Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER THIRTY

Margriet sat and brooded while Gertrude and Beatrix set about making a pottage with some uncertain mushrooms and cress.

She rubbed her chin with the back of her hand. There was a patch of three or four stiff hairs poking through, just long enough to be annoying. Her fingertips could not feel the hairs, only the skin on the back of her hand. That annoyed her, too. She missed her tweezers, sitting in her little chest in the Ooste house. She missed chairs and beds. She missed the bells of Our Lady’s church. She missed Bruges, when it came to it: the city where she was born, where she had lived her whole life. The greatest city in Christendom, it had been, until the Chatelaine had decided to strangle it.

“Anyway,” Margriet said, pulling her hands away from her chin with a tiny act of will, as though someone had spoken, “has anyone got any tweezers?” she asked.

Beatrix laughed. “Tweezers, Mother? You’re worried about your eyebrows at a time like this?”

“Chin hair,” Magriet grumbled. “It’s not about how it looks. It’s annoying, that’s all.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Gertrude, who was between Beatrix’s age and Margriet’s. “You are too young to know but one day you’ll understand. Margriet, I had some lovely tweezers, but they were in the house. If they are still there, they are somewhere in the ashes.”

“Bah, never mind,” said Margriet.

“I could make you something,” Gertrude said.

Margriet waved her away. “I can live with a beard if need be.”

The girl Claude was looking at her. Her own chin was narrow, her little bird bones coming to a sharp point beneath smooth sun-brown skin.

“What did you do about it?” Margriet wondered aloud. “Didn’t they ever ask why you never shaved?”

Claude raised her eyebrows. “Everyone always wants to know the most boring things. How I pissed. How I shaved. Nobody wants to know how I shot eleven soldiers with only ten bolts at the battle of Zappolino.”

Impudent girl. As if it were a thing to be proud of, killing people. As if any child couldn’t do it, if they were forced. Margriet shrugged. “I assume you slaughtered people, as mercenaries are paid to do.”

There was a pause.

“Well, I want to know all of it,” Beatrix said. “The soldier parts and the other things. I guess you could just pretend to shave, couldn’t you?”

Claude shook his head. “Not since I was very young. It was too obvious. We would march for days, fleeing, or without fresh water, and not a shadow on my face. No, I had a beard made.”

“Ah,” said Margriet. “The pitch in spirits.”

“Yes. I made a false beard with my own hair. I carried a little bottle of pitch mixed in Italian spirits, and I used that to glue it on whenever it came loose after a battle, with the sweat and rain and blood. Easier to pretend to trim a short beard than to pretend to shave. Anyway it helped me not look so much like a woman.”

The girl looked wistful. She wanted to go back to it, not only the fighting and the riding horses and whatever else, but the being a man, too. She didn’t make a very good woman, Margriet had to admit. She couldn’t imagine Claude spinning or cooking or cuddling up to a worksore husband at the end of the day.

Of course, Margriet had never done any of those things very well, either, come to think of it.

“It sounds like a hassle,” Jacquemine said.

“It was a pain in the ass,” Claude answered with a grin. “But I got used to it. No more a pain than braiding one’s hair or plucking one’s eyebrows or whatever it is women do.”

“Yes, but if our hair comes tumbling down out of its braids, we won’t be—” said Gertrude loudly. She said everything loudly. She was loud just sitting there. The women looked at each other. “Anyway,” she continued, red in her round face, “what I mean is that it would matter so much, that beard. I imagine it must have always been a worry. I admire you. For being able to fight and everything, and keep everything else perfect. Keep your breasts and everything hidden and whatnot.”

“Not much to hide,” Claude said with another grin. “Not like you and Margriet. How do you walk around like that? Isn’t it a great weight? Don’t they flop around? I don’t know how you manage it.”

“We all have our crosses to bear,” Gertrude said seriously, with a heavy sigh, and Beatrix giggled and Claude laughed out loud like a soldier, and even Margriet had to smile.

“Come on, then,” said Margriet, patting her lap. “Agatha, come over. Who wants to hear a story?”

“Will you tell us about Reynard?” Agatha asked, scrambling over.

Margriet looked up at her daughter. She wanted to show her in her face that she forgave her, that she understood. But she knew how her own face looked. It scowled. It grimaced. It was incapable of anything kinder.

“What would you like to hear, Beatrix?” she asked. “Reynard, or something else?”

“Reynard, always,” Beatrix said with a little smile.

“Sometimes,” Margriet said, “you think you know what an animal will be like, because of its kind. So you think all foxes are tricky. Did you know that Frenchmen won’t even say the word goupil, the word for fox in their language? They think it is unlucky. So they call them renard instead. Isn’t that silly? I think Reynard laughs.”

“I am not afraid to say it,” said Agatha. “Goupil. Is that right?”

“That is right,” said Margriet. “But my name is Fox, too, isn’t it? Margriet de Vos, Margriet the fox. Yet I am not tricky at all.”

“But you have whiskers,” Agatha said with a grin and put her little finger to Margriet’s chin.

Claude and Beatrix roared with laughter.

