The Sea Beggars (28 page)

She emptied the till into a sack and put it under the counter. With a damp cloth she scrubbed the racks until they gleamed.

While she was sweeping the floor, her mind still occupied with grumbling at Michael, who spent all day now with that Calvinist girl, there came a knocking on the door.

She looked through the front window. A man in an odd green coat stood under the bakery sign. Only after she opened the door did she see the squad of soldiers in the street behind him.

“What do you want?” she said loudly, to cover the fluttery panic in her belly.

“The tenth penny of your receipts.” The man in the green coat pushed his way in past her, into her shop.

“Not from me,” she said, backing away from him, the broom between them. “I'll not pay your Spanish tax.”

He went to the till. Behind him the six soldiers marched single file in through the door. The baker wound her fingers around the haft of her broom, the inside of her mouth pasty with fear, while the tax collector rummaged through the till and the drawers around it, looking for money. Abruptly she thought of Michael. What if he came back now? What if he got in a fight with these soldiers?

The tax collector wheeled on her. “Where is the money?”

“I have no money,” she said. “I sold nothing today.”

“I want the tenth of your receipts for the past week.” He loomed over her, his arms swinging at his sides. “And every week hereafter I shall expect the same amount, or better.”

“One tenth of nothing is nothing,” said the baker stoutly. “I've had the shop closed this week. I've sold nothing.” He was too near her; suddenly she found it hard to breathe. She started past him into the back of the store. “You'd better go. I have nothing for you.”

He caught her by the arm. Painfully tight, the grip brought her up stiffly onto her toes, tears in her eyes. “One more time,” he said. “Where is your money?”

“I have no money,” she said.

He dragged her toward the door. Her arm was numb to the shoulder, and a stabbing pain crossed her chest. “I'm a good Catholic,” she cried, and stumbled on the threshold. The soldiers surrounded her. The tax collector had a rope. She gasped. But surely they were only trying to frighten her. They would not really hurt her. “I'm a good Catholic,” she said again, and they put the rope around her neck.

She screamed.
Michael
, she thought.
Michael
—“I'm a good Catholic,” she said again, and they hauled her up to hang by the neck from the sign of her bakery shop.

Since Alva had first entered Antwerp, his soldiers had been busy rounding up a flock of victims. Two days after his entry into the city, when the gallows were ready, he had these people taken out into the Grand Place and hung. Hanneke watched in the crowd.

They brought Clement's boy to the gallows and pulled him up by the neck, but he was too light to die that easily. He swung at the end of the rope, screaming, until the executioner jumped up and caught the boy's legs and hung his whole weight from them, and so the boy died.

Hanneke went down by the river. She did not weep; there were no tears left in her. There was nothing left in her at all. She had nothing, neither father nor mother, neither home nor hearth. Alva had scoured away everything save her life from her.

When she reached the gate of the city, swarms of people were already flowing out through it. They carried bundles of clothing and food on their backs and their children in their arms. Their faces all seemed the same to her, blank and dull with the pitiable things they had seen. No one spoke. The little children cried and stretched out their arms toward Antwerp, but their parents walked on, their backs to their city and their past. Hanneke walked with them, going east, toward Germany.

10

The moon was setting. With it, the light fitful breeze that had murmured all night in the rigging of the
Wayward Girl
died to a flat calm. Jan shifted his weight, slack on the little perch at the top of the mast, and rubbed his hand over his eyes; he blinked and worked his face to ease muscles stiff from long staring into the distance. He braced his foot on the opposite rail of the lookout and turned his gaze south again over the trackless sea.

Stuck up on top of the mast, the lookout exaggerated every rolling action of the ship; the sea seemed to rise and fall in huge parabolas around him. Jan liked being up here. Now they were standing out far enough from the mouth of the English Channel that the
Wayward Girl
rode the broad ocean swells rather than the choppier waves of the narrow seas, and the action of the ship made him sleepy. He fought a jaw-cracking yawn.

“Jan!”

That was Pieter, at the foot of the mast, his shape foreshortened to nothing but a head. Jan leaned out over the edge of the platform.

“Nothing yet,” he called.

