The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  “Here, what do you want?” Pieter said crossly. He waved at Mouse, as if to send him away. To the other players, he said, “He’s an idiot. We should have left him on the shore.”

  Mouse leaned over him. “What are you doing? Can I play?”

  With his elbow he knocked over Pieter’s jug. Pieter yelled; he grabbed the jug and righted it again before all the liquor could spill out. Mouse babbled at him—for a fool, he was good at this, although Pieter had spent a patient hour drilling him at it—and stooped to catch the liquor dripping off the tabletop in his cupped hands.

  When he tried to pour it back into Pieter’s jug the men around the table rocked with laughter. Pieter huffed and fumed, yelled for the barmaid to bring a rag, rescued the deck of cards from the spreading pool of gin. Beneath the table, while he pretended to clean up, Mouse laid three cards on the old man’s knee.

  “Get away,” Pieter shouted, and pretended to kick him. Palming up the cards, he waited until the barmaid was bent over the table and the other men were looking down her bodice before he slipped the new cards into his hand. Mouse had brought him the World and the High Priestess and the Ace of Wands.

  “Well, well,” Pieter said, when the barmaid had gone. “I don’t think there’s much I can do with this hand. I’ll bank on it, Lumey—ten pieces.” He counted silver into the pile in the middle of the table.

  Lumey made a variety of low animal sounds. He fingered his cards and rubbed his nose and shifted on his stool, as if he were making up his mind. He would not throw it in, not now. Pieter knew Lumey well enough to be sure of that. Finally he counted out the ten pieces, and old Pieter laid down his cards.

  All the other men groaned. Sonoy shook his head. “As the saying goes, Pieter, cakes grow on your roof.” They drank to Pieter’s luck and, smiling, Pieter hauled in his winnings.

  Mouse was proud of himself; he had done exactly what Pieter had told him, and done it well, because now Pieter was rich. The old man had promised to buy him a knife of his own if he did it properly. Tonight he would have his own knife—no more waiting like a baby while his brother cut his meat for him. He went to the window, where the sun made it warm, and sat up on the ledge.

  He still had three of the cards, and he took them from his shirt and held them in front of him. The pictures were very strange, the colors as bright and pretty as the glass windows in the Oude Kirk in Nieuport. Funny things happened in the pictures, hands without arms reaching down from clouds, and people flying. He turned the picture over to look at it better and covered his right eye with his hand.

  “What’s that he has?” someone said behind him.

  He looked around. At the table, the cardplayers were all staring at him.

  “By God’s blood,” Pieter said loudly. “He must have taken them off the table, after the hand was played. Here, boy, give me those. We’ll have to deal again.”

  Mouse shrank back, clutching the oblong pictures in his hand. Pieter had not told him about this part of it. The five men at the table sprang up and marched toward him. Frightened, he cowered back into the angle of the ledge, and the big man in the gold coat tore the cards out of his fingers.

  “Trumps, by Heaven!”

  A hand seized Mouse by the nape of the neck. “Where did you get those?”

  Pieter was talking so fast the words tripped on one another. “Off the table. Must have taken them off the table when the deck was down—”

  “In a priest’s punchbowl,” the big man shouted. “It was a jig! You cheated me!”

  Mouse whined, pushing at the hands that held him, at the big bodies that fenced him into the window space. He threw a beseeching look at Pieter, who understood all this, and could rescue him.

  Pieter was backing away. “He’s an idiot,” he said, and shrugged. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  “We’ll find out what he’s doing!” The man who held him raised a fist, stuffed with rings like barnacles. “Talk!” he bellowed at Mouse.

  Mouse sucked in his breath. He knew he was going to be hurt, and he began to cry. Twisting away from the threatening fist, he pressed his face to the glass.

  Beyond the window, out in the street, Jan was walking toward him.

  “Jan!”

  The hand on his neck yanked him around again. “Talk! Where did you get those cards?”

  “He’s a fool,” Pieter shouted. He was sidling away across the room. “He’s too stupid to tell the truth!”

  Mouse was sobbing. He cried again, “Jan!” and struggled to bury his face in his hands. The men around him pressed closer. He saw the ring-studded fist coming.

  An instant later the wall of bodies broke. Whirling aside, the men staggered back, away from Mouse. Jan stood there, breathing hard.

  “What’s going on?”

  The big man, who still had Mouse by the neck, thrust the crumpled cards under Jan’s nose. “Your uncle was cheating us, and this idiot helped him.”

  Jan put his hands on his hips. “He’s too dumb to cheat anybody.”

  “He cheated me!” The big man shook Mouse back and forth.

  Jan’s face changed, sliding into an uneven grin with no merriment and much anger in it. “Well, if you admit it—it makes a fine story—the great Lumey de la Marck cheated by a half-witted boy?”

  Behind them, someone laughed. The grip on Mouse’s neck relaxed, and Lumey backed off a step.

  “Your uncle cheated me!”

  Jan looked broadly around the room. “I don’t even see my uncle here.”

  They whirled. A howl of rage went up from Lumey, who pumped his arms and bit his beard in fury. “The little bastard!”

