The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  When the dawn came she was sleeping in the doorway of a shop near the gate. The sound of marching feet jarred her from her dreams, and she raised her head, her eyes sticky with unshed tears and blood splashes and lack of sleep, and watched the first few ranks of soldiers tramp down the broad street past her.

  The sun was rising. The horizontal light struck their round helmets and the edges of their pikes in ripples, like sunlight on the water. The pikes feathered the air. They marched in step, their arms swinging in unison, so that they seemed not to be individual men but one great beast that crawled along the street on thousands of legs, piercing the air with thousands of spines.

  Now a banner passed her, a square of cloth that fluttered in the wind with a heavy thumping crack, on it the quartered arms of Spain—Leon and Castile and Aragon and Portugal, the lions, the castles of fairy tales.

  She got to her feet. More ranks of soldiers swung past her; they sang, and some shouted at her, and a few made lewd gestures with their fingers. She wondered if they saw she was covered with blood. What they would do if they knew it was Spanish blood.

  Another rank of flags was approaching, three huge banners held up by men on foot, while behind them a man on a black horse banged away at two drums slung across the withers of his mount. In his wake came a single rider.

  She took two steps closer. The tall figure held her fascinated gaze, his hair shining silver under his flat black hat. He sat straighter than the pikestaffs on his horse. No decoration relieved the black sobriety of his coat. He might have been a Calvinist, so plainly did he dress. His spurs chimed with each step of his horse.

  Alva, she thought. That is the Duke of Alva.

  She sank back into the doorway, her eyes following him as he rode off down the street. Evil has come here, she thought, remembering what Clement said, and knew it was true.

  The trumpets blared again, ahead of him, behind him; their brass voices echoed off the buildings on either side. Alva rode with one hand on his hip, the reins slack in the other, his eyes aimed straight ahead, through the forest of pikes.

  No one had come to greet him. No cheering throngs crowded the street of Antwerp, no schoolchildren performed pageants of welcome, no official made speeches of formal gladness at his coming. Only the cold faces of the buildings watched the entry of the Spanish army.

  If his heart raged at the insult, his face would not show it. Trained from babyhood in the service of the King of Spain, he knew better than to show what he felt. He would avenge the insults soon enough; the gilt-trimmed buildings with their ornate stepped roofs and elegant glass windows might stand proud against him now, but he would shame them low as hovels soon enough.

  A horseman was trotting up the side of the street toward him: one of his officers. Beyond, through the spreading bare branches of the trees, the high towers showed of the new castle where the Estates met. He touched his lips with his tongue. The excitement in his guts tightened and coiled like a spring. The young officer wheeled his horse around to ride beside Alva’s and saluted.

  “His Excellency Luis del Rio is waiting at the castle to greet you, my lord.”

  Alva’s head bobbed once. “Very good. You may tell him we will meet him at once.”

  The young man saluted and reined his horse around and galloped away. Alva’s horse tossed its head, wanting to follow, but the duke kept to his slow walk. Only now he let himself smile.

  His men filled up the broad field before the castle, rank on orderly rank, and opened a lane between them to the main gate. Alva rode down into the castle, through the unfinished wall, into the newly paved courtyard.

  Luis del Rio was waiting there, in ceremonial dress, with his aides behind him. When Alva dismounted, he stepped forward, his smile stiff.

  “Welcome to Antwerp, your Excellency.”

  “You may make me welcome,” Alva said, pulling off his gloves, “in a more substantial way. Have you done my orders?”

  “Yes, your Excellency. Even now—”

  Del Rio gestured toward the gate. Alva turned. Through the gate he looked back up the field, up the broad straight lane between his troops.

  Down that lane little groups of his men were coming, and in their midst each group led a prisoner, a halter around his neck. Alva smiled.

  “I thirst,” he said, and instantly a young man leapt forward with a cup of cold wine.

