The Sea Beggars (31 page)

The Englishman, confronted by two noisy foreigners, was backing away. Lumey and the Spaniard sneered at one another. Jan turned to Dirk Sonoy.

“What are they saying?”

Sonoy was still watching his ship, burned now to the waterline; great coils of black smoke rolled from her smoldering hull. Slowly he turned his eyes to Lumey.

“He's accusing the Spanish of burning her. The Spaniard's denying it.”

“Naturally,” Jan said, with force. Sonoy gave him an instant's sideways look, sardonic.

“The Spaniard's saying they're honorable men, not pirates, and anyhow the
Calvin
was already sunk.” Sonoy wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “He's saying we burned her.”

The crowd was hooting and jeering at the tall Spanish officer. The harbor master stood with his arms clasped across his chest, his gaze switching from the commodore to Lumey and back again.

Sonoy said quietly, “I had important charts on board. My letters of marque. And other things.”

“I'm sorry,” Jan said.

Sonoy said nothing. A small, slightly made man, he stood very straight, to use his every inch, and his expression was always sober; now he looked as if he would never smile again. Jan imagined losing the
Wayward Girl
—losing her like this, by the work of his own friends, and put out his hand to Sonoy.

“You have other ships. The Prince will send you new letters.”

“She was my first ship,” Sonoy said. He shook his head. “Ay, ay, there's something black in it, too, because of her name.”

Jan said nothing more, for fear of betraying his own part in it. He wished now he had done something to stop it; even if he had failed, he would feel better about it now. A few feet away from him, Lumey was beating his hands together and shouting, “Revenge! Revenge!” The crowd picked it up, chanting with him. “Revenge!”

The Spaniard stood with his mouth twisted into a grimace. He gestured with one hand and his musketeers closed around him. The harbor master pushed forward. He shoved Lumey to one side and facing the crowd waved his arms and shrieked the mass into a flattering mutter and then into silence.

He made some loud remarks in English, which Sonoy translated into Jan's ear. “‘I am an officer of the Queen! I am not here to do a mob's will, but the Queen's!'”

At the mention of their sovereign the English raised a cheer as mighty as their chanting for revenge. Lumey scowled. Jan thought,
He has lost
, and was startled to find himself pleased.

“Then we'll go to the Queen!” Lumey roared, in Dutch, remembered himself, and bellowed in English.

That silenced everybody. In the hush, with the Spaniards and the English gaping at him, Lumey raised his arms and wheeled around toward his men. “We'll go to the Queen for justice!”

Another cheer went up from the crowd. Sonoy stepped forward.

“You're mad,” he cried, and gestured toward the Spanish commodore. “He'll sail as soon as we're gone from Plymouth!”

“We'll have justice from the Queen,” Lumey cried. His face was cherry red; he shook his fist in the air.

Sonoy wheeled on the harbor master and spoke a volley of English. The harbor master seemed more inclined to deal with him than with Lumey, and nodded and spoke and finally reached out to shake Sonoy's hand.

“He'll keep them here until the Queen decides,” Sonoy said.

The harbor master was looking at Jan, and suddenly he smiled; he said something to Sonoy and struck him jovially on the arm. Sonoy grunted.

“He says we should take you along. He says she likes them dark but she loves them tall.”

“What did he mean by that?” Jan asked, startled.

Lumey threw an arm around his shoulders. “Don't you want to be the Queen's lover, boy?” He laughed into Jan's face and beat him over the shoulders and hugged him. “We'll leave at dawn.”

Lumey and Sonoy and Jan hired horses at the hostelry in Plymouth and took the road to London. The farther they got from the sea the more Jan wished he had not come. The road was wild and lonely, traveling through stands of forest and heath, and over hills higher than any he knew in his own country, and from Lumey's remarks he guessed he was being brought along on this adventure as a bait to tempt the lusty and rapacious English Queen. He longed for his ship, where he was master.

They spent the night at an inn, where they all lay down together in a bed so full of fleas and bedbugs Jan could not sleep for his and his companions' scratching.

