by Patty Jansen
And Nellie had expected a story about wanting to trade magic and sell it to the church, which had already proven itself irrelevant because the Shepherd was a magician. Or that Madame Sabine wanted magic, that she disliked the church and had been trying to increase Lord Verdonck’s influence over the Regent, and things like that. What Gisele told her changed everything.
She would have allowed Madame Sabine to stay as long as she found out enough about why the young Lord Verdonck hated her so much, but this moved her opinion towards banishing her from the group altogether.
Still, Nellie didn’t want to do that.
Koby came to talk to Gisele, and Nellie continued walking by herself, deep in thought.
They arrived at the barn and installed themselves inside. Mina was delighted with the kitchen. “We will make sure we use our own food and clean everything as much as possible,” she said. “I don’t want to give any of these people the opportunity to say bad things about us. We may be poor, but we are not savages.”
So much needed to be organised. Some of the women rolled out mats and blankets for sleeping in the hay, and they needed to close the door to the weaving room so the children wouldn’t play there and damage the loom.
“I guess she told you all about me,” Madame Sabine’s voice said behind Nellie.
She turned around. If Madame Sabine was a cousin of the Lurezian king, she didn’t look it. She looked just as worn out as everyone else. “Come, I need to talk to you.”
Nellie preceded her outside. She didn’t want any of the other women listening to this conversation.
The open area outside the barn was for carts to stop and turn around after having delivered or picked up produce. A horizontal wooden beam for tying horses rested on two posts. There was also a water trough—now empty. To the side of the barn stood a small shed, open on three sides, that contained neatly stacked firewood and a chopping block.
Even though it was only mid-afternoon, it was already getting dark.
Nellie began, “The young Lord has said we are welcome here, but you are not. You’ve been with us for a few days, and I need to know your position. I don’t mind arguing with him on your behalf, but I need to know that you’re not going to betray us.”
Madame Sabine snorted. “I can argue for myself.”
“Henrik and I have been invited to the house. Are you coming as well?”
She knew that Madame Sabine had not been invited, of course.
Madame Sabine laughed. “You have been invited?”
“Yes, he wants us to come to dinner.”
“Well, well, fancy that.”
“There is no need to talk down to me. I used to live in the room that’s now taken by your youngest son. I spent all my days upstairs with the king and queen. You may not like me or trust me or think much of me, but don’t tell me I don’t know how to behave in noble company.”
Madame Sabine gave her a suspicious look. “You’re a strange one for a maid.”
“You’re a strange one for a noble lady.”
Madame Sabine lifted her chin.
In fact, the more Nellie got to know her, the less she looked like a noble lady. Everything about her was scandalous and designed to be that way. Madame Sabine made a point of annoying people. “So, then, why doesn’t Adalbert Verdonck like you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“It is. We saved you. Adalbert Verdonck wants us to abandon you—”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Because I’m not the type of person who abandons people, no matter how unfriendly or prickly they are to me.”
“And you think I am, huh?”
“I don’t know what you are. That’s why we’re here. I need to know if I should worry about protecting you. Why does Adalbert Verdonck want to see you leave?”
Madame Sabine shrugged. “Because he doesn’t like Lurezians? Because I take the place of his mother? Who knows?”
“Or could it be because of the things you know?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Why, for example, do you have dragon scars on your back? Why did Lord Verdonck have dragon scars on the back of his leg? Why indeed did you have the dragon box?”
“Would you want the church to sit on this treasure? It’s been very useful to us already, hasn’t it?”
“That was not my question. The reason I took the box from the chest was that my father wrote about it in his diary, which I received, and he warned about its powers.”
“Oh yes, your father was always so good at knowing what to tell people to do.”
Much as she wanted to defend her father, Nellie had to admit that this was right. And she was very good at telling people what to do, herself. So father, so daughter.
What little confidence she had in herself or her ability to lead fled her now. She was just becoming another preacher. People would hate her like they had hated her father. “I removed the box, because my father told me about people trying to abuse it. It had been owned by the church and I considered that the safest place for it to be.”
“But you were wrong.”
“Yes, but that is beyond the point. I took it because I was going to return it to the church. I need to know what you were going to do with it. If you intended to give it back to someone who legally owned it, like Prince Bruno, you wouldn’t have opened it. And since you did open it, why did the dragon attack you? I opened the box, by accident, and the dragon did not attack me at all. Which makes me wonder what were you trying to do with him?”
“You would really like to know that, wouldn’t you?”
“I would. And I will go even further. If you don’t tell me, I will tell the Lord Verdonck that we have no further interest in protecting you and that he is free to send his guards to remove you from our group.”
“You wouldn’t do that. You would regret it.”