  As he drank, the first of his prisoners marched into the courtyard. Seeing del Rio, the man called out, trying to break from his captors’ arms. “I am a deputy of the Estates! You can’t do this to me …”

  Seeing Alva, he lost his voice. His eyes blinked rapidly. Rapidly he was hustled off into the castle.

  One after another, by twos, by threes, the other deputies were brought to the castle. Alva stood watching them enter. Every man who cried out, every indignant word, fell like balm upon his soul. Patient as a mother, he waited for the last laggard vote to appear, to complete his gathering of the Estates.

  They could not bring them all; some had escaped, hearing of his coming, and some lived outside Antwerp. But they brought enough, and in the end, with two pikemen standing beside each deputy, they signed the proclamation Alva had brought with him, announcing the royal tax on the tenth penny of every sale in Antwerp.

  “She is not here,” Vrouw Kelman said, when Michael knocked on her door. “Carlos is gone, too.” She clutched her dressing gown tight over her breast; her face was older than her years with strain. “Something’s wrong. Did you hear the soldiers pass this morning? Something is awfully wrong.”

  Michael said, “She’s not here? When did she leave?” But already the housewife was shutting the door. He turned and went down the walk to the gate.

  He started away toward Clement’s shop. Maybe she had stayed there the night. He remembered how she said he might give her work there.

  When he came out onto the broad street before the Bourse, there were soldiers everywhere, banging on the doors of the shops and marching along the street. He swerved to avoid them. They were after the Calvinists again. Two of them were dragging a bearded man out of a doorway. He turned quickly to keep from seeing that.

  In Clement’s shop he found the printer hunched over his big press, listlessly setting the bits of lead into the frame.

  “Have you seen Hanneke?” Michael asked.

  Clement shook his head. “They took my boy,” he said.

  He lifted his face, smudged with black ink. Through the stains, tears like drops of lead coursed in an unceasing stream.

  “Who took him? Why?”

  “The soldiers. He was out carrying around broadsides of the Prince of Orange’s letter—they took him to the castle.”

  Michael’s throat was dry. He swallowed down his doubts and panic and carefully unkinked his knotted fists. He said, “They’ll let him go. He’s only ten.”

  Clement covered his face with his long blackened hands. In Michael the urge grew to reach out and comfort this wretched man whose heresies had doomed his only child. But he had to find Hanneke, and he went away.

  He wandered from quarter to quarter of the city, never finding her. Once a double file of soldiers marched past him, and he stood in a doorway and watched them go by, hating them with an intensity that frightened him. Men like him, Catholics like him, subjects of the same king. What had he to fear from them? Yet he knew they were his enemies now.

  In the German quarter, where the breweries were, he overheard people arguing about the tenth penny, whether foreigners had to pay it, whether Alva had the right to levy it on them. On the door of the greatest brewery was a broadside of Orange’s letter against the tax. Michael stared at it, thinking of the little boy who had brought it here. A big tow-headed German went up to the door and ripped the broadside down. Balling it up in his fist, he flung it into the gutter. Michael walked quickly away.

  He crossed the Grand Place again, no longer empty. All across the wide cobbled square, men were unloading lumber from wagons, and hammers were beating nai
ls into wood. The ringing of the hammers echoed off the high fronts of the buildings, with their extravagant gilt decoration, their multitudes of windows that glared back the sunlight. Michael walked through the midst of the rising structures in the Place; he refused to think about them, standing like a new city all around him. As he reached the far side of the square, the clamoring rhythms of the hammers approached each other, met for a few strokes of accidental unity, and diverged again on their separate courses. Michael plunged down a side street, looking for Hanneke.

  At noon Michael still had not come back. His mother swore under her breath, using a favorite oath of her husband’s, and pulled shut the shop door. There were three little and two big loaves left on the racks and she piled them on a tray and took them into the back, to have for dinner when Michael finally did come home.

  She emptied the till into a sack and put it under the counter. With a damp cloth she scrubbed the racks until they gleamed.

  While she was sweeping the floor, her mind still occupied with grumbling at Michael, who spent all day now with that Calvinist girl, there came a knocking on the door.

