The Folly of the World (25 page)

Lady Foolsuit rushed after her father, clobbering dark scuffs onto the freshly scrubbed oak and trailing an actual wake, so heavily was her oiled cerulean cape shedding rainwater. Lansloet mashed the graaf’s sopping cloak in his long fingers for only a moment before smoothing out the garment and hanging it on the rack. A shout from the kitchen implied Dribbling had met their guests. Lansloet ambled after.

These two Bumpkins made Graaf Thirstybird seem cultured and intelligent, so at least Lansloet would be spared his master’s usual after-guest raging about how everyone was always mocking him in his own home, as if he were too stupid to know what they really meant, et cetera. No, for once it seemed that Count Wolfmean had engineered a true meeting of equals—this ranine moron and his grotesque spawn might be richer than your average Dordrecht noble, but they seemed even less housebroken than the cook’s courtyard chickens.

Following the muddy boot-and-clog prints down the hall, Lansloet ignored Dribbling’s shrill blather regarding guests in her kitchen and made straight for the dining room. He stopped short of the still-swinging door and peered around the side, where the freshly oiled double hinges gave him furtive glimpses of the immaculately set table. Yes, there was Wolfmean intercepting graaf and daughter at the partition that separated parlor from dining board. Rather than follow them into the room, Lansloet took a step back, lest the count catch sight of him. Let him handle the introductions.

After watering down the wine far more than he did when filching mugs for himself, Lansloet added far less honey than he personally favored and mixed it all up with his crumb-caked ear-picking finger. He didn’t even bother skimming the stray flake from the surface before placing the clay vessels on a polished tray. Quakeyshakes tried to take it, but he bared his teeth at her and strutted out of the kitchen—he wanted to make sure Wolfmean had the first cup he had dipped his digit in.

“—put the poltroon off the boat!” Graaf Gauche brayed as Lansloet edged the gate-section open, someone having closed the screen after them. Wolfmean, no doubt, in payment for letting the foreigners run amok through the house instead of being appropriately led in. Graaf Gauche’s accent was even worse than his manners, the man sounding more like an especially daft laborer rather than a dignitary.

“Hilarious,” Wolfmean said, following this pronouncement with an artfully executed chuckle. Yet again, Lansloet was impressed by the count’s skill—he sometimes wondered what might have been had he served Wolfmean; if it should have made his life better or worse to have so crafty a lord. Worse, no doubt.

“Your Worship,” Lansloet murmured, offering Graaf Thirstybird the first goblet. Lansloet’s master took it like a drowning sailor seizing at driftwood, giving Lansloet a knowing, exasperated nod in the direction of Graaf Gauche, who was muttering something to his daughter.

The five nobles sat in a half-circle around the hearth, with Graaf Thirstybird closest to the fire in his lounger, Lady Greenplum sitting primly beside him, Lady Foolsuit to her left, Graaf Gauche beside her, and Wolfmean between him and the roaring fire. As usual, the tidy blaze Lansloet had painstakingly built had been heaped with more wood by his master, and everyone was sweating in their posh seats.

“Thank you, Lansloet,” said Lady Greenplum, taking her wine. He winced at her. She was cunning, and without her constant
whispering into Graaf Thirstybird’s ear, the man should be utterly helpless. Had Lansloet been of a slightly more vicious temperament, he would have poisoned her long ago, but he thought himself a principled fellow and so he simply avoided her whenever possible.

“Thank you,” said Lady Foolsuit, which was an unexpected bit of class. She seized the cup with both hands in a display of such nervous passion that she sloshed wine all over the long yellow gloves she had still not removed, despite the heat of the room. That was a bit more expected. “Arseling!”

Unsure if she were directing the insult at him or at herself, but not particularly caring, Lansloet smiled his secret smile as he said, “I shall fetch the lady a cloth. If you care to—”

“Go on, man!” said her father, leaping up and taking the two remaining glasses from the tray. “Clumsy chit will’ve spilt more by the time you’re back.”

Lady Foolsuit grumbled something unintelligible at this, and Lansloet caught Wolfmean stifling a smile. There was now no way of telling whether Wolfmean or Graaf Gauche would receive the earcheese-tainted wine, but that was all right. Plenty more would flow before this night was through, or Lansloet was a smoked kipper.

