by Kate Mosse
* * *
Willem van Raay, though reserved and formal, took to accompanying Salvadora to Mass each Sunday. He was a pious man, devout in the Catholic traditions in which he had been raised. He worshipped at the Nieuwe Kerk and was pleased to take Madame Boussay with him. There had been a time when Minou wondered if some autumn romance might flourish between the two but, though they enjoyed one another’s company, Salvadora did not take to life in Amsterdam. The language, the customs, the confinement, none of it suited her. Her health was poor and the loss of her great-niece, her niece and her favourite nephew had taken its toll. When the Peace of La Rochelle was signed in July 1573, bringing the fourth war to a close – and the travelling roads through France became passable once more – Salvadora had returned to Toulouse.
Minou had been sad to see her go, and fearful for her undertaking. But Willem van Raay had provided an escort for some of the journey, and Salvadora had made it home without mishap. Though news was sporadic, from time to time a letter from her did manage to make its way from Languedoc to Amsterdam. Now she was no longer in Salvadora’s company every single day, Minou found it easier to think fondly of her aunt.
And as France herself stumbled from one conflict to the next, bringing a realisation that they could not yet – perhaps not ever – return to Languedoc, Amsterdam had slowly become home.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The winters were less harsh in Amsterdam than in Puivert and the air in spring was softer. The land beyond the city walls stretched out flat and wet, a criss-cross of locks and dykes and waterways, so far as the eye could see. Fields of farmed land, windmills and occasional clusters of houses, a church. It was a landscape as unlike the jagged, grey landscape of the Midi as Minou could imagine. Even the light in Amsterdam was different.
Increasingly, Minou came to think of France as somewhere existing only in her imagination. Carcassonne, Toulouse, Puivert – places she had once known and loved – were only memories existing in old dreams as they faded and lost their colour. So, although she tried to hold in her mind the image of the chapel in Puivert where she and Piet had married, the vast wooden vaulted ceiling and the skylight paintings of Sint Nicolaas were more real to her now. And when she tried to remember the feeling of the wind on her face as she rode her bay mare through the Puivert woods on a summer’s day, it was instead the rough salt spray of the IJ on her skin that made her feel most alive.
As the months passed into years, Minou became accustomed to living in a world defined by water rather than forest. She crossed the narrow bridges and explored medieval passageways. She walked the whole world of the walled city along broad canals that followed the line of the medieval moat protecting Amsterdam, from Singel in the west to Sint Antoniespoort in the east, and home to Zeedijk. She stood on Damrak and looked south to Heilige Stede chapel where a fourteenth-century miracle had made Amsterdam one of the most visited pilgrim sites in the north. Even in these difficult times, hundreds of Catholics still flocked to the city each March to honour the Miracle of Amsterdam and walk the pilgrim route. Other days, she went to Damrak and looked north to the forest of masts in the deeper water of the IJ. She came to love the sound of the rigging snapping in the breeze in the floating palisade of tall ships in the harbour and the harsh shriek of the gulls calling the sailors home.
All the same, sometimes, when her spirits were low, Minou failed to stop the ghost of her daughter coming to stand beside her. Marta would have loved the seagoing ships and their promise of adventure, the setting sail for other lands. On those deceiving days, Minou glimpsed girls with long brown hair like Marta everywhere: a moment of hope, and Minou’s heart would speed up and she would follow. But the flash of blue stayed always just out of reach, and when the dream passed Minou would find herself bereft again, standing alone on an unknown street.
News of the French wars reached them from the stories of merchants and sailors, from the deserting soldiers and villagers fleeing north: of the concessions granted and rescinded; of the death of King Charles and the accession of his brother, the Duke of Anjou, to the throne; of the foundation of the Catholic League led by the Duke of Guise and the escape of Navarre from his long house arrest in Paris to lead the Huguenot forces. Fragments of information carried on the wind and in the sails of the mighty ships and the hulls of the little boats.
