The Saint-Germain Chronicles (2 page)

Whittenfield coughed and turned his eyes toward the ceiling. “About Sabrina. Let me see. She was twenty in 1610, married to Captain Sir James Grossiter. Cesily was three and her boy, Herbert, was one. It is a little hard to tell about these things after so long, but apparently certain difficulties had arisen between Sabrina and her husband. Sir James had quarreled with his father when he had got into trouble with his commanding general, and had run off to the Continent, which was a damned silly thing to do, considering the times. He tried a little soldiering, which was the only thing he knew, and then got caught for some petty offense and was flung into gaol, leaving his wife with two children to feed and no one to help her, and in a foreign country, to boot.”

“Well, she’s not the first woman to earn her bread on her back, but I shouldn’t think you’d bring it up…” one of the guests was heard to remark.

Whittenfield shook his head. “Most men prefer whores who can speak to them, which Sabrina could not. And her children were inconvenient for such a profession. She knew some French and had been taught a few Italian songs as a child, but for the most part she was as good as mute.” He drained his glass again. “She was greatly distraught, as you might suspect, and did not know which way to turn.”

“That’s a female for you,” the same guest said, and the sixth guest turned to him.

“What makes you believe that a man in those circumstances would fare any better?” The sixth guest clearly did not expect an answer, and the man who had spoken glared at him.

Charles went on as if he had not heard. “She sold all that she and Sir James possessed, which was not much, and then she began to sell their clothes so that they had only what they wore on their backs, and that quickly became rags. However she was able to afford a few bits of food and to hire mean lodgings in a backstreet of Antwerp. By doing scullery work at a nearby inn, she got scraps to eat and enough to buy cabbages to boil for her babes. But it was inevitable that there come a time when she would not have enough money even for these inadequate things, and her children would have no shelter or food.”

“What on earth has that to do with the glass?” Twilford asked, blustering to conceal his perplexity.

“I’m coming to that,” Charles Whittenfield said with a great show of patience. “If you’ll let me do it in my own way.”

“Well, I don’t see how we can stop you,” muttered an older man sitting in the corner hunched over his pipe.

“Everard, please,” Dominick put in imperiously.

The older man gave Dominick a contemptuous glare. “No manners these days. None at all.”

“Pray go on,” said the sixth guest in slightly accented English. It might have been because he was the only one not drinking that his clothes were the neatest and most elegant of any man’s in the room.

“I intend to,” Whittenfield said to his guests. “As I’ve intimated, my many-times-great-aunt Sabrina was stranded in Antwerp because Sir James was in prison and she was destitute. She had been cast out by her family when she had elected to follow her husband to the Continent, so she could not turn to them for relief, not that she was the sort who would have, in any case. Of course, Sir James’ family had washed their hands of him some years before and would have nothing to do with him or any of his. Sabrina could play the virginals and had a fair knowledge of botany, as many well-bred women did in those days, but those were the limits of her skills. Yet she must have had courage for all of that, because she did not despair, or if she did, she conquered it. She was determined to keep her children with her, as the alternative was giving them to the care of nuns, and being a good English churchwoman, she could not bear to surrender her unprotected babes to Roman Catholics.” He recrossed his legs. “My uncle George married a Roman Catholic, you know. There was the most frightful uproar and dire predictions, but Clara has shown herself to be a most reasonable woman and a truly excellent wife. No trouble there, I assure you. So all those warnings came to naught.”

“The glass, Charles, the glass,” Twilford insisted.

“I’m coming to that,” the young peer protested with mock dismay. “You’ve no patience—positively you haven’t a jot.” He held out his glass for refilling as Everard helped himself to the port. “So,” he resumed after an appreciative moment, “I trust I’ve made her predicament clear to you. Her husband was in prison, she had no one to turn to, her children as well as herself were in real danger of starvation, she was living in the poorest part of the city in a low-ceilinged garret in a house that should have been pulled down before the
Plantagenet's fell. There was no reason for her to hope for anything but an early grave in Potter’s Field.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Dominick interrupted. “Very touching plight. But as her daughter had a daughter we must assume that all was not lost, at least not then.” He splashed a bit more brandy into his snifter and lit up another cigar.

