Unless her father was too thick to realize the worth of his product, of course. The thought had come to her before, but it was only when she was dyeing her hands that she really worked it over. It was actually quite funny, in a mean-spirited way… just like remembering that the most her father had ever been paid in his life was the four groots Jan had given him in exchange for Jolanda, and those groots had been every bit as false as the man who had paid them out. Counterfeit coin for a genuine daughter—Jan had certainly got his money’s worth out of the old dye-maker!
The wide bowl balanced between her knees, her cold hands long since asleep in their shallow bath, she sat in the dark of her room, the stinking dye making her eyes flow like those of some more merciful creature, some more loyal daughter. Her father had a traveling merchant he sold to, the man visiting Monster once a month or so during the peak season to take what the purple-maker had produced in exchange for a handful of pfennigs, and oh, how her old man bragged to be paid! Since becoming noble, Jolanda had taken to letters more than numbers, but even without a firm grasp on arithmetic she figured the traveling merchant had to be reselling the purple they made for a hundred times what he bought it for, if the figure the dye-seller in Gouda had listed was remotely accurate. How in heaven’s name her father had learned his trade but not its value she could hardly imagine…
A wicked thought came to her, and she smiled, turning her hands over in the bowl. It would be easy work to undercut the merchant who bought the dye from her father and then resell it at a substantial profit to a dyer or guildsman in Dordrecht or Rotterdam. All she had to do was hire some goon to go proposition her father, maybe with a comparatively large onetime payment to have him sever all ties with the old merchant, lest some bidding war gain traction. Her father was thick, but not so thick that he wouldn’t grow wary if his old contact and Jolanda’s agent kept raising their offers.
Aye, best to concoct a story about her man being a relation of the old merchant but having had a falling-out, I’m-the-one-you-should-be-dealing-with-and-here’s-five-groots-if-you-never-talk-to-him-again, that sort of thing. The old dye-buyer wouldn’t like it, of course, but devil take that fraud—she had half a mind to pay her imaginary representative to rough the merchant up a bit, taking such cruel advantage of her family.
Granted, the plan would involve making her shitbird brothers and slaphappy father more financially comfortable, but the time away had somewhat softened her animosity toward them. Somewhat. After she’d bought a few batches of purple and made sure that the old merchant was gone for good, she’d have to go back there, all dressed in fine attire, with a retinue of servants, and seriously flaunt her shit in front of those sandy arseholes.
That, thought Jolanda, was a plan. She had enough pocket money stowed away in her dress chest to finance the venture without consulting Sander, which was just as good—never knew if the old poot would start to listen to Wurfbain’s insistence that she be married off, and soon, and it would do to have a substantially larger nest egg before quitting the Voorstraat nest. The purple-maker’s-daughter-turned-graaf’s-child-turned-wealthy-independent-purple-merchant—not bad for a lass of some eighteen winters.
She began working her tingling fingers in the dye, trying to wake her hands back up. It had been midafternoon when she’d set to work, and dark as it was, it had to be long past suppertime. Sander still hadn’t come back from ratting with Simon, but to hell with the both of them, she was hungry.
As she shifted her aching thighs a bit, the bowl rocked and some dye dribbled over the side, shudder-inducingly cold on her knee. She was naked, having learned from experience, and the carpet was pulled back—her bare floor was spotted with blue and red from the mixing of the stuff. Not for the first time that night, and not for the hundredth time since Wurfbain had issued the mandate that Sander had been too chickenshit to override, she cursed the meddlesome count.
A miracle, she’d offered, which, sure, was what it seemed like to her when the purple began to fade from her skin with the slow-but-certain pace of seasons passing, so why should anyone else doubt the explanation? The son of a purebred bitch wouldn’t budge. It would arouse attention, Wurfbain had said, it would raise questions. Bad enough they’d had to initially tell everyone she had such extensive birthmarkings, but to then claim they were going away, lightening and lightening on her hands and arms—whoever heard of such a thing?
No, the only thing for it now was to re-dye her limbs when they began to fade, which, when all her raging had come to naught, led to her discovery that the dye that had originally marked her could not be had without a large fortune.
