The Folly of the World (56 page)

Hence the Hand of Glory. The door was a thick oaken thing with bolts on the other side keeping him in, so without a lock for them to worry ’bout him picking, he’d been able to set everything up. Tin cup for a mold was no problem, and he was allowed to cook his own chow, even in prison—weren’t that something sick? All those honest souls slaving away just to lick rancid oats off their dirty fingers come mealtime, and here in lockup he still had his Shrovetide pancakes served up with his private cutlery. Fooling the guards into thinking he was trying to hide a knife, he’d finally given up the blade and kept the spoon instead. Amateurs. The wall of the gatehouse had given the latten ladle quite the edge, and he had his wee hearth in the cell, which was an old sleeping chamber, like as not, so yeah: Hand of Glory.

Or whatever that Frenchman Gilles, had called it—Glory something, and it was made from a hand, so yeah, Hand of Glory. Gilles had been too sweet-looking for witchery, you’d have thought, the sort of handsomeness you didn’t usually put with badness, but Sander had run with Jan long enough to recognize when good looks were being put to misdirection for some inner scheming. Funny how the world tells you all you need, even if you don’t ken the import at the time, and—

“Are you listening to me?” Hobbe snapped his fingers in Sander’s face.

“Nay,” said Sander, blinking away his plan. “Said they were letting me out?”

“Of course not,” said Hobbe.

“Then what I care to hear it?” Sander would have throttled his double-crossing visitor to death, but the guards might respond by simply braining Sander and saving the city the trouble.

“It’s about those papers I brought you yesterday,” said Hobbe, shifting in his chair. Sander would allow the two seats in his cell
weren’t as comfortable as he’d like. His ass was still so swollen from where the quarrel had struck him that sitting was a torture to rank up with the ordeals the martyrs suffered. The real bad ones. “I know you were too busy then, but have you had a chance to sign them?”

“Nay, and I won’t until you tell me what they say,” said Sander. “We both know you’re lying ’bout them being for Jo’s benefit.”

“I swear, Sander, I’m not,” said Hobbe. “I know you and I have had our differences, but I’d still rather see Jo inherit the business and deal with her than with whatever inevitable relation of the Gruyere brothers comes slithering from the fens. If you had married her off, as I suggested, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I told you, Jan’s back,” Sander whispered, glancing nervously around the windowless cell. “He was the one who did Lansloet and Drimmelin, he was the one who did the kids, who made Simon hang himself. He’s back, and he’s pretending to be me, and he’ll try to get at Jo, if he hasn’t already. You have to watch out for him!”

“All the more reason to sign the papers,” said Hobbe. “Jo’s been staying with Zoete and me ever since your arrest, but if this impostor you keep talking—”

“He’s not an impostor, he’s bloody Jan! Back from the grave! Back from Belgium!”

“Indeed,” said Hobbe firmly. “You’ll be executed before the week is out, Sander, and if you haven’t signed these—”

“What?” said Sander, paying more attention now. How long had he been locked up? Of late Sander had been having a devil of a time keeping track of little things like time and space. He hadn’t even started on the Hand of Glory yet… “You said you could delay it. You said you could work something out, that—”

“—That was before Simon’s confession, the one that implicates you, was made public.” Hobbe rubbed his temples. “Bribes won’t delay the execution now, nothing will—Dordrecht won’t
be appeased until you die, and publicly. They’d have come for you in the night already if I hadn’t exercised my influence, had honest militiamen stationed here instead of Cod stooges.”

“I can’t die,” said Sander, his hands shaking. Hands of Glory. “I can’t. Oi, give me that dagger of yours and I’ll sign, you swear it’ll do Jo good.”

“You have my word,” said Hobbe, eyebrows reassuringly flat.

Sander nodded, sharply, and the count drew his ornamental knife, offering it pommel first. Sander staggered over to his cot, his ass afire, and stashed it in the hay. Then he took the quill from the pot and scratched his X on the bottom of the greasy vellum document Hobbe had brought the day before. Sander must’ve already sealed the thing at some point, because there was the Tieselen crest in a blob of wax right next to his mark. When had he done that? He’d lost the ring, of all the foolish…

“Sander,” Hobbe said kindly, and Sander realized he’d been drifting off again. Looking up from the document, he repeated that simple truth in a mad world:

“I don’t want to die.”

