The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  A dog chased her. She was afraid of dogs and she ran, the children streaming after her, the dog yipping at her heels. Swiftly she lost her breath and wanted to stop but the dog would not stop; it seized her dress in its teeth and tore off part of her skirt. If it caught her flesh in its teeth—

  The dark was falling. Her lungs fiery, her eyes blind with tears, she ran around a corner and hid behind a tree.

  They seemed to have gone. Somehow they had missed her. She leaned against the tree, struggling for breath. The hammering in her ears drowned all other sound. She longed to sit down.

  Slowly the banging in her ears subsided, and below it, she heard the snuffling of the dog, searching for her in the dark.

  She howled. Mindless with terror, she leapt away from the tree and ran, and they were all back again, the demons, yelling and snapping at her heels. She lost her sword. Screaming, she hurried down the street, while the hell pack scorched her with their flaming breath and fastened their iron teeth in her flesh. Something struck her hard in the back of the head. She fell. Under the weight of their bodies. Smothering in their fur. She pushed herself up onto her feet and ran on.

  “The witch! The witch!”

  Desperately she yearned to be home, to be with Hanneke, to have the door to shut after her. She turned into a twisting dark street and ran along it, searching for the house, but all these houses were strange. She was lost. The street climbed under her feet. Wheeling, she looked back, down the long winding way.

  Empty. No one followed her. She was alone in the dark.

  But when she turned and walked on, suddenly they were back again, leaping from the shadows at her, and she broke into a shambling run. She could feel their breath on her back. Their fangs tearing at her. Ahead the canal bridge. Backed like a camel. Up and up into the night, into the soft rain. She labored up the steep rise in the bridge. Something sprang at her from the dark. Huge. She flung out her arms and embraced it. Hot fur; the stinking blast of its breath in her face. She fell backward and it bore her down, pressing its fur over her face, down forever in an eternal fall.

  “The damned Calvinists,” said Michael’s mother, lunging and thrusting with her arms at the grainy dough. “They brought it on us.”

  Michael caught the gleam of her eye, watching him obliquely, and knew where this was going. He rolled a handful of dough into a ball, flattened it with his hand on the baking tray, and picking up the jam pot dropped a spoonful of sugary cherries into the center of the circle. He had six more trays to make, and then he could go find Hanneke, no matter what his mother said.

  “It’s God’s curse on us for letting them live here,” his mother said loudly. “For not keeping His way and making the damned Calvinists do the same.”

  “The Estates haven’t voted for it yet,” Michael said. “Maybe they won’t. Maybe it will never happen.” Not even the Duke of Alva could collect a tax that had been rejected by the Estates.

  “Pah.” Lifting the mass of dough into the air, the baker slammed it down again on the floury board with an emphasis that lifted white clouds into the air around her. “If God wants it, it will happen, never mind what the Estates say. And if it happens, boy, you’ll find out what hard work means—hard work and lean profits, because we cannot afford to pay the duke a tenth of our makings.”

  She had been saying this now for days, since the rumors and the printed broadsides began circulating that foretold the tenth penny. The other taxes, on land and real property, she did not seem to mind: of course they had little enough of that. But the constant bleeding of one out of every ten pennies the shop took in had her fierce, a lioness, more adamant than Michael had ever seen her.

  She heaved up one of her interminable sighs, now, and began dividing the dough to rise. “I pray every night your father will forgive me for bringing his business to this.”

  Lately she had been talking much of his father. Michael, who kept the bakery’s books, knew perfectly well that under his mother’s direction the shop had done steadily better than under his father’s, in spite of the equally steady increase in the prices of flour and sugar and fruit, but if he suggested that she ought not to fear his father’s reproaches, she flew at him in a fury.

  “Get to work,” she said, as if he were not working. “By God, boy, you’ll know hard work soon enough, soon enough.”

  Another great tremulous sigh. Michael bent over the dough, ladling jam into the center of another white fluffy square.

