Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Michaelmas day dawned cold.

“You must not leave me,” Gertrude said, grabbing Margriet’s sleeve. “Please.”

“First you throw a pot at us,” said Margriet. “And now you want us to stay. Well, we can’t stay. But before I go I will pay for the food Beatrix and I ate, and for the beer.”

“What good is clinking money to me here?” Gertrude asked. “Where shall I spend it?”

Margriet shrugged. “I will not steal from you, so I must pay you.”

“You can pay me by staying with me. I—I can’t stand it here alone. The water—sometimes I think I hear voices on it.”

“If you truly wish to come with us,” Margriet said slowly. “That is your choice. But do you have the courage?”

Gertrude was shaking her head. “I cannot. I cannot go out there. I cannot.”

This quivering widow—this would be Beatrix, if she were left alone in the world. A young woman, afraid of the world outside and the world within, and with good reason. Margriet had coddled her, perhaps. She had let her marry for love. She had made mistakes. But she had thought, somehow, she would be there to watch out for Beatrix, always.

By Christmas, if not before, Margriet would be dead, and Beatrix would be alone.

If she had her inheritance, she would be able to buy herself a husband or, better still, a place at a proper nunnery, high-walled and remote. Protection from the world and from her dead husband.

Without her inheritance, she would have little choice but to cast her lot in with the beguines in some city, working her fingers to the bone and vulnerable not only to Baltazar’s revenant but to her own reckless imagination. Why, it was not so long ago that they burned a beguine at the stake in Paris for writing a bad book. The last thing Beatrix needed in her life was mystical women, hard work, and hunger.

And here Gertrude cowered before her, asking for what none of them could have, without money. Asking for a safe place in the world.

Margriet would win this trial, no matter what she had to do or say.

“You are a most exasperating woman,” she spat at Gertrude. “Stay, then, and mind the children, and listen to the ghosts in the water.”

Michaelmas morning, Claude rode on the plodding palfrey they gave him, his skirts bunching strangely, the reins held by a Mantis-man. And he thought. He always thought best when he was riding.

Three months after he had joined the Genoa Company, or maybe four, a few of the men had cajoled him into going with a small band in the night to recover some dice winnings for Janos. Claude was perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old by then. He had been on his own, or with various bands of ne’er-do-wells, for three years before he joined the Company. Claude had not yet spoken much with Janos, though he had watched him joke with the others, watched him win every contest with his crossbow. Janos was a few years older than Claude; his beard did not look as though it had been glued on.

“What is the plan?” asked Abdul gruffly as they stumbled down the cobbled streets of Barcelona.

“How should I know?” said Janos with a grin. “The plan is God’s.”

“But we must—” Claude had said, his voice as deep as he could muster.

“If I have no plan, then nothing can go wrong,” said Janos. “I will not waste any time rewriting my plans as I go. I do not want any planners and falterers, Claude, mark me, now, for you are young and desperate, and I want you to stay that way. I want only desperate men beside me!”

But when they reached the alley before the house of Don Carlos, Janos had let the three others go on ahead, and he had pulled Claude to him and spoken to him there in the shadows, leaning one hand on the grimy wall.

“I ask only two things of you, Claude. First, always, you must look after yourself. Will you do that? Don’t ever trust anyone to do that for you. Not even me.”

Claude had nodded. He was close enough to feel the warmth off Janos’s shoulder, feel his breath when he spoke.

“I may be small but I can fight,” he’d said.

“I know you can, or I would not have let you come,” Janos said with a smile. “There is another reason I will not plan. Planners become schemers, and schemers cannot be trusted. I don’t want you to make your decisions here—” and Janos put the heel of his hand to Claude’s forehead “—but here.” And he put his hand firmly on his lower belly, so that Claude drew in his breath but did not pull away.

“If you have no plan, you will think with your fists, and the only decision you’ll make is whether the face before you is a face you know or not. The face you do not know, you punch. The face you know, you do not punch. That is true loyalty. They say we men of the free companies have no honour, because we fight for whoever pays us. But Claude, my little Claude, our honour is not in whom we serve but in whom we protect. That is the second thing I ask of you: Look after those whose faces you know.”

Claude had grinned, for he had never heard Janos be so serious. “God’s nails, have you been drinking?”

“Always,” said Janos, and kissed him, hard, not a kiss of peace but a kiss of war, and they joined the others. They got Janos his money back.

Later they had slower kisses: kisses of joy, and of pain, and of wonder, and many kisses of lust. They learned each other’s secrets and the others more or less let them be. For two years they were happy, until the day Janos was felled by an arrow through the eye, his quiver empty of quarrels and eighteen dead men to his count.

A cold day, but not cold enough to harden the mud that clung to their shoes. Margriet was almost glad of the chill air and the sucking mud. It dampened their spirits and stilled their tongues so she could think.