The old man stalked away without a word. He was always thus before a fight. Being only one of a dozen ships in the Beggar fleet did not help his mood. Jan glanced around behind him, looking northeast, up the Channel. No sign of them. But they were there, waiting just below the horizon; when the sun rose, perhaps he would pick out a masthead, another lookout. Meanwhile …

In the east the sky was turning pale. A lick of a breeze cooled his cheek.

He watched the southern horizon. His thoughts rambled away into daydreams, the ships he would command someday, the battles he would fight, the gold he would spend. He imagined the women who would lust after him, a famous sea captain with a heavy purse. Big-breasted women who would lie in his lap. He slid his hand down under his belt into his breeches. The other sailors talked about it all the time, what they did with women.

Hard and aching, the thing throbbed in his hand. In silent desperation, he pulled on it, ashamed, wanting only to ease it.

The breeze stiffened. The
Wayward Girl
leaned over, a rolling wave passing under her keel. The sky overhead was creamy white. Far, far down the sea, at the very edge of the world, something red moved.

He sat bolt upright; he yanked his hand out of his pants. The world tilted away from him, streaming with dawn light, the horizon a blur of pale sea and white sky. There, among the golden clouds, the spot of red moved like a jewel.

“Pieter!”

Down on the deck, feet pounded. Jan leaned over the edge of the lookout for the lantern hanging off the mast, lifted it up by the wire handle, and unshuttered it, to let the gleam of light through. So close to daylight, perhaps the lantern would not show to the ships watching, far to the north. He masked it a moment with his hand, counting in his head to five, lowered his hand, and let the light shine for a count of five.

“What is it?” Pieter bawled, below.

“Sail,” Jan called. “Break out the pennant—I think we'll need it.” During the day, they were to use the pennant for a signal.

He hung the lantern up again and stood on the lookout platform, his feet widespread, stooped until he had his balance on the reeling masthead. The wind whipped his hair across his cheek. Turning his eyes south again, he searched a long moment among the furrows and billows of the sea, until the sail leapt out again from the background of cloud and wave; now he could clearly see the red cross on the sail. The Spanish fleet was making its run for the English Channel.

That fleet carried the silver to pay Alva's army in the Netherlands. Jan's chest swelled. To fight the Spaniards was good enough. To get rich into the bargain made it excellent. He bellowed, “Sail ho! Sail off the larboard beam!” Reaching out for the ratlines, he swung his body off the lookout and raced hand over hand down toward the deck.

The crew of the
Wayward Girl
were sleeping on the main deck. At his shout they rolled out of their blankets and leapt to their feet. Jan dropped into their midst. Here it seemed darker, low to the sea, the steep black ocean waves rising above the rail before the ship climbed them and the seas passed under her. The crew hurried around him; their faces bleary with sleep, they stowed their blankets and stretched and yawned and tugged their clothes straight. Mouse popped up through the forward hatch with a fisherman's flat basket full of bread. The sailors fell on it. Behind them old Pieter walked down the deck from the stern.

Jan strolled over to the rail, near the brass culverin, his hands tucked into the sleeves of his canvas jacket. The sharp dawn air turned his skin rough with gooseflesh. He was hungry, but his stomach danced with excitement; he had no wish to eat. He stood by the gun, looking out over the empty sea, until his uncle came up beside him.

“Good morning, Uncle.”

The old man growled at him, scratched fretfully at his beard, and hugged his arms around him. “This cold's got me. It's a wonder I can walk.” He stamped his feet on the deck; one of his knees cracked like a green tree limb. “Where away's the dirty Don?”

“Off the larboard beam three points south,” Jan said. “Hull down still from the masthead. And right in the wind's eye, where you said they'd be.”

Mouse ran down the deck to them, his arms laden with cold biscuit. Jan took two or three chunks of the hard bread and put them inside his jacket. Old Pieter waved away the food. He put his hand up to sample the wind.

“Well, well. We've got a few hours yet to say our prayers. Did you signal Lumey?”

“Run up the pennant,” Jan said. “It's too day-bright for the lantern.”

Mouse bounced and jumped around them, his face glowing, his skewed eyes looking off in all directions. “Let me do it! I can do it—”

The two men brushed by him, ignoring him, and went to the locker at the foot of the mast. Pieter opened it with the key on his belt and bent over the folded cloth inside. Mouse pulled on Jan's arm.

