The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  “Hush,” said the older man, Marten’s father. “Keep your fool’s tongue.”

  Pieter scratched his jaw. “Don’t suppose you have any bit of work for an old man who needs something for his gut.”

  “No,” said Marten’s father, harsh. “No charity for pirates.”

  “Father,” Marten said, objecting. He stooped over the heap of mussels and began shoveling the shells into a bucket.

  “I said no!”

  “Well, now,” Pieter said, edging away. “I don’t want to put strife between a man and his son—”

  “The catch is half mine,” Marten said, with a glare at his father, and brought Pieter the bucket.

  “Thank you,” Pieter said. Another thing that came unnaturally. He carried the bucket off down the street; behind him Marten and his father argued in loud voices.

  Pieter’s nephew had wandered off. Presently he reappeared, and, the tide being in, they went across the street to the wharf. Pieter sat down on the wharf, his legs over the edge, took out his knife, and reached for a mussel.

  Jan got his own knife. They sat there with the bucket between them, opening the mussels and eating them off the shell. After a few mussels had slipped down his throat, Jan reached into his shirt and took out a sausage, bit off a chunk, and held it out to Pieter.

  The old man goggled at it in surprise. “Where did you get that?”

  “Back in the market.”

  “Someone gave it to you?”

  “I stole it.”

  “Stole it.”

  Pieter snatched the long brown sausage out of Jan’s hand. Springing up onto his feet, he brought the sausage down like a club over Jan’s head.

  “Hey,” Jan cried, recoiling under his raised forearm. “What’s the matter?”

  “Never steal from your own people!” Pieter smacked him again with the sausage and whirled and flung it end over end out into the harbor. In the cloudless air above him a gull let out a scream of greed and sailed toward the splash.

  “I’m hungry,” Jan shouted.

  Pieter shoved the mussels at him. “Eat.” He sat down, shutting up his knife into its whalebone handle.

  “I need more than this!”

  The old man glared at him. “I didn’t ask you to come here.”

  Jan’s face was stiff with bad temper; he looked very young, and much like Mies, who, although delicate and high-minded as a nun, had often shown a choler fit for a fighting man.

  “I don’t need you,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “You don’t steal from your own kind, you big square-headed fool,” said Pieter.

  “I’ll steal from anybody who has anything!”

  “Not from your own people.”

  “My people. They aren’t my people—where were they when my father—”

  He gulped, his face red and swollen with rage. Pieter poked his finger at the boy’s chest. “You have to live here, you fool—if they think you’re a thief, you’ll get nothing but hard looks and blows!”

  “You sound like my sister.” Jan got halfway to his feet; he was running away. Then to Pieter’s amazement he fell back sitting onto the board of the wharf and burst into tears.

  “Oh, there, now,” Pieter said, uneasy.

  The boy wept voluminously as a woman, all his feeling gushing out in rivers, his hands over his face. Pieter watched him a moment. He preferred the boy’s rage, which he could argue with. Finally he put out his hand and touched Jan’s shoulder.

  “There, now,” he said again, feeling foolish.

  Jan shook his head; tears splattered his shoulders. “Hanneke,” he cried, in a broken voice. “Hanneke. I want Hanneke, and Papa, and my mother. I want Hanneke.”

  Pieter stroked his back, keeping at arm’s length from the unseemly storm of feeling. “Come on, now. A man doesn’t cry.”

  “I’m sick of being a man!”

  Mumbling sounds like words, Pieter patted his back a little more; he wondered what sort of water ran in Jan’s veins, that he cried for his sister, a big strong boy like this. But now he found himself thinking of his brother, Mies, hanged in Brussels, and of the Wayward Girl, and his eyes began to ache painfully with tears of his own.

  None of that, now. He got heavily up onto his feet. “Well, let’s go find something fit to eat.” With either hand he grabbed the pail of mussels and his nephew and towed them off down the street.

  “So we laid up a while by The Lizard,” Pieter said, loud; the beer and juniper in his belly had him stoked to a full roar. “Staying up there to windward of them, and the day broke, and the storm lifted. There was sail all over the sea, there, Spanish crosses, like sheep scattered in a field, just ready to pick off.”

