The Folly of the World (45 page)

“Don’t see a fire going,” Sander finally said after they had stood there in silence for a while, staring at the desolate house. “Think they’re back in town, getting food and all?”

“I suspect they’re halfway to ’S Gravenhage by now,” said Jolanda.

“What’s that, a better provisioned village?”

“It’s a woodland where they can hide out. They’ve nicked off with my money, Sander.”

“Nah, not those boys—they were shitting their breeches, no way they’d be so bold!”

Jolanda closed her eyes, listened to the wind squealing through the chinks in the driftwood walls, and imagined she could hear it groaning through the empty cauldrons that used to rest out here, in the shadow of the blackthorn. They must have sold off the purple pots once they realized the shellfish weren’t coming back. Sander was cursing now, but she simply smiled and went to the door—at least this way she could set the place aflame when they left in the morn.

Home.

H
ome.

Sander hadn’t believed he’d ever think of Dordt that way, but here they were, back on Voorstraat, and damned if it didn’t feel like the end of a journey. That was a new sensation, it was, the sense that the road actually stopped at a certain point, that you could quit it as long as you wanted instead of just until the search party passed by or you got kicked out of the tavern. As they approached through the gloaming, snow again powdering their crowns, Sander saw light spilling through the shutters of the parlor window and let out a long, happy sigh. Much as he’d feared Lansloet and Drimmelin returning before them and conspiring with Hobbe, over the last few weeks of awful, drafty inns with awful, nasty food, he’d been even more scared that the servants might
not
beat him and Jo back to Dordt. Duke Philip must have drawn his court away from Zeeland, and once that happened, Von Wasser and the rest of the Cod locals would’ve been eager to be home to crow about their victory.

“Happy?” Sander asked his moody compatriot. Even burning down that hovel at the beach hadn’t cheered her up, angels only knew why. When he’d finally called her on the fishermen being her kinfolk, she’d fessed readily enough, but not provided more than a sour “aye.” Probably raw they hadn’t recognized her, but what did she expect? It wasn’t like she was merely dressing a mite differently these days; she looked totally unlike the rabid little bitch Sander had met in Rotterdam, ten years older instead of three, human instead of monster. “To be back, I mean?”

“
Yes
,” Jo said with more passion than he’d heard from her all trip.

“Me too,” said Sander, slapping her back, and that finally knocked a smile loose from the grump. She swung back on him, and then they were capering in the street, no longer caring if slush got into their boots, for they would be shed soon enough, bare feet propped in front of a warm fire. Sander let her land a good smack to his cheek, and his pratfall turned genuine as the icy cobble rebuffed his heel. She laughed like old to see him go ass-first into a filthy brown snowbank between their stoop and their neighbor’s, but stopped cawing soon enough as he fumbled together a snowball. By the time he had it packed, though, she was up the stairs and through the front door.

Sander sat there for a while, closing his eyes and letting the dirty snow soak through his surcoat and hose—weren’t so long ago he would’ve been sitting here because he was a drunk idiot without anywhere better to go. Yet now he could stand whenever he wanted and go inside a graaf’s house and wring out his clothes and warm himself before a ball-sweatingly hot hearth. How about that?

Eventually picking himself up and tossing the snowball aside, he’d stepped onto the stoop when something caught in his eye, like a fleck of sand. Turning to look down the lane, he saw a figure standing in the middle of the road half a dozen houses down. That put the shudders on a fellow, no doubt. Sander squinted, but could make out nothing beyond the obvious—it was somebody tall wearing a hood. Huh. Sander licked his lips, and quick as it had come, the chill inspired by this peeper warmed off, and he resolved to give the nutsack a wee lesson in the propriety of staring at one’s betters.

“Jan!” Sander nearly jumped out of his skin as Jo shouted in his ear. He hadn’t heard the front door open; lazy broad probably hadn’t closed it after her. He scowled at the girl, too surprised to immediately scold her for creeping up on him. “Look!”

