The Sea Beggars (33 page)

His head was beginning to hurt. He said, “The choice is yours. This is your kingdom, is it not?” Grimly he wished himself back on board the
Wayward Girl
, where the choice was his.

“What arrogance! By what right come you here, invade my pleasures, and trifle with the innocent young girls of my court?”

“I did nothing! She came at me, she—” He stopped his tongue, embarrassed; the girl was gone, all his protestations only proofless words. He faced this iron queen in her silvery dress. “Do as you will, lady. God, I would I were anywhere but here, a Spanish gallows but not here.”

She said nothing a moment. Leisurely, her gaze traveled over him from head to foot, her face, with its angular bones and feline breadth between the eyes, empty of expression. At last she moved, walking toward him, walking past him.

“Came at you, I can imagine. We have no such beasts in our English menagerie. Sit down here; you seem unsteady yet from your brawling. Or perhaps the wine.”

He went after her through the bushes to a little open glade where a stone bench sat under a tree. This one was not gauded up with fakeries, only its own new softly uncurling leaves, and he sat down on the cold bench and put his hand to his head again.

“You are one of the Prince of Orange's men?” she asked, behind him.

“I? No, not Orange—that … court dancer, that toy soldier—”

“Oh?” Surprise sharpened her voice. “I took you for a Sea Beggar.”

“That I am, lady.”

“Oh. Well, a matter of names, as is all the world. You did come here to tell me about the evil deeds the Spanish did in Plymouth, and to have my help in the business.”

He lifted his head; it had all begun with that, with that falsehood, the burning of the
John Calvin
. “Yes,” he said.

“Well, I am inclined to favor your suit, if there be a way to do so without drawing down on me the untoward blusterings of Spain. I will not have foreign powers making war in my harbors.”

He pressed his lips together, remembering all that had happened in Plymouth. She spoke behind him, her voice mild and colorless.

“Spain believes he does the work of God; it is a common self-deceit of power. Daily his arrogance binds more tightly on my own English seamen, here and in the Indies. But this is worse than arrogance—to burn a ship in Plymouth harbor—”

“We burned her,” Jan burst out.

Behind him there was now a silence, crowded and heavy, like the air before a thunderstorm.

“I said,” he said, more loudly, “that we burned her. She was already sinking. The idea was Lumey's. Sonoy had no doing of it. We burned her, to force the Spanish out where we could deal with them.”

With a whisper of cloth she strode around before him, face to face with him. “Why do you tell me this?”

“I am tired of lying,” he said.

“By God's blood!” She walked two steps away and whirled around again, her white gown flying about her and the silver arrows flashing on her shoulder. “What insolence is this—first you contrive to dupe me, and then you have the belly to tell me so. What a fool you take me for!”

He shrugged, careless of her; he had cleansed himself, and all his fear and low thoughts were gone.

“You have my leave, Master Dutchman!”

He got up onto his feet, steady now, and sober. “Thank you for saving my life,” he said to her, and bowed again, the bow his tutor had schooled him in during his classroom days in Antwerp. She stood like an idol in her white and silver, her eyes brilliant with rage. He went away through the garden.

He had no idea what had become of Lumey and Sonoy, and he didn't care. Going back down to the inn where they had taken a room, he stuffed his clothes into his seabag, slung it on his back, and walked away down the road toward the far end of England.

Most of the night he walked, then slept through the dawn in a field beside the road. In the morning light, he walked on. He followed the Roman road; sometimes other travelers joined him, merchants and chapmen, vagabonds and highborn people on horseback, but usually he went alone, with nothing to do but think.

He remembered what his uncle had said, about stealing from the people around him, but Pieter had not gone far enough in his explanation. To steal, to cheat corrupted everything; one lie fueled another, making truth impossible.

He thought of Alva, his courage, his cold brilliance. There was a grandeur in his evil that Jan could not find in himself. If he were good, it was in modest ways. More likely, he was neither good nor evil, but only something formless in between.