  The front door opened. His mother threw her head back. “Who’s that?”

  “I’ll see.” He went into the front of the shop.

  It was Hanneke. Amazed, he circled the counter, pulling off his apron, and at the look of distress on her dear face he stretched out his arms to her, his hands and forearms gloved in flour. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t find my mother.” She put her hands to her face a moment. When she lowered them again he saw the dark smudges of fatigue beneath her eyes and guessed she had been out all night again, searching. She slumped against the counter. “Michael, have you a bun I could beg? I haven’t eaten anything, and I have no money.”

  He went swiftly to the tray of buns put out to cool on the end of the counter. “You’re missing work again.”

  “I’ve lost that,” she said. She took the bun and began to eat it; he saw how she forced herself to eat daintily, in spite of her hunger, and his heart took an odd beat.

  “Michael,” his mother called.

  “What do you mean, you’ve lost it?”

  She licked the sugar from her fingers. “I have no work anymore—they let me go.”

  “You’ll find something else.”

  “I’ve looked.”

  “Michael!”

  “The only task I’ve been offered is to help the printer Clement turn out seditious broadsides.”

  “Do you want another bun?”

  “No—no, thank you, Michael. You’re very kind to me—I don’t know where I would have gone, save to you.”

  “I’ll ask my mother if we can hire you here.”

  She turned her face full on him and laughed. Her eyes were old with strain and exhaustion.

  “Michael!” His mother poked her head out the door. “Oh,” she said in another tone, and marched out behind the counter, her hands on her hips. “So it’s you again.”

  “I’m going,” said Hanneke, and started toward the door.

  “It’s all your fault!” The baker waved her fist at Hanneke’s back. “I’ll lose my bakery, and it’s all your fault!”

  “Mother—” Michael got between the girl and the door. “Don’t go,” he said to Hanneke, and faced his mother again. “Mother, she’s desperate. At least we can give her some bread—”

  “Let me go,” Hanneke said, and put her hand on his arm: the first time he could remember her actually touching him. “I have to find my mother.”

  “As well she might be,” the baker said. “The hour’s short for you Calvinists, young woman, very short indeed. What’s wrong with her mother?”

  “Don’t go,” Michael said, and clasped Hanneke’s arm above the wrist. “Let me get you some bread to take with you. Don’t go.” With a little shake, as if pinning her to the floor, he went off swiftly through the shop.

  “What’s the matter with your mother?” the baker asked.

  Hanneke’s fingers twisted in the fabric of her skirts. “She’s gone. I can’t find her. I have to find her.” Her voice rang dull as pewter.

  “Run off again, has she? She’s mad as a March hare, that’s the rumor,” said Michael’s mother.

  Hanneke licked her lips; abruptly she turned her face away, and her hands twisted and pulled at her skirt.

  “Well, now,” the baker said. “You’ve been searching all night, by the looks of you. You should rest. And pray to God to show you the right way, and then you wouldn’t fall onto these things, by God!”

  Michael came back, hurrying, his arms laden with loaves of bread. “Here,” he said, and thrus
t them into Hanneke’s hands.

  “What are you giving her?” his mother cried. “The entire store?”

  “She’s lost her job also,” said Michael. “She has nowhere else to go, Mother; what do you want of me?”

  His mother sighed. Flour lay in the creases of her face, in the wiry tendrils of hair that crept from under her tight white cap. Hanneke said, “Thank you,” in a voice that shook. The bread in one crooked arm, she stretched out her hand to Michael’s mother. “Thank you, Mistress.” Some yards separated them; her fingers reached out to midair. The baker lifted her hand, as if she might take Hanneke’s, and her head bobbed and some mumbled words dropped from her lips. Her hand fell to her side again, without making contact with Hanneke’s, and the girl went out past Michael, out to the street.