  “He’s gone,” Sonoy cried. “He took all the silver, too.”

  Jan got Mouse by the arm. “Come on,” he said. Swiftly they went out of the tavern.

  “I thought you said not to steal from your own people,” Jan said.

  Pieter muttered something under his breath. He puffed on his pipe. The pungent smoke of the tobacco made the air around them hard to breathe. He thrust out his legs before him on the deck. “They aren’t my people.”

  “They’re Dutch.” Jan held out his hand, palm up. “Like us. And we’ll sail with them. That scheme for taking the supply fleet, that’s a good notion.”

  He was eating smoked fish, and he stopped to pick a bone from between his teeth. They and Mouse were the only people on board the Wayward Girl, and Mouse was sleeping. He and Pieter sat in the forecastle, looking down the length of the ship. There behind the mast, by the helm, the lantern gleamed over the compass; otherwise no light showed, and yet Jan could have found his way effortlessly throughout the whole ship, could have done the most intricate task necessary to sail her, with his eyes closed. So small a world, he thought, and felt her around him like a case.

  “We have no country anymore,” old Pieter was saying, beside him. “Get used to that. No country, no family or friends—only the ship and the sea and the winds. That’s the truth. If you don’t like it, you can make up stories, the way the Beggars do, and try to say it’s otherwise, but you’re only fooling yourself.”

  Jan said nothing. He longed for his sister and his mother, for his home in Antwerp; that very longing made him think that Pieter was right. Everything past was gone, and the longing was proof of it. He had nothing anymore save this hardened, wicked old man, and the half-wit boy asleep on the deck beside him. Nothing. He put his head back against the timbers of the ship and shut his eyes.

  9

  “But you can’t,” Hanneke said, and clenched her fists. “I must work—I have no other way of living. My mother—”

  The leadman was shaking his head. “You’ve been missing days of work anyway.”

  “But I explained that to you—and I do extra work to make up for it—”

  His head swiveled from side to side, his expression implacable. “I can’t keep you on.”

  “Please!”

  He reached for the door, to swing it shut between them, and as he shut
it in her face he said, “If I were you, girl, I would not remind people my name’s van Cleef.” The door closed. She was left staring at the stained boards.

  He had paid her, at least scrupulous about that, to the last penny she was owed. She held the money in her hand, just barely enough to pay the Kelmans the rent. And then what? They had to eat something. She could not survive forever on the sweet buns Michael gave her. She turned away from the back door of the factory and walked off along the street.

  What he had said to her came back; she stood under a tree by the side of the canal and looked into the dark swirling water and knew bitterly that he had let her off because she was her father’s daughter. Mies, what a heritage you have given me. She struggled against her rage at her father, who had left her this misery.

  The canal’s slippery water rushed by, deep and dark from the spring rains. She thought of jumping in, of drowning, and getting out of her troubles that way, and enjoyed the idea for a moment: how sweet to sleep. But of course she could not; there was her mother to care for, and God forbade suicide anyway. She would not sleep; she would writhe in Hell. She walked off along the street to the bridge and crossed over.

  In the Italian quarter, where most of the banks were, close by the Bourse, she went from shop to shop asking for work, but no one had any jobs she could do. Some of them even laughed at her, not meanly, but in amazement she would ask. Now and then she came on a shop that was closed up, which did not strike her odd, for a while, until she came to the end of the Lombard Street and saw people carrying furniture and goods out of a building and loading them onto wagons to be taken away.

  At that she did stop and put this all together in her mind; she realized there was something ominous in this, that the foreigners were leaving Antwerp. For generations, people from all over Europe had been crowding into Antwerp, the hub of the world, and now, for some reason, they were going.

  Only a few streets away, toward the river, was the shop of the printer Clement. He would know what was going on, and she went there.

  The shop was loud with the clanging of the presses. Clement and several other men rushed about at their work, methodical as soldiers; the paper rattled in their hands and flashed white in the dim room, and as each lever swayed down the great screw presses groaned like monsters. The smell of ink and lead was painful to the nose. She went to the corner by the fire and sat down on the stool. The cat was curled up in the deep padded chair beside the window.

  After a while the door opened and Clement’s boy, Philip, came in. Seeing her, he smiled all over his face. Her heart lightened. She hardly knew him; yet he was glad to see her, and he came over to her and sat down on the floor beside her.

  “How are you? I haven’t seen you in a long while.”

  They talked a little about the weather and the coming of the spring.

  “I’ve lost my job,” she said, when the conversation got around to that. “And I can’t find another. Why are the shops closing in the Italian quarter? What’s going on? Something’s wrong.”

  Clement’s boy folded his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “Yes, a lot of people are going away.”

  “Why? Is there some reason?”

  “The Spaniards, naturally,” he said, and shrugged. “What else is there?”

  “But they’ve gone,” she said, thinking of Carlos, and realized at once how narrowly she had understood the Spanish power in Antwerp.

