The Sea Beggars (48 page)

21

The rising sun found Alva on the march, riding south at the head of a column of infantry toward Louis of Nassau, who was trying to sneak over the border from France with an army of Huguenot rabble. News had reached him from The Brill, but The Brill was far away, and unimportant; Alva would deal with that at his leisure, when his border was secure.

On either hand were green fields, young corn growing, and strips of cabbage and onions. The road led him down between two rows of trees, through which the sunlight slanted. Alva was thinking about Louis of Nassau's impatience and courage, which led him often into attacking when he had not the resources to attack, a weakness Alva meant to use to destroy him.

The thoughts gave him a sense of peace. For months he had been pent up in little rooms, fretting at problems that seemed to grow on the solutions he attempted to apply to them; now at last he had something to do that he understood.

“My lord,” said his son, riding just behind him.

Alva lifted his eyes. Ahead, the road wound down between rows of trees, and on every tree trunk a piece of paper hung.

An aide galloped ahead to bring one to Alva, and he spread it on his saddlebow; he did not signal a halt, and the column moved on, steady, inexorable, south toward Spain's enemies. The paper was still stiff, the printing clear. If it had been hanging very long, the morning dew would have pulped it and made the ink bleed. Someone had put up these broadsides only moments before Alva saw them. Irritated, he swung his head from side to side, scanning the empty fields. They were out there somewhere, hiding, the villains who did this. Watching him. He lowered his eyes to the broadside.

“What does it say?” He held the paper out to Luis del Rio, on his right.

“On Saint Fool's Day, as it passes
,

The Beggars stole the Duke of Alva's glasses

“Brill means spectacles in Dutch,” said del Rio, in a badly timed display of superfluous knowledge.

Alva crumpled the broadside. “God's death on these animals.” With a curt nod to the aide he sent for his map of the Low Countries, and three more aides hurried up the column with it. All the while everyone marched on, without pause, toward the battle in the future.

The map, held up between the hands of two aides while the third led their horses on, resolved the problem of The Brill into a series of movements over land and water. Alva tapped the waxen cloth with his forefinger, confident of his dominance over it. Still, he did not like what he saw. Those islands and sandspits up and down the coast of the North Sea would be easy to defend, should the Beggars chance to extend their power over them, and The Brill was in the center, well located to extend from. Coldly Alva told himself that from such a holding even the Prince of Orange could withstand the onslaught of an empire.

“Don Federico,” he said crisply. “We shall squash these impudent Beggars now, once and for all. Let them find it was a mistake to venture within my grasp. There is an army at Bergen: take it, and wipe out this thieves' nest at The Brill.”

“Yes, my lord.”

His son's voice rang like a clarion. Federico always enjoyed commands far from his father's overlook.

Alva turned his eyes on del Rio, riding beside him. “You are to return to Antwerp and gather the army quartered there. March them north to The Brill to support Don Federico's troops.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“God be with you.”

“God is our sword and our shield,” they said in unison, and saluted him. They left him there. Alva rode along a while, staring at the map, wondering why every moment spent studying the position of The Brill should bring him more alarm. With a twitch of his hand he sent the map away and turned his face south, toward Louis of Nassau, toward what was important, more important than The Brill, if only because he understood it better.

22

At noon, Luis del Rio, the King's governor in Antwerp, entered the silent city. With two columns of mounted lancers at his back he rode along the main street toward the heart of the city, where stood the tower he was building. No bells rang, no crowds of citizens rushed out to greet him—not even a beggar appeared to ply the governor's generosity for a coin. He rode through Antwerp as if through a graveyard.

As he rode, he remembered how he had first seen this city, standing among her elms and poplars like a bride in her bower; then the streets had surged with carts and coaches, merchants on foot surrounded by their retainers, packmen bawling out their wares from door to door, messengers racing to and from the Bourse. How it had amazed him then to hear Greek and German spoken here as freely as Dutch or French! The streets for all their traffic were clean as church floors; the houses, trimmed with paint and gilt, were kept like monuments.

