Authors: Iris Anthony
“He supplies the armory with gunpowder, he pays for extra masses to be said on behalf of the poor, and he provides the city’s orphanage with food. I would very much like to meet an honorable man!”
I could see I would find no understanding here, so I nodded and turned to leave.
“Monsieur Lefort?”
I paused. “Yes?”
“I would be very careful around Arne De Grote if I were you.”
•••
The boy I was at twelve would not have needed the warning. And he would not have allowed himself to be ambushed in a fight. He would have walked through the streets with his head up, regardless of the rain, so he could see the danger that lay before him. That boy would have noted there was something amiss about men who did not turn up their cloaks against the weather.
That boy would not have been pummeled as I had been.
There was nothing of the gentleman left about me now. The man had become the boy once more.
“Be careful of Arne De Grote.” I was tired of being careful! I had acted with all the restraint and reserve my cousin had taught me, all of the care I once promised God, and it had gotten me nothing. I was without funds, without friends, and without means. I had no lodging, and I had no food.
•••
I slept that night in an alley protected by overhanging buildings and then quit the city the next day. I had no doubt my attempts at begging had been thwarted by the way I looked. No one seemed to believe me the gentleman I claimed to be. Perhaps in the countryside, the peasants would be more discerning. Perhaps they would look beyond my wounds and the shabby state of my clothes and would offer the food and lodging I sought.
Two weeks.
Then I could collect my lace, show myself to De Grote, and make him abide by the terms of our agreement. I would retrieve my father’s dagger, by means just or foul. And I would also regain my horse.
As I walked along, shoulders to my ears, back bent against the wind and rain, I imagined doing those very things. In truth, it gave me much more satisfaction to imagine forcing De Grote to give up what he’d stolen than it did to imagine he would surrender them without a fight.
My path lay in the direction of Lendelmolen. As night fell, I came upon one of those windmills that stood sentry along a canal. Its silhouette loomed in the falling night. Slipping in through the unlocked door, I hoped to find a bag of grain from which to skim a handful or two, but it seemed I was in the wrong countryside. The mill dealt in water, not grain.
Stepping out, securing the door behind me, I struck on through the night. Hunger soon drove me to the doorstep of another windmill. This one belonged to a miller, though there were no bags of grain from which to pilfer. I chased the mice from the milling machine and scraped together the meal that dusted the floorboards. Then I lowered myself to the floor, taking great pains not to disturb my injured shoulder. There, I settled in to sleep.
Throughout the night, the giant sails creaked, and the gears groaned. In the darkness around me, vermin scratched and scurried. It put me in mind of the nights I had passed in the forests of Béarn. Here, at least, I was not being rained upon. And the mush and grit in my mouth reminded me, when I was wont to complain, that I had eaten.
•••
I was awakened before dawn by the sails. They strained against their moorings, the wind battering the canvas. The entire structure moaned and seemed to sway as if pleading for release. There was no use trying to sleep and no value in nursing an empty stomach. I took to the road, stepping into the mist, listening to the gulls splash about in the water. I reached the next town at first light.
There was no work, no sympathy, no food for me there, according to the owner of the tavern. I left to save him the trouble of tossing me out, stumbling through the door and then down the road. The next town ought not to have been too much farther, but with each step I took on those miry clay roads, I seemed to slip two steps backward. If I did not find both food and shelter, an insistent voice within me told me I would soon die. I hadn’t the strength to argue with it, but neither could I acquiesce. Lisette’s life depended upon the delivery of the lace. And so did the viscount’s fate.
So when I heard a cart splashing in and out of the puddles I had just trudged through, I turned to face it. And when the man driving the oxen hailed me, I did not move. I would force this man to be my savior.
“Hey—get off the way.” He waved toward the side of the road.
“I need…” I needed everything.
He halted his mud-streaked cart several paces from me. “You look like you’ve found trouble, friend.”
Trouble had found me. I gripped my elbow, trying to keep my shoulder from moving, hoping to spare myself that piercing pain. “I need food. I’m willing to work for it.”
