The Folly of the World (32 page)

“Certainly not!” Sander couldn’t believe how thick Simon was. “There’s not a militia in the world lazier and shadier than the Dordt watch! We tell them we found a body, at best they’ll be on us like stink on shit for weeks and weeks, poking around our business, getting their touch on our warehouse, seeing if we’re involved. That’s best case, mind, worst case is they just blame us and hang us, end of story.”

“No,” protested Simon, “they wouldn’t, we didn’t, we—”

“We didn’t find nothing out here, Simon!” said Sander, trying
not to shout. “Militia does
not
need to be sniffing around me, and that’s all they’d do. Think about it, Simon, think for once—what can they do that we haven’t? Poke it with a fucking stick? She’s dead, so it’s a little late to help her, and she don’t have a head, so it ain’t like they can tell who she is, so where’s that leave us?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Simon. “Where?”

“Doing the gallows jig, we tell anyone ’bout this!” Sander told himself Simon hadn’t lived a real life, that the lad couldn’t know how wicked the Dordt militiamen could be, given the chance. “They think I’m a Hook, Simon, everyone does, ’cause I’m in good with Hobbe but none of the Cod nobles, save you. Believe me, man, they’re just looking for an excuse to bring me down—best case,
best case
, I bribe them to let me walk, but what if they decide to just hang my ass and turn out my pockets when I’m dead, eh?”

Simon was wincing from each pronouncement, and Sander really was shouting now: “I’m hanging dead from a gibbet in Grote Markt Square, pants full of spunk and shit and piss, I’ve bit my own tongue off, so blood’s everywhere, Jo’s reputation’s ruined, if they ain’t hanged her, too,
you’re
out on the streets if you’re not swinging beside us, and why?! Why, you cunt?! Because Simon had to tell the militia ’bout something nasty he found by the wineshed?!”

“I’m sorry,” Simon whispered, tears rolling down his cheeks as he stared at the corpse. “I… we’ll just leave her, then.”

“Good,” said Sander, turning to his task before Simon’s spine lost its stiffness again. Sander wrinkled his nose as the piece of moldy canvas he was tugging out of the mound melted between his fingers. “Now, come over here and pull this crap down on her, cover it up like we couldn’t even know she was out here.”

Simon trudged over, defeated. “Why?”

“What’s wrong with you? This jacket’s fawn, Simon, fawn—I get corpse-grease on it, I’ll never get it clean.”

“No, why… why cover her?”

“Just ’cause we’re too smart to report this doesn’t mean some
other cunt won’t be, they stumble on her,” said Sander, pleased with himself for being so sharp. “This heap’s a bow’s shot from our warehouse, and folk know we rat out here—we don’t want it looking like we must’ve seen her and not told somebody. That’ll look even worse than telling the militia in the first place.”

“So if it’s bad either way, let’s just tell—” But Sander was done with Simon’s bullshit, and cut him off by tugging at a board protruding from the mountain of refuse. He danced back as an entire layer of Trash Island sloughed off, burying the corpse in an avalanche of waterlogged wood and the reeking gray sludge that mortared the waste pile together. After frantically checking his jacket and seeing it was relatively spotless, Sander looked up to see that Simon was splashed with foul mud from his mustache on down. It would have been hilarious in different circumstances, but even now it was pretty funny. Sander waved toward the warehouse and began picking his way back across the flat.

Fucking tide had come in while they were messing around, and Sander’s boots were sloshing-full before he got ten steps. It was only when he settled into the dinghy that he realized Simon hadn’t brought the stuck rats and stray bolts with him, meaning the lot was taken by the meer by now. Goddamn Simon.

They returned to Dordrecht in silence, other than the occasional reiteration that Simon not tell a fucking soul about what they’d found. Shouldn’t have to say it even once, but, considering the greenness of Gruyere, Sander felt the need to repeat himself. Simon rowed and Sander looked behind them, to where Trash Island and the cluster of warehouses jutted out of the marsh like tombstones, the sunset turning the surface of the meer to blood. Or maybe just watered-down wine. Sander sighed. Some life.