How she’d love to pour the hated woad into Wurfbain’s wine, or Sander’s, the coward, always relenting to the count for fear of being exposed. Sander always asserted they owed Wurfbain, for putting them up and teaching them to be nobles and working out the Tieselen snatch of the Gruyere fortune, but Jolanda suspected the mad poot had other reasons for being loyal to the silver fox. Reasons that involved gobbling cock, though she’d never substantiated this suspicion. And thank all the saints for that singular mercy!
She lifted her arms from the basin, dye dripping from elbows to fingertips, and delicately shook herself off so as not to send any drops over the rim of the bowl. This took some time, and even when she was done shedding purple spots, she still couldn’t wipe her arms off—the dye set better in her skin if she let it dry on its own. Her room had grown much colder now that her numb arse and legs and hands were waking back up. Leave it to her worthless skin to feel the chill more when her hands were out of the pot than when they were soaking in frigid soup. A little moonlight was coming through the open window, but she’d rather be blind than freezing, and so she set the basin down beside her and stood.
Well, actually it was more of an upward lurch, one leg still nettle-riddled, the other awake but seemingly hungover, and she smiled to herself as she stumbled across the room. She nearly tripped over the rug she had rolled back to protect it from the dye, and thanked her past self for having the foresight to keep her chests, table, and wardrobe all lined up against sundry walls rather than out here where she could stub her toe on them in the gloom. As sometimes happened, the black shadows of the room suddenly seemed denser, cooler, as though she were back in another benighted noble house, holding her breath as she floated toward another hazy window.
Then she was in the patch of moonlight proper, and drove the thought back under to admire the sleek, dark sheen to her arms. There was something about the purple tint that she’d come to almost like, just as she’d grown to appreciate the bittersweet taste of horehound tea. Maybe it was just that the purple kept her separate from all the ponces and bitches she dealt with, that it reminded her she’d worked more as a beach sprat than these lords and ladies would in the whole of their lives. Maybe. Or maybe—
“Oi, cover your tits!” came a cry from the street below, and Jolanda, too shocked to do anything but obey, slapped a hand over her modest bosom. Peering down, she saw Sander standing in the middle of the dark road, staring up at her like some besotted paramour gazing at his lady’s window. How long had the creeper been down there, getting snowed on, sheep-eyeing his own house like the barmy coot he undoubtedly was? “Simon’s not coming tonight after all, so you can put ’em away!”
Snow? Her eyes floated up from the still-shouting Sander. The upper stories of the houses across the way were dark, and above the unlit windows and pigeonless gables she saw that the jumbled nightscape of Dordrecht’s rooftops had a fine salting already settling against its cliffs and ridges, upon its hills and hollows. The powder was drifting through the air like goose down or dandelion fur, lightly falling yet, but the sky was the color of her sword blades, harkening a heavier snow by dawn. The waning moon was sinking deeper into the gray clouds like some burnished piece of metal dropped in a lake, a silver horseshoe casting up pale flakes of sediment as it sank. It was like glimpsing the sun from the bottom of the meer.
Jolanda shivered. No wonder
it was so damned cold in her room, first snow of the year sneaking in when she wasn’t looking. The front door banged beneath her, and looking back down, she saw that Sander had gone inside. Smart. She shut the window, her skin burning where her sticky arm had briefly bonded to her chest. Supper, then, and a word or three on his calling attention to what she may or may not be doing in her own window under cover of darkness, and the added insult of alleging that she’d display herself for Simon.
Much later, after Sander had acted even queerer than usual at the supper table, muttering about landing the biggest rat of them all before turning terse and mean, Jolanda lay in her cold bed in her cold room and stared at the black beams striping the white ceiling. She had left the shutters ajar, thinking it better to be cold than blind after all, and wished she could have Lijsbet beside her. Yet she knew that having the maid as a bedmate so soon after dyeing herself would lead to questions arising from the pungent woad smell, questions Jolanda wouldn’t be able to answer.
