The Folly of the World (33 page)

Much later, after Sander had acted even queerer than usual at the supper table, muttering about landing the biggest rat of them all before turning terse and mean, Jolanda lay in her cold bed in her cold room and stared at the black beams striping the white ceiling. She had left the shutters ajar, thinking it better to be cold than blind after all, and wished she could have Lijsbet beside her. Yet she knew that having the maid as a bedmate so soon after dyeing herself would lead to questions arising from the pungent woad smell, questions Jolanda wouldn’t be able to answer.

Lansloet, beady-eyed old baddie though he was, did not ask questions, not even when his attic became the rank aging cave for the dyes, not even when he saw Wurfbain treat Sander less as lord of his own home and more like a servant, and not even when a drunk, weeping, and naked Sander had to be helped up the stairs to bed after stripping to his skin and burning his fine clothing in the parlor fireplace, as he’d done twice since becoming graaf. Of course, sooner or later Lijsbet would notice the dye, either the smell of the stuff or the fluctuating shades of Jolanda’s hands, and then she’d have to be told
something
, but for now Jolanda couldn’t think of a lie, and so a cold bed it was.

A draft pushed the shutters farther open, making them groan,
and Jolanda’s heart skipped at the noise. A puff of snow fluttered in, wide flakes swinging slowly down to fade into the rolled-back rug. Jolanda was out from her sheets like a spooked ray quitting its sandy bed, bare feet barely touching the cold floorboards as she danced to the window.

The breeze that had set her on her course died off, perhaps hoping she’d change her mind, but it was too late for reprieve—latched shutters, then a pile of blankets so deep they’d need a team of clam diggers to excavate her come dawn. The snowy roofscape of Dordrecht again shone before her, and she paused, a hand on each shutter, grinning out at the frozen city where a few lights still burned in garrets and towers, twinkling like stars in the night sky or sun-kissed shells in the morning surf.

Pretty enough, but cold enough to freeze a Frisian. Before she could close the shutters, though, something caught her notice, and set its hook well. She was focusing on it even as every part of herself save her eyes was cautioning against it, telling her to dispense with shadows in the night and return to bed. Ignoring this urge to slam the shutters and flee to the covers, she squinted down, and for the second time that night her heart iced over as she stood in her open window.

Sander was down in the street again, looking up at the house. At her. At least he couldn’t complain about her tits this time, the night air billowing her shift around her like a jellyfish’s mantle as it pushed itself through the abyss. But no, he wasn’t looking at her, or even noticing she’d come to the window—he’d have said something by now if he’d been eyeing her casement.

She leaned a little farther out into the moonlight, half-trying to catch his notice so he’d break the stillness of the night, half-trying to get a better look at him, see if he had a bottle he could toss up. He wore a hooded cloak, everything about him black except for his upturned face, which was as white and faintly luminescent as the snow falling upon it. It would have been downright creepy if she didn’t know creepy was simply a matter of nature for Sander.
Shadowed though the ivory-dusted lane of Voorstraat was, Jolanda could see no tracks coming or going from him, meaning that the lunatic had been out there for no small time, getting snowed on and gawping up at his own fortune. Her mind turned over, trying to till up something clever to needle him with, but just as she settled on an excellent jab, a knock came at her door.

Jolanda lurched back from the window, out of the moonlight. The knock had startled her, frightened her even, for some stupid, indefinable reason. No doubt it was Lijsbet, here to complain about Drimmelin’s night-gas and beg to share Jolanda’s bed. No doubt. From her cover behind the shutter’s shadow, Jolanda saw Sander hadn’t moved from his position, still clueless to his being observed. Better to let Lijsbet in quickly and then bring her to the window so they could both have a quick taunt of Sander before bed. She scurried to the door, careful not to step in front of the window, wondering if there was enough snow on the sill to pack a snowball to volley down at the mad graaf.

The knock came again, louder and harder than the maid had any right to rap in the middle of the night when she was not expressly invited, and Jolanda threw open the door. For a moment the candle in Lijsbet’s hand blinded Jolanda, and she blinked away the tears, holding a finger to her lips lest the servant set in with her constant blathering and spoil the ambush.

