Armed in Her Fashion Read online

  But Grandfather had never been one to delay the inevitable. He sank down onto the bench, his face slack.

  “Yes, he is taken, he is a revenant,” said Mother.

  “But you did not invite him in, Margriet.” Katharina said. It was hardly a question, as if she could not bring herself to make it a question.

  “I never wanted that man in my house, even when he was alive.” Mother stared at Beatrix, her eyes now steely. Beatrix squinted but couldn’t quite see her mother behind her words. I have no father, Beatrix thought. I have no father now.

  Grandfather put his hand to his forehead. “Willem gone, too,” he said. “So many.”

  “It’s done, and past help,” Mother said. “The main thing is that I caught him carrying off a sack full of clinking money and rich things. We were never poor. The bastard has been hiding a fortune from us. And now it’s ours.”

  Katharina put a hand to her heart. “But where? What sort of fortune?”

  “He was a usurer, and God knows what else besides. A man may make a fortune during wartime, even a man as gormless as my husband. Now he has taken his fortune off to Hell, but it is ours by right, Beatrix. Widows are entitled to one-third, and children to the rest, by custom.”

  “When the siege is over, will you go to the bailiff?” Grandfather asked.

  “The bailiff is dead.”

  “The Count, then,” said Beatrix.

  “Bah,” Grandfather said.

  “Count Louis is no longer in control of Bruges, not really,” Mother said. “Besides, he is the king of France’s man, and doubtless he would try to apply some barbaric French law.”

  “But King Philippe—” Katharina broke in.

  “Philippe is no true king,” Grandfather snapped. “He came by it through trickery.”

  “What does it matter?” Beatrix asked. “There is no one to give us back what Father has taken. We did not even know we had a fortune, and now it has gone. Let us say a prayer for Father’s soul and for all the souls not yet at rest.”

  “I’ll say a prayer for him,” Mother said, “after he gives me my due. If we leave tonight, we will catch him before long. The revenants only walk at night. I can walk until my feet fall off.”

  “And if you catch him and he refuses?” Katharina asked. “What will you do, then, Margriet? Beat him about the head with your apron?”

  It was then, for some mysterious reason, that the grief and worry burst up out of Beatrix’s throat and a sound like a sob crossed with a hiccup escaped her throat. Beatrix clapped her hand over her mouth.

  Mother squatted down to look into her face. Weeds poked out of her apron. Heaven knew where she had been gathering weeds, what garden within Bruges’ walls still boasted a few stalks of anything that could be boiled or beaten.

  “I must,” she whispered. “What does Willem need now with silver and gold? It is all going to the Chatelaine and her ally, that pustule. I can’t let the Chatelaine and the French king take what is yours by right, Beatrix.”

  “It is suicide,” Katharina said. “How would you even get out of the city walls? What about the chimeras? They will surely kill you if they find you out in the country.”

  “Bah. They’re only people. You know who’s a chimera now? Young Julius, you remember, the boy who was soft in the head. Well he’s got a new head now, but he’s still Julius. They’re only soldiers, and I killed my first French soldier when I was younger than Beatrix is now. A rock to the head is as good as an axe, if you aim it properly. There is no more danger outside the city walls than within, especially now that the chimeras are trying to take those walls down. That’s why Beatrix, at least, must come with me, if you and Father will not.”

  “Beatrix!” Katharina’s eyes went wide.

  Her place was here, in Bruges. Once the siege lifted, Baltazar might come home, wounded and hungry, and find her gone.

  But perhaps, if she went out there into the world, she would find word of him. Perhaps Father, or whatever was left of Father, would tell her what had befallen her husband. Or she could ask the Chatelaine herself!

  “Margriet, you must not drag Beatrix into this foolishness,” Katharina said.

  “You go with your mother,” said Grandfather, unexpectedly. They all looked at him. “It is your wealth, too. The claim is two-thirds yours. You must be there to make it. Perhaps there is enough left of the father in him that the sight of you will soften his heart. There is nothing here for you, nothing to eat and nothing to spin.”

