Slipper

by Hester Velmans

  He found himself being drawn back to the infirmary in the end, not because he cared now who lived or died, but because Bessie might be there, and Bessie was his one link to the angel who now, rightfully, abhorred him.

  “Mister Prynce,” she said, “Mister Prynce. Let me take another look at that wound of yours. That’s it, sit down here.”

  He did as he was told.

  “The camp is moving on,” came her soothing voice, “and we should be moving on too.”

  “Indeed,” he said.

  “Yes, I am taking my young lady back to England, sir. We’ll follow the wagons headed north, to Utrecht, and then make our way to the coast from there. I think that’s best, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said woodenly.

  “If it is any consolation,” she said, “she is taking it very hard too.”

  “A consolation? Not really,” he replied in a voice creaking with despair.

  44

  BODEGRAVEN AND ZWAMMERDAM

  The French offensive against Holland had begun in 1672, one year before Bessie and Lucinda joined Louis XIV’s massive wagon train. Louis had succeeded in crossing the Rhine with his army that year, and had found only negligible resistance in his sweep toward Amsterdam.

  However, the Dutch, with their backs against the wall and the French invader on their doorstep, had had one last card up their sleeve. They cut the dikes and opened the sluices to let in the sea, flooding the low-lying countryside from the Zuyderzee on one side to the North Sea on the other. This simple measure had stopped the mighty conqueror in his tracks. There had been nothing for it but to retire to Paris for the winter, and hope for a hearty freeze.

  It was a mild winter. The troops Louis left behind at Utrecht under the command of General Luxembourg took out their frustration on the towns and villages on the south side of the watery divide. They were allowed to run wild that winter, raping, murdering and pillaging everywhere they went. The villages of Bodegraven and Zwammerdam were burned to the ground.

  It was to supply this same General Luxembourg in Utrecht that a portion of the baggage train was now being sent north from Maastricht. The rest of the baggage trundled off in the opposite direction with the main army, headed for Westphalia.

  On the second night of the northbound caravan’s march, they bivouacked outside Weert. Bessie was stirring a communal broth over an open fire.

  “What’s in the pot, Missis?” asked Goodbody O’Day, a sturdy Irish war widow and part-time bawd who could drink any man under the table and was in charge of some of the packhorses.

  Bessie’s eyes twinkled. “Eels. The ditches are swimming with them here.” She proudly drew a long, lugubrious specimen out of the pot, to show her.

  Suddenly Lucinda felt ill. She tried to stand up straight, but doubled over instead on a wave of nausea, and vomited heavily onto the ground.

  “Lamb! What’s come over you?” Bessie exclaimed, patting her between the shoulder blades. When the heaving had stopped, she cleaned the girl’s face with a corner of her apron.

  “I don’t know, something I ate, I expect,” Lucinda mumbled, wiping her bespattered slippers on the grass.

  Bessie kept a close watch on her that night and the next day. Finally, observing Lucinda reeling from another bout behind some bushes, she grabbed her by the hands.

  “How long have you been feeling like this, pet?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’ll go away. I just feel a little queasy, lately.”

  “I see. And when did the blood last come?”

  “The blood? You mean my terms?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. A few weeks ago, I think.”

  Bessie folded her arms and looked at her severely. “You may be with child, pet. I shouldn’t wonder, with all your carrying on…”

  “With child!” Lucinda was aghast. “But…”

  What she was thinking was surely she had suffered enough.

  It took some courage to ask the next question.

  “Bessie,” she said at last—they were camped outside Zaltbommel, less than two days’ journey from Utrecht; the troops had already marched on ahead—”if, as you say, I am with child…”

  “Oh,” said Bessie, “we’re not certain of that yet, lamb.”

  “But say that I am with child. How—how will I know who the father is?”

  Bessie gave her a keen look. Either Lucinda was pretending to be more naïve than Bessie imagined, or Bessie’s guess about what had passed that night between her pet and Lieutenant Prynce was about to be confirmed.

  “Well, pet,” she began. “It all depends.”

