The Sea Beggars (2 page)

“Vive les gueux! Long live the beggars!”

To the left of the Prince of Orange, Count Horn murmured, “That word again.”

“What are they doing?” Orange asked. He twisted in his saddle to look around him at the jubilant crowds; clearly they were celebrating the Governess's decision to make no more decisions. Many of them had drunk too much, explaining the high degree of their excitement. Their cheers resounded with the French word for
beggar
. That put him off—to seize on an insult for a rallying cry divided them emphatically from the government. With his friends and their troops of retainers he rode on through the thick and noisy crowd toward the palace where they had been invited to dine.

The gate was clogged with people, and circles of dancers wheeled and dipped in the courtyard between the two wings of the house. Music boomed forth from the balconies, where musicians sat struggling to keep tune in the wash of echoes from the high walls around them. When Horn and Egmont and Orange rode in, the cheering doubled, and Orange had difficulty dismounting his horse and walking into the great hall of the house.

There a great banquet was laid out on long tables, and seated all around them the men who had delivered the petition drank and sang and cheered themselves and their friends.

“Vive les gueux!”

At the sight of the three newcomers the cry went up like a peal of thunder. “Vive les gueux!” In a single leap, the revelers rose to their feet, hoisting their cups in greeting.

They were wooden cups—beggars' cups. Orange frowned, his sense of proper value overturned by such impudence. Around their necks these men wore beggars' chains. They had taken the insult as an accolade—as a common bond.

“Long live the beggars!”

Orange stopped, unready to join this—unwilling to have this salutation pressed on him. It was too late. Forth they rushed, his hosts and friends, his fellows in opposition to the Crown, and carried to him chains and a wooden cup. “Vive les gueux!” The roar shook the rafters. Like a bobbing bit of cork on an ocean wave, he felt himself lifted up and carried away with the rest, his will made nothing. Laughing, they surrounded him, these beggars, and hung the chains around his neck, and pushed the wooden cup into his hand. He knew it was the cup of fate. “Long live the beggars!” they cried, and swelled by their ardor his courage like a rushing wave ran on beyond his reason.

“Vive les gueux!”

He raised the cup and drank it to the lees.

1

In the heat of the summer, the great Calvinist preachers went into the countryside, into fallow fields and meadows, and there delivered their sermons under the open sky. From all over the Provinces, pious folk came to listen, whole families, with their children by the hand and their dinners in baskets.

In a barley field near the great city of Antwerp, in Brabant, the preacher Albert van Luys stood up to declare the Word of God. Hundreds of people came to listen; the women sat on the grass in a circle around him, with their little children on their laps, and the men stood behind them in another circle.

Albert van Luys had the true fire of his calling, but the day was hot and long and some of the men had brought beer with them, and gin, and wine in flasks. Some too had muskets, which they fired off now and again, shouting, “Vive les gueux!”

Mies van Cleef had no musket, and drank no more beer than necessary to cool his throat and maintain his strength through the heat of the day. Standing in the ring of men facing the preacher, he dwelt with his whole mind on the sermon:
The day of the Lord cometh like a thief in the night
. Mies had a wonderful power of concentration. Intent on Albert's words, he noticed neither the occasional bursts of musket fire nor the shouts of the drunkards; and he realized only gradually that his son, Jan, had slipped away into the crowd.

That annoyed him. He was a merchant, with a large trade and many employees, whom he expected to obey him without flaw. That his son could disobey him pricked his temper like a needle in his flesh. For a while longer, when he was sure Jan was gone, he struggled to keep his interest on the sermon, but the needle pierced ever deeper into his pride and his rectitude, and finally he stepped backward through the ring of men to the empty meadow.

There he paused and collected himself, a lean man in middle age, balding, his clothes as somber as a monk's and expensive as a prince's. He cast a look around him. The grass was trampled to a pulp; a fine gray dust lay over everything, even the shoulders and backs of the men watching the preacher, whose ranks he had just left. He shook a layer of dust off his sleeves.