The clouds raced over the sky like greyhounds on the hunt. The rain fell.

It was raining when he came to Salisbury, several days on, and he found his way to Stonegate House. By the time he reached the gate yard the rain had stopped. He stood by the way in, looking into the brick courtyard, where ducks fluttered and splashed in the puddles. A milkmaid was coming up the lane toward him, a yoke on her shoulders, a bucket of milk in each hand. The rain was over, and now he needed no more shelter than one of the huge-barreled oaks that grew up over the lane, but he lingered still. As the milkmaid passed, she smiled at him, and he followed her into the courtyard.

Ivy covered the little old brick house on the far side. The milkmaid disappeared through a low archway in the back. A man in a woolen cap was unloading wood from a wheelbarrow in a corner of the yard, and he straightened and spoke in English, with a question rising at the end of his words.

“Mistress—” As he spoke, her name, forgotten until now, sprang to his tongue. “Mistress Simmons?”

In the ivy-covered brick wall, a shutter opened, and a woman leaned out; she called sharply down into the courtyard. The man at the woodpile turned, shouting back, and waggled his thumb at Jan. The woman gaped at him. She pulled the shutter closed. The man in the woolen cap turned to Jan again and smiled and motioned with his hand for him to wait. Jan let the seabag slide down off his shoulder.

“You look wet,” she said, leading him up the stairs. “Were you caught in the storm?”

“In several storms, Mistress Simmons.”

“Well, then, I'm pleased I have a room to offer you to yourself this time, and not the stable.”

Outside the door, he stood looking down at her. “I have a little money. I should be very happy to pay—”

“No, no,” she said, briskly. “My husband, when he died, left me with more than I could ever use myself. We had no children; he had no other heirs; what is there to do with it, save God's charity?” She smiled at him. Older than he remembered, her eyes nested in fine lines that fanned out when she smiled. “Make yourself comfortable. We shall have a supper, when night falls, in the hall.”

“Thank you.”

She opened the door for him and stood on the threshold talking, while he put his seabag down and looked around the little room.

“Have you been already to London? I hope your business transpired as you wished.”

He had no interest in telling her the tangled doings of the past few days. “This is very comfortable,” he said. “I should have been happy in the stable.” The room was just large enough for the bed and a tall old-fashioned French wardrobe; a little hearth faced the window. On the rope webbing of the bed, a straw-filled tick was folded. She came into the room and spread it out on the bedframe.

“Will your friends be coming along later?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I left without seeing them.” The wardrobe smelled of fresh lavender. He inhaled deeply of the pleasant scent. “This is very fine, Mistress Simmons.”

“If there is anything necessary to your comfort, we shall try to supply it.”

He was standing at the window, looking out over the wall of the courtyard. It was so different here from his own country: this swelling plain, not flat like Brabant, the trees squat old oaks instead of poplars and elms, no canals, no mills, and yet some things the same, the black and white cows that grazed on the far meadow, the sky's depthless blue, glittering after the rain. He turned toward Eleanor Simmons again.

“You've given me very much, simply in being here,” he said. “I came from London with a very bad taste in my mouth, which your hospitality has rinsed away. Thank you.”

“You are very kind,” she said, and her cheeks reddened. This time, she did go, and he was alone.

Before supper Eleanor walked to the village, to take some bread to the poor there. As she walked back up the plain toward Stonegate, she saw, ahead of her, the young Dutch seaman coming toward her.

They met where the path ran by the old standing stones; when she came up to him, the Dutchman was looking at the huge old stones, frowning.

“What are these?” he said, and put his hands on one stone and pushed as if he might knock it down.

“Pagan things,” she said. “It's for this my house is named Stonegate.”

She had forgotten his name. It quivered on her tongue to ask him.

He walked around the stones, touching them, and looking up at them. Usually she went by this place in a hurry, but today she lingered. His great height amazed her; the good proportions of his body disguised its size. He jumped up to touch the lintel stone. Measuring the gate with himself.