The situation was no less fragile in the Dutch Provinces. Brutal suppression of the Prince of Orange’s forces by the Spanish, and the destruction of villages and crops, had left the populace homeless and starving. Amsterdam, the sole remaining Catholic city, was suffering economically, losing trade and financial power as the battle for independence dragged on. It was time for that to change. Many of the Calvinists and Geuzen exiled in the early years of the Revolt had started to return to their land and property in Amsterdam.
Piet had been welcomed into their company with open arms. His many years of supporting Dutch independence meant that he was much sought after, as an ally, a leader, and as a friend. During the course of the previous winter and spring, he had frequently attended meetings in Lastage, the shipbuilding and chandler district outside the eastern gates that was home to many rebel Protestants. Amsterdam was returning to him a purpose and vitality that had been lost. Minou tried to be pleased, though the truth was she was angry at how easily he seemed to forget the past: Aimeric missing, Alis missing, Marta gone.
‘Frans,’ Minou called out, ‘this is the last time I will say this. Be more careful! You are too wild.’
‘Het spijt me.’ I’m sorry.
Minou poured herself a cup of ale from the pitcher, then looked for her own children in the crowd. Just as Aimeric and Alis had sometimes been taken for twins in their childhood, despite their difference in age, so Jean-Jacques and Bernarda, though some three years apart in age, were likewise a match. They favoured their father in their colouring. Neither child looked anything like her, or their older sister.
Marta. Minou felt the familiar twist of her heart. She would have been thirteen this summer.
Six years had passed and she and Piet never talked about Marta now. There was little point. Minou remained convinced that if her daughter’s life had been taken, somehow she would have known. Piet believed the opposite and thought Minou’s refusal to accept the truth held her imprisoned in the past.
She envied Piet his certainty. When her beloved father had passed away, she had thought death was the greatest loss a heart could bear. Now she realised that not knowing what had happened was a different kind of hell. That tiny treacherous sliver of hope, diamond sharp, that refused to die.
They spent time in one another’s company, and they were courteous and respectful of one another’s opinions. But they lived now more as affectionate friends than wife and husband. Minou had tried to forgive Piet for making her abandon Marta in Paris and for having stopped looking since. This far after the event, she accepted there was nothing else they could have done – the toll of the dead and the missing confirmed it – yet, unfair as it was, she still blamed Piet for not fighting harder. For giving up.
‘Mistress Reydon?’
Minou turned. ‘What is it, Agnes?’
‘There is a person at the front door asking for you.’
Minou raised her eyebrows. ‘A person?’
Agnes frowned. ‘A man, I think, though slight. He is unkempt, and his hair is short and wild, but his clothes are … strange.’
‘Strange?’
‘I did say you might not be at home.’
Agnes was right to be cautious. From time to time, a mother or a father, who had put their child out onto the streets, turned up at their door demanding restitution. Seeking payment for a child they’d abandoned.
Minou sighed. ‘Did this person give you their name?’
‘I asked but—’
Behind them, the door onto the terrace banged back upon its hinges, and the visitor stood unannounced, swaying under the burden of something they were carrying.
For a fleeti
ng moment, her eyes tricked her into believing Aimeric had come back to her. Minou blinked. Then the visitor spoke.
‘I have found you.’
At the sound of the familiar voice, Minou’s cup fell from her hands, the ale splashing across the flagstones. With tousled black curls cut crooked and short, the visitor looked like a boy rather than a woman of three-and-twenty years, but there was no mistake.
Minou rushed across the chamber and threw her arms around her sister. ‘My darling Alis! Can it be?’
‘At last,’ Alis said, then collapsed in a faint at her feet.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The setting sun was painting the tops of the towers of Sint Antoniespoort a burning red when Piet rushed into the attic room at the top of the house.
‘Is it true? Is Alis here?’
Minou looked up from her sister’s bedside and smiled. ‘Yes. Salvadora would say it was a miracle.’
Piet glanced at Alis lying still beneath the covers. ‘When did she arrive?’
Minou looked out through the small, square window and saw it was nearly sunset.
‘Early in the afternoon.’
Piet’s face was creased with worry. ‘Is she hurt? Ill?’
‘She is exhausted. She fainted, so we carried her up here. She’s been sleeping ever since.’ Minou paused. ‘I sent Frans to Lastage to fetch you some hours ago.’
