The Sea Beggars (3 page)

He said, “What would they do, if you turned them off? Who would care for them? Are they Catholic?” The Catholics gave bread to their poor.

His father laughed. “No, they are good reformed folk, like us, most of them. If we had not settled the issue of the Inquisition, things would be worse than they are in Antwerp.”

“‘If
we
had not settled' it,” Jan said, an edge in his voice. “You had nothing to do with that.”

“Men who think like me,” Mies said. “Keep a filial tongue, my boy, or you will see worse than the loading docks.” He frowned at Jan; the older man's face was hard as a bandit's. “Keep your ears open down there—I want to know who says what, who makes trouble. Now that you know what to look for.”

Jan shut his lips tightly together. They were at the end of the street; ahead of them, other men were hurrying to their homes, and through the last overhanging linden branches the painted eaves of his house were visible, the carved window frames, the door. In an upper story window a pale oval appeared, his sister's face. The place seemed more solid to him now, warmer, a refuge. He lengthened his stride toward it.

Mies van Cleef lived with his family in the house his grandfather had built on Canal Street in Antwerp, three streets away from his cloth-weaving factory. The house was three stories high, with big windows facing the street, carvings around the door, and a wall to hold in the yard, opening in a five-foot wrought iron gate. Mies spent a lot of money on his house, to show how God had favored him, and the house was a formidable presence on Canal Street.

Hanneke van Cleef knew this because as people went by the house they always paused and looked up at it with awe and sometimes envy on their faces. She herself saw the outside of the house very seldom. She spent most of her days helping her mother order the servants and keep the place. In the afternoons usually she sat in the front room on the second floor and read, or looked out the window at the street, waiting for her father to come home.

That was when her life began, when Mies appeared, walking up the street of the big linden trees toward his house.

Today she sat in the window, her elbow on the sill and her chin in her hand, her gaze steady on the corner where Mies would appear, although it was still nearly an hour before the church bells would ring out the end of the day. She was tired of reading, and done with her needlework; the day seemed very empty. She missed Jan, too. Usually she had his company in the afternoons but lately his father had been keeping him at work in the factory.

She wished she were a boy, able to work side by side with Mies. Thinking that, she brought a sigh up that sounded through the room.

“What was that?” her mother said, looking in the door.

“Oh, nothing,” Hanneke said.

Her mother came up behind her and set her hands on her shoulders. “A girl should keep busy. Have you nothing to do?” Stooping, the older woman peered out the window over Hanneke's shoulder. “Oh, look—van der Heghe's stork.”

Now it was her mother who sighed, watching the angular white bird circle above the chimney of the house opposite and drop to its great nest of sticks. “I'll set Jan to steal that nest this winter, if I must give him money to do it.”

“Oh, Mother.”

“Well, why should van der Heghe have a stork and not Mies van Cleef?” Her mother straightened, swished at the windowsill with her dustrag, and sniffed. “They haven't got a penny to part their hair with, I'll tell you that. All pretense and show it is with them.” She sniffed again. “They don't deserve a stork.” She marched out of the room, batting at the furniture with the dustrag, although not a visible fleck of dust ever lay long on the van Cleefs' household.

Hanneke turned back to the window, suddenly near tears. Storks and dust, that was all her mother cared about—all she could care about; and that way lay Hanneke's life too, a house like this one, except probably not as nice, and envy for the neighbors and gossip and never going out. That presumed she married; if she did not, things would be even worse. She pressed her face to the sour-smelling glass, feeling sorry for herself.

In the street below a boy ran, shouting and waving a sheet of paper over his head.

The window kept his voice out. Hanneke watched him hurry past, his paper like a banner overhead. Little boys could run the streets at will, like dogs, and she thought it very unfair that she could not leave the house without her mother, who never wanted to go out at all. Across the way, van der Heghe's door opened, and the cook came out onto the walk between the rose beds, looking after the boy with his broadside.