  “I cannot leave you here, Grandfather.”

  “I cannot come with you, old as I am. I will be fine with Katharina. There will be more food for us with you gone, you little glutton.”

  Beatrix laughed. That was true, at least. But to go out there! To go to Hell! She could not imagine it.

  Saint Catherine, she prayed in silence, what shall I do?

  Grandfather leaned over the table and whispered. “A week ago, it was safer inside these walls than outside them,” he said. “Not so now. We are near starvation, Beatrix, and I will go more happily to my grave if I know you two have some chance. Your mother is right: I can aim a rock, at least, once they come in. Take care of her. Be her better judgement.”

  Mother was stubborn. She would go alone, if Beatrix did not go with her. Beatrix might at least be able to prevent her from getting herself killed. Mother was too sharp, too sure of herself.

  “The apples are ripening out there, somewhere,” Beatrix said to her grandfather quietly. “I will bring you back a bushel.”

  “Keep your apples. I want honey. And figs, oh, fine figs like we used to get, do you remember?”

  Beatrix insisted on taking her distaff and spindle, although Mother rolled her eyes. She did not want to be without them, and perhaps, she told her mother, they would find something to spin on the journey, and make a little money to buy food. They did not take any food from Grandfather’s small store, but they took two leather water flasks, the flasks Mother and Father used to take when they travelled on Father’s business, or what everyone thought was Father’s business.

  They hurried through the dark streets, back to the Ooste house so Mother could take her leave. They filled the flasks at the conduit.

  “Do you remember,” Beatrix huffed as they walked, “what happened when the baker put that mouldy bread in the bottom of the basket, years ago?”

  “Hmph,” said Mother.

  “You demanded your money back, as was proper. You had every right to that sou. You argued for it until the sun set, and finally you got the sou back.”

  “Indeed. That squinting blackguard.”

  “And then for five years, we had to walk three streets further to buy our bread. For the sake of a sou.”

  “Yes? What is your point, Beatrix?”

  “I just wanted to know if you remembered,” she said with a sigh, and hitched up her little bundle of spare linen.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Claude sat at the Ooste table and ate the thin pottage they gave him. Dark, greasy bits of meat—rat, probably—floated in it. No worse fare than he’d had on the Modena campaign, but the company then had made up for it. He and Janos had won six ducats at dice and got drunk on crisp Vernaccia wine. He could still feel the smack of it between his eyebrows.

  Claude glanced up at the table. No dice here. Certainly no wine. The dour-faced little girl stuck out her tongue, taking advantage of the fact that her mother was pacing behind her with a mewling baby. The old manservant and the even older cook would not even look at him.

  Damn it, all this for a mace, a weapon he barely knew how to wield. But what choice had Claude had? He had not known how it would attach itself to him, how it would worm its way in to his flesh.

  What would he take back now, of his choices? Claude had been desperate for a way out of Hell. But the Chatelaine would not relent. Every day she asked him to sub
mit to the fire, to become one of her grotesques. And Claude might have given in, if the Chatelaine had not been so fascinated by him, had not called him a natural born chimera. Claude did not like to be teased.

  When he learned that the Chatelaine’s mace worked as a key, that it even opened the mouth of Hell itself, he saw his way out. That angry smith was just waiting for a chance for treason.

  The smith had not warned Claude. Claude had not known what the mace would do.

  As he ran to rejoin his company, he had considered keeping the thing. It was heavy but he liked the feel of it on his arm.

  But it would have made him too easy to find, once the Chatelaine sent someone to look for him, as she would. The Chatelaine did not seem the kind to let a grudge go easily. Besides, Claude was a crossbowman. A mace was good for close combat with armour: a knight’s weapon, or at least a squire’s. That weapon, if it was to be a weapon and not a mere encumbrance, would reinvent him. He’d need to get a full harness of armour, and a warhorse, and a squire or attendants he could trust to clean out his clothes—clothes that would sometimes have the wrong kind of blood in the wrong places. And knights and squires would be married off; they had obligations to their lords.

