Chapter 1

Chapter 1

F

OR SOME PEOPLE,

a fiftieth birthday was a cause for celebration. A life well lived, a caring family, children and grandchildren aplenty, and golden years during which one was treated with respect.

For Nellie, her fiftieth birthday was none of those things.

She got up early because there was work to be done. She dressed well, if inelegantly, putting on many layers of clothes because it was cold in her little room on the ground floor of the palace where the servants lived and worked. It was only slightly warmer in the kitchen, but on a busy day like today, people would walk in and out through the back door to deliver supplies for the banquet. When it was windy, which was most of the time, the gusts came right off the Saar delta, and that was a big chunk of water where the wind picked up biting cold air and cloying humidity.

She pulled the blankets and sheets of her bed straight and put the Book of Verses back in the drawer of her tiny bedside table where she had forgotten to return it after prayer last night. She shut the door to her clothes cupboard and turned down the wick to the oil light until the flame went out.

Phooey, it was pitch dark in here.

In the corridor that ran from the servant rooms to the kitchen, it already smelled of pudding and sweet cakes, even if the Regent Bernard’s banquet in honour of the sixteenth birthday of his son was still more than two days away.

Her coat hung on the hook outside the door to her room. She took it off, stuck her arms in the sleeves and tied up the belt in front.

In the kitchen, a woman yelled, “It was supposed to be here yesterday! What are you doing? What are we going to feed two hundred people if you can’t get it here on time?”

Nellie cringed.

An upcoming banquet brought out Dora the cook’s legendary temper.

She treated each menu-related mishap as an assault on her reputation and yelled twice as much as usual at the kitchen workers.

Mountains of work waited for anyone who dared enter the kitchen.

Get more

firewood; pluck those chickens; scrape those carrots.

Nellie knew it all too well. It was hard, thankless work, and with each season that passed it grew more tiring, but it kept Nellie warm and out of the poorhouse.

Before she joined the madhouse, though, she had an even less enviable task to perform, and she needed to hurry.

She stuck her hand in her pocket. Her fingers met the thick paper of the envelope, which she’d put there when she could no longer stand looking at it sitting on her bedside table.

On the front, in curly letters, it said,

Miss Cornelia Dreessen.

Nellie snorted every time she saw that. Nobody in their right mind called her Cornelia. Except perhaps the shepherd, when he needed to address her formally in church—which wouldn’t happen until the day she died and then the only people who would hear it were the very few who cared to come to her funeral. The name belonged on a headstone.

The letter came from the office of the solicitor who had worked for her father when he was still alive and working for the church, and had been written by her father’s old solicitor. The letter inside the envelope—which had been delivered by a mail boy when she was working in the kitchen a few days back—had only told her a day and time that the man wanted to see her. Nothing about the reason.

It worried her. What did this man want?

She walked through the dark hallway.

A biting cold wind lashed her face when she let herself out onto the steps. Fuzzy grey clouds chased each other over the choppy surface of the Saar delta. A seagull floated in the sky, not even needing to flap its wings to stay in the air. A sole fishing boat made its way across, sails billowing and sprays of water blowing over the bow.

Bastian, who collected the scraps from the kitchens, fed them to the pigs and chickens and took the animals to the slaughterhouse, was just arriving at the yard with his cart. The wind blew all his grizzled hair to one side.

He greeted Nellie with a wave of his hand.

Nellie pulled up her shawl, walked down the steps and left through the side gate. It led to a narrow alley that ran past the side of the palace—and the laundry door—to the forecourt and past the stables that were neatly swept for the impending arrival of banquet guests from out of town.

At the marketplace, farmers sold the last of the autumn’s harvest from a few rows of cloth-covered stalls. A cheese vendor stood watch over droplet-laced cheeses, hands deep inside his pockets and stamping his feet.

It was a worry to see, this early in winter, that the wares were already sparse and poor in quality. The apple season had been poor, and a hailstorm in early autumn had damaged the fruit. A couple of chickens for sale resembled wet rags huddled together on their perch.

With all the bands of rogues roaming the countryside, the only produce that came into town was that from the farms surrounding the city.

There were no more Estlander sausages, those hard and salty ones full of spices. The seller of pickled peppers and dried fruit from warmer climates had stopped coming months ago, because he couldn’t get enough produce, and even if he did, it was too expensive for most citizens to buy.

Dora still made the Regent’s cakes with juicy raisins, but Nellie hated to think what he paid for them.

Nellie passed the stately houses of the merchants and other well-to-do people in town, many of whom would come to the palace tonight. She walked past the big church where the doors were still closed. Once this horrid meeting was over and the day’s work done, she would go to church, but she preferred to attend the smaller church near the harbour. It was a nicer place, and she liked the shepherd there.

