The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  “The reeds, then?” she asked, and trying to kindle herself for the chill of the swim, got herself properly annoyed. “Why aren’t we moored there, then? Like seeing me shiver?”

  “That’s it, all right,” Jan said. “Means the roof hasn’t caved, at least not completely. We’ll take the boat over when we’re ready, but it’s too chancy to beach on it while we sit around—last thing we want is to knock some bricks loose.”

  “It’s past time you told me what it is, Lob,” she said. “Can’t well find your shit if you don’t tell me the shape of it.”

  “His fucking da’s house, is what it is,” said Sander. He’d swooped up the cat and held her under one arm, gesturing with the docile animal as he spoke. “Flooded as the rest, so he wants you to swim in there and get his ring.”

  Jan nodded genially, which only irritated Jo more.

  “There anything you’ll tell me, instead of my hearing it from him?” she demanded. “Swear that cuntbitch is more honest than you, and that’s saying something indeed.”

  “Slander me at your peril, slut,” said Sander, pointing the cat at her. “Eager enough to use the words I taught you, even if you’re wrong about the how of it. Cuntbitch is only something you call women.”

  “Didn’t teach me that, nor nothing,” said Jo. “My papa called me such more often than my name, and woman or would-be, I’ll call you whatever I see fit, shitbird.”

  “Explain yourself, whore, or taste my fucking heel,” said Sander.

  “I mean honest folk don’t tell them tales you’re always on about, all them myths and ghost stories and horseshit—”

  “Explain the would-be woman shit you said, I mean. And anything I tell you is true as apples are green—even a stupid little kid like you’ll know that lying in a graveyard’s not even possible, why they hold councils and such in—”

  “I’m in love with you, Uncle Sander, and think you’re a handsome fellow with all kinds of clever about you,” said Jo, her eyes closed and her gaunt cheeks puffed out in a smile. “I’m also the countess of fucking Burgundy.”

  “Goddamn cuntbitch!” Sander shouted. “Bringing all kinds of ruin on yourself, saying such things in a churchyard! I didn’t mean it wasn’t possible, I meant it wasn’t possible without damning yourself, sure as spitting on a church door!”

  “Yeah, ’cause that’s what you said, Uncle.” Jo rolled her eyes as the man seethed, and she again worried for the safety of the cat he held.

  “In any event,” Jan said easily, “it’s time to go in. I don’t wish to be out here any longer than necessary.”

  “Spill your fucking guts already, you lying piece of gooseshit,” said Jo angrily. “He might not shut his goddamn mouth, but I’ll take that to your never unhinging yours.”

  “The less you know—” said Jan, but Sander jumped in, clearly eager for a last word or twenty.

  “Tell the wee cuntcrease, already!” Sander’s spittle rained down on them. “You’re going in there to get his da’s ring so he can pretend he ain’t a bastard, so he can pass himself off as something fine and dandy in Dordt and elsewheres. You get the ring, he gets himself graafed, and that’s the whole fucking truth from an honest man to a stupid goddamn slut without the sense to use words for what they do. You know what’s good for you, you’ll swim off with it yourself and cheat the cheater of his loot!”

  “That’s quite enough, I think,” said Jan in the sharp, clipped tone he adopted when he was annoyed.

  “I don’t know what he said,” Jo replied, looking back and forth between them. “What’s going on? You’re a… what?”

  “Better you—”

  “No!” Jo stood. “You explain it, Jan, or I don’t swim. Your choice.”

  “Remember this,” said Jan, but he was looking at Sander. “It’s like Sander said. My father was graaf of Oudeland. He fucked my mother, the widow of a local miller. She bore me, and as his wife gave him nothing but daughters, he took an interest in me—tried to play it off, of course, as something other than what it was, but when I grew older my mother told me the truth of it, and when I confronted him, he admitted to being my sire.”

  “So you really are a rich man,” said Jo in wonder. “I’d started thinking you were lying about that, too.”