  He stopped for a deep draught of his liquor. He was sitting on the bench in front of a wharfside tavern; several other men lounged around him, sucking their pipes, and drinking, and looking out across the harbor. Red Aart, whose tavern it was, came along the front sweeping the paving stones, a dirty apron tied around his waist. No one paid much heed to Pieter and his story, which they had all heard twenty times or more, but the old man did not mind their inattention; the story drove up irresistibly within him, like a whale breaching.

  “So we went down toward the galleon. She was rolling like a barrel in the troughs of the waves, two masts gone, and the mizzen down over her bow, all the sail and rigging dragging along beside her in the water …”

  Jan sat on the flagstones with a great tub of water in front of him; he was washing Red Aart’s cups and dishes, in return for which, and other small chores, the tavern keeper had promised them the makings of a stew.

  “As we was coming up to her you could hear the axes ringing. Trying to cut her away, they was, what hands was left.”

  Red Aart stood over Jan, watching critically. The brilliant hair that gave him his nickname stood up like a cockscomb on the top of his head. Bending, he scooped up a bowl and waved it under the boy’s nose.

  “You call that washed?”

  Silently Jan took the bowl to wash again. Pieter burned for him: humiliating enough to do woman’s work; worse yet to be chided for doing it poorly. He saw the boy’s neck flush dark below the ragged line of his fair hair. There was nothing to do, save go on with his story. The old man reached for his tall flared cup.

  “So then we came up, quiet as mice, you, see—”

  “Pieter,” said one of the men beside him. “There she comes!”

  Everyone sat up straight, even Jan, looking out to the harbor, where the river came in. Pieter let out a choked exclamation. A brace of little galleys was towing up a ship into the harbor, and the ship they towed was the Wayward Girl.

  Now she was rigged up, with new line and new canvas. Her new paint shone in the late sun, and the water turned over at her forefoot in a little round green wave. The boats towed her toward a mooring in the deep harbor, among the seagoing ships.

  No one around Pieter said anything. In utter silence they watched the little ship made fast by stern and bow at her new mooring. The few men on board her slid down her side into the galleys and rowed across the shiny harbor water toward the wharf.

  The hands were Dutch, but the black-haired man who stepped smartly from the galley onto the wharf and began giving orders was a Spaniard. He wore a green and white and red-trimmed doublet so new it pinched his neck; he put his finger inside it once or twice to ease it.

  Seeing the Dutchmen at the tavern watching, he strolled toward them. With one hand he kept his long fancy sword out from between his legs.

  “Well, there they are,” he said, in crippled Dutch. “The Sea Beggars. One hand out and their mouths filled with please.” He laughed, throwing his chest out, and marched up and down past them, flirting his sword hilt fretted with fine silverwork.

  “See her, you old pirate?” His eyes on Pieter, he waved his hand at the Wayward Girl. “Old Beggar. That’s all you’ll ever see of her, dirty old Beggarman. In four days she’ll be La Diamante.” His white teeth sho
wed in a nasty grin and he jabbed his sword forward, not taking it out of the scabbard, only pushing it at Pieter. “La Diamante. My ship, old dirty Beggarman.”

  Pieter said nothing. His heart burned like a coal in his chest.

  The Spanish officer strutted and bragged a little more, but none of the Dutch would speak to him, and finally he strolled away. Jan had finished with his chore. He sat cross-legged on the broad blue-gray paving stones, his eyes on the Wayward Girl. He lifted his head once; his gaze met Pieter’s in a short burning look. Standing up, he took the tub of dirty water across the wharf and threw it into the harbor.

  “Damned green stripling,” one of the other men muttered, looking after the Spaniard. “Never sailed in water over his head, I’ll be bound.”

  “He’ll take her out and wreck her,” said another man, Joris, who had sailed with Pieter once or twice on the Wayward Girl.

  “Take her out the first time onto the bars and run her aground,” said someone else.

  Up the wharf came Marten, the fisherman, staring out at the moorings; when he came even with Pieter, he swung around and said, “Captain, look! They’ve fitted her with new guns. See? Brass guns, by God!”

