Chapter 4 Drawn to the Edge
IV.
Drawn to the Edge
“Another girl is gone,” Dacia said. “I heard from one of the washing women.”
“Another?” I asked, then yawned. I stood bleary-eyed and clutching my too-thin wrap against the icy wind, on the premise of scrounging up some eggs for Cook. The rest of the girls were inside, clinging to the last few moments of sleep before Josef would order them up.
Privacy was hard to come by in a brothel, but in these late morning hours when all the previous night’s patrons had left and that night’s patrons had yet to arrive, there were a few precious moments when I could pretend we were just two village wives, our cheeks and noses reddened from the wind and our eyes weary from babies or husbands keeping us up at night.
I drifted off, staring at Dacia’s golden curls as she ducked to look behind a barrel for some hidden nest. She straightened and caught me staring.
But I did not blush. I never blushed.
“You’re supposed to be looking for eggs,” Dacia scolded.
“I’m too cold,” I said. But I turned my attention to the nooks and crannies of the yard where the chickens liked to lay.
It had been an early and long winter, following a meager harvest. The first girl went missing in the October freeze, before Allhallowtide.
At first, there were the usual tales of wolves and running off, but then another disappeared, and then another and another and another.
A few had been daughters or wives of good standing in the village, good girls, and so the tales had shifted.
The current favorite was that of Death, a tall lord, all in black, who rode a black stallion with smoke at its hooves, and lured girls from their beds to carry off to his chateau deep in the forest. Sometimes as slaves.
Sometimes as queens. The village opinion of the girl in question determined the difference in her fate.
I picked a corner of the yard where Dacia could not see, and thinking only of having an egg deposited into my hand, reached. My fingers slid across the warm shell of the egg, buried in the straw. “Here,” I said, offering her the pretty blue pullet. “Who was it?”
Her smile was generous and just a little sly, there at the corner, which always made my heart race. She took the egg and tucked it away under her wrap. “I don’t know how you find them so easily.”
“A gift,” I said with a bitter little laugh and quickly changed the subject.
“She probably ran away. Hoping to find patrons other than the Baron’s men,” I said to reassure her.
It had only been last summer when our long absent Baron arrived from King Frederick II’s court in Palermo to take up residence in his valley maison.
At first, we were excited for the flush of new men and good business.
But soon after his arrival it became clear that the Baron was present only to send out a large retinue of guards to gather tributes, taking back in taxes nearly everything we earned from his soldiers.
I’d heard—not from his soldiers, but from other women at the well—that he’d been exiled from the Holy Roman Court on account of some financial misdeeds.
“You don’t think it’s Lord Death?” Dacia’s question was said in jest, but it did not distract me from hearing the undercurrent of fear that swirled in her voice.
We all asked the reasonable questions: If they had run away, why had none ever sent word?
If they had died, why had no one found their bodies?
I remembered the black-eyed gaze of the burning man, looking at me from inside the forest, and a chill crept down my spine.
That was the kind of creature in the forest—not some romantic hero that whisked beautiful girls away to make them queens.
And too, I remembered the thin figure that had come for Valerie as she burned.
That was no Lord or even man. But saying any of this would make Dacia think I’d lost my mind.
“Or they ran away to the Bandits of Molsheim,” I offered instead, with a waggle of my eyebrows. The bandits, supposedly led by a pair of much-sighed-about green eyes, had started tormenting the new Baron.
Dacia laughed and shook her head at me.
“Be sensible,” I said. “If you were Lord Death, you would not keep a home in the middle of a nowhere such as this.”
“If it was Lord Death, I might rather he take me,” she said, and I could tell I’d set her at ease. But then she looked toward the forest and called. “Lord Death!”
A raw bite of wind snuck along my neck, and the moment she called out, it gusted and sent chills up my arms. It seemed the whole world fell silent, as if a speaker had overheard his name and abruptly stopped so he might eavesdrop.
“Stop,” I hissed, panicked.
Her face fell. Eyes wide. “Salomé, I was only joking.”
“I know, but …” I half turned, glancing behind me at the mountain ridge looming just past the village.
The dark gray trees clattered like bones in the wind.
A terrible burning leapt into my throat, as if I were still out there, in the field, screaming for my sister to be returned to me.
