The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  Devils. Imps. Her breath whined between her teeth. If Mies saw them he would lash them. Take a stick to them. That was what she needed. She looked around her, saw a stick lying in the gutter, and ran over to it.

  “Now,” she cried, and lifted the stick high over her head, like a sword. “Now let’s have at it, you devils!” She ran straight at them, hooting.

  They scattered. The smiles vanished from their faces, and they turned their backs and ran. She darted after one or another, just a few steps, driving them away; her stick swung at their backs. She hit nothing, but the stick made a lovely sound in the air as it passed, and more than one little boy wailed in terror. Griet howled with delight. Long-striding, she dashed after one boy until he disappeared, and wheeled and made for another, until they were all gone from sight. With a yell of triumph, she tossed the stick high up into the air; it fell with a clatter to the ground. Square-shouldered, she marched off to find her house.

  The crowd was pressed so tight together that Hanneke’s basket was crushed. It was hard to breathe. She wondered if the crowd did that or if she were just afraid. Afraid of what? She knew what she had come here to see.

  Behind her was the broad high façade of the Fullers’ Guildhall; people stood on the roof of it and hung out the windows, waiting. Before her, held open by ropes that kept the crowd back, was the square, and beyond that, the cathedral, its door obscured by the scaffolds that filled the square, and its off-center tower rising up into the sky like some huge scaffold of its own. She thought she was going to be sick. The crowd surged forward and carried her along, nearly off her feet, up to the rope barriers.

  “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

  She pulled and shoved at the shoulders and backs around her, trying to see past them. The shout went up from a thousand tongues, and now the crowd pressed up to the ropes and knocked them down and would have flooded across the square, carrying her in their midst, but for a row of soldiers that ran up with their pikes at the ready and forced the people back.

  The soldiers calmed them all. Hanneke gripped her basket in both hands, thought of praying, but could not. She looked up at the scaffolds, wagon wheels set up on poles, and no prayer would find its way into her mind. And now they were coming, the condemned, to the throbbing of drums.

  Her back tingled, and her hair stood on end. In white shirts, each carrying a cross, they marched up like soldiers into the square. Many were too weak to walk by themselves; others in the row supported them. On their arms and legs she saw the marks of chains. Her heart sank. There were too many of them. She would never see Mies here, in all this mob. She would never see her father again.

  The executioners started almost directly before her; they took the first two prisoners and flung ropes up over the spokes on the wheels overhead, adjusted them to balance, and pulled the condemned people up by the necks into the air.

  Hanneke screamed. It was awful. They did not die. They hung there and kicked and their faces turned blue and swelled up, and as they jiggled in the air a filthy rain of urine and feces splattered down on the cobblestones under them, so that some in the crowd even laughed. She recoiled. More and more were going up into the air now. She doubled up, hiding her face, and struggled to get away.

  Near the building, she stopped, trying to catch her breath—to get her soul in harness again. Over the heads of the crowd she could see the first row of bodies, quiet now, in God’s hands, hanging there. Their faces were black. She tore her gaze from them. Not Mies. Not that way.

  One hand on the rough stone wall of the Guildhall, she walked along behind the crowd, clutching her basket. She was tired; she had to get home. Get some sleep, before her work started in the morning. What was going on here was over, an end of things, to be forgotten. Forget she ever had a father. Her stomach heaved. Not like that, not Mies. Then in the crowd ahead of her she thought she saw Jan.

  She called his name; she struggled to reach him. But the crowd was moving, shifting forward to see those dying in the rows nearer the cathedral, and in their midst her brother was carried farther and farther away from her even while she tried her hardest to close with him. She wailed, desperate: “Jan!” He didn’t hear her. Or maybe it wasn’t he at all; now she could not even see him, for the press of bodies between them. She sank back, exhausted and defeated, and slowly made her way back home.

  In the evening after the executions Jan went to the Kelmans’ house, to say goodbye to his sister. There were many more soldiers in Antwerp now, and he had decided to take her advice and go away, to their Uncle Pieter in Nieuport.

