The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  Now she was going in the gate, his gaze full of her, his black eyes like the eyes of a jungle animal, hypnotic and evil. She made herself meet his look the whole way from the gate to the door.

  Inside, she leaned up against the wall a moment, recovering. He was still there, just the other side of the door. She went back through the house to the kitchen, where the Kelmans’ cook hummed over her pea soup, and let herself out the back door, to the little wooden stair up to the attic room.

  Her mother was sitting in the window, staring out. The floor and the top of the table and the cupboard bed were spread with bits of clothing, books, and linens. Hanneke closed the door. She had to fight down a surge of hot anger at her mother, who ignored her and began to sing.

  Taking off her shawl, Hanneke hung it up on the hook by the door. The room was smaller every time she came back to it. The two women had little enough—a few bundles of clothes, a box of books, a chair, a chest full of embroidered linen for Hanneke’s dowry—but with space so dear it all had to be neat, or the room was a chaos. When she did not go out roaming the streets Hanneke’s mother spent the day opening drawers and boxes, taking out her possessions and laying them about, and there was never anywhere to step or sit or even to stand.

  Hanneke said nothing to her mother. She set about cleaning up the room.

  Her mother broke off singing. “Where were you?”

  “Out,” Hanneke said.

  She folded the linen bedsheets intended for her wedding night and laid them back into the cherry wood chest her father had given her when she was twelve. She hated touching these things, seeing them, thinking about the blasted world they tied her to.

  “That boy was here again,” her mother said.

  “What boy?”

  She knew which boy: Michael Rijnhardt, the baker’s boy, who had been coming into Kelman’s backyard every day to look up at the window of Hanneke’s room.

  “I hope you threw something at him,” Hanneke said.

  “He looks like a very nice boy.”

  “He’s a Catholic.” Hanneke slammed the chest lid shut. Her gaze traveled the room, littered with the fragments of their past life. “Mama, why can you not keep all this shut away?”

  “Have you seen Jan?”

  “No, Mama.”

  She lowered her eyes to the chest; whenever she thought of her brother a hard lump formed in her throat. She rubbed her fingers over the deep carved roses on the lid of the chest. She would never marry now. When she was a little girl she had always assumed someday she would find a handsome charming man who would fall entirely in love with her and take her for his wife, but now she knew she would never marry. No one wanted the daughter of a hanged man. When she felt the familiar stinging in her eyes she scrubbed angrily at them with her hand. What right did she have to cry? Roughly she got to her feet, lifting the chest, and heaved it up onto the shelf beside the cupboard bed.

  “Help me, Mama.” She stooped to gather up the books strewn about the floor.

  “Do you know where Jan is?”

  “No, Mama.”

  Her mother climbed down from the window, reached for a book and put it away in the box, reached for another book. Hanneke gathered up the mess around her. Her brother had not come to see them for some time. He was gone, she thought; she had the sense of an emptiness in the city that meant he was gone. She sighed. A soft sound behind her brought her gaze back to her mother. The old woman sat with an armload of her husband’s books clutched to her breast and wept. Hanneke tore her attention away. Her mother’s grief frightened her. This mirror of her own fear made her fear more real. Furiously she busied herself putting away the rest of the books. After a little while, behind her, her mother began to sing again.

  He had been gone too long; his mother would scold him like a child when he got back to the bakery. Michael scuffed his shoe through the inch of new snow that lay over the cobble street, his gaze pinned to the door of the factory. The sun had set over half an hour before and the snow thickened the night as it fell. His mother was right; he should be there to help her, and not standing here in the street like a mooncalf. As he turned to go, the door opened.

  Hanneke came out under the little white lantern that hung over the factory door and pulled her shawl up over her head. In the steady silent downsifting of the snow she was only a shape, but Michael recognized her at once; although he had known her only a few weeks he knew her in every nerve end, every sense, as the only thing worth knowing. He went forward to meet her, and she stopped and frowned at him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help it—it bothers me that you must walk home alone after dark.”

  “Please, Michael.” She walked on past him down the street.

  Michael fell into step beside her. Longing to take her by the arm, to guide her and protect her; certain of the rebuff if he tried. It was that distance between them which gave his feeling for her its electric poignancy. He wondered sometimes, if she had accepted him, if he would not have swiftly tired of her.

  She was cold. The snow fell on her head and shoulders and she shivered.

  “Will you take my coat?” he said humbly.

  She shook her head.

  “Must you work so late? All the other women have since gone home.”

  “I must sweep up after them,” she said. “That’s my duty there.”

  “What times are these,” he said, “when such as you must work.”

  That drew a swift angry look from her. “I’m glad of my work. At least I can care for myself and my mother.”

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” she said, her chin up in the air. “Your pity is quite misplaced.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. They walked along down the hill toward the Swan Street, through the light cottony snow; everyone else was indoors and the street was empty. The little round-backed bridge lifted them over the frozen canal. At the height, she stopped and looked away down the canal, frowning; she did this every time they crossed the bridge, and he had concluded that she was looking at the tall stately house down on the next street. Her shawl had slipped back from the crown of her head and the starched wing of her cap was wilting in the snow. She turned and walked on.

