The Sea Beggars (24 page)

Jan said nothing. He longed for his sister and his mother, for his home in Antwerp; that very longing made him think that Pieter was right. Everything past was gone, and the longing was proof of it. He had nothing anymore save this hardened, wicked old man, and the half-wit boy asleep on the deck beside him. Nothing. He put his head back against the timbers of the ship and shut his eyes.

9

“But you can't,” Hanneke said, and clenched her fists. “I must work—I have no other way of living. My mother—”

The leadman was shaking his head. “You've been missing days of work anyway.”

“But I explained that to you—and I do extra work to make up for it—”

His head swiveled from side to side, his expression implacable. “I can't keep you on.”

“Please!”

He reached for the door, to swing it shut between them, and as he shut it in her face he said, “If I were you, girl, I would not remind people my name's van Cleef.” The door closed. She was left staring at the stained boards.

He had paid her, at least scrupulous about that, to the last penny she was owed. She held the money in her hand, just barely enough to pay the Kelmans the rent. And then what? They had to eat something. She could not survive forever on the sweet buns Michael gave her. She turned away from the back door of the factory and walked off along the street.

What he had said to her came back; she stood under a tree by the side of the canal and looked into the dark swirling water and knew bitterly that he had let her off because she was her father's daughter. Mies, what a heritage you have given me. She struggled against her rage at her father, who had left her this misery.

The canal's slippery water rushed by, deep and dark from the spring rains. She thought of jumping in, of drowning, and getting out of her troubles that way, and enjoyed the idea for a moment: how sweet to sleep. But of course she could not; there was her mother to care for, and God forbade suicide anyway. She would not sleep; she would writhe in Hell. She walked off along the street to the bridge and crossed over.

In the Italian quarter, where most of the banks were, close by the Bourse, she went from shop to shop asking for work, but no one had any jobs she could do. Some of them even laughed at her, not meanly, but in amazement she would ask. Now and then she came on a shop that was closed up, which did not strike her odd, for a while, until she came to the end of the Lombard Street and saw people carrying furniture and goods out of a building and loading them onto wagons to be taken away.

At that she did stop and put this all together in her mind; she realized there was something ominous in this, that the foreigners were leaving Antwerp. For generations, people from all over Europe had been crowding into Antwerp, the hub of the world, and now, for some reason, they were going.

Only a few streets away, toward the river, was the shop of the printer Clement. He would know what was going on, and she went there.

The shop was loud with the clanging of the presses. Clement and several other men rushed about at their work, methodical as soldiers; the paper rattled in their hands and flashed white in the dim room, and as each lever swayed down the great screw presses groaned like monsters. The smell of ink and lead was painful to the nose. She went to the corner by the fire and sat down on the stool. The cat was curled up in the deep padded chair beside the window.

After a while the door opened and Clement's boy, Philip, came in. Seeing her, he smiled all over his face. Her heart lightened. She hardly knew him; yet he was glad to see her, and he came over to her and sat down on the floor beside her.

“How are you? I haven't seen you in a long while.”

They talked a little about the weather and the coming of the spring.

“I've lost my job,” she said, when the conversation got around to that. “And I can't find another. Why are the shops closing in the Italian quarter? What's going on? Something's wrong.”

Clement's boy folded his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “Yes, a lot of people are going away.”

“Why? Is there some reason?”

“The Spaniards, naturally,” he said, and shrugged. “What else is there?”

“But they've gone,” she said, thinking of Carlos, and realized at once how narrowly she had understood the Spanish power in Antwerp.

Clement's boy was watching her with wide grave eyes. His hair needed cutting; it fell over his forehead in a wing, and she put out her hand and brushed it back behind his ear. “What have you been reading lately?”

“A book about trajectories,” he said. He looked as if he were still thinking about what they had just spoken of.

“Trajectories. What's that?”

“How things fall.”

“Really. How odd, an entire book about how things fall. I cannot conceive of that filling even a page.” Her words sounded hollow to her, frantic, planking over a yawning gap in her understanding.

“Well,” the boy said, “that's the interesting thing about the new science, that the more closely you look at what seems like a simple thing the more there is to see. Why did they throw you out of your work? Because you are Calvinist?”

At that her chest contracted; she faced the dread she had been avoiding. “Yes,” she said.

He put his hand on her shoulder. “My father will help you.”

Hanneke smiled at him. Her face was stiff. If she had lost the one job for her faith, then the chances of her finding another were very slight. She thought of her mother, who complained even now of their poor food and close quarters.
I should have taken the canal
, she thought, and turned her gaze into the fire.

A few minutes later Clement was sitting down in the chair, the cat on his lap. “Well, Mistress van Cleef, what brings me the honor of a visit from you?”

“She's lost her job,” his son said. “Because she is a Calvinist.”

Hanneke said, “I can tell him myself, you know.”

Clement's big black-smudged hand flattened the cat's back. “Not just that, I am sure—it is the tax.”

“What tax?”

“The Spaniards are requiring several new taxes of us—to pay for the troops they are keeping here. The taxes on goods and land have no bearing on you, but there is a great tax that does, whereby the tenth penny of every sale in the Low Countries must go to the King.”

“Every sale of what?” she asked, not understanding at all.

“Every sale of anything. If a loaf of bread is sold, one tenth of the price must go to the King, or if a keg of beer is sold, or a sheep, or an onion, or a piece of cloth, and so the shopkeepers must raise their prices or cut their expenses in some way, and the easiest way is to let go some of their help.”

She gaped at him, amazed to have her particular disaster so neatly made part of something huge. “Is that why the shopkeepers are leaving Antwerp?”

“Very probably so,” said Clement.

“But then the King must not do it.”

Clement smiled at her; his hand stroked down the cat's gray fur. “So we must convince him. I can give you work here, if you want it. Not much, and for little money.”

