The Sea Beggars (44 page)

“I'm tired of running errands,” he said, and his gaze slipped away from hers.

“That's the nature of ruling,” said Elizabeth. “We are all running the errands of the kingdom, me no less than you. You may serve with a merry heart or a melancholy, but you must serve, or matter not.” She wiped her hand over her face, watching him, gentle again toward him, who suffered so much for her sake. “And serve one another as well, that's one comfort.”

“You make a fool of me.”

“Tchah.” Impatient, she waved him off. “Begone. You annoy me.”

“As you will, Madame.” He swept her a bow full of flourishes and marched out.

Robin
, she thought, but did not call him back. She leaned into her throne. The musicians had come in, with their viols and tambours, their lutes and pipes. She would call him later and they would dance. He was good at dancing. He had no mind for statecraft: he could not separate himself from the larger good; he saw only what affected him.

She loved the Dutch and hated Spain, but for England's sake she had to threaten what she loved and yield to what she hated. Well, well, the time would come when things would right themselves. She put out her feet to the stool, where bonny Robin's foot had been. She could wait. She only hoped the Dutch could wait as well.

19

There was a child sick in a poor man's hut at the edge of the village, and Eleanor spent the morning there, nursing the baby and holding the exhausted and hysterical mother's hand. At noon, when the child died, Eleanor walked home again, feeling the world heavy on her back as a fiend from Hell.

She stopped at the standing stones to rest. The sun had burned off the morning's mist and the stones were hot to the touch. Moss and lichens grew on them. She rubbed her fingers over the leathery edge of one green-gray patch, her mind on the pitiable baby dying in her cradle. It was wretched to see children suffer. They did not understand; they could not fight back against the demon eating them up. Gone to God, she was, the child. Her lips cracked from fever, her eyes crusted. Eleanor put her hands to her face, despairing.

When she lowered her hands again, a figure moving down the hillside caught her eye.

She straightened, reaching for the basket at her feet; it would do no good to her reputation to be seen loitering here, in this place of sin. Her eyes sharpened. This was no one she knew, walking down the path from Stonegate House, none of the local people, none of her servants. A moment later a glad cry burst from her, her body knowing him before her mind dared recognize him.

“Jan!”

She stood rooted where she was. He strode up the path toward her, smiling. He wore no hat and his pale hair was like tow in the sun. He came up to her as casually as if they had parted only that morning and said, “Well, hello, Mistress Simmons.”

She put out her arms to him, and he gathered her up and kissed her firmly on the mouth.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I thought you were never coming back.”

He sat down on the stone where she had been, still holding her hand. “I was at sea.”

“Can you stay? Are you here forever, now?”

He pulled her down beside him, his arm around her waist. “Forever! That's a longer-time than I can think of.” His gaze searched her face; taking her by the chin, he looked deep into her eyes. “You look so pretty, prettier than I remembered.” He kissed her again.

She put her hands on his chest and held him away. “Pshaw! Do you take me for a light woman? I want to know what you intend for me. Are you staying with me, to marry me, or will you go off again and leave me here to the humiliations of my neighbors?”

His eyebrows arched up. “Have you been humiliated?”

“Oh, very much,” she said, bitterly. “And by people whom I have been the very life and breath to, sometimes.”

He squeezed her hand. “I'm sorry.”

She waited a moment, expecting more, some answer to her question, but he said nothing; impatient, she blurted out, “Well?”

“I cannot stay very long, dear Eleanor. The ship is mine now; I must take her to sea.” He told her of his uncle's death.

“Oh, God,” she cried, less in mourning than abhorrence of the sordid flavor of it—to die in a tavern brawl.

“The worst is that he probably was cheating. He hated Lumey.”

“Jan, you are a better man than that.”

“He was not a good man, my uncle, but I loved him. Anyway the
Wayward Girl
is mine now.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I'm a ship's master now,” he said. He smiled at her, his blue eyes sharp. He seemed much older to her somehow. He said, “I am a man of substance, Eleanor. I can take a wife.”