Lansloet, beady-eyed old baddie though he was, did not ask questions, not even when his attic became the rank aging cave for the dyes, not even when he saw Wurfbain treat Sander less as lord of his own home and more like a servant, and not even when a drunk, weeping, and naked Sander had to be helped up the stairs to bed after stripping to his skin and burning his fine clothing in the parlor fireplace, as he’d done twice since becoming graaf. Of course, sooner or later Lijsbet would notice the dye, either the smell of the stuff or the fluctuating shades of Jolanda’s hands, and then she’d have to be told something, but for now Jolanda couldn’t think of a lie, and so a cold bed it was.
A draft pushed the shutters farther open, making them groan, and Jolanda’s heart skipped at the noise. A puff of snow fluttered in, wide flakes swinging slowly down to fade into the rolled-back rug. Jolanda was out from her sheets like a spooked ray quitting its sandy bed, bare feet barely touching the cold floorboards as she danced to the window.
The breeze that had set her on her course died off, perhaps hoping she’d change her mind, but it was too late for reprieve—latched shutters, then a pile of blankets so deep they’d need a team of clam diggers to excavate her come dawn. The snowy roofscape of Dordrecht again shone before her, and she paused, a hand on each shutter, grinning out at the frozen city where a few lights still burned in garrets and towers, twinkling like stars in the night sky or sun-kissed shells in the morning surf.
Pretty enough, but cold enough to freeze a Frisian. Before she could close the shutters, though, something caught her notice, and set its hook well. She was focusing on it even as every part of herself save her eyes was cautioning against it, telling her to dispense with shadows in the night and return to bed. Ignoring this urge to slam the shutters and flee to the covers, she squinted down, and for the second time that night her heart iced over as she stood in her open window.
Sander was down in the street again, looking up at the house. At her. At least he couldn’t complain about her tits this time, the night air billowing her shift around her like a jellyfish’s mantle as it pushed itself through the abyss. But no, he wasn’t looking at her, or even noticing she’d come to the window—he’d have said something by now if he’d been eyeing her casement.
She leaned a little farther out into the moonlight, half-trying to catch his notice so he’d break the stillness of the night, half-trying to get a better look at him, see if he had a bottle he could toss up. He wore a hooded cloak, everything about him black except for his upturned face, which was as white and faintly luminescent as the snow falling upon it. It would have been downright creepy if she didn’t know creepy was simply a matter of nature for Sander. Shadowed though the ivory-dusted lane of Voorstraat was, Jolanda could see no tracks coming or going from him, meaning that the lunatic had been out there for no small time, getting snowed on and gawping up at his own fortune. Her mind turned over, trying to till up something clever to needle him with, but just as she settled on an excellent jab, a knock came at her door.
Jolanda lurched back from the window, out of the moonlight. The knock had startled her, frightened her even, for some stupid, indefinable reason. No doubt it was Lijsbet, here to complain about Drimmelin’s night-gas and beg to share Jolanda’s bed. No doubt. From her cover behind the shutter’s shadow, Jolanda saw Sander hadn’t moved from his position, still clueless to his being observed. Better to let Lijsbet in quickly and then bring her to the window so they could both have a quick taunt of Sander before bed. She scurried to the door, careful not to step in front of the window, wondering if there was enough snow on the sill to pack a snowball to volley down at the mad graaf.
The knock came again, louder and harder than the maid had any right to rap in the middle of the night when she was not expressly invited, and Jolanda threw open the door. For a moment the candle in Lijsbet’s hand blinded Jolanda, and she blinked away the tears, holding a finger to her lips lest the servant set in with her constant blathering and spoil the ambush.
Except it wasn’t Lijsbet. It was Sander.
“Hey.” He looked ghastly, his nightshirt a collage of stains, his unwashed body giving off the moldy scent of stagnant mud and standing water. He looked, in a word, like Sander, instead of Graaf Jan, respectable nobleman and merchant. He also had no cloak nor boots, no snow in his hair, and Jolanda hated him more than she’d ever hated him before, which was saying quite a lot.