J
olanda never thought she would miss the smell of putrefying sea snails, but the purple pots of her youth were veritably fragrant compared to the stench that woad gave off. The herb itself was not so bad, but to get the color from it, she had to dry the leaves and pack them in piss and sheep shit, and then wait and wait and breathe through her mouth whenever she went up to the attic to check on the rot’s progression. How Lansloet could stand to keep his nest up there was beyond her—Drimmelin’s bed was more than wide enough for him, even with Lijsbet sharing it, but no, the bald ferret liked his attic, and kept to it even when the woad was eye-wateringly close to ripeness.

Jolanda also had to mix a bit of madder into the finished blue dye to get a comparable shade, but the reddish root was nowhere near as odiferous as the fermenting woad. The result was a far duller purple than what she and her family had manufactured, and every bit as time-consuming, but she had been unable to find the particular spiral-shelled snails in any of the markets she had visited during her tenure as a lady. On the one occasion she had found a merchant in Gouda who claimed to be able to procure for her a purple dye made from shells, the price he had quoted her was so outlandish she had laughed in his face. If the purple was worth that much, she sure as Mary’s mercy wouldn’t have starved most of the year in a shitty shack with a perpetually skint father.

Unless her father was too thick to realize the worth of his product, of course. The thought had come to her before, but it was only when she was dyeing her hands that she really worked it over. It
was actually quite funny, in a mean-spirited way… just like remembering that the most her father had ever been paid in his life was the four groots Jan had given him in exchange for Jolanda, and those groots had been every bit as false as the man who had paid them out. Counterfeit coin for a genuine daughter—Jan had certainly got his money’s worth out of the old dye-maker!

The wide bowl balanced between her knees, her cold hands long since asleep in their shallow bath, she sat in the dark of her room, the stinking dye making her eyes flow like those of some more merciful creature, some more loyal daughter. Her father had a traveling merchant he sold to, the man visiting Monster once a month or so during the peak season to take what the purple-maker had produced in exchange for a handful of pfennigs, and oh, how her old man bragged to be paid! Since becoming noble, Jolanda had taken to letters more than numbers, but even without a firm grasp on arithmetic she figured the traveling merchant had to be reselling the purple they made for a hundred times what he bought it for, if the figure the dye-seller in Gouda had listed was remotely accurate. How in heaven’s name her father had learned his trade but not its value she could hardly imagine…

A wicked thought came to her, and she smiled, turning her hands over in the bowl. It would be easy work to undercut the merchant who bought the dye from her father and then resell it at a substantial profit to a dyer or guildsman in Dordrecht or Rotterdam. All she had to do was hire some goon to go proposition her father, maybe with a comparatively large onetime payment to have him sever all ties with the old merchant, lest some bidding war gain traction. Her father was thick, but not so thick that he wouldn’t grow wary if his old contact and Jolanda’s agent kept raising their offers.

Aye, best to concoct a story about her man being a relation of the old merchant but having had a falling-out, I’m-the-one-you-should-be-dealing-with-and-here’s-five-groots-if-you-never-talk-to-him-again, that sort of thing. The old dye-buyer wouldn’t
like it, of course, but devil take that fraud—she had half a mind to pay her imaginary representative to rough the merchant up a bit, taking such cruel advantage of her family.

Granted, the plan would involve making her shitbird brothers and slaphappy father more financially comfortable, but the time away had somewhat softened her animosity toward them. Somewhat. After she’d bought a few batches of purple and made sure that the old merchant was gone for good, she’d have to go back there, all dressed in fine attire, with a retinue of servants, and seriously flaunt her shit in front of those sandy arseholes.

That
, thought Jolanda, was a plan. She had enough pocket money stowed away in her dress chest to finance the venture without consulting Sander, which was just as good—never knew if the old poot would start to listen to Wurfbain’s insistence that she be married off, and soon, and it would do to have a substantially larger nest egg before quitting the Voorstraat nest. The purple-maker’s-daughter-turned-graaf’s-child-turned-wealthy-independent-purple-merchant—not bad for a lass of some eighteen winters.

She began working her tingling fingers in the dye, trying to wake her hands back up. It had been midafternoon when she’d set to work, and dark as it was, it had to be long past suppertime. Sander still hadn’t come back from ratting with Simon, but to hell with the both of them, she was hungry.

As she shifted her aching thighs a bit, the bowl rocked and some dye dribbled over the side, shudder-inducingly cold on her knee. She was naked, having learned from experience, and the carpet was pulled back—her bare floor was spotted with blue and red from the mixing of the stuff. Not for the first time that night, and not for the hundredth time since Wurfbain had issued the mandate that Sander had been too chickenshit to override, she cursed the meddlesome count.