  “Depends? On what?”

  “It depends,” she said carefully, “on who bedded you when it was conceived.”

  “Oh,” said Lucinda.

  “Yes. If, for instance, your—uh, paramour were Captain Beaupree, then it would be his child.”

  “What if there was someone else—as well?”

  “If there was someone else as well, then we should never know for sure,” said Bessie firmly. She folded her arms across her chest and pursed her lips.

  “Oh, Lord.” Lucinda hauled herself to her feet.

  “Where are you going now, lamb!”

  “A little walk, if that’s all right with you!” she spat out.

  “Don’t go far, lamb,” Bessie pleaded, suddenly anxious. She regretted having shown her disapproval like that. “Please, pet. I don’t like it when you wander off by yourself in these foreign parts.”

  Grimacing wanly, Lucinda brought out a withering, “Ah, Bess—still worried I might be set upon by pirates or Frenchmen?” and hobbled off toward a copse in the distance.

  Despite her expertise in the healing arts, Bessie was not possessed of a well-rounded education. She knew less than nothing of astronomy, alchemy or Greek, and had no patience with politics, geography or world events. (Bear in mind that she did not have a husband to inform her.) If you had asked Bessie what this huge army was up to in the United Provinces, she would have been at a loss to explain it to you. Not that she differed much in this respect from the majority of soldiers, or even some generals, taking part in King Louis XIV’s magnificent campaigns. All they knew was that there was a living to be made, there were orders to be followed, and that their betters must have good reasons to pick the fights they did.

  Which is why, when Bessie found herself suddenly seized by the hair and poked in the ribs by a group of wild-eyed people brandishing axes and pitchforks with the guttural battle cry Bodegraven en Zwammerdam! Bodegraven en Zwammerdam, Bodegraven en Zwammerdam! her last conscious thought on this earth was that she had no idea what they were shouting about.

  45

  THE HERO

  Writers of fiction, of all people, have no right to question the veracity of history books. After all, historians are tasked with giving nothing but the facts, whereas fiction bestows on the writer the license to throw away those facts and simply invent. Beware, however, of putting all your faith in the work of the scholars, no matter how thorough, credible, and authoritative they may seem.

  Take the rape of Bodegraven and Zwammerdam, for instance. You will be hard pressed to find even a single reference to this incident in any French history book. Which is understandable, from a French point of view, since it would surely take some of the shine off France’s glorious past to dwell unnecessarily on a macabre episode in which the entire civilian populations of two small Dutch towns were unspeakably raped, mutilated, tortured, burned and otherwise annihilated by bored French troops serving under General Luxembourg in the winter of 1672.

  Dutch historians, on the other hand, have been less willing to let bygones be bygones. In the Netherlands, “Bodegraven en Zwammerdam” is a dirge that is memorized by conscientious schoolchildren to this day.

  As for the retaliation by the local Dutch populace—the massacre of one hundred and fifty camp followers of Louis XIV’s army outside the town of Zaltbommel the following summer—you will find no mention of it in
any history book whatsoever, neither French nor Dutch. Nor, digging through the records or documents of the period, are you likely to come across a single contemporaneous reference to that tragedy, other than a complaint sent by General Luxembourg to Louvain, France’s war minister, that the supplies he was expecting never arrived because the baggage was burnt by a rebellious mob.

  You see now how important it is to read between the lines.

  It is time to return to our hero—although “hero” is a label not to be tossed off so lightly. There are plenty of so-called “heroes” in literature, sadly, who never perform even a single heroic deed! No, a true hero, the sort implied here, earns his stripes by the way he handles the most extreme, ultimate challenge. It is when physical hardships have sapped the last ounce of remaining strength, when the goal seems utterly out of reach, in other words, when any ordinary mortal would have long given up, that the true hero finds the will to make a last stand, to spit in the witch’s eye, to cut his way through the forest of thorns, to climb the burning stairs to the attic, or make one last charge at the dragon.

