The Sea Beggars (40 page)

“You can stay here, if you want,” the innkeeper said. “There's work to be done. You can earn your keep.”

She put her hands up to her face, to hold off the sight of this place; she struggled not to hear him. If she wanted it enough, surely she would have her home again and her mother's arms around her.

An arm did fall around her. She almost turned into the embrace; she almost gave herself up to that safety. Then his hand gripped her breast, and she recoiled from him, striking out blindly, with a blind accuracy catching him squarely on the nose.

The innkeeper howled; he gripped his nose, and with his free hand knocked her down. She fell on her back, her legs kicking up, and in the back of the kitchen the cook howled with laughter.

Hanneke sat up swiftly, tucking her skirts down around her knees. The innkeeper glowered at her. With his huge hairy paw he still held his nose. His voice came muffled past his sleeve.

“You'll change your answer, I think. Stupid wench. Get to work. Sweep the rooms and scrub the chamberpots, and we'll think about giving you some dinner. Go on!” He swung his foot at her, and she leapt up and hurried away from him.

She stayed on at the inn, sweeping and scrubbing for her bed and meals, dodging the drunken and lecherous customers, and doing battle daily with the equally lecherous innkeeper, for the rest of the winter. The hard work tempered her. At first she wept for loneliness, but as the days passed she grew content with herself. She felt herself growing whole again, as if the events of the past few years had shattered her soul into pieces that now began to fit together once more.

The inn was popular; every day swarms of strangers moved in, ate, slept, and went off on their way. She watched them as if from a great distance, from a height. Their lives seemed trivial, unconnected to the great matters of the universe. They went on whole-mindedly pursuing their small interests and ephemeral pleasures, unaware of the huge forces that could crush them in an instant, destroy their lives in a single moment. The catastrophe that had seized her set her apart from the passing herd. Her language set her apart: she understood German, and the Germans understood her, but it was like seeing through a gauzy veil.

She felt herself in readiness, waiting only for the insight of purpose. Twice a day she prayed to God to reveal Himself to her, to tell her what to do. Then one day in the spring, while she was emptying out the chamberpots, she heard someone in the innyard speaking Dutch.

She rushed to the common room window and leaned out to see. Below her was a little party of horsemen. They were plainly, even rudely dressed, and the innkeeper was ignoring their entrance, having sent his son to see to them. There among them was a red-headed man, a little stooped and sober in his manner, whose face she knew immediately although she had seen him only once before, when he rode into Antwerp a long long time ago. It was William, Prince of Orange.

She drew back from the window, one hand on the sill. Her heart was beating painfully hard. No need to run to him now. There would be time enough to talk to him, in the evening. She knew she would talk to him—that great things would come of it. God had brought Orange here to her. Stooping for the stack of chamberpots, she went off to finish her chores.

“Aaaah.”

The boot came off reluctantly, like a layer of living skin; Orange wiggled his toes. They had been riding for three days. One of the men was bringing him a cup of wine, and he reached for it, smiling his thanks, his throat parched.

“What a rat's hole.” His brother Louis paced up the room, kicking at the rough furniture and the stacks of their baggage sitting around it. “Of all the inns in Germany, we had to find the worst.”

“We'll only be here a few days,” said Orange. “Until the others come.”

“Why wait for them? Why not go on and let them catch us?” Louis dropped into a chair. His face was sour with bad temper. “God's blood. Rather a bivouac in the field than this.”

“We need an army to bivouac,” said the Prince. The wine was harsh and made his head pound. He held out the cup to his servant. “Water this somewhat, please. Halfway.” Turning to his brother again, he said, “I pray you, keep your chafings to yourself—you will infect all our company with your malaise.”

Louis growled at him. Raising one arm, he flung it over his eyes.

Orange sighed; he struggled against his own low feelings. Leaning forward, he scratched and rubbed his aching boot-bound feet. The servant had gone for a jug of water. The others of his company sat slumped around the room, none talking, busy with their own private complaints. The shadows in the corners, the gloom that lay over them palpably as the dust of their travel, were more real than the high-flown cause they pretended to honor.