  Michael shut the door, his eyes on his mother; she surprised him sometimes, which moved him very much—that after so many years his mother was still mysterious to him. She was staring at the door, as if she still saw Hanneke before her; her face had settled into an unreadable mask, not even human, as if cut from stone or made of stones one on the other.

  Catching Michael’s eyes on her, she turned toward him. “They are doomed,” she said. “Their time is very short.” Erect as a soldier, she marched back into the kitchen of the bakery, leaving Michael there alone.

  “The latest letter from the Prince of Orange!” Clement’s boy raised his broadside over his head and waved it. “Read the latest letter from the Prince of Orange!”

  He was walking down the edge of the meadow by the river, opposite the new castle that Alva had caused to be built here, and before him was a sea of people. It was like the fair; everyone was dressed in their finest clothes and carried baskets of their dinner, and jugs of beer, and some were playing music on flutes and lutes, and some were dancing. As if Alva had never come here; as if hundreds of Antwerpers had not danced Alva’s jig in the sky. The boy’s chest swelled with pride and delight at the resurgence of his city.

  “Read the latest letter from the Prince of Orange!”

  A tall man in a wide-brimmed hat stopped to buy one of the broadsides from him, but others laughed: “That fool!” Orange had disgraced himself. The word was all over Brabant that Orange had sneaked away from his army in France in the dead of the night because he could not pay the soldiers.

  Still, it was a good letter, saying things about the people’s privileges and the King’s responsibility to the law. Clement’s boy waved it overhead and called it out, and here and there someone gave him a bit of money and took away the glossy sheet of paper.

  The sun was climbing higher into the sky, and already the air buzzed with heat. An early summer, everyone said. The boy walked through the growing crowd, past the families that spread their tablecloths on the grass and laid their babies down on folded blankets and sat to eat and sing, and he wondered why it was that some summers were hot and others were cold, just as he wondered why the wind blew from the north in the winter and from the west in the summer, and why the days were shorter in winter than in summer. The whole world seemed to him an overwhelming question; he could not draw breath for thinking of a new one.

  “Read the latest letter from the Prince of Orange!”

  There was Hanneke van Cleef. Gripping his bundle of broadsides, he hurried toward her, calling her name. She turned, hearing him, a tall figure, her face marked with strain.

  “Hello, Philip.” She put out her hand to him.

  “Here.” He gave her a broadside. Worried, he peered into her face; she seemed shockingly older. “What’s wrong? Is it your mother again?”

  “She’s gone,” Hanneke said, in a queer flat voice.

  She sat down suddenly on the ground, looking around her, her arms draped over her knees. With one hand she poked the loose threads of her hair back under her headcloth. Her dress was of fine material, worn so threadbare that holes were opening up in the skirt. Clement’s boy held his breath a moment out of sympathy. He wished he were older, to comfort her like a man.

  She said, “I’ve never found her. Not since that night. It’s been days and days—I don’t think I will ever find her.”

  “She’ll come back.”

  “No.” Hanneke shook her head. “She’s gone and I’ll never know what happened to her.” Her voice was colorless as water.

  “I’ll help you look for her. I’ll—”

  “There’s Michael,” she said, more happily.

  He looked where she was looking. A tall young man with a basket slung around his neck was walking down across the muddy grass toward them. In the basket were sweet buns: a baker, a peddler. Hanneke was getting up. She was going to him. With a pang like a tooth in his heart, Clement’s boy realized that this was her lover.

  “Come on,” she said, looking down at him. “Come have a cake—they’re very good.”

  He shook his head, too jealous to speak, his eyes burning.

  “Come along.” Stooping, she reached for his hand, and he jerked it away and hid it under his knee. She stared at him, her brow puckering; an instant later, the peddler called her, and she went toward him, without a backward look. Clement’s boy clenched his fists together. He had never felt like this before. Slowly as an old man, he got to his feet, collected his broadsides, and went off through the crowd.

  “The latest letter from the Prince of Orange!” His eyes hurt. He wanted to kill her and the peddler both. “Read the latest letter from the Prince of Orange!”