  “Not yet,” said Jan stiffly. “He was a strange man, I realize now, or I should never have discovered what I did; he never would have done the things he did. He was… touched, my father. Wracked by demons, fight them though he did, and I wonder if that had something to do with it.”

  “Demons,” whispered Sander, his eyes widening as he dropped the cat. She threaded her way around Jo’s legs as Jan finally stood as well. It cheered Jo to see that Sander seemed surprised by this admission, but the seriousness of Jan’s expression unsettled her. Unlike Sander, who saw spirits in every moonbeam and portent in every bird cry, Jan had never spoken of such things, and it troubled her greatly that he did so here, in a flooded graveyard she would soon be diving into. A strong regret for pushing the issue warred with a gloating pleasure at having finally got him to open up.

  “So they say. He had fits where he would lose himself. The priest claimed it was possession, but he was the sort of churchman to look for such things. Often my father would catch a whiff of something strange, something otherworldly, and then he would fall and thrash, sometimes frothing at the mouth. I saw an old dog run over by a cartwheel once, and he looked just like it, shaking and spitting and such. But he always recovered from them, and they were not a common occurrence.”

  Jo and Sander exchanged worried glances, and she picked up the cat, holding it to her chest. The mist seemed ever thicker, despite a chill breeze that had picked up across the meer. Jan looked out to the rushes where the graaf’s house presumably lay buried.

  “He did not think highly of women, even his daughters. He wanted a son more than anything, and I was as close as he seemed liable to have, for his wife was getting on in years, and when she did manage to provide him a child, it was invariably a girl, even the stillbirths. So he had me from a young age as a servant, to keep me about, to watch me, and wherever he went, riding or fishing or hunting or even to the cities on business, he had me with him. He was a Hook through and through, and lectured me on politics as well as training me for combat. He also educated me, though I didn’t know the queerness of it at the time, for letters.

  “He had a plan, you understand—I was a bastard and would receive nothing, much as he might wish it, but if I were a legitimate nephew, then I could inherit his estate instead of whoever married his daughters. It happened that he had a younger brother, who had gone abroad to seek his fortune. This brother had died not long after leaving home, but my father, long-sighted man that he was, concealed this information from all—my mother had birthed me by this time, whereas his wife had only borne him girls, and even then, all those years ago, he plotted to break the world for me. Strange.”

  There was a look to Jan that Jo had never seen before, an almost doleful grimace. Perhaps this was how he looked when he told the truth. The cat squirmed and Jo let her drop back down.

  “I fought for him when war flared up with Brabant, and even went to court with him, and he put everything in place for my ascension following his death. A lawyer in Dordrecht was given the various correspondences between himself and his long-dead brother, letters that he wrote one side of and I the other—if you are familiar with letters you can often spy a difference between one man’s style and another’s, hence the wisdom in our strategy. These missives were detailed enough to leave no room for doubt as to the legitimacy of the fictitious nephew I would become, but vague enough to avoid falling apart under scrutiny—a younger brother finding fortune, property, and a wife of minor nobility in the wilds of the East is not so unheard of, neither then nor now. The letters I wrote in the name of my deceased uncle made much mention of a son named Jan, a nephew to my father, and how the boy should visit soon, very soon.

  “The final touch would be his brothe
r’s ring, which bore the Tieselen seal—my family’s crest. My father received it with the news of its bearer’s death when I was still in swaddling rags—he kept this ring behind a loose hearthstone in his bedchambers, though he showed me its hiding place so I could retrieve it following his death. Then I could escape Oudeland and journey to the lawyer in Dordrecht, who would assist with the rest—I would become Graaf Tieselen of Oudeland.”

  “And everyone hereabouts wouldn’t know you for the servant you was?” said Jo. It seemed an obvious question to her, but Sander stared at her agape, as if she had hit on some unexpected snarl that not even Jan had considered.