Except it wasn’t Lijsbet. It was Sander.

“Hey.” He looked ghastly, his nightshirt a collage of stains, his unwashed body giving off the moldy scent of stagnant mud and standing water. He looked, in a word, like Sander, instead of Graaf Jan, respectable nobleman and merchant. He also had no cloak nor boots, no snow in his hair, and Jolanda hated him more than she’d ever hated him before, which was saying quite a lot.

She was too upset to speak, and so she sucker punched him in his paunchy gut. Nasty goddamn poot, nasty, nasty,
nasty
man. Back when they’d first met, he probably would have expected that, maybe caught her arm or at least tensed for it, but since
becoming a noble, he’d grown lazy as an eldest son, stopped respecting her ability to whip his arse at a moment’s provocation. Stopped being so crazy, too, aye, but what—

“—the fuck?!” Sander was gasping, stumbling back. Instead of swinging on her, the ponce grabbed his belly in one hand and held the candle between them with the other. “Why?”

“Not funny,” she said, her fists tight, hoping like she’d hoped for few things in her life that he’d make a move on her instead of sniffling there in her door, the caitiff.

“What?” Sander looked so stupid she could laugh. She didn’t.

“Teach me about standing in my own window?” She suddenly felt like crying, wondered if she was getting sick. “That why? You put Simon out there, teach me…”

She trailed off. Sander had no idea what she was talking about, she could see that, his eyes narrowing, angry-dog-like, his overgrown head listing to the side as though he couldn’t quite hear. It was how he looked when he suspected, often correctly, that she was taking the piss. She shuddered, her mind struggling to make sense of it, glancing at the window to make sure nothing was there, nothing but the moon…

“Simon,” she settled on him quickly, desperately. “Goddamn letch. Don’t know what he wants to get up into more, his old house or my thighs.”

“Simon’s gone back to the warehouse,” said Sander quietly, and blew out his candle. “You seen someone out your window?”

“He must’ve stayed in town the night, not gone back after dropping you—”

Sander said nothing, stalking across the dark room. He stumbled over the bunched-up rug, then flung the shutters fully open, jutting his head out into the snow. He stood there for so long Jolanda was sure he saw the man below, was trying to make out his features, but when she bit her cheek and joined him at the window, the street was empty, the clouds now too thick to make out any tracks leading up or down Voorstraat.

Sander looked cadaverous in the snow-thrown brightness, jaw set, brow shiny, breath held, flakes settling on his sweaty face like ashes on a corpse. Like the priest’s censer dumping ash into her mother’s open grave, Jolanda thought, the unexpected resurrection of that particular memory making an already fun night positively euphoric. She grabbed her upper arms and rubbed the pimply flesh, just as she used to when quitting the sea.

“A dream,” Jolanda said, not believing it but hoping Sander would, that he could talk her into believing. “Stupid dream, was all. Sleepwalked to the window, and you woke me up when you knocked.”

Except that even after the knock had come the man had still been right there, sizing up the house—she remembered looking down to see if he had heard the noise. Sander finally pulled his head back inside and closed the shutters. Little light came through the slats on a clear, full-moon eve, and on a night like this the room was dark as the bottom of the meer.

“You can dream when you’re awake,” Sander said, quieter than she’d thought him capable of speaking. “Dreams like that, they’re impossible to tell from real life. Not like sleep dreams at all. So real you can feel everything, taste everything.”

“I’ve never heard that,” Jolanda said, teetering on the rim of belief, hoping he could push her the rest of the way.
Had
she heard that before? She thought she had, now that he said it—it was maddening, like a smell she couldn’t quite place drifting from the kitchen, taunting her with its familiarity. A memory bubbled up, then, of another occasion when she had beheld a vision that defied comprehension, back in the sunken house in Oudeland… but she forced it back down, trying to fulfill the promise to herself to never again think of what she had seen there. That had been completely different; she had been drowning and imagined—never mind, she told herself, never mind, never mind.

