The Sea Beggars (26 page)

Del Rio went to his desk, near the middle of the room. “The matter is not in my hands. The Duke of Alva requires that we raise these taxes to pay the army.”

The second deputy cleared his throat. “Excellency, there is—we cannot …” He glanced at his fellow. “I don't really see how we can expect any success in this matter now.”

On the desk was the charter for the taxes, written in red and black ink, handsomely decorated with ribbons and seals, a very elegant document. Del Rio picked it up but did not read it; he knew what it said.

He asked, “What time would be better? Orange's army has been chased out of the Provinces into France. Alva has saved you again from destruction. How better to show the gratitude of Antwerp, of all Brabant, than by voting him this present of money?”

Two or three of his aides said, quietly, “Long live the Duke of Alva.” The two deputies did not echo it.

“Excellency,” said the first deputy, his hands performing delicate arabesques before him, “with such a mob before the gates, it were hard enough to entice the Estates to vote for something they wanted, but to vote for something that repels them—”

“Repels them? Are they so ungrateful that they will not give even this modest acknowledgment of the Duke of Alva's great work?” Del Rio tapped the document. “If not for Alva, Orange would have invaded the Provinces! Tell them that. You would have seen again the horrors of sixty-six—churches sacked and looted, holy relics smashed, priests murdered.” He thrust the document at them. “Do you think safety comes cheap?”

The deputies swallowed simultaneously, their throats working; they looked at him dumbly, like chickens waiting to be axed. He snorted, angry at them. If they would not take his arguments, there was small hope the Estates as a whole would listen. He kicked the desk.

“Then hear this, if you will not hear good sense. Alva is free now. He's been gone, off at the borders, keeping Orange from burning down your homes around your heads, but Orange is gone now, and Alva will come back.” He walked up before the two deputies and put his face into their faces. “Do you understand?”

“Your Excellency—”

“If we do not have these taxes by your good will and free, my men, we shall have them by force, as what is due us. Do you understand?”

The deputies' eyes shone. Their lips pressed together in thin lines like old unhealed wounds.

“Are you threatening us, your Excellency?”

Del Rio let out a roar of angry laughter. He struck the man before him on the chest. “Yes! That's what I am doing.” Wheeling, he walked away across the room. “God, what does it require to move these people—not sense, not right, not God or king—”

His aides murmured, agreeing with him, as they always agreed with him. The two deputies bowed and took the document and backed toward the door.

“As your Excellency requests.”

“I do not request,” del Rio said. “I require.” His hands on his hips, he strolled across the room again toward the door onto the balcony. Through the frosty glass he could see down onto the field, where now men on horseback were riding toward the castle. The deputies to the Estates were arriving. As they rode on, the people swept up around them, surrounded them, blocked their path, and shouted and waved papers at them. In their midst the deputies raised their hands, yielding.

Del Rio put out his hand to the cord of the drapery. They were stubborn as stone these people, even the Catholics. With a pull on the cord, he drew the brocaded drapery shut across the glass doors.

“The deputies!”

The roar that went up from the people around her seemed to lift Hanneke a little off her feet. She wheeled with them, toward the castle; like them all, when she saw the men in the doorway, she shouted. On her left Michael gripped her arm. They rushed forward, with the others, toward the castle.

“What's the vote?” The outcry began at the head of the crowd and spread backward through the whole mass of people, every voice joining the yell. “What's the vote?”

In the doorway the smiling man with the beard raised his hand for quiet. Hanneke held her breath. She clutched Michael's hand tight and got an answering squeeze from him; suddenly before her, she saw Clement's boy and leaned forward to catch him by the shoulder and pull him back beside her, her arm around him.

“The vote—” cried the man in the doorway. “The vote is no!”

The roar that greeted this went up like thunder. Hanneke flung her arms around Michael and hugged him, and whirling she caught Clement's boy and lifted him up off the ground.