  Whether John Prynce can be called a true hero or not is a matter of conjecture. A man certainly can’t be excused from heroic duty because he chooses to drown his sorrow in his cups. But, lurching on horseback around the neatly pine-forested ridges of the Ardennes, our Prynce did eventually regain his sobriety. Or, rather, sobriety hit him squarely between the eyes in the form of a single, devastating thought: in letting Lucinda slip away, he had just made the second most unforgivable mistake of his life.

  Being a hero of sorts, he knew what he had to do.

  He wheeled his horse around.

  It took him three days and two nights of straight riding to catch up with the northbound baggage train. It wasn’t until the third day, however, that he came into the truly flat, hollow land that gives Holland its name: a grid-landscape of perfectly symmetrical fields separated from one another by drainage ditches clotted with pond scum, punctuated here and there by some pollarded willows, a windmill, a bridge, a thatched farmhouse, or a herd of well-behaved cows peacefully grazing,

  A smear of white shimmered along the horizon. John sat up and peered blearily into the distance. What in God’s holy name was that?

  Less than an hour later he found himself trotting alongside fields strangely draped in white as far as the eye could see. He seemed to have entered a stark, desert landscape, an ocean of white. Ghostly sheets everywhere, held down at their corners by stones, lazily rippling and bulging in the breeze. There was an awful tidiness about the scene. The whiteness reflected the sunlight sharply, and John had to tilt his hat low over his eyes against the glare. Despite the sun on his back, he suddenly felt cold.

  The warm earth was laid to rest, wrapped in a shroud.

  A farmer’s wife who sold him a jug of buttermilk and some bread and cheese giggled at his worried face. She pointed out the mounds of untreated linens, and the large vats of lye these were soaking in before being spread out in the sun. She showed him the bolts and bundles neatly packed into hampers, ready to be shipped out. Her own apron was a dazzling white and billowed with every gust of wind, like a sail.

  But her cheery explanation of that region’s bleaching industry did not dispel John’s eerie sense of foreboding.

  On a clear afternoon in a land short on mountains, hills, ridges, crags or other topographical obstacles, a traveller leaving one town can often see clear to the next, and even beyond that, to the town or village behind it. Leaving Kerkdrie now, John spotted the tower of Zaltbommel in the distance, and, rising from the level horizon behind it, a column of black smoke reaching to the clouds. There was no reason to start shaking with a dreadful premonition, or to suspect the smoke, miles away, had anything to do with anybody he knew; yet John was unable to shake the conviction that something terrible had happened to his one true love.

  And indeed, spurring his horse to a gallop, passing through the town of Zaltbommel at an impatient trot, then galloping out again at full speed, his horse lathered with foam, his own skull prickling with sweat, coming closer to the smoke, closer, and then spying a horribly mutilated woman—not Lucinda, thank God!—one of her legs half hacked off, her breasts amputated, her mouth slashed from cheek to cheek, lying dead in the middle of the road, his worst fears were confirmed. The smoke, he now saw, came from a heap of smoldering wagons. He left his nervous horse tied to a tree and made his way to what was left of the camp on foot.

  Blood and gore all around; piles of bodies, piles of brutal, gruesome bodies. One woman had been decapitated and hung upside down, her legs spread wide; the head was balanced with macabre humor in her crotch.

  There was a terrible stench of burning flesh. It was impossible to shut it out. It insinuated itself evilly into the sinuses and made the eyes water. John found himself retching, and retching again, and fighting the urge to run away, to bury the scene deep in his nightmares.

  But he could not. He must not. He had to find Lucinda. He wiped his mouth, and steeled himself. He started to sort, methodically, through the piles of corpses.

  It was Bessie he found first, lying on the ground pop-eyed and spread-eagled, a pitchfork through her chest. Averting his own streaming eyes, he reached out and numbly closed hers.

  This could not be. He was not awake. What was going on here? Where were the local people? Why had they not come to help, or, at the very least, to gawk? Was there no one alive, then, but him?