“Well, Charles, what happened?” Everard demanded. “Did she catch the eye of an Earl traveling for pleasure, or did some other person come to her aid?”

“Not quite that,” Whittenfield conceded. “Not a traveling Earl in any case, but a traveling Count.”

“Same thing,” Dominick scoffed.

“He was, as you perceive from the title, a foreigner,” Charles persisted. “He had arrived in Antwerp from Ghent some time before and had purchased one of the buildings not far from where Sabrina lived in terrible squalor.”

“And he gave her the mirror for primping,” Everard finished. “There’s nothing very mysterious about that.”

“Now, that’s the odd part of it,” Whittenfield said leaning forward as he spoke. “He didn’t give it to her, she bought it for herself.” He did not wait for his listeners to exclaim at this, but went on at once. “But that comes later in the story. Let me tell it as it must be told.” He puffed his cigar once and set it aside again. “She became acquainted with this foreigner through an act of theft.”

“What could anyone steal from her?” Twilford asked of the air.

“You don’t understand—it was Sabrina who was the thief.”

The reaction ranged from guffaws to shock; the sixth guest gave a small, wry smile and said nothing.

“Yes, she had decided to steal money so that she and her children could eat that night. You must understand that she had not stolen before and she knew that the penalties for it were quite harsh, but she had come to believe that she had no other choice. It was late in the afternoon when she saw this foreigner come to his house, and she determined to wait for him and accost him as he came out. She thought that since the man was not a native of the place, he might be reluctant to complain to the authorities, and of course, since he was foreign, he was regarded with a degree of dislike throughout the neighborhood.”

Everard shook his head. “Sounds like a rackety thing to do.”

“It was better than starving,” said the sixth guest.

The other man with the pipe coughed and made a gruff protest. “But what is the point of all this, Whittenfield? Get on with it, man.”

“Lord Graveston, you are trying to rush me,” Whittenfield said with the slightest hint of a slur in his pronunciation. “That won’t do. You’ll have to listen, the same as the rest.”

“Then stop this infernal dallying about,” Lord Graveston said with considerable asperity. “At this rate, it will be time for breakfast before you’re half done with your story, and we’ll never know what the point of it is.”

Whittenfield shrugged. “I don’t see the virtue in haste when one is recounting the travail of a family member, but if you insist, then I will do my humble best…”

“For all the saints in hell, Charles…” Dominick expostulated.

“Very well,” Whittenfield sighed lavishly. “Since you insist. As I told you, Sabrina conspired to set upon this foreigner and rob him so that she would have money for food and lodging for her and her children. She went down the street at night, filled with terror but determined now on her course. There were beggars sleeping in doorways, and a few poxy whores plied their trade in this quarter, but most of the denizens of the night left her alone. She was an Englishwoman, don’t you see, and isolated from them. It was a cold, raw night and her shawl did not keep her warm. Think of her predicament, gentlemen—is it surprising that she nearly turned back half a dozen times?”

“What’s surprising is that she attempted it at all,” Dominick said quietly. “Not that I approve of thieving, but in this case…”

“Precisely my point,” Whittenfield burst out, the contents of his glass sloshing dangerously. “Most women would have not been able to do a damned thing, at least not any of the women I know. Sabrina, though, was most—unfeminine.”

“Hardly that,” murmured the sixth guest.

“She reached the house of the foreigner and slipped into the doorway of the shuttered baker’s shop across the street, and set herself to wait for her prey to appear.”

“How do you know that?” one of the guests interrupted. “How do you know that her shawl wasn’t warm, or that there was a baker’s shop where she could wait for the man?”

“I know,” Whittenfield said with a faintly superior air, “because she kept a diary, and I’ve read it. She devoted a great many pages to this unfortunate time in her life. Her description of the rooms where she lived with her children almost make me itch, so deeply does she dwell on the filth and the vermin that lived there.” He shuddered as proof of his revulsion.

“Well, you’ve got to expect that poor housing isn’t going to be pleasant,” Twilford observed, appealing to the others with a wave of his hand. “Some of the tenant farmers I’ve visited—appalling, that’s what it is.”