A miracle, she’d offered, which, sure, was what it seemed like to her when the purple began to fade from her skin with the
slow-but-certain pace of seasons passing, so why should anyone else doubt the explanation? The son of a purebred bitch wouldn’t budge. It would arouse attention, Wurfbain had said, it would raise questions. Bad enough they’d had to initially tell everyone she had such extensive birthmarkings, but to then claim they were going away, lightening and lightening on her hands and arms—whoever heard of such a thing?

No, the only thing for it now was to re-dye her limbs when they began to fade, which, when all her raging had come to naught, led to her discovery that the dye that had originally marked her could not be had without a large fortune.

How she’d love to pour the hated woad into Wurfbain’s wine, or Sander’s, the coward, always relenting to the count for fear of being exposed. Sander always asserted they owed Wurfbain, for putting them up and teaching them to be nobles and working out the Tieselen snatch of the Gruyere fortune, but Jolanda suspected the mad poot had other reasons for being loyal to the silver fox. Reasons that involved gobbling cock, though she’d never substantiated this suspicion. And thank all the saints for that singular mercy!

She lifted her arms from the basin, dye dripping from elbows to fingertips, and delicately shook herself off so as not to send any drops over the rim of the bowl. This took some time, and even when she was done shedding purple spots, she still couldn’t wipe her arms off—the dye set better in her skin if she let it dry on its own. Her room had grown much colder now that her numb arse and legs and hands were waking back up. Leave it to her worthless skin to feel the chill more when her hands were out of the pot than when they were soaking in frigid soup. A little moonlight was coming through the open window, but she’d rather be blind than freezing, and so she set the basin down beside her and stood.

Well, actually it was more of an upward lurch, one leg still nettle-riddled, the other awake but seemingly hungover, and she
smiled to herself as she stumbled across the room. She nearly tripped over the rug she had rolled back to protect it from the dye, and thanked her past self for having the foresight to keep her chests, table, and wardrobe all lined up against sundry walls rather than out here where she could stub her toe on them in the gloom. As sometimes happened, the black shadows of the room suddenly seemed denser, cooler, as though she were back in another benighted noble house, holding her breath as she floated toward another hazy window.

Then she was in the patch of moonlight proper, and drove the thought back under to admire the sleek, dark sheen to her arms. There was something about the purple tint that she’d come to almost like, just as she’d grown to appreciate the bittersweet taste of horehound tea. Maybe it was just that the purple kept her separate from all the ponces and bitches she dealt with, that it reminded her she’d worked more as a beach sprat than these lords and ladies would in the whole of their lives. Maybe. Or maybe—

“Oi, cover your tits!” came a cry from the street below, and Jolanda, too shocked to do anything but obey, slapped a hand over her modest bosom. Peering down, she saw Sander standing in the middle of the dark road, staring up at her like some besotted paramour gazing at his lady’s window. How long had the creeper been down there, getting snowed on, sheep-eyeing his own house like the barmy coot he undoubtedly was? “Simon’s not coming tonight after all, so you can put ’em away!”

Snow? Her eyes floated up from the still-shouting Sander. The upper stories of the houses across the way were dark, and above the unlit windows and pigeonless gables she saw that the jumbled nightscape of Dordrecht’s rooftops had a fine salting already settling against its cliffs and ridges, upon its hills and hollows. The powder was drifting through the air like goose down or dandelion fur, lightly falling yet, but the sky was the color of her sword blades, harkening a heavier snow by dawn. The waning
moon was sinking deeper into the gray clouds like some burnished piece of metal dropped in a lake, a silver horseshoe casting up pale flakes of sediment as it sank. It was like glimpsing the sun from the bottom of the meer.

Jolanda shivered. No wonder it was so damned cold in her room, first snow of the year sneaking in when she wasn’t looking. The front door banged beneath her, and looking back down, she saw that Sander had gone inside. Smart. She shut the window, her skin burning where her sticky arm had briefly bonded to her chest. Supper, then, and a word or three on his calling attention to what she may or may not be doing in her own window under cover of darkness, and the added insult of alleging that she’d display herself for
Simon
.