“Maybe I would, but I will take utmost satisfaction from doing it anyway. Or you can just be nice and tell me. We are a group of very different people, but we have escaped from a great injustice that was being carried out by your husband and the church. We might as well try to survive together because we will have a better chance. If we have the dragon and the ship and all these people, we may see the next summer, and then we can consider our options.”
Madame Sabine was silent for a while. They had stopped walking, and she was looking over the fence into the paddock where a couple of dopey horses grazed.
Nellie continued, “All right, since you are not very forthcoming, I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re a spy for the Lurezian king or the Belaman Church.”
“Lies. All lies. I don’t spy for anyone. Those men accept your help and then when you have helped make them richer, they turn around and betray you.”
“Then tell me what the story is.”
“You’re not going to give up, are you?”
Nellie shook her head. “We have all risked our lives getting here. I won’t risk my life any further by supporting someone who may betray me.”
Madame Sabine let out a breath. “I’m sure Gisele has told you all the sordid gossip about my family, about my cheating father and my brave mother.”
“Some of it, yes.”
“Soon after she left her husband, she fell ill and died. I was alone, sixteen, and my mother’s family didn’t know what to do with me, so they married me off to an old man. He owned the house where the Science Guild first met. He also forbade me from ever talking to anyone who visited, or ever going into the room where he kept all his experiments. He was not bad to me—he wasn’t interested in me in any kind of way—he simply needed a wife to look after him. I secretly went into his room and looked at all the things he was doing. He was working on balloons. Unfortunately, he was old and died soon after. Some people in his family didn’t like me. They said I was too outspoken for a woman, and they blamed me for his death. I had nowhere left to go, so I dressed myself as a man and went to the army because they were recruiting. It took th
em about a year to figure out that I was a woman.”
Nellie looked at her full figure and found it a bit hard to believe.
“I was a lot skinnier back then. That is one of the problems when you’re not allowed to do anything. You end up eating too much.”
Not that that had any ever been a problem in Nellie’s life.
“But instead of casting me into the street, the commander had plans for me. He wanted me to infiltrate the Science Guild to see if there were useful developments in technology the army could use. So I visited all the meetings because they were not as difficult for a woman to get into as they were for a soldier. This is how I found out that the army wanted to use balloons, and began to consider the study of them as more than a frivolous pursuit. I studied everything there was to know about them, I made diagrams and sewed sheets together into huge gasbags. I helped make the baskets and I helped with the first very short flights. But once the project was starting to look like it might be successful, people didn’t want me to get any credit for it. I had an argument with the commander and that was the end of my involvement with the army.
“But I didn’t want to give up working with these new balloons. Especially not once the Eastern traders came with the iron ships and dragons. We can’t sit and do nothing while people in other parts of the world develop new things. But I had no money and no one to support me. That was when I met Bernard, who offered to help me out if I married him. It seemed the lesser of two bad options. Whore myself honourably or dishonourably. The only thing he ever wanted from me was an heir, so when that was done, we lived separately.”
Nellie wanted to ask whether she cared for the boys at all, but she was almost afraid to hear the answer. It was clear to her that Madame Sabine did not.
Madame Sabine continued, “I later discovered that Bernard was a great deceiver. He pretended to have lots of money, and I only found out that he didn’t after I had married him. He thought I had money because of my family. But my mother and I had not been nobles for years. That is my story.”
“But what about the things you have in the young Lord Verdonck’s shed that he said he was going to burn?”
“His father and I collected many items that would be helpful in our study of flight. We started to construct balloons. It would be a tragedy if they were burned.”
“Can I see them?”
Madame Sabine gave her a suspicious look and shook her head. Nellie had expected her to say no, but then Madame Sabine said, “Why not? It’s not far from here.”
She looked around the countryside. “I don’t think anyone will be watching. The fields are empty, and no one will see us.”
Nellie wasn’t so sure, but she wanted to know whether these things in the shed were worth her loyalty. She still wasn’t quite sure whether to trust Madame Sabine, and history had proven that she probably should not, but she didn’t want to make any decisions without knowing what all of this was about.
They set off along another lane. For a while they said nothing, and they walked next to each other with breath steaming in the misty air. The horses in the paddock barely moved. If Nellie had the dragon with her, they would be more interested.
“It’s a tragedy that Ronald’s son is so much against my work,” Madame Sabine said eventually.
“Has he said why?”
“Don’t ask me to explain the thoughts of men.”
“Are you sure it’s your work he has a problem with?”
A sharp look. “Well, he himself is not exactly a paragon of loyalty to his wife.”
“Is he married?”
“He was, but his wife couldn’t give him children, so he’s looking for a new one.”
Sometimes Nellie was glad she was not part of the noble class. These people were so horrible to each other. You would think they would look out for each other, instead of always stabbing each other in the back.
After walking for a while, they arrived at a second barn. From here, you could see a couple of houses in the valley.