Hanneke's gaze sharpened. The boy was coming back; the cook had a coin out and was buying his broadside. Turning her thumb ring around, Hanneke rapped on the glass, trying to get the cook's attention.

“Marta—”

The cook read the broadside and yelled. With a flutter of her white apron, she dropped the paper into the street and ran back up the brick walk to her front door.

“Marta!” Hanneke shouted, and rapped on the glass. “What is it?”

Van der Heghe's door slammed. The boy ran away; the broadside lay in the street, blowing over in the breeze from the canal. Hanneke leapt up out of her chair and bolted from the room.

Her mother was in the back room, putting flowers in a vase. As Hanneke raced by her door, she called, “Johanna! Walk, like a proper Christian woman!”

Hanneke ran down the stairs and to the heavy front door. Her mother's shrill voice followed her, demanding to know what she did. The door was heavy, a barrier, a bulwark against the world. Hanneke pulled it open and went down the walk to the wrought iron gate.

The broadside still lay in the street, halfway between her gate and van der Heghe's. From the other end of the street came the shouts and screams of children playing. Hanneke gripped the wrought iron spikes of the gate, wondering if she could coax one of the children to bring her the broadside; but they were far away. She pulled the heavy spring latch backward, pushed the gate wide, and ran out into the street.

“Hanneke!” her mother cried, behind her.

She snatched the broadside up out of the dust and whirled and ran back to her own yard. Until she had the gate shut again, she did not stop to read it.

The title shouted at her:
WORD FROM THE KING!
She leaned against the gate and scanned the lines of print below that. A low cry burst from her. She read it again, to make sure she understood.

“Hanneke!” Her mother stood in the doorway. “Get in here this moment!”

“Mother,” Hanneke said, and went toward her, both hands out, the broadside gripped in one fist. “Mother, we're lost—the King has refused the petition.”

“What?”

“The King has refused the petition! They will bring the Inquisition here—”

Hanneke went by her mother into the downstairs hallway, turned, and faced her. “Mother, they are going to try to destroy us.”

Her mother's face seemed to fall still. She clasped her hands in front of her. “Wait until your father comes home.”

“Mother—”

“Don't talk to me. Wait until your father comes home.”

Hanneke was struggling against a rising surge of panic. She lifted the broadside again and stared at it. But her mother was right: there was nothing to do except wait. Slowly she turned and climbed the stairs again, to go back to her station, to take up her place, and wait.

Word of the King's decision came swiftest along the canals, shouted from barge to barge and barge to shore, shouted back again by voices hoarse with disbelief. Jan heard it standing on the third step of the stair up from the wharf.

He said, “Oh, my God.”

The loading crew, some on the wharf, some on the steps above him, said nothing. They let fall whatever they were carrying and turned and ran up onto the canal bank; the foreman, coming from the end of the wharf, brushed past Jan on the steps so roughly Jan lost his balance and nearly fell into the water.

“Wait,” he called, but no one waited.

On the canal, the long low scow whose boatman had called out the news was sliding away toward the next wharf; from that platform, already the men were crying out in despair and anger. Jan looked down at the litter of dropped bundles on the wharf and scrambled up the ladder to find his father.

Halfway across the high-piled yard to the back door of the factory, he stopped. Why was he looking for his papa, like a little boy afraid of the dark? His hands were damp with sweat. What Mies had said to him only a few days before returned to him like bells ringing in his mind:
If we had not settled the issue of the Inquisition, things would be a lot worse
… In the factory before him a loud voice rose, the words inaudible, but the tone one of outrage. Jan went to the gate and let himself out into the street.

If his father challenged him over leaving his work, he would say he went to spy, as Mies had hinted he should do.

The trouble was that he had no idea where to go to do that. He walked aimlessly down the street, in the opposite direction from his home, into the middle of Antwerp. A tinker passed him, burdened down with pots and pans. At the corner, where this street met the broad thoroughfare that led past the Bourse and down to the river, several women in scarves and shawls were talking intensely together. Jan turned into the great street. A boy ran past him, yelling, “The King's a bastard!” in French. The usual press of horse-drawn carts and bustling people on foot crowded the street, but here and there the traffic had slowed and knots of people stood around talking.

