by Patty Jansen
Instead of suggesting she wear more comfortable shoes, Zelda sold her a jar of salve, and also some of her secret tea, which in this case would soothe pains of sore joints and feet.
In the next house, an elderly woman complained about constipation. Zelda again gave her herb tea. She encouraged the woman to share it with her entire family, because the grandkids were making a racket in the kitchen, and the woman complained that her daughter would never shut them up. If they ran out, Zelda would bring more because, while food might get scarce in the city, herb tea was in plentiful supply.
Each conversation developed along a pattern.
Zelda told the merchants’ wives that the tea did everything they wanted it to do and then got paid lots of money for it.
At the end of her round through the merchant quarter, Zelda knocked on a few doors where she went up herself and instructed Nellie and Koby to stay with the cart and the donkey.
Each time a bewildered servant opened the door, Zelda did her sales pitch. She appeared successful most of the time. The servant would talk to her, and sometimes they took the free sample she offered. A few people made arrangements to see Zelda later.
One man shouted at her. “Get out of my sight, you filthy thieves!”
Zelda sped back to the cart. She snorted as she climbed back onto the driver’s seat. “A very rude man that,” she said. “I come to help him, and he yells at me? Very rude man.”
But Nellie wondered what she herself would have done when faced with a peddler wanting to sell remedies for ailments. She probably would have told the person to go away, too, especially if she was peddling a chamomile tea for exorbitant prices.
When they got back to the shed, they unpacked the cart and put it away.
Gertie, Hilde and Josie had left, but all the items for the next day of trade lay ready on the bench: the bags of samples, the large jar of dried leaves, and the jar with dragon poop which she had no doubt would be sold for ridiculous prices.
Two silver florins for some chamomile tea!
Zelda’s pocket was jingling with coins, and when they walked back through the main street in the artisan quarter, Zelda gave Koby some coins to buy sweets for the children.
She also bought a bag of flour for porridge, but the rest of the coins still jingled in her pocket.
Nellie wondered what she did with it, and why she didn’t give it to Koby.
“You can be my local woman now,” Zelda said. “We make good team.”
Nellie didn’t want to do any such thing. “Where do you get that special tea?” she asked.
Zelda smiled. Her teeth were brown. “Is very special indeed. I buy it from a man in town who gets it from up the river. Herbs grow where the water is clean and free of filth from dirty cities.”
“Who is this man who sells such valuable things?”
“Mr Oliver, but he rarely has tea. You have to ask for it, and then it may be out of stock. Only very special times of the year you can get it.”
That was not the answer Nellie had suspected, and she wondered how much of it was true. Judging by all the rest of Zelda’s stories, probably not that much. But Mr Oliver was a well-known merchant of all kinds of foodstuffs. From his warehouse in the harbour quarter, he sold fine sausages and jams and other confectionery. He would sell tea, too, if there was any tea to be had. Now that the ships had stopped coming from across the ocean, the normal teas and exotic spices had become rare.
Nellie felt tempted to ask Zelda about what she did with the money in her pocket, and whether this was just a good day, but she guessed the feeble relationship could probably not withstand those questions. Besides, the women might not have much chance to make a living otherwise, even if Zelda held back earnings from them.
Back in the warehouse, the other women were cooking the midday meal. The flour Zelda had brought received much appreciation. Nellie felt sick because she knew two silver florins could have bought so much better food.
She spoke to Mina when they were both collecting new wood from the pile outside the door.
“It’s all quackery,” Nellie said. “Everything she tells those women is a lie. She is deceiving nice people and saying I am a well-known local herb woman.”
Mina shook her head. “Don’t worry, she has done that to all of us. If any of the merchants worked out that we are just poor women, she would use someone else as the next new local herb woman.”
“But it’s unsavoury.”
“It’s not the most honest of ways to make money, but it keeps us fed.”
“Were you already doing this when you lived in the church?” Nellie was getting a queasy feeling about this. She remembered the time she had come into the church when Jantien was out, “doing a job”. Was this what she had been doing? Selling quackery to unsuspecting honest citizens?
Would Zelda have used the innocent children as well?
“It doesn’t make much money,” Mina said.
“Have you been with her inside the merchant houses?”
“I can’t go with her. Everyone in town knows I am just a poorhouse woman. She takes Jantien’s children to help her and mind the donkey. She says children make people nicer to her.”
“It’s no wonder she prefers to take children. She is deceiving all of us. I saw how much money she was making. She gives you the bag of porridge, but she keeps most of the money for herself.”
Mina shrugged. “Isn’t that the case for all people who make lots of money? They let us do all the work and they get the harvest.”
“Aren’t you angry about that?”
“We have no other way to survive. Tell me how else we can get food.”
And that was the ultimate problem. Nellie felt sick. She did not want to rely on this thievery to make her living.
She might have another solution so that the women didn’t have to do this. It might be dangerous to her, but she could sneak into the kitchens and Dora could give her food. If she waited at the gate until Henrik was on duty, he would let her through. Then she just needed some way of carrying all the food out here.
