“Yes, but to be certain that it is going to be you—it must be horrible.”
“It would help to be certain that the weapon would work,” said Mother. “I suppose if one knew that that the gates would fall, that might be reason enough for the sacrifice. Think of how many die long, slow deaths being pecked by crows on the field. Better to die all at once in a blaze and take one’s enemy down, too.”
“They very nearly didn’t take us down, for all that,” said Jacquemine, her voice hard. “Getting into the city doesn’t mean taking the city. You remember, Margriet, the Matins of Bruges, when we were children.”
Her voice dropped when she said it, as if it were a secret, what had happened.
“Yes, I remember.”
“We fought back this time, too, as best we could,” said Jacquemine, softly, not waking the baby. “Even old Hans ran a few of them through with a sharpened stick before they killed him. And my cook Clara, they killed her, too. Our house, like your father’s, is burned to the ground.”
Little Agatha played on with her bits of pot, ignoring the women.
“I could not stay there, with no home, little money, no future for my children,” said Jacquemine. “My husband was one of the aldermen of Bruges. When the horned man offered me passage to Ypres, I had to take it. I hoped they would not find you, Margriet. I lied, and I lied well. I told him you three had gone in the direction of Ghent. I would not have told him that much, but the priest had spilled already that you were together.”
“They have hounds,” Mother said. “They were looking for Claude. Claude was after something Willem had in his sack—a weapon. They took her, are holding her in the Hellbeast.”
“No! I had thought she must have left you at the first chance, after you got away from Bruges. Poor girl! The priest put her in my care, and now she is in Hell.”
“The Chatelaine has her,” Mother said. “But she cannot harm her, for she is to bear witness at the trial.”
“Trial!” said Jacquemine. “Do you mean over your husband’s chest?”
Margriet nodded. “The bishop of Tournai is to decide it.”
Jacquemine whistled lowly. “It must be of some importance to the king, then. What is Willem’s argument?”
“Not Willem’s but his mistress’s. The Chatelaine says he is not truly dead, that the revenants are not truly dead. So I am no widow. She says.”
“Interesting.”
“Interesting?” Beatrix asked. “Why so, Vrouwe Ooste?”
Jacquemine Ooste, the alderman’s wife, had a mind for politics.
“If the revenants are not dead, they cannot die, which means their property would stay with them forever, and their children never inherit. And the Chatelaine controls the revenants, so she controls their property. So all she would need to do, to gain herself a … well, a chest of gold or a fine destrier or a palace or a demesne, would be to change its owner into a revenant. Much better than killing them because if she killed them, someone would be around to inherit. Yes, I see why the king wants this case decided in the open, by a bishop. A bishop of his own choosing, I don’t doubt. But did he suggest which side he supports?”
There was a sound outside the door.
Someone wailed, “Alienor! Alienor!”
Mother pulled her knife.
“It’s a revenant,” Margriet hissed.
Jacquemine was down on the floor, gathering Agatha to her. She pulled her up into the bed and tucked her under the thin blanket, behind Beatrix.
“Who is Alienor?” Jacquemine asked.
“It thinks this was its home,” said Beatrix. “It came here, looking for Alienor.”
The thing was still calling, plaintive. Beatrix could almost imagine that the memory of Alienor was here with them, that that memory was the true ghost, haunting the poor corpse outside the door.
Jacquemine put her hands over her face and shook with a silent sob.
“It’s all right,” Beatrix said. She put her hand on Jacquemine’s shoulder. “We’re safe.”
“For today. But what kind of life will we have? What kind of life can I make for my children, now?” Jacquemine whispered.
“You must take them to England,” Mother said, settling herself on the one spare inch of the bed yet unoccupied with a long sigh, and resting the baby on her lap. “Poor little chicks.”
“I will take them, just as soon as Agatha is well enough for the voyage. And you, Margriet?” Jacquemine asked, shuddering herself calm just as the baby had done.
“Once we regain the money my husband owes us.”
“I envy you your purpose, at least.”
“It’s my right. I can’t simply pretend it isn’t.”
“How did your husband come by this money?”
Mother shrugged. “A question to which I wish I knew the answer. I can guess, a little.”
“It matters,” said Jacquemine. “If he came by it dishonestly, and given what we know of Willem, that seems likely, then someone else may have a claim to it.”
“The thing about clinking money is, that no one knows whose groats and florins were whose, once they change hands a few times,” said Beatrix. “Who is to say who has a claim to any part of it?”
“It may not be possible to trace the coins themselves,” Jacquemine said, “but there might be someone who is owed a certain amount, or like Claude has a claim on some item, and will not forget it.”
“Then let them make their claim,” said Mother. “I do not ask more than justice, and I am happy to be just in my turn.”
Outside, the revenant screamed. Baby Jacob screwed his face into a red ball, and then he screamed, too.
Jacquemine buried her face in her hands, then lifted it.
“We can’t stay here,” she hissed. “We need time for my girl to get well, but we can’t stay here. I know a family, near here. Good people. Only a half-day’s walk. I would have gone there but I did not want to show up at their door on the back of a chimera.”
