Fiction
The Secret at Minnewater
About the Book
Brugge, 1444. Ten pieces of red cloth leave Mahieu Huyt’s dye yard. Twelve appear in the accounts. When young clerk Emmerik Saye is found dead at Minnewater, a dispute over cloth and money draws Mahieu’s son Severin into suspicion. Dismas Loete and his daughter Alix follow the small, stubborn discrepancies left behind: a mark on a board, a questionable debt, a key whose presence tells the wrong story. As the inquiry reaches from a working family’s yard into a wealthy merchant’s household, secrets threaten livelihoods, marriages, and loyalties. In a city built on trade, someone has made a young man’s silence worth more than his life. The Secret at Minnewater is a historical murder mystery of family, ambition, and the price of an honest account.
STORY COMPLETE · PUBLICATION DECEMBER 1, 2026
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The boy had found a way to carry cloth without looking like a dyer’s son.
He stood beside the cart with one glove tucked into his belt and the other still on his hand. The gloves were pale leather, too fine for the morning’s work, and he had managed to keep them clean while everything around him bore some evidence of the yard. Madder in the creases of a knuckle. Red beneath a nail. A smear of pale dust on the horse’s nose, where it had investigated a basket it should have left alone.
Mahieu Huyt watched his son adjust the cuff of his coat. He had paid his dues to the red-dyers’ craft before buying himself a new one. The blue dyers had their own work and their own rights; a man did not add a woad vat because a customer asked.
“Take that off.”
“The coat?”
“The glove. You’ll drop your end.”
“I have carried cloth before.”
“Then you know how.”
Severin drew off the glove one finger at a time. He did this without haste, which was his way of showing that haste had been demanded unfairly. He was twenty-two, long in the back, narrow at the waist, with his mother’s fine straight nose and a dark growth of beard he shaved more often than it needed. Mahieu had been pleased when the beard first appeared. Now he found himself wishing the boy had remained seventeen for another year or two.
They lifted the first piece together.
The cloth was a deep red that would look brown in a poor room. Mahieu had spent three days bringing it to the color the buyer wanted, and another morning persuading the buyer’s man that the color was what he had asked for. Such men liked to carry dissatisfaction from one house to another. It allowed them to appear useful.
Across the yard, a woman was holding a strip of undyed wool against the daylight. Mahieu’s wife did not call after them. Kateline had already told them what they needed to hear: the left wheel wanted looking at; the horse had a sore place under the collar; and Severin was not to buy anything on the strength of money they had not yet received.
The last instruction had been addressed to the cloth.
“Ten,” Mahieu said when the cart was loaded.
“I can count.”
“So can I. Ten.”
Meet the Author
John K. Milius
John K. Milius brings four decades of sales, leadership, customer relationships, and hard-earned commercial judgment to the page. His fiction turns that same eye toward Brugge—a city of water, memory, history, and stories waiting beneath the stones.
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