The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  “Very tidy,” said Wurfbain. “We might make a lady of you yet. But never, ever refer to John of Bavaria’s theft as such—don’t forget, we Hooks are in a delicate spot, with our Jacoba on the run. Ah, and those from Brabant are Brabançons, not Brabanters. As for you, I wouldn’t advise that.”

  Sander put the stopper back in the small bottle he’d been drinking from and tucked it into the fold between the bottom cushion of the seat and the brocade backing. He muttered, “Shouldn’t be here. Won’t work.”

  “Nonsense,” said Wurfbain brightly. “Why, with Jolanda’s wits and your credentials, you’re—”

  “Getting out,” said Sander, fumbling with the latch on his door. “You lot get hanged if you want. Not me. Getting out. Forget it, the whole thing. Keep my coin, I’m out.”

  “No, you are not,” said the count, rapping Sander’s knuckles with the gilded cane he had hereto steepled his hands upon. “If you leave this carriage you will be caught by sundown and tortured through Pentecost, do you understand me?”

  “Dare threaten me, you cunt?” said Sander, the reddening hand Wurfbain had struck shooting out to the count’s throat, the chains of the coach jangling and the whole box shifting as Sander fell upon the man. Jolanda found herself incapable of moving, half-buried as she was under the uprooted Wurfbain. Over his shoulder she saw that several passersby had stopped to peer through the window, evidently delighted to see the noblesse throttling one another. And on Easter!

  “I do, Sander, I do, indeed,” whispered the count. He had never before called his pupil by that moniker; even when he was acknowledging the ruse, which was not often, he never used the man’s real name. Wurfbain went on, as though they were continuing a pleasant conversation postponed by the refilling of glasses. “You murderous sheephead thug, you listen to me, with both ears. I know all about you, and I have men who can find you wherever you go, and—”

  “All about me?” Sander faked a laugh. It sounded painful, desperate. “What’s there to know, fancy man?”

  “All your secrets.” Wurfbain’s lips had pulled back, his mouth resembling a deep wound, all blood-red gums and bone-white teeth. “We both know what I’m talking about.”

  “Secrets…” A shadow of fear passed over Sander’s face, like the pulsing current of a winter stream momentarily darkening the thin ice atop it, but quick as that it was gone again. “I haven’t got any secrets.”

  “No? What about Sneek, you mad buffoon?” asked Wurfbain, still pinned to the seat beside Jolanda. “What about that?”

  The color returned to Sander’s face, and how. He looked purple as Jolanda’s arms, and she wondered if his eyes would pop out like those of a sunbaked fish, so wide did they bulge. She didn’t understand what was happening—Sander should have punched in the count’s face for continuing to take a tone after being warned, but instead the larger man released Wurfbain and fell back, blocking the window with his wide shoulders and earning boos from the small crowd of townsfolk who had gathered beside the coach.

  Then, just as quickly as it had struck, Sander’s terror palpably withdrew, leaving him bristling mad again. “Jan was there, that cunt. Helped me get away. He told you about it.”

  “Ah, yes, he brought you your sword as you were fighting your way through the mob,” said the count, his voice never rising above a whisper. “But what about after? When you went into the canal? When you went under? And all those long weeks and months after? Whole seasons, Sander, gone—did you tell your beloved Jan about where you were that Christmas? That Shrovetide? That Easter? Do you even remember?”

  “I told him.” Sander choked on the words, clearly trying to convince himself of something. “I told, I told about losing them months, about—”

  “Belgium?” Wurfbain said lightly. It was an odd, ugly-sounding word that Jolanda didn’t recognize. Based on Sander’s appalled expression, it wasn’t the sort of word you’d want to recognize. “Did you tell him about your Belgian playmates, you nutty bastard?”

  Sander’s face fell and his shoulders slumped. His eyes were brimming with tears. Strange as it was, this relaxed Jolanda, even as she wondered just what in heaven they were talking about, wondered at Sander letting somebody other than Jan call him mad to his face.