She was too upset to speak, and so she sucker punched him in his paunchy gut. Nasty goddamn poot, nasty, nasty, nasty man. Back when they’d first met, he probably would have expected that, maybe caught her arm or at least tensed for it, but since becoming a noble, he’d grown lazy as an eldest son, stopped respecting her ability to whip his arse at a moment’s provocation. Stopped being so crazy, too, aye, but what—
“—the fuck?!” Sander was gasping, stumbling back. Instead of swinging on her, the ponce grabbed his belly in one hand and held the candle between them with the other. “Why?”
“Not funny,” she said, her fists tight, hoping like she’d hoped for few things in her life that he’d make a move on her instead of sniffling there in her door, the caitiff.
“What?” Sander looked so stupid she could laugh. She didn’t.
“Teach me about standing in my own window?” She suddenly felt like crying, wondered if she was getting sick. “That why? You put Simon out there, teach me…”
She trailed off. Sander had no idea what she was talking about, she could see that, his eyes narrowing, angry-dog-like, his overgrown head listing to the side as though he couldn’t quite hear. It was how he looked when he suspected, often correctly, that she was taking the piss. She shuddered, her mind struggling to make sense of it, glancing at the window to make sure nothing was there, nothing but the moon…
“Simon,” she settled on him quickly, desperately. “Goddamn letch. Don’t know what he wants to get up into more, his old house or my thighs.”
“Simon’s gone back to the warehouse,” said Sander quietly, and blew out his candle. “You seen someone out your window?”
“He must’ve stayed in town the night, not gone back after dropping you—”
Sander said nothing, stalking across the dark room. He stumbled over the bunched-up rug, then flung the shutters fully open, jutting his head out into the snow. He stood there for so long Jolanda was sure he saw the man below, was trying to make out his features, but when she bit her cheek and joined him at the window, the street was empty, the clouds now too thick to make out any tracks leading up or down Voorstraat.
Sander looked cadaverous in the snow-thrown brightness, jaw set, brow shiny, breath held, flakes settling on his sweaty face like ashes on a corpse. Like the priest’s censer dumping ash into her mother’s open grave, Jolanda thought, the unexpected resurrection of that particular memory making an already fun night positively euphoric. She grabbed her upper arms and rubbed the pimply flesh, just as she used to when quitting the sea.
“A dream,” Jolanda said, not believing it bu
t hoping Sander would, that he could talk her into believing. “Stupid dream, was all. Sleepwalked to the window, and you woke me up when you knocked.”
Except that even after the knock had come the man had still been right there, sizing up the house—she remembered looking down to see if he had heard the noise. Sander finally pulled his head back inside and closed the shutters. Little light came through the slats on a clear, full-moon eve, and on a night like this the room was dark as the bottom of the meer.
“You can dream when you’re awake,” Sander said, quieter than she’d thought him capable of speaking. “Dreams like that, they’re impossible to tell from real life. Not like sleep dreams at all. So real you can feel everything, taste everything.”
“I’ve never heard that,” Jolanda said, teetering on the rim of belief, hoping he could push her the rest of the way. Had she heard that before? She thought she had, now that he said it—it was maddening, like a smell she couldn’t quite place drifting from the kitchen, taunting her with its familiarity. A memory bubbled up, then, of another occasion when she had beheld a vision that defied comprehension, back in the sunken house in Oudeland… but she forced it back down, trying to fulfill the promise to herself to never again think of what she had seen there. That had been completely different; she had been drowning and imagined—never mind, she told herself, never mind, never mind.
“Used to happen to me a lot,” Sander said morosely, and with such casual conviction that she believed him at once—he was an even worse liar than her, and if he’d been bluffing, she’d have known it. She was so relieved, she threw her arms around him, hugging him tight. He tensed at her touch and she almost gagged on his redolent shirt. Then he relaxed and she turned her head to the side, and they stayed that way for a moment, her blindly holding him as he just stood there, slack armed and stinking. It was, surprisingly enough, comforting, but then he spoiled it by adding, “Or could be you were awake, and there was some hen-toucher down there what heard you air your charms in the window, came by for a peek.”
The Folly of the World Page 25