“Used to happen to me a lot,” Sander said morosely, and with
such casual conviction that she believed him at once—he was an even worse liar than her, and if he’d been bluffing, she’d have known it. She was so relieved, she threw her arms around him, hugging him tight. He tensed at her touch and she almost gagged on his redolent shirt. Then he relaxed and she turned her head to the side, and they stayed that way for a moment, her blindly holding him as he just stood there, slack armed and stinking. It was, surprisingly enough, comforting, but then he spoiled it by adding, “Or could be you were awake, and there was some hen-toucher down there what heard you air your charms in the window, came by for a peek.”

Rather than releasing him, Jolanda squeezed him until he groaned, really digging into his ribs. “
Charms?
Don’t call ’em that again, it’s awful. Only reason I didn’t have anything on was the dye. You want me to ruin something nice on account of modesty in an empty room?”

“Could be a suitor, though, yeah?” said Sander, doing that annoying thing where he only partially responded to what she’d said, too caught up in his own harebrained thoughts. “I’ve heard you’re not as bad in the face as some of those rich bitches, and that counts for a lot with young lads.”

“You’re a charmer yourself, Papa,” said Jolanda. “Maybe it was some lovelorn poot working up the courage to knock at your backdoor.”

There was a pause, and Jolanda wondered if he was smiling or frowning. She could barely make out his silhouette, even with her eyes somewhat accustomed to the darkness of the shuttered room. He muttered, “Something about a canal.”

“What?”

“Canal runs behind the house, should’ve done something clever about canals and backdoors. Too tired to think straight. To bed with you.”

“Aye,” said Jolanda. A thought came to her, inspired, perhaps, by the general peculiarity of the night, and she blurted it out
before she could stop herself. “We should go ratting sometime, you and me. Sounds like fun.”

“Not what you’ve said about the practice before,” he muttered, the mad bastard sounding all stiff and awkward again. “Besides, we need to start thinking about your future. I won’t live forever, and we’ll never marry you off if you get a reputation for being moon-touched as your old da.”

Well, that was one sure way of making sure the evening was ruined after all—the prospect of marrying some elderly bachelor was about as appealing as eating fishhooks. One thing she’d learned from all those bad times that had come before her current situation was that older men were only after their own interests. Of course, Simon’s arsehole older brother, Braem, was proof enough that younger fellows could be pretty much the same. “I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a—hey!”

Sander had swept her off her feet, and she was too startled to fight back—how the hell could he see her well enough to pull that off in the dark? He had one hand behind her knees and the other sweaty paw ’round her back, and was making for the bed, she guessed. She tensed an elbow, ready to jab his collar and set to squirming free if he didn’t drop her at once, when he spoke in that odd, quiet voice again, “Told me a hundred times. Like I could make you do something you didn’t want to.”

“Well,” said Jolanda, not sure how else to respond. This was a different sort of Sander than she was used to, and it unnerved her a great deal more than his usual bluster and crank.

“Do me a boon, though,” said Sander, leaning forward a bit and depositing her with an almost tender clumsiness on the bed. “When you go out, take that new Lizzy girl with you.”

“When?” Jolanda asked as Sander pulled the blankets up around her. Although it did not occur to her until after he left and she lay alone in the dark, unable to sleep, no man had tucked her in since her brother Pieter had left home.

“Anytime,” Sander said. “From now on, anytime you leave.
And carry a blade tucked away with you. Villains everywhere, looking to get their grope on.”

“Nice,” said Jolanda, trying not to let him spook her out again after the night she’d had. “Goodnight.”

“Night,” he said, and a few moments later the door opened, letting in the hint of whatever light he’d left burning in his room down the hall. Seeing him outlined there, his figure somehow blacker than the room had been before he’d opened the door, she suddenly remembered what had sounded so familiar about Sander’s claim of dreaming while awake. He and Wurfbain had talked about just that during the coach rides to and from the Easter service in Leyden, something she’d written off at the time as just another example of a madman’s folly. It had been a dreadful, tense exchange, something about Sander maybe hurting, no,
killing
a bunch of lepers up in Friesland. A family of them. How they’d nursed him when he was sick only to have him murder the lot.

Jesus Christ preserve her.

“Wait,” she called, anxious for an answer, any answer. “Those dreams, where you were awake when they were happening? How did you wake up from those? How did you make them stop?”