“A wife,” she said.

His hands turned over, cupped as if he supported a little world of his own in his hard callused palms. “I want a wife, and a house of my own, to come home to.”

“Will you stay with your wife, in your house, and work the land and not go sailing?”

A low laugh broke from him, surprised. “No. I'll plow the sea, not the dirt, mistress. I'm a sailor.”

She looked away through the gap in the stones, toward the treeless horizon. Some sheep grazed on the champion ground there. The birds were singing and pecking in the grass around the foot of the stones, busy at their husbandry.

“Will you marry me, Eleanor?”

“And spend my time wondering if you'll ever come back again?” She kept her side to him, her head turned away, her fists jammed into her lap.

“Think on it, please.” He reached for her hand again. “Don't say no yet.”

She would not give him her hand. Tears rushed into her eyes. She had been so glad to see him; now all the misery in the world filled her. She shook her head.

“Don't touch me,” she said.

He left off trying. They sat side by side for a while, without speaking; finally they walked silent back to Stonegate House.

In her chamber that night, she made a fire, and sat on the hearth, her heart pounding. Before long there was a knock on the door.

She opened it a little, and Jan said, “Will you let me in?”

“This is why you came,” she said bitterly. “Isn't it? This is what you want me for.”

“Eleanor, let me in!”

She let the door swing wide and he strode through it, filling up the little room, his boots scraping on the floor. He pushed the door shut behind him.

“What's the matter?” he said. “Why are you angry with me?”

She had no answer; she had been angry with him for leaving, and she was angry with him now for coming back. She could not trust him. Or herself. Merely having him in her room stirred her memories, and her memory charged her lust, loosening her thighs and breeding a warm tingling in her belly.

“Will you let me kiss you?” he said.

“I ought not. It's sin, what we did—” She put her hand over her mouth, to keep from saying too much.

He stood looking down at her, his brows drawn over his nose; there were lines at the corners of his mouth she did not remember from the last time they had been together, when he had seemed to her like a young sun god, strong as nature. Finally he shook his head.

“Maybe I should not have come.”

She stooped and put wood on the fire. She thought her heart would break if she spoke to him.

“Have you thought much yet of marrying me?”

“I cannot think,” she said, her voice clogged up with feeling. “Not while you're here.”

At that he sank down beside her and took her in his arms, and she flung her arms around his neck and they kissed.

He said, “I want to sleep with you.”

“I—”

“No, hush.” He put his hand over her mouth. “I'll sleep on the other side of the blanket, but I want to hold you.” He kissed her again. “Is that sin?”

She locked her arms around his neck. After a while they went to bed. They slept little; they argued all the night.

“I cannot leave Stonegate,” she said. “Too many here depend on me.”

“Depend on you! Who does?” Jan cried.

“Why, the poor folk whom I feed, and my people here—”

“They don't depend on you. You said yourself, when you fell into scorn, they scorned you just as much as anyone else. If you go, someone else will feed them.”

He saw at once he had struck something deep in her; her face thinned and sharpened, and her eyes grew harsh as ice. “How dare you say that, when I have devoted my whole life, these past five years—” She struck at him with her open palms.

“I need you,” he said, fending off her hands. “I cannot do with anyone else but you. But you cannot stay here. I cannot come up here, three days' walk, every time my ship makes Plymouth.”

She rolled over, her face to the wall. “I will not leave Stonegate.”

He lay beside her, braced up on his elbow, watching her. There was a candle on the windowsill over the bed, which gave him light to see her by. This struggle with her baffled him. He had expected nothing of it. At their last meeting it had seemed to him he saved her from a dull and thankless life, and now, when he came to rescue her permanently, she fought him violently as a Don.

She said, her back still turned, “You must come here. There is work here, a good life here—”

“You mean, leave the sea? Oh, no.”

She rolled over toward him again, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Then you do not love me.”