  “Nobody gives a quick shit that you murdered a Frisian, and then murdered some more when they tried to hang you,” said Wurfbain, leaning toward Sander and patting the man’s trembling knee. “Sneek’s a long way behind us. I don’t bring that up, or the Belgian business, to threaten you. I simply mention them so that we understand each other, Jan. I know who you were, who you are, and rest assured, if you ruin what I’ve worked so hard to achieve with your… cowardice, then I will have you tortured to death. Slowly.” Perhaps as an afterthought, the count turned to Jolanda and smiled as he added, “And the dye-maker’s daughter. Slowly, Jan.”

  Sander was silent. Jolanda was silent. The coach lurched forward a few dozen paces and stopped again.

  “Or you can both be filthy, filthy rich until the day you die, old and happy,” Wurfbain said, looking back and forth between them. “Your choice!”

  “He really say all that?” Still smashed against the door of the carriage from the weight of his fear, Sander looked over the count’s head, at Jolanda. “You hear him say that, ’bout…’bout Sneek, and afterward and all? He say that?”

  Jolanda nodded, and Sander put his hand in his mouth, biting down and closing his eyes. Wurfbain swatted her arm lightly, winked at her. She flinched, a burst of hatred burning through her—she wasn’t sure what he had meant with his speechifying, but he had clearly intended to hurt Sander with his words, and succeeded wildly. To say fuck all of threatening to torture her if Sander ran off.

  Eventually they began moving again, Wurfbain testing her on the differences between Leyden’s old Pieterskerk and the new Hooglandse Church until the latter came into view through Sander’s window, which he was no longer blocking, having finally slithered back down onto the bench. After that, Jolanda forgot to keep offering Sander reassuring glances as the coach came around the side and then the front of the mighty building. It was the biggest thing Jolanda had ever seen, so large it hurt her eyes to look upon it—squinting at the spiny spires cresting the front of the church far, far overhead, she felt herself grow dizzy.

  They slowed to a stop as a man and a woman draped in fur-trimmed, well, everything, ascended the stairs, the open doors of the church flanked by militiamen whose attire was nearly as fine as that of the noble couple entering the building. Sander leaned forward, sticking his head out the window and spoiling the view, but before Jolanda could tell him to move his fat head, he puked down the side of the coach.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Wurfbain, his constant smile straining so hard Jolanda wondered that he didn’t pull something. Sander retched again, and as he hung farther out the window, Jolanda saw that the couple on the stairs had turned and looked back at them with disgust—justifiable, she had to allow, and she sank back into her seat, wishing she could blend into the soft cushions and be left behind. Wurfbain put a white-gloved hand on Sander’s heaving shoulder and murmured, “There we are, as noble an appearance as any I’ve witnessed. Now, get the hell out there, Jan, before we slow things down any more.”

  Jolanda closed her eyes, told herself it would be all right. In the precious blackness she heard Sander spit. Then the door of the coach creaked, and crockery shattered, startling her eyes open. Sander had knocked the bottle he had tucked into the seat cushions onto the ground, and as he stood blinking miserably beside the coach, Jolanda realized it had stopped raining and the sun was out, shining upon their entrance.

  “Come then, m’lady,” Sander said, leering at her as Wurfbain surreptitiously wiped off the madman’s face with a handkerchief. The count resembled an embarrassed mother cleaning up her boy with a washrag in front of unamused company. “The cunt of Holland awaits!”

  II.

  The sun might have finally showed its craven face, b
ut outside the coach it was still damp as a used whore’s thighs. Or so Sander had heard; he’d never lain with a woman, bought or free, in all his life. His stupid, overlong calfhide noble shoes slipped halfway up the wet stairs of the church, but he regained his balance and advanced on the massive double doors. He offered the crowd of peasants fanned out in the square on the far side of the line of carriages a knowing nod. People were laughing. Lots of them.

  Fuck ’em. He was Graaf Jan Tieselen, and he was going to fucking church on Easter.