She went through the main street that led to the harbour front, to her destination: the office of the old man who used to be her father’s solicitor and whom she hadn’t seen for many years.

She did not have enough possessions to justify using a solicitor. Even when her father still lived, this man had never spoken to her.

“Maybe you’re inheriting money,” Dora had said when Nellie told her about the letter a few days ago.

But Nellie had already considered that and discounted the possibility. Her father died six years ago, and he had never been rich. He worked for the Church of the Triune as an accountant. She was certain that all matters to do with money, including those of the church, had been dealt with soon after his death. Her mother died a few years later, but she had lived with her sister and that side of the family were even less well-off. They’d never owned a house and possessed no more furniture than what Nellie had given to her aunt in return for looking after her mother in the final years of her life.

“You worry too much,” Bastian had said about the matter, while eating his soup at the kitchen table.

“I don’t know what you don’t want me to worry about,” Nellie said. “This letter scares me. I don’t understand what this man wants from someone like me. I have nothing to give him and know no one with influence or money.”

“There be only one way to find out,” he said in his typical pragmatic manner.

And true to his word, Bastian never worried. He came to pick up the scraps, and he’d feed them to the pigs or chickens. Day in, day out, whatever the weather, whoever sat on the throne, people in the palace would always eat food and there would always be scraps. His job was as dull as it was reliable.

Nellie tried so very hard to take his advice not to worry about the letter, but she couldn’t.

Once she’d been a maid to the queen; she’d worn fine dresses and she’d eaten beautiful food. Then, one day, it was all gone. Things could change so quickly.

She had already lost so much, and couldn’t stand the thought of losing even more.

And during that walk through the city, she worried about

everything.

She worried about her position in the palace; she worried about the upkeep of her parents’ graves she had fallen behind on—because money was tight. They would not repossess graves, would they?

She even worried about her little bedside table with the Book of Verses, both of which had belonged to Queen Johanna. Nellie had taken them to her room when she saw that that boor of a man—the Regent, a distant cousin of the King’s, newly instated by the church—would put these beautiful things in the dark and damp storage room where they would get dusty and mouldy and no one would appreciate them. Nellie had waxed and dusted that table for years. She thought it would be fair for her to use it because no one else would.

And the book . . . Nellie knew every single word in that book. She knew it by heart because it was the book that Mistress Johanna—before she became queen—had used to teach her to read. She had wanted Nellie to learn, because the Queen said women should, even if Nellie’s father said they shouldn’t.

The book reminded her of happy afternoons they spent learning, because Nellie wanted to know what the Triune said in His book that the shepherds preached and interpreted in their own way.

The little table and the book were the only things that Nellie still had from those happy days, and she did

not

want a junior office clerk half her age to tell her that an audit of the palace stores had shown that some items were missing and should be returned to the mouldy cellar where they belonged.

Because why else would this solicitor be so keen to see her?

He wanted something because that was the only thing that jolted these men into action: when they thought there was money to be made. When they thought a common

old woman

had something they liked, and that they didn’t think she should have.

You couldn’t stand up against men like that, because they always won, and not only would they take what they wanted, but make you pay a fine. Nellie had no money.

And so, with each step that brought her closer to the office, her knees grew weaker.

She walked along the harbour front.

A low riverboat had just moored, and a man with a horse and cart was waiting for the first of the cargo to be carried down the gangplank.

The ship was one of those that belonged to the Guentherite order of monks. A couple of young men—and the monks were always young, because they were often the sons of noble families who were sent to the order to be taught humility and hard work—were rolling barrels of wine across the deck.

The supplies for the banquet.

The window of the solicitor’s street-level office was still dark. For a moment, Nellie feared she was too early or that she’d misunderstood the date, but then she spotted a small light in the depths of the shop.

Nellie opened the door. The bell rang loudly in the stuffy silence. She entered a narrow, rather bare hallway. A sign on a door to the left said

reception,

so she let herself into the large and messy ground floor office. A young man looked up from his desk.

He raised his eyebrows.

“I was told to come and see Master Oudebrandt,” Nellie said, her jaw stiff from nerves. She showed him the letter.

She tried very hard to speak in a matter-of-fact tone, but her heart thudded against her ribs. Her voice sounded high to her ears—childish, even.

He took the letter from her, gave it a quick look and said, “Certainly, madam. Please wait here.”

He rose and left the room. His footsteps clacked through the hall and then went thud-thud-thud up the stairs. The sound of voices drifted through the ceiling, followed by more thud-thud-thuds and clack-clack-clacks and then the young man returned.

“You can go upstairs. First door on the left.”

Nellie went back into the cold hall and climbed the stairs. The steps were steep, the wood creaked, and it was terribly dark in here.

A thin strip of golden light spilled out of a door that stood ajar on the upstairs landing. She knocked.

“Come in,” said a gravelly male voice.