“We've won! We won—we won—”

The boy's arms went around her neck and he hugged her with a strength that surprised her. An instant later he was scrambling out of her grip and running off through the crowd.

“We won!” She seized Michael's hands and kicked her feet in a celebratory dance.

“I thought dancing was evil,” Michael said. “Who was that? That little boy.”

All across the field, the gathered people of Brabant were cheering, drinking, dancing; a gun went off somewhere, and she even heard a cheer of “Vive les gueux!” Hanneke drew her hand from Michael's, wanting some distance back between them.

“The printer's son. Clement the printer.”

“That Calvinist you told me of.”

She nodded. “I'm going home, Michael, if you don't mind.”

“I'll walk with you.”

She started away along the edge of the crowd. The preachers were getting up on the wagon again, off by the river, and most of the people were pushing off in that direction to hear the sermons.

“He offered me work, once,” she said, thinking of Clement. “Maybe I ought to go there and help him.”

“That will get you in trouble.”

“I'm in trouble now, Michael. I have no money and no work and no family.”

“I'll give you bread.” He seized her hand. “I'll marry you.”

“Michael.”

“Then you will have a family.”

“Michael, your mother will never consent.”

“Will you marry me?”

She looked at him, her head tipped back, and studied the fine honest architecture of his face. Mies would never have considered it—a baker's son, a Catholic, no fit husband for the daughter of Mies van Cleef! When she thought of Mies her mood turned heavy. She turned away.

“I can't marry you, Michael. Or anybody. Not now.”

“Why not?”

“I can't.”

“Why?”

“I just can't, that's all.” No way to explain to him how she felt, stripped of everything, home and family, and even her first feeble efforts at caring for herself: as if she herself were nothing, and if she married him what would she become but a shadow of him? And she did not love him. If she had loved him, then she would have been strong enough to marry him, but she did not.

She said, instead, “Clement's son is so clever—you should meet him.”

“A little boy?”

“He's very clever, and reads all the time, and has the most interesting ideas.”

“He's nine or ten years old. I'm a grown man. Why are you turning me away like this?”

They were walking along the canal now, on the path that led over the edge of the bank. Ahead a house leaned out over the water, reflected in the smooth surface, and a swan fed in the swampy weeds below the wharf. Hanneke kicked a stone into the water.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait until I …”

When she made no more of it, he said, “Until what?”

“I don't know. But I will, when it's happened.”

“I'm a grown man, Hanneke.”

In a flash of understanding, she saw that he had to insist on that because he did not entirely believe it—that he wanted her to marry him because grown men married. She looked up at him, feeling something of a new kinship with him, each struggling with the hollows in their lives.

She said, “Thank you, Michael.”

“For what?” he said roughly.

She laughed at him, took his hand a moment, and stood up on her toes to let him kiss her cheek. “I'll see you tomorrow, I hope.” Before he could answer, she ran off down the bank of the canal, toward the opening to the Kelmans' street.

“There's Antwerp,” said the man beside Carlos. “I wish it were Burgos. And me with silver in my purse.”

Carlos muttered an indefinite sound in his throat. Ahead the flat foreign plain gave way to a cluster of spires and towers and red-tiled roofs. The sky was overcast and a raw wind blew, but his heart lightened as if the sun burned bright.

“I'll lay down this stick off my shoulders,” said the man marching with him, “but I wish I were doing it in Burgos.”

“I'll do it gladly in Antwerp,” said Carlos.

The sergeant behind them shouted, “Keep the step! March! You—Miguel, Carlos—if you can't talk and march at the same time …”

They marched in tight ranks, all feet in unison, with a boom like a giant striding over the flat land. Heavy on their shoulders the pikes rode all at the same angle. They had not been paid in months, but their pride kept them soldiers.

Up ahead, some long-throated fellow began to sing, and they all sang.

“Ho! Bring the fairest ladies
—

Here comes the tenth!

Ho! Bring
—
the deepest kegs
—

Here comes the tenth!”

