Кейт Хартфилд - Armed in Her Fashion

“I only married you because I had to,” she screamed. “Because you had a good business from your father, before you squandered it, and my father was sick from the wars. You selfish bastard.”

He trudged through the open door into the night, dragging the sack behind him like his sins. The sight of Willem, stolid, balding Willem, walking out into the road just as he had in life. No one would dare take his wealth from him now.

But it was hers. It belonged now to her, and to Beatrix.

She ran out into the empty street and grabbed the sack but he was too strong; he kept walking and she fell forward. So she grabbed him from behind, her arms wrapped around him almost as though they were lovers. He did not stop. She scraped her nails into his dead flesh but he kept walking and did not even cry out. She pulled on his thin hair and it came out in her hands and she fell away from him, tumbled to the ground in horror, looking at Willem’s hair falling out of her grasp to the cobbles.

An arm grabbed her from behind and she smelled sweat and wine.

“Got you.” The swaggering drunk, damn him.

Margriet dropped her hips as if she were sitting in her rocking chair, and felt his arms loosen. She stomped her heel on his right toe and then ran after Willem, leaving the drunk cursing behind her.

She ran, calling his name, screaming it, as around her the plaintive calls of the revenants calling the names of their beloved drifted into the sky. Willem had gone. He’d be over the city walls by now, and she couldn’t follow, not through the gates anyway.

“You were a great disappointment!” she screamed.

Beatrix let the flax slip through her raw fingertips. It was the hair of a princess. She would coil it and dress it with star-flowers.

“Still spinning?” Grandfather asked with a little smile. She had not heard him come in to their main room.

She dipped her fingers in her dish of water and paused to smile back at him. “The devil finds work for idle hands.”

“Your mother is late,” said Aunt Katharina.

Aunt Katharina stood behind Grandfather, and everyone’s smiles faded. She was holding the bits of wool for stuffing their ears.

“Is it dusk already?” Beatrix whispered.

Grandfather limped over to the doll-sized window he had cut into the shutters, and put his eye to it.

“Perhaps Margriet could not get away,” he murmured.

“Mother will come,” Beatrix said. “No revenant would be a match for mother, if she met one in the street. Can you imagine? She’d talk it back to Hell.”

“I should hope she’d have the good sense to stay indoors,” said Katharina.

Grandfather closed the little window and sat on his stool by the supper table, shifting the candle so the light fell fully on Beatrix’s work.

“I am surprised you still have any flax left to spin,” said Katharina.

“I spin all I have each day, yet every morning I wake to find the kabouters have refilled my baskets,” Beatrix teased. “Actually, this small basket is the last of it. Tomorrow I will have to spin grandfather’s belly lint. Get it ready, Grandfather.”

“Really, Beatrix,” Katharina scolded.

Beatrix’s stomach rumbled. She wished she could spin them all something to eat. One bony fish between the two of them, tonight. Grandfather looked gaunt. She wished for a chicken. No, a lovely big goose or a swan. They used to land on the fields outside the moat.

“Perhaps I can spin the mist off the canal,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

“You might as well spin air as flax,” said Katharina. “Who’s going to buy it now? The traders are all dead or gone, and the roads shut.”

Grandfather coughed.

“When life gets back to normal, we will be glad of something to sell,” Beatrix said, trying to make her voice soothing but it came out stinging like a nettle.

Katharina held the bits of wool out to her, two hard white twists. Each plug sighed into shape in Beatrix’s ears, suffocating the sounds of the world, as if she were spinning now on the bottom of the sea, fathoms deep.

Grandfather dutifully plugged his own ears. He sat staring at the scratched old table.

A sharp knock at the door. She and grandfather looked at each other, like conspiring children, as if neither wanted to admit they had heard. If Katharina lost faith in the earplugs, who knew what she would do next to try to keep them safe from the revenants. Lock them in the cellar, probably.

Another knock.

Beatrix let the flax fall from her hand. This could be Baltazar. Any knock, every knock, could be Baltazar, her beloved, her husband, her all, returning to her at last. Hurt in the war, perhaps. Wandering, confused. Or a captive, escaped. She would spin his memories smooth. She would put her fingers to his rough lips, if only he would come back to her.

Grandfather opened the little peephole in the window and put his face right up to it, trying to see around to the door.

“What are you doing?” Katharina hissed.

Without answering, Grandfather unlatched the door.

Katharina stood, a knife in her hand. In the open doorway, Beatrix’s mother stood, holding her side as if she had a stitch from running.

“I’m not a revenant yet, Katharina, but I might send a message to Hell and ask to be made into one, if you leave me out in the dark again.”

Beatrix had never seen her mother’s eyes shine like that, like a cornered vixen’s. She pulled the wool out of her ears and Grandfather did the same.

“There’s a bit of bread, Mother,” Beatrix said. She had been saving it to eat before bed, to split with Grandfather. They did that together every night now, shared a morsel before their prayers. But she wanted now to offer her mother something, to take that hungry look out of her eyes. “More than half sawdust, but let me see if I can soften it a bit.”

Mother waved her away. “I’m not hungry. Never mind that now.”

“You’re late,” Grandfather said. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve been at the walls,” Mother replied. “I’ve seen the chimeras, trying to blow them apart with some infernal weapon. They did not succeed, but they will keep trying, I am sure. We must leave Bruges, all of us.”

Katharina’s mouth dropped open.

“How?

“I have a way. It is difficult. Will be difficult for you, Father. But we must try. To stay here means death.”

Grandfather smiled. “Dear daughter, to go means death for me. I can barely walk from this table to the door without losing my breath. You must go.”

“But we cannot!” Beatrix said. “Our husbands—how will they find us?”

Mother took a deep breath, closed her eyes. “I’ve seen Willem.”

Beatrix knew in a moment what her mother meant. She knew why her mother had not said, “Willem is back,” or “Willem is here.” Yet Beatrix could not help herself from drawing it out, from holding hope in her hands for as many breaths as she could.

But Grandfather had never been one to delay the inevitable. He sank down onto the bench, his face slack.

“Yes, he is taken, he is a revenant,” said Mother.

“But you did not invite him in, Margriet.” Katharina said. It was hardly a question, as if she could not bring herself to make it a question.

“I never wanted that man in my house, even when he was alive.” Mother stared at Beatrix, her eyes now steely. Beatrix squinted but couldn’t quite see her mother behind her words. I have no father, Beatrix thought. I have no father now.

Grandfather put his hand to his forehead. “Willem gone, too,” he said. “So many.”

“It’s done, and past help,” Mother said. “The main thing is that I caught him carrying off a sack full of clinking money and rich things. We were never poor. The bastard has been hiding a fortune from us. And now it’s ours.”