Jo was still in her brigandine, which must stink like a pig’s crooked dick by now, but she had her cloak off and was holding it out to him for inspection. Fuck that, he had bigger fish to fillet, and—shit. He’d only looked away for the moment, but the peeper down the lane had vanished.
Hell
no. Sander took off after the cunt, ignoring Jo’s shouting, but when he reached where the dastard must have been, he couldn’t find any tracks—the center of the lane was a shiny, cobbled creek instead of snow pack. Sander kept running, hoping to spot a fleeing shadow in one of the alleys or at the intersection with Visstraat, but nobody was about, despite the hour—it was mostly dark, yeah, but this time of year that was still early enough. There should have been people out; it was like the whole shitty town was working together to help the plaguebitch get away.

“Shit,” he said, spinning around in the intersection. He thought of the night Jo had seen someone watching her window from the street, thought of what he and Simon had found out in the meer, thought of how nobody had been minding the dark warehouse when he’d had the Rotter boatman swing by there on their way back into the city not an hour ago. He thought of Hobbe, like as not eager to make a move on him and Jo, if he hadn’t already. “Shit!”

“What is it?” said Jo, catching up to him. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” he said, not wanting to scare her. “Thought I… forgot something, is all, but the boatman’ll have pissed off back to the Rott by now.”

“The harbor’s the other way,” said Jo, glancing back toward their house.

“All the more reason to forget it,” said Sander, and seeing she still held her cape in both hands, he hoped to distract her by asking, “What’ve you got there?”

“My cloak,” said Jo, falling for Sander’s ploy like the dullard she was. “It’s… look, what do you think that is?”

“Eh?” Sander squinted at the blue cloth, reached out and brushed a dark stain with the back of his fingers. A bit came off on his skin—cold, wet, brown. He sniffed it, licked it. “It’s blood, yeah?”

“Aye,” said Jo. “That’s what I thought.”

“How’d you—” Sander began, worried this was going to be some kind of talk about her monthlies or busting her maidenhead on a horse or something, the stain being right there on the back of the garment and all.

“It’s Lijsbet,” said Jo, which was hardly an improvement to talking about cuntblood. “I gave her the cloak before we left.”

“Oh,” said Sander, because, yeah:
oh
. “Well, where’s she, then?”

“I don’t know,” Jo snapped, like it was his doing. “She… I don’t know, I ran inside, and was in the kitchen before I saw you weren’t after me. Drimmelin’s in there, and she asked what happened to the cloak, and I said
what
, and she said it was hung up all muddy and when did we get back, and so I went and found this on the peg and took it out to you and then you ran off.”

“So they’re back, then,” Sander nodded. “Wondered if it was just Lizzy, when I seen someone was home.”

“I gave it to her,” Jo said, plaintive.

“Well, let’s go find her, then,” said Sander, and figuring a lie couldn’t hurt, added, “And yeah, might not be blood at all, just some mud, like Drimmelin said.”

“You said—”

“Everything tastes like blood, chapped as my lips are,” said Sander, because sure, a few more lies on the stack wouldn’t topple it. “You haven’t looked upstairs for her, nor the attic, nor asked Lansloet or Drimmelin where she might be, yeah?”

Jo didn’t answer, spinning on her heel and dashing back up the street. Sander wondered if she was as sure as he that Lizzy wouldn’t be found asleep in Jo’s bed, nor straightening up the attic nor sweeping the snow in the courtyard nor anywhere else
in the house. He hoped she was, of course, hoped he’d walk in the door and they’d be laughing it up. Oh, how he hoped…

After giving the crossroads a final scowl, Sander took his time walking back—not so eager to be back inside after all. When he reached his own stoop, he could hear raised voices from within. Nobody was watching him this time, but he still paused in the doorway, wondering what he’d find in the kitchen, where it was Jo doing the shouting. Was it too much to ask to come home to a quiet house? Apparently.

