‘Picaro!’ Doña Marisa called him a rogue.
‘No te preocupes, mi amor. I shall peel oranges only for you – now and always,’ said he in an audible whisper to her.
His promise having pleased her, she resumed her story. ‘Thereafter, the two lovers continued to meet in the evenings under their trysting tree, where Don Luis enticed Jacinta with an orange, and each time she divided the orange in half, she would find an orange diamond nestled inside. But alas, on the evening of their twenty-second tryst, the enchantment ended, and no more glittering orange diamonds were to be had. Don Luis took his leave with alacrity, never to return to Portugal, he being all the richer with twenty-one orange diamonds tucked away in his bolsa.’
‘He didn’t love her,’ declared I.
‘That dog,’ muttered Señor Gonzalez.
Doña Marisa shushed her cortejo. ‘Poor Jacinta. Finding herself with child, she feared her papai’s wrath, for he would surely send her away to live in a convent…’
‘I lived in a convent when I was a bebê,’ remarked I. ‘There’s a wheel for the foundlings that goes round and round…’
‘Sí, sí,’ Doña Marisa interrupted me. She pinched the bridge of her nose for several seconds as if she suffered from head-ache. When she had calmed herself, she concluded her tale. ‘One starry night, Jacinta leant against the trysting tree, contemplating her sad lot, when a drunken Gallego labourer stumbled upon her presence. Unbeknown to them, Senhor Soares had seen them standing together underneath the trysting tree. He raged at his daughter, declaring her ruined and lost for ever to him. He forced her to choose between a vow of poverty, imprisoned behind the bolts and bars of a convent, or a vow of poverty, married to a poor Gallego labourer. Jacinta determined that her fado, her fate, was to marry this poor Gallego, and marry him she did, and several months later she gave birth to a girl – a girl christened Maria Isabel but whom she would always call Marisa.’
A girl named Marisa! My eyes became round as saucers. I begged her to tell me more about the girl Marisa, but alas, she pronounced that I would have to wait, and if I were a good little girl, perhaps she would tell me another tale. Sensing my disappointment, she explained that we must needs disembark – ‘Mira! We have reached Rotterdam.’
We floated into a maze of canals, passing under many a picturesque draw-bridge, when we came upon a landing-place near a tree-lined promenade. From there, we hastened to find lodgings at the Maréchal de Turenne, an inn kept by an Englishman who took pride in its Dutch cleanliness – gleaming windows and floors, polished furniture and grates, snowy-white linens and what not – for everything was clean and perfect on a moon.
Fatigued, Doña Marisa disappeared into her bedchamber for what would be a sennight, to be attended by Josefina, her lady’s maid. With Doña Marisa indisposed, and there not being much need for a foot-boy, I was allowed to do as I wished. But soon I became lonely. Oh, how I missed Pico, the master planner for our adventures. I wandered outside the inn, where I sat on a bench and moped.
‘Goedemorgen, jongetje,’ the maid greeted me, and pretty and charming she was in her white mob cap, short blue petticoat, white apron and wooden clogs. Armed with soap and a pail of water, she proceeded to attack the street with her scrubbing-brush, and with such great violence, to wash it clean. Between her bouts with the dirty street, the maid Grietje told me that she came from nearby Gouda, where she had learnt the secret of making stroopwafel.
‘Jongetje! Little boy! Want you a stroopwafel?’ Grietje reached into the large pocket tied to her waist. She handed me a small cloth, wrapped inside of which were two thin wafers with a syrupy filling in between.
‘Danke je.’ My countenance brightened now that I had a sweet and sticky treasure. ‘Do you have gooseberry tart?’
‘Ja, ja – kuisbessen-taart.’
Soft giggles erupted behind us. Twin girls, who appeared to be the same age as me, inclined their heads together, speaking in audible whispers of ‘een kus, een kus’.
Grietje laughed. ‘Niesje and Kaatje want kissen you.’
‘I’m not a boy. I’m a girl,’ declared I, having forgotten that I wore my nankeen breeches and red jacket.
‘Jongetje, jongetje,’ the twins chanted as they skipped round me.
I stamped my feet – left, right, left, right – but to no purpose. They considered me their beau, their namorado, and they insisted on calling me Hendrik. They followed me everywhere, these children of the innkeeper. Soon, however, I found that being Hendrik brought me unexpected pleasures. Hendrik voiced a command, and the twins obeyed him. Hendrik strolled the Boompjes Quay, a promenade along the River Maas, and the moon men would nod at him, as if they all belonged to the same moon men fraternity. Hendrik requested stroopwafel whenever he wished for one, and the kitchen maid would make it for him. As the boy Hendrik, I had become golden.
