by Patty Jansen
Gisele looked disturbed for a moment. Then she shrugged. “Could be. I don’t know if it’s the prince. But someone definitely lives down there.”
Nellie said, “Would you be prepared to check?”
“I have no idea how to get in there. The only way I got in was with someone else who opened the door for me.”
Yes, but Nellie had the key.
Chapter 15
NELLIE DEBATED whether she should let Gisele know she had the key, but decided against it for the time being. She thought she could trust Gisele, as least somewhat, but if Gisele got desperate, who was to say she wouldn’t trade the information that someone had the key for something she wanted?
She might want Gisele’s help later, but she would only tell her that she had the key at that time.
So she asked Gisele and Els for information about how to poison gin. Had they ever seen or heard of gin that could be poisoned with magic?
“A lot of sailors talk about this,” Els said. “When they go out to sea, they have no way of getting back at whoever it was who sold them the foul gin, so they prefer to buy only from people they know are safe suppliers.”
“And I’m guessing you are a safe supplier?”
She smiled mischievously. “Reputation is everything. You have told me many times yourself.”
“Who are they, then, these magicians who poison gin with magic?”
“If people knew, then they wouldn’t live for long,” Gisele said. “It’s considered the lowest form of crime to kill someone in this way.”
“But they would have to be a magician, wouldn’t they?”
“Either that, or they would have to employ a magician to do it.”
Nellie said, “What sort of magic would be involved? I know that people who have wood magic see things in wood, but they can’t do anything with the wood, other than listen to it. I know that works the same with wind and water magic. People touch the water, or let the wind touch the face, and then listen to all the things it tells them. I think that is called passive magic. Artisan magic. If someone were to put magic in gin that would be an active use of magic.” Nellie struggled to find the right words. She had heard some language used to describe magic when she was travelling with Mistress Johanna, but she was not well versed in the terminology that magicians used to talk about their skills. That, she realised, was the way Saardam had seen its downfall. It was because someone who had a dangerous amount of magic—the young princess—had been left untrained. And here was the church, who wanted to forbid the training of all such people, instead banishing them from the city.
It made sense, in an evil kind of way.
Gisele said, “Yep, that is active magic, and it’s rare and dangerous.”
“That means that there is such a magician in the city.”
“Or somewhere outside, and the gin is imported.”
“But gin is only made locally. Even a little distance up the river the monks prefer wine, and further still, they have all kinds of different liquors.”
“That’s true.”
So, Nellie asked again. “Who else in the city sells gin? I know you don’t like talking about your competitors, but we need to know, or several people will be put to death unnecessarily. Specifically, I’d like to know who sells to the palace.”
“We don’t sell to the palace,” Els said.
“I know. You have already told me that.”
Gisele said, “The Regent is from the south, and I don’t think he likes gin.”
“Would he not provide any for his guests?”
“Gin is considered a drink for uncivilised sailors,” Gisele said. “I don’t know that anyone sells it to the Palace. When I was serving there, I didn’t see any.”
Nellie didn’t remember seeing any while serving, either. In fact, thinking back to her time working with the Regent, she didn’t think she had ever seen gin in the dining room. “Yet there was a bottle of gin in the Lord Verdonck’s room. I know because I saw it there. It was empty. I remember what it looked like because it was one of the square ones like those in your warehouse. The label was different, with a goat on it. I’ve never seen that before, but I’m sure he would have bought it somewhere in town.”
“The gin that gets sold in the shops is made at the Oliver distillery,” Gisele said.
“Do they use a label with a goat on it?”
“Their usual label doesn’t have a picture, but they may do special batches for people. I don’t know. I have to say I would be very surprised if someone who has a lot of magic would work there, so probably someone bought it there and then infused it with magic before giving it to Lord Verdonck as a present. They might even have changed the label.”
That was another option, and Nellie’s head was spinning with all the different possibilities. She wasn’t sure she would ever find out who sold that bottle of gin, and she became less sure that the poisoning had been caused by the gin.
The distillery was one of the businesses that still operated in the street behind the harbour, and Nellie decided to go and have a look after she had said goodbye to Gisele and Els.
It was operated by the Oliver family, a well-respected merchant family in town. There were two brothers in the business. One had the distillery, the other ran the confectionery and special foods business that supplied the palace. It was a respectable business in a good part of town, and it had been there for a long time. When someone mentioned the name, she could smell the smoked ham, and the salty aged cheese that was so dry it crumbled when you tried to cut it. She could see the racks of bottles with exotic spices. There was a set of shelves containing bottles of gin, too, which came from the family business.
When she came to the distillery building, the doors into the factory hall were open. The familiar smell of boiling grain wafted out in clouds of steam. The setup was much bigger and better than Gisele and Els’ operation in the abandoned warehouse. This hall had permanent tables, wash basins for bottles, drying racks and a giant pot hanging over a raging fire, where a man was stirring the contents. Another man was writing out labels and affixing them to bottles and then packing the bottles in crates.