“What can I do? Tell me, Jan—I want to do something!”

Jan removed his arm from the boy's grip. “Don't bother me now.”

Pieter straightened, the long red pennant they had made in Plymouth unfolding from his hands. He clipped it to a halyard on the mast and ran it up to the top. Mouse danced around him.

“Can I do it? Let me do it!”

“'Sblood,” Pieter snarled. “Get this little devil away from me!”

Jan grasped the boy's shoulder. “Look, Mouse, we need someone to go up onto the lookout and watch for signals from Lumey. Will you do it?”

The boy's face went bright red with eager excitement. He nodded vigorously and leapt into the rigging, climbing like a monkey toward the mast top, where the red pennant fluttered now.

“Good,” old Pieter said. He reached for his pipe and tobacco. “We'll keep a northwesterly course as long as the wind holds. With luck she'll blow fair all morning. The main thing is to keep the Dons well off the French coast so that Lumey and Sonoy and the others can slip around behind them and steal the weather.” He tipped his head back, his beard jutting out over his collar. “I don't like the looks of the sky, boy-o.”

Jan said nothing. They had gone over and over the plan; he thought Pieter was talking to ease his soul. The sky was clear enough, a few low clouds along the horizon, but nothing to be afraid of. Anyway the ship sailed very well in wet weather. The pungent odor of his uncle's pipe tinged the air and Jan moved away a few steps.

“Well,” Pieter said, “let's to it.”

Jan walked the few paces up the deck to the wheel. “Hands to the braces! Ready to make sail.” With a flourish he pulled free the rope that lashed the wheel. Pieter went by him, up the three steps to the stern deck, to con their course.

The crew raced around the deck, their bare feet nearly soundless on the worn boards. The mainsail and the jib went up with a rattle of salt-stiffened canvas. At once the nimble little ship answered the wind. Pieter felt her tremble under his feet like a hunting dog that hears the horn, and the sea chuckled against her side.

Jan, on the main deck below him, took the ship up a few points higher in the wind, let her fall off a little until the sails luffed, and laid her back on course, all as Pieter had shown him, to get a feel of how she was today, how the wind and the sea suited her. Pieter fought against a smile. Jan was a good sailor. The old man sucked the tobacco smoke into his lungs, enjoying the heady taste. The crew obeyed his nephew as well as they did Pieter—better, some of them, since Jan could knock them down, and Pieter could not.

He knew the guns better than Pieter; he had been at practice, while they waited for the Spaniards, and Pieter had seen him blow empty wine tuns out of the water at the distance of a cable length—no small feat, all things considered, although the guns the Spanish had been kind enough to install in the
Wayward Girl
were the best Pieter had ever seen and had made even Lumey envious.

Jan could shoot and he could sail, but one thing Pieter could not give him. The old man raised his eyes again to the gray lowering sky. The sun had risen but no blue showed through the veil of clouds, and near the eastern edge of the world the sky was black as mourning.

Jan took nothing seriously that he could not control himself. Pieter shook his head. Only time would teach him that.

Their work today was easy enough. The Spanish galleons were sailing up into the Channel, the wind over their sterns and their course laid for the Low Countries. The
Wayward Girl
, handier at sailing off the wind, would play with the huge ships like a dog with a phalanx of bulls, teasing and taunting, drawing them on. If the Spanish did nothing else, the
Girl
would keep them occupied while the rest of the Beggars got behind the galleons. With any luck, the Dons would lose their tempers at the baiting and try to close quarters with the
Wayward Girl
, and then Pieter meant to maneuver them out of formation, so that when Lumey came the four galleons would be helpless to act in unity, and easy victims of the swift and well-armed Dutch fleet.

He stood watching the sea to the south. Now he could make out the topsails of the galleons. The wind filled the pleated sails and drove on the hulls like plows through the heavy seas. Huge as they were, they could not turn too suddenly, nor turn too far, without losing the wind and going dead in the water. He was determined to make them turn, to follow him, to join in long-range shooting if necessary. His skin tingled. As usual, when action offered, he wished himself well away from here, somewhere warm and safe, with the solid ground under his feet. And now the rain was beginning to fall. He went forward a few steps, to call to Jan to alter course, and bring the ship down on the four great galleons sweeping north.