“I will enter if I wish.”
“This is my husband’s house,” she spat, “and only I and my husband may enter here. Go, before he comes and knocks that dunderpate clean off your shoulders.”
She swung the door open, not caring whether she hit him, and darted through, slamming the door behind her. She threw the bolt across. The bells stopped ringing just as the door closed; it was as if the door stopped the sound, stopped all sounds, separated her from the world outside. In here it was quiet.
On the other side of the door, the drunkard bellowed, “Troublemaker! Termagant!”
A closed door was no kind of magic. She smiled bitterly and bit back her curses. She would give him a few minutes to move on, then dart out to Beatrix’s house.
It was dark inside. She paced. The place was as she left it, if a bit dusty. No squatters or rats to worry about in these times. No oil in the lamp, no tinderbox to light it, but she did not intend to stay. She must go on to see Beatrix.
Yet she did not like to stand in the gloom, with her husband’s tables and shelves, empty now of his wares, squatting around her like beasts.
She felt a stare upon her. She turned around and saw, in the doorway, her husband. The shape of him, looming against the dim golden evening.
“Dear God, Willem,” she gasped. “You gave me a fright.”
“Margriet.”
At the sound of her name she almost was grateful to see him. Old familiarity. Nothing more.
“You’re home, then? Might have given me some word, but of course men never think of women, never think how they worry. How did you get into the city, with those chimeras ringed all around the walls?”
She did not approach him. He stood, pale in the dark room; she had to squint to see his face. It was bloodied about the mouth, as if he had walked here straight from the battlefield without pausing to bathe his wounds or rest.
“Margriet, I am come home.”
She stood, unsure what to do with herself, as she had stood on their wedding night. She had last seen him, when? Five, six weeks ago, a little more, as he and the other men went off to wait for battle in their tents, or whatever it was men did. Yet he seemed like a stranger. Perhaps it was a consequence of killing; perhaps it changed a man. Her father on that bloody night of 1302, holding his dagger to a Frenchman’s breast, had not been the same man who once plied his boat through the canal, who taught her the boatmen’s songs.
And she, as a child, sitting on the roof tiles with a rock in her hand. She had changed that night, too. She had taken up arms, in the fashion of women and children, and had never quite let them drop again.
“Margriet.”
She should be a patient wife to him, and forgiving; but alas, those were not her virtues.
“Have you eaten, Willem? You’ll have to bathe, too, before you go to bed. You’re covered in muck.”
Blood, she had wanted to say, but changed the word at the last moment.
He shook his head a little too slowly, grinding his head from side to side as if he were trying to rid himself of a crick in the neck.
“Margriet,” he said. “Margriet, Margriet, Margriet.”
She stared at him and she understood. In the hollow of her stomach. Dead. Her rotten husband, dead. She drummed her fingers against her thigh. Her brain screamed the word she refused to speak.
“You’re different,” she whispered. “You’ve changed.”
“I have returned.”
“For what?” Her voice was hoarse, as if she had been screaming, or crying. “What do you want?”
His face was dull as a doll’s. Some of his teeth had been knocked out since she saw him last.
“I am on the Chatelaine’s business.”
She had expected him to say that he wanted her: as his bride, or even as his property. It was a relief that he did not. Even so she felt a lurch in her gut, as if she were all alone in a sinking boat.
She tried not to think of the door, of the Plague mark that must soon be set upon it. A revenant. A revenant had entered her house. Was this her house? Not truly, not anymore. She just happened to be inside it.
Of course, with Willem dead, it was her house now. Hers and Beatrix’s.
“How did you get in here?” she whispered.
“You invited me, Margriet. ‘My husband may enter here,’ you said.”
Her stomach turned.
“That’s not right,” she said. “That can’t be enough. I didn’t want you. You did not even call me. It isn’t just.”
Willem stared.
“I am here.”
That goddamned drunkard in the street. May he live to be flayed alive. With a dull knife. And she would use his skin for a book, and write all her accounts in it with ink of gall and wormwood. She would gut him, if she ever saw him again.
Willem, or the revenant who had been Willem, walked to a shelf and pulled one of the rough, empty sacks down. He turned to one side and began to pace the floor between the tables, stepping with care, listening the squeak of each board. She walked closer to him, circling him as though he were a rabid creature. In his back, a red hole gaped, a hole as thick as a lance. The hole from which his life had ebbed. She thought she could see clear through it, but it was hard to say, in the gloom.
“What happened, Willem? How did you die?”
He stopped pacing for a moment and looked into the distance, as though remembering. No trace of sadness, or of any feeling at all, crossed his face.
“A poleaxe through the back. But somehow I did not die, not at first. I lay there as men trampled me. I was so very cold, so very thirsty. I remember that, more than the pain. And I remember looking up into the bluest sky I had ever seen. And then the Crow-women came.”
“Crow-women?”
“Chimeras. They lifted us up into the sky. Margriet, I thought I was being carried to heaven, but it was Hell. The Crow-women dropped us at the mouth of the Hellbeast. Baltazar was there, too. His head was bashed and bloodied and he could barely burble when he saw me. The Hellbeast opened its mouth, and a great tongue reached out and took us, and I knew no more for a time. When I awoke I no longer felt thirsty or cold, or anything at all. I felt nothing, except that I knew I must come for my life’s work, my wealth. It was a great relief, to feel nothing else.”
