The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  His eyebrows arched up. “Have you been humiliated?”

  “Oh, very much,” she said, bitterly. “And by people whom I have been the very life and breath to, sometimes.”

  He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry.”

  She waited a moment, expecting more, some answer to her question, but he said nothing; impatient, she blurted out, “Well?”

  “I cannot stay very long, dear Eleanor. The ship is mine now; I must take her to sea.” He told her of his uncle’s death.

  “Oh, God,” she cried, less in mourning than abhorrence of the sordid flavor of it—to die in a tavern brawl.

  “The worst is that he probably was cheating. He hated Lumey.”

  “Jan, you are a better man than that.”

  “He was not a good man, my uncle, but I loved him. Anyway the Wayward Girl is mine now.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “I’m a ship’s master now,” he said. He smiled at her, his blue eyes sharp. He seemed much older to her somehow. He said, “I am a man of substance, Eleanor. I can take a wife.”

  “A wife,” she said.

  His hands turned over, cupped as if he supported a little world of his own in his hard callused palms. “I want a wife, and a house of my own, to come home to.”

  “Will you stay with your wife, in your house, and work the land and not go sailing?”

  A low laugh broke from him, surprised. “No. I’ll plow the sea, not the dirt, mistress. I’m a sailor.”

  She looked away through the gap in the stones, toward the treeless horizon. Some sheep grazed on the champion ground there. The birds were singing and pecking in the grass around the foot of the stones, busy at their husbandry.

  “Will you marry me, Eleanor?”

  “And spend my time wondering if you’ll ever come back again?” She kept her side to him, her head turned away, her fists jammed into her lap.

  “Think on it, please.” He reached for her hand again. “Don’t say no yet.”

  She would not give him her hand. Tears rushed into her eyes. She had been so glad to see him; now all the misery in the world filled her. She shook her head.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  He left off trying. They sat side by side for a while, without speaking; finally they walked silent back to Stonegate House.

  In her chamber that night, she made a fire, and sat on the hearth, her heart pounding. Before long there was a knock on the door.

  She opened it a little, and Jan said, “Will you let me in?”

  “This is why you came,” she said bitterly. “Isn’t it? This is what you want me for.”

  “Eleanor, let me in!”

  She let the door swing wide and he strode through it, filling up the little room, his boots scraping on the floor. He pushed the door shut behind him.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “Why are you angry with me?”

  She had no answer; she had been angry with him for leaving, and she was angry with him now for coming back. She could not trust him. Or herself. Merely having him in her room stirred her memories, and her memory charged her lust, loosening her thighs and breeding a warm tingling in her belly.

  “Will you let me kiss you?” he said.

  “I ought not. It’s sin, what we did—” She put her hand over her mouth, to keep from saying too much.

  He stood looking down at her, his brows drawn over his nose; there were lines at the corners of his mouth she did not remember from the last time they had been together, when he had seemed to her like a young sun god, strong as nature. Finally he shook his head.

  “Maybe I should not have come.”

  She stooped and put wood on the fire. She thought her heart would break if she spoke to him.

  “Have you thought much yet of marrying me?”

  “I cannot think,” she said, her voice clogged up with feeling. “Not while you’re here.”

  At that he sank down beside her and took her in his arms, and she flung her arms around his neck and they kissed.

  He said, “I want to sleep with you.”

  “I—”

  “No, hush.” He put his hand over her mouth. “I’ll sleep on the other side of the blanket, but I want to hold you.” He kissed her again. “Is that sin?”

  She locked her arms around his neck. After a while they went to bed. They slept little; they argued all the night.

  “I cannot leave Stonegate,” she said. “Too many here depend on me.”

  “Depend on you! Who does?” Jan cried.

  “Why, the poor folk whom I feed, and my people here—”

  “They don’t depend on you. You said yourself, when you fell into scorn, they scorned you just as much as anyone else. If you go, someone else will feed them.”