  “You need not go on any farther,” she said. “My home is just over there.”

  He knew that. She always said that. Just as she always paused, looking at the Kelmans’ house, and seemed to gather herself for an assault.

  “Perhaps when the snow stops we can go skating together,” he said.

  “I have no skates.”

  “I will bring you a pair. My mother’s old skates.”

  Someone was coming toward them, two people, one tall and stooped and the other a child. Hanneke drew back a little, to give them wide room to pass. Michael shifted to one side, shielding her from them, and turned to her again to press his invitation to skating.

  “Once the snow stops the canals will be like glass. We’ll have wonderful races.”

  “Mistress van Cleef?”

  The tall stooped man came up before them, his shoulders hunched in the cold, his hands stuffed under his coat.

  “Who are you?” Hanneke asked sharply.

  “I am Clement de Vere,” he said. “I’m a printer. I met your father briefly during the—” His gaze shifted to Michael and abruptly he cut off. The little boy beside him looked solemnly up at the three tall people. “I heard you were in need,” said Clement the printer. “I came to offer you what help I can.”

  “I need no help,” Hanneke said.

  “I admired your father.” Again the printer glanced at Michael and cut short what he would have said. Michael thought suddenly: He is a Calvinist. He wondered how Clement had escaped the persecutions. “If I can do anything—”

  “Nothing,” Hanneke said, in a voice thin with strain; and suddenly she burst out, “You’ve done enough, haven’t you? You and all your kind. If not for you he�
��d still be alive—all this would not have happened—” Her hands balled into fists before her, shaking in the air. “Leave me alone. Please leave me alone.” She lunged forward, pushing between Clement and Michael, not running, but walking very fast toward the Kelmans’ house.

  Clement was left facing Michael in the soft whispering snowfall. He said, “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Michael said. “For her sake.”

  “I pray God she is right, and needs no help,” Clement said. “These are wicked times, when women are thrust alone into the world.” He took hold of the little boy’s hand and led him away through the dark street.

  Michael looked after him a moment. He was a good Catholic; he had been to Mass only that morning, and prayed for the King and the purification of the Faith. His mother said he was mad to have to do with Calvinists. Yet they seemed no threat to him, only to themselves. Hanneke was right: but for their own follies, none of the horrors would have befallen them. Perhaps someday she would return to the Faith. He thought not; there was that in her mettle which would not bend. He loved that in her. He loved her. Smiling over that, he made his way homeward through the snow.

  She did not go skating with Michael. On the Sabbath she prayed all the morning, and went out in the afternoon to walk and pray. The snow had fallen all the week long but had now stopped, and Antwerp was half-buried in it, drifts against the walls and fences, conical heaps on top of the chimneys that came crashing down as the sun warmed them. From the bridge over the canal she looked down and saw the children sweeping the ice clear; where they had made a clean surface, the ice was already traced with curves and circles from their skates. On the slopes, they ran with their sleds and jumped down on them and flew bumping and screaming over the packed snow.

  On the Sabbath they ought not to do so much. She turned away, wishing she could go skating with Michael.

  Nonsense even to consider it. She walked home, enjoying the sunlight. That too was probably a sin: enjoyment on the Sabbath. Along the eaves of the houses she passed, the snow was melting into long icicles that dripped and splashed in a kind of music. Someone was playing the virginals in the house next to Kelman’s, and not sacred songs either.

  The Spanish soldier Carlos was walking in the garden. Hanneke tensed, her mouth dry. Every day, this happened—every day. Grimly she went forward through the gate, and he swung and attacked her with his stare. She stared back. Every step an effort, she walked by him to the door.

  He said something, low, in his own tongue. She slammed the door on him.

  In the kitchen, the oven was cold; Kelman at least kept the Sabbath that well, forbidding his cook to work. A pot of cold meat stood on the table. The housemaid sat at the head of it, mending her hose with a needle. When Hanneke came in, on her way to the back door, she said, “That friend of yours was here, Mistress van Cleef.”

  Hanneke was on the verge of saying, “I have no friend.” Instead she said, “Thank you,” and went out to the back stairs.

  Something hung on the latch of the door to the attic room. She went up swiftly to see it, her heart galloping, and took it from the door: a wreath. In the dead of winter when no flowers grew he had clipped sprigs of holly and wound them together, the berries bright in the glossy green foliage. A thorn pricked her thumb when she lifted it from the latch. She sat down on the top step and sighed.

  No one had ever left a courting wreath on her door before. It broke her heart that it had to be now, when she could not take it. What did he think, that she could invite him into the tiny room, the same room where she and her mother slept? In a rage she flung the wreath down into the yard.

  It lay there on the snow, bright as a banner, the red berries like blood drops. She sucked the drop of blood from her pricked finger. Leave it there. When he came back to see the fate of his token, he would see that she rejected him. She beat her fist on the stair rail. No one had ever left a wreath on her door before. No one ever would again. It was terrible, terrible: everything evil happened to her, even the good things made evil by circumstance.