  Pieter stood up. Sliding his hands over his shirt, he strolled across the street to the wharf, and as one man the others walked with him. They stood on the wharf, eyeing the Wayward Girl, which the current was pushing around nearly broadside to them. Pieter spat into the scummy water below the wharf. It was true: amidships, on either side, two long shining guns rested on wooden carriages on the deck, and a fifth gun, smaller, but just as shiny and new, waited in the bow.

  Pieter whistled under his breath. “She’ll need a new trim, to carry that weight and still show her speed.” It ached like sickness that he would not be the man to handle her. An instant later a queer new excitement stirred under his heart. He glanced around him at the other men and saw Jan standing behind him, his mouth half open, his eyes fixed on the ship.

  “Aye,” Red Aart said. “She’s way down by the head, with that big shooter there.”

  “I’d move that one back to the stern,” Pieter said. He threw his chest out, giving room to the wild rising lust inside, and gave his nephew another quick look. “Move the midships guns up a little, ahead of the mainmast.”

  “She’ll be fast as a snake in the water,” said Marten.

  Jan swung his blazing look from the ship to his uncle. “We can’t let her go to the Spanish. She’ll tear up our own ships. They’ll use her on Dutch ships.”

  Pieter reached for his pipe and stuck it between his teeth. “Now, boys,” he said.

  The others were pressing in around him. Red Aart still held his broom; he shifted his grip until he held it like a weapon. “We could sink her. Swim out at night and ram a hole through that fancy paintwork—” He thrust with the broom handle.

  Marten groaned. Joris said, “Such a pretty lady—”

  Jan said, “Are the Spaniards God’s people?”

  “Hunh?” The other men turned their incomprehending looks on him. Pieter cleared his throat.

  “You mean, steal her from them?”

  Jan’s head bobbed once in a sharp nod. “Take her to sea. Turn pirate. Attack the Spaniards with their own guns.”

  Pieter stuck the stem of his pipe between his teeth. “I can’t sail her by myself.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  The other men were staring at them, their jaws slack with surprise. Joris gave a violent shake of his head.

  “Christ! You’ll never get me into it. The governor’s hanging people every day just for thinking. For stealing a ship—”

  Red Aart scuffed his wooden shoe over the pavement. “The harbor master has two armed galleys that would blow you to splinters before you made it out of the harbor.”

  “And if you got that far, the big guns there would make an end of you,” Marten said.

  Pieter said nothing. He took a little pouch from his shirt, loosened the drawstrings, and dipped his fingers into the aromatic shreds of leaf inside. Carefully he put a pinch of the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “We can’t sail her alone, anyway. I’d need eight more men at least.”

  “I’ve got my tavern,” said Red Aart. “And there’s my brother. I can’t go.”

  “The Spanish would blow you to bits,” Marten shouted.

  “Shut up.” Joris knocked him in the ribs with his elbow. “Do you want everybody to know what we’re doing?”

  Pieter got out his firebox. In the midst of the other men, Jan sat with his shoulders hunched scowling at his uncle, his head sunk down like a sullen dog’s. Pieter smiled at him, pleased with him.

  “The tavern’s not much,” Red Aart was saying. “But it’s mine. And I can’t very well leave my brother.”

  He was talking to nobody; the other men were arguing at one another, each saying some excuse that no one else paid heed to, having excuses of his own to make. Red Aart swung toward Pieter.

  “I can’t leave my brother.”

  “Bring him,” said Pieter. “I went to sea before I was his age.”

  “You had all your wits. And what about my tavern?”

  Pieter sucked smoke through his pipe. He winked at Jan, sitting silent among the turmoil he had started. The scowl had softened to a puzzled frown. Pieter got up onto his feet.

  “Well, well, I’m to my home fire.”

  “Wait,” Marten said. “We’ve got talking to do yet.”

  “You do, maybe,” Pieter said, and beckoned Jan after him. “My feet are cold; I’m for the fire. Good day.”

  “La Diamante,” Jan said bitterly. “She’ll kill Dutch ships, too, I know it.”

  Pieter said, “When they’re done fitting her up, we’ll go out and sink her.”

