One of Meg Verstraeten’s small gifts was growing plants, flowers, and herbs alongside the turnips and cabbages that kept her family alive when the coins were scarce. The stony dirt patch that she gently called her garden was a twenty-minute walk from her married home and outside the town walls. She liked being there, away from the stupidity and noise that held everything together in the shortsighted daily life of her husband’s family and friends. Out here in the fields, she could see for miles across the water-laced landscape.
This morning was bright and even, with a frosty crispness that sharpened the smells and the details of the land. Meg looked up at Das Kagel and let its magnitude fill her eyes until only its bulk existed outside her tired pain. She often did this when the drudgery of her life honed its pointlessness on the loose side of her complex soul. She looked higher and saw the tiny birds, which she knew must be gigantic, their shadows flapping against the blinding snow.
She had never seen anything so pure. Today, in the cleansing cold, she recognized a frozen heaven. So far away that she could not hear the birds cry in the silent wind that buffeted their flight.
She wanted to be with them, high above the tree line where only the blue shadows and the majestic gray clouds spun and melted into one another. She had never been more than a few miles up its ragged, lonely path that was said to spiral to the summit. What treasures must lie there? But none would let her go. Her father would have agreed with her husband about that. It would be wasting her time, and it was dangerous. Best stay close to the kitchen and the animals. They were right; they were always right, even when she knew they were wrong. But they were back there, and she stood tall in this garden and dared to breathe the height and width of the mountain into the remnants of her imagination, which had been so rich when she was a child.
A sudden recall of that time strengthened her reverie and then plunged Meg into sadness, still tasting the reflection of her innocence before it was knotted by labor and scrubbed dull by abuse. She could even dream then, before the men undressed and snuffed it out into a nightmare. Their tallow, in the darkness, muzzling her screams, burgling her home.
The wind was making her eyes run, but she still kept the mountain in her head, where the untouched places were, the hollows that would always remain unknown to her. The spaces as bright as flowers and as secret as seeds. She had heard old people talk about such places in Das Kagel and understood that they were speaking about her. For in her childhood, everybody had recognized them in her.
Now she spoke to those spaces, but only out here, where nobody could hear her or see her lips move.
“ ’Tain’t the insults. ’Tain’t the cruelty toward all that is dear and kind. ’Tis the wrath that swells in all my hollows, filling them so there is no space for anything else to nest and thrive in. I have no family now. Only the other women who suffer the same as me.”
Meg walked to the far end of her garden without ever taking her eyes off the cloud-covered peak. Stopping, she stared down at a weed-covered section of earth, the only patch that was left to grow wild. The place where she had buried her uncle Jacob after poisoning him with carefully selected mushrooms.
As she left the garden with a small basket full of her tenderly grown potatoes, Meg decided to stop and visit Willeke Dijkstra, one of her oldest friends. Willeke was the only person alive who knew of the punishment Meg had exacted on the old man in her vegetable field decades before. She had also been a victim of Jacob Verstraeten’s lechery and cruelty, and she had been happy to help her friend, following her instructions about which of the wild fungi to pick and prepare.
Meg had let the old villain know that she and her companion would be having a picnic that day, somewhere out in the fields. When the old man turned up and told them that he had told nobody of his visit, they feigned surprise and did not complain when he helped himself to most of their repast. He had been unbuckling his belt when the first pain hit.
The girls stood up and stepped back from the old blanket, which they had so daintily set to serve as their table and seating. The second pain took away any actions old Jacob could control, and his eyes widened in bilious comprehension. He kicked and rucked up the blanket in his agony, folding himself into its scruffy irregular symmetry. It found its final composition an hour later, and the girls dragged it and its soiled weight across to the pit that they had dug.
The kitchen table, where they now sat, was sturdy, spotless, and covered with half the contents of Meg’s basket. Willeke examined the vegetables and smiled at their quality.
“They didna come from the ol’ Klootzak’s plot?” she asked in such a deadpan voice that Meg would have taken her seriously, had she not heard the question a countless times before.
“Ney, Mother, theys comes from the sun-end near the apple trees. Which I think will be a goodly crop this year.”
“Are there signs already?”
“The closer leaves are curled, making a tighter base of the flowers.” Willeke grinned and nodded at Meg’s good news and brought out two small glasses and a stone bottle of gin.
They had been friends from childhood, their families working the land and marrying across its seasons. Willeke had refused to join the clans when they made Meg an outcast. There was no proof that she had committed any crime, though the coincidence of her quiet, terse gaiety and the vanishing of Uncle Jacob seemed to have a balance that many considered might be cause and effect. But it was never spoken of by those who also remained silent about all Jacob’s other dealings with the children.
Meg didn’t solicit sympathy or ever ask for help. She’d never had, nor developed, a curved approach to life. She did not practice the skills of dissembling canniness that help lubricate daily confrontations and exchange. Meg was blunt and direct, a trait that she rarely found in others and greatly admired when she did. Many said that this trait and her lack of womanly wiles were why she had become so distanced from her family. Hadn’t the same thing happened in her marriage and turned her husband to drink and her son to waywardness?