“Baltazar is dead, then,” she said. Beatrix would be beside herself, poor girl. She would not be safe. “He is a revenant? Is he here? Willem, is he here?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. Not tonight.”
She must warn Beatrix, for all the good that warning would do. No, she must keep her safe, take her with her to Jacquemine Ooste’s, where Margriet could be sure to stop her ears. Beatrix had loved her husband. The Grief would find her an easy target.
But Willem—why was he kneeling on the floor? He used his fingernails to pry a board up, fingernails which had grown long, and as he pried, the head of the nail pulled his fingernail off, leaving only a hideous flat of quick, the grey-pink of salmon skin.
He did not seem to notice.
Willem, or the revenant that had been Willem, pulled the floorboard up, then straddled the space and yanked a box up out of the cavity. It was a massive thing, a chest with handles, and with an iron padlock.
“What in God’s holy name have you been keeping from me?” Margriet breathed.
“I was a trader,” he said.
“You were the worst trader in Bruges. As wicked as the devil but not half as clever. Always trying to cheat people too smart to be cheated. Always came home with less than you had to start with.”
“I had wealth. I lied to you.”
He said it plainly, baldly. Then he plucked a small iron key from a fold by his waist and opened the chest.
Margriet’s breath caught at the gleam of it. Willem had been a trader in cloth, but there was no cloth in this chest. A
silver ewer, fine and tall. Daggers. A small sword in a fine scabbard. Bits of plate armour. Piles and piles of coins. She knelt beside her dead husband, leaned forward and ran her hands through the coins: silver and gold in all kinds, groats and pennies and florins.
“Where did you get it, Willem?” She could smell the battlefield on him: clay and decay.
“I kept some of my earnings apart, all the years of my life. I did not trust you with the keeping of it. You would have spent it on women’s things.”
“You dishonest, misbegotten knave. I rue the day I married you. What did you do to get all this, then? Was I married to a usurer?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “Some of this is war-wealth. Some I traded. This,” he said, and picked up a flanged mace, nearly the length of the chest itself, “I bought it off a young mercenary. The last thing I got before I was killed. He sold it to me for the clothes I stood up in. I hid the goods and came home in my braies and shirt—I told you I had been robbed.”
“I remember.” She snatched the mace from him. It was heavy, but not as heavy as it looked. The handle was strangely hollow.
He took it back from her; he had lost none of his strength.
“This is all the Chatelaine’s now,” he said.
He piled it all into the sack, coins and silver, weapons and gold.
“You lying lickspittle, it isn’t yours to give her,” she said, hoarsely. She licked her lips. “Not now. You’re dead.” She forced herself to say it out loud, as though the words could break whatever sorcery held his bones upright and bellowed his breath. “Your daughter is a widow, you tell me, and yet you would take her inheritance?”
He put his head on one side. It flopped just a little too far over.
“Neither of you are widows. Baltazar is the Beast’s now. He still walks the earth.”
She shook her head. “You’re dead; you’re nothing. Nothing but meat. Food for flies. A bag of bones walking. You’re dead. This is mine. Mine and Beatrix’s. Flemish law says a widow gets one third, the child the rest.”
He stared at her.
“Everything is the Chatelaine’s,” he said. “She holds the reins of Hell and Hell holds me. I am hers, and all my wealth.”
“No, it isn’t. For years, Willem, I farm myself out like a cow. Our daughter spins until her hands are raw. My father wears hose that are all over patches. And all the while you sit on a fortune!”
“You are mine. This is mine.”
He slammed the lid down on the empty chest and stood, holding one end of the sack. It was not quite full but heavy. The sack dragged on the floor as he took one step toward her.
“My husband is dead,” she said again, standing straight up to face him. She had a right to that truth. She was entitled to her widowhood, to the sympathy and respect of her neighbours, to the deference of younger women. To these walls and these tables and to her husband’s wealth, no matter how he’d got it.
“I am hers and you are mine. And you are marked by death now, Margriet. The Plague will take you. You are not a widow for I am not truly dead. It is right that a wife should die, when her husband has no further need of her.”
“I only married you because I had to,” she screamed. “Because you had a good business from your father, before you squandered it, and my father was sick from the wars. You selfish bastard.”
He trudged through the open door into the night, dragging the sack behind him like his sins. The sight of Willem, stolid, balding Willem, walking out into the road just as he had in life. No one would dare take his wealth from him now.
But it was hers. It belonged now to her, and to Beatrix.
She ran out into the empty street and grabbed the sack but he was too strong; he kept walking and she fell forward. So she grabbed him from behind, her arms wrapped around him almost as though they were lovers. He did not stop. She scraped her nails into his dead flesh but he kept walking and did not even cry out. She pulled on his thin hair and it came out in her hands and she fell away from him, tumbled to the ground in horror, looking at Willem’s hair falling out of her grasp to the cobbles.
An arm grabbed her from behind and she smelled sweat and wine.
