Кейт Хартфилд - Armed in Her Fashion

“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.”