  He went up to the gate, to call her. The night was falling and the breeze blew cold and bright into his face. In the blue twilight he made out some people in the garden, and he was about to call to them to fetch his sister for him when he noticed that one of them was a foreigner.

  It was a Spanish soldier. At once he understood; there would be a soldier quartered here on the Kelmans.

  His hand slipped from the gate. He turned his head, looking away down the street; for a moment longer he stood there, in case she should see him and call to him, but no one called him back, and he went away down the street, away to Nieuport and his uncle.

  In Brussels there were hangings too, hundreds of dead, ornaments, folk said, for the Duke of Alva’s Advent. After the common folk had been dragged out and executed, the executioner stood up on a broad platform in the Grand Place, with all of Brussels looking on, and there on a cloth of black velvet he stood waiting with his ax while his last two victims came out.

  The first was Count Horn, who knelt down, and put his head to the block, and was killed. Silence met this act, the execution of so great a man, this downfall from the heights of life to the black pit of disgrace.

  They put a cloth over Horn’s body, and led out Egmont. “You, too, my friend,” said Count Egmont, and went as tamely to the block, to have his head struck off. Then the executioner came forward, displaying their heads in his hands, and called on men to cheer the name of the King.

  No one cheered, except a few soldiers; there was a breathless hush, as if all the air had been sucked up out of the square.

  In a loud voice the executioner read a proclamation, declaring forfeit and lost all the estates and titles of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, who had fled from Alva, and announcing that should this Prince of Orange come back to the Low Countries, the same lot would befall him as had befallen these two friends of his, who lay dead on the scaffold.

  No one cheered that, either. It did not seem to matter. To most of the people watching, Orange seemed as good as dead. Night was coming. They gathered themselves and took one another by the hand and went away home.

  3

  The tide was out; on the sloping sandy beach half a dozen little boats lay tilted on their keels. Jan walked along the low bulkhead at the top of the beach, peering out toward the harbor. Nieuport lay at the throat of a little river, behind the banks of dunes that bounded the North Sea, with the harbor tucked into the dredged and widened river mouth. Now the sun was setting, and although the hot light still gilded the peaks of the dunes, the harbor was deep in twilight; all the ships were in, and the nets hung like folded wings from the shears.

  Jan kicked a rock off the bulkhead; it fell deep into the soft wet sand of the beach. He had no idea how to find his uncle.

  Ahead, the bulkhead curved away to his left, turning upriver, where the town lay. There was a little market in the swell of the curve, which was shutting down for the night. He went through the market, past the gossiping fishwives rolling up their awnings and packing their baskets. The paving stones were slick with fish scales and guts. The smell of the beach came at him, the dry salty smell of dead seaweed and fish, cork and tarred canvas. The air fell calm. Out across the harbor the water was glassy still. Softly the first breath of the freshening breeze cooled his forehead.

  He asked three or four people before he found one who could direct him to his uncle’s house. With the homeward-going working
men he trudged up the single street of the town, along the riverbank. The lights of the houses shone on the ruffled water. He went up on a bridge over a canal coming in from the right and turned on the far bank to walk along it.

  The third house from the end was built down sheer to the wooden bulkhead of the canal. A dinghy was tied up to the back door. Jan knocked on the front.

  There was a light in the house, shining out under the door, and through the oilskin over the window. Someone pulled at the oilskin, looking out.

  “Who are you?” a hoarse voice whispered. “I don’t know you—who are you?”

  “Uncle Pieter?” The boy went a step toward the window, which was on the left side of the door.

  “Who are you?” the old man cried.

  “Jan van Cleef, sir—your brother’s son.”

  There was a silence; then suddenly the door flew open. “Well, come in,” the old man said sourly.

  Jan kicked off his shoes and went into a small bare room, smoky from the lantern on the wall. His father’s brother blinked up at him, unsmiling. Lifting a leather-covered bottle, old Pieter took a deep pull at it. He faced Jan again, looking slowly up and down him.