“Come now,” said Hobbe, blowing on the wet ink. “You’re a versatile fellow, I’m sure you’ll find a way to manage it when the time comes. Always easier the second time around, Your Worship.”

Sander stared at Hobbe. What the shit did that mean? Before he could find his voice, which he seemed to have misplaced, or calm his heart and stomach, which seemed to be trying to trade places, Hobbe stood to leave, the vellum held open in his hands to keep it from smearing.

“Farewell, Graaf Tieselen,” Hobbe said, a bit more cheerfully than Sander thought the bleak situation warranted. “You had me rather worried at the onset, you know—I wondered if your being shat from a ewe in a ditch had infected you with some idiotic sense of duty toward your fellow peasants. I actually had a nightmare on one occasion that you ruined the whole business
by shifting your fortune into draining the polders outside Dordrecht, to create honest work for all those poor souls made destitute by the flood. It was
quite
the relief to wake up and find you every bit as selfish as a born prince.”

“What?” Sander still hadn’t wrapped his stiff mind around what Hobbe had said about his dying twice, and now it rather sounded like he was being insulted. Maybe? “I mean, I hired Simon, helped him in a tight spot. Yeah?”

“How charitable that you found a place in your heart for a fellow noble while ignoring a whole city’s worth of desperate paupers, people who no doubt grew up in conditions every bit as miserable as your own. In fact, you might have even known some of them personally—didn’t Jan say you hailed from somewhere out in the Groote Waard? I wonder why ever you left the cheerful farms and fragrant fields!”

“Never you mind that,” Sander muttered, the circumstances regarding his flight from his childhood home being a topic even less desirable than his imminent execution, his apparently un-Christian administration of his estate, or that unsettling crack about managing to die better the second time ’round.

“A happy chance that you did, whatever the motivation,” said Hobbe, and seeing the ink had dried enough to get a move on, get a move on he fucking did, the ponce. “I’m ever so pleased to have known you, and
especially
pleased that we could come to this ultimate understanding. And
if
I might offer a parting suggestion, from one friend to another, use your bedsheet to effect what Simon did—it shall spare Jolanda the pain of witnessing your execution, and prove less excruciating for you than a quartering. Guard! I’m ready! Good day, Sander, you won’t be seeing me again.”

Then he was gone, leaving Sander to stare down at his grimy, ink-damp hands. Except for the yellowish band on his left ring finger where the Tieselen seal had rested for those too-brief years, they weren’t very calloused or scarred, the way you’d
expect those of a peasant’s son to be. For all the dirt and grease and dried blood adhered to them, they were the smooth hands of a gentleman.

It wasn’t until the door was again bolted that Sander remembered what the count had said about Jo staying with him and Zoete. What was that idiot doing, running straight to Hobbe after all Sander had done to keep her safe? There wasn’t any time to lose, he needed to bust himself out, and fast. Sander turned to his wine—hidden somewhere in that barrel was the nerve to cut off one’s own hand, and he was just the cunt to dive in and find it. At least the count’s dagger would make better work of the job than a sharpened spoon.

W
hen the knock came, Poorter Primm jumped in his chair. He always did—would that he lived in happier times, when patrons bought expensive crossbows by the bushel, so that an honest businessman could react with joy, or maybe even ennui, at a knock upon his door. Granted, over a year of steady commissions in preparation for the resumed war with Jacoba and her Hooks, Poorter had grown almost comfortable with callers, but given that the last two times he’d opened up he’d received horrendous beatings and the ruination of several exquisite pieces, Poorter knew he could be forgiven for falling into old, anxious habits. Poorter never had a problem forgiving himself.

He rose from his seat in front of the hearth and toddled across his workshop, scratching Beatrix on the head as he passed the table where she snoozed. That Jolanda girl had called her something else, something dreadfully foreign, so Poorter had given her a much better name. As a rule he detested cats, but Beatrix was the exception—her limp kept her from running around knocking valuable parts over, and she was skittish enough that whenever visitors called she would vanish, like a conjurer’s trick, and not reappear for days. Ah, and there she went as the knock came again, the cat not even waiting for him to open the door before shooting up into the loft and out the window he left cracked for her. Farewell, Beatrix, he thought, as he stared at the ominous door.