She looked around the print shop; the other printers were away in the back eating their dinners. The floor was thick with dust and bits of metal and scraps of paper.

She said, “I can sweep.”

“No, no,” Clement said. “This is much more dangerous than that. My—” His head jerked toward the rear of the shop. “My assistants are Catholic, or untrustworthy in other ways. I need help in printing for the cause of God.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I can teach you all you must know in a few days. But it is dangerous work, and I cannot pay you very much, because it comes out of my purse, and not from commissions.”

Hanneke turned her eyes toward the fire again. For doing little more than this, her father had gone to prison. Why was Clement not in prison, not dead too? Her mind leapt at that, as if to solid ground. She swiveled her head to look at him, suspicious. Perhaps he was a seducer, who lured people into crimes and gave them to the Spanish. Why would he be so forward in offering help to her, whom he had never known before this?

She said, “I have my mother to consider. If anything happened to me …”

Clement was already shrugging, leaning back, his big square hands giving the cat a shove that knocked it off his lap. “Your decision. Whatever you wish. Will you have some dinner with us?”

“I must be going,” she said. Perhaps Michael would give her work. She got up to her feet, gathering her shawl around her.

“Can I go part of the way with you?” Clement's boy asked.

“No,” she said, short. “I have things to do.”

“Please, Hanneke.”

She went between them, going to the door, sure now she was right, and they were a den of traitors. “No.” The door squealed when she opened it; she went out onto the street, into the sunlight.

“Hanneke,” her mother said, waited for an answer, and got none.

Gone again. What a wicked girl. All things had gone to wickedness, since Mies went away.

She went to the doorway and looked out. The sun was going down. The air was moist and blustery, banging at the shutters on the house and pulling the door back and forth in her hand. Rain soon. The wind tugged on the door and she let it go; it swung outward with a crack against the outside of the house. She laughed.

Without looking back at all she flung herself out and down the stairs, down into the yard, and away to the corner in the very back, behind the privy, where she had hidden her helmet and her sword. The helmet hurt her head and so she had padded it with dry grass. She put it on and took the long wooden spike of her sword in her hand and went out to find the doorway.

Where it was, what it looked like, she had forgotten; all she knew or needed to know was that somewhere there was a door, and if she found it and went in she would leave this world and go back into the old world where the bread was soft and there was butter to have on it, and herring for breakfast, and a bed with white linen that she shared with Mies, and from day to day nothing ill happened. So she went off to find that door.

The first raindrops fell sharp on her helmet, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. She strode down the street, swinging the stick in her hand, her sword.

Rat-a-tat-tat—

Not rain. She spun around, and behind her the mob of small children broke and ran in all directions, screaming.

“The witch! The witch!”

She howled at them. Waving the sword, she charged after them; she took a few steps after one, turned, and went off a little way after another. They ran from her, squealing and crying. Out of breath, she stopped in the middle of the street and brandished her sword at them. Fiercely she snorted through her nostrils at them. They were all gone, hiding behind fences, giggling in the alleyways. She turned and started along the street again.

At once they were after her; a volley of small stones pocked the dusty street ahead of her, and a sharp pain drove into the back of her knee. She wheeled around and did battle with them once more, driving them off.

A dog chased her. She was afraid of dogs and she ran, the children streaming after her, the dog yipping at her heels. Swiftly she lost her breath and wanted to stop but the dog would not stop; it seized her dress in its teeth and tore off part of her skirt. If it caught her flesh in its teeth—

The dark was falling. Her lungs fiery, her eyes blind with tears, she ran around a corner and hid behind a tree.

They seemed to have gone. Somehow they had missed her. She leaned against the tree, struggling for breath. The hammering in her ears drowned all other sound. She longed to sit down.

Slowly the banging in her ears subsided, and below it, she heard the snuffling of the dog, searching for her in the dark.

She howled. Mindless with terror, she leapt away from the tree and ran, and they were all back again, the demons, yelling and snapping at her heels. She lost her sword. Screaming, she hurried down the street, while the hell pack scorched her with their flaming breath and fastened their iron teeth in her flesh. Something struck her hard in the back of the head. She fell. Under the weight of their bodies. Smothering in their fur. She pushed herself up onto her feet and ran on.

“The witch! The witch!”

Desperately she yearned to be home, to be with Hanneke, to have the door to shut after her. She turned into a twisting dark street and ran along it, searching for the house, but all these houses were strange. She was lost. The street climbed under her feet. Wheeling, she looked back, down the long winding way.

Empty. No one followed her. She was alone in the dark.

But when she turned and walked on, suddenly they were back again, leaping from the shadows at her, and she broke into a shambling run. She could feel their breath on her back. Their fangs tearing at her. Ahead the canal bridge. Backed like a camel. Up and up into the night, into the soft rain. She labored up the steep rise in the bridge. Something sprang at her from the dark. Huge. She flung out her arms and embraced it. Hot fur; the stinking blast of its breath in her face. She fell backward and it bore her down, pressing its fur over her face, down forever in an eternal fall.

“The damned Calvinists,” said Michael's mother, lunging and thrusting with her arms at the grainy dough. “They brought it on us.”

Michael caught the gleam of her eye, watching him obliquely, and knew where this was going. He rolled a handful of dough into a ball, flattened it with his hand on the baking tray, and picking up the jam pot dropped a spoonful of sugary cherries into the center of the circle. He had six more trays to make, and then he could go find Hanneke, no matter what his mother said.

“It's God's curse on us for letting them live here,” his mother said loudly. “For not keeping His way and making the damned Calvinists do the same.”

“The Estates haven't voted for it yet,” Michael said. “Maybe they won't. Maybe it will never happen.” Not even the Duke of Alva could collect a tax that had been rejected by the Estates.