“Will you go there tomorrow?”
“Come with me,” Jacquemine said. “You can help me with the children, Margriet, and you need somewhere to stay before the trial. Five days? Ypres will bleed you dry in five days, if it doesn’t drive you mad first.”
They attended mass at one of the smaller churches in Ypres, for the Sabbath day, and left the city.
Margriet glowered at the low grey sky in the morning. Her nose was running from the chill and the heavy ground sucked at her feet. Let it rain and have done; but the sky held its grudges.
It was slow going, with the children. The three women took turns carrying Jacob on their hips while little Agatha trudged obediently. A good girl, even when she was ill. She nattered to Beatrix and they made up stories about the squirrels and birds in the branches that overhung the road.
“They are making their winter preparations,” said Beatrix. “They are putting aside food.”
“Because there will be a siege?” Agatha asked with big hungry eyes.
They came to a field burned down to stubble, the wet ground an ashy mess that held their footprints as if in evidence. The whole world smelled now of doused fire; the whole world smelled of Hell.
At the far side of the valley, a mill stood by a creek, and beyond it a dammed millpond. The mill itself still stood, blackened, but charred and tumbled walls around it said there had been a family there.
Jacquemine stood, one child on her hip and Agatha shivering, holding her hand, and stared. “This is the place,” she whispered. “This is where the Vermeulen family lived. My friends.”
Perhaps they would find another chicken wandering. Perhaps there were fish in that millpond.
“Perhaps they survived,” Margriet said. “Come on. Let us see if we can offer some help, at least.”
They walked forward, but Beatrix stood still as a donkey and stared.
“It is the place from my dream,” she whispered. “The one with the hounds.”
“Nonsense,” Margriet said, taking her arm. “You have not been here before. Come on, child.”
No dogs walked the yard, no friendly chickens this time came wandering.
As they approached the mill, something flew over their heads and crashed next to Beatrix. A clay cooking pot, thrown from the window on the second floor. Margriet drew her dagger with her right hand, and then dropped it.
Damn her fingers.
“John, ready the Greek fire!” came a woman’s voice from within, screeching in langue d’oil French. “And tell the lads to take up their swords!”
Jacquemine burst out laughing, a laughter just this side of tears.
“Gertrude!” she called. “Gertrude, is it you? Gertrude, it is Jacquemine Ooste!”
Silence.
“Let’s go in,” Margriet said loudly, not even bothering to whisper. Better that the woman hear all their plans, see all their movements. Alone or not, wounded or not, she was afraid.
Any woman in such circumstances would be armed in her fashion.
Margriet shrugged and pushed on the door, which fell off its hinges. But as she was still standing on the threshold, something—an iron pan—hit her hand with such force from above that her arm fell to her side and she screamed, and in the middle of her scream she realized that she felt no pain in her hand itself from the blow, nothing at all, just a dull ringing up into her shoulder.
She screamed louder.
“Curse you! Can’t you see we’re women?”
There was no sight of anyone in a window above, but the shutter was open.
“God’s bleeding body, of all the millwives in France we had to find a murderess,” Margriet grumbled.
“She’s no murderess,” said Jacquemine. “Gertrude! It is Jacquemine, truly!”
Something crashed onto the ground beside them: another clay pot.
This would go on all day.
“I’m going in,” said Margriet, loudly.
Beatrix, though, walked through the charred door, holding her distaff before her like a priest in procession. God only knew what she thought she would do with it. Bless the place or discharge its ghosts; not likely. If there were ghosts here—
They had not thought to check the door for a mark.
Margriet lifted the ragged, burned wood from the floor with her foot and turned it over. No mark. No Plague here, except what Margriet had brought with her. No Grief, either? Could that be the explanation for the woman’s behaviour?
They walked in, behind Beatrix. Inside it was dim, and the waterwheel and its workings crouched silently, disconnected from the millstream that burbled below. They walked as loudly as they could up a rickety staircase to the top floor.
The woman crouched in a corner, holding an iron frying pan.
She let it drop to her side.
“Jacquemine, is it truly you?”
Jacquemine handed Jacob to Margriet and walked to the woman, embraced her. “Gertrude, where is everyone? Where is Pierre, and the children?”
“Gone,” she said. “All gone.”
Jacquemine hugged the woman tight. “We had thought to come stay with you for a short time,” she said. “My little Agatha has a fever.”
Gertrude nodded. “There is food. Yes. And water. And beer.”
What kind of army burned a place and left the beer untouched?
“We can pay for what we take,” Margriet said.
“The hounds,” said the woman, and stopped, staring dead ahead. She had a pleasant freckled face, somehow made even more pleasant by the shimmer of ginger whiskers on her upper lip and chin.
“You see!” Beatrix said. “I told you. I saw a vision. A true vision. The distaff—”
“Find that beer, Beatrix, and be quick about it.”
Margriet sat beside the woman.
“You’re a mother, I can tell.” The woman’s mouth twisted.
A mother of dead children, then. Recently dead, unlike Margriet’s own.
