The Sea Beggars (50 page)

“Enough of that. We need another sheer. Two masts, this time—lash them together.” He looked up at the rampart over his head, where the gun was to sit. It seemed an immense distance. He thrust off his doubts and pointed to various men of his crew.

“You and you, go fetch the masts. Get sound ones. Marten, bring me thirty fathoms of line—anchor cable, if you can find it.” He wiped the sweat from his face on his sleeve. A long rip opened the white linen from shoulder to elbow. He fingered the edge. “My wife won't like the looks of that.”

“Your wife is glad enough it's just your shirt.” Eleanor came up the street toward him, smiling, but pale as the shirt itself. A basket hung on her arm. “I brought you dinner. Have you time to eat?”

He took her up on the rampart to share the meal with her. They sat looking out over the fields outside The Brill. Cows grazed on the meadow grass below the wall. The land stretched flat as a table out to the dike; not a tree grew on it. Jan ate bread and the good yellow cheese of the district.

Two women in white starched coifs were coming along the top of the dike toward the city, baskets on their arms, probably from the onion fields on the far side. A dog gamboled along ahead of them, its head turned toward them. They were townspeople, some of the few who had come back to The Brill after the Beggars seized the town.

He wondered what the rest would do—if they would come back. He hoped not all. The house where he was living suited him very well, and he had no desire to give it up to its rightful owner.

“Who is that?” Eleanor pointed.

Jan shaded his eyes with his hand. Coming along the flat lowland was a troop of horsemen.

“Lumey,” he said. “Back from another raid.”

Eleanor leaned over the basket, looking for the knife, and cutting herself another slice of bread spread fresh butter over it. She wore a blue dress, the cloth smooth and plump over her breast. “Is he your leader?”

Jan moved his shoulders, having no answer he liked to that question. Now that the double file of horsemen was closer, he could see Lumey himself in the lead, his beard bright with ribbons. The gaudy coat he wore was the embroidered vestment of a Catholic priest. The line of prisoners he dragged in his train was doubtless made up of priests. Jan turned his head and spat over the wall.

“Good cannot come of his bloody deeds,” said Eleanor, her eyes lowered.

In his heart Jan agreed with her, but he would not say so; Lumey was their leader, by word of the Prince of Orange, and if they argued with that now, where would they stop arguing? Now they needed unity, of mind, of purpose, of leadership. Lumey gave orders well enough, when the need called for it. Jan stood up, brushing the crumbs from his thighs. As he always did, he turned to look north, where the dike curved around to shut out the sea.

The wind was fierce out of the north today, driving the waves hard against the rocks on the outside of the dike. White fingers of spume flew up over the earthen wall.

“Here come your men,” Eleanor said.

He went down to rig the sheer to the wall and raise the cannon up into place to defend The Brill.

“I have heard,” Lumey said tenderly, “that priests have no balls. What do you say to that?”

He sat in a chair before the first of his victims, a young man in a cassock, his eyes round and glistening with fear. He was tied by the arms and waist to an upright beam of the house. Jan squirmed to see this. The chair he had taken was too small for him. He cast a longing look at the door.

“Well, he's not talking,” Lumey said, genially. “We'll have to see for ourselves.”

He held a broad-bladed fish knife in one hand, and reaching it out he slipped it into the front of the priest's sober dark gown and with a twist of his wrist slashed it open from the priest's waist to the hem. The young man whimpered. Against the wall behind him, the other captives mumbled their prayers and strained against their bonds.

Jan said, “You're mad, Lumey.”

Around the room, the admiral's other guests agreed with that. Lumey only laughed. With the saw-toothed fish knife, he lifted up half the priest's garment.

“By God! It was a lie all this time. He does have balls.”

The knife probed the priest's genitals. Jan's hand slipped down to his crotch. The small hairs crawled on his nape and the insides of his thighs. Sweat pebbled the face of the young priest; he was staring away, over Lumey's head, into the darkness, his eyes glassy.