  “Of course they would,” said Jan. “Which was why I was to give myself time to grow a beard before coming forward, and even then be sure to take my father’s city house in Dordrecht instead of the family seat in Oudeland. As I said, my father had a long vision, and early on had inserted himself into Dordrecht, though his peers scoffed at his dirtying his hands in what they called peasant business. Which is the only reason we’re out here—becoming graaf of flooded fields would do me no good at all, but unlike most of these shortsighted Groote Waard nobles, now property-and-pfennigiless from the flood, I’ve got a fortune tied up in a Dordt-based wine importation business. It’s fallen to my father’s wife’s family, but if a direct male heir were to emerge now…”

  “So the flood came, and cheated you of your rightful place, aye?” asked Jo. It seemed like one of the tales her brother Pieter had told her as they worked Snail Bay so long ago.

  “No,” said Jan with a twisted smile. “Something worse arrived. That sow of his finally bore him a son, and that was that. He had me kicked out of the house, lest I try to murder the boy. To his credit, though, he gave me a small purse of money. To find my way, he said.”

  “Would’ve ratted him out to any that’d listen,” said Sander bitterly, and it again occurred to Jo that he might not have heard the entirety of this story before, either. “Would’ve found a way to fix ’em.”

  “Even still, he did me better than yours did you, to hear your tales,” said Jan, though there was no sting to his voice, only a sort of grim humor. “And who would listen? The word of a bastard is just that. I left Oudeland and went directly to the lawyer who held the fictitious correspondence. I paid him every coin my father had given me to keep those letters safe, even if my father instructed him to burn them, which, it turns out, he did.”

  “Burned them?” asked Sander. “Then how—”

  “No, no,” said Jan. “My father ordered him to destroy the letters shortly after my visit, apparently, but Laurent, the lawyer, was honest to his bribe—he told my father they were burned, but kept them safe for me. And here we are.”

  Jo’s chest pounded as she looked at him, the clement brown eyes that matched the hair framing his handsome face, and she decided that even if she were to die in the attempt, she would bring him his ring. Such a strange creature was he, scarcely human, but she realized they were not so different, him and her—he had been hurt by his family, just as she had been done wrong by hers. And he was of noble birth, bastard or no, which explained his aloofness, his airs. Yet for all that, he had a softness, she saw that now, and if he kept it locked up, safe from harm, who could blame him?

  Not her, certainly. She stepped closer and gave him a kiss on the cheek, a sudden sorrow coming upon her like a jellyfish carried by a wave. She imagined she would start her moons soon, all these strong, inexplicable pushes of emotion.

  “Quit swooning over His Highness and get your scrawny ass in the water,” Sander snapped, and she supposed she had made him jealous with her kiss. Good. Meeting Jan’s eyes, she blushed.

  “Here,” said Jan, snapping a rush from beside the crypt and squatting down. He set to sketching the outline of a square, scratching it into the harder muck they had not been able to completely kick from the crypt. He then made a smaller square inside the first, the two figures sharing their bottom lines. “This is the hearth. It’s set against the wall of the bedchamber, the back wall. There’s only a single fireplace in the room, so you should find it well enough. The loose stone the ring’s under is here, on the base at the left side. The stone is free of mortar, unlike the rest.”

  “Easy,” said Jo, but then a thought came to her. “So why haven’t you swum down yourself to fetch it?”

  “I tried,” he said, and Jo thought he might have bristled a bit, like a flexing hedgehog. “When we came out here, Andrei and I. It was too deep, though, too dark. And, Andrei said, too fresh after the flood—silt was stirred up, it was like swimming through a sand dune. I didn’t want to give up, however, and almost drowned myself in the process.”

  “Hard to imagine you being foolish like that,” said Jo quietly, shyly. He returned her smile and ignored Sander’s snort.

  “Well, I was. The water was higher, then, and covered the roof, so I had to swim down and go through a window. The shutters were locked from within, from before the flood, and hadn’t rotted enough to come loose, so I had to enter one that was unlatched on the ground floor. The bedchamber is on the second. It was black as old blood down there, and I got turned around in the dark, couldn’t find my way out until it was almost too late.”

