The Sea Beggars (10 page)

The phrase ran back and forth through his mind like a rat in a trap.
Curse God and die. Curse God and die
. He had never admired Job. There seemed nothing stoic in Job at all, no fortitude, no heart. Now bitterly he knew there was nothing much at all in himself, just a bitter despair that could not wait for death.

He groaned, and the warder nearest him struck out with his whip and clubbed him over the face with the butt end. Mies bit his lips together, tasting blood.

Even Christ had despaired on the Cross. Mies leaned his head against the wall. Why did this happen to me—what did I do to deserve this? He picked through all his sins, his boyish defiance of his father, his marriage to Griet above the objections of both families. His greed, his cold charity. He had done nothing that hundreds of other men had not done, and did yet, in freedom still.
Curse God—

The light went off, deeper into the room. He saw glowing patches of people, squatting in the filth, their clothes like shreds of skin that hung from them. Sores on their arms and bodies and faces. Like his. His back itched where the wall had worn it open. Vermin in it probably. Eating away his flesh. Not worth anything anyway. Just a pile of meat. God deserted me.

Even Christ despaired.

At least, crucified, He had died swiftly. Relatively swiftly. He thought of hanging from nails through his hands and the swollen infected flesh of his arms and hands throbbed painfully against the manacles. I don't deserve this. I'm innocent.

No one is innocent. He thought of the times he had cheated in his business and thought himself clever. Of beating his son out of bad temper when the boy was too slow to do something probably no child would have done well anyway.

God, forgive me
, he thought, and suddenly, from nowhere, a light unlike the dirty light of the lantern came on inside his skull. God had forgiven him. That was why Christ died on the Cross.

He shivered; some enormous force swept through him, too strong for his flesh to bear, and nearly made him weep. He lifted his weighted hands to his face.
Oh, God
, he thought. It is true.

Down there at the end of the room, someone moaned, and the whip cracked. The lantern shifted through the filth and darkness, and the hammers rang on iron, chaining up someone else. Mies bent forward, his face against his knees.

All his life he had heard it, that Christ died for him, that Christ had won him life eternal, and never understood, but now he understood. When he needed Christ, all he had to do was turn toward Him and He was there.

He sobbed. The manner of his death to come seemed trivial now. He had found something else. The wild rush of gratitude to God Who had saved him, and Who would take him through that death into Paradise, warmed his body and lit up his mind like the coming of daybreak. The animal sounds of his prison, the stench, the hunger, nothing mattered now. He wept for gratitude; in the first white heat of his understanding he saw that everything was worth this. Falling into prison, losing his life, all this suffering was well worth the understanding that now he had: that God had saved him. He pressed his face against his knees and prayed to God in thanks for having sent him to this place.

Hanneke was gone. Everybody was gone.

Griet opened the door a little and looked out. The steps that led down to the backyard of this strange house shone yellow in the sunlight. Nobody was there. She could get away now.

She pulled her housedress around her and held it fast with one hand. Carefully, because her feet were bare, she went out step by step down into the yard. It was cold. No matter. In a little while she would find her own home, where it was always warm, and Mies would bring her her slippers and a foot-warmer. Mies was so kind to her, always; if only she could find him again, everything would be all right.

She crept through the yard to the gate and went out to the street. No one had seen her. If Vrouw Kelman saw her she would shout and call for help to get her back into the attic room, but she did not belong there. She belonged somewhere in a tall house with painted shutters and a stork on the chimney. She set off up the street to find it.

Before she had gone very far, two little boys ran out of a yard by the street and shouted at her and threw clods of earth at her. Griet hurried away from them. A dog chased after her, barking.

At the corner, where the little foundry shop was, she picked up a broken iron pot out of the street. She had seen the Spanish soldiers wear pots on their heads, to protect them, and she put the iron pot on her head, in case the children threw stones.

