were alive.

  Claude dropped it again, startled, and again it banged. His heart thumped against his ribs but not only now because of the guard outside, the sleeping chimera. Iron that lived? Was this some new sorcery from Hell? What would it do, bite his hand off?

  He picked the padlock up again, this time in his stronger left hand, and waited. Nothing.

  He put it into his right and there it was, the sensation of stirring, as if the iron were sleeping.

  The sorcery was in him. In the hand that had borne the mace. And why not? The mace was after all a key—the key. Had it left behind not only this itching wound, this terrible yearning, but something of its power?

  Gritting his teeth with the effort, he tightened his grasp and moved his fingertips along the cold, gritty iron. Reluctantly, slowly, something inside it shifted. The shackle popped out.

  Claude squatted a moment more, just staring. Then he gently pulled the padlock out and rested it on the trampled ground.

  He lifted the lid and saw in the darkness the beautiful gleam of steel.

  A sword! And a good one, too, by the rich scabbard. He’d have that. He gently eased the sword out of its scabbard and balanced it in his right hand. A good blade, clean and true, although with an ordinary single-handed hilt, so he’d have trouble putting much weight into it with his weakened right arm. Well. Soon he might be a left-handed swordsman, one way or the other, if he got the mace back for his right. Time to learn.

  What else? A pair of gauntlets, heavy and ornamented, and greaves and boots. All too big for Claude but he’d take them anyway and sell them on if he couldn’t adjust them. A skullcap and a gleaming bascinet helmet with a visor. Too big but with a bit of padding… . Chausses! Good God above, wool chauss
es and a quilted aketon so he could finally dress in man’s clothes again. And a mail hauberk which would fall to Claude’s knees, but still, useful. No dagger; the chimera probably slept with it.

  All of this was the Chatelaine’s ultimately, and poor payment for Claude’s weakened draw arm, but it was a start.

  Very slowly, he took one item at a time and pushed each through the bottom of the tent to the outside, on the far side from where the guard was posted. He kept his face turned toward the sleeping chimera.

  He grabbed the heel of bread off the ground and squeezed back to the outside.

  The easiest way to transport the loot was to wear it. He drew the loathly kirtle over his head, wincing as he pulled his injured arm out. His breath came faster as he tugged on the clothing. It was too big, all of it. Whoever the chimera was, he had a chest like an ox. Claude tied up the chausses and hoped they would not drop around his ankles.

  He tried the gauntlets but they scraped over his sore right hand and pained him. For selling, then. He wrapped them up with the bread in the kirtle.

  He could not wear the helmet without drawing attention to himself, could he? No one walks through camp armed cap-a-pie. Well, perhaps he could. Here he might be taken for one of the chimeras who had built-in armour. Better that than being taken for a woman.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was foolhardy to follow Baltazar anywhere—the whelp barely knew where he was going himself, half the time, and yet here they were following him into the shadowy woods. Not only following Baltazar, no, worse—following the corpse that used to be Baltazar. With each step in her son-in-law’s footprints, with every heart-rent question she asked him, Margriet’s daughter walked closer to the cliff-edge that was the Grief.

  And yet, what other path would lead them to Willem and his sack, here in the dark, burnt, silent expanse of conquered Flanders? She had imagined, she supposed, that they would find him on the road, the road that she and her good-for-nothing husband had travelled so many times in their donkey cart, looking for someone to buy his good-for-nothing wares. She had been so angry, last night. She had put little thought into the matter of finding Willem, not until they were out into the dim starlit world outside the city, and saw that the road was a hazard, not a comfort.

  She had put even less thought into how she would take the fortune from him. Corpse he may have been but he seemed at least as strong as he had been in life, and less inclined to recoil or avoid pain. And what wife would contemplate indignity to her husband’s body, even a good-for-nothing dead husband’s? And yet he was stealing away her right and her daughter’s right, and for that she would gladly undertake some small sins, yes, even now when her remaining days might be few.

  She would wrest it from him, if she could.

  In her pack, Margriet had some rope. She had not taken it thinking of using it to bind Willem—or perhaps she had, if she was willing to admit it. He would not expect her to have followed him, and would certainly not expect her to walk up to him and throw a noose around his arms.

  Margriet tied the overhand loop in the rope-end, the same knot she had used to snare the Nix, as a child, all those years ago. She tied as they walked, ignoring Beatrix’s inquiring frowns. Margriet needed no light to see her work although she would have liked to feel the rough fibres against her fingertips. No matter. This was a knot she knew like the bonds of love. She was the daughter of a boatman of Bruges. Her knot would not fail.

  They followed the flitting corpse that had been Margriet’s son-in-law. He was easy to see, even in this murk: his hair was still as blond as flax, though it was matted with blood behind one ear.

  He said he had been called. He said he could not lie. Yet what was he if not a deceit, a counterfeit? She could not trust him, and yet he said he had been called. And he seemed to obey Beatrix, when she pointed her distaff and said, walk.

  As soon as they had the sack, they would make for Ypres, and hire a pair of palfreys, and like pilgrims make their way to Dunkirk or Calais. Margriet would see her daughter on a boat before she died, see her well across the ocean from Baltazar’s corpse.