A young man whom she knew as the son of the business owner came to meet Nellie. He wore a simple thin coat and his cheeks were red from the steamy heat inside the hall. “Can I help you?”
“I’ve got a strange question,” Nellie said. “I was wondering if you could tell me whether someone from the nobility or the palace bought a small bottle of gin as a present for a visitor.”
The man laughed. “We sell hundreds of bottles every week. Do you think I would remember?”
Seeing the size of the operation behind him that did not surprise her at all. “But you do sell to the palace?”
“Not very much, we don’t. That foreigner insists on having his own foreign drink brought in as if we’re not good enough for him.”
Clearly not a supporter of the Regent. “Where do you sell to, then?”
“Many people. All the nobles, merchants, the church.”
“The church?”
“Yes, they love a good glass of gin. Especially Shepherd Wilfridus.”
With all the will in the world, Nellie could not imagine Shepherd Wilfridus approving of drinking anything like gin.
But maybe he gave it to his monks to loosen their tongues.
“So you don’t remember anyone who bought a small bottle as a present? It could have been someone from out of town.” She looked around him, but the labels the man at the table was sticking on bottles contained only writing, no pictures of goats.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have memories as good as that.”
“Do you make small batches with special labels?”
“We sometimes sell bottles without labels, if clients want to use their own.”
Well, this didn’t help Nellie very much. What had she expected? To see crates with goat-labelled gin? What would that mean anyway? Probably that the poison hadn’t been in the gin. She considered aski
ng about the goat labels, but decided against it because it would only draw attention to herself.
She was about to go, but then thought of another question. “Can you tell me, is there such a thing as gin magic?”
“The making of gin is a craft. In our case, it has been passed down from generation to generation. If you want to call that magic, you are wrong. In this factory hall, we do not meddle in magic or other dark craft. What you see here is all honest work.”
“I’m sorry to upset you. It was not my intention. But I know that when a baker makes bread, the best bakers have a kind of magic that makes their bread better than everyone else’s. Someone told me you are the best gin maker in town.”
“The only one.” His face was prim.
“So I wondered if there might be a special gift involved in the magic of gin.”
“It’s craft, no more.”
Whoa, he was defensive all of a sudden.
She thanked him for his replies and left again, with more questions than when she had come.
So it was possible that the gin in Lord Verdonck’s room had been purchased at that distillery, and that someone else had put the goat label on it and infused it with magic. But it was a long shot, and who that person would have been was a mystery.
Then she had another thought. She already knew an accomplished magician was in town because the fire dog would not exist without a master. That person would have enough magic to do such a thing. But Nellie had no idea who that person could be.
She wasn’t getting anywhere near solving who had poisoned Lord Verdonck, but she knew where she might find Prince Bruno. Because the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that the boy was Prince Bruno. She also remembered that she had seen a drawing in a book in the crypt of a boy aged about ten who looked like Prince Bruno. If there was indeed a boy in the crypt, as Gisele had insisted, then it was Prince Bruno.
If the women were going to escape from the city, they should take him, because the thought of a young boy locked up inside the crypt horrified her.
She should tell the dragon she knew where his master was. If anything could entice him out of hiding that information would do the trick.
When she came back to the barn, the women were again sitting on the floor of the main barn tying wooden slats together with a thin rope to make a shield against arrows.
They looked up when Nellie came in. “Where have you been?” Agatha asked, her voice brusque.
No matter what Nellie did or said, she could never shake the feeling that Agatha disliked her.
“This is going really well,” Nellie said of their handiwork.
“It’s cold work,” Agatha said. “My fingers are ready to fall off.”
She held up her hands. Her fingers were red, the skin flaky.
Nellie was more concerned about Koby’s fingers. The girl was quiet and didn’t complain, but her hands and legs were covered in sores that never seemed to heal.
“I will come and help you soon, but I have some news I have to tell the dragon.”
“What makes you think it will listen this time?” Agatha said and continued to talk about some people doing all the work while other people gallivanted about.
Nellie ignored her. At some point, she would figure out what Agatha’s problem was, but that time was not now.
At the word dragon, the children in the corner of the barn stopped dropping pebbles in the water near the sea cows and watched Nellie.
She went into the storeroom where they slept and retrieved the dragon box from her bag.
When she picked it up, a puff of sparks exploded from the top shelf and drifted down to the mattresses that lay on the hay, and then back up into the air.
Nellie opened the box.
The sparks withdrew to the door.
“Do you want to get in? Are you afraid of this box?”
The sparks moved closer to her and back to the wall a few times.
“Come on, show yourself. We won’t bite.”