He tipped up his hat and took a look at me. “What are you good at, then?”
Good at? “Stealing things. And being stolen from.”
A rumble of hearty laughter erupted from him. “At least you’re honest. For a thief.” He looked me over and then nodded. “So what’s to assure me you’re not set on stealing from me?”
“I’m reformed.”
He gave me a long look beneath his brow. “I doubt it.”
I gave him an even longer look. And then I decided to tell the truth. “I’m here on business. Only the man I’m to do that business with robbed me.”
He chewed on the inside of his cheek as he listened to me speak. “This business you’re conducting…?”
“Is none of yours.”
He held up his hands as if to fend off a blow. “No need to take offense. Where are you headed?”
“Lendelmolen.” Eventually.
“I’m going past. Toward the sea.”
I didn’t care if he was headed to Spain, as long as he wouldn’t leave me stranded on the road. “I shall be done with my business in two weeks’ time and headed home…” No. Not home. Souboscq was home to some other man now. It would never be my home again. “Until then, however…?” He would either help me or he would not.
“I have a farm, and I could use some help repairing a dike, though I won’t pay you for it.”
I hadn’t hoped for payment. “Bed? And board?”
“If you earn it. Reginhard Deroeck never cheated any man.”
“I’ll earn it.”
“But first—” He reached out and clapped one of his hands to my shoulder.
I nearly fainted from the pain.
His other hand grabbed my elbow, and then he gave a sharp tug to my arm. With his grunt, my scream, and a loud popping sound, my shoulder came right. “I suppose I should thank you…” I lost consciousness to the sound of his belly-shaking laughter.
•••
I awakened in the cart and found myself sharing the space with a cage of chickens and a pile of turnips. When we lurched to a stop, the man Reginhard helped me to standing. Then he pulled me over to a small hut from which ushered a spindly thread of smoke and the tantalizing smell of what I hoped would be supper.
He pushed open the door to reveal the homely scene of a family lit by a glowing fire. Two small children played with a top at one end of the sole room while two other older children aided a woman cooking at the fire.
The woman straightened as we stepped into the place.
“That’s Gertrud. And this…” The man gestured to me as he hung his cap on a hook and shrugged off his cloak. “This is…a Frenchman.”
“Alexandre.” It didn’t matter that I was a Lefort. In these circumstances, I might as well have been a Girard.
“He’s to help me with repairing the dike.”
She cast a glance toward me and then went back to stirring a kettle that hung over the fire.
“I told him he could have a corner to sleep in.”
She deigned to give me a longer look this time, as if I merited further inspection. After she was done, she turned toward the man. “I’ll give him some straw, as well, if he’ll plug that hole in the roof.”
The man raised a brow at me.
I nodded
“He’ll do it.”
“Fine. That’s fine.” She took a bowl from a sideboard and ladled something into it from the kettle. Then she set the bowl in the middle of the board, which sat in the center of the room. One of the two girls helping her pulled some bread from the fire and swept the ashes from it. The other had busied herself with carrying the smallest of the children toward the table.
The man spoke a blessing and then broke the bread. The woman divided it among the family and then gave me the hard, ash-stained end. Once everyone else had dipped their bread into the bowl, it was pushed down to me. I sopped up the remainder and ate it, then followed it with several sips from a jug of beer. There being no cloth, I wiped my fingers on the hem of my doublet.
Afterward, the woman nodded toward a ladder I might have had trouble climbing in the best of conditions. “You’ll find the hole up there, in the loft.”
I wish I could say I made quick work of the task, but climbing the ladder seemed to wrench every aching bone in my body, and examining the hole in the loft’s dim light didn’t make the work easy. Once I found the hole, I didn’t know what to do about it. My experience had to do with forest living and stone-walled châteaux.
“Fallen on hard times, has he?” The woman’s voice carried up to the loft through the sizeable gaps between the floorboards.
“
Nee.
I rather think he’s trying to come up in the world, to advance himself.”
I poked at the hole glumly. The man had got it right: I was a fellow who had been hoping to advance himself. Now I was just a fellow who was hoping to survive.