  “You’re Mies’ son? Where’d you get such a size on you?”

  “My mother’s family’s tall, sir.”

  “Stop calling me sir.” The old man went away across the room and through a door covered with a length of canvas.

  Jan looked around him, uncertain. He had seen his uncle just once, years before, when he was only a little boy; Mies had brought him here. He remembered a more respectable house than this, with chairs and carpets and cupboards and maps on the walls. This shabby little house was bare as a mousehole.

  “Come on, damn y’!” the old man shouted, and Jan ducked through the canvas curtain and into the main room of the house.

  This was rather more inviting. Relieved, he looked around him with a smile. A mat of woven rushes covered the floor, and there was a hearth with a little fire and a pot on a hook over the coals. Two battered chairs and a low table took up the middle of the room. The lamp on it gave off the best light in the room, and to this warm yellow circle Jan went gladly as a child.

  “Sit,” his uncle said, taking one of the chairs, and picking up a long-stemmed pipe from a dish on the table.

  Jan sat down.

  “So.” The old man’s gaze poked at him. “Mies’ boy. Well, you look a good stout lad. What brings you out this way from Antwerp? Get caught with your hands in the chambermaid’s skirts?”

  Jan scratched his nose. He was painfully hungry; the old man’s sharp inquiry angered him. He said, “My father’s dead, sir.”

  “Dead.” Above the fringe of Pieter’s mustache, his waxen-lidded eyes widened a moment, round with new interest. Almost at once he shuttered them up again. Drew on his pipe. The stomach-turning smoke rose in a spiral above the lamp. “Well, a man who spends his time sitting and thinking will wear out faster than one who works.”

  “He was hanged,” Jan said. “For heresy. The Duke of Alva hanged him.”

  Old Pieter gaped at him. His hand trembled and the pipe spilled a flutter of ash down the front of his shirt. “Hanged—” He threw his head back and erupted into howling laughter.

  Jan started up straight, offended. His uncle roared with mirth, pounded his foot on the floor, and thumped his knee. Gradually the fit faded; he wiped his eyes, chuckling, and leaning one heavy elbow on the table faced Jan again.

  “It wasn’t funny,” Jan said. His throat filled with rage and grief. “We’re ruined, all of us.”

  “Well, well.” Pieter looked around him at the ashes floating over his sleeves. “Life’s a big joke, boy. A big stupid joke.” He spat into the fire.

  “Where’s the joke?” Jan cried. “Ten thousand people the Spaniards hanged—”

  “All my life,” old Pieter said dreamily, “all my life people have said I was born to be hanged, and only look at my godly brother, Mies, crowned with piety and wealth …” His flat palm struck the table. “Now who went to the gallows, and who sits …”

  He spat again. Jan saw the joke; he saw, too, the deep bitter lines along the corners of the old man’s mouth.

  “He’s better off, probably,” old Pieter said.

  A little silence spun out between them. Jan’s stomach contracted with hunger. His gaze strayed around the room toward the fire; he snuffled hopefully at the air.

  “What brings you here, anyway?” Pieter said.

  “You said once—remember? Mies brought me here, I was only a little boy, but you said”—Jan licked his lips—“when I grew up, I could sail with you.”

  Pieter stared at him a moment; another mirthless laugh rumbled up out of his throat. “Oh, I did, did I? And what are we to sail on?”

  “You said—I could—on your ship. Remember?”

  Again the wet red laugh. Pieter wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. “Impounded. The Wayward Girl. Devil give them plagues and never let them die.”

  “They took your ship?”

  “Impounded her.” Pieter sucked on his cold pipe, his eyes half-closed. “So, you see. Mies was hanged, and I, I sit and think.”

  Jan looked around again at the dreary room. Suddenly his mood slipped away into despair; he imagined the Duke of Alva, looking in through a window in the roof, laughing at him. He put his hands up to his face, longing for Hanneke, for his home. His stomach growled.

  “Got the bear in you,” Pieter said. “Well, well.” One hand moved, starting to point to the pot on the hearth, but the gesture died. He nodded to Jan. “There’s a mess in the pot. I’ll get you a stoup of the juniper, to warm your gut.”