“Got you.” The swaggering drunk, damn him.
Margriet dropped her hips as if she were sitting in her rocking chair, and felt his arms loosen. She stomped her heel on his right toe and then ran after Willem, leaving the drunk cursing behind her.
She ran, calling his name, screaming it, as around her the plaintive calls of the revenants calling the names of their beloved drifted into the sky. Willem had gone. He’d be over the city walls by now, and she couldn’t follow, not through the gates anyway.
“You were a great disappointment!” she screamed.
CHAPTER SIX
Beatrix let the flax slip through her raw fingertips. It was the hair of a princess. She would coil it and dress it with star-flowers.
“Still spinning?” Grandfather asked with a little smile. She had not heard him come in to their main room.
She dipped her fingers in her dish of water and paused to smile back at him. “The devil finds work for idle hands.”
“Your mother is late,” said Aunt Katharina.
Aunt Katharina stood behind Grandfather, and everyone’s smiles faded. She was holding the bits of wool for stuffing their ears.
“Is it dusk already?” Beatrix whispered.
Grandfather limped over to the doll-sized window he had cut into the shutters, and put his eye to it.
“Perhaps Margriet could not get away,” he murmured.
“Mother will come,” Beatrix said. “No revenant would be a match for mother, if she met one in the street. Can you imagine? She’d talk it back to Hell.”
“I should hope she’d have the good sense to stay indoors,” said Katharina.
Grandfather closed the little window and sat on his stool by the supper table, shifting the candle so the light fell fully on Beatrix’s work.
“I am surprised you still have any flax left to spin,” said Katharina.
“I spin all I have each day, yet every morning I wake to find the kabouters have refilled my baskets,” Beatrix teased. “Actually, this small basket is the last of it. Tomorrow I will have to spin grandfather’s belly lint. Get it ready, Grandfather.”
“Really, Beatrix,” Katharina scolded.
Beatrix’s stomach rumbled. She wished she could spin them all something to eat. One bony fish between the two of them, tonight. Grandfather looked gaunt. She wished for a chicken. No, a lovely big goose or a swan. They used to land on the fields outside the moat.
“Perhaps I can spin the mist off the canal,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
“You might as well spin air as flax,” said Katharina. “Who’s going to buy it now? The traders are all dead or gone, and the roads shut.”
Grandfather coughed.
“When life gets back to normal, we will be glad of something to sell,” Beatrix said, trying to make her voice soothing but it came out stinging like a nettle.
Katharina held the bits of wool out to her, two hard white twists. Each plug sighed into shape in Beatrix’s ears, suffocating the sounds of the world, as if she were spinning now on the bottom of the sea, fathoms deep.
Grandfather dutifully plugged his own ears. He sat staring at the scratched old table.
A sharp knock at the door. She and grandfather looked at each other, like conspiring children, as if neither wanted to admit they had heard. If Katharina lost faith in the earplugs, who knew what she would do next to try to keep them safe from the revenants. Lock them in the cellar, probably.
Another knock.
Beatrix let the flax fall from her hand. This could be Baltazar. Any knock, every knock, could be Baltazar, her beloved, her husband, her all, returning to her at last. Hurt in the war, perhaps. Wandering, confuse
d. Or a captive, escaped. She would spin his memories smooth. She would put her fingers to his rough lips, if only he would come back to her.
Grandfather opened the little peephole in the window and put his face right up to it, trying to see around to the door.
“What are you doing?” Katharina hissed.
Without answering, Grandfather unlatched the door.
Katharina stood, a knife in her hand. In the open doorway, Beatrix’s mother stood, holding her side as if she had a stitch from running.
“I’m not a revenant yet, Katharina, but I might send a message to Hell and ask to be made into one, if you leave me out in the dark again.”
Beatrix had never seen her mother’s eyes shine like that, like a cornered vixen’s. She pulled the wool out of her ears and Grandfather did the same.
“There’s a bit of bread, Mother,” Beatrix said. She had been saving it to eat before bed, to split with Grandfather. They did that together every night now, shared a morsel before their prayers. But she wanted now to offer her mother something, to take that hungry look out of her eyes. “More than half sawdust, but let me see if I can soften it a bit.”
Mother waved her away. “I’m not hungry. Never mind that now.”
“You’re late,” Grandfather said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve been at the walls,” Mother replied. “I’ve seen the chimeras, trying to blow them apart with some infernal weapon. They did not succeed, but they will keep trying, I am sure. We must leave Bruges, all of us.”
Katharina’s mouth dropped open.
“How?
“I have a way. It is difficult. Will be difficult for you, Father. But we must try. To stay here means death.”
Grandfather smiled. “Dear daughter, to go means death for me. I can barely walk from this table to the door without losing my breath. You must go.”
“But we cannot!” Beatrix said. “Our husbands—how will they find us?”
Mother took a deep breath, closed her eyes. “I’ve seen Willem.”
Beatrix knew in a moment what her mother meant. She knew why her mother had not said, “Willem is back,” or “Willem is here.” Yet Beatrix could not help herself from drawing it out, from holding hope in her hands for as many breaths as she could.
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