The Sea Beggars (27 page)

“But—I thought …” She put the cheese down on the plate, thinking miserably of Carlos.

“We have only declared the war open, as it were,” Clement said. “Now he will try to have by force what he could not get by asking, and we must show him that we will not yield to force.”

She was staring at him; the low firelight painted his cheek above the beard. His voice was quiet and well modulated, like a schoolmaster's. She remembered once before when words he had spoken had opened her mind up to this, to see the problem huge, her experience of it only one tiny part of something spanning thousands of lives. She sucked in her breath. In her mind she saw a vast landscape, peopled with tiny figures, each in torment, each fighting or running or praying or thinking: the Low Countries. Into that crowd her mother had vanished, and her brother. In it she must find her part.

“Then you do need me,” she said to Clement.

His beard parted in a smile. “I need your help, Hanneke.”

“Then I will help you.”

“But if I were you, girl, I would go. And I would go now, before Alva comes, because when he comes—”

He reached out his arm to the side and took his son in against him, to lean against him.

“Because when he comes there will be such an evil on this city we may none of us escape.”

“Are you staying? And Philip?”

“Yes,” Clement said. “We'll put our lives in God's hands.”

“Then I will stay too, and help you,” she said.

“Very well. Come and I'll show you around the shop.”

She stood up, to follow him; her gaze fell on the little sliver of cheese on the plate. Quickly she picked it up and ate it, going after him.

She worked all day sorting type, learning to read the letters backward, and getting her hands dirty, in spite of her surreptitious efforts to wipe off the worst of the black greasy ink that worked its way into the lines of her palms. She did not want Clement to think she was too fastidious for this work. At the end of the day, she swept up the shop for him—a task he usually left undone—and made a great heap of the dust and scraps of paper and rubble in the street outside the door. At last, tired but feeling better than she had in some while, she went back toward the Kelmans' house.

It was too far, she thought, as she walked. She would have to find a place closer to the shop. Cheaper, too. Or perhaps Clement would let her sleep in the shop; there was room, by the fire, and she could pay him a little for her meals. Do extra work for meals.

Thinking up a line of reasoning to convince him of this, she passed the old elm tree at the corner of the Swan Street and walked toward Vrouw Kelman's house, and from behind her Carlos pounced on her.

She screamed. He had her arms, he was dragging her off across the street, into the shelter of the tree, to do what he had done there once before. For some reason her mother leapt into her mind; for her mother's sake she could not let this happen again, and she struck at him with her fists, kicked at him, and tried to bite him. Her mother—

“Hanneke,” he said to her, in a voice choked with exertion. “Hanneke—” Crooning. She writhed from side to side in his grasp. His clothes pressed against her face. She was losing; he was bearing her down under him on a pile of dead leaves. She lost her footing and fell. No—she tore one arm free and groped wildly around her on the ground for some weapon, while he pulled her skirts up, his breath in her face, while his hands stroked her legs. He murmured to her in his language. His hand was against her body between her legs, poking his fingers in there. She gathered herself to scream, and her searching hand found the cold hilt of the dagger in his belt.

She drew the knife up over his back and plunged it down, and he stiffened with a jerk, his head snapping up. A groan escaped him. She struck again, pushing him back, and rolled out from under him. Struck again. Again. In the dark he thrashed there on the leaves, gasping, at her feet. He said her name again, loving and hopeless, and shuddered and lay still.

Hanneke backed away from him; she opened her hand and let the dagger fall. Her dress was covered with blood. He was dead, and she had killed him.

She went down on her knees beside him, her hands out to him, but she could not bring herself to touch him. She had killed him. Whatever he had done to her shrank to nothing in the shadow of what she had done to him. She had sent him on to God, Who would deal with him as He had decided, long before Carlos was ever born—his life, his dream of himself swallowed up in the great plan. All gone. Whatever he had been was gone.