That was a good idea, because now there were more children, and they were throwing stones. She walked off as fast as she could, turned into the next street, and began searching for her house. A volley of pebbles pelted her back and shoulders and she wheeled around, furious, and yelled and made faces and waved her arms.

The children laughed. She did not frighten them enough. When she turned to go on in her search, they rushed after her again, and more stones came, more bits of dirt and even dog turds, horrible smelly things. She broke into a run to get away from them and they ran after her, streaming after her, laughing and yelling. People were looking out their windows at her now. Humiliated, she stopped and turned again to face them, and the children skidded to a stop, a dozen or more of them, ten feet behind her.

“Yeeaaw!” She waved her arms at them. They laughed. A stone whizzed past her shoulder.

Devils. Imps. Her breath whined between her teeth. If Mies saw them he would lash them. Take a stick to them. That was what she needed. She looked around her, saw a stick lying in the gutter, and ran over to it.

“Now,” she cried, and lifted the stick high over her head, like a sword. “Now let's have at it, you devils!” She ran straight at them, hooting.

They scattered. The smiles vanished from their faces, and they turned their backs and ran. She darted after one or another, just a few steps, driving them away; her stick swung at their backs. She hit nothing, but the stick made a lovely sound in the air as it passed, and more than one little boy wailed in terror. Griet howled with delight. Long-striding, she dashed after one boy until he disappeared, and wheeled and made for another, until they were all gone from sight. With a yell of triumph, she tossed the stick high up into the air; it fell with a clatter to the ground. Square-shouldered, she marched off to find her house.

The crowd was pressed so tight together that Hanneke's basket was crushed. It was hard to breathe. She wondered if the crowd did that or if she were just afraid. Afraid of what? She knew what she had come here to see.

Behind her was the broad high façade of the Fullers' Guildhall; people stood on the roof of it and hung out the windows, waiting. Before her, held open by ropes that kept the crowd back, was the square, and beyond that, the cathedral, its door obscured by the scaffolds that filled the square, and its off-center tower rising up into the sky like some huge scaffold of its own. She thought she was going to be sick. The crowd surged forward and carried her along, nearly off her feet, up to the rope barriers.

“They're coming! They're coming!”

She pulled and shoved at the shoulders and backs around her, trying to see past them. The shout went up from a thousand tongues, and now the crowd pressed up to the ropes and knocked them down and would have flooded across the square, carrying her in their midst, but for a row of soldiers that ran up with their pikes at the ready and forced the people back.

The soldiers calmed them all. Hanneke gripped her basket in both hands, thought of praying, but could not. She looked up at the scaffolds, wagon wheels set up on poles, and no prayer would find its way into her mind. And now they were coming, the condemned, to the throbbing of drums.

Her back tingled, and her hair stood on end. In white shirts, each carrying a cross, they marched up like soldiers into the square. Many were too weak to walk by themselves; others in the row supported them. On their arms and legs she saw the marks of chains. Her heart sank. There were too many of them. She would never see Mies here, in all this mob. She would never see her father again.

The executioners started almost directly before her; they took the first two prisoners and flung ropes up over the spokes on the wheels overhead, adjusted them to balance, and pulled the condemned people up by the necks into the air.

Hanneke screamed. It was awful. They did not die. They hung there and kicked and their faces turned blue and swelled up, and as they jiggled in the air a filthy rain of urine and feces splattered down on the cobblestones under them, so that some in the crowd even laughed. She recoiled. More and more were going up into the air now. She doubled up, hiding her face, and struggled to get away.

Near the building, she stopped, trying to catch her breath—to get her soul in harness again. Over the heads of the crowd she could see the first row of bodies, quiet now, in God's hands, hanging there. Their faces were black. She tore her gaze from them. Not Mies. Not that way.

One hand on the rough stone wall of the Guildhall, she walked along behind the crowd, clutching her basket. She was tired; she had to get home. Get some sleep, before her work started in the morning. What was going on here was over, an end of things, to be forgotten. Forget she ever had a father. Her stomach heaved. Not like that, not Mies. Then in the crowd ahead of her she thought she saw Jan.