Nellie went in.

A fire in the hearth appeared to be the source of the golden light. The room’s window looked out over the north side of the harbour. It would get little light even in the middle of summer. The half-drawn curtains made the room even darker.

Everything in the office was dark. The walls were dark green, the shelves were made of dark-stained wood, the curtains made from dark brown brocade fabric. A huge imposing desk that seemed out of proportion to the size of the room took up much of the space.

It, too, was made from dark wood.

The air was heavy with pipe smoke.

Nellie had never seen the man behind the desk. He was perhaps in his thirties, with a short reddish beard that reminded her somewhat of poor King Roald.

His eyes, clear and blue, regarded her with curiosity.

Nellie felt like sinking through the ground. She wanted to go back to the kitchen where she trusted the people.

“Yes?” His voice was dry, neither friendly nor unfriendly.

Nellie showed him the letter. “I received this from your office. It says to come here.”

He took the letter from her, a frown on his face, but after a glance, his face cleared up. “Oh, my colleague sent you this, but I can handle it. Wait here.” He got up from the desk and left the room.

All alone in that creepy dark office with its dark wallpaper and dark curtains, Nellie looked around. The shelf behind the desk spilled over with books about law, big fat leather-bound tomes with gold lettering on the spine.

Men’s voices drifted through the wall. A moment later, the man came back. He carried something that he put on the desk: a small flat box made of polished wood with a brass fastening. Nellie recognised it as the box that held her father’s leather-bound notebook.

On rest day afternoons he would sit in the living room smoking his pipe with this book on the table before him. He would call it his book of thoughts and would write in it with a pen he dipped in an inkpot. She could still hear the scratching as he made curly letters on the paper.

No matter how much Nellie asked, he would never show her what he wrote. Her mother would tell her not to ask, because her father’s writings were men’s thoughts, and not for her to understand. Nellie would ask why her mother wasn’t curious, and her mother would say that some things one was better off not knowing.

The man handed the box to her. Nellie took it.

The lid was waxy and dusty under her fingertips. It felt all wrong for her to have it. Any moment now, her father would come in and say, “Give that to me, young lady.”

Her heart was racing.

“Where does this come from?” Her voice sounded nervous to her ears.

The bearded man said, “There is a story connected to this item. When your father died, lacking a son, his academic effects went to his brother.”

Because women shouldn’t be taught to read. Nellie found it hard to suppress her annoyance. Why should her uncle Norbert have cared about her father’s books? The two brothers couldn’t be more different, and couldn’t possibly think less of each other.

“Your uncle sold your father’s books, having no interest in them, but this box was never touched. When your uncle died, and this box came into our possession, being your family’s solicitor firm, we were at a loss what to do with it, because the first page states that the content of the book is important; but it also contains a specific written instruction that no woman may read it until she has acquired the maturity of fifty years of age.”

“Did he say why?” This sounded like something her father would do: always making up rules. Nellie was not allowed to wear stockings until she was six—she had to wear short dresses until she wouldn’t crawl on the floor anymore. She could not come into the front parlour until she was ten, when she could sit still for more than fifteen minutes. After this time, she could no longer play in the street because she was done with children’s things, but she had to help her mother in the kitchen.

The house had been full of rules.

“I’m sorry, madam, we’re a solicitors firm and neither dispute nor investigate our clients’ wishes. We act on them with as much integrity as possible. We’ve kept this item for you in our office for the past two years so we could hand it to you on your birthday, as per your father’s instructions.”

“And what if I hadn’t lived to this age?”

But as she asked the question, Nellie knew this had been the point of her father’s words. He had not expected her to live healthily until the age of fifty, so that whatever was in the book would be useless to her, because she would have been too old and frail to act on it.

Then Nellie had a further thought: her father didn’t even know that mistress Johanna had taught her to read and write.

He had said many times he didn’t think girls should learn. After all, when would they use those skills?

So, he had made up rules to ensure that she would never get the book.

She clutched the box to her chest, the blood roaring in her ears. Something rattled inside, so the box contained more than just the book.

“Is that all?” she asked. It cost her a lot of effort to keep her voice straight.

No, she should not get angry. Her father was

dead.

She shouldn’t let him taunt her from beyond the grave. That was

not

worth it.

“Yes, that’s all.” The man gave her a penetrating look.

Nellie was shaking too much to contemplate what his expression might mean. Was it pity for the poor simple dumb kitchen maid who wouldn’t understand the great importance of the thing she’d just received?

Nellie said a hasty goodbye, because the sun was coming over the roofs of the houses on the other side of the harbour, and she needed to be back at the palace. She had her job to go to. Real work, for which she was paid, even if it wasn’t much.

Real work, like her father had never done, because he used to get paid by the church out of the donations of the citizens.

She didn’t care about her father’s secrets.