One day, while we children sat near the entrance of the inn, Hendrik lazing with his feet atop the bench and eating stroopwafel, the twins playing with their dolls – cleaning them, dressing them, grooming them, for Dutch girls’ hands are never idle – I espied a familiar-looking boy wearing Dutch boy’s clothes and smoking a pipe along with other Dutch boys his age. When this boy sauntered towards me, puffing on his pipe and setting his three-cornered hat a bit jauntily to one side on his head, only then could I credit my eyes.
Pico boasted to me, ‘I gave old Captain Bridge-y the slip (puff-puff).’ He had earned some coppers by guiding English travellers in Helvoet, traded his livery and cocked hat for Dutch costume, clay pipe and tobacco, eaten apples that he snatched from orchards, slept on a flat boat in the canal and thereafter footed it to Rotterdam in hopes of finding work of some sort.
‘What’s that yer eatin’, Soofia-Eee?’ Pico licked his lips.
‘I, Hendrik. Want you a stroopwafel?’ pronounced I in the curious English spoken by the Dutch.
‘Yi, Hendrik.’ Pico gobbled up the stroopwafel. ‘Wheer’s them Spaniards?’
‘Doña Marisa took to her bed,’ I told him.
‘Landlubber.’
‘I gave her waterzooi…’
Pico made a face. ‘Pah!’
‘…and she put her head into a pot.’
Pico convulsed with laughter. ‘Yer a rum ’un fer givin’ her that stink o’ fish stew. Give her erwtensoep – pea soup. The travellers always ask fer it at Hobson’s.’
Eager to be in Doña Marisa’s favour once more, I fetched a bowl of Dutch pea soup for her dinner, but she grumbled that it smelt like green canal water. And bury her head into a pot again she did, just like with the waterzooi. ‘Tonta!’ Josefina shook her finger at me, and she handed me the stinking pot when her mistress had done with it.
The next day Pico announced he was in ‘need o’ munny’. He formed an idea for us children to turn somersaults near the road where the carriages passed by. We rushed to the roadside with childish glee, and when Pico gave us the signal, we rolled head over heels – once, twice, thrice. Sure enough, the foreign travellers in the carriages laughed at our tumbling act, and they gave us five sous. Feeling emboldened by his success, Pico directed me to beat my drum while we sang a few verses of ‘Rule, Brittania’ for some red coats, who cheered for good old England and tossed us a generous handful of sous.
When, on the following day, we gathered on the roadside to perform our tumbling act, and for me to beat my drum, something singular happened. An assortment of painted wagons drawn by old horses approached us. On closer inspection, Pico counted fifty or so brown-skinned, dark-haired men, women and children who rode in the wagons or walked besides the horses, and one fine-looking man, he being the leader, the ‘duke’, who rode astride a horse.
‘Waterloo teeth! Waterloo buttons! Waterloo musket balls!’ the gipsies shouted. This caravan of gipsies had come from Brussels, where they had scavenged stuff from Waterloo, all of which things they offered for sale. Not understanding the meaning of this, I asked Pico why Waterloo had a goodly amount of stuff, and he explained
that this stuff had once belonged to soldiers – tens of thousands of them – who had perished in a bloody battle a few months ago. This confused me. Did not moon men live for a thousand years?
I questioned the twins. ‘Is this a moon?’
‘De maan? Ja, ja – de maan,’ the girls replied together, for they always agreed with whatever Hendrik said.
‘Yer dunderheads, this isna the moon.’ Pico seized my cap, and he rapped me on the crown of my head with it.
He had no sooner done so, than Grietje came to retrieve the twins. ‘De Zigeuners,’ exclaimed she with disgust, as she hastened the girls away, their wooden clogs clattering on the broad stone street. The gipsies ignored her rudeness, as if they had become used to such treatment wherever they roamed. But the whole thing struck me as odd. Were not peace and friendship a part of the creed of good moon-folk?
Captivated by the exotic gipsies, Pico and I followed their roving caravan. They encamped at a field a quarter of a mile from town, where they sold medicines and lured the curious with fortune-telling. When the gipsy acrobats strung up a tight rope, I quick marched to the scene, eager to join them. I shifted my drum to my back, and before anyone could stop me, I climbed up the ladder to reach the rope.
