Read Online Tale of Elske by Jan Vermeer - Free Book Online Page A

carried by the servants.
    Elske moved in their midst like some captive of great worth being taken to the Volkking.
    After they had crossed the snow-covered bridge to the old city of Trastad, the party divided. Elske was to go on with the tall man, Var Jerrol, and his two servants. Parting, Var Jerrol said to his companions, “One of you will take the notice down from the door of the Council Hall,” and “We’ll see to that,” they promised him. “Good sleep, Var,” they bid farewell to one another, adding that this was a good night’s work. “These foreign Adels need to be ridden with a short rein,” they said. “Good sleep, Var.”
    The icy air was thick with falling snow. The four made their way, turning now left, now right, past ship chandleries and livery stables, warehouses and taverns. Then they were walking between the flat faces of tall houses, their ground-floor windows shuttered but the upper ones showing cracks of light that lit the snow as it fell.
    At one of these tall houses the party halted. The door opened as if they had been watched for, and they entered into a small room. The tall Var told Elske, “The wolf cloak must be burned,” taking it from her. And those were all the words he spoke.
    A maidservant gave Elske a candle, and led her up three flights of stairs. She opened a door into a dark, cold chamber that contained a bed, a chest and a short-legged box made out of flat tiles. As Elske watched, the servant struck a tinderbox to light a fire in the box, blew on it until the flames burned eagerly, then took three pieces of wood from a basket and fed them to the fire. She half-closed a metal door at the front of the box. “Once your room warms, you should close and latch the door of the stove,” she told Elske, and left the room.
    Stove , Elske thought; and she thought she understood; she had already learned latch . It was wonderful, Elske thought, to keep fire tamed in a box that took its smoke away with pipes and chimneys. Winter in the one-roomed houses of the Volkaric was a choking season, unless you opened the shutters and let clean icy air blow through.
    Elske looked about her to see what the candlelight revealed. The bed had fat covers lying on it, and pillows, too. Two small windows were tucked under the low ceiling, and they showed a black curtain of night, with little white flakes blowing up against the outside of the glass. She set the candleholder down on the wooden chest, hung her dress on a peg beside the door and latched the door of the stove, closing in its fire. Then she climbed up on the bed. She slipped down under the coverlet, as if all her life she had been used to such a bed. But she did not sleep. She remembered.
    She remembered the orderly quiet of Var Kenric’s house, and the days as Idelle’s maidservant, days as like one another as one onion to the next; and she remembered the young men’s threats, in the lonely street. She remembered the strength of her arm against their captain; remembering, she noticed what she had not seen at the time, which was how easily cowed they all were—Idelle, the Adels, the servants.
    What she would be now, Elske did not know. Nursemaid, if she could believe Var Jerrol, and she had no reason to disbelieve him. Had he not taken her under his protection? But Elske knew enough about Trastaders to know he would have his own uses for her, for his own profit.
    Remembering, Elske noticed again Var Jerrol’s eyes, how they had measured her, and then she noticed how he had—having taken her measure—given orders to arrange the outcome to his will. Among the Trastaders she had met, only Var Jerrol might be dangerous, Elske thought.
    And then she noticed that she had taken her own measure of him.
    Her legs and shoulders were already sleeping, but a newly born person behind her eyes struggled to stay awake, just a little longer, to ask if Elske had also noticed this: that