  He saw at once he had struck something deep in her; her face thinned and sharpened, and her eyes grew harsh as ice. “How dare you say that, when I have devoted my whole life, these past five years—” She struck at him with her open palms.

  “I need you,” he said, fending off her hands. “I cannot do with anyone else but you. But you cannot stay here. I cannot come up here, three days’ walk, every time my ship makes Plymouth.”

  She rolled over, her face to the wall. “I will not leave Stonegate.”

  He lay beside her, braced up on his elbow, watching her. There was a candle on the windowsill over the bed, which gave him light to see her by. This struggle with her baffled him. He had expected nothing of it. At their last meeting it had seemed to him he saved her from a dull and thankless life, and now, when he came to rescue her permanently, she fought him violently as a Don.

  She said, her back still turned, “You must come here. There is work here, a good life here—”

  “You mean, leave the sea? Oh, no.”

  She rolled over toward him again, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Then you do not love me.”

  “I do love you,” he cried. “Would I have come back all this way, just to be railed at by a harridan, if I did not love you?”

  “Oh, so I am a harridan, am I?”

  “Eleanor—”

  The candlelight glittered on the snail tracks of tears on her cheeks. She said, “I will not marry you unless you come here, to Stonegate, to live here with me. That is my answer.” Without waiting for his, she rolled over again and pulled the blanket high up over her shoulder.

  Jan watched her a moment and lay down on his back. The bed was too narrow for the two of them, but her warmth reached him even through the blanket and he wanted the closeness with her even if she hated him now. It seemed she did hate him. To force him to come here, miles from the sea …

  Into his mind flashed the memory of the sea, the green wave rising fetterless and irresistible into the sky. He sighed. He would never live at Stonegate, in a woman’s shadow. Staring up at the ceiling beams, woolly with cobwebs, he waited for sleep to take him from his unhappiness.

  In the morning Jan went out with the other men of Stonegate to the fields, to cut the spring hay. Eleanor sat with the cook in the courtyard, going over the kitchen accounts; nearby, the hall maid was churning butter. The round wooden tub clattered on the uneven paving stones.

  The girl sang as she pumped the handle up and down.

  “Now listen a while and let us sing

  To this disposed company

  For marriage is a marvelous thing—”

  “Leave off,” the cook called to her. “Or sing a pious song.”

  “Let her sing what she will,” Eleanor said.

  “Hoho,” said the cook. “Is that the way the road tends? I wondered, when I saw the white-haired sailor back again.”

  Eleanor picked a winged maple seedling from her lap and sent it spiraling off on the wind. “He has asked me to marry him.”

  “And will you?”

  “But sure there is no doubt to know,”

  the maid sang,

  “Of man and wife the married state—”

  “I don’t know,” Eleanor s
aid.

  “He is not English,” said the cook.

  “If he say yea, and she say no

  I hold a groat the wife will ha ’it!”

  Eleanor laughed at the song, which lifted her spirits; surely it was an omen, and he would agree to her terms. She glanced around her at her home, snug and prosperous, everything desirable.

  The cook sniffed. She drank as heartily as any man, and the excess of wine marked her face in red winy veins along her nose. “And you’ll leave us here to our fate, I suppose.”

  Surprised, Eleanor looked up from the accounts. “Not at all. Why do you think it? There is room enough here, surely, for a husband for me.”

  The cook set her head to one side. “You’ll wean a sailor from the sea? It is not done, my girl.”

  Eleanor opened her mouth to argue, but the rattle of the churn stopped, and the hall maid said, “Hello. Who’s that?”

  Two strangers were standing there in the gateway. Eleanor rose to her feet. “Good welcome, sirs.” One was tall and fair, and the other a boy, with crossed eyes; they both wore sailor’s clothes, just like Jan’s, and she saw, alarmed, that they were Jan’s men.

