Samuel snatched the vase and held it as a shield, hoping his opponent wouldn’t risk shooting at the bulb as long as he believed it to be authentic. Marselis, without a thought, shot at John.
From the center of his shirt a dark red blotch spread fast and his body fell. Bridget cried out in terror as Marselis calmly reloaded the pistol and aimed it at her. “Signor Fulla, you’re still valuable until you tell me your secret, but you’re running out of friends. You came to trade. So let’s trade: she keeps her life, and I keep the flower.”
Seeing no other option, Samuel hurled the vase at Marselis, breaking it against his head. He grabbed Bridget by the arm and made for the door. She resisted being parted from John, and Samuel yelled, “No time. Run!”
He pulled her out of the hall and headed for the main door, but it was guarded by more servants. She turned and saw another way. “Upstairs! Come!” she yelled.
They hurried to the next floor, ignoring the angry screams from below. Sensing their chaser’s approach, they picked a room and hid inside. Samuel dragged a massive desk to block the door and collapsed, overcome with the burst of effort.
Bridget sat on the rug by his side, finally letting herself cry, both for her life and for John’s. She was shaking, muttering incomprehensible words that Samuel wished Marselis wouldn’t hear.
“You can’t stay hidden,” said Marselis from outside. “You’re in my house, and you have no way out.”
That wasn’t quite true; Samuel noticed that the room, which was furnished like an office, had a large window looking over the main entrance of the house. But he also saw, when he drew the curtain open, a group of servants gathering outside despite the cold, no doubt expecting their attempt to flee.
He regretted having destroyed the vase. Marselis must have already ordered someone to pick up the bulb and replant it. As soon as it were discovered to be nothing but layers of tinted leather, it would no longer matter whether they succeeded at leaving the house: there would be no hiding place for them.
The desk moved a notch, pushing Bridget out of her commotion. She looked up and noticed that the door to the office was being forced. “The desk won’t be enough,” she warned. Samuel looked around for another piece of furniture to add to the door, but there were only a few chairs, a lit fireplace with no useful implements, and a bookcase that proved immovable; his efforts only managed to drop a dozen books to the floor. Bridget felt strange seeing such a big man be so lacking in muscle, and climbed onto the desk to add her own weight to it. He saw the sense in her decision and joined her on the desk.
She looked behind her and toward the door. The shoves had ceased, but not knowing what Marselis could be planning felt worse. “Today we die.”
“What happened to that faith of yours?” spat Samuel, and he bit his tongue one moment too late. She had just become a widow, and he felt a pang of guilt for his harshness.
For the first time since he had met her, she laughed, the sound mixing with her sobs. “You wonder about my faith?” She rubbed her face with her hands, trying to get rid of tears that kept coming. “To think that all those years in Leiden, I believed my faith was being tested. I believed my life was bad. Look at us now.”
“What was bad about your life?”
Bridget had a long look at her cousin, focusing her attention on the scar on his face to avoid picturing the years of horror she knew he’d been through. To complain of a hard life in front of this man had a taste of the incongruous. She shook away the feeling and pushed her mind back to his question. “Perhaps you remember what the congregation used to teach about life in Holland. That it was too evil for us.”
“The way I remember it,” he replied, “we were too good for it. I didn’t see how wrong we’d been until I saw Istanbul.” His gaze tried to reach past the window, beyond the horizon and around the curve of the globe. “They were other people, and they were like us. They lived their lives the best way they knew how to. Like everyone.”
“You don’t think our parents found some truth that no one else saw?”
“And what could it have been?” He tried to keep a level tone, but the unseen threat from behind the door kept his nerves on alert. “There is no better place to live, in all of Christendom, than Holland. If our parents were so unhappy here, why didn’t they just move to Geneva? No, they had to build their own Geneva, just a more insufferable one. Tell me: did you really want to be with them in whatever new nation they wanted to make? I shudder to even picture what that place must have been like. Can’t you fathom the horror of taking the worst of Europe’s wars and making it the norm for everyday life? Is that what you yearned for?” He shut up when he remembered that John had described the same desire just minutes before dying. “I should probably be speaking of other things right now.”
“I’ve never been one to be afraid of truth.”
Samuel had to admit he’d found something to admire in her. “That’s a trait you didn’t get from our family.”
“I am my own person.” She rearranged the papers on the desk to sit more comfortably and saw there were diagrams on several of them. “Do you understand what these are about?”
He held a paper aloft and frowned. “I don’t know anything about shipbuilding, but this design makes no sense.” The craft depicted was all hull and no masts; it had no discernible way to sail. He looked at the back of the sheet and saw lists of numbers and names he didn’t know. He read aloud, “Hafgufuprojektet.” He raised an eyebrow at Bridget. “This is not Dutch.”
“Marselis trades with King Christian; maybe it’s Danish.”
Samuel left the paper with the others, resigned to not having answers. “We could be sitting on the secret of how they get to China and we’d never know it.”
A gunshot passed through the door and between their heads, shattering one of the windowpanes. They jumped down from the desk and crouched in front of it, putting their combined weight against the door. Bridget closed her eyes, where tears were forming again.
“I can’t wait all day,” said the voice of Marselis. “I’ll break this door open.”
They heard his steps grow fainter, and Bridget risked raising her head above the desk. “He must have gone to fetch an axe. What do we do?”
Samuel’s eyes roamed for an answer, but apart from the fireplace, the bookcase and the chairs, the only item at hand was the desk behind his back. He considered leaving his post to do a proper search, but it would only let Marselis burst his way in. His tired gaze rested on the floor, where thin rectangles of afternoon light were starting to form by the window. Again it drew his attention; it spanned the entire height from floor to ceiling. He felt the impulse to take that exit but knew he’d only jump into the hands of his pursuers. It was pointless to even plan on waiting for them to leave the spot under the window; Marselis must have guessed he’d want to try that way out, and ordered his men to stand ready to catch him or Bridget.
A plan began to form in his mind, a way to take advantage of their position.
“They’re expecting us to jump,” he whispered, nodding toward the window.