Neither of them said a word.
Margriet was not afraid of the woman. The disease did not seem to pass from the living to the living. It came only from the revenants who had started to return to Bruges a few days after the battle of Cassel, men Margriet had known from children. They were dead now: wounded, bleeding, rotting. They swam the moat, uncaring how many hastily made arrows and javelins stuck in their backs. They climbed the city walls after sundown with bare hands and feet. They walked the streets until dawn. They called out names.
Margriet jumped as church bells clanged from all directions, from whatever parts of the city still had a priest or a child to pull a rope.
She turned away from the woman with the rolling pin and the rotting flesh and hurried down an empty street, cleaner than any street of Bruges had ever been in Margriet’s life.
She had a little time between the bells and the revenants.
Her daughter would not want to leave Bruges. Beatrix’s husband, like Margriet’s, had not come back from the Battle of Cassel. Beatrix was living now with Margriet’s father and sister, in the house where Margriet grew up.
Nobody lived now in the rooms Willem and Margriet had shared over Willem’s shop, where the tables stood empty, waiting for their master’s return. Two years ago, after Margriet had lost yet another baby, she had moved in to the Ooste house to nurse little Jacob and help Jacquemine care for her toddler, Agatha. It was a way to make some money. She had not regretted living apart from Willem. There would be no more dead babies for her. She had Beatrix, her first child, her only child. Beatrix was her blessing and Margriet was finally too tired to ask God for more.
As for Willem, he had been a poor husband and a worse merchant. Margriet would be able to sell the house, if he was dead.
If she could return to Bruges, that is. If the houses still stood when she did.
She turned the corner into Casteelstrate and nearly barreled into a man stinking of wine.
“The bells are ringing,” he said, loudly, to be heard over the clanging.
She had not smelled a drunken man for some time. It was hard to find enough wine to get soused in a city that had been besieged for a month. One of the churches must still have had something to be looted.
“I am on my way indoors.” She stepped to one side to get past him.
He let her pass but turned and dogged her steps.
“It’s people like you who let the revenants in,” he puffed. “You think it’s hard to block your ears against their calls when you’re safely in your chamber? It is impossible when you see them face to face. You must not be in the street.”
Just her luck to run into a man in this city of women. The only men of age left in Bruges now were this sort: stooges or cowards. This bullying fool fancied himself some kind of protector, in the absence of better men. Ha. Margriet had helped protect this city from the French when she was a child, before this idiot was even born. She had protected it with the rocks and bricks that came to hand, sitting on the cold rooftops before the dawn.
“Get out of my way.” She pushed him aside.
“Every person in the street when the revenants come will turn traitor. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Then I suppose you must have been in the street yourself.”
“I go into the streets to protect the weak, you stubborn woman.”
“I don’t need the protection of a drunkard. You stink like a friar. Now go, before I make you go.”
“Ha! Make me go how, I’d like to know.”
She had nearly reached the doorway of Willem’s empty shop. Her father’s home was not much farther, but she wanted to be rid of this blackguard.
She stood close to the lock and fumbled for one of the keys she still wore on the chain around her neck, hiding it with her body, as if the key were something secret. She fit it into the lock.
“This is where you’re going? No, too close to the street. Look at these flimsy shutters. You’ll stand no chance against them, in here alone.”
He crowded against her. He wanted to come in.
“I have no need of you. Go.”
“I will enter if I wish.”
“This is my husband’s house,” she spat, “and only I and my husband may enter here. Go, before he comes and knocks that dunderpate clean off your shoulders.”
She swung the door open, not caring whether she hit him, and darted through, slamming the door behind her. She threw the bolt across. The bells stopped ringing just as the door closed; it was as if the door stopped the sound, stopped all sounds, separated her from the world outside. In here it was quiet.
On the other side of the door, the drunkard bellowed, “Troublemaker! Termagant!”
A closed door was no kind of magic. She smiled bitterly and bit back her curses. She would give him a few minutes to move on, then dart out to Beatrix’s house.
It was dark inside. She paced. The place was as she left it, if a bit dusty. No squatters or rats to worry about in these times. No oil in the lamp, no tinderbox to light it, but she did not intend to stay. She must go on to see Beatrix.
Yet she did not like to stand in the gloom, with her husband’s tables and shelves, empty now of his wares, squatting around her like beasts.
She felt a stare upon her. She turned around and saw, in the doorway, her husband. The shape of him, looming against the dim golden evening.
“Dear God, Willem,” she gasped. “You gave me a fright.”
“Margriet.”
At the sound of her name she almost was grateful to see him. Old familiarity. Nothing more.
“You’re home, then? Might have given me some word, but of course men never think of women, never think how they worry. How did you get into the city, with those chimeras ringed all around the walls?”
She did not approach him. He stood, pale in the dark room; she had to squint to see his face. It was bloodied about the mouth, as if he had walked here straight from the battlefield without pausing to bathe his wounds or rest.
“Margriet, I am come home.”
She stood, unsure what to do with herself, as she had stood on their wedding night. She had last seen him, when? Five, six weeks ago, a little more, as he and the other men went off to wait for battle in their tents, or whatever it was men did. Yet he seemed like a stranger. Perhaps it was a consequence of killing; perhaps it changed a man. Her father on that bloody night of 1302, holding his dagger to a Frenchman’s breast, had not been the same man who once plied his boat through the canal, who taught her the boatmen’s songs.
And she, as a child, sitting on the roof tiles with a rock in her hand. She had changed that night, too. She had taken up arms, in the fashion of women and children, and had never quite let them drop again.
“Margriet.”
She should be a patient wife to him, and forgiving; but alas, those were not her virtues.
“Have you eaten, Willem? You’ll have to bathe, too, before you go to bed. You’re covered in muck.”
Blood, she had wanted to say, but changed the word at the last moment.
He shook his head a little too slowly, grinding his head from side to side as if he were trying to rid himself of a crick in the neck.
“Margriet,” he said. “Margriet, Margriet, Margriet.”
She stared at him and she understood. In the hollow of her stomach. Dead. Her rotten husband, dead. She drummed her fingers against her thigh. Her brain screamed the word she refused to speak.
“You’re different,” she whispered. “You’ve changed.”
“I have returned.”
“For what?” Her voice was hoarse, as if she had been screaming, or crying. “What do you want?”