It felt good to walk the streets in chausses and aketon again, to have people call him sir. He strode into a tavern.
The moment his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw Monoceros.
The horned man was sitting around a table, talking with three boys. They looked terrified, and they looked as if they were trying not to look terrified. New recruits.
Monoceros looked up, caught Claude’s eye, and smiled. He stood. His horn nearly scraped the ceiling.
“In men’s clothes again,” he said quietly, coming closer.
Claude nodded. He reminded himself that he was free, that the Chatelaine had no hold on him.
“I thank you,” he said. “It was a great kindness.”
“I was impressed by your testimony,” Monoceros said. “You are an honourable … man.”
Claude’s heart beat faster. “An honourable man in stained clothing and without a denier to his name,” he answered.
Monoceros glanced down at his clothing—a mistake, for his eyes lit on the bundle of leather and cloth scraps and the little bottle in Claude’s left hand.
“Then you must let me buy you a drink,” Monoceros said. “Let us tell our best war stories, and see how strong the hearts beat in these whelps before I let them become chimeras.”
“I would rather a sturdy crossbow and passage to new lands, but if a drink is all that is on offer, I will not say no,” Claude said.
Monoceros laughed.
Beatrix and Gertrude walked in silence to the church to fetch the horns. Gertrude seemed to sense that Beatrix needed to be silent, needed to have an argument with her mother in her head, which was the only place it was possible to have an argument with Margriet de Vos.
As they were leaving, Beatrix had tried to be light and joyful with her mother.
“We will have to give your gold to the Church,” said Beatrix to Mother. “If we even get it.”
“The Church took my brother,” Mother snapped. “Now the score is even.”
“Do you really think you can settle scores with God?” she had asked quietly.
“I do not, of course, my daughter,” Margriet said. “But if I can raid at the gates of Hell, surely I can ask for a small dispensation at the gate of Paradise, where I shall be shortly, so let’s finish this business.”
She never thought about Beatrix, never thought to apologize to her, or ask her opinion. Stubborn to the last. And she would be in her grave soon, and there was no point in trying to change her now, but Beatrix wanted to all the same.
The ground was cold but firm and she and Gertrude went quickly.
“I should just keep walking,” Beatrix said out loud, to have it said, out in the cold air.
“You know, I have always been a good walker,” Gertrude said. “I wanted to go on pilgrimage.”
“So have I!” Beatrix said. “Well, Baltazar and I spoke about it, often. We were going to go together, one day.”
“And why not go without him?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Beatrix said. “I never thought of it. Every time I thought of the future, Baltazar was in it.”
“Let’s walk there now,” said Gertrude and took her hand. It was warmer than her own, despite the cold air, as if Gertrude were more alive than she was.
They swung their arms like children.
“We’ll walk for three days to Paris,” said Gertrude, “then on to Spain.”
But their feet took them to the little tumbledown church, where Gertrude said a prayer and smashed a window.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Late into the night, they worked. Gertrude used the forge-hammer to shape metal. Beatrix and Jacquemine sewed and wired.
They armed themselves in the morning.
Claude was cutting rabbit skin. Gertrude had stamped the holes in her copper cauldron with her forge-hammer and a sharp bit of twisted scrap iron. She put it on and looked ridiculous; she had meant it to look like a helm, but it looked like a cauldron with holes in it.
“I am not wearing that,” Margriet said.
“Good,” said Gertrude, taking it off. Her face was even redder than usual. “I’ll wear it. I’ll die the same with a cauldron on my head as I would with a great steel helm with an ostrich feather.”
Margriet had picked up a stone at the age of eleven, and clambered up onto the rooftops of burning Bruges, and hurled her stone down at the first lurching, bleeding figure who came into sight. That stone had missed but the next brick hadn’t. She had brained him, a killer at eleven, her first blood before her first blood. It did not require a fancy blade or a plumed helmet to be a fighter.
“How would you all like to die?” Margriet asked. She had been thinking about death, when she was alone, in the night, retching her bloody guts up in the privy.
There was a long moment when no one spoke. They were all thinking of her Plague, of the fact that she would be dead in a moment. Damn her loose tongue. They were pitying her.
“Is that a threat?” asked Claude at last, a little too lightly.
“I suppose I’d want to go painlessly,” said Gertrude after a moment, with a world of pain in her voice. Margriet wondered what she had watched, her children. Margriet had watched her own children die, one after another, little blue dolls curdy and bloody.
“You know,” Margriet said, remembering childbirth, “I don’t want a painless death. I would rather have pain, and no fear.”
“It isn’t one or the other,” said Gertrude.
“It is,” Margriet retorted. “I remember with my third baby, the pain and blood would not stop. I got so cold, and all I could think about was the pain. I did not care whether I lived or died; my sister was there to watch over Beatrix. And a few days later when I had recovered I took comfort, and that moment I knew I would not fear death, so long as it came when I was in pain, because then I would welcome it, and so I would not be afraid.”
Beatrix said, “You need not fear anyway, Gertrude, because you will live again in paradise.”
“Yes,” said Gertrude with a sigh, “but I won’t be here, will I? And what if there is something I’ll miss? What if there are no figs?”
“I think there are figs,” said Beatrix with a smile, a smile that faded to a look of horror. She was remembering, no doubt, how she had promised to bring figs home for her grandfather. Remembering that her grandfather and her aunt were dead, that she would have been, too, if Margriet had let her stay in Bruges.
Gertrude had made a smaller helmet out of a piece of iron, hammering it over and over again, shaping it into something like a bowl.
“I’ll take that,” Margriet said. She put it on her head. “I don’t need much. I have my gauntlets. I’ll wear those. And a breastplate, Gertrude, if you can make me one. Punch a couple of holes in that silver plate from the church, for a leather strap.”
“What would you ask for, if you were going to be a chimera?” Claude asked.
Margriet looked sharply at her.
“Why?”
“Well, why not?”
Margriet thought. “There was an alderman of Bruges, dead now, who had a pair of spectacles. He was insufferable about them. Every time the boys would play outside his house, he would tut and hold his spectacles up high. Folding things, you know, bits of glass in bone.”
“You want a set of spectacles?” Jacquemine asked.
“I did not know your vision was so poor,” Beatrix said.
“It isn’t,” Margriet snapped. “Not for things that are close up. But sometimes I want to look at things that are far away.”