With my fingers and toes tingling, I balanced myself on the taut rope. There, six feet above the ground, with one of the gipsies standing underneath me to catch me, I turned fearless. I rope danced half-way across, beating my drum, and to much applause, for I had attracted a wide crowd. ‘Hoezee!’ the onlookers cheered. Buoyed by their encouragement, I handed my drum to the gipsy and thereafter amazed everyone with my best trick – roasting the pig – by laying myself upon the rope and swiftly turning round and round ere I dropped into the gipsy’s arms. ‘Hoezee! Hoezee! Hoezee!’ the crowd chanted.
My triumph complete, the gipsy lifted me high above his head. With the broadest of grins, I waved to the cheering crowd. How I wished to be adored so for ever! And how those coppers rained down on us! Puffed up from my brilliant feat, I searched for Pico to show him the five sous I had earned, when I observed him take to his heels to hide behind a wagon.
‘There you are, foot-boy,’ Señor Gonzalez grasped my arm. ‘You have made Doña Marisa most anxious.’
‘Señor Gonzalez?’ I started at the sight of him. ‘I rope danced with the gipsies and…’
‘Los gitanos?’ He glowered at the gipsy rope dancers, and with a fling of his capa over his left shoulder, he commanded in a sharp voice, ‘Vámonos!’
He strode back to town, with me scurrying behind him, when a Dutch official demanded to see our passport. ‘I am Señor Gonzalez, escort of Doña Marisa, and we travel with servants,’ explained Señor Gonzalez, showing our papers. The official cast a suspicious look at him and then at me with my drum perched on my back, until Señor Gonzalez pointed out that our passport had been signed by the Dutch minister in London and countersigned by the Dutch minister in Rotterdam.
Once the official had returned our passport and let us alone, Señor Gonzalez grumbled ‘voto a Dios’. He complained that he had been stopped ten times since our arrival in Rotterdam. When I asked him why, he mentioned that an age ago this country was known as the Spanish Netherlands until the Dutch revolted, led by their king, William I of Orange, and that is why many of the Dutch still disliked the Spanish. Yet, somehow that didn’t discourage the Dutch from trading with the Spanish. ‘Dinero, dinero, dinero. They love our money,’ concluded he in ill-humour.
Señor Gonzalez declared his need to be quit of this ‘foul-smelling’ country, and when we reached our inn, he advised me that we would be departing Rotterdam two days hence. This struck me into a panic. If Pico was right that Rotterdam and its town-folk didn’t belong to a moon world – what with everyone hating each other and arguing over money and killing each other in a war – how, then, would papai find me? Ai de mim! Cousin Annie had forgotten to tell me the rule for running away when I could not be found.
My mind in a muddle now, I rushed out of doors. I found myself at the bank of the green canal, and there, in my lonesome and pitiful state, I wept for half-an-hour, for I had been too long from home. Oh, how I missed my papai, my mamãe, my puggy and my Scarborough home and everyone else and everything in it. ‘There’s nothing more beautiful and noble than the sight of Scarborough,’ papai would often say to me.
I remembered how mamãe would dress me in my pink night-dress with whimsical embroidered roses – each rose having a pair of eyes to watch over me while I slept – and the warm home feeling it always gave me when she put me to bed. I remembered how papai and I would ramble the sands of the North Bay and how he would let me run barefoot, and when I had done prancing up and down the shore, he would tickle me by brushing the grains of sand from in between my toes. With a grieving heart, I trudged back to the inn, now that my crying spell had come to an end.
It occurred to me later that I must needs bother Doña Marisa, the landlubber-ish invalid, to write another letter to papai. The next afternoon I tap-tapped at her door, this time bearing a gift of hot and fresh stroopwafel. To my dismay, Josefina refused me entrance, no matter how much I pleaded with her. ‘Vete!’ she dismissed me with a wave of her hand. In her bad English, she told me I was a ‘no good penny’, sure to return with food to make her mistress ill, whereupon she shut the door in my face, cutting off my cries of ‘Minha Senhora! Minha Senhora!’