“It's a longer journey than I remembered,” Lumey said.

They went on, following the old Roman road, straight as a ruled line across the round bare hills and plains. In the afternoon the sky darkened with ugly gray clouds.

“God spare us,” Sonoy said. “I'd rather sleep in a hedgerow than another bed like the last, but if it rains we'll drown in the ditch.”

“No fear of that,” said Lumey. “Yon's Salisbury—I know a lady there, a widow, who keeps a good house, and takes in all who need her charity, for the fear of God. We'll go weep at her door, and she'll give us a clean bed and a dish of supper, mark me.”

The rain began. They rode through a steady downpour to a house called Stonegate. There Lumey knocked on the gate, and a porter let them into a little courtyard, already splashy from the rain.

The charitable lady had taken in too many beggars; there was room in the old house for only two more. Lumey grandly volunteered Jan to sleep in the stable, since he was of common birth.

The stable was snug and dry, and warm from the beasts lined up along either wall. Jan sat on a pile of old hay listening to the rain on the thatch overhead and longing for the sea and his ship; he felt himself a different person here, so far from his work and the people who knew him. An old gray cat came up, purring, and rubbed against his arm, and he took her on his lap and stroked her. She warmed him, and he talked to her a little, mostly about Lumey, who was a fool and worse, and felt comforted.

The light faded. He was hungry, and lying in the dark with the cat rumbling away on his knees he wondered where he should go to eat. But then a woman came into the stable, a lantern in one hand and a dish in the other.

She spoke to him in English, and he shook his head, sitting up, eager, his nose working at the smell of beef and onions emanating from the covered dish. She set the lantern down between them.

“French, then, have you? Good. I am Eleanor Simmons, and Stonegate is my home.” She put the dish before him. He moved toward it so quickly the cat leapt out of his lap.

“You are very kind,” he said in French. “I am sorry to impose myself on you, with no warning, and so late in the day.”

She smiled at him. “Not at all. You give me the opportunity to serve God.”

She was a tall, thin lady, some few years older than Jan himself, much younger than he had expected from Lumey's description of her as a widow. Her hair was brown and her face plain, not homely, raised from homeliness by the refinement of good birth and gentle manners. He tried not to eat too fast, although the food was delicious. When he was done he put the dish down for the cat to lick.

“You have a goodly appetite,” she said. “Are you a sailor also, like the lord Lumey de la Marck?”

“Yes—we sail together.”

“How exciting that must be—to travel over the sea to so many different places.”

Jan wiped his fingers on his sleeve. “I cannot say, lady, since in my sailor's life I have seen no place but Nieuport and Plymouth.”

“Well, perhaps you shall see others.” She ran her hand over the cat's arched back between them.

Was that why she lingered, to hear of foreign places? He lay back on his elbow, his mind leaping from thought to thought for one sufficiently entertaining to keep her here; he had no wish to lose her company.

“I should like to go to the New World,” he said. “Someday, maybe—”

“Oh, yes.” Her face brightened like the moon rising. “The names are enchanting, are they not? Cartagena, and Mexico, and America—”

“Dangerous waters,” he said, pleased at her enthusiasm for this talk. “And the Spanish mean to keep us out. But someday I'll go. There's silver and gold, I've heard, lying in the beds of streams like paving stones in the streets of Antwerp, and the people are docile as cattle.”

“A new world,” she said. “New chances—new beginnings.” Her fingers ruffled the cat's thick fur. “It's hard to believe, isn't it, that only a hundred years ago no one even knew it was there—as if God were saving it for … someone.”

Speaking in another language, perhaps she said not what she meant; but Jan was struck by the look on her face, by the depth of feeling in her voice. He thought,
She longs for something new
. At the same time he became aware, intensely aware, that they were alone together. That he could stretch his hand out and touch her.

She raised her eyes suddenly to meet his, and he clenched his fist in the hay at his side.

“You think I'm foolish, don't you,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Of course not. You have taken me in, and given me to eat; I think nothing but gratitude.”