His heart sank. This was what it came to, then, all the great words, all the resolution: a little troop of exiles in a shabby German inn, the largest thing in their minds their piles and boot sores. The door opened.

At first no one moved; they were all too tired to move. The woman who came in among them was only a servant anyway, from her coarse clothes. She came into their midst, tall, big boned as a boy, her fair hair bundled under a rag around her head, and the Prince of Orange saw the ardent temper in her eyes and thought for an instant,
She's mad
. He sat up straight, warned.

“Running away?” she said, her voice clear and sharp in the quiet of the room.

The others stirred, facing her; one by one, in the gloom, their heads lifted toward her.

“Is this your course? When your people are dying and need you, you run away?”

She was talking to Orange himself. He licked his lips, surprised, wondering what he should answer. Her face held his gaze. Her features were common enough, wide-spaced eyes in the broad square face, a heavy-lipped mouth, a large nose: the looks of a woman of the Dutch countryside. Yet her fury glowed forth nobly, a radiance of truth.

“Did you know,” she said to him, her words like a whiplash, “that we are dying, that we are being murdered and tortured, that we are being driven out of our homes and down the streets of our own cities by the Spanish? While you run away?”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Hanneke,” she said. “I am from Antwerp. On the day I left, with my hands red with the blood of a Spanish soldier, they were hanging people by the tens and hundreds.”

“Antwerp.” Someone sighed, in the dusty, gloomy margin of the room, and moved closer.

“We needed you,” she shouted into the face of the Prince of Orange, “and you weren't there. You ran!”

“Stop your tongue!”

The Prince's brother Louis sprang forward, hot, to confront her. He flung out one arm toward Orange.

“He has lost everything in your cause, stupid woman—all his money, all his lands, even his firstborn son, sent into prison in Spain. How dare you speak like this to him?”

“Hold.” Orange took Louis by the arm and drew him back, and drawing him away he stepped forward himself to take the girl by the hand. “Sit down, Hanneke of Antwerp, and tell us what you have witnessed. Give us fuel to stoke our dying resolution.”

For a moment longer she stood like a column of marble, her face blazing with the intensity of her feelings. Her fingers tightened on his. Her eyes grew luminous with tears. The Prince stretched out his other arm to her, and she came into his embrace and put her face against his chest and wept. The others crowded around her, speaking comforts. The Prince, cradling her against him, saw their weariness drain away, their faces alive again with sympathy, with their purpose and their cause; she had brought them back to themselves. God, as usual, had provided what was necessary even in their despair. He touched her trembling shoulders, pleased and grateful.

“I am going with them,” she said to the innkeeper.

The German's jowly face swung toward her. “What?”

She waved her hand toward the Prince of Orange's party, assembling in the innyard; the people they had come here to meet had caught up with them, and they were ready to go on. “I am going with them.”

The innkeeper spat onto the floor, a practice he did not allow his customers. “So. This is how I am repaid for taking you in and keeping you and putting up with your foul temper all these months.”

“I worked for my keep,” she said, startled; she had not expected this from him.

“Some sweeping,” he said. “A few chores done. Pagh. Go on, anyway; you are a useless girl, anyway.”

She turned toward the door, where her few belongings waited, tied into a bundle inside her heavy cloak. Outside, in the sunlight, her new companions waited in the dust.

“Hold,” the innkeeper said, behind her.

She turned, and he dug into his purse and took out a coin, rubbed it between his fingers, saw it was a golden guilder, and put it back in the purse. “Nay, hold.” He fumbled among his hoardings a moment longer and dug up a silver mark. “Here, take it.”

She hesitated, weighing this unexpected action in her mind, and he pushed it at her. “Take it.”

She took the money, and he turned away; they separated without more goodbye than that.