Slowly she got up. What she had just done changed everything. She could not go back to Vrouw Kelman's. When the watch found Carlos' body they would go to the Kelmans' first, and Hanneke was covered with blood. Nor could she go to Clement—lead them to Clement; and as she stood up, shaky on her feet, and went out to the street, she realized she could not go to Michael either. She walked a few steps in one direction, turned, and went the other way. It did not matter now where she went. Her legs trembled so that she could barely stand. Slowly she made her way off into the city.

When the dawn came she was sleeping in the doorway of a shop near the gate. The sound of marching feet jarred her from her dreams, and she raised her head, her eyes sticky with unshed tears and blood splashes and lack of sleep, and watched the first few ranks of soldiers tramp down the broad street past her.

The sun was rising. The horizontal light struck their round helmets and the edges of their pikes in ripples, like sunlight on the water. The pikes feathered the air. They marched in step, their arms swinging in unison, so that they seemed not to be individual men but one great beast that crawled along the street on thousands of legs, piercing the air with thousands of spines.

Now a banner passed her, a square of cloth that fluttered in the wind with a heavy thumping crack, on it the quartered arms of Spain—Leon and Castile and Aragon and Portugal, the lions, the castles of fairy tales.

She got to her feet. More ranks of soldiers swung past her; they sang, and some shouted at her, and a few made lewd gestures with their fingers. She wondered if they saw she was covered with blood. What they would do if they knew it was Spanish blood.

Another rank of flags was approaching, three huge banners held up by men on foot, while behind them a man on a black horse banged away at two drums slung across the withers of his mount. In his wake came a single rider.

She took two steps closer. The tall figure held her fascinated gaze, his hair shining silver under his flat black hat. He sat straighter than the pikestaffs on his horse. No decoration relieved the black sobriety of his coat. He might have been a Calvinist, so plainly did he dress. His spurs chimed with each step of his horse.

Alva, she thought. That is the Duke of Alva.

She sank back into the doorway, her eyes following him as he rode off down the street. Evil has come here, she thought, remembering what Clement said, and knew it was true.

The trumpets blared again, ahead of him, behind him; their brass voices echoed off the buildings on either side. Alva rode with one hand on his hip, the reins slack in the other, his eyes aimed straight ahead, through the forest of pikes.

No one had come to greet him. No cheering throngs crowded the street of Antwerp, no schoolchildren performed pageants of welcome, no official made speeches of formal gladness at his coming. Only the cold faces of the buildings watched the entry of the Spanish army.

If his heart raged at the insult, his face would not show it. Trained from babyhood in the service of the King of Spain, he knew better than to show what he felt. He would avenge the insults soon enough; the gilt-trimmed buildings with their ornate stepped roofs and elegant glass windows might stand proud against him now, but he would shame them low as hovels soon enough.

A horseman was trotting up the side of the street toward him: one of his officers. Beyond, through the spreading bare branches of the trees, the high towers showed of the new castle where the Estates met. He touched his lips with his tongue. The excitement in his guts tightened and coiled like a spring. The young officer wheeled his horse around to ride beside Alva's and saluted.

“His Excellency Luis del Rio is waiting at the castle to greet you, my lord.”

Alva's head bobbed once. “Very good. You may tell him we will meet him at once.”

The young man saluted and reined his horse around and galloped away. Alva's horse tossed its head, wanting to follow, but the duke kept to his slow walk. Only now he let himself smile.

His men filled up the broad field before the castle, rank on orderly rank, and opened a lane between them to the main gate. Alva rode down into the castle, through the unfinished wall, into the newly paved courtyard.

Luis del Rio was waiting there, in ceremonial dress, with his aides behind him. When Alva dismounted, he stepped forward, his smile stiff.

“Welcome to Antwerp, your Excellency.”

“You may make me welcome,” Alva said, pulling off his gloves, “in a more substantial way. Have you done my orders?”

“Yes, your Excellency. Even now—”

Del Rio gestured toward the gate. Alva turned. Through the gate he looked back up the field, up the broad straight lane between his troops.