They walked in a line, Margriet in front, Beatrix in the middle, and Jacquemine behind. They walked through empty burned fields, past charred and desolate farms, keeping a line of low trees on the horizon.

Jacquemine’s mouth was a straight line. But they had been right to leave the children with Gertrude. Jacob and Agatha adored her. She let them put things under the big hammer: bent nails and twisted buckles that became, with a little romance and sun-glint, swords and lances and bucklers.

Gertrude had run after the women as they left and watched them go, the children clinging to her.

Zonnebeke Abbey was not far, but by the time they reached it, their hose were spattered and their shoes were caked. Margriet’s nose was running. They would not cut fine figures, but they were not there to catch husbands. They were three bedraggled widows with no way to travel but shanks’ mare; let them look the part.

The bells were ringing for Terce. A thin, tall porter let them in and escorted them, standing a little to one side as if some of the mud on their clothing might fall on him. A large, rich abbey, this. There were grotesques on the church walls, some of whom looked eerily like the Chatelaine’s chimeras. But they were bound not for the church but for the chapter house, a great round thing buttressed and peaked.

It was round on the inside, too, and sunlight striped the floor of green-and-yellow tiles.

Men were arrayed on the benches all in a circle. The chapter house was so large that most of the men were far enough distant for their faces to be blurred. Margriet knew them by the shapes of their clothing. There was the bishop in his golden cope and pale mitre, and the dark-robed men beside him priests or monks. There was the king in his rich cloak and several men beside him, tonsured or not she could not say. One cleric sat at a little table with ink and parchment.

The porter showed them to a cold bench.

The Chatelaine was nowhere to be seen, but as the bells rang again the door to the antechamber opened and she came through it, with the abbot. Behind them came the tall thin man who had stood at Hell’s door, who caught Margriet’s eye.

“I feel like one of the animals, come to King Nobel’s court,” whispered Beatrix.

“I feel like a beggar waiting for scraps,” Jacquemine sighed.

At least they all three had clean and neat wimples and veils, thanks to Gertrude’s scrubbing. Beatrix had not been in the habit of always wearing a wimple or gorget, except on days she was out in the streets on some business. She favoured a simple hood or cap at home, and a net or a fillet and veil over her beautiful golden braids on feast days. But she was a widow now, and anyway they had brought nothing else to wear.

“We are no beggars,” said Margriet, not bothering to whisper. “We are here for what is right. Let us hope this king is wiser than King Nobel.”

The sound carried farther than she’d thought it would and several of the men looked at her.

“Or perhaps if he is not,” whispered Beatrix, leaning close to Margriet, “let us hope that we are Reynard and not Ysengrim.”

Margriet did not even smile, for she was looking at Claude. She had barely noticed her come in behind the Chatelaine and her servants. But there Claude was, dressed in a long blue kirtle with buttons on the sleeves and a full skirt, so that no one could doubt it was a woman’s garment. And her scraps of hair were hidden under a plain blue caul and white veil that joined under her chin.

“I almost did not recognize our man-at-arms,” Jacquemine said, following Margriet’s gaze.

“No,” Margriet said, as Claude passed by them close enough to spit but did not look up. “They have dressed her as a woman indeed, even her hair for once. She looks about as comfortable as a cat in water.”

Claude sat a little distance from them on the empty bench near the Chatelaine’s thin servant.

“She really does look ridiculous somehow, poor thing,” Beatrix chuckled, and then put her hand to her mouth to stop it, and the sound that came out was something like a hiccup that turned into a sob, and she sniffed.

The worrying thing about Claude was not her clothing but that Claude would not look at them. Had the Chatelaine broken her? What had the hellkite promised her?

The bishop stood and the chapter house hushed.

“We have chosen to hear the petition of this woman of Bruges, one Margriet de Vos, who says she is entitled to this chest that belonged to her husband. We shall ask questions of anyone who we deem to have some knowledge of this matter, but to begin with let the woman speak. Come forward.”

Margriet stood. “I am grateful for the chance to speak on my behalf. I know—”

“Come to the middle, so we can all hear you,” the bishop said.

Margriet swallowed and strode forward on uncertain legs. Her feet were tingling, numb, as they had been for days now. She felt as if she might trip on the cracks between the beautiful tiles. The warm patch of particoloured sunlight falling from the window made her squint. She bent on one knee, so grateful to have made it without stumbling that she went down like a sack of beans.

“I know my cause is just,” she said breathlessly, “and I hope for God’s mercy.”

“Make your case, then.”

She stood again, creakily. Damn this Plague, working its way through her skin and bone! Perhaps she ought to be grateful to seem decrepit but she was not. She only wanted what was hers, by right, and not through pity or any trickery.

“It is the custom in Flanders,” she said, “that a widow is entitled to one-third of the wealth of her husband, and any child, male or female, to the remaining two-thirds. In support of this I ask Your Excellency to consider the case of Anna van Aert, wife of the merchant Victor van Aert, who two years ago was given all her husband’s furniture and his home in that town, while their daughter, Katherina, was given all his clinking money.”