  “So now you want me to go down there, blind and all, and get inside and feel around for it?” She hadn’t meant for it to sound so hard coming out, and worried he would think her frightened. Which she was, maybe.

  “Yes,” said Jan, as if it were really that simple. But then, she supposed that for him it was, and so it would be for her. Having shrewdly forgotten her uncomfortable pelisse at Primm’s and keeping her wonderful blue cloak folded neatly in her satchel rather than risk dirtying it, she was able to pull off her gown in one easy motion, leaving her naked save for her thin shift. The sensation of fresh air on liberated skin distracting her from her time and place and trial, she looked at the somber meer with new eyes. Dark though it was, and sinister, at least if she were to die here, she would die wet.

  “Let’s do it, then,” she said, suddenly eager to prove herself, to bring up Jan’s fortune in half the time it had taken him to try and fail. Neither this meer nor that bastard of river and ocean they had crossed from Rotterdam to Dordrecht had called to her the way her sea always had, the surface here too calm, the water here too sweet, but he had chosen her for this and she wouldn’t disappoint. Sander had gone quiet, as had Jan, and looking between them, she supposed she had startled them both with her eagerness. “Why I’m here, aye? Let’s have me do my purpose and go back to being a worthless cuntwhore, eh, Uncle?”

  “Cuntbitch,” Sander corrected, but he looked… she wasn’t sure what, almost scared? Sickened? No matter—she pulled her shift over her head, hoping it would make him uncomfortable rather than interested. It seemed to have the intended effect; he turned away, whatever stupid expression he was wearing deepening in its displeasure.

  Then a hand was on her bare arse and she jumped, her heart and her guts oozing happily together, the calluses of Jan’s fingers scratching her as he cupped the cheek and gave it a light squeeze. Then he was past her, before Sander could notice, she knew. Someone else evidently had, however, the furious-sounding Muscovite shouting from his boat:

  “I did not agree to be party in such obscenity, Hollander! Unhand devushka, or I shall abandon you here!”

  Mortified and unsure what else to do, Jo spun around and jumped into the water.

  She knew better than to dive, considering how shallow the meer was directly around the crypt. Even without a visible mudflat on the side from which she launched, her feet sank in filth almost immediately after hitting the water. She went in near to her waist, the warmth of it making her gasp, and she wriggled out of the mud with the vigor of a nested crab escaping a burning piece of driftwood. The water barely covered her as she slid along the muddy shallows, blackness clouding around her as she frantically strove for deeper water, desperate to escape the cackling laughter of Sander and the angry yelling of the Muscovite.
Then she had it, kicking off a stone marker to her side and propelling herself down and under, twisting around and rubbing the tenacious smears of filth from her legs before resurfacing with a gasp.

  At first she couldn’t see the men, open water steaming before her, and she idled there, letting her embarrassment flow out with the piss she’d been holding all morning. Let the Muscovite chide Jan for his blatant groping, then—the pervert deserved it, touching her up out in the open like that. She certainly didn’t want Andrei thinking she’d consent to such behavior; what with his cat, his obvious love for the water, and his constant harassment of Sander, she had warmed to the boatman at once, despite his foreign nature, and she would hate for him to think she was the sort of girl that would let any fellow, even her beloved, paw her naked arse in front of other men. She’d have a word with Jan about his forwardness when all was said and done…

  Cocking her ear, it sounded like Sander’s sadistic laughter and Andrei’s chivalrous outburst had coalesced into a general hallooing after her, and so she swam leisurely toward their voices, keeping to the deeper water and circling the marsh of stone and rush. There they were, all three back in the boat and edging out past the last gravestone. Jan waved from the prow and pointed dead ahead, and she felt the old coals begin to glow as she swam unfettered of muck and shallow, racing a boat rowed by two stout men and quickly taking the lead. She realized they were holding back, which irritated her immensely, but before she could call them on it, she saw the stand of reeds jutting up before her and stopped paddling, bringing her legs underneath her to tread in place while she inspected the floating thicket.