She called his name; she struggled to reach him. But the crowd was moving, shifting forward to see those dying in the rows nearer the cathedral, and in their midst her brother was carried farther and farther away from her even while she tried her hardest to close with him. She wailed, desperate: “Jan!” He didn't hear her. Or maybe it wasn't he at all; now she could not even see him, for the press of bodies between them. She sank back, exhausted and defeated, and slowly made her way back home.

In the evening after the executions Jan went to the Kelmans' house, to say goodbye to his sister. There were many more soldiers in Antwerp now, and he had decided to take her advice and go away, to their Uncle Pieter in Nieuport.

He went up to the gate, to call her. The night was falling and the breeze blew cold and bright into his face. In the blue twilight he made out some people in the garden, and he was about to call to them to fetch his sister for him when he noticed that one of them was a foreigner.

It was a Spanish soldier. At once he understood; there would be a soldier quartered here on the Kelmans.

His hand slipped from the gate. He turned his head, looking away down the street; for a moment longer he stood there, in case she should see him and call to him, but no one called him back, and he went away down the street, away to Nieuport and his uncle.

In Brussels there were hangings too, hundreds of dead, ornaments, folk said, for the Duke of Alva's Advent. After the common folk had been dragged out and executed, the executioner stood up on a broad platform in the Grand Place, with all of Brussels looking on, and there on a cloth of black velvet he stood waiting with his ax while his last two victims came out.

The first was Count Horn, who knelt down, and put his head to the block, and was killed. Silence met this act, the execution of so great a man, this downfall from the heights of life to the black pit of disgrace.

They put a cloth over Horn's body, and led out Egmont. “You, too, my friend,” said Count Egmont, and went as tamely to the block, to have his head struck off. Then the executioner came forward, displaying their heads in his hands, and called on men to cheer the name of the King.

No one cheered, except a few soldiers; there was a breathless hush, as if all the air had been sucked up out of the square.

In a loud voice the executioner read a proclamation, declaring forfeit and lost all the estates and titles of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, who had fled from Alva, and announcing that should this Prince of Orange come back to the Low Countries, the same lot would befall him as had befallen these two friends of his, who lay dead on the scaffold.

No one cheered that, either. It did not seem to matter. To most of the people watching, Orange seemed as good as dead. Night was coming. They gathered themselves and took one another by the hand and went away home.

3

The tide was out; on the sloping sandy beach half a dozen little boats lay tilted on their keels. Jan walked along the low bulkhead at the top of the beach, peering out toward the harbor. Nieuport lay at the throat of a little river, behind the banks of dunes that bounded the North Sea, with the harbor tucked into the dredged and widened river mouth. Now the sun was setting, and although the hot light still gilded the peaks of the dunes, the harbor was deep in twilight; all the ships were in, and the nets hung like folded wings from the shears.

Jan kicked a rock off the bulkhead; it fell deep into the soft wet sand of the beach. He had no idea how to find his uncle.

Ahead, the bulkhead curved away to his left, turning upriver, where the town lay. There was a little market in the swell of the curve, which was shutting down for the night. He went through the market, past the gossiping fishwives rolling up their awnings and packing their baskets. The paving stones were slick with fish scales and guts. The smell of the beach came at him, the dry salty smell of dead seaweed and fish, cork and tarred canvas. The air fell calm. Out across the harbor the water was glassy still. Softly the first breath of the freshening breeze cooled his forehead.

He asked three or four people before he found one who could direct him to his uncle's house. With the homeward-going workingmen he trudged up the single street of the town, along the riverbank. The lights of the houses shone on the ruffled water. He went up on a bridge over a canal coming in from the right and turned on the far bank to walk along it.

The third house from the end was built down sheer to the wooden bulkhead of the canal. A dinghy was tied up to the back door. Jan knocked on the front.