“I've forgotten your name,” she burst out suddenly.

He smiled at her. “Jan van Cleef, at your service, my lady.”

That made her laugh. “I am only Mistress Simmons, my lord. Or Eleanor, if it please you.”

“It pleases me.” He took her basket from her, to carry it for her, and they walked up the path toward the house.

“Enlighten me, sir. Why are you who rebel against the Spanish King called Beggars?”

He walked along beside her, his eyes on the path, which was slippery from the recent rains. “Because years ago, when we were still asking the King politely to honor our rights and privileges, the court scorned us by that name. Now every true Dutchman reverences the title Beggar.”

“And you are a Beggar.”

“Yes,” he said, adamantly.

“I think it most honorable and true to be so, from what I have heard of affairs in your country.”

“They murdered my father,” he said.

She pressed her hand to her breast, her gaze straight ahead of them on the path. “God help you. I am very sorry to hear it.”

“Tell me how your husband died. Was it recently?”

They were coming up toward the house; in the fallow field on the other side of the path, the dray horses grazed, standing to their hocks in the daisies. She said, “He took a fever, five years ago.” He had told her of his father; this exchange of pain was good currency. Yet it opened up the old sore again. She and William Simmons had quarreled before he died, and he had gone off so abruptly, in the space of a day, that she had had no chance to mend it with him. Whenever she thought of it, remorse dragged her down in its net of melancholy.

She said, “Now I spend my life in service to others.”

Beside her, he stopped abruptly. “There's still daylight left,” he said. “Will you sit with me and talk?”

They sat down on a log beside the lane, under an oak tree. He said, “Since I left Plymouth I've had no one to talk to, save Lumey and Sonoy, and they are …”

She waited for him to finish; he did not. She said, “Sometimes even here, where I have been nearly all my life, there seems to be no one to talk to.”

“Maybe,” he said, “there's nothing to say.”

“What a curious remark. I assure you, I always have something to say.” Did he think she was stupid? She frowned at him.

He stretched his legs out in front of him, moving his shoulders, working his great muscled arms. He said, “There is a world of words, and the real world, and you must not mistake the one for the other.”

That was even more curious. “Whatever do you mean?”

“I am not sure. Except it seems to me that sometimes people—I myself, very much—do something and attach words to it, and think by putting the right words to it to make the deed mean other than it does.”

“Yes, that seems a common folly of mankind, and nothing new with you.”

“There's a boy on my ship, a little slow in the head, named Mouse. While we were chasing the Spanish, I sent him up to the masthead, to get him out of my way, and he fell into the sea.”

“Oh!”

“He's safe now; don't cry for him. We had to stop and pick him out of the ocean and the Spanish nearly got us, all because of me, trying to play hero while doing the villain's business.”

“But you regret it,” she said, and put her hand over his. “You know the wrong.”

He turned to face her; his hand turned over beneath hers, and his fingers closed on hers. He said, “Knowing wrong is miles off from doing right.”

“God knows the truth in that.” His hand was warm, and so large it swallowed hers. Her gaze fell, lest he read too much in her eyes. She fumbled for some honesty to match his. Low, she said, “I try so hard to do God's work, but it's all ashes to me, my charities. I cannot say why—it brings me no peace. It all seems so small, taking bread to this one, medicines to that—a business of number and transport, not of my person. I want … I want …”

Now she was coming close to the center of her being, and she could not speak it, how she longed to matter in herself again, as she had mattered to William Simmons, long ago. How she yearned for some important work, some sacrifice, to fight, to die for her causes, to have her people's hearts with their gratitude.

He said, “You will have what you want.”

“You don't even know it.”

“Still, I can see in your face what a great-hearted woman you are.” He leaned toward her and pressed his lips to hers.

The kiss was chaste enough, with closed lips, but their joined hands went wanton, squeezing and stroking.

Somewhere beyond the hill a bell began to ring. Eleanor looked up. Her heart was pounding so hard she thought it must shake the cloth of her dress.