Margriet kissed Agatha’s forehead, held her close, for what might be the last time. She nuzzled her with her whiskered chin. A few more days and she would be dead. She would go to her grave with whiskers on her chin. At the day of judgement, when her body was raised, would it go to Paradise with whiskers on her chin? Or would all her imperfections be taken away? If God took away Margriet’s imperfections, she would look nothing like herself.

The chausses were too big. As he had walked in the grey, drizzly pre-dawn from Lille, following the surly messenger, the blue wool had gapped and flapped around Claude’s thighs. Worse than that, the chausses were much too long. He had to roll the tops, which meant he was walking around with extra rolls of itchy, sweaty fabric near his crotch. And the laces at the tops didn’t fasten properly, so the whole contraption kept slipping down.

He was hungry. His legs were wet with this clinging cold mist, and his wounded foot ached, and his arm itched. By the time he had arrived at the mill, his initial surprise and delight at Monoceros’s gift had vanished, and he was in a foul temper.

Strange to say, his mood had lifted. Yes, it was suicide, this plan of Margriet’s. But it was a plan. There was something familiar about preparing for a raid. He had never quite agreed to Margriet’s plan, never quite said yes. He didn’t need to. Margriet knew, well enough, that he would not refuse.

Claude borrowed a bone needle from Jacquemine Ooste and sat, stitching the chausses, making them fit.

The first law of going into battle: Make sure your underthings don’t ride up.

He smiled. Janos would have liked that.

The true first law, of course, was to make sure you weren’t bringing your own death with you, because death had a way of spreading to one’s comrades.

He stretched out his weak right hand, the hand that shook with the needle in it.

“I can mend them for you,” Beatrix said.

Claude shook his head. “A man-at-arms knows perfectly well how to handle a needle.”

His foul mood was still there, lurking.

Of everything Monoceros had given him, perhaps only half of it fit. The chausses were only the beginning.

He put the needle in its case, sighed. Then he rummaged through his bundle.

“Listen,” Claude said, and tossed the heavy gauntlets to where Margriet and Beatrix sat, drawing with bits of charcoal on the floor, trying to think of what they could wear to look like chimeras. “These gauntlets don’t fit me at all. You have bigger hands, Margriet. Would you like them? Or you could sell them.”

Margriet ran her knobby fingers over them. They were steel, with little brass gadlings on the knuckles in the shapes of beasts.

“What are these?” Margriet asked, running a fingertip over them.

“They’re to protect your hand, mainly. They’re called gadlings. Usually they are just little knobs or bits of steel. Sometimes they make them in shapes, animals and whatnot. A bit showy, aren’t they?”

“They aren’t even real beasts. This one is a leopard or something with wings. This bird—well, I’ve never seen any bird like this.”

“Are you saying you want me to steal you gauntlets with gadlings that resemble the courtyard chickens of Bruges, or some other animal with which your vast experience has made you familiar?”

That seemed to quiet her, for a moment at least. Margriet put the gauntlets on slowly and stretched out her fingers in them.

“They fit well,” she said. “They looked far too big but they fit rather well.”

Claude had been sure at first that Margriet’s message was at least part lie, and then on the road he had begun to remember things like the hot cake, and to wonder. Although even if Margriet were dying, he did not know what she wanted him for. But truth be told, he was curious, and Italy would wait.

Of all the things he had thought Margriet might tell them, he had never considered it might be a plan to raid Hell. And now they were sitting on the floor drawing disguises, like monks drawing monsters in the margins of books.

He looked down at the scratched drawing of a stick figure with a cauldron on its head, and grimaced.

“It’ll be a bear to wear, unless we can make it lighter than it looks,” Claude said. “Talking of beards has given me an idea. Have you seen some of the animal chimeras? If I can get some fur and fix it on my face and hands, and wear my mail and aketon—”

“Not strange enough,” said Margriet.

“I don’t know if you have forgotten, but we do not actually have access to the forges of Hell,” Claude snapped.

“We have brains,” Margriet snapped back. “What could you wear on your head other than a helmet?”

“What about horns?” asked Gertrude. “There are two drinking horns in the little church across the field. I am sure even now they are in the sacristy.”

“You would steal from a church?” Beatrix asked.

“Not steal. Borrow. I know the priest. Or I did, when we were young.” Gertrude smiled, and Margriet raised her eyebrows. “They have silver work but only on the edges, and I think it could be hidden.”

“All right,” Claude said. If Gertrude got talking about her romances, they would be here an hour. “Then where shall I put them? If I can get a leather coif, we could make two holes and poke them through.”

“But how will you affix the fur?” Beatrix asked. “We don’t have pitch in spirits.”

“I have some birdlime,” Gertrude said. “Perhaps—”

Claude shook his head. He had tried birdlime, with his first false beard, at fourteen. It had been a messy business, and the hair had come off when he sweated. “I should be able to get pitch in spirits in Ypres, at the apothecary.”

“In Ypres?” Margriet asked.

Claude nodded. “I won’t be long, and can get anything else we need, while two of you fetch the horns. I’ll need money, or something to trade.”

“Have your food first,” said Gertrude.