In a house down a back street not very far from the Leyden prison, a man
and a woman sat at breakfast on the morning following the burning of the
Heer Jansen and his fellow martyr. These also we have met before, for
they were none other than the estimable Black Meg and her companion, named the Butcher. Time, which had left them both strong and active, had not, it must be admitted, improved their personal appearance. Black Meg, indeed, was much as she had always been, except that her hair was now grey and her features, which seemed to be covered with yellow parchment, had become sharp and haglike, though her dark eyes still burned with their ancient fire. The man, Hague Simon, or the Butcher, scoundrel by nature and spy and thief by trade, one of the evil spawn of an age of violence and cruelty, boasted a face and form that became his reputation well. His countenance was villainous, very fat and flabby, with small, pig-like eyes, and framed, as it were, in a fringe of sandy-coloured whiskers, running from the throat to the temple, where they faded away into a great expanse of utterly bald head. The figure beneath was heavy, pot-haunched, and supported upon a pair of bowed but sturdy legs.
But if they were no longer young, and such good looks as they
ever possessed had vanished, the years had brought them certain
compensations. Indeed, it was a period in which spies and all such
wretches flourished, since, besides other pickings, by special enactment
a good proportion of the realized estates of heretics was paid over to
the informers as blood-money. Of course, however, humble tools like
the Butcher and his wife did not get the largest joints of the heretic
sheep, for whenever one was slaughtered, there were always many honest
middlemen of various degree to be satisfied, from the judge down to the
executioner, with others who never showed their faces.
Still, when the burnings and torturings were brisk, the amount totalled
up very handsomely. Thus, as the pair sat at their meal this morning, they were engaged in figuring out what they might expect to receive from the estate of the late Heer Jansen, or at least Black Meg was so employed with the help of a deal board and a bit of chalk. At last she announced the result, which was satisfactory. Simon held up his fat hands in admiration.
"Clever little dove," he said, "you ought to have been a lawyer's wife
with your head for figures. Ah! it grows near, it grows near."
"What grows near, you fool?" asked Meg in her deep mannish voice.
"That farm with an inn attached of which I dream, standing in rich
pasture land with a little wood behind it, and in the wood a church. Not
too large; no, I am not ambitious; let us say a hundred acres, enough
to keep thirty or forty cows, which you would milk while I marketed the
butter and the cheeses----"
"And slit the throats of the guests," interpolated Meg.
Simon looked shocked. "No, wife, you misjudge me. It is a rough
world, and we must take queer cuts to fortune, but once I get there, respectability for me and a seat in the village church, provided, of course, that it is orthodox. I know that you come of the people, and your instincts are of the people, but I can never forget that my grandfather was a gentleman," and Simon puffed himself out and looked at the ceiling.
"Indeed," sneered Meg, "and what was your grandmother, or, for the
matter of that, how do you know who was your grandfather? Country house! The old Red Mill, where you hide goods out there in the swamp, is likely to be your only country house. Village church? Village gallows more likely. No, don't you look nasty at me, for I won't stand it, you dirty little liar. I have done things, I know; but I wouldn't have got my own aunt burned for an Anabaptist, which she wasn't, in order to earn twenty florins, so there."
Simon turned purple with rage; that aunt story was one which touched him
on the raw. "Ugly----" he began.
Instantly Meg's hand shot out and grasped the neck of a bottle, whereon
he changed his tune.
"The sex, the sex!" he murmured, turning aside to mop his bald head with
a napkin; "well, it's only their pretty way, they will have their little
joke. Hullo, there is someone knocking at the door."
"And mind how you open it," said Meg, becoming alert. "Remember we have
plenty of enemies, and a pike blade comes through a small crack."