“Well,” Lumey said. “Priests should have no balls. I shall remedy this one's defect right—now—”

The shriek from the young man's lips struck through Jan like a shock of lightning. He leapt up out of his confining chair and made for the door.

“Woman-hearted, are you, sailor boy?” Lumey roared in exaltation, and held up the dead parts on the tip of his fish knife. Jan opened the door. The other priests lined the wall beside it; some overflowed with prayers, and one had fainted, and more than one were cursing like seamen. Jan gave them an instant's sympathetic glance.

“Keep courage,” he said, and went out to the street.

Baron van Treslong was already out there, leaning up against the wall that separated the house from the common thoroughfare, twining his fingers together. Jan stood beside him a long moment before either of them spoke.

Van Treslong said, “God help me, I know they are Papists, but I would save them if I could.”

“We've got pistols,” Jan said. “Let's go back in there and stop this—this—”

“You are still young,” van Treslong said, and taking Jan's arm he steered him away down the street, away from Lumey's house, where now as they left another shriek rang out. “Things are still very simple to you, Master van Cleef.”

“They are Dutch,” Jan said.

The dark houses on either side were deserted. Their footsteps rang hollow in the empty street. Van Treslong's arm was linked with Jan's, a heavy pressure like a chain. Suddenly he longed for the sea and its simple order.

“If we offend Lumey, he will leave,” said van Treslong. “Together with his ships and crews, and probably several other captains and their ships and crews. And then how will we hold The Brill? Besides, Orange made him admiral. Only Orange can remove him.”

They turned the corner. To the left now was the harbor, where their ships rocked at anchor, their masts gaunt against the starry sky. Jan kicked a stone across the wharf.

“Orange,” he said, scornful. “That nothing prince.”

“Hold,” van Treslong said. “Speak well of the Prince of Orange.”

“Why should I? What does he, but sit in safety at some friendly court and write us letters that send other men out to die? We took The Brill. We have seized our fortunes by God's grace, not Orange's.”

“Hold,” a harsh voice called behind them, and they wheeled around, separating. It was the watch, manned by local Calvinists, who walked up toward them under their lantern and peered into their faces.

“Good evening, Captain. Good evening, sir.” Tipped their hats, and went off down the street. Jan watched them go, bouyed up by their respect; he began to feel a little better about Lumey.

Van Treslong came back to his side. “You have never met the Prince.”

“No.”

“Then let me ask you this, if there were a man in all things so unlike Lumey as an angel to the Devil himself—who is gentle even to captive enemies, who thinks ever of the long view and the people's good, who counts his own advantage last of all his necessaries, and who understands statecraft as a needlewoman does her handiwork—would you not want him to help us make our country free?”

He flung a quick glance at Jan, who shut his lips and would not speak; he saw he was being led along like a child.

“Think on it,” said the baron. “We must make our country free of the King who has always ruled us, free of Spanish law and Catholic order—make a whole new kingdom, as it were, the way a set of carpenters and masons builds a house from the ground up.”

They turned into the broad main street that ran past the town hall to the land gate. Jan shoved his hands under his belt. Van Treslong's words fascinated him; he had given no thought to any of this before. It had never occurred to him that they would have to shape their country again. It had seemed to him that countries had shapes as people did, from their birth, that could not change.

“Can you do it?” the baron said. “I cannot. I do not know what to do—who should do what the King did, in the old way, or even what it was he did, really. How to order church and state so that both thrive, how to keep the peace without tyranny, how to hear the voices of all the sorts of people, how to make new laws and judge the old ones, how to speak to other countries and have them speak to us—I know nothing of this. Orange knows. He is no soldier. But he'll make a king.”

“Hunh.” Jan walked on awhile, van Treslong at his elbow and his eyes lowered, thinking of all this—thinking, too, that van Treslong knew a deal more than he admitted. He shook himself.

“Why are we talking like this? There will be no new kingdom. When Alva gets here, we'll all be dead.”

Van Treslong said, “That's in God's hands.”

“You brought us here. Taking The Brill was your idea. Did you plan it all simply that we should die?”