Piet ignored her unasked question. ‘And she’s said nothing in all that time? About where she has been or how she—’
‘Nothing.’ Minou put her hand out and touched the tapestry. ‘Do you remember this, Piet? Alis managed to carry it all the way from Puivert.’
For an instant, Minou closed her eyes, remembering how the light fell on the tapestry hanging in the solar in Puivert while her family talked and lived beneath its gaze. The colours were faded now, but the vibrancy and movement in the stitching was unchanged. The Reydon-Joubert family in their finest clothes. She and Piet adorned in gold thread and silver and jewelled beads, with two-year-old Jean-Jacques in velvet breeches with his wooden rattle and seven-year-old Marta in her vivid blue dress and favourite cap with red stitching.
She opened her eyes to the Amsterdam dusk. ‘Where have you been, Piet? Frans said he couldn’t find you.’
Piet looked around, as if fearing to be overheard, then closed the door and the window. But for the expression on his face, Minou might have laughed at the idea that their conversation at the top of the house could possibly be overheard in the street.
‘Change is coming,’ Piet said, his voice stiff with anticipation. ‘Hendrick Dircksz is under pressure at last.’
Minou joined him at the window. ‘Is he no longer in charge of the town council?’
‘For now, the Stadhuis is still under his control, but his influence is declining. The massacres in Naarden, in Haarlem, the wholesale slaughter of women and children by Spanish troops, these crimes are not forgotten. Dircksz held out for too long against signing the Satisfaction. Even now, he refuses to comply with many of the terms.’
‘Why did he agree to sign at all?’
‘The “Beggars” forced him to at the point of a sword. But –’ Piet was warming to his theme – ‘by continuing to support the Spanish occupation against the Prince of Orange – when every other major city in the north and west of the Province has joined the Revolt – Dircksz is destroying Amsterdam’s prosperity. Too many ships pass us by these days in favour of Baltic ports. Merchants are moving their warehouses to England and Denmark.’
‘Commerce, then,’ Minou observed, ‘rather than sovereignty or faith.’
‘Dircksz and his fellow burgomasters bowed to commercial pressure, yes. But if they continue to deny us our churches, they must go.’
‘Us?’ she asked lightly. ‘You mean Huguenots, refugees like us?’
‘Huguenots, Calvinists, Protestants, the word doesn’t matter. All of the Reformed faith,’ he said. ‘Dutch, French, even English; that, too, does not matter. Many of the Calvinists exiled from Amsterdam have now returned. I have known many of these men by reputation for some ten years. To now be of their company and to be welcomed as a brother is an honour.’
‘I know that,’ Minou replied carefully. ‘But, from your expression, something specific is going to happen. Isn’t it?’
‘You should not fear change, Minou.’
‘That’s a foolish thing to say.’
Piet met her gaze. ‘This situation has dragged on long enough. The Dirckists have ruled Amsterdam for forty years. The world has changed, Amsterdam has changed. We need new leaders, a new Holland led from Amsterdam as its capital city. We need to look forward, not back.’
‘Should I be frightened?’ Minou asked steadily. ‘It seems to me I should. For our friends and neighbours, the children. Ourselves?’
‘No, of course not. Our intention is that this change of government at the Stadhuis should be peaceable, reasonable, an appeal to common sense.’
Minou looked at her steadfast, honourable husband and saw the worry lines on his brow. His russet hair was faded and grey at the temples now. He was a good father, a good husband, a man of principle, but she saw zeal in his eyes, the light of adventure, and a naivety. She did not find it reassuring.
‘There have been reports of nuns paraded naked through the streets, a Catholic priest found mutilated and hanging from a tree outside Schreyershoektoren,’ she said. ‘After every hedge sermon, where the Calvinists stir up the blood of the crowd, there are rumours of marauding bands beyond Haarlemmerpoort menacing the local populations.’
Piet frowned. ‘They are opportunists, vigilantes, nothing more.’
‘Dangerous all the same.’ Minou sighed. ‘And what will happen if the burgomasters and burghers – the Catholic clergy too, I assume – do not go willingly? What if they do not simply cede office to your comrades?’