  No, he had decided. Let him remain a crossbowman. Let him go back to his company with a new name, a different colour of false beard, and without the weapon. The Chatelaine’s chimeras would not find him without it. They would not expect him to get rid of it.

  He had had a devil of a time ripping the thing off his arm. Every pull in one direction hooked it deeper in the other. Finally he peeled the edges away from his skin with a dagger and tore it off. He screamed with pain, but the pain would pass, or so he thought.

  He came upon a Flemish trader. Still wearing the tunic and hose they’d given him in Hell, Claude wanted new clothes to help him escape the Chatelaine’s spies. The trader was not the sort to ask questions.

  He walked away in the trader’s clothes. The pain in his arm dulled.

  But the itch had begun that night and had not subsided, and his arm felt weak without the mace on it. By the time he rejoined his company, by the time the battle of Cassel began, the arm was near useless.

  “When that Margriet gets here, she’ll get the other end of a tongue lashing for once,” said Jacquemine Ooste, bouncing her baby on her knee and spooning pottage into its mouth. The baby was still fat. A strange sight in a besieged city. Jacquemine’s little daughter, Agatha, ate her soup hungrily.

  A knock at the door. They all froze.

  “That’ll be her,” said Jacquemine smoothly. “Get the door, Hans.”

  The old servant looked at her under caterpillar eyebrows.

  “The revenants don’t knock,” Jacquemine said. “They call.”

  “We don’t know that they can’t knock, though,” said Hans.

  They’d be here all night, listening to the knock, at this rate. And if it was the wet nurse, Willem’s wife, then Claude was finally getting near the mace. His arm itched as if his very skin knew it, too.

  “God’s teeth, I’ll answer it,” said Claude, with a grin. He rose.

  The cook squeezed her face into a sour rictus. There was one who did not approve of swearing. Well, so be it. A woman like her would find some cause to hate a man like Claude eventually. Better to push the righteous away from him quickly, before they could find cause to be disappointed. Much better to force people to choose at once, friend or foe, and then he knew where they stood.

  But Jacquemine held her hand out, motioning Claude to stay. She took her knife from the table and held it in her hand, blade out, as she walked. Her baby bounced on her other hip.

  Jacquemine Ooste was interesting. Part of it was the way she held herself like a figurehead in rough waters, with her wimple and veil and fine surcote never out of place. Part of it was that Claude had expected his own golden skin to be the darkest skin in most rooms in Flanders. The woman had spoken to Claude in French at first, but Claude had insisted on Flemish. This was how he had learned seven languages; he might as well improve his eighth. Claude did not like to be at a disadvantage.

  Jacquemine went out into the little anteroom and came back with a woman older than herself—that must be the infamous prodigal wet nurse—and a young woman with a distaff as long as a poleaxe in her hand, to which a skinny strand of flax still clung.

  “Margriet, you’ll feed the baby before you eat,” Jacquemine said sharply. “Your daughter is welcome to join us now. It’s good to see you, Beatrix. I hope you and your aunt and your grandfather are as well as can be hoped. God have mercy on us.”

  The girl inclined her head. “Thank you for your welcome, Vrouwe Ooste.”

  The older woman reached forward and plucked the baby from Jacquemine’s arms, cooing, “Oh, come here, little thing. Come here.”

  She walked behind the carved screen with the child, and Jacquemine followed her.

  Claude stood, at a loss. He needed to speak with Margriet de Vos. How long did it take to nurse a baby? Should he sit and wait?

  The girl Beatrix rested her distaff against the wall and sat at the table. The daughter. Willem’s daughter? Claude smiled at her and she returned it, looking at him with some confusion. What must he look like, in his kirtle and his loose scraps of hair? Like an unkempt woman, he supposed. Certainly not like a man-at-arms. The wet nurse and her daughter both wore neat linen wimples.

  Claude sat next to her.

  “You are Willem de Vos’s daughter?”