  Except now the ruse, the meeting of predominantly Cod nobles who would hate him for being a Hook even if they didn’t suspect his fraudulent nature, all of it was eclipsed by a much greater and more pressing concern: Hobbe fucking Wurfbain. It was only through the most steadfast concentration that Sander had kept thoughts of that aquatic Frisian nightmare from his mind over the last year, and now the count had dredged it all up, rubbing his nose in it. The ponce wasn’t just a ponce; he knew more than anyone, he knew about Sander’s dream about Belgians and—

  But what if it wasn’t a dream? Shit, fuck, piss, if Hobbe knew about it, then it couldn’t just be a dream, could it? How would he know about it if that were all that had happened, a knock on the head when he went into the canal, a prolonged dream-fit or something—Saint Lizzy’s crack, had he really just pretended it hadn’t happened? That it wasn’t a big deal that he didn’t know where he’d been or what he’d done a year ago? Or for months on either side of last Easter? Well, he knew that somewhere in there he’d been down in the world’s biggest cunting well with a pack of demons. No, worse, a pack of Belgians, whatever the shit a Belgian was, but that hardly made up for all the time he’d lost. He—

  —Had entered the church without even noticing, the vaulted ceiling stretching high as heaven above him, rich people everywhere, staring and covering their smiles with kidskin gloves, Hobbe whispering something behind him as Sander strode forward up the aisle of the packed church. It was white, the church, white walls and white chapels and white pillars and white statues. Too white, it was, the sort of white that made filth stand out all the brighter.

  Sander must have met Hobbe during those now-forgotten times and then told him all about his Belgian dream. Yes. Sander imagined the scene, bearing down on it, hammering the fantasy into a memory—it might not’ve even been Hobbe, it could’ve been any random asshole, the story eventually finding its way to the count. Saints knew, each and all of them in heaven, that the first thing Sander would do after having a dream like that would be to tell anyone who would listen, especially if he was out of his head from… whatever it was that made him go out of his head, and—

  —Hobbe snared Sander’s elbow, which almost led to the ponce catching it in the chin. But then Sander saw the count was trying to pull him over to a gap in a row of churchgoers, Jo hissing at him to step out of the aisle, but he couldn’t hear her over the coughing, scraping, squeaking, rustling riot of the church.

  Sander continued to sift through his convoluted theories throughout the service, only coming back to the church when the bleating jester at the front hit an especially high note of Latin. There was so, so much for Sander to riddle out, and stretches of warm relief were bookended by cold flashes of panic as he vacillated between a calm certainty that Hobbe was simply playing on his fears in order to manipulate him and the mind-rattling terror that each and every member of the noble congregation was in cahoots with Hobbe and the Belgians. That the monsters and the counts of Holland were collaborating to get Sander’s fucking ass was a shit prospect. By the time Hobbe leaned over and whispered in his ear, Sander was drenched in sweat.

  “That’s it, Jan, we’re off,” said the count. “Now as we leave, I’ll introduce you to whoever happens to be about, so I need you to pull yourself together. Now. Or you and the girl will pay for it. Simply be a good boy and we’ll have a private chat later, you and I, but if you’re bad…”

  Sander awkwardly stepped in place, getting the life back into his dead legs until Hobbe let him enter the stream of nobles leaving the church, Hobbe and then Jo following him out. As they moved slowly toward the open doors, through which Sander could see that the rain had begun again, the count chatted with an older woman draped in fancy pelts and another lady Sander recognized as Zoete, the noblewoman who came around the manor to tutor Jo in the arts of being a rich female. Hobbe introduced the dowager to Sander, but her name swum away even as he heard it and he made no effort to net it again.

  Thankfully, the ladies seemed more interested in Jo, and so Sander was free to further ruminate on the possibilities—whatever the means, the end seemed to be that Hobbe was a conniving motherfucker who knew more than he ought to, and thus a dangerous enemy. Stupid cunt thought he could control Sander, though, which was something Sander could use to his advantage—meant he didn’t have to be in a hurry, meant he could bide until he found out what he needed to, until he found a way to get Jo safely away from the evil nobleman.

  “Something amusing?” Hobbe asked after the women parted their company at the door. Sander realized that the fantasy of smothering Hobbe with a pillow on the night he and Jo escaped the manor had caused him to grin like an idiot. They were atop the stairs just outside the church, at the crest of a velvet-and-satin wave waiting to break down upon the line of carriages as soon as the rain let up or one’s personal coach was sighted in the queue.

  “Nay,” said Sander. “Just thinking ’bout what you said.”

  “Papa?” said Jo, taking his hand and giving it a squeeze. “Are you all right?”