Beyond the rooftops that fenced the lefthand side of the street rose the single off-center spire of Antwerp's cathedral. When he saw it Jan's hackles stood on end. Yes. Swiftly he bent his steps there, to the center of the Catholic faith, to the visible enemy.

He came into the square before the cathedral, into the back of a great restless crowd. Everyone seemed to be staring at the ornately carved stonework of the huge old church. He passed a woman with her little boy by the hand who as Jan went by snatched the child up and hurried away with him.

Along the front of the cathedral the throng reversed itself: in the square they all stood facing the church, but before it were ranks and ranks of men with their backs to it, facing the square. They carried clubs and rocks; they were Catholics. Defending their church. Jan clenched his teeth. He pushed his way through the mob, unwilling to stand still, his heart thumping. He had to elbow a man out of his way and the man wheeled and glowered at him and swore in a keen voice. Others ignored him. Everyone was staring across the little strip of open ground at the Catholics, who stared back at them.

Jan hated them; he did not know how he came to the passion, which seemed to flow through the crowd. He felt himself part of this great wounded beast of a crowd, its expectations poisoned by the King's treachery. Overhead the cathedral's offset spire towered up against the rushing clouds; the men ranged before it to defend it seemed tiny by comparison, tiny and insignificant. Jan started forward. All those around him started forward too, at the same time, with a growl like dogs unleashed, and in time with these others, these other parts of himself, he lost his head and flung himself on the Catholics.

All he wanted was to hurt them; he struck out with his fists at their faces and felt flesh give under his knuckles, and he kicked at them and his shoes found meat and bone. Around him bodies pressed so tight he could scarcely move. One arm was pinned. He lashed out at the people around him. Throwing his head back he howled like a wolf in rage. Something hard thrust into his stomach.

The wind burst from him. He doubled over, falling to his knees on the cobblestones, and at once feet pounded on his back, knocked him flat, ground him into the pavement. He gasped. Once the air was gone out of his lungs he could not swell his body enough to take in another breath. His face scraped on the cobblestones. Desperately he realized he was being trampled. He surged forward, trying to get to hands and knees, and was knocked down again under the weight of the mob.

His eyes blurred. A sharp pain radiated through his side, and his hands hurt. He lunged upward, strong with a panicky mad strength, and got his feet under him and stood. Blind and stupid from pain, he thrust out his arms ahead of him and tore a way through the surging scrambling mass of bodies. His legs hurt so badly he thought they would give way under him and drop him into the street again, and he knew that would be the end of him and fought with every step to keep upright. Abruptly his outstretched arms milled the air. He had come to the edge of the crowd. Forward he plunged, into an alley between buildings, and fell into the dirt and rolled over until he lay against a wall, protected by the wall, and covered his face with his arms and lost consciousness.

At first it was rage that drove Mies, a red fury; he searched for his son through the streets of Antwerp as if for a deadly enemy. Damn him for running off. Damn him for fighting—because Mies knew that Jan was fighting, somewhere, in the madness that had seized Antwerp this day and that was continuing on into the night. His mind fixed on Jan as if Jan himself had caused the King's decision.

He walked on and on through the city in his search, through the streets clogged with angry people who fought and shouted and threw stones at one another. Before the cathedral, guarded around and around by armed men, he saw bodies on the cobblestones and heard about the mob's charge barehanded against the great building, flesh against stone, life against death.

By then the night was falling. In the growing darkness the friendly, familiar city seemed to disappear; the shrieks that sounded in the night were forest noises, the crash of something breaking, the thunder of running feet, all these alien in Antwerp, where now everyone ought to be at home, at supper, reading the Bible, playing draughts. Now Mies began to be afraid.

He found himself a lantern and went on, calling Jan's name, looking into corners and alleyways, and peering at the faces of every gang that passed him.