  He had come too late. There was nothing for him to do now. It occurred to him that he ought to say a prayer for Bessie. For all of them…but—God!—the enormity of it! It was overwhelming. It was too much to expect of him! The feelings were wrong, too. He should be feeling pity for these poor souls, not this awful, this dire disgust. As if it was their shame. A brutal indignity they should have been able to forestall: a disgrace they ought never to have permitted…

  He felt himself teetering on the edge. No safety net below. Emptiness all around. Blank, glaring, howling, unfathomable space. No limits, no end. Cut loose from all the fables we make up to comfort ourselves—the walls, the roofs, the blankets, the cozy corners. (Human beings are basically good, life is good, people do not, cannot behave like this. Death, rape, violence, evil—I know of it, I have heard of it, but it is not for me, it is something that happens, to be sure, but not to me and mine. At least, not here, not now, not any more, not yet!)

  He was floundering in a bottomless pit. The abyss was rummaging around in his soul. It was pulling out all the stops in his head and booming out a fugue of doom.

  He had to pull himself together, to focus on one thing at a time. One thing, dead or alive. What was it? Her. He must find her. He must call her. He must know if…

  But to find Lucinda, he had to confront the terror again. The belching, lethargic horror of being too late. How was he ever to know her? The bodies in the wagons were for the most part burnt beyond recognition.

  Under a charred wagon wheel, something winked at him in the sun. He knelt down. He picked it up. He bowed his throbbing head. A little mule, covered in ashes. An embroidered slipper.

  Lucinda had shown him a pair of glass-beaded slippers, that night in her tent. Her legacy from her mother, she had said. Yes, he was sure that he recognized it! The beading was incomplete, around the heel. What had she told him again? That her mother had died before finishing it, or some such thing. Lucinda’s mother—but there was another horror snapping at his heels—

  What were the odds of Olivia, she who had rejected him for another, turning out to be the mother of his one true love? And, worse—had he not wanted to punish Olivia, at the time, for her falseness? Admit it, he had. He had! But not like this. Never! God! It was another horror that did not bear thinking about, another horror to rend black holes in his broken soul! He let go of the slipper in a sudden panic, as if it was a burning coal, a murder weapon, some dead, revolting thing.

  Something tapped him gently on the back. He spun around, staggering to his feet. A charred h
uman limb, dangling from a mass of burnt flesh, swayed in the breeze. He almost lost his balance, and reeled backwards.

  Then he heard a high-pitched cry. A weak little mewl. Gratefully he turned in the direction of the sound. Sticking out from beneath a heap of bodies, he spied the long dusky legs of the African woman. Lucinda’s friend. Zéfine.

  Desperately he dug through the corpses. There was something warm in there. Alive. He pulled it out.

  John stared at the infant. The infant looked back at him uncompromisingly. It blinked its large liquid eyes at him. A perfectly formed bubble emerged from its soft lips. John held his breath.

  A gust of wind on its damp head made it startle. It stiffened and threw its little palms heavenwards, in horror.

  Instinctively, John drew the little bundle close to his chest and started making clucking noises. The baby relaxed, and began to butt its face against the third button of John’s coat.

  Fortified by the infant’s admirable reflexes, John took a deep breath and strode back to the place where he had found the slipper.

  It was impossible to extract any useful information from the sullen burghers of Zaltbommel. No one had seen what happened. No one knew who was responsible. Nobody really cared to know what had happened to that French filth, if he really wanted to know the truth. Nobody knew who had stolen the packhorses and the stores. People suggested darkly that John should quiz the French general, the whores’ paymaster, the one they called Luxembourg, who was quartered in Utrecht and was eating them all out of house and home.

  John stayed around long enough to organize—and finance—the digging of a mass grave. The innkeeper’s wife sold him a pewter horn with a sponge teat wrapped in linen, for feeding the child. She charged him two pistoles for it. Then, perhaps to atone for robbing him blind, she waddled over to him in the spotless taproom with a tankard of boiled cow’s milk. Suddenly putting on a great show of motherly concern, she shook her head and tut-tutted sadly over “de poor liddle sing”.