There was a pause and a shuffling of cloth shoes on tile. The cleric at the little table wrote furiously.

The bishop said, “The most gracious king has provided us with us an authority on Flemish custom, one Jan Vroom. Do you confirm this custom, Master Vroom?”

One of the dark-robed men, with a bulging red chaperon on his head, stood.

“I do.”

“And do any of the king’s lawyers wish to dispute or question on this point?”

“We are not speaking of demesnes,” said Vroom, “nor even of houses in this case, so the Salic law of inheritance, which has been the subject of so much scholarship of late, does not apply. We have no dispute with the Flemish custom, insofar as it is in accordance with canon law and the restrictions on inheritance that come with remarriage, per exemplum.”

The words rushed past Margriet like murky water. She could barely hear. Her breath was coming short and her legs were weak. Damn the walk from Gertrude’s house. It had been more than her Plague-ridden body could bear.

“Vrouwe de Vos?”

Margriet blinked. “I’m sorry?”

The bishop coughed. “We are not speaking of houses, no, as I understand it, but of a chest full of coins and goods. Is that so, Vrouwe de Vos?”

Margriet nodded. “The house in Bruges was mine, but it burned, as did my father’s house, in the attack. If there is some compensation due me for that, it is only the same as what is due all the other people of Bruges whose houses were destroyed. This chest, this wealth, I never laid claim to, because I only learned about it after my husband’s death.”

A quaver went through her at the thought that if they asked her outright about where such and such happened, and how—or God forbid if they asked about Willem—then everyone would know she had the Plague, and no one would need to listen to her or give her her due, for they would know that she was walking into her grave. Stumbling, more like.

“You did not know your husband had collected such wealth?”

She shook her head, and tried to speak but coughed first.

“Someone bring this woman water,” someone said.

Margriet waved it off and recovered her voice.

“When we were married, the priest asked if he would share his body and his belongings—and his belongings, mark—and treat me in all ways as a husband should treat his wife. He said yes. And instead he hid his goods from me, and kept them from me, so that I had to go out as a wet nurse, and our daughter, Beatrix, there, had to spin her poor fingers red and raw.”

Vroom stood. Margriet squinted to see if she could recognize his face. She had known a few Vrooms but could not place this one. He spoke French with a Paris accent.

“You speak of wedding vows, but what of your vow to treat him as a woman ought to treat her husband?”

Margriet blinked. “I do not understand.”

A few of the men chuckled unpleasantly.

“We have made inquiries,” said Vroom, “among the people of Bruges. We have heard that this woman is a notorious shrew, eager to revenge any slight, even perhaps an invented one. We have heard that she mistreated her husband, giving him both sides of her tongue even in the public market.”

“If I argued when he gave me cause to argue, then I was no different than any other wife saddled with an oaf for a husband.”

A few titters among the king’s men.

“And did you share your belongings with him? When you were paid for nursing? Did you share every sou?”

Margriet shook her head. “That was to keep my body and soul together and my daughter’s, too. It was all I had. He gave me nothing. He said he had nothing to give. He lied.”

“Then we have established that you were not treating him as a wife should, if you were a scold to him and withheld your belongings.”

Margriet’s mouth was sour. She should have eaten more on the road but she was in the habit now of saving food, and anyway what good was food to a dying body, beyond what it needed to keep stumbling from today into tomorrow?

She did not know how to answer them, when they asked if she had been a good wife. She had been the only wife she knew how to be. In the early days, she had tried to be something other than she was, to dull her tongue and wait upon Willem. But then Beatrix had arrived, and then it was a never-ending cycle of pregnancies and confinements, and she did her duty by him in bed, and she gave birth to his dead babies, and she lost the will or the strength to be anything but a mother to Beatrix.

“You may say it is a woman’s duty to be kind to her husband, but what is the duty of a mother? When I was a child I trod the treadmill with the other children to work the crane that lifted the barrels for the boatmen. When my Beatrix was a girl, she broke her ankle walking that treadmill and I paid for the bonesetter out of my savings. And when she could not walk it any longer because it made her ankle ache, I went out to wet nurse, for my husband told me we were destitute. When Beatrix was married, she had for her dowry a silver ewer that I bought for her with the money I had set aside from double-watering our wine and eating the day-old crusts from the worst baker in Bruges. When the Devil puts up walls, men smash them, and if they cannot smash them, they despair, or they walk away. But women must trickle through the cracks, they find a way through because they have no choice, because they have nowhere to go, and nothing to smash with. No one would feed my daughter but me and so I fed her, with whatever sous I could earn as an honest woman. I have been a faithful wife to Willem de Vos and served him in the truest way I know: I have born his children, all six of them, though five are in limbo now, where I pray for their souls every day.”

She would have said more but she ran out of breath and drowned from the lack of it. Her eyes went dark and she only dimly felt herself hitting the tile floor.