The baron said, “I planned nothing. I only asked of you, of all of us, that we—you put it best, van Cleef—that we be
greater than pirates
.” He smiled; they were in the main street, beside the canal, and the few houses where people still lived shed the light from the lanterns over their doors in trails across the water. Jan could see the baron's face in the faint glow. “If we die, yet we cannot fail. Everyone now will know what we have chosen to die for. Others will make the same choice. In time, there will be enough. More than enough.”

Jan said, “A human sacrifice.”

“I hope not.”

“Damn it, I don't want to die. I just got married.”

“It's your choice.”

They walked on toward the gate, where voices were rising; Jan at first paid no heed to that, his head heavy with arguments and counterarguments. Reaching the open square before the gate, he caught the voices in his ear and stopped.

“We cannot let you in!” someone was calling, on the top of the wall. “Wait until morning.”

Faintly, another voice answered, unintelligible, from beyond the wall. Van Treslong stepped forward. “What's this?”

On the top of the wall, the sentry wheeled around. “Captain—my lord—some woman's come, she wants to join us. Shall I open the gate and let her in?”

“A woman,” Jan said, and grunted. “Another mouth, and a weak arm.”

Van Treslong called, “Open the gate for her; we are in no position to deny people, and it's cold out there.”

The sentry went to the winch that worked the gate. Jan went back to thinking about the talk with van Treslong. Suddenly he longed for Eleanor's company. She had no such unsteadiness of mind as he; when she had decided she was solid in her choice, and she had decided to stay here in The Brill. He sighed, tired of debates. The gate was creaking open. Through the widening gap came a single tall woman with a staff in one hand and a bundle over her shoulder.

“Welcome to The Brill,” said van Treslong.

“Welcome to the end of your life,” Jan said, harshly.

She let the bundle slip from her shoulder to the ground. “Thank you, sirs. I have traveled long to come here; it is very good to have arrived at last.”

Her voice was familiar. Jan took a step toward her. His heart leapt like a deer startled up from its resting place. “Hanneke?” In the darkness, all he could see was her shape. “Hanneke?”

She turned to him; she came into his arms. His sister. He brought her body against his like a piece missing from himself, and deep in the embrace they laughed.

“Why did you come here?” Jan asked. “You walked all across the whole country, to come here and die?”

“There are worse things than dying,” she said. “Mother died.”

They were walking up the street toward his new house; van Treslong had discreetly left them alone.

“Dead,” Jan said. “How?”

“It's on my shoulders. I left her alone too much. You know how helpless she was, how she relied on Papa. She was worse, after we left the old house.” Her voice was mild, almost without feeling. Jan wondered at the change in her; she had always been so high of feeling before.

She said, “They have destroyed Antwerp. It's a dead city. No one has anything to eat, and people are starving in the streets. All trade's stopped. The people are so bitter and low of spirit—”

She stopped, staring away down the street, seeing something she alone could see. Her lips trembled.

“Why did you come here?” Jan said. “Of all Europe, why The Brill?”

“God brought me here,” she said. Her voice was soft, but as she spoke it quickened, vibrant. “Just as He brought you and all these other people, to do His work, to build His kingdom on earth.” Her lips curved in a smile that vanished almost before it appeared. “Where else is there in Europe to be?”

He reached out his arms and she came into his embrace; the warmth of her body shocked him, somehow, as if she burned by the power of her idea. He struggled to see what she saw—something ahead of them, something to gain, to fight for. He saw plainly that it was the past that had driven him here, the past and the losses he had suffered, but the past and the things he had lost could not sustain him. He needed what she had, something to fight for, some idea of the time to come. What van Treslong had: the New Kingdom.

Jan could not believe it. He was afraid to believe in it, afraid of failing. Of being wrong. But his sister was here, warm in his arms, his sister. He pressed his face to her wind-tumbled hair.

Hanneke lay sleeping in the second-best bed; Jan drew slowly back from her, reluctant to leave her. Eleanor felt the sting of jealousy. Until now, she had never known he had a sister.