  Willem was not blond. They were nearly upon him before they saw him. He turned his head and looked and them, at his wife and daughter, and then carried on walking.

  “Father!”

  He ignored them.

  “Baltazar, why doesn’t he stop? Why won’t he speak to me?”

  “He is driven by his last desire, my love. It seems it has nothing to do with you, or with your mother.”

  Nothing for it now but to act, and quickly. Willem might not care what Margriet did but he would damn sure care when she took the sack from him.

  “Be ready to run,” she hissed to Beatrix.

  It was a fine rope, a sound knot, and would have been a good throw if Margriet’s fingers had let the rope fly free. Instead they cramped—the night air, perhaps—no, the Plague, the damn Plague! The noose dropped sadly to the ground and she bent to pick it up.

  Now she had Willem’s attention. He turned and took a step toward her. Her heart sped.

  One more throw.

  This time she managed to fling the noose but Willem had enough warning to catch it. He dropped the sack and pulled her toward him, hand over hand on the rope, as if they were children playing tug-of-war. There was no way she would get the rope around him now. Curse her blasted fingers! She should have asked Beatrix to throw it but she could not have asked such a thing of her, and she would have hesitated anyway. She loved her father, God only knew why.

  Willem made no sign that he even recognized his daughter, his face doughy and blank. That face, that irritating blank face. The face that had watched her lift up dead baby after dead baby for his blessing, and never once given her any comfort.

  “You unnatural creature,” she spat at him, pulling the rope. “Leaving me all those years to patch the patches while you were hoarding like a miser. The shame you brought upon us! When I would go to the cloth hall or the market and all the other wives would look at my poor clothing with pity. And at home, what did I have except the constant, rotting stench of your filthy feet, and a woman can’t wear that, or the foulness of your farts, and a woman can’t eat that.”

  Willem’s face did not change.

  “My one comfort was that you were so often on the roads. You must have wondered, on those journeys, whether your wife kept the commandments. Or did the thought never enter into your doddering pate? Do you know how many men asked for my favours, before and after our marriage? But I will tell you now, although you never asked, that never a moment’s indulgence did I give any of them, all the while you were doubtless inflicting your belches and groping upon whatever poor maidens you encountered on your sinful business. And leaving me at home to milk money out of my breasts. But do you know how relieved I was to have my milk become our livelihood? Because then I had a reason not to lie with you, not ever again, for fear of souring the milk.”

  “Mother, stop,” screamed Beatrix, coming up beside her. “Father, leave us, for she won’t stop until you do.”

  “We stay where we list,” said Baltazar.

  “Where she sends you, you mean,” Beatrix snapped. “You have no wills of your own. If you did—”

  Her voice broke. It must be a horrible thing, Margriet realized, to be in love with a man. It always ended badly in stories. If she had known Beatrix loved Baltazar, she would never have let her marry him. Poor child.

  Beatrix set her mouth, her jaw clamped. It was an expression Margriet knew well: first from the bad times in Beatrix’s childhood, when she had gone days with nothing but sawdusty bread or skinny canal fish in her stomach, and then again from the past month in Bruges, during the siege. She had often wondered what was in her daughter’s mind when she wore that expression: prayers for relief or prayers for fortitude?

  She let the rope go slack a bit, let the remaining rope run through her h
ands, let him think he was winning the tug-of-war, and then she gripped so tightly her fingernails bit into her flesh, so she could be sure of her grasp, and she yanked as hard as she could. Willem was not a big man but he was big enough that her yank made little difference. Still, he stumbled forward just a little. And the sack was on the ground beside him.

  She darted forward and took the sack-end in both hands. It was heavy and he was on her before she could drag it a foot.

  “Beatrix!” she shouted, and turned and scraped her nails across Willem’s face.

  He did not cry out, but he did pause, long enough for Margriet to bend her knees and kick him hard in the gut, so that he stumbled back and fell on his arse.

  “Beatrix, take it!” She shouted. “It is your right. This is not your father. It is a corpse, under sorcery. Your father may not have been much but would he steal your inheritance, if he were truly your father? Would even Willem de Vos leave his daughter a widow with nothing?”

  Beatrix, good girl, was already dragging the sack away in one hand, her distaff in the other. She was younger, stronger; she was nearly running with it. She would make it. Baltazar made no move but only watched her.

  “I told you yesterday, Margriet,” Willem said, getting to his feet, “that neither of you are widows. You will accept this.”

  Willem strode toward Beatrix. Margriet ran toward him and grabbed him around the knees. He fell flat on his chest.

  “Run!” she screamed.

  But Beatrix had stopped, foolish girl, and was staring at her.

  “He told you yesterday … about Baltazar? And you did not tell me?”

  “Run, foolish girl! I kept you safe. Why do you think I took you out of Bruges? I am giving you your chance! Run!”

  But now Baltazar was walking toward Beatrix, holding out his hands.

  “Wife,” he said. “I came back for you. You are not a widow. You are my wife. Your place is by my side.”

  Beatrix stared at him. What had gone wrong with the girl? Margriet screamed her daughter’s name with every ounce of her breath, screamed so loud it rang in her own ears.