It felt as if the hole had been made from the slipping of a tile. Reaching up past the roof into the rain, I pulled the tile back into place, sending a stream of water down my arm and dampening my shirt in the process. I finished the work from the inside, by thrusting my fist at the tile and using that jarring motion to close the final gap.
The woman fulfilled her promise. As I bedded down for the night, I fluffed up my straw, settled my cloak about my shoulders, and then closed my eyes. When sleep came, it brought with it a desperate longing for Lisette, who could mock me with a teasing glance and then redeem me with a single touch. Were she to see me now, she would know without doubt I was not worthy of redemption.
•••
Due to the interminable rains, it took a full two weeks to mend the farmer’s dike. By the end of the first day’s work, I began to suspect the sun never shone on this miserable place. We wrestled mud into the cart to transport it to the banks of the canal, only to pack it into the dike and watch it slide away, down into the waters with the constant, dripping rains.
There was no work we did that the rain did not undo. I fell onto my corner of straw each night, exhausted both in body and in spirit, filled with a sense of complete and utter defeat. Each new day saw us starting again to repair the same washed-out place. “How is it that you stay here?” I asked the question one especially frustrating afternoon, when thunder rumbled in the distance and the sky was more parsimonious than usual with its light.
Sweat and rain comingled, so when I paused to wipe my brow, I could not say whether I was swiping away evidence of my own spent efforts or the heavens’. Rivulets of the stuff had turned my locks into channels, directing streams of water down my brow to either side of my nose. These streams ran down into the canal waters that pooled and eddied around my thighs. The more I labored, the greater I added to my own discomfort. “How do you do it?” I could not imagine one more hour, one more day trying so strenuously to delay the inevitable advance of water toward the family’s hut.
The man sent me a bleak look. “Don’t you mean to ask why?”
I didn’t have the energy to shrug, and the phrasing of the question mattered little to me. The how and the why were not so very different things when my hands were coated in layers of muck and I had been standing, for hours, in water that surpassed my knees.
“I tell you, Frenchman, there is nowhere else to go.”
Nowhere else to go.
That, I could understand. What would compel a man to fight God and nature, to wrestle with mud and rain, to wrest from the sea land that was never meant to be seen? Only the fact that there was no other choice. If he wished to survive at all, he must do the impossible, must spend his life doing the unbearable. He must try through any means, be they useless or futile, to bring reason to such insanity.
There was nowhere else to go, therefore a living must be stolen from the sea.
I could find no greater logic, and I could imagine no better answer. Things must be as they were simply because that’s the way they are. And so, standing in that murky canal, with rain pouring down upon my head, I laughed as I had never laughed before. I laughed until I wept, my tears mixing with my sweat and with the rain. It all streamed down my face and joined the water, which did not care from where it had come, and only added, in the end, to my work.
There was nowhere else to go.
How exactly right that my journey had ended here. There was nothing in the world for me now except this one thing. This one task: to finish repairing an irreparable dike. And after that, to deliver a length of lace to the Count of Montreau. And after that? There was no inheritance; there was no château; there was no home.
But I would do what I had to, simply because I must.
The load of mud we had just packed into the dike slid down the embankment and was swept away by the canal.
•••
There was no way to come clean after such work. The water from the well was nearly as muddied as the ground itself. And yet I knelt in front of it every evening, trying to rid myself of the day’s mire. The farmer regarded me silently that first evening and then left me to my own devices after that.
By the fourth night, I had rubbed all the hair off my arms, and my skin had gone red from my efforts. The fifth night I’d borrowed a knife to clean my fingernails. The tip had gouged furrows beneath the nails, which subsequent days of work had filled in with dirt.
By the end of that first week, I had given myself an even more thorough scrubbing, for I had determined to visit the abbey to inquire after my lace. I nearly flayed my own skin in the doing of it. While trying to excavate the dirt from beneath my nails, I’d pried one of them entirely off my finger. And there was an ooze that issued from the places where I had scrubbed the top layer from my skin.