Down that lane little groups of his men were coming, and in their midst each group led a prisoner, a halter around his neck. Alva smiled.

“I thirst,” he said, and instantly a young man leapt forward with a cup of cold wine.

As he drank, the first of his prisoners marched into the courtyard. Seeing del Rio, the man called out, trying to break from his captors' arms. “I am a deputy of the Estates! You can't do this to me …”

Seeing Alva, he lost his voice. His eyes blinked rapidly. Rapidly he was hustled off into the castle.

One after another, by twos, by threes, the other deputies were brought to the castle. Alva stood watching them enter. Every man who cried out, every indignant word, fell like balm upon his soul. Patient as a mother, he waited for the last laggard vote to appear, to complete his gathering of the Estates.

They could not bring them all; some had escaped, hearing of his coming, and some lived outside Antwerp. But they brought enough, and in the end, with two pikemen standing beside each deputy, they signed the proclamation Alva had brought with him, announcing the royal tax on the tenth penny of every sale in Antwerp.

“She is not here,” Vrouw Kelman said, when Michael knocked on her door. “Carlos is gone, too.” She clutched her dressing gown tight over her breast; her face was older than her years with strain. “Something's wrong. Did you hear the soldiers pass this morning? Something is awfully wrong.”

Michael said, “She's not here? When did she leave?” But already the housewife was shutting the door. He turned and went down the walk to the gate.

He started away toward Clement's shop. Maybe she had stayed there the night. He remembered how she said he might give her work there.

When he came out onto the broad street before the Bourse, there were soldiers everywhere, banging on the doors of the shops and marching along the street. He swerved to avoid them. They were after the Calvinists again. Two of them were dragging a bearded man out of a doorway. He turned quickly to keep from seeing that.

In Clement's shop he found the printer hunched over his big press, listlessly setting the bits of lead into the frame.

“Have you seen Hanneke?” Michael asked.

Clement shook his head. “They took my boy,” he said.

He lifted his face, smudged with black ink. Through the stains, tears like drops of lead coursed in an unceasing stream.

“Who took him? Why?”

“The soldiers. He was out carrying around broadsides of the Prince of Orange's letter—they took him to the castle.”

Michael's throat was dry. He swallowed down his doubts and panic and carefully unkinked his knotted fists. He said, “They'll let him go. He's only ten.”

Clement covered his face with his long blackened hands. In Michael the urge grew to reach out and comfort this wretched man whose heresies had doomed his only child. But he had to find Hanneke, and he went away.

He wandered from quarter to quarter of the city, never finding her. Once a double file of soldiers marched past him, and he stood in a doorway and watched them go by, hating them with an intensity that frightened him. Men like him, Catholics like him, subjects of the same king. What had he to fear from them? Yet he knew they were his enemies now.

In the German quarter, where the breweries were, he overheard people arguing about the tenth penny, whether foreigners had to pay it, whether Alva had the right to levy it on them. On the door of the greatest brewery was a broadside of Orange's letter against the tax. Michael stared at it, thinking of the little boy who had brought it here. A big tow-headed German went up to the door and ripped the broadside down. Balling it up in his fist, he flung it into the gutter. Michael walked quickly away.

He crossed the Grand Place again, no longer empty. All across the wide cobbled square, men were unloading lumber from wagons, and hammers were beating nails into wood. The ringing of the hammers echoed off the high fronts of the buildings, with their extravagant gilt decoration, their multitudes of windows that glared back the sunlight. Michael walked through the midst of the rising structures in the Place; he refused to think about them, standing like a new city all around him. As he reached the far side of the square, the clamoring rhythms of the hammers approached each other, met for a few strokes of accidental unity, and diverged again on their separate courses. Michael plunged down a side street, looking for Hanneke.

At noon Michael still had not come back. His mother swore under her breath, using a favorite oath of her husband's, and pulled shut the shop door. There were three little and two big loaves left on the racks and she piled them on a tray and took them into the back, to have for dinner when Michael finally did come home.