And then she had to laugh about that. Fancy telling a dragon not to be afraid. Dragons shouldn’t fear anything.
She snapped the box shut again.
“Suit yourself, but if you don’t get in the box, you will never see your master. I know where he is.”
The sparks came a bit closer again.
“Do you know that he’s alive? I learnt this today from someone who knows there is a boy living in the crypt. I think that’s him. I think you know that, too.”
Sparks came a little closer.
“Come on. I’m not angry with you. At least I won’t be angry if you’re nice and behave yourself and don’t mess things up again.”
Now the sparks went lower, to about knee level.
“So this is it, right? You feel sorry because you made a mess?”
The sparks went even lower.
Nellie kept talking. She wasn’t sure that the dragon understood, although she would like to think he did. “I know you can’t help it. That fire dog scared me, too. I don’t know where it came from. I need your help to figure out who it belongs to. We need to make sure it doesn’t discover us. Maybe when we have your master we’ll defeat the magician who owns it, but for now we just need to be careful.”
The sparks shivered.
Nellie bent down and pretended to pat them as if they were a dog.
Her hand and went right through, and she didn’t even feel any pricks of the sparks.
“Come on, we could you use your help. I forgive you. We all make mistakes. I’m sure that the other women will forgive you too, as long as you now know to be quiet.”
The sparks exploded outwards.
Slowly the space in between solidified. First a golden mist appeared that grew thicker and thicker until it formed into a deep golden dragon with shimmering scales. Not the same colour as before, because the dragon had been red, but still the same animal.
“Boots!” Anneke yelled from the door. She ran into the storeroom and spread her arms against the dragon’s flanks.
“See, he came back. He was here all along. He loves us.”
The other children also stood in the doorway, cheering. “Boots is back, Boots is back.” This brought the adults to the door.
Nellie went to stand in front of the dragon and held out the box. He sniffed at the box, and then sneezed, blowing a gust of warm air over Nellie’s hand.
“I hope this means you will behave, and you will go back into the box whenever we tell you. It’s for your own best interest, and we do want you to come with us.”
But in all honesty, she was happy to see the dragon again, because having him around would mean they had another weapon against the guards. If things went wrong during the escape attempt, having a dragon in your pocket was always a good thing.
With the dragon in the room, it was already much warmer, so at least tonight they would not have to bring coals into the room with all kinds of danger of fire.
The other women were all standing in the doorway.
“Look, mammy, Boots is back,” Anneke said.
“As long as it doesn’t get you kids into any more mischief,” Agatha said, in a prim voice.
“We’ll be very careful. We’ll teach him to lie still and be quiet, won’t we, Boots?”
Her mother sniffed and turned to the barn.
There was something familiar about her behaviour that made Nellie think of herself when she first came to work for Mistress Johanna. The little girl had only been a few years younger than Nellie, but Nellie was so very disturbed by the way Johanna used her wood magic to snoop on people. Because it was Not Proper, and One Didn’t Do That Sort Of Thing.
And the church said magic was bad and therefore people with magic were bad, which she believed . . . until she met a person with magic, and it wasn’t like that at all. Nellie had been afraid of Johanna at first, and her fear had manifested into telling Johanna not to do anything that brought her into contact with situations where magic might happen.
Nel
lie was scared of it, and she had been even more scared that her father would find out that the well-off, wholesome merchant family who employed his daughter had dealings with magic. Because she was sure her father would be furious and tell her to stay home. Nellie had liked the young girl and her father, and she liked living away from her home, so she had forced herself to accept Johanna’s magic.
That made her realise: Agatha was scared of her daughter’s ability.
Chapter 16
AT NIGHT, IN the storeroom, while listening to the waves slapping against the quay and the soft snoring of the dragon which again slept surrounded by the children, Nellie attempted to sort out the disturbed thoughts she had about the church.
She believed the church had collected evil artefacts with the purpose of keeping them out of the hands of unwitting citizens.
The past of Saardam was littered with stories of people who had acquired evil items by accident and had suffered for it.
So she accepted the good intentions of the church in keeping those items out of the hands of the public.
With no will in the world, however, could she justify keeping people prisoner. Not even the most evil of crazy people deserved to be locked up in the crypts of the church. She didn’t think that most people in the church knew about this, because good, honest people would never stand for it. And most of the people in the church were good, she had no doubt about that.
And then, because it was dark, and at night everything seemed different, the more she thought about it the more she doubted that there was a boy locked up in the crypts. Why would the church lock up people when there was a perfectly good prison for them to go to? A prison, which she should add, the Regent had no trouble using.
At night, when the world was dark and strange and sounds kept her awake, was when she needed her faith in the Triune to pull her through. All her life, the church had been her one shining beacon, the light that guided her through the dark waters, the home she longed for.
The church couldn’t do something as bad as lock up a young boy.