The supper was poached eggs with cumin sauce and a perch blancmange. The food was exquisite; the conversation, painful. The contrast between rigid hosts and thrashing guests would have been comical if the Bumpkins’ deplorable habits had not started to rub off on Graaf Thirstybird as he lowered himself farther and farther into his cups, to the quiet but obvious chagrin of Lady Greenplum. Lansloet would have expected the opposite, the Bumpkins shamed into emulating their betters, but apparently he had underestimated both their obliviousness and his own master’s coarse roots, which were forever coming to the surface like those of a young willow on a rain-ravaged riverbank.

When Graaf Thirstybird pronounced the Bumpkins the best
guests he’d ever had, even Wolfmean appeared embarrassed, a feat Lansloet would have doubted possible prior to this shameful occasion. The table looked like a flooded farmyard after the waters had receded, edible flotsam and cutlery jetsam cast hither and yon, a few half-picked drifts of bone lying forlornly in pools of grease and spilled drink. Lady Greenplum had spent the bulk of the supper futilely trying to put the anxious, ox-faced Lady Foolsuit at ease, but all this had resulted in was the increasingly tipsy girl asking ever less appropriate questions of the young noblewoman.

“My papa’s got more money than the count of Burgundy,” Lady Foolsuit was slurring as Quakeyshakes cleared the table and Lansloet served the cider. That Wolfmean failed to reprimand him for not waiting until the party had moved back to the parlor Lansloet took as a sign that, for tonight, at least, they had an understanding. The sooner this was over the better, for all concerned. “How much money does your papa have?”

“Ugh.” Lady Greenplum coughed into her cider. Lansloet doubted it was an errant clove in her throat. She recovered quickly, dabbing at her mouth with a napkin. “He is… comfortable.”

“I hate it here,” said Lady Foolsuit. “It’s too wet on islands. Don’t you hate it here?”

“I find it…” Lady Greenplum sighed, casting a forlorn glance at the blathering lord of the house, who had scooted his chair over beside Graaf Gauche to better shout over him. “Comfortable.”

“ ’Cause you don’t know no better.” Lady Foolsuit burped. “You come and stay with me this summer. You’ll see, then.”

Lady Greenplum sipped her cider to avoid answering, and Lansloet’s secret smile bloomed wide and warm to see his lady squirm. How she must be struggling to bite that nasty tongue of hers! This had been a rather fun night, after all, seeing her and Wolfmean in such perfect misery.

“Papa will find you a husband,” said Lady Foolsuit. “Then you’ll never have to come back here. Why are your fingers purple?”

Lady Greenplum finished her cider and motioned at Lansloet for another. Then she darted her violet arms across the table, knocking Lady Foolsuit’s mug to the floor and seizing her hands. Lady Greenplum seemed to be crushing the younger girl’s gloved fingers between her palms, her mouth splitting into a wicked, wine-ruddy grin. For a moment Lansloet dared to hope she might bite the child.

“An angel held me.” Lady Greenplum spit the words in the startled girl’s face. “When I was a little thing, still inside my mother. I was turned ’round in her belly, and couldn’t find my way out. An angel came and took my hands, just like I’ve got yours, and he led me out of her crack. Angels are fearful strong, so I’ve borne his mark ever since.”

The two graafs failed to notice what their daughters were up to, but Lansloet noted that Wolfmean was watching the girls. Lady Foolsuit was staring into Lady Greenplum’s large, dark eyes, a minnow mesmerized by the maw of a pike. Lansloet made a to-do of his age slowing his efforts to clean up the cider his lady had spilled, wondering if Lady Greenplum had lost her temper to the point of violence, as she sometimes did with the graaf, the two wrestling in the parlor like mad dogs or Flemish children. Lansloet dearly wished his mistress would strike the child, or something similarly entertaining that would also result in trouble for her even after the Bumpkins departed.

Instead, Lady Foolsuit burped and yanked her hands free, her eyes darting away from the older girl’s. “Angels don’t.”