  The girl looked up, startled. She nodded. The cook came back from the kitchen with a bowl for Beatrix and she spooned it in to her mouth. Ravenous, like everyone else in Bruges.

  From the far side of the screen came the voices of Jacquemine and Margriet, arguing.

  “The baby’s been wanting you.”

  “Oh, little thing, heavenly fat dumpling, don’t fuss, here you go. Vrouwe Ooste, I was delayed in part by my husband, who has come back to Bruges as a revenant.”

  Several spoons clattered onto the table.

  Willem de Vos was a revenant. But what of the mace?

  The manservant, Hans, looked stricken. Beatrix’s mouth twisted as if she were about to cry. The little girl’s face fell and her eyes went pink and wet. Claude couldn’t have them all weeping. Claude waved his hand dramatically in front of the servant’s rheumy eyes, reached over and slid his bowl of pottage to his own place. He slurped it up noisily, looking at the little girl. She sniffed, then giggled a little.

  “Margriet, I’m sorry,” Jacquemine said from beyond the screen. “You don’t mean you—you met him out on the street, I hope?”

  “I would never invite him in, Vrouwe Ooste. But I must leave Bruges, I am afraid. Tonight.”

  “Leave Bruges! I’d like to see you manage it!”

  Claude put the spoon down and listened hard.

  “I know a way,” the wet nurse was saying. “A small and secret way, a dangerous way. Vrouwe Ooste, I have been at the walls. I have seen the chimeras. They are going to attack Bruges. Soon. You must think of the children. If you will come with me, tonight, perhaps you can find some shelter in an abbey.”

  Nobody spoke or caught each other’s eye. The manservant gripped the table. The little girl’s lip quivered.

  “Let them come,” said Jacquemine Ooste. “We know how to deal with invaders, in Bruges. We will survive, Margriet. You and Beatrix can stay here with us. Surely it is at least as safe here as it is out on the road, or even at some abbey, in these times.”

  “I am going to the Chatelaine, to lay a claim on my husband’s wealth. It seems I was married to a wealthy man after all. I learned as much from his revenant tonight.”

  “Bah. A liar, in death as in life, I have no doubt.”

  “I have seen it, Vrouwe Ooste. A great chest with real groats and florins, and a great silver ewer.”

  “No gol
den spurs?”

  Magriet chuckled. “No, but some war pelf, I think. There were weapons. I saw a sword, and some plate, and even a great mace with a hollow handle.”

  Claude’s heart sped.

  “But Willem has taken it all away, away in a sack.”

  That trader. The wet nurse’s husband. A revenant now, on his way to Hell, with the mace.

  “You would abandon us?” came Jacquemine’s voice, quiet as a feather on the air. “For the sake of some silver?”

  “I have a right to it. My daughter does, too.”

  “And my baby must starve so you can get your due?”

  “The baby is nearly two. He only nurses twice a day now anyway. And I’m losing my milk, Vrouwe Ooste. I doubt I could nurse him much longer in any case.”

  “Oh, I see you kept that knowledge to yourself until it suited you. Where will you go, Margriet? Do you even know where to find the Chatelaine?”

  “I’ll follow my husband. Catch up to him. The revenants only move at night, don’t they? We never see them during the day. He must be on his way to Ypres. The Chatelaine has gone there to meet the French King.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Silence.

  “Inheritance falls under canon law,” Jacquemine muttered. “It isn’t the Chatelaine’s to award it to you.”

  “And how do I tell which diocese contains Hell, Vrouwe Ooste? Willem is her servant now, and he has stolen my due. If she is his lord, then let her chastise him. Perhaps she does not know the Flemish customs of inheritance. I will explain it to her.”

  “And you will walk? Two women alone?”

  “If I may, Vrouwe Ooste, I’ll take my pay now. Beatrix and I will not stay here tonight.”

  “Mmm?”

  “My sou, for the week. Today is Wednesday.”

  There was a silence.

  “Margriet de Vos, you are a wonder. At a time like this, you are thinking of your sou? I’ll have to go to the strongbox. Watch the children.”