The other thing, that was sin, and an insult to her; he hid his fist down deep in the hay.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Jan van Cleef. My ship is the
Wayward Girl
.” He spoke the name in Dutch and then in French.

“How pretty,” she said, and smiled. Now she was going; she got to her feet, took the dish from beneath the cat's rasping tongue, and reached for the lantern. “Shall I leave this here?” She drew her hand back.

“Yes—I'd like the light.”

“Be sure you don't burn the place down, will you?”

“I shall, lady. Thank you.”

“Good night.” She went away. He watched her go; the cat curled up in his lap again, vibrating with contentment. After a moment Jan lay back in the straw.

Before dawn Eleanor Simmons took a basket of bread to a poor family in the village under her hill, and walking back through the grass, soaked by the rain that had ended only a few hours before, she passed by the place that gave her house its name: four huge gray stones set on the bare windy plain, one fallen flat, two upright, one lying on top of the uprights like the lintel of a gate, a stone gate.

She hated this place and these stones. The village people came here for trysts and other wicked purposes, and she was sure that the antique pagans who had built it had used it for something awful, for sacrifices, or lewd rites. The stones seized on her imagination, and raised the devil in her; whenever she passed by she found herself envisioning those lewd rites.

She refused to surrender to it, and tried to avoid them. Whenever her course took her past the stones, she went unswerving by them, and warred with her mind all the way. Today she kept her thoughts pure by thinking of the Dutch seamen who had spent the night under her roof, the grateful receivers of her kindness. Especially she thought of the tall young man, whose name she had, unfortunately, forgotten.

When she went into her courtyard, they were standing there with their horses, ready to go. She went up to them, smiling, to have their thanks and farewells.

Lumey kissed her hand, and Sonoy bowed and spoke of God's good mercy shown through her, which made her heart fat with pleasure. By his horse the tall young man stood silent, and when his friends turned to mount he mounted too, without a word to her.

She stepped back, downcast at that. They rode out the gate. Her mood sank lower; she had thought she had made a good impression on him, bringing him to eat with her own hands and talking to him of his voyages; she felt the reproof like a cut. But as he rode out the gate, he turned and smiled and waved his hand to her, and her spirit soared up again. She went into her house, happy.

12

While Lumey and Sonoy were talking to the Queen's secretary, Jan went to look around her palace.

There was to be a pageant here, or an execution; workmen were building wooden stages in the garden, and on strings between the tall trees and over the little artificial watercourse they were hanging lanterns and swags of colored cloth. Across the lawn from the stage, a cluster of men were struggling to make a fountain work. Jan went closer to watch. They had the ornamental top of the fountain pulled off and were fitting pipes together in the base. The pipes ran away up the slope in a trench through the green grass, with the sods piled up beside it, leading to a huge wine tun. They were trying to make the fountain flow with wine.

Not an execution, then, unless these English were more ghoulish even than the Spaniards.

As he walked away, they got the pipes connected. A red spurt of wine gushed up from the fountain's throat, and the workmen cheered.

The palace itself was a patchwork of old and new buildings, strung together over the hillside. He walked back into the gallery where he had left his fellow Beggars, to find Lumey shouting red faced at the secretary and Sonoy pacing up and down nearby, shaking his head.

“We're chasing eels with herring nets,” he said when Jan came up to him, which Jan took to mean they had come all this way for nothing.

“Two weeks!” Lumey shouted, storming up between them. “
Maybe
she will see us in two weeks!”

Through the nearest door into the long sunlit gallery came two pretty little boys in lace collars, the first carrying a hat with a long white feather, the second carrying a wooden head, topped by a fluff of black hair. As the boys ran past Sonoy, the black hair flew off and landed at Jan's feet. He jumped back away from it, startled. The boy snatched it up, plopped it back on the wooden bulb of the wig stand, and rushed on down the gallery.

“What's going on here?” Jan wheeled around toward his friends.

“There's a disguisers' ball tonight,” Sonoy said. “The Queen hosts a German prince, here to offer marriage to her.”