  She looked through the front window. A man in an odd green coat stood under the bakery sign. Only after she opened the door did she see the squad of soldiers in the street behind him.

  “What do you want?” she said loudly, to cover the fluttery panic in her belly.

  “The tenth penny of your receipts.” The man in the green coat pushed his way in past her, into her shop.

  “Not from me,” she said, backing away from him, the broom between them. “I’ll not pay your Spanish tax.”

  He went to the till. Behind him the six soldiers marched single file in through the door. The baker wound her fingers around the haft of her broom, the inside of her mouth pasty with fear, while the tax collector rummaged through the till and the drawers around it, looking for money. Abruptly she thought of Michael. What if he came back now? What if he got in a fight with these soldiers?

  The tax collector wheeled on her. “Where is the money?”

  “I have no money,” she said. “I sold nothing today.”

  “I want the tenth of your receipts for the past week.” He loomed over her, his arms swinging at his sides. “And every week hereafter I shall expect the same amount, or better.”

  “One tenth of nothing is nothing,” said the baker stoutly. “I’ve had the shop closed this week. I’ve sold nothing.” He was too near her; suddenly she found it hard to breathe. She started past him into the back of the store. “You’d better go. I have nothing for you.”

  He caught her by the arm. Painfully tight, the grip brought her up stiffly onto her toes, tears in her eyes. “One more time,” he said. “Where is your money?”

  “I have no money,” she said.

  He dragged her toward the door. Her arm was numb to the shoulder, and a stabbing pain crossed her chest. “I’m a good Catholic,” she cried, and stumbled on the threshold. The soldiers surrounded her. The tax collector had a rope. She gasped. But surely they were only trying to frighten her. They would not really hurt her. “I’m a good Catholic,” she said again, and they put the rope around her neck.

  She screamed. Michael, she thought. Michael—“I’m a good Catholic,” she said again, and they hauled her up to hang by the neck from the sign of her bakery shop.

  Since Alva had first entered Antwerp, his soldiers had been busy rounding up a flock of victims. Two days after his entry into the city, when the gallows were ready, he had these people taken out into the Grand Place and hung. Hanneke watched in the crowd.

  They brought Clement’s boy to the gallows and pulled him up by the neck, but he was too light to die that easily. He swung at the end of the rope, screaming, until the executioner jumped up and caught the boy’s legs and hung his whole weight from them, and so the boy died.

  Hanneke went down by the river. She did not weep; there were no tears left in her. There was nothing left in her at all. She had nothing, neither father nor mother, neither home nor hearth. Alva had scoured away everything save her life from her.

  When she reached the gate of the city, swarms of people were already flowing out through it. They carried bundles of clothing and food on their backs and their children in their arms. Their faces all seemed the same to her, blank and dull with the pitiable things they had seen. No one spoke. The little children cried and stretched out their arms toward Antwerp, but their parents walked on, their backs to their city and their past. Hanneke walked with them, going east, toward Germany.

  10

  The moon was setting. With it, the light fitful breeze that had murmured all night in the rigging of the Wayward Girl died to a flat calm. Jan shifted his weight, slack on the little perch at the top of the mast, and rubbed his hand over his eyes; he blinked and worked his face to ease muscles stiff from long staring into the distance. He braced his foot on the opposite rail of the lookout and turned his gaze south again over the trackless sea.

  Stuck up on top of the mast, the lookout exaggerated every rolling action of the ship; the sea seemed to rise and fall in huge parabolas around him. Jan liked being up here. Now they were standing out far enough from the mouth of the English Channel that the Wayward Girl rode the broad ocean swells rather than the choppier waves of the narrow seas, and the action of the ship made him sleepy. He fought a jaw-cracking yawn.

  “Jan!”

  That was Pieter, at the foot of the mast, his shape foreshortened to nothing but a head. Jan leaned out over the edge of the platform.

  “Nothing yet,” he called.