  She ran down the steps into the yard and picked the wreath out of the snow. It was hers; let people think what they would, it was hers. Someone loved her. She took it back up the steps and inside the room and put it away in the bottom of her dowry chest.

  Thereafter Michael met her every night when she left the factory and walked her home, except when his mother found work enough to keep him at the bakery, and Hanneke did not discourage him. She would not let him hold her hand, and they spoke of other things than love.

  White the marble altar, white the linen altar cloths, white the candles that burned above. Carlos prayed to this whiteness as if to God Himself, whose purity and intensity sustained the world, even this imperfect world of the Low Countries. With the others of his column he knelt at the tinkling of the bells and bowed his head and offered prayers for the King, for the Duke of Alva, for the redemption of this foul and evil country from the heretics, and the power of prayer, the memory of other prayer, filled his throat with an uncomfortable lump and brought him near to tender tears.

  He crossed himself, standing, and with his fellow soldiers lifted his voice in response to the priests. This was their Mass, the earliest, the first Mass of the day; none of the Dutch were allowed to attend. Probably none of them would have: the Dutch Catholics seemed as alien to him as the Calvinists he longed to destroy. They cared too much for profit, they were always cheating the Spanish soldiers, or arguing that they took too much of the country’s worth, when they were here to protect the country’s true worth if the fools would only see.

  Here, shoulder to shoulder with his brothers of the sword, Carlos found himself home again, and safe.

  He went with the others in a long slow file to receive the Body of Christ, and after prayer and thanksgiving he marched out with the rest to the square before the cathedral to hear the day’s orders. There was nothing new; they were all to report to the field by the river for drill, and then to take the rest of the day at liberty. He liked the drill; the liberty he dreaded. Most of the men went to taverns and got drunk but Carlos had promised his mother not to fall into sin. So he spent the day in the garden of the house where he lived, listening to the incomprehensible chatter of the housewife and daydreaming, occupations relieved only by the occasional appearance of his dear one, his heart’s desire, his beloved, his Hanneke.

  Now, on his way to drill, he walked off from the rest of his column through the side streets to the long low brick building by the canal where she worked. It had appalled him to discover that this was where she came every day, and for some time he had struggled to reconcile this new information with his image of her as pure and delicate and deserving of his love, but slowly he had fit her into a story in which wicked parents denied her, deprived her of her fortune, and cast her out, so that like the princesses in old stories she had to toil with her pretty fingers until the prince should come.

  This morning, as usual, she was out in front of the long low building, sweeping the walk. Her back bent, her head wrapped in a white cloth. She would work hard, his Hanneke, without complaint, because she was truly noble, and in the end he would rescue her and she would love him for it. The sound of her withy broom reached him across the empty street, whist-whist-whist, as she stirred the snow along the front of the brickwork.

  The sun was climbing above the gabled roof of the building, a pale disk in the cold gray sky. He would be late for drill; the sergeant would call him out in front of the others and berate him, even give him extra marching for punishment. Carlos smiled, thinking of it. He would bear it well, because for Hanneke’s sake he would bear anything, any torment, any burden. He lifted his hand to his lips and kissed his fingertips and threw the kiss across the street to the figure bent over its busy broom, and turning he went away through the hostile streets of Antwerp to join his column.

  When Hanneke came home in the evening her mother was gone. The door at the top of the wooden staircase stood ope
n and a line of snowdrift lay deep into the room. She went around the room, as if something there would tell her where her mother was, and shutting the door firmly behind her she started out into the dark city to look for her. She was so upset about her mother that she paid no heed to Carlos, in the front doorway of the house.

  The sky was clear and the night was bitter cold. There was no wind. She walked quickly to keep warm, hurrying down one street, then the next, walking every street in turn on the way to her old house, but on the way she saw nothing, and at the house in Canal Street, where now some officers of the Duke of Alva’s army lived, there was no sign of her mother.

  She called; she went down to the bridge to look along the canal. The cold made her teeth chatter. She was hungry, too, and tired, and longed for her bed. Up and down the streets she went, calling, looking into corners and alleyways. Gradually beneath her anger and resentment and hunger and weariness she began to be afraid.

  The watch came by, and she asked them had they seen her mother; they had not. They told her to get home, that they would look—four old men in threadbare doublets, a lantern on a pole above their heads. To placate them she pretended to go back to Kelman’s house, but when they had gone she circled around behind them and went on searching for her mother.

  In the deep night the city was much different than during the day. Dogs prowled through the lanes and fought over bits of garbage behind the houses; on the rooftops sometimes she saw the low sinuous shape of a cat running by. She saw no people. The houses were closely barred. When she called out her voice sounded off into the darkness with the peculiar hollow resonance that meant there would be no answer. Sometimes she was too afraid to call—afraid to bring attention to herself.

  In the dawn light finally she gave up looking and sat down beside a wall to rest, and overwhelmed by the sleepless night she dozed.