She didn’t like begging either, but would rather that than rely on thievery to make ends meet.
The plank that formed the door to the warehouse slid aside, and Agatha came into the courtyard.
“I’m going to the warehouse to make potions,” she said. And she disappeared into the alley.
Mina said in a low voice, “Whatever you do, be careful around Agatha. She is a very angry woman, and she is a strong friend of Zelda’s. She believes that all rich people are evil and should be scammed out of as much money as possible.”
“Is there anyone in this group who isn’t angry?”
“It’s very hard not to get angry when you’re always worried about where your next meal is coming from and whether you will have a place to sleep.”
That was true, and Nellie felt ashamed of having asked the question. “I’ll be your friend, Mina, whatever happens.”
Chapter 3
* * *
FOR THE NEXT few days, Nellie didn’t leave the warehouse much.
Zelda went out on her rounds, but she took only Koby and Ewout, Jantien’s oldest son. He was ten, and quite a handsome young lad with his thick mop of blond hair. Nellie hated to think how many hearts he melted with those big blue eyes, and how many purses opened at the thought of him living on the street.
Zelda either didn’t need someone to pose as a local herb woman, or she noticed Nellie’s reluctance to play that role. Even when she was at the warehouse, she always looked for ways to make money. She sent the kids to trade ointment for eggs. She told Agatha to go to a house in New Harbour to pick up a parcel. It contained two bottles of syrupy liquid, which she took to the workshop where Hilde and Gertie mixed it with water until it filled twenty bottles of “apple wine”, according to the label.
The dragon poo was dry enough to be ground and turned into an ointment. The main ingredient was wool fat, which came in a barrel and smelled terrible. It was full of stic
ks and grass so needed to be heated and strained before it could be mixed with the poo powder. The resulting paste was drab brown, so Zelda told them to mix it with black soot.
“If it’s black, people think it’s very powerful,” Zelda said.
Nellie wondered how impressed the merchant wives would be with getting soot all through their clothes.
Fortunately, the work kept Nellie warm, and Gertie, Hilde and Josie were good company. Josie, especially, had an infectious laugh.
Nellie asked them what they thought of the fact that Zelda sold simple dried leaves as a wonder remedy with no proof that it worked.
“Isn’t that the case with all these concoctions?” Josie said.
“Some of them do work,” Nellie said. “But nothing like what she tells these women.”
Hilde shrugged. “I have never known the herb sellers to be any different. They will talk up their potions as if they’re the best thing. It would surprise me if these noble women didn’t understand that. One thing about rich people: they didn’t become rich by being dumb.”
“Then why are they buying this tea?”
“Because the lady from next door, whose family has even more money, bought it and swears by it? Rich people do things for all kinds of strange reasons we will never understand.”
But there was always a reason. Nellie had worked for these families although the Brouwer family had never taken part in displaying wealth. You knew they had it when you walked into their house, in the same way you knew these merchants were trying to appear more important than they were.
It disappointed Nellie that none of the women were worried about Zelda’s sales swindle, but maybe that was what happened when you were desperate: you didn’t care so much about right and wrong.
Nellie hoped that this would never happen to her, but could see it might, and it frightened her.
Doing the right thing had already caused her a lot of trouble. She had only wanted to return the dragon box to the church, and now she was homeless. She was still waiting for the fallout from her escape from the palace.
Nellie expected hordes of guards to come looking for her by now, but if they did, they were looking in the wrong parts of town. In fact, the silence after her escape worried her a lot. She couldn’t believe the guards really wouldn’t have a clue of where to look for her, which meant that those guards were occupied with other things. If they weren’t worried about a dragon loose in their town, what problem occupied them?
But no matter how well Nellie listened to the shards of gossip brought in by the women from the streets or the market place, she didn’t get any indication of what it would be.
Since her escape, the palace had gone eerily quiet. Of course she was no longer living there, but she had the feeling that people would hear from the Regent on a regular basis, especially if there were soothing words to be told about the presence of a dragon in the town.
The Regent was pompous enough to speak to the citizens from the steps of the palace, as he had done on several occasions. He would say everything was under control, that his men would find the beast and kill it, and the people would cheer and the Regent would boast about how he was the best and how he deserved to be king. He loved opportunities like that.
But the steps of the palace remained conspicuously empty.
And as much as Nellie thought the Regent was a ridiculous windbag, she was starting to wonder about the lack of reaction from the palace.
People had seen a dragon in the city. If that wasn’t a good enough reason to bring the Regent to the palace steps, then what was?
It was not as if no one knew about the dragon. Not that anyone had seen him, but after a few days the women who went to the markets reported that a lot of people knew about the dragon in the palace and had an opinion on it—whether it was real, whether it was good or evil, and where it might have come from.
Nellie told the women most of her story: about her father’s book and how it described that the church had been buying dark artefacts and that the dragon box was part of it, that it had been stolen from the church, but that the church didn’t want it back. That the dragon appeared to like her, or at least hadn’t scratched her. She left out that she had the key to the crypt and that she had more or less stolen the box from Lord Verdonck’s chest. She did say the Regent tried to accuse the dragon of killing Lord Verdonck, but if the women didn’t care about Zelda selling quackery to merchant women, they cared even less about the Regent.