“That is where the farm workers live,” Madame Sabine said. “They’ll probably notice us here and tell Adalbert that we have been here. He might think I’m going to remove all this from his shed.” She opened the door to the shed, and they went inside.
At first Nellie didn’t know what she was looking at. The floor of the barn was full of strange pieces of equipment. Wooden frames, metal struts, structures made from baskets.
On a big wooden beam that crossed the room and supported the roof hung a big piece of fabric. Next to it was leather harness much too big for a sea cow.
And now Nellie understood. “You wanted to get the dragon to pull you.”
“It was a good idea, but it didn’t work. The problem with these balloons is that they get carried by the wind. Another problem is that they are either too heavy or too light, and it is very hard to control how high they fly. You need to carry weight, and once you have dropped the weights the only way to get down is by letting air out of the bladder. That means you can’t go back up again, and if there is a wall in your way when you’re flying over a city, you don’t want to be in that situation. So we heard of these magical flying creatures and wanted to try it for ourselves.”
“How did you know where the dragon was?”
“Are you kidding? How did you know?”
Nellie knew through her father, obviously, but had Sabine ever met him? “How well did you know my father?”
“Not very well. When he died, I had just arrived at the palace. He was already old and bitter and had stopped working for the church. He didn’t come to the meetings of the society that he started, and he said that we were all twisting his ideas.”
“He was not a very easy man to get on with,” Nellie said. It felt great to have finally admitted this. She was sick of defending her father. He might be dead, but he would not have liked her defending him. He would have been very capable of defending himself.
“He must have told some people about the dragon, because soon after I started going to the Science Guild meetings, two deacons broke into the church crypt and attempted to open the dragon box. We heard about it from a monk. The two deacons never said a word about what they had seen, but they almost burned down the crypt, so it was clear to us. Rumour went that when the dragon came out of the box, they had panicked and tried to kill it.”
“Why did you think you wouldn’t suffer the same fate?”
“We were different. We weren’t going to harm the creature.”
Then Nellie also noticed the scorch marks on the beams. “Let me guess. You paid someone who had access to the crypt to steal the box. You brought the dragon here, you opened the box, and then you tried to tie him into the harness as if he were a sea cow.”
“Pretty much.”
“And the dragon decided that he didn’t like to be treated that way and he attacked you.”
“That was a wild night. We opened the box and the dragon came out in a ball of flames. We tried to tie it in the harness, but the creature ended up bucking and flying like crazy, dragging the gasbag behind it until the bag caught fire when it emptied and the dragon knocked over the oil lamp. All our work was ruined. I’ve had to make an entirely new balloon, but the good thing is that I could try a new design.”
“How did you get the dragon back into the box?”
“Ronald managed to catch it with a magic net. We were lucky it didn’t escape.”
“I don’t know how much the dragon can escape. I’m pretty sure he needs to stay close to the box. If you have the box, he will always come back to the area.”
“And it will probably stay close to its owner. I don’t think anyone else knew that the Prince was still alive, but the dragon did. It did not want to be in this barn without the prince.”
And that, eventually made Nellie decide to trust Madame Sabine, at least for the time being. And even if she didn’t trust Madame Sabine, she could see some uses for this contraption. She would do everything she could to prevent Adalbert Verdon
ck burning all this work.
And that meant they had to find another place to live.
Chapter 5
AS ADALBERT VERDONCK had promised, a guard came to the barn later in the afternoon.
Before that time, Nellie had scoured the ship to find something suitable to wear. She only had the clothes she had left the palace with, and they were very dirty. Not suitable at all for a visit to a lord’s house. The cupboards below the deck held a few habits, and while Nellie hadn’t expected to find any women’s clothes there, she’d hoped for something to make herself a bit more respectable.
Not finding it, she tried to fix up her hair, but she had no comb, and she’d lost some of her hairpins.
Henrik still wore his smudged uniform. No amount of rubbing would remove a black stain from the lapel, and Nellie decided it was not that important. Running an agricultural estate, the young lord would be used to people coming into the house looking like peasants.
So when the guard turned up, Nellie and Henrik still looked very much like peasants, and dirty ones at that.
It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was already setting over the fields as they walked along the tree-lined lane through the fallow fields and leafless orchards. The estate lay in the middle of a well-tended garden with clipped bushes and a garden house where the lady of the house, if there was one, would entertain guests in summer—if they ever received guests this far out of the city.
A moat wide enough for a river ship surrounded the garden, and a drawbridge provided the only crossing to the safe island haven that surrounded the house.
This house was a sprawling affair, two storeys tall at most, with an attached stable, servant housing and storage sheds.
They went in through the main doors, where a servant took Henrik’s coat. His shirt underneath had also once been cleaner. Nellie was a little embarrassed to see that there was a rip in the back of his shirt.
She herself probably looked no better.
They went across the hallway past a sweeping staircase into an audience room on the ground floor.