At that moment a crackle of gunfire went up on the far side of the crowd. That told him where to find his son. He strode off around the outside of the circle in the direction of the shots.

The field lay along the Antwerp–Mechlin Canal; boats crowded both banks. On the far side, a gigantic mill creaked and wheeled its arms in the gusty breeze. White clouds streamed across the sky. Mies lengthened his stride, pressed on by these hints of a storm coming up over the horizon: his wife and daughter would not enjoy getting rained on.

“Long live the beggars!”

Another musket went off into the air; a man in a flapping black hat waved his weapon over his head. Near him was Mies' son, Jan, squatting on his heels beside another man with a gun, asking questions. Mies' jaw tightened. When he took Jan into a factory with him, or out to the shops, Jan never asked questions. Mies stalked across the beaten grass to his son and taking a handful of his collar pulled him to his feet.

“This is how you value the chance to hear God's Truth expounded!”

Jan shook him violently off, blushing to the ears; his sun-bleached hair bristled with bad temper. Although he was only seventeen, he was much taller than Mies, which perversely angered his father as much as Jan's sinful interest in guns and fighting. He struck Jan on the face with his open hand.

“Go back to the sermon!”

“Don't hit me,” Jan said, between his teeth. Past him, Mies saw the men with their muskets, grinning at them.

“Go back to the sermon,” Mies said, and wheeling marched away again, toward his place in the circle of men.

Jan followed him. Some last shred of filial piety remained in him. It was not enough for Mies; bitterly he wondered why God had sent him this lout for a son, and wasted a keen mind and a heart for truth on his daughter, who would never be anything but someone's wife.

The sermon was ending. Albert had them in prayers, many in the crowd, even men, weeping for their sins. Mies stopped to look among the gathering for his wife.

Jan stood sullenly beside him. With the briefest of looks into his son's face, the father said, “Be sure your mother does not learn of your truancy.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy mumbled. His fine white skin still showed the stain of his furious blush.

Now rain was falling. Quickly Mies collected together his family; the sermon had overcome his wife, in whose large-boned frame he saw the pattern by which his son was cut, and she leaned heavily on his daughter's shoulder. Hanneke too had their mother's tawny hair and generous size of bone. She smiled at her father as he lifted her mother's weight from her arm.

“Beautiful,” her mother said, and sobbed. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “When Albert speaks of Heaven, he makes me long so for it …” In a flood of weeping she lost the power of speech.

“What thought you of the sermon, Hanneke?” Mies asked. Supporting his wife on his arm, he led his family toward the canal where their boat waited.

“His style is very fine,” the girl said, “but I think he is not so strong in his reasoning as he might be. There were moments I thought he tried with a great wind of words to blow me over the gaps in his logic.”

Mies laughed, delighted with her composed and critical expression. He reached past his wife, to squeeze his daughter's hand. “Trust you to yield not to his fulsome blasts, my little dear one.”

Jan burst forward, moving on ahead of them, awkward, as if the size and weight of his limbs outstretched his mastery of them. “I'll help with the horses.”

It was in Mies' thoughts to stop him, to remind him of his place, but there was no use in it. He shrugged. “Very well,” he said, to his son's back.

They got into the flat-bottomed boat, and Mies arranged his wife on cushions in the stern and sat there with her, his hand on the tiller. Their boatman brought the horses and hitched up the long towline to the harness; with Jan to help him, he had the van Cleefs' boat ready long before the others in the crowd, whose horses neighed and jogged up and down the high bank of the canal while the boatmen cursed and struggled with tangled lines. Stuck in the midst of the fleet, Mies could not see a way clear, and they had to wait for the others to hitch up and move along, to make space for them. Reluctantly Jan climbed down the dusty bank of the canal and stepped into the barge, which dipped under his weight and swung into the boat next to it. He sat beside his sister in the bow, glowering, his eyes downcast, his large square hands gripped between his knees.