Nellie cared, because some of the suspicion fell on her.
The dragon barely showed himself. He slept in the hayloft, surrounded by the children and an increasing number of cats.
Every day, the children collected the orange poop and traded it with Zelda for sweets and sausages.
When and what the dragon ate, no one knew. Nellie suspected that during the day he would assume his magical form to hunt, but cats and children didn’t appear to be on the menu.
For her part, Nellie kept her head down, trying to figure out what she would do when it became necessary for her to leave the group. She no longer had a home to go to. The palace had been her home for the past twenty years. Her parents were dead, the house had never been theirs, her father’s brother was dead, too, and because the two brothers hadn’t liked each other, Nellie had never been close with her cousins on that side. Her mother’s family lived in a village outside the city where they owned a mill. She could go there and would be welcome, but it was a good distance to travel, and the coaches didn’t go when there was snow on the ground. And it would be hard to turn up as an uninvited guest with a dragon in tow.
She helped the women. She helped Jantien look after the children. She helped gather firewood, which the women took from the two neighbouring abandoned warehouses. The group had found an axe which was extremely blunt but good for wedging loose wooden planks and shelving that could be used as firewood. Chopping it to manageable lengths was hard work with the blunt axe, but it kept her warm.
Food was not terribly scarce, because of Zelda, but Nellie grew increasingly uneasy with the woman’s activities.
She happened to be in the workshop when an angry man demanded his money back because the “Dragon magic extract” he bought had caused him a terrible rash.
Zelda did repay him—but Nellie thought only because she and Josie were watching—the two whole florins he had paid for the jar. What an outrageous price. She wondered how many people suffered in silence.
And not much later, while going to buy wax for sealing bottles, she watched Zelda in the street with Ewout and one of his younger twin sisters, both dressed in rags. She instructed the children to approach people, especially, it seemed, well-dressed women.
As she watched, one of the women instructed a maid to give Ewout some coins.
Nellie’s cheeks glowed. Zelda was teaching the children to beg.
“Did you know that?” she raged at Hilde and Josie in the workshop. “It’s disgusting. We’re proud women. We can work. We can sell things. We don’t beg.”
Hilde snorted. “Can’t say I’d want any of my relatives to see me ask for money.”
“Exactly. We can do better than that.” Nellie was glad they finally agreed with her. “We can look after ourselves in an honest way.”
“I can make jams,” Hilde said.
“I can sew,” Josie said.
But there was no fruit in winter, and a list of clients who would pay for mending clothes would take a long to time to collect. And quite a few of the merchants’ businesses weren’t doing well. Those wives probably did their own sewing now.
The problem would be how to get through winter.
“You can keep getting leftovers from the palace,” Hilde said.
Nellie had thought about it. She didn’t want to go back to the palace, because someone would want to arrest her there, but could not see another option. It was go back to the palace or continue to live off Zelda’s activities.
“I also heard that the Regent will start handing
out food from the city stores soon,” Josie said.
“Oh? I haven’t heard that,” Gertie said.
“That’s because it’s a rumour. I spoke to my brother-in-law, and he heard it from people who work at the stores. I think the Regent is afraid that if he doesn’t hand out food, people will steal it. Some is already being stolen.”
“I think it’s because the Regent wants to buy our support to be declared king,” Nellie said. “It’s only the start of winter. Supplies are not that low yet. He’d be stupid to hand it out now.”
“That’s what I heard,” Josie said.
But if it happened, a group of women and children would amongst them have enough rations to build up a supply. Then she would only need to get leftovers from the palace every week. That sounded much more acceptable.
Nellie decided to try it. After all, Henrik and Dora would help her.
Early morning was the best time. The bakers would have left, most of the nobles wouldn’t be up yet, the guards would be at the end of their shift and would expect people to come to the kitchens to deliver things, so they might not pay that much attention to visitors.
What was more, she was curious to know what had been going on in the palace, and she wanted to let Dora know she had found a safe place.
So she got up early while the others were still asleep, stoked the fire and put a pot of water to boil so there would be water for porridge and tea.
Then she wound a scarf around her head in the way Zelda did hers. She should get one of those colourful ones to make the disguise better, but this would have to do. Then she went into the pale blue predawn light.
After the cold and wet weather, the temperature had again fallen below freezing, and a blanket of snow covered the city. That was what winter in Saardam was like: wet and cold, with the occasional few days of snow.
Dawn was a quiet time at the marketplace. Most of the market stallholders had not yet arrived for the day’s business, especially in the cold weather.
Normally, the visiting merchants would linger in the glow of the street lamps, discussing business with colleagues, but it was cold and snowing, so they were all still in the taverns, leaving the snow to settle on the ground, disturbed only by a prowling cat which, by the twitching of its tail, seemed most displeased about the weather.