There was no real need to be wary, he told himself—the mad graaf was incarcerated and awaiting execution, his faux daughter
missing ever since the arrest and thus presumably taken care of, and after the rather intense pummeling he’d given Poorter when last they’d met, the returned Jan had promised that they were now square, so long as Poorter kept his mouth shut. Those three were the whole reason Poorter had come to fear guests, after all, and now he was free of them. At worst it was some besotted Shrovetide revelers banging on every door they passed, and at best it could be a noble or three coming by to compliment him on how true his bows had fired at Brouwershaven. Nobles, he told himself, loaded patrons, and with a prayer he opened the door.

A noble lady and three attendants. Poorter blinked at them, and tried not to grin. Unless he was very much mistaken, he’d sold this grande dame’s son half a dozen of the most lavish bows he’d ever set to lathe. She’d better not be here to try to get some of the money back, there was no way that was flying with Poorter. He bowed, and said, “My lady, to what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“Do you always conduct business on your stoop like a pimp, or shall we move inside?” said the commanding crone, advancing on him before he’d even stammered an,

“Of course, my lady, of—”

“Lady Meyl,” said she, striding into his shop and making straight for the fire. “I am not
your
lady, Primm, I am
the
Lady Meyl, and I trust you know what that means?”

“I do,” said Poorter, though of course he didn’t, beyond it meaning she was a heinous noble who was bossing him about simply because she could. Hertog Willem Von Wasser had been a good bit more cordial than his mother.

The last of her footmen closed the door behind him and bolted it, which seemed a touch odd, and taking in his visitors a second time, Poorter’s heart began to sink. Rather than furs and pearls, Lady Meyl was wearing a voluminous plain brown cloak, and her three attendants wore the same, as well as swords—hardly handmaids attending their lady on a shopping spree.

Lady Meyl had taken Poorter’s only chair and nodded at the
stool beside his suddenly shaky knees. “Bring that over here, you treacherous hog, and let us see if you truly comprehend what you have done. It may mean the difference between a painful lesson and a fatal one—a fool I can abide, but never a clever man. Fortunately for you, I have it upon very good authority that you are the former, and thus
potentially
useful.”

Poorter felt light-headed. He was only going to the window to let in some air, but one of Lady Meyl’s thugs moved between him and the curtains. A hand fell to a pommel. Oh dear. Poorter took the stool, nearly dropped it, and carried it over to the hearth, wondering just how deeply he had stepped in it this time.

“My lady, I assure you that the price I gave your son was fair,” Poorter began as he sat. “I am aware that the cost may seem high, comparatively, but the difficulty in attaining quality metals and unwarped wood on this isolated and damp island is, I assure you—”

“That’s right, you’re a bow-maker,” said Lady Meyl, which did not put Poorter at ease. “It was all my son talked about on the way to Brouwershaven. If you make it out of this, Primm, I expect you will find a rather dependable patron in Willem—my son loves toys every bit as much as he evidently enjoys breaking them. I suppose he gets that from me. Bring me your finest working example, if you please.”

“Of course, my, ah, Lady Meyl,” said Poorter, wondering just what the blazes was going on. Poorter took a moment to weigh whether to give her a genuinely impressive crossbow to show off his skill or a lesser model, in the event that she intended to have it smashed before him by way of intimidation. Why,
why
did everyone always take it out on the bows? He quickly chose a mid-range selection, and took a knee before the tarpan-faced old woman, holding it up as he explained, “The stock is beech, which, yes, is common enough, but the inlay is—”

“Load it,” said Lady Meyl, her eyes as cold as Poorter’s guts felt.

“I—what?”

“With an arrow, Primm, with an arrow,” said Lady Meyl impatiently, but that hadn’t been what he was unsure of. He heard the sound of a boot shifting on the floor just behind him, and already being good and well poached at this point, he did as she asked. It was hard, with one arm still in a sling from the drubbing Jan had given him when he’d tried to escape through the kitchen window upon seeing a ghost at his door, but Poorter soon got it strung and nocked. He was about to straighten up and retrieve one of the unfletched shafts that he’d yet to fix a head to, when one of Meyl’s men helpfully handed Poorter a dove-feathered frog-crotch bolt. Well. That was just wonderful. He fit the quarrel into place, fingers trembling, and looked up to see Lady Meyl extending her hands to accept the weapon.