  Nice of her to ask when she was clearly the one shitting herself, the girl washed-out and trembling as a water lily on a choppy day. He squeezed her fingers back, but must’ve done so a mite too hard, for she scowled and yanked her hand away. Her anger brought some color to her cheeks, and he smiled at this. “Just fine, Jo, just—”

  “What is the meaning of this?” A squirrelly young man in a red cape had appeared on the steps before them. “Who the devil are you?”

  It took Sander a moment to realize the lad was addressing him, but when he did, he comported himself pretty damn well, he thought. “I’m Jan Tieselen—and whose honor I got?”

  “What?!” The man’s thick blond mustache made Sander think he might be a decent sort, his odd response notwithstanding. “What?!”

  “Damn,” said Sander, realizing he must have bungled his introduction. Taking off the hat he had mauled between his fingers into an orange velvet lump during the service, he bowed as best he could without this worked-up twit giving him space to properly do it. “I am Graaf Jan Tieselen, at last returned from my, uh, tenure in the East. Whose, ah, acquaintance I got the credit of making?”

  “Bullshit,” the nobleman sneered, turning to Hobbe. “Who is this man, Wurfbain, this, this—”

  “Jan Tieselen,” Sander said a third time. The fancy-caped fellow was now giving him his full attention, probably due to the fact that Sander had darted out his hand and grabbed the man’s cock and one of his balls through the puffy junk-pouch of his hose—fashionable or no, this ponce was going to learn the value of a real codpiece. Sander squeezed hard enough to blanch the man’s face, but not enough to make him collapse. Yet. “And I’m a graaf you don’t ignore without result. Cunt. Now tell me your fucking name ’fore I geld you.”

  “Simon,” the man gasped. “Simon Gruyere, please, I, I meant no—”

  “ ’Course you didn’t,” said Sander, releasing the ponce—the last thing he wanted was to hold on long enough for one of these other assholes to notice and make a scene. “Now that we’re met and all—”

  “You mad cur!” the ponce hissed, slipping backward on the stairs. “You have no, no concept of whom you’ve made an enemy!”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Sander. “Simon Gruyere’s the name of the cunt, and I don’t aim to forget it.”

  Jo giggled behind them, and to Sander’s surprise Hobbe laughed as well, the count taking a step down the stairs to put
himself between Gruyere and Sander as he addressed the offended noble. “Tell your brother to start packing. You boors have just been hooked!”

  Gruyere abandoned whatever retort he had been levying at Sander and stared dumbstruck at Hobbe. The rain dribbled off his tremulous mustache, and Hobbe descended the stair past him, wiggling his fingers in a silly little wave as he did so. Sander followed the count, imitating Hobbe’s gesture. Jo caught up with Sander and took his hand, smiling up at him.

  The exhilaration of barking down that Gruyere bitch had cheered Sander considerably, but clambering back into the coach to sit beside Hobbe, he was well reminded that not everything was so grand. The count was giving him a peculiar look that might have been either annoyance or pride, Sander wasn’t sure which. He decided to be optimistic:

  “That went well, eh?”

  Hobbe laughed until he wept, then regained his composure, wiping his face. Looking back and forth between Jo and Sander, he started again, hooting with mirth as he shook his head. Finally, he managed,

  “No, no, no, not at all. That was dreadful. Dreadful. You grabbed his pouch!”

  “He learned a lesson from it,” Sander said defensively. “Won’t happen again, tell you that.”

  “Aye, he had it coming,” said Jo. Sander’s victory was short-lived as she added, “But that don’t mean you ought to give it to him.”

  “Exactly,” said Hobbe. “John fancies himself a knight of legend, despite his picking fights with his own niece. Grabbing another noble like that at court where he might see is about as stupid a thing as you could manage without special instruction. Jolanda, on the other hand, did wonderfully. Did you enjoy yourself?”

  “It weren’t so bad,” Jo allowed. “Zoete’s friend was nice enough.”

  “Lady Meyl Von Wasser? She’s the evilest Cod in Holland. Charming enough to exchange pleasantries with at an Easter service, certainly, but Hook women like you and Zoete will never be invited to join her sewing circle, even when you’re all neighbors in Dordrecht.”