Sander kicked the door shut with his heel as he strode in, and making out Lansloet’s quiet protests during a lull in Jo’s storm, he sighed and took off his damp, freezing leather cloak and unbuckled his scabbard, hanging them both up on their pegs. The surcoat was shed next, but he was out of hooks and so he just dropped it on the floor. Looking through the open parlor doors to the crackling fire in the hearth, he sighed again—if he had to re-don his wet boots he’d just become depressed, and so he left them on, pausing only long enough to bolt the front door before heading down the hall.

“—was here!” Jo said, looking back and forth between Lansloet and Drimmelin, who stood on opposite sides of the table where the cook had laid out a goose stuffed with jellied pike and almonds.

“Lansloet, Drimmelin,” said Sander, leaning in the kitchen doorway. “A welcome sight, a fire in the parlor and a bird ready for the roasting. How, I wonder, did you know we’d be back to enjoy such finery?”

There was a pause while Lansloet and Drimmelin pushed at each other with their eyes, and Jo scowled at Sander for interrupting her interrogation. Lansloet eventually piped up when it became evident the cook wouldn’t. “We knew Your Worship would crave something of substance upon his return, and we thought it better to err on the side of having a hot meal prepared and our master absent than risk a late-arrived lord with nothing suitable in the pot.”

“And if we didn’t make it, you’d find a way to see the food wasn’t wasted, yeah?” said Sander. He was going to take great delight in sacking these two, as soon as he got to the bottom of more pressing matters. “Where’s Lizzy?”

“Like we told the young miss, we don’t know,” said Drimmelin hastily. She looked sallow and shaky—concerned for the maid’s safety or guilty for her part in whatever had befallen the girl?

“Why not?” said Sander—whatever their answer to the next, he’d see that they were well searched before they quit his house, lest one have an extra key secreted somewhere. “She let you in, didn’t she?”

“As we told the Lady Jolanda,” said Lansloet, not trembling in the slightest, “we arrived to find the door unlocked, a fire in the hearth, and several candles burning around the house. A most irresponsible situation, you will agree, and one that ought to be addressed when next you lay hands on the girl.”

“She’s not stupid,” Jo said. “Somebody was here, as I put to these two, but it can’t have been her—she wouldn’t leave the fire going, or use our candles.”

“Or perhaps she did, and eloped with her beau upon hearing our approach,” said Lansloet. “Girls, you know, are like that. The kitchen shutters were open, were they not, Drimmelin?”

“They were,” said Drimmelin, but Sander thought it might have been, “they were?”

“Why would—” Jo began, but Lansloet talked over her, the steely-eyed steward meeting Sander’s gaze.

“
Girls
, sir, are like that. I presume you gave her a key and instructions to mind the house in our absence?” Sander nodded once, and Lansloet continued. Jo looked as though she might leap upon the servant at any moment. “An honest mistake, then, on your part. The girl has a lover, and as soon as we are gone, she pokes a broom through the window to signal him inside. Thereupon he enters your home, and the two of them take full
advantage of your larder and cellar. We did find several empty wine bottles and cheese rinds, did we not Drimmelin?”

“We did,” said the cook, but again, that doubt: was it a question or an answer?

“You’re lying!” Jo said, striding to Lansloet and seizing his tunic front. She stood a head and a half shorter than the servant, but he somehow seemed dwarfed by the furious young woman. “You tell another lie and I’ll bludgeon you, you scheming cunt! They did it, these greedy arseholes, they ate and drank and lived it up on our fortune, and now they’re trying to pin it on Lijsbet!”

Lansloet said nothing, looking plaintively over Jo’s head at Sander. Drimmelin intervened, and Sander thought her too flustered to be lying. Maybe. “But it
is
true, m’lady, m’lord—the house was in a proper state when we came home this morning. We spent last night in Rotterdam with Lady Meyl and Hertog Von Wasser’s people. Ask the lady or the hertog you don’t believe us, Graaf Tieselen, I beg you! Mud and dirty dishes everywhere, what Lansloet and me spent the day cleaning. Begging all your pardons, we thought… we thought…”

The cook had gone the color of the diced garlic peppering the raw bird—perhaps recognizing her own goose was destined for the same fate, now that she’d run her mouth. Sander crossed his arms and said, “You thought what?”