Now the wind tossed dead leaves and garbage along the pavement and the houses were decaying into rubble.

The people had left, the many-tongued merchants, the packmen, the rich and the poor; not all had left, but enough to hollow out the city like a shell. Of those who stayed behind, no one bought or sold, not in real ways, not since the tax fell on them. How they lived from day to day the King's governor could not tell and was afraid to think about.

He was coming to the heart of the town, by the brown tide of the Schelde. On his left the street opened up on the great square before the Bourse, whose doors were nailed closed. A winter fire had gutted the building and collapsed the roof; even the pigeons had deserted it now, although a stork's nest rested on the peak of the end wall.

There was a woman walking down the street ahead of him.

The sight was so unusual it held all his interest. The ground dipped down under her feet, falling away toward the river, so that she stood up against the empty sky: a tall woman in a shawl, leaning on a staff. As he came even with her, she stopped to watch him pass. A bundle hung on her shoulder. He had seen so many leaving; it startled him to see someone return.

They passed by one another, not fifteen feet apart. A tall woman, with a broad plain peasant face, who leaned on her staff and calmly watched the Spaniard ride by. Something in her look held his attention. He twisted in his saddle to keep his gaze on her as she fell behind him. Some power in her face, in her tall shape. Yet she was only a woman of the people. He straightened up, assuming a more military bearing, to ride into his citadel, where at last someone would cheer.

Hanneke watched the King's governor go past, thinking not of him but of the devastated city around her. It was almost like a foreign place to her, so different was it from the city where she had grown up.

She went down past the empty Bourse into the brewery district, where the wooden tanks stood empty and collapsing from neglect, their iron bands sprung, and their hollows noisy with birds; the canals and pipes of the waterworks were full of lily pads.

In the street behind the Brewmasters' Guildhall there were people, at last, not Spanish soldiers, but Dutch; a little boy sat on the edge of the pavement beating disconsolately at the cobblestones with a stick, and a woman was pulling a two-wheeled cart down the walk from a ruined house. Beyond, several doors down, a man sat in the doorway of the bakery, staring at nothing.

Hanneke quickened her step, her eyes on his face. Slowly she recognized him, feature by feature. He was much changed. Coming to a stop before him, she waited for him to notice her, but he was sunk deep in thought, his forehead gathered into a frown, and he ignored her.

She said, “God's greeting to you, Michael. Don't you recognize me?”

He looked up. His cheeks were clawed with deep harsh lines. Like a burst of light the recognition of her hit him, and he got heavily up and came slowly out into the street to meet her, saying nothing. The intensity of his look unnerved her, and she began to speak, to parry that fierce stare, but before the words were half begun, he surrounded her in an embrace and hugged her to him with a crushing strength.

She pressed her face against his shoulder. For the first time she felt truly home.

At last his hard grip eased, and they stepped apart, their hands on one another's arms. She said, “I'm so glad to find you here—everything seems so changed.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, thinly. “Very changed. Come inside. There's nothing we can say out here.”

He led her into the front of the shop, where he and his mother had sold their cherry buns and soft sweet bread; now nothing stood there but the empty shelves, thick with dust. Michael opened the counter and they went into the rear of the shop.

A fire burned in the hearth. He drew a stool up to it and made her sit. Hanneke slipped her bundle down from her shoulder with a sigh. She watched him rummage in the back of the kitchen and return with a small loaf of bread, a jar of jam, and a little wooden pot of beer.

She sniffed. This room, once ripe with odors of yeast and flour, now smelled of nothing but cobwebs. She said, “Are you not a baker anymore, Michael?”

“Not since my mother died,” he said. “Since they tied the tenth penny to our necks, I have not sold a crumb of bread.”

Sitting on the hearth, he cut the little loaf in two and put one piece solemnly before her. She made no move toward it.

“Then how do you eat?” she asked. “What of your custom—the people who depend on you?”