Vexed at being cast off, I stamped down the stairs, carrying my basket of stroopwafel. I, Hendrik, ordered the twins to bring me paper and pencil, and so they did. Together we wrote a letter to my papai. I told him Rotterdam was no good and push on we must to the Land of Cuckoos. I knew not where this cuckoo-land might be, but the twins had heard their papa speak of it with Señor Gonzalez. I drew a large heart, inside of which I scribbled the word ‘mamãe’ for my dear mamãe in Scarborough. At the bottom of the letter, the twins sketched a picture of themselves, writing their names Niesje and Kaatje under each of their likenesses.
I folded up the letter, and I addressed it to ‘Colonel Fitzwilliam, British Army’. Surely the army could find him on the road somewhere, searching for me and the perfect world in a moon. I asked the twins to get me a wafer to seal the letter with, but they knew not what I meant. Then I remembered the stroopwafel. I broke off a small piece, wondering if it would do. I removed one side of the wafer to reveal the warm, syrupy filling, and I pressed this sticky wafer onto the letter to seal it.
‘What are you zuinig.’ The twins nodded with approval.
‘Ja, I am thrifty,’ declared Hendrik, impressed with himself.
We sat within, facing the large window in front of the inn, Hendrik beating his drum, the twins playing with their small knitting needles and balls of bright orange yarn. I kept a look-out for a red coat by glancing at the two spying mirrors that hung outside the window, these framed mirrors giving me a clear view of all that passed on the street. We heard a Frenchman shout out, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ By and by, the disgruntled prisoner came into view, hooked to a pole and steered to gaol by a guard. Next came a match girl with a pole slung across her shoulders – the large balls of stick matches dangling from each end of the pole. Half-an-hour passed when I sighted a British officer striding towards us, his gait crisp, his air of authority so similar to my papai’s. I ran outside the inn, where I saluted him soldier-like with a pull of my cap. He halted before me, curious about this foreign drummer boy.
‘Your name, drummer boy?’ asked he with an officer-politeness.
‘I am Drummer Boy Hendrik. Do you know Colonel Fitzwilliam, the son of Lord Matlock?’
‘Och! I do, indeed.’ The officer grinned. ‘I, Captain O’Sullivan, served under him in Portugal.’
I gasped. ‘What was he like?’
‘The former lieutenant colonel, now Colonel Fitzwilliam, was and is a worthy, excellent officer, a valiant soldier and a warm-hearted friend beloved by all who know him.’
I stood proud, with my chin lifted. ‘Captain, could you give
him this letter?’
The Captain examined my childish scrawl and the sticky wafer seal ere he placed the letter inside his coat pocket. ‘Depend on it, drummer boy, I shall fulfil my commission.’
‘Thank you, Captain.’ My heart filled with gratitude.
The officer set off, happy to have this commission, methinks.
When the morning arrived for our leave-taking, Niesje and Kaatje began to weep, and miserably so, until Hendrik deigned to let them kiss his cheek three times, which seemed to ease their sorrow. Hendrik, being a brave boy, never shed a tear. The twins gifted me with a pair of wooden clogs, each clog bearing their names on it so that I would not forget them. In return, I gave them a picture I had sketched of us riding the wafer sails of a windmill that I had named ‘De Stroopwafel’, having learnt that all the windmills in Holland are christened with names.
‘Vaarwel!’ Grietje and the twins waved at me as our diligence rumbled away. ‘Adeus!’ cried I, with mingled feelings of loneliness and wistfulness at the loss of my Dutch friends. I waved back at them for a long while, because I, along with the snappish Josefina, had been placed in the basket seat located at the rear of the carriage. ‘Siéntese!’ Josefina chided me, each time I stood up to wave. When we lost sight of the inn, only then did I allow the hot tears to tumble down my cheeks. Dressed now in my striped livery and cocked hat, I took up my duties again as foot-boy to Doña Marisa, whose sickly countenance, by the bye, still looked a bit green to me, like the colour of pea soup.
Chapter Seven
The Officer and the
Water Maiden
MY FIRST TRUTH, thinks I, on this voyage to a moon world, was not so much an inward feeling that Doña Marisa and I were nearly connected to each other, but rather that Doña Marisa still pined for my papai, her first love, whereas he not for her, though she was not inclined to admit any of it. You see, my papai had come to love me, his love child, and Agnes Wharton, his true love. There, now, I have said it. But like all things clever or real or wise, no one else pays attention to them when their hearts and minds aren’t open to receiving the truth or when, such as here, a small child uncovers the truth, and the truth of the truth is phoo-phoo’d by the all-knowing grown-ups.
I, Sofia-Elisabete, Love Child of Colonel Fitzwilliam Page 8