“Now who’s digressing?” Whittenfield asked.

“Charles is right,” Dominick admitted. “Let it keep, Twilford.”

“Well, I only wanted to let you know that I had some comprehension of what…” Twilford began but was cut off.

“We can all agree that we’re shocked by the reduced circumstances of your whatever-many-times-great-aunt,” Lord Graveston said portentously. “Get on with it.”

Whittenfield glared around the room to be certain that all his guests had given him their attention. All but one had. His sixth guest was staring at the spider glass with a bemused smile on his attractive, foreign face. Whittenfield cleared his throat and was rewarded by the sixth guest’s reluctant attention.

“Pray forgive me,” he said politely. “That glass…”

“Precisely,” Whittenfield said. “That is why it has remained intact for so long, I am convinced. In any case, I was telling you about how Sabrina Grossiter came to try to rob this foreigner in Antwerp. She took up her post outside the baker’s shop, hidden in the shadows, and waited for many long hours. She had thought that the foreigner used the house for romantic assignations, but that did not seem to be the case, for no woman came to the house, or man either, for that matter. Well after midnight a middle-aged man in servant’s livery left the building, but the foreigner remained. It was cold, very cold and Sabrina’s hands and feet were numb by the time she saw the lights in the upper windows go out. She hoped that the foreigner was going to leave so that she could at last try to take his purse. There was no one else on the street: even the beggars had found whatever shelter they could.”

“Sounds a foolish thing to do, wait up half the night for a man to walk out of his house. Not very sensible of her.” Twilford looked to the others to support him.

“All the women in our family are like that,” Dominick said, at once proud and disgusted.

“She was desperate,” the sixth guest said.

“In her journal,” Whittenfield went on more sharply, “she remarks that it must have been an hour until dawn when the man came out. She did not remark him at first, because he was dressed all in black, and at night, in the shadow of the buildings, he was little more than another shadow.”

“He was a knowing one,” Lord Graveston said to the air. “Should stay away from such men. if I were her.”

“But she didn’t,” Whittenfield put in downing the last of his wine before going on. “She couldn’t, you see. She says herself that hunger and worry had driven her slightly mad. She believed that there was no other course, but when she saw the man start away from the building, she all but failed. It was only the click of his heels on the pavement that alerted her to his departure. It may be that she dozed, though her journal insists that she did not. However it was,
she did not have quite the element of surprise she wished for and took after
him, stumbling in the dark so that the foreigner turned and reached out a hand
to her to keep her from falling.”

“Did she abandon the idea of robbing him then?” Lord Graveston asked as he filled his pipe a second time.

“No,” Whittenfield said with half a smile. “She thought this might be to her advantage, so she leaned up against the man and reached out for his belt. You know how they wore them then, over the padded doublet and a trifle below the waist in front? She thought she might be able to release the buckle and pull the whole belt away. Most men carried their purses on their belts in those times, and if she got the belt she would also have the purse.”

“A clever woman,” said Peter Hamworthy, who had been listening in silence. “Surprising she had so much gumption.”

Whittenfield glanced over at the speaker. “Gracious, Peter, I thought you were asleep,” he said with sarcastic sweetness.

“Not quite, merely dozing a bit,” Hamworthy responded affably. “I’m finding your tale, though circuitous, interesting.”

“You relieve me,” Whittenfield said, then went on. “I’ve told you that it was a cold night, a very cold night, and that Sabrina’s hands and feet were chilled. This probably accounted, at least in part, for her ineptness. She had not stolen before, and with her hands nearly blue with cold, she had little control of her fingers, which fumbled on the buckle. The foreigner seized her hands in his and held her securely.”

“And then he called the Watch, and she was taken along to join her husband in gaol. And that still doesn’t explain about the glass,” Twilford said, exasperated.

“But he didn’t summon the Watch,” Whittenfield said slyly. “He held her hands and stared hard at her, and though it was deepest night, Sabrina said in her journal that she had the uneasy feeling that he could see her plainly. He demanded to know what she was about, in Dutch, of course.”