  “Thank you,” Jan said, going toward the fire.

  “There she is,” Pieter said. “Yon by the careening beach.” He braced his elbows on the top of the river wall, his eyes directed across the quiet water toward a little single-masted ship.

  “What are they doing to her?” Jan shaded his eyes with his hand. The Wayward Girl looked rather like a fishing boat. Her hull was round as a bowl at stern and bow, her fore decks flush with the main deck, a little sterncastle standing up over the rear end of her. A third of the way from the top of her mast, the jack yard of a gaffsail jutted out like a cocked thumb. Men worked on her.

  “What are they doing to her?”

  The old man shrugged. His pipe in his hand, his gaze on his lost ship, he sank into his reveries. Not tall, yet he was stout through the body, with heavy shoulders and a neck thick as a yardarm. When he fell into his daydream, he seemed to shrink inside his clothes.

  Jan looked over the river toward the Wayward Girl. Her hull appeared freshly painted. The sun flashed on a bright bit of metal by her mast foot.

  “She seems pretty good to me.”

  “Just careened her,” the old man said. “They ought to be towing her out to a deep mooring some time soon.”

  “They’re refitting her?”

  He looked at her more closely, wondering what the Spaniards had in mind for her. Like most Dutch boys, he had sailed all his life, although in nothing larger than the river-going flyboats that plied the canals and the broad Schelde. The Wayward Girl had a clean, trim look not entirely attributable to her new paint and lack of rigging. She looked fast and handy as one of the gray sea gulls that swooped and glided over the harbor around her. The Wayward Girl. He loved the name. In a flash, he knew he loved the ship.

  Now the Spaniards had her. He sucked on his teeth, wounded in his newborn heart.

  “Couple times,” the old man said softly, “I’ve thought over swimming in, at night, and banging a hole in her, so the dirty devil won’t get his hands on her, but—”

  In one of the tall houses behind them a window rattled open. A shrill female voice shouted, furious. Jan was eyeing the ship, his mind dreamy; not until his uncle pulled on his sleeve, tugging him off down the street, did he realize the woman was yelling at them.

  “And don’t come back!” she screamed, now tha
t they were moving. “I’ll set the watch on you. Riffraff! Dirtying up the street all day long in front of decent folk’s houses …”

  Jan’s ears burned and he shoved his hands deep under his belt and hunched his shoulders and did not look around him. He followed his uncle quickly down the quayside toward the harbor, away from the Wayward Girl.

  Pieter van Cleef had never had a wife or a child: only his ship. As long as he had the Wayward Girl, he needed for nothing else, not a way of making a living, nor a good name for himself, nor something to love, but when he lost her he was transformed into a miserable old man, his days empty and overcast with longing.

  He wondered what Jan made of him. Beside him the boy walked along humpbacked, his gaze lowered to the ground, his shoes knocking on the pavement. He walked with a loose stride that threw him off-balance a little. He was still growing. When he became confident in his size he would move better.

  If he grew. Probably he was hungry. He was always hungry.

  Pieter led them away down the street toward the market. He was used to getting along on very little to eat, but a boy like Jan needed good round meals.

  He squared his shoulders a little. After weeks of doing nothing he felt better having someone to care for.

  It was Friday afternoon and the market was loud with people in from all over the district to buy fish. Pieter walked down the edge of the crowd, looking for any face he knew. By the angle in the street, where the bulkheads spread the river into the open water of the harbor, two men in wide-bottomed trousers were laying out mussels by the bucketful on a streaming bed of kelp.

  “Eh. Marten.” Pieter nudged the crinkled seaweed with his foot.

  The younger of the two straightened up, smiling, and put out his hand. “Hello, Captain. Good afternoon to you.”

  “Have a good haul?” Pieter said. His cheeks felt stiff from the unnatural act of smiling. He avoided the frowning look of the older man.

  “The mussels are Protestant,” Marten said, and laughed.