With the Prince of Orange, she walked on down the road toward the neighboring duchy, whose master was Lutheran. Here, the Prince told her, he hoped to find support for a new attack on Alva—money for an army, mercenaries, supplies. She understood none of that, and cared nothing for it: all that mattered was that he meant to go back.

“I'll go with you,” she said.

She had no horse; she was walking along beside the Prince's stirrup, looking up at him. Abruptly he threw down his reins and swung out of his saddle to walk beside her.

“You shall go back to Dillenburg,” he said. “To my mother's home. You'll be safe there.”

Before she could answer his brother Louis pushed his horse up between them. “Here,” he said. “Let her ride behind me. You must ride, William.”

“I am content to walk,” said the Prince. He held up his reins to his brother. “Lead my horse, if you will.”

“You cannot walk,” said Louis. “You are a prince. You cannot walk like a common peasant.”

“Oh, can I not?” the Prince said pleasantly. “Why, my brother, I should think that a prince should be able to do more than a common man, not less.”

“Exactly,” said Louis.

“Then I shall ride sometimes, and walk others,” the Prince said. “Lead my horse.” He smiled at Hanneke, as if they shared a secret.

“William,” his brother said, “you have no sense of your own greatness.” He spurred his horse away, leading the Prince's after.

“I haven't any wish to be safe,” Hanneke said.

“Whatever do you mean?” the Prince said.

“When you go back to the Low Countries, I shall go with you.”

“To what end?”

That stopped her; she had no answer for that. She knew she could not carry a pike or a musket. She stared away across the fields they were passing, where men and women stooped to hoe and plant. The land dipped away down from the road; there on the far slope, where it rose again, a hitch of oxen drew a plow across the golden ground, the furrows darker than the fallow.

She said, “God will tell me what to do.”

“I think you do what God desires of you,” the Prince said, “in being what you are. You inspire us all.”

“Not I,” she said firmly.

She wanted more to do than that, more than simply to be, like a statue in a church, something to stir living hearts.

They walked on a little way; it was warm for the season, and the fine dust of the road rose in clouds under their feet. Taking her arm, the Prince moved to the side of the road, where grass grew up beside the ditch, and they walked there, still arm in arm.

“Hanneke,” he said, “what will you have me do in the Low Countries?”

“You must drive the Spanish out,” she said.

“The King is Spanish. We cannot drive them out entirely.”

“Then make them be honest with us. Or we must have another king.” She frowned at that, wondering if that were possible, and a new thought struck her. She looked around keenly at the man walking beside her. “You could be our king.”

He shook his head. At the corners of his mouth creases appeared, like a smile beginning. “Then everyone will say I have done it all for my own ambitions. I will not have that said of me. Or of your people.”

“We must have a Calvinist king,” Hanneke said, “or we will never be safe.”

As soon as she said it, she was sure it was true, and suddenly new truth appeared before her, like a new world rolling up over the horizon of her mind.

“I am not a Calvinist, Hanneke,” the Prince was saying.

“A Dutch king, at least.”

“Nor am I Dutch.”

She shrugged, less interested in what he said than the vision growing clearer before the eyes of her imagination. “Certainly we must have a new kingdom.”

“A new kingdom,” he said, and looking at her he did smile.

“One where everyone could live in peace. Where everyone could work, no matter what your faith, and where children would not be hanged, and where they had to give you a fair trial when you were arrested, and you couldn't be arrested at all except for a very good reason, and—”

“Can we not have the old kingdom still, only make it more just?”

She lifted her face toward the sun. “A kingdom where the true king is God Himself.”

“I think,” said the Prince, “we are talking of two different realms now.”

Hanneke did not reply. The idea she nurtured delighted her; she felt it grow and swell in her mind, quickening, robust. Ahead, the spires of a town appeared above the round crest of the road, and with a few light words the Prince turned to his horse and mounted. She walked along the side of the road, her arms clasped over her stomach, protecting something within her.

The duke looked dismayed. “By God, sir, it grieves me to see you fallen so low in the world. I knew you had lost much, in the unpleasantness, but to see you like this …”