“They do,” said Lady Greenplum, still sprawled across the table from titties to tummy like a stretching cat. “One came to you, when you were in your mother.”

“No, it didn’t,” the girl said with a shudder, despite the dining
room fireplace being every bit as hot as the one in the parlor. His Worship did like a good fire. “You’re lying, Jolanda. I’d remember.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Lady Greenplum, and Lansloet laboriously straightened back up with the fallen cider mug. It had a hairline crack running down it. “The angel told you to forget you’d ever seen him. But he was there, inside your mother with you. Watching you sleep.”

Lady Foolsuit was growing upset, fidgeting in her chair and knotting her fingers together in her lap. “You don’t know. How would you know?”

“I can see where he touched you,” said Lady Greenplum, her wide smile every bit as mean and sharp as the ones Lansloet kept hidden inside his breast. She slowly stretched even farther across the table, and Lady Foolsuit leaned farther and farther back in her chair, until there was nowhere left to flee and Lady Greenplum’s legs were up in the air behind her, her body flat across the board. A purple index finger settled just beneath the trapped girl’s twitching nose. “Here. The angel watched you sleep, and he told you all the secrets of the world, every one, and then he touched you. Here. And his touch marked you, like it marked me, but he made you forget everything. Not me, though. He let me remember. I remember everything.”

Lady Foolsuit, who was perhaps ten years old, looked as though she were torn between being sick and bursting into tears. Lady Greenplum squirmed back across the table and half-fell into her chair. Looking back and forth between Wolfmean and Lansloet, she shrugged. Checking her mug and finding it empty, she raised her brows at Lansloet, who bowed and hurried off to refill it. By the time he returned to the dining room, Lady Foolsuit had fled her chair and crawled into her father’s lap, nesting there like some monstrous gosling. Graaf Gauche was cooing to the girl, saying,

“There, there, lump, it’ll be all right. Best be off, she’ll be
retching it out before long, ho! Poor chit always gets like this from wine, it riles her guts. What do I tell you, lump, what do I tell you? Pace yourself!”

“I shall accompany you as far as the burgemeester’s,” said Wolfmean, getting to his feet. “It’s not far from here, and close to where I am staying. Come, the night air will do her good!”

It was common knowledge that Count Wolfmean’s mistress, Zoete Van Hauer, lived across the street from the burgemeester’s, so common, in fact, that Lansloet wondered at Wolfmean not mentioning her by name. Unless of course he didn’t want these two popping by anytime they should like. Ah.

“Yeah, well, come on back next chance you get,” said Graaf Thirstybird, too drunk to rise from his chair but sober enough to know better than to attempt it. “Me and Jo’ll put you up, you need it. And mind the grape juice you had this night—get you fair fucking prices, son, keep you well wet.”

“It’s been a pure pleasure,” said Graaf Gauche, pushing his daughter from his lap. Lady Foolsuit grunted, landing like an especially clumsy cat and scrambling upright as her father hauled himself to his feet. “A pure pleasure, Graaf Tieselen.”

“Jan,” said the bleary-eyed Thirstybird, looking beyond his departing guests, beyond the looming shadow of Wolfmean, beyond his sour daughter Greenplum, beyond Lansloet, to something far beyond the sight of even his attentive servant. “You just call me Jan. Everybody else does.”

A
fter their unexpected introduction to Count Hobbe Wurfbain in the kitchen of Poorter Primm, the enigmatic nobleman immediately spirited Jolanda and Sander off to his house outside Leyden. They were to stay hooded at all times on the journey, but even from the depths of her cowl Jolanda saw more luxury than she’d ever dreamed of: velvet cushions on the board of the boat from Dordrecht to the mainland, private rooms at an inn in Delft, an enclosed wagon called a coach that was essentially a tiny house on wheels, and everywhere they went, wine and soft cheese and fresh meat. A lass could grow accustomed to such things, she thought, but Sander seemed more suspicious than ever, his eyes shining with the wide wildness of an overstimulated kitten. But then, he was mad, so such behavior was somewhat expected. The only downside was Wurfbain’s staunch refusal to let her take the Muscovite’s cat with them, but Primm assured her he would take care of Margareta until Jolanda’s return.