  At that Jan bit back a curse; he had been learning new oaths from his uncle, words that would have made his mother faint and which it still shocked him a little to hear from his own mouth. They were walking up the street toward Pieter’s house. Darkness was fast falling over Nieuport. They passed by the front steps of an old plaster house, the wife standing on the top step on her toes to light the lantern over the door.

  The watch was coming. Jan could hear their marching feet. He followed Pieter up over the bridge that spanned the canal.

  At the top of the bridge, Pieter stopped so abruptly that Jan walked on his heels.

  Not the watch that marched along the street ahead of them. A column of men with iron pots on their heads and double-bladed pikes laid over their shoulders was striding briskly down the way between the canal and the row of houses facing it. As they passed each doorway, a soldier left the column and climbed the step and hammered on the door with his fist.

  Pieter swore, one of his dirtier oaths. “Well, well,” he said. “Now we’ll all be hostelers.”

  “What?” Jan said. The wild thought entered his mind that everyone in Nieuport was to be arrested; but the houses opened their doors, and the soldiers went in, and no one came out again. “What are they doing?”

  Pieter growled at him and led him down across the canal and into the next street. They had to step back nearly to the wall of the corner house to let the soldiers pass. The clank-clank of their iron clothes marked the time of their march. Jan sniffed. They smelled funny—sour, like pickles.

  “Germans,” said Pieter. “Farts from Hell.”

  The column past, they went down their own little street. In front of Pieter’s door a soldier was waiting. Pieter said nothing to him. He climbed the steps and opened the door, and the soldier barged up past him and into the house. The floor seemed to shake under his feet. Pushing through the front room, he stopped in the larger room beyond, where the hearth was, and the furniture, and looked around, and shrugged his pike and his pack off his shoulders.

  “I’ll take this room,” he said, in ruined Dutch. Pieter and Jan retreated to the chill and bare walls of the front room.

  Red Aart hated tavern work; he put Jan to doing it, in exchange for feeding him and
filling Pieter’s cup. He would have filled Pieter’s cup anyway. The tavern was his because his father had sailed with Pieter for years, saving up his shares of booty and smuggling in the tavern stores. Sitting on his tall stool at the back of the tavern’s drinking room, Red Aart counted the coins in the till, one eye set to oversee Jan’s work with the broom, and wondered why there was never any money extra, as he was sure there had been in his father’s time.

  “Hi, there,” he called to Jan. “Don’t ply the broom so strongly; you put all the dust up into the air.”

  His father had shouted the same words to him, and the eminent good sense in it enlarged his feeling of himself, as the few coins clinking in his hand did not.

  Jan flung him a surly look, but he softened his strokes of the broom. In the corner, Red Aart’s half-witted brother, Mouse, scowled fiercely at Aart. Mouse had taken as good a liking to Jan as a bride to her new husband and spent the day trailing after him.

  Lifting his hand, Red Aart let the coins slide into his purse. No meat today. He got down from the stool and went across the street to the fish market, to buy a fish for dinner.

  He chose a fine halibut, the eye still shining and clear. Although she knew he was taking it only thirty yards away, the fishmonger made a point of wrapping it in paper. Red Aart haggled the price with her a while. As the money changed hands, Jan came from the tavern and crossed the cobblestones to the wharf, where he stood looking out at the Wayward Girl.

  “Come take this fish and clean it,” Aart called.

  Jan wheeled toward him, hot. “I’ve already worked half the day for you—”

  From behind him, Mouse ran up, a runty boy, cockeyed, and took the wrapped fish in his arms like a baby and bore it away to the tavern. Jan and Aart glared at each other a long moment. Finally Red Aart said, “Do you want to eat?”

  Jan’s mouth twisted in a grimace. He ate enough for two men. Lowering his eyes, he went after Mouse, and Aart followed, relieved. There was something about Jan that made Aart very nervous at the thought of fighting with him, although they were nearly of a height.

  He took his stool again, and fell to brooding over the lack of money in the till. Through the back door he could see Jan hacking off the head of the fish. The knife scraped at the scales. A moment later Jan came in, the damp fishy paper in his hand.