“You don’t know what you might call. I can’t …
” But my words stayed clumped together in my throat.
I was now twenty-four, and five years had passed since I’d lost Rochelle, but my childlike terror and the memory of the monster who took her remained clear and vivid in my mind.
I had never heard a story since that described such a creature or explained what it might have been.
My stomach trembled and I grabbed Dacia’s hand in the middle of crossing herself. “Let’s go. It’s cold.”
We rushed inside and I slid the bolt tight behind us. Leaning against the door, I waited for my heart to slow. Dacia didn’t notice, carefully carrying the eggs to Cook.
I had nothing to fear, I reassured myself, for there was nothing left to take and nowhere lower for me to go.
“Dacia!” one of the young girls, Odette, cried as they came downstairs, face swollen with sleep and eyes wild as she careened around the corner, flashing her bare bottom. “Is this the pox?”
Without even a pause, Dacia studiously bent to inspect.
I could barely stand to look at the younger girls like Odette.
They all reminded me of myself as I’d arrived there all those years ago, raw and wide-eyed, trying to believe this was merely a stop.
We all depended on Dacia—running to her for help with everything from a stained dress to an angry patron.
I wasn’t jealous, only wished she’d keep more for herself some days.
“It’s fleas,” I said to Odette, even though Dacia continued to listen patiently to her fussing. I grabbed a bowl of oats Cook spooned out. A spirit—pale and ghastly with a wrenched neck—hung off Cook’s back, and I had to shimmy past to avoid it, earning myself a dirty look.
“It’s fleas,” Dacia finally said.
Odette sighed with relief. “I heard Lord Death took another one last night,” she said to Dacia. “I thought he might have marked me. To take next.”
“Don’t listen to those old women at the well. They only think it’s Lord Death because they know he is coming for them any day,” Dacia said with confidence, and Odette looked reassured.
In these early moments of the day, without any customers, it felt less like a brothel and more like a strange convent of wayward women.
Josef blustered in, cursing and stamping like a temperamental goat, but he had not drunk enough yet to be truly mean.
Cook was busy letting the oats burn as she horrified one of the newest and youngest girls with a tale of a giant in the forest who held a lantern that would light his way to young girl’s beds and steal them out of it.
The rest of us were still pulling on shoes and stockings and as many rough layers as we owned and filtering down to the empty boards for a bowl Cook slopped from the kettle.
The fire smoked high and the first pattering of rain hit the stone.
A few moments later it became so heavy it hissed into the hearth.
I reassured myself that all I had felt outside was the rise of rain on the wind.
“I’ve been thinking,” Dacia said to me softly over the clinking of bowls. Across the room Josef began yelling at Lorraine for lingering with a customer the day before. I glanced at him, my brows tight, then to Dacia.
“Whatever for?” I said dryly.
“Maybe …” Dacia swallowed, her throat bobbing. She didn’t look at me, but deep into her own bowl. “Maybe I’ll go into a convent.”
I froze, my appetite suddenly gone. “Why?”
“A convent is better than disappearing.”
“These girls aren’t disappearing, Dacia. They are running off to Strasbourg or Comar or Dambach-la-Ville. Running to something better,” I said.
“I thought you said it was the bandits?” Dacia said, a little smile at the edge of her mouth.
“Don’t you think when you must leave, we will have to say you have disappeared?” I retorted. My throat felt tight. I cleared it and scraped the edge of the bowl.
“I saw him once, did I tell you?”
“Who? The bandits? You’ve never told me that. Don’t distract me.”
“I’m serious. Their leader. I saw him at the market—he had a hood on and was rather shorter than I expected, but I saw those green eyes. They are just like the songs say.”
I rolled my eyes. “You saw a farmer with green eyes and a cloak his mother gave him, it happens. You can’t go to a convent being swept away by farmers in the market.”
“Salomé,” Dacia sighed. But she didn’t say anything, and when I glanced at her, she met my gaze with her clear blue eyes. “I’m getting too old for this. I’m twenty-five. I only meant to be here for a moment. I had nowhere …” but she stopped, giving me a sad smile.
“You have so much life,” I blurted, unable to hold the words back. “A nunnery will crush it out of you.” I thought of Rochelle, then. “You could marry someone! You’re beautiful and loving. You are not meant to be in a nunnery.”