And these traits had made her dangerous friends. Not like the meek Willeke Dijkstra, who always sat in Meg’s shadow, but more like Grietje van der Elzen, who was burned at the stake six months earlier. Both Meg and Grietje had a knowledge of childbirth beyond the basic mechanics—and both understood the powers and persuasions of certain plants and their applications; many of these plants grew in Meg’s garden. Meg had had a closeness to Grietje, which became a perilous involvement the moment Grietje was arrested by the caballistas, accused of witchcraft, and found guilty.
The women had all pushed their way into the town square on the day their friend was turned into smoke, cinders, and ash. Their menfolk had gotten there early to make sure they had the best view of the spectacle. So the women had to jostle and stand on tiptoe to watch. But they did not have to strain to hear Grietje’s words, which she shouted loudly. She had been offered a crucifix to hear her redemption, but instead she bellowed out the name of every demon in the book, and a few that had never been written. The men automatically took steps backward and trod on the toes of the women behind, some of whom had covered their ears. Meg did not. She strained to understand the meaning of this roll call. Had her friend gone insane? Or was it just an insult spat out to confound her torturers?
Near her end, when the words bubbled with smoke, a sudden new force came with them, and just before they roasted in her skull, Grietje turned her eyes to the crowd, seeking someone. She found Meg and screamed again, the sound giving Meg a prodigious slap. The percussion of their meaning dislodged years of subservience and made her head ring with vibrant certainty. Meg stumbled back and crossed her arms over her bosom in defiance and to keep the clarity and power of Grietje’s last breath inside her forever. None of the men saw this because they had moved forward again and could not take their eyes off the woman being stripped by the flames.
All the women turned away in shame, but they’d witnessed everything and knew a transformation had taken place. They moved in a reserved mass, turning their backs on the spluttering cinders, and closed in around Meg, lifting her up and away. Nothing happened after that, but all were waiting, and nothing was said.
“Have you seen any other signs?” asked Willeke, who poured more gin and then went back to nervously fondling one of the potatoes.
“Only those verminous ones, the painter’s birthlings that Grietje named.”
“Filthlings?”
“Aye, there be so many now, even in the city, in the homes, and they’re changing in some ways, losing their strangeness.”
“Are they really the same ones that Grietje assigned that terrible day?”
“They must be the same. What else? But they are changed now.”
“Changed?”
“Yes, they have learnt to talk.”
Willeke became cross, put down the potato, and said, “In a devious, lying blasphemy, no doubt.”
“No, that’s what’s so strange. They sound honest, direct, and true.”
Willeke was out of her depth, so she changed the subject to regain her position in the conversation. “So you say! But, more important, have you heard any more about poor Dircx?”
The question banjaxed Meg’s train of thought completely, and the vacuum it made started to fill with unexpected emotion, because for a short while, her speculations had replaced her hurt. She looked across the table at Willeke, tears forming in her eyes, and her mouth spoke for her: “We have heard nothing, and Rynch says we never will.”
She hadn’t thought about her son and husband for a long while, and their names sounded odd on her tongue.
“I doubt Rynch knows much about what he says. And what ’as he done to find out?”
Willeke was becoming defensive for her friend, who had just shown her vulnerability. She poured more gin and asked and answered her own questions. “Did he go and plead for Dircx? Did he do anything? No! You did it all!”
Meg was now fondling the same potato and limply some old part of her said, “Rynch has been busy.”
“Busy doing what?” exploded Willeke. “Where is he now?”
“Preparing for Carnival.”
“Ah! Carnival.”
“He is playing one of the central characters in the mock battle between Carnival and Lent. He is practicing for the part again.”
“Practicing for getting pissed out of his head again, spending money you don’t have, and trying to get his leg over any doxy stupid enough to come anywhere near him.”
Meg looked very glum at the truth of her friend’s tirade, until an inch of giggle unzipped part of her mouth.
Willeke didn’t see this and was in full flow. “Every Shrovetide we go through this ridiculous ritual. The entire town, the entire country goes mad. Spending weeks preparing, so that for three days they can wear masks and debauch themselves in the palaces and the taverns, in the gardens and the gutters. And mostly we stay at home cooking and slaving so this can happen. And all the loose women that our husbands make looser give whelp to a tribe of scurvy bastards next autumn. Three days in which anything can happen, and it all does.
“I dread to think what will happen this year with even more foreigners, beggars, and lepers coming in from the countryside, more criminals and actors befouling the streets. And your unholy Filthlings with their ‘new ways’ jabbering and fornicating over the foodstuffs and children. And who will stop them when it ends and the bell rings in the hardship of Lent that is imposed on us all? Who will explain to them that the beast must be caged and the bottle stoppered and that all holiness return? God is in His Heaven, and all sin is wrapped in hangovers and lardered away for another year. And…”
Willeke paused to regain her breath and fill their glasses and then looked up to see the beaming countenance of her friend wiping a flock of very different tears away from her face with the back of her wrinkled hand. The potato was rolling across the floor.