  Clement’s boy was watching her with wide grave eyes. His hair needed cutting; it fell over his forehead in a wing, and she put out her hand and brushed it back behind his ear. “What have you been reading lately?”

  “A book about trajectories,” he said. He looked as if he were still thinking about what they had just spoken of.

  “Trajectories. What’s that?”

  “How things fall.”

  “Really. How odd, an entire book about how things fall. I cannot conceive of that filling even a page.” Her words sounded hollow to her, frantic, planking over a yawning gap in her understanding.

  “Well,” the boy said, “that’s the interesting thing about the new science, that the more closely you look at what seems like a simple thing the more there is to see. Why did they throw you out of your work? Because you are Calvinist?”

  At that her chest contracted; she faced the dread she had been avoiding. “Yes,” she said.

  He put his hand on her shoulder. “My father will help you.”

  Hanneke smiled at him. Her face was stiff. If she had lost the one job for her faith, then the chances of her finding another were very slight. She thought of her mother, who complained even now of their poor food and close quarters. I should have taken the canal, she thought, and turned her gaze into the fire.

  A few minutes later Clement was sitting down in the chair, the cat on his lap. “Well, Mistress van Cleef, what brings me the honor of a visit from you?”

  “She’s lost her job,” his son said. “Because she is a Calvinist.”

  Hanneke said, “I can tell him myself, you know.”

  Clement’s big black-smudged hand flattened the cat’s back. “Not just that, I am sure—it is the tax.”

  “What tax?”

  “The Spaniards are requiring several new taxes of us—to pay for the troops they are keeping here. The taxes on goods and land have no bearing on you, but there is a great tax that does, whereby the tenth penny of every sale in the Low Countries must go to the King.”

  “Every sale of what?” she asked, not understanding at all.

  “Every sale of anything. If a loaf of bread is sold, one tenth of the price must go to the King, or if a keg of beer is sold, or a sheep, or an onion, or a piece of cloth, and so the shopkeepers must raise their prices or cut their expenses in some way, and the easiest way is to let go some of their help.”

  She gaped at him, amazed to have her particular disaster so neatly made part of something huge. “Is that why the shopkeepers are leaving Antwerp?”

  “Very probably so,” said Clement.

  “But then the King must not do it.”

  Clement smiled at her; his hand stroked down the cat’s gray fur. “So we must convince him. I can give you work here, if you want it. Not much, and for little money.”

  She looked around the print shop; the other printers were away in the back eating their dinners. The floor was thick with dust and bits of metal and scraps of paper.

  She said, “I can sweep.”

  “No, no,” Clement said. “This is much more dangerous than that. My—” His head jerked toward the rear of the shop. “My assistants are Catholic, or untrustworthy in other ways. I need help in printing for the cause of God.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I can teach you all you must know in a few days. But it is dangerous work, and I cannot pay you very much, because it comes out of my purse, and not from commissions.”

  Hanneke turned her eyes toward the fire again. For doing little more than this, her father had gone to prison. Why was Clement not in prison, not dead too? Her mind leapt at that, as if to solid ground. She swiveled her head to look at him, suspicious. Perhaps he was a seducer, who lured people into crimes and gave them to the Spanish. Why would he be so forward in offering help to her, whom he had never known before this?

  She said, “I have my mother to consider. If anything happened to me …”

  Clement was already shrugging, leaning back, his big square hands giving the cat a shove that knocked it off his lap. “Your decision. Whatever you wish. Will you have some dinner with us?”

  “I must be going,” she said. Perhaps Michael would give her work. She got up to her feet, gathering her shawl around her.

  “Can I go part of the way with you?” Clement’s boy asked.

  “No,” she said, short. “I have things to do.”

  “Please, Hanneke.”

  She went between them, going to the door, sure now she was right, and they were a den of traitors. “No.” The door squealed when
she opened it; she went out onto the street, into the sunlight.

  “Hanneke,” her mother said, waited for an answer, and got none.

  Gone again. What a wicked girl. All things had gone to wickedness, since Mies went away.

  She went to the doorway and looked out. The sun was going down. The air was moist and blustery, banging at the shutters on the house and pulling the door back and forth in her hand. Rain soon. The wind tugged on the door and she let it go; it swung outward with a crack against the outside of the house. She laughed.

  Without looking back at all she flung herself out and down the stairs, down into the yard, and away to the corner in the very back, behind the privy, where she had hidden her helmet and her sword. The helmet hurt her head and so she had padded it with dry grass. She put it on and took the long wooden spike of her sword in her hand and went out to find the doorway.

  Where it was, what it looked like, she had forgotten; all she knew or needed to know was that somewhere there was a door, and if she found it and went in she would leave this world and go back into the old world where the bread was soft and there was butter to have on it, and herring for breakfast, and a bed with white linen that she shared with Mies, and from day to day nothing ill happened. So she went off to find that door.

  The first raindrops fell sharp on her helmet, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. She strode down the street, swinging the stick in her hand, her sword.

  Rat-a-tat-tat—

  Not rain. She spun around, and behind her the mob of small children broke and ran in all directions, screaming.

  “The witch! The witch!”

  She howