The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  It was in Mies’ thoughts to stop him, to remind him of his place, but there was no use in it. He shrugged. “Very well,” he said, to his son’s back.

  They got into the flat-bottomed boat, and Mies arranged his wife on cushions in the stern and sat there with her, his hand on the tiller. Their boatman brought the horses and hitched up the long towline to the harness; with Jan to help him, he had the van Cleefs’ boat ready long before the others in the crowd, whose horses neighed and jogged up and down the high bank of the canal while the boatmen cursed and struggled with tangled lines. Stuck in the midst of the fleet, Mies could not see a way clear, and they had to wait for the others to hitch up and move along, to make space for them. Reluctantly Jan climbed down the dusty bank of the canal and stepped into the barge, which dipped under his weight and swung into the boat next to it. He sat beside his sister in the bow, glowering, his eyes downcast, his large square hands gripped between his knees.

  Lout, Mies thought, with a hot spurt of anger. The rain was falling harder now. The boats ahead of them were moving at last, and he called to his boatman to drag the barge along the canal, back to their home in Antwerp.

  For running off from the sermon, Jan’s father sent him down the next morning to the wharf on the canal behind the silk factory, to work at loading and unloading the boats. Although the work was hard Jan enjoyed it; he liked showing off his strength, and while the rough, voiceless men of the regular crew shuffled up and down the steps, four hands to every bolt and spool, Jan leapt back and forth from the wharf to the factory with the great heavy goods balanced on his shoulders and scorned any help at all.

  After he had done this for most of the morning, the foreman of the regular crew took him aside and told him to stop.

  “If the overseer catches you doing that, he will think we ought to be doing it too,” the foreman said. He was a burly man whose bulging forearms jutted out of the frayed sleeves of his shirt.

  “It’s not that hard,” Jan said.

  They were standing on the wharf, beside the tufted bollard where the canal boats tied up. Behind the foreman, the short steep ladder scaled the canal bank, and along the top of the bank on either side of it the rest of the crew stood watching what went on between their leader and Jan. The foreman crossed his arms over his chest.

  “You’re only a boy,” he said, “and you have no family. Likely you will take your wage and spend it on beer and whores. We all have to put bread into our babies’ mouths. If you work so hard, the factory men will think they don’t need all of us, and some of us will be turned off.”

  Down the canal, someone yelled; a heavy-laden barge was steering around the bend. Jan said, “You should do a good day’s work for your wage.”

  The foreman cocked his fist. “You slow down, or we’ll see you don’t come back tomorrow.”

  Jan opened his mouth to inform this brute that he was the son of the factory’s owner, but something warned him against that. He looked up at the row of men on the canal bank above him, their faces in shadow, the sun at their backs. The barge passed behind him, parting the canal water with a low murmur; as it passed, its horn gave a breathy honk.

  “Very well,” he said. “I won’t be here that long anyway.”

  The foreman smiled and lowered his fist. “That’s a good boy.” His wrist was spotted with old healing sores, flea bites, or scrofula. When he turned to go back up the ladder, Jan saw spots of blood on his shirt. Jan stooped to hoist a bale of carded wool to his back, remembered, and straightened up to wait for help.

  That evening he and his father walked home together and his father said, “How did you on the wharf?”

  “Fair enough,” Jan said.

  “Did you talk to any of the other men?”

  “A little,” Jan said, warily. They were walking down the tree-shaded lane toward their street; the sun had just gone down and the birds shrilled and flapped in the branches overhead, revived in the cool after the day’s humid heat.

  “Did you notice any one of them who seemed to be”—Mies made a thoughtful face—“a troublemaker?”

  “What?”

  “One who incited the others to laziness, perhaps, or wild talk.”

  “No,” Jan said.

  His father shook his head a little, his lips still pursed, as if over some indigestible idea. He said, “Well, keep your eyes and ears open.”

  “Am I a spy, then?” Jan asked, furious.

  Mies gave him a sharp look. “You are my son. What benefits me does you also, does it not? People who talk sedition are bad for business.”

  “No one talked any sedition.”

  Mies said, “There are how many on the wharf? Six? Do we need so many?”

  That came at Jan too fast to answer; he opened his mouth and shut it again, wondering what to say. Although he had spoken to the other men only briefly, and the foreman had threatened him, he felt the first formings of a loyalty to them.

  “Well?” his father asked.

  “What will you do if I say no?” Jan said.

  His father walked along, square and solid as one of the big linden trees they passed beneath. “They are overpaid as ’tis. To send some off would help me balance my books a little more favorably.”

  “They have families. Children to feed.”

  “So do I.”

  “You’re rich.”

  “I am not in business to provide a means of life for half the rabble in Antwerp. What a tender heart you have. Then there are too many men on the wharf.”

  “But I am not there always,” Jan said. “When I am not there, surely the work must be harder on the others.”

  “True,” said Mies.

  They were coming to the end of the street. Soon their house would be in view, the smells of dinner floating from it; Jan’s stomach let out a loud and painful growl. His hunger sharpened something in his understanding of the foreman and his babies.

  He said, “What would they do, if you turned them off? Who would care for them? Are they Catholic?” The Catholics gave bread to their poor.

  His father laughed. “No, they are good reformed folk, like us, most of them. If we had not settled the issue of the Inquisition, things would be worse than they are in Antwerp.”

  “‘If we had not settled’ it,” Jan said, an edge in his voice. “You had nothing to do with that.”

  “Men who think like me,” Mies said. “Keep a filial tongue, my boy, or you will see worse than the loading docks.” He frowned at Jan; the older man’s face was hard as a bandit’s. “Keep your ears open down there—I want to know who says what, who makes trouble. Now that you know what to look for.”

  Jan shut his lips tightly together. They were at the end of the street; ahead of them, other men were hurrying to their homes, and through the last overhanging linden branches the painted eaves of his house were visible, the carved window frames, the door. In an upper story window a pale oval appeared, his sister’s face. The place seemed more solid to him now, warmer, a refuge. He lengthened his stride toward it.

  Mies van Cleef lived with his family in the house his grandfather had built on Canal Street in Antwerp, three streets away from his cloth-weaving factory. The house was three stories high, with big windows facing the street, carvings around the door, and a wall to hold in the yard, opening in a five-foot wrought iron gate. Mies spent a lot of money on his house, to show how God had favored him, and the house was a formidable presence on Canal Street.

  Hanneke van Cleef knew this because as people went by the house they always paused and looked up at it with awe and sometimes envy on their faces. She herself saw the outside of the house very seldom. She spent most of her days helping her mother order the servants and keep the place. In the afternoons usually she sat in the front room on the second floor and read, or looked out the window at the street, waiting for her father to come home.

  That was when her life began, when Mies appeared, walking up the street of the big linden trees toward his house.

  Toda
y she sat in the window, her elbow on the sill and her chin in her hand, her gaze steady on the corner where Mies would appear, although it was still nearly an hour before the church bells would ring out the end of the day. She was tired of reading, and done with her needlework; the day seemed very empty. She missed Jan, too. Usually she had his company in the afternoons but lately his father had been keeping him at work in the factory.

  She wished she were a boy, able to work side by side with Mies. Thinking that, she brought a sigh up that sounded through the room.

  “What was that?” her mother said, looking in the door.

  “Oh, nothing,” Hanneke said.

  Her mother came up behind her and set her hands on her shoulders. “A girl should keep busy. Have you nothing to do?” Stooping, the older woman peered out the window over Hanneke’s shoulder. “Oh, look—van der Heghe’s stork.”

  Now it was her mother who sighed, watching the angular white bird circle above the chimney of the house opposite and drop to its great nest of sticks. “I’ll set Jan to steal that nest this winter, if I must give him money to do it.”

  “Oh, Mother.”

  “Well, why should van der Heghe have a stork and not Mies van Cleef?” Her mother straightened, swished at the windowsill with her dustrag, and sniffed. “They haven’t got a penny to part their hair with, I’ll tell you that. All pretense and show it is with them.” She sniffed again. “They don’t deserve a stork.” She marched out of the room, batting at the furniture with the dustrag, although not a visible fleck of dust ever lay long on the van Cleefs’ household.

  Hanneke turned back to the window, suddenly near tears. Storks and dust, that was all her mother cared about—all she could care about; and that way lay Hanneke’s life too, a house like this one, except probably not as nice, and envy for the neighbors and gossip and never going out. That presumed she married; if she did not, things would be even worse. She pressed her face to the sour-smelling glass, feeling sorry for herself.

  In the street below a boy ran, shouting and waving a sheet of paper over his head.

  The window kept his voice out. Hanneke watched him hurry past, his paper like a banner overhead. Little boys could run the streets at will, like dogs, and she thought it very unfair that she could not leave the house without her mother, who never wanted to go out at all. Across the way, van der Heghe’s door opened, and the cook came out onto the walk between the rose beds, looking after the boy with his broadside.

  Hanneke’s gaze sharpened. The boy was coming back; the cook had a coin out and was buying his broadside. Turning her thumb ring around, Hanneke rapped on the glass, trying to get the cook’s attention.

  “Marta—”

  The cook read the broadside and yelled. With a flutter of her white apron, she dropped the paper into the street and ran back up the brick walk to her front door.

  “Marta!” Hanneke shouted, and rapped on the glass. “What is it?”

  Van der Heghe’s door slammed. The boy ran away; the broadside lay in the street, blowing over in the breeze from the canal. Hanneke leapt up out of her chair and bolted from the room.

  Her mother was in the back room, putting flowers in a vase. As Hanneke raced by her door, she called, “Johanna! Walk, like a proper Christian woman!”

  Hanneke ran down the stairs and to the heavy front door. Her mother’s shrill voice followed her, demanding to know what she did. The door was heavy, a barrier, a bulwark against the world. Hanneke pulled it open and went down the walk to the wrought iron gate.

  The broadside still lay in the street, halfway between her gate and van der Heghe’s. From the other end of the street came the shouts and screams of children playing. Hanneke gripped the wrought iron spikes of the gate, wondering if she could coax one of the children to bring her the broadside; but they were far away. She pulled the heavy spring latch backward, pushed the gate wide, and ran out into the street.

  “Hanneke!” her mother cried, behind her.

  She snatched the broadside up out of the dust and whirled and ran back to her own yard. Until she had the gate shut again, she did not stop to read it.

  The title shouted at her: WORD FROM THE KING! She leaned against the gate and scanned the lines of print below that. A low cry burst from her. She read it again, to make sure she understood.

  “Hanneke!” Her mother stood in the doorway. “Get in here this moment!”

  “Mother,” Hanneke said, and went toward her, both hands out, the broadside gripped in one fist. “Mother, we’re lost—the King has refused the petition.”

  “What?”

  “The King has refused the petition! They will bring the Inquisition here—”

  Hanneke went by her mother into the downstairs hallway, turned, and faced her. “Mother, they are going to try to destroy us.”

  Her mother’s face seemed to fall still. She clasped her hands in front of her. “Wait until your father comes home.”

  “Mother—”

  “Don’t talk to me. Wait until your father comes home.”

  Hanneke was struggling against a rising surge of panic. She lifted the broadside again and stared at it. But her mother was right: there was nothing to do except wait. Slowly she turned and climbed the stairs again, to go back to her station, to take up her place, and wait.

  Word of the King’s decision came swiftest along the canals, shouted from barge to barge and barge to shore, shouted back again by voices hoarse with disbelief. Jan heard it standing on the third step of the stair up from the wharf.

  He said, “Oh, my God.”

  The loading crew, some on the wharf, some on the steps above him, said nothing. They let fall whatever they were carrying and turned and ran up onto the canal bank; the foreman, coming from the end of the wharf, brushed past Jan on the steps so roughly Jan lost his balance and nearly fell into the water.

  “Wait,” he called, but no one waited.