They drank beer out of a blackjack that had doubtless belonged to the man of the place. It was good beer and sat on the tongue kindly.
A cup or two soothed the woman into a dull-eyed melancholy in which she was able to speak. Gertrude had been in the privy, which was a little distance from the mill and stable, and she had seen the two-headed hounds coming and hid inside the hole, holding on to the edge with her fingers, wet and shivering, listening to the sounds of the dogs yelping and the cries of her own children, willing herself not to simply let go and fall down into the stinking muck.
“It is risky,” Chaerephon said, “to have the girl admit to stealing the mace. Even if she does not reveal that she stole the very keys to Hell, the fact that she stole anything at all is a fact we should keep hidden. Do we want the world to know that your artificers can be bribed, or seduced, or suborned? That for a price, anyone could avail themselves of the fires of Hell, for their own purposes?”
“Do you think I don’t know this?” snapped the Chatelaine. “Of course I know this.”
They paced in the menagerie, where no one was allowed except on the Chatelaine’s orders, where that had been true even when her husband was at liberty. It was the place she felt most confident of being able to speak freely without being spied upon, although she was surrounded by the ears of all her creatures, and by the Hellbeast, of course.
“Then we must convince the bishop that the revenants are not dead,” mused Chaerephon.
The Chatelaine nodded. If Willem was not dead, none of his property would pass to his widow, not even the mace he’d bought off that lying wench.
“I do not know this bishop of Tournai,” she muttered. “I do not know his price.”
“We may not need a price,” said Chaerephon. “The churchmen have held three synods already on whether the Hellbeast is one of death’s many kingdoms, and they cannot make up their minds. They want someone to give them the answer. So we will give them the answer they will like best: no, it is not. The Hellbeast feeds on the revenants. They are not dead.”
“Of course they are not. We understand this, we who live in the Beast. But can you prove it?”
“Well, to start with, what is death? My friend Socrates mused upon this very question on his deathbed. He asked us what was the opposite of life? And if it is death, then, was it true that death and life were opposites, entire unto themselves, and that death must be the departure of the soul from the body?”
He had the little grin that meant he was enjoying a puzzle, like a rat on a bone.
“How does this help us?” asked the Chatelaine, resignedly.
“If death is defined as the separation of the soul and body, then the revenants must have their souls still within them, somewhere. And what is the soul?”
“Perhaps you should tell me.”
“If we say the soul is eternal, would it change or not change?”
“I’m too damned tired for sophistry, Chaerephon.”
“If we say it does not change, then surely someone who truly knew a man would recognize it in him, even if his face looked different, even if he was wounded or ill.”
“Go on.” The Chatelaine was doubtful that anyone knew anyone’s soul, but she knew Chaerephon well enough to let him worry his bone until he got it into a useful shape.
“Plato used to say that there were three parts to the soul. The reasoning part we could try to prove, but with what sort of test? After all, crows and horses can reason to an extent, but do they have a soul? Not according to the Christians. The spirited part, too, but again, a beast can be driven into a temper. But the appetites—well, if we know a man’s appetites, and his soul is unchanging, then his appetites could be recognized.”
“The revenants have no appetites,” said the Chatelain
e coldly. “They do as I tell them, and they feed the Beast. They do not care about anything.”
“Then perhaps their appetite is to serve,” Chaerephon mused. “Perhaps their appetite is to nourish. But that won’t do. Somewhere in them there must be the memory of the people they were, and if someone who knew them well could recognize it in them—the wives.”
“What wives?”
“The one from Bruges, who claims to be a widow, and her daughter. If we can make them admit that they recognize their husbands’ appetites within them—”
“But what sort of appetites? Shall we force them to eat their favourite foods?”
“No, no. I mean that if they seem to still be the men who loved them, then some part of them must be the same men. Bodies lust but souls love.”
The Chatelaine thought.
“I do not think Margriet de Vos can be seduced out of her inheritance,” she said. “She had a shrewish look.”
“But her daughter,” Chaerephon said. “Her daughter was quiet. Shall we call the revenant Baltazar Claes to us? Let us see if he remembers how to love his wife. Or at least,” he said with a dry laugh, “how to seem to love her. We cannot stimulate the impulse but perhaps we can simulate the action. And between the impulse and the action, which is the more real? When a woman wants to know whether her husband loves her, the only way she can know is through his actions, through his words which are a kind of action. She cannot see into his heart.”
“Only if she cuts it open,” said the Chatelaine cheerfully, tossing a bit of Hellflesh, red and dripping, to the wolf cub who paced his iron cage. “Yes, let us knead the heart of the daughter. And the mother has a price, Chaerephon. We just need to find it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The room was growing dark as the afternoon waned. Soon it would be time to light the cheap tallow candle. Gertrude was downstairs using the pot (she refused to use the privy) and Beatrix was propped with her back to the wall at the other end of the room, a child in each arm, telling stories. Little Agatha was looking better today, thank God. Jacquemine would soon be gone, up to Dunkirk, and safety. Three more days until Michaelmas.
Armed in Her Fashion Page 17