“I do love you,” he cried. “Would I have come back all this way, just to be railed at by a harridan, if I did not love you?”

“Oh, so I am a harridan, am I?”

“Eleanor—”

The candlelight glittered on the snail tracks of tears on her cheeks. She said, “I will not marry you unless you come here, to Stonegate, to live here with me. That is my answer.” Without waiting for his, she rolled over again and pulled the blanket high up over her shoulder.

Jan watched her a moment and lay down on his back. The bed was too narrow for the two of them, but her warmth reached him even through the blanket and he wanted the closeness with her even if she hated him now. It seemed she did hate him. To force him to come here, miles from the sea …

Into his mind flashed the memory of the sea, the green wave rising fetterless and irresistible into the sky. He sighed. He would never live at Stonegate, in a woman's shadow. Staring up at the ceiling beams, woolly with cobwebs, he waited for sleep to take him from his unhappiness.

In the morning Jan went out with the other men of Stonegate to the fields, to cut the spring hay. Eleanor sat with the cook in the courtyard, going over the kitchen accounts; nearby, the hall maid was churning butter. The round wooden tub clattered on the uneven paving stones.

The girl sang as she pumped the handle up and down.

“Now listen a while and let us sing

To this disposed company

For marriage is a marvelous thing
—”

“Leave off,” the cook called to her. “Or sing a pious song.”

“Let her sing what she will,” Eleanor said.

“Hoho,” said the cook. “Is that the way the road tends? I wondered, when I saw the white-haired sailor back again.”

Eleanor picked a winged maple seedling from her lap and sent it spiraling off on the wind. “He has asked me to marry him.”

“And will you?”

“But sure there is no doubt to know,”

the maid sang,

“Of man and wife the married state
—”

“I don't know,” Eleanor said.

“He is not English,” said the cook.

“If he say yea, and she say no

I hold a groat the wife will ha 'it!”

Eleanor laughed at the song, which lifted her spirits; surely it was an omen, and he would agree to her terms. She glanced around her at her home, snug and prosperous, everything desirable.

The cook sniffed. She drank as heartily as any man, and the excess of wine marked her face in red winy veins along her nose. “And you'll leave us here to our fate, I suppose.”

Surprised, Eleanor looked up from the accounts. “Not at all. Why do you think it? There is room enough here, surely, for a husband for me.”

The cook set her head to one side. “You'll wean a sailor from the sea? It is not done, my girl.”

Eleanor opened her mouth to argue, but the rattle of the churn stopped, and the hall maid said, “Hello. Who's that?”

Two strangers were standing there in the gateway. Eleanor rose to her feet. “Good welcome, sirs.” One was tall and fair, and the other a boy, with crossed eyes; they both wore sailor's clothes, just like Jan's, and she saw, alarmed, that they were Jan's men.

They came in the gate, the boy slipping into the shelter of the man's shadow; she remembered Jan had said there was a dull-witted boy on his ship, and this was surely he. She fought with her panic. They had come to take him. There was no way she could prevent them from finding him; the reckoning was come, sooner than she had expected, before she was ready.

The man put his fist up to his forehead, in a peasant's salute. He spoke in mumbled Dutch, the only audible words being Jan's name.

“Yes,” she said. “He's here.” It would do no good to lie. “Come with me,” she said, beckoning, and led them out the gate again.

The men were haying in the champion below the hill, near the standing stones. She strode down the path, her skirts in her hands. The sun was bright and warm, and the wind a little gusty: a good day for haying. Down the hillside the men worked in rows, raking up the cut yellow grass.

She kept her eyes on them; the two strangers beside her unnerved her, both their mission and their enforced silence. If he went away now, she would never see him again.

Down there he had seen them coming. Giant among the other men he paused in his work, the rake slanting up through his hand, and straightened, and threw the rake down. He strode up to meet them. His long legs carried him forward almost at a run. Behind him the other men stopped to watch. Even the two big dray horses lifted their heads to watch.