  On the canal, the long low scow whose boatman had called out the news was sliding away toward the next wharf; from that platform, already the men were crying out in despair and anger. Jan looked down at the litter of dropped bundles on the wharf and scrambled up the ladder to find his father.

  Halfway across the high-piled yard to the back door of the factory, he stopped. Why was he looking for his papa, like a little boy afraid of the dark? His hands were damp with sweat. What Mies had said to him only a few days before returned to him like bells ringing in his mind: If we had not settled the issue of the Inquisition, things would be a lot worse … In the factory before him a loud voice rose, the words inaudible, but the tone one of outrage. Jan went to the gate and let himself out into the street.

  If his father challenged him over leaving his work, he would say he went to spy, as Mies had hinted he should do.

  The trouble was that he had no idea where to go to do that. He walked aimlessly down the street, in the opposite direction from his home, into the middle of Antwerp. A tinker passed him, burdened down with pots and pans. At the corner, where this street met the broad thoroughfare that led past the Bourse and down to the river, several women in scarves and shawls were talking intensely together. Jan turned into the great street. A boy ran past him, yelling, “The King’s a bastard!” in French. The usual press of horse-drawn carts and bustling people on foot crowded the street, but here and there the traffic had slowed and knots of people stood around talking.

  Beyond the rooftops that fenced the lefthand side of the street rose the single off-center spire of Antwerp’s cathedral. When he saw it Jan’s hackles stood on end. Yes. Swiftly he bent his steps there, to the center of the Catholic faith, to the visible enemy.

  He came into the square before the cathedral, into the back of a great restless crowd. Everyone seemed to be staring at the ornately carved stonework of the huge old church. He passed a woman with her little boy by the hand who as Jan went by snatched the child up and hurried away with him.

  Along the front of the cathedral the throng reversed itself: in the squar
e they all stood facing the church, but before it were ranks and ranks of men with their backs to it, facing the square. They carried clubs and rocks; they were Catholics. Defending their church. Jan clenched his teeth. He pushed his way through the mob, unwilling to stand still, his heart thumping. He had to elbow a man out of his way and the man wheeled and glowered at him and swore in a keen voice. Others ignored him. Everyone was staring across the little strip of open ground at the Catholics, who stared back at them.

  Jan hated them; he did not know how he came to the passion, which seemed to flow through the crowd. He felt himself part of this great wounded beast of a crowd, its expectations poisoned by the King’s treachery. Overhead the cathedral’s offset spire towered up against the rushing clouds; the men ranged before it to defend it seemed tiny by comparison, tiny and insignificant. Jan started forward. All those around him started forward too, at the same time, with a growl like dogs unleashed, and in time with these others, these other parts of himself, he lost his head and flung himself on the Catholics.

  All he wanted was to hurt them; he struck out with his fists at their faces and felt flesh give under his knuckles, and he kicked at them and his shoes found meat and bone. Around him bodies pressed so tight he could scarcely move. One arm was pinned. He lashed out at the people around him. Throwing his head back he howled like a wolf in rage. Something hard thrust into his stomach.

  The wind burst from him. He doubled over, falling to his knees on the cobblestones, and at once feet pounded on his back, knocked him flat, ground him into the pavement. He gasped. Once the air was gone out of his lungs he could not swell his body enough to take in another breath. His face scraped on the cobblestones. Desperately he realized he was being trampled. He surged forward, trying to get to hands and knees, and was knocked down again under the weight of the mob.

  His eyes blurred. A sharp pain radiated through his side, and his hands hurt. He lunged upward, strong with a panicky mad strength, and got his feet under him and stood. Blind and stupid from pain, he thrust out his arms ahead of him and tore a way through the surging scrambling mass of bodies. His legs hurt so badly he thought they would give way under him and drop him into the street again, and he knew that would be the end of him and fought with every step to keep upright. Abruptly his outstretched arms milled the air. He had come to the edge of the crowd. Forward he plunged, into an alley between buildings, and fell into the dirt and rolled over until he lay against a wall, protected by the wall, and covered his face with his arms and lost consciousness.