  The old man stalked away without a word. He was always thus before a fight. Being only one of a dozen ships in the Beggar fleet did not help his mood. Jan glanced around behind him, looking northeast, up the Channel. No sign of them. But they were there, waiting just below the horizon; when the sun rose, perhaps he would pick out a masthead, another lookout. Meanwhile …

  In the east the sky was turning pale. A lick of a breeze cooled his cheek.

  He watched the southern horizon. His thoughts rambled away into daydreams, the ships he would command someday, the battles he would fight, the gold he would spend. He imagined the women who would lust after him, a famous sea captain with a heavy purse. Big-breasted women who would lie in his lap. He slid his hand down under his belt into his breeches. The other sailors talked about it all the time, what they did with women.

  Hard and aching, the thing throbbed in his hand. In silent desperation, he pulled on it, ashamed, wanting only to ease it.

  The breeze stiffened. The Wayward Girl leaned over, a rolling wave passing under her keel. The sky overhead was creamy white. Far, far down the sea, at the very edge of the world, something red moved.

  He sat bolt upright; he yanked his hand out of his pants. The world tilted away from him, streaming with dawn light, the horizon a blur of pale sea and white sky. There, among the golden clouds, the spot of red moved like a jewel.

  “Pieter!”

  Down on the deck, feet pounded. Jan leaned over the edge of the lookout for the lantern hanging off the mast, lifted it up by the wire handle, and unshuttered it, to let the gleam of light through. So close to daylight, perhaps the lantern would not show to the ships watching, far to the north. He masked it a moment with his hand, counting in his head to five, lowered his hand, and let the light shine for a count of five.

  “What is it?” Pieter bawled, below.

  “Sail,” Jan called. “Break out the pennant—I think we’ll need it.” During the day, they were to use the pennant for a signal.

  He hung the lantern up again and stood on the lookout platform, his feet widespread, stooped until he had his balance on the reeling masthead. The wind whipped his hair across his cheek. Turning his eyes south again, he searched a long moment among the furrows and billows of the sea, until the sail leapt out again from the background of cloud and wave; now he could clearly see the red cross on the sail. The Spanish fleet was making its run for the English Channel.


  That fleet carried the silver to pay Alva’s army in the Netherlands. Jan’s chest swelled. To fight the Spaniards was good enough. To get rich into the bargain made it excellent. He bellowed, “Sail ho! Sail off the larboard beam!” Reaching out for the ratlines, he swung his body off the lookout and raced hand over hand down toward the deck.

  The crew of the Wayward Girl were sleeping on the main deck. At his shout they rolled out of their blankets and leapt to their feet. Jan dropped into their midst. Here it seemed darker, low to the sea, the steep black ocean waves rising above the rail before the ship climbed them and the seas passed under her. The crew hurried around him; their faces bleary with sleep, they stowed their blankets and stretched and yawned and tugged their clothes straight. Mouse popped up through the forward hatch with a fisherman’s flat basket full of bread. The sailors fell on it. Behind them old Pieter walked down the deck from the stern.

  Jan strolled over to the rail, near the brass culverin, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his canvas jacket. The sharp dawn air turned his skin rough with gooseflesh. He was hungry, but his stomach danced with excitement; he had no wish to eat. He stood by the gun, looking out over the empty sea, until his uncle came up beside him.

  “Good morning, Uncle.”

  The old man growled at him, scratched fretfully at his beard, and hugged his arms around him. “This cold’s got me. It’s a wonder I can walk.” He stamped his feet on the deck; one of his knees cracked like a green tree limb. “Where away’s the dirty Don?”

  “Off the larboard beam three points south,” Jan said. “Hull down still from the masthead. And right in the wind’s eye, where you said they’d be.”

  Mouse ran down the deck to them, his arms laden with cold biscuit. Jan took two or three chunks of the hard bread and put them inside his jacket. Old Pieter waved away the food. He put his hand up to sample the wind.

  “Well, well. We’ve got a few hours yet to say our prayers. Did you signal Lumey?”

  “Run up the pennant,” Jan said. “It’s too day-bright for the lantern.”