Piet screwed his left hand into a fist. ‘They will, they must. We have men on the inside who think the tide has turned. They believe the time is right and that religious loyalty is no longer the deciding factor. We will give the old guard no option but to withdraw. For the good of Amsterdam, and for our faith.’
For a moment, Minou was silent. Memories of Carcassonne, of Toulouse, of Paris, overcame her. Blood in the streets, fam-ilies at war. History proved how rare it was for men to relinquish power readily once they became accustomed to it; how men of ambition did not meekly hand over the keys of a city they controlled to those they despised.
‘Should we prepare to leave?’ Minou asked, though she was doubtful she could survive another exile. Not now Alis was here, too. She had lost one home, she was not sure she could endure the loss of another. ‘Tell me, Piet. Should we leave before this “peaceful coup” becomes another massacre?’
‘No!’ he cried. ‘Minou, I give you my word. There will be no blood spilt by our side. We want to protect Amsterdam as a safe and prosperous city for our children and grandchildren, not destroy it.’
‘What about Cornelia and her father? Willem van Raay is a burgher on the town council. He is one of Dircksz’s men. What will become of him?’
He held her gaze. ‘All will be welcome, provided they accept that things are different. This is for the good of all.’
Minou looked at him with disbelief. ‘After everything Monsieur van Raay has done for us, after everything Cornelia does, would you turn your back on them? Piet, you must warn him of what is to happen.’
‘Warn him?’
‘Give him time to prepare, at least.’
‘I cannot betray—’
‘It is not a betrayal!’ she cried, her voice rising. ‘Take him into your confidence, Piet. Without him and Cornelia, we would have nothing. We would not have survived.’
They were interrupted by the creaking of the frame of the bed.
‘Minou?’ Alis murmured.
Putting their quarrel aside, Minou rushed back to her sister’s bedside and looked down on the beloved face. She was thinner, and her black curled
hair was hacked short, but the spark in her dark eyes was undimmed. At this moment, she looked so like her brother. Minou caught her breath. How could she bear to tell Alis about Aimeric?
‘Minou…’ Alis said, trying to sit up in the bed. ‘I am here? It wasn’t a dream?’
Minou laughed. ‘It wasn’t a dream. Welcome to Amsterdam.’
CHAPTER FIFTY
WARMOESSTRAAT
‘You rang for me, Father?’
‘Come in, my dear.’ Willem van Raay ushered Cornelia into their formal room on the first floor, and closed the door behind him.
Devastating fires in 1421 and 1452 had destroyed most of the wooden heart of the medieval city. At the same time, the tragedies had given the opportunity to the modern city of Amsterdam to find its shape and go from being the poor relation of Antwerp to surpassing it in trading power and influence. At the heart of this new commerce were men such as Cornelia’s father, Willem van Raay. Sober, honest, pious, but prepared to drive a hard bargain.
Many of the fine red-brick merchant houses on Warmoesstraat, where they lived, were some five storeys high with elegant neck gables and ornate pediments. Steps led up from street level to a narrow front door, with long leaded glass windows to the side. On some houses, above the door, carved decorative tiles of painted plaster and gilt boasted the year of construction and, often, an indication of the occupation of the householder. The tile set between the stone-arched windows of the van Raay house showed a richly dressed man, standing in front of a cargo ship bearing the family ensign, letting grain slip between his fingers into a basket.
Cornelia disliked the ostentation, though she understood it was important to her father that his success was visible to others, especially now when so many merchants and tradesmen had been driven out of business by the wars. Even in these troubled times, appearances still mattered in Amsterdam.
To the rear of the houses on Warmoesstraat, warehouses led directly to the quay. Through their long, tall windows Cornelia could see the last rays of the setting sun reflecting on the water. Armies of lighters and barges and shallow-hulled boats sailed up and down Damrak from dawn until dusk, ferrying merchandise to the cargo ships moored in the harbour and the ship-building and repair yards at Lastage: grain, hops, cheese, fish, beer, wine, cloth, soap, hemp, timber, nails, rope. In this great trading city, anything could be bartered and sold.