Lout
, Mies thought, with a hot spurt of anger. The rain was falling harder now. The boats ahead of them were moving at last, and he called to his boatman to drag the barge along the canal, back to their home in Antwerp.

For running off from the sermon, Jan's father sent him down the next morning to the wharf on the canal behind the silk factory, to work at loading and unloading the boats. Although the work was hard Jan enjoyed it; he liked showing off his strength, and while the rough, voiceless men of the regular crew shuffled up and down the steps, four hands to every bolt and spool, Jan leapt back and forth from the wharf to the factory with the great heavy goods balanced on his shoulders and scorned any help at all.

After he had done this for most of the morning, the foreman of the regular crew took him aside and told him to stop.

“If the overseer catches you doing that, he will think we ought to be doing it too,” the foreman said. He was a burly man whose bulging forearms jutted out of the frayed sleeves of his shirt.

“It's not that hard,” Jan said.

They were standing on the wharf, beside the tufted bollard where the canal boats tied up. Behind the foreman, the short steep ladder scaled the canal bank, and along the top of the bank on either side of it the rest of the crew stood watching what went on between their leader and Jan. The foreman crossed his arms over his chest.

“You're only a boy,” he said, “and you have no family. Likely you will take your wage and spend it on beer and whores. We all have to put bread into our babies' mouths. If you work so hard, the factory men will think they don't need all of us, and some of us will be turned off.”

Down the canal, someone yelled; a heavy-laden barge was steering around the bend. Jan said, “You should do a good day's work for your wage.”

The foreman cocked his fist. “You slow down, or we'll see you don't come back tomorrow.”

Jan opened his mouth to inform this brute that he was the son of the factory's owner, but something warned him against that. He looked up at the row of men on the canal bank above him, their faces in shadow, the sun at their backs. The barge passed behind him, parting the canal water with a low murmur; as it passed, its horn gave a breathy honk.

“Very well,” he said. “I won't be here that long anyway.”

The foreman smiled and lowered his fist. “That's a good boy.” His wrist was spotted with old healing sores, flea bites, or scrofula. When he turned to go back up the ladder, Jan saw spots of blood on his shirt. Jan stooped to hoist a bale of carded wool to his back, remembered, and straightened up to wait for help.

That evening he and his father walked home together and his father said, “How did you on the wharf?”

“Fair enough,” Jan said.

“Did you talk to any of the other men?”

“A little,” Jan said, warily. They were walking down the tree-shaded lane toward their street; the sun had just gone down and the birds shrilled and flapped in the branches overhead, revived in the cool after the day's humid heat.

“Did you notice any one of them who seemed to be”—Mies made a thoughtful face—“a troublemaker?”

“What?”

“One who incited the others to laziness, perhaps, or wild talk.”

“No,” Jan said.

His father shook his head a little, his lips still pursed, as if over some indigestible idea. He said, “Well, keep your eyes and ears open.”

“Am I a spy, then?” Jan asked, furious.

Mies gave him a sharp look. “You are my son. What benefits me does you also, does it not? People who talk sedition are bad for business.”

“No one talked any sedition.”

Mies said, “There are how many on the wharf? Six? Do we need so many?”

That came at Jan too fast to answer; he opened his mouth and shut it again, wondering what to say. Although he had spoken to the other men only briefly, and the foreman had threatened him, he felt the first formings of a loyalty to them.

“Well?” his father asked.

“What will you do if I say no?” Jan said.

His father walked along, square and solid as one of the big linden trees they passed beneath. “They are overpaid as 'tis. To send some off would help me balance my books a little more favorably.”

“They have families. Children to feed.”

“So do I.”

“You're rich.”

“I am not in business to provide a means of life for half the rabble in Antwerp. What a tender heart you have. Then there are too many men on the wharf.”

“But I am not there always,” Jan said. “When I am not there, surely the work must be harder on the others.”

“True,” said Mies.

They were coming to the end of the street. Soon their house would be in view, the smells of dinner floating from it; Jan's stomach let out a loud and painful growl. His hunger sharpened something in his understanding of the foreman and his babies.