  “When will the Estates meet?” Hanneke asked, and licked the sugary taste from her lips.

  Michael was handing out buns and taking in money as fast as his hands would move. The crowd around him jostled and laughed and fought for space in the line. “At noon,” he said. “By that time, there ought to be thousands of people here.”

  “All of Antwerp!” A jovial man with a fringe of red-yellow beard nodded to them, taking buns and pouring coins into Michael’s palm. “We’ll show them they cannot tamper with our trade.”

  “Look.” She pointed across the crowd, toward a wagon where a man was standing, his arms raised over his head. “A preacher. There’s going to be a sermon.”

  “The crowd’s made them brave,” Michael said.

  He had sold the last bun. Shrugging off the straps of the basket, he slung it on one arm, and they walked down the field toward the river.

  “A sermon,” Hanneke said. “It’s like the old days.” She could not help but smile; it seemed everything was changing and soon would be as it had been.

  Although when she thought of that she shrank from thinking how it really had been.

  “Come and let’s go dancing,” Michael said.

  “I’m not supposed to dance.”

  He snorted at her. “I think you’d be much happier if you were a Catholic.”

  “That’s no reason to be one thing or another. To be happier.”

  “Why can’t you dance?”

  A troop of boys ran by them, a dog gamboling along beside, yipping and patting at the children with its forepaws. Hanneke watched them run off. “It’s frivolous.” She looked for Clement’s boy, wondering if he were still bound to his task of distributing weighty messages. The odd look he had given her when she last saw him remained in her mind.

  “At least we can listen to music.” Michael took her hand.

  “This is very serious business.” She did not take her hand away. It was pleasant to touch him, to have him with her, to have him love her. She smiled at him, and their eyes met; something warm passed between them. She felt her feelings gather and focus, and looked away before he could see. He squeezed her hand. They walked down toward the castle, where the Estates of Brabant would meet to vote on the new taxes.

  Luis Del Rio, governor of Antwerp, stood on the upper balcony of the castle and looked out over the great crowd before his gates and frowned. He said, “They would not lift a hand when we were carrying off their friends and neighbors. Only threaten their purses and they rise in righteous indignatio
n like pigs deprived of their slops.”

  His aides murmured behind him. He leaned against the side of the doorway, watching the dancers. In spite of himself he was drawn to these people, to their easy gaiety, to their high spirits. Animals, they were, indiscriminately reveling in the joys of this world. Spiritual matters seemed beyond them. Yet like children they were hard to hate.

  It would be easier for him if he could hate them. He turned his back on them and went into the warm room inside the door.

  His aides stood around waiting for orders. The two men from the Estates whom he used to present his demands were standing rigidly before the fire, their hands behind them, and their faces very long. When del Rio came in, they fidgeted; they would not meet his eyes. He gestured to a page to shut the door.

  “Now,” he said. “The real task begins.”

  “Excellency—” The first deputy took a step forward, his hands appearing in front of him, to make pale gestures against his dark clothes. “Perhaps you ought to postpone the issue of the taxes. Especially the tenth penny. The people are much incensed …”

  Del Rio went to his desk, near the middle of the room. “The matter is not in my hands. The Duke of Alva requires that we raise these taxes to pay the army.”

  The second deputy cleared his throat. “Excellency, there is—we cannot …” He glanced at his fellow. “I don’t really see how we can expect any success in this matter now.”

  On the desk was the charter for the taxes, written in red and black ink, handsomely decorated with ribbons and seals, a very elegant document. Del Rio picked it up but did not read it; he knew what it said.

  He asked, “What time would be better? Orange’s army has been chased out of the Provinces into France. Alva has saved you again from destruction. How better to show the gratitude of Antwerp, of all Brabant, than by voting him this present of money?”

  Two or three of his aides said, quietly, “Long live the Duke of Alva.” The two deputies did not echo it.