They had not fought at all this campaign, only marched. Carlos was sick of marching. His boots needed mending and the broken sole had rubbed a blister into the ball of his foot. He raised his eyes to the clutter of red roofs ahead of them, the end of the long road, the color bright against the slate-colored clouds, and his heart warmed again with glad recognition.

“Ho! Bring—the little virgins—”

“I'll never see Burgos again,” the man beside him said, in a miserable voice.

Carlos spat. “Stop juicing over it. If you took a mind to it you'd make Burgos of any village.”

“My girl's in Burgos.”

“My girl's in Antwerp.”

He had thought of her every night before he went to sleep, her shy diffidence like a deer's; perhaps by now she loved him. Her white thighs like columns against his. He had slept with her in his heart every night since he left Antwerp.

“You've got a woman there? Is she local?”

He nodded, swelling with modest pride at the note of envy in his comrade's tone.

“Is there room enough for two?”

In midstep he wheeled around, twisting from the hips up, and swung the butt end of the pike in a short half circle that ended between his marching partner's legs. Miguel shouted, stumbled, dropped his weapon with a clang, and fell. Carlos gripped the ten-foot pole of his pike with both hands; with the heavy double-edged head off-balance the pike strained like a living thing in his fists. He tamed it, grunting at the effort, brought it up again obedient on his shoulder, like a woman. Behind him the sergeant was beating and kicking and cursing the luckless Miguel to his feet. Carlos, smiling, smoothed his fingers over the satiny ashwood pole and marched along to Antwerp.

All the way across the city, Hanneke thought of her mother, wondering where she was—if she were alive, if lost and hungry and cold somewhere (although it had been two weeks now since she left, and if she were alive, somehow she must have fed herself). If Hanneke would ever know what had happened to her. That tormented her above even the thought of her mother dying, like turning the page of a book halfway through a sentence and finding nothing but blank paper.

She went across Antwerp to Clement's shop and stood at the door, remembering that she had been short with him when he offered her work before and that now the need for her might be over. She lifted her hand to knock but the door opened before she could touch it; there stood the little boy Philip.

He smiled wide as a player's mask. “Hello, Hanneke. Papa—” Turning, he called into the shop, “Papa, it's Hanneke.”

Heavy footsteps sounded in the dark depths of the shop. She said, “May I come in?”

“Of course.” The boy stepped aside to let her by.

Now her heart was beating faster. She had to find work, or she would starve; she had to have this work of Clement. He stood there, in front of the foremost press, wiping his big hands on a filthy cloth, his face all in shadow. Forbidding, like a minotaur. She had never found him so before, but now he had something she wanted.

She said, “May I talk to you, sir?”

“Hanneke. Please sit down.” He came toward her, with his big stained hands gesturing toward the fire and the chairs there, and as the light from the front window swept up over his face he became, again, a friend. “What can I do for you, Hanneke?”

First they sat down, and the boy ran for bread and beer and a piece of cheese and even some old apples, dry but still good-tasting, and a knife to cut them with.

“The baker has cherries,” she said, eating. “Can you imagine? Where they come from I cannot know, so early in the year.”

“In Antwerp anything can be bought,” said Clement.

“These are bright red ones, too,” she said. The harmless words made a bridge between them; dreading to ask what she had come here to ask, she needed this contact, this friendliness. He gave her a sliver of the cheese to go with her apple.

“Can I help you, Hanneke?”

“I need—” She raised her eyes to him. “I need work. I must have some way to live.”

“Hanneke.”

“I know the need is past—now that we've beaten Alva—but I will do anything. Sweep, and scrub—”

“Beaten Alva,” he said, in a voice with a peculiar ring. He sat back on the stool, his hand on his hip. “Alva is coming here.”

She lifted her head, startled. Into her mind sprang Carlos' image.

“We have not beaten Alva, girl, not by a long haul. There's a long way to go before we've beaten Alva.”