“We smuggle in the bread we eat,” he said. “Everything we need, we bring in by secret ways, at night.”

“We.”

One of his broad sloping shoulders rose and fell. He took the lid from the pot of beer. “Those of us who are left. Calvinists, some of them. Clement was a great man among us, at the beginning. Now he is dead; someone else has taken his place. As each one dies, there is always someone else to take his place—what is the saying, about the demons in the swine?” An unpleasant smile crooked his mouth. “‘Our name is legion, for we are many.'”

“You are the demons, and the Spanish are the swine,” she said. “It is apt, I suppose. What of your mother?”

“The Spaniards murdered her.”

Hanneke's mouth fell open. “Your mother? But she was—”

“The day you disappeared, I went everywhere looking for you, and when I came back, she was hanging from the sign.”

“Oh, sweet Heaven.”

“Where did you go? Why did you go without telling me?” The words burst from him with a long-restrained fury. For a moment he faced her, wounded, soft as the boy he had been when she left. “All this time I have wondered—I have dreaded knowing—why did you leave me?”

She said, “Carlos—the Spanish soldier—he attacked me, and I … killed him.”

She watched his face for some sign of revulsion. The boy Michael would have been revolted; but this harsh, haunted man was not. His face flattened with satisfaction. “Good blow.”

“I was afraid—if I went to you, they would blame you for it, so I went out of Antwerp.”

“A good-struck blow.” He gripped her hands and kissed her.

“I think not,” she said. “I wish I had not done it.”

“Bah. He was Spanish. But where have you been?”

“Away,” she said. “Looking for a place to rest, at first, and then I saw what must be done, and I came back here.”

“And you are here now,” he said, and took her hand and kissed it. When she did not draw back, he leaned toward her and pressed his lips to hers. She trembled, but she let him do it; she knew this stranger would demand of her what Michael had only asked for.

“Tell me where you have been. Did you go far?”

“Far enough,” she said. “Far enough to see I had to return here to do God's work.”

He leaned back. He was much thinner than she remembered him, which made him seem much older. “And what work is that? Are you still Calvinist?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “Aren't you?”

“No.”

“But—how can you fight the Spanish and not be Calvinist?” She shrugged. “Are you demon, or are you swine? I cannot see—”

“You don't see,” he said, roughly. “But you will, when you've been here awhile.” He caught her hand and held tight to the fingers. “I'll make you see, Hanneke.”

She stared at him, their hands still linked, with the feeling of seeing him across the black void of an abyss. The wind came and rattled the window. A sifting of pale flour floated down from the rafters. Hanneke turned her gaze to scan the gloomy silent room. The old woman was here still, somewhere, watching over her son; the past still had him by the heart. She tugged her hand free of his grip.

“Michael, the time has come to break free of the old ways. God is calling on us to make His kingdom on earth—”

“I need no new kingdom,” he said. “Only to make the old one the way it ought to be—the way it was. I need you, Hanneke. I need my woman to give me comfort, while I fight for what belongs to me.”

“Michael,” she said. “No.”

He was reaching for her hand again. “You can't have come back after so long, and not give me what I need. I've been waiting for you for so long …” Painfully he clutched her hand and pulled her toward him, his face lean with hunger.

She sprang up to her feet, her hand imprisoned in his grasp. They faced each other like battlers. In an instant, she saw that it was true: they were enemies. He was Catholic, bound to the old ways, and she was free of that. God had set her free.

In an undertone, she said, “Michael, let me go.”

“You can't have come back now and not be what I want,” he cried.

“Michael—” She jerked her head around, toward some thin sound from the street. “What's that?”

He lifted his head to listen. In the silence of the bakery, all sound seemed damped away to nothing. Hanneke raised her eyes again, toward the ceiling coated with flour, as if she might meet the gaze of the old woman, watching. Then again she heard the distant blast of a trumpet.

Michael pulled her toward the door. “Outside.”