  They came in the gate, the boy slipping into the shelter of the man’s shadow; she remembered Jan had said there was a dull-witted boy on his ship, and this was surely he. She fought with her panic. They had come to take him. There was no way she could prevent them from finding him; the reckoning was come, sooner than she had expected, before she was ready.

  The man put his fist up to his forehead, in a peasant’s salute. He spoke in mumbled Dutch, the only audible words being Jan’s name.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s here.” It would do no good to lie. “Come with me,” she said, beckoning, and led them out the gate again.

  The men were haying in the champion below the hill, near the standing stones. She strode down the path, her skirts in her hands. The sun was bright and warm, and the wind a little gusty: a good day for haying. Down the hillside the men worked in rows, raking up the cut yellow grass.

  She kept her eyes on them; the two strangers beside her unnerved her, both their mission and their enforced silence. If he went away now, she would never see him again.

  Down there he had seen them coming. Giant among the other men he paused in his work, the rake slanting up through his hand, and straightened, and threw the rake down. He strode up to meet them. His long legs carried him forward almost at a run. Behind him the other men stopped to watch. Even the two big dray horses lifted their heads to watch.

  “What is it?” he said to her, coming in among them, and his eyes went to the two strangers. Before she could say anything, he was speaking to them in Dutch; he had passed into their world and left her behind.

  She stood there a little separate from them, knowing she had lost him; her hands closed to fists at her sides. What a fool she was: last night, at least, she could have loved him, shown she loved him. He wheeled toward her.

  “The Queen of England’s ordered us gone. She’s closed England to the Sea Beggars, and we have to sail, and we can’t come back.”

  She put out her hands to him. “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know.” His big hard hands reached for hers. “I have to go at once; you know that.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Then come with me. Come with me now, on the Wayward Girl, and we’ll get married as soon as we can find a preacher.”

  In her heart, something wild swelled and rose like a bird taking flight. She turned her head, to sweep her gaze over the placid fields, the mounds of hay, the cottage in the distance. The kindly English sky, the English earth. She lifted her face toward her lover’s.

  “I’ll need some clothes, and my books.”

  They threw their arms around one another and kissed. Eleanor laughed, more to let out the exultant energy that danced hectic in her blood than from any real amusement.

  “We have to hurry,” Jan said, and they went swiftly off to Stonegate House.

  20

  Jan got to Plymouth three hours before the tide began to ebb, giving them only time enough to fill their water barrels and take on some stores of bread and salted meat, sailcloth and tar and line. The other ships of the Beggar fleet waited for the Wayward Girl at the mouth of the sound. The wind was rising out of the east. Jan smelled a storm breeding in the gray clouds that bullied their way into the eastern sky.

  Twenty minutes before the tide would turn, he was running along the waterfront from shop to shop, looking for something to make the little master’s cabin prettier and more comfortable for Eleanor. At last he bought a bolt of red cloth and a pitcher with flowers painted on it.

  They put to sea as the first rain began to fall. The wind drove them west out of the Channel, into the wild Atlantic. The red cloth lay untouched on the cot in the master’s cabin; he never saw the painted pitcher again. Against the storm he needed every hand, even Eleanor’s, to keep the ship afloat and in the fleet. The pumps worked constantly, and still the water climbed in the bilge. The buffeting winds blew the ship off steadily west; huge seas rose like mountain ranges between her and the other Dutch ships. Now and again the storm faltered, the wind calmed, the seas flattened, and Jan sent his men up the masts to set the sails, and they beat back to the east, tacking for miles to recover a few hundred yards of weathering, until again the savage gale set on them.

  Finally the winds blew themselves out. The sun shone through the clouds and patches of blue sky appeared. Save for the men working the pumps, the crew gathered on the deck to thank God for their deliverance. Jan stood with Eleanor beside him, reading out of Marten’s Bible. When he was done, he turned to her, ready with reassurances, but her blazing smile met him.

  She said, “God is proving Himself to us, Jan, and we to Him.”

  He grasped her hand and kissed it, pleased with her. The crew cheered them in weary voices, and they sat down to eat, their first food since leaving Plymouth. That was when they found one of the casks of meat bought in Plymouth was rotten, and that bilge water had leaked into most of their bread.

  The only Beggar ship in sight of them was the Christ the Redeemer, Lumey de la Marck’s ship. Together the two vessels sailed eastward, to raise the coast of Europe and judge from their landfall where they were. Just before night three more ships appeared, two of Sonoy’s, and one little hoy of Baron van Treslong’s, which was badly beaten up and looked about to sink.

  The first call from these ships was for water; they had lost all their water stores in the storm.

  The ships gathered together for the night. Jan worked nearly all the night long, with three other men, stuffing tarred rope into the strained seams of the Wayward Girl. By morning, the bilge pumps were sucking air, and he could order them shut down for a while.

  He went down to the master’s cabin. Eleanor slept there on the cot, wrapped in his big boat cloak, her head pillowed on the bolt of red cloth. When he came in, meaning only to look at her and make sure that she was warm, she stirred, looked up at him, and sat, putting out her arms to him.

  He sank down into her embrace, and they kissed. She pressed her cheek against his face.

  “My love,” she said. “When will you come to sleep?”

  “Soon, I hope,” he said. He kissed her again. “When I do, Eleanor, I think we ought to sleep apart, until we find a man of God to marry us.”

  She hugged him, her arms around his neck. “When will that happen?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. We cannot go to England, nor to France, and my own country belongs to the Devil.” He forced himself to laugh. “When you came with me, you gave up everything else, dear Eleanor.”

  “Nothing of any worth,” she said, in a husky voice.

  His heart jumped at that; he had thought she would regret it, coming with him, but he saw now that something in the storm had kindled her spirit. They sat awhile, in silence, kissing each other now and then; finally she lay down again to sleep, and he wrapped the boat cloak a
round her and with a kiss on her forehead left her there.

  When she came on deck, Eleanor drank in the keen salty air like a draught of wine. For a moment she stood looking across the deck at the sea and the sky, so utterly changed from the days of storm. The deck still rocked under her feet and she walked carefully toward the rail.

  Now the sea lay around her in wide calm swells, blue-green under the sun, that lifted the Wayward Girl in swoops up to the sky and let her down again into the trough of the wave. The sky was bland as milk. Against her cheek the wind blew a light warm breath. She thought of the storm; the waves had climbed up into walls that towered over the ship, the wind driving hard lances of rain against her face, the sky black with clouds, demonic.

  At the rail, she stood watching the other ships. There were fifteen of them altogether now, each rocking and dipping in its own dance with the sea, each one different. None was near enough that she could see people on board. They were like separate worlds.

  The ship was, she thought, the world pared to its elements. No overgrowth of extraneous custom blurred the stark outline of the eternal struggle. No embellishment or habit of society could moderate the constant intervention of the hand of God. The sailors gave themselves up to the unequal battle with the sea; whom God chose survived.

  The infinite horizon filled her with a sense of gigantic purpose. The very emptiness of the broad sea, which dwarfed the little wooden ships, satisfied her with its obvious order and proportion.

  A mumbled voice beside her diverted her gaze.

  The slow-witted boy, Mouse, stood there, holding out a chunk of bread and a wooden bowl of some indeterminate stew. She smiled at him, suddenly hungry, ready to share this new companionship.

  The bread was so hard she could not bite into it. The boy talked to her in his own language, which was so close to hers and still unintelligible to her. Taking the biscuit from her, he dipped it into the broth in the bowl, lifted it, and pretended to eat, and gave it all back to her.

  She soaked the bread until it was soft enough to eat. It all seemed very tasteless, and the meat looked and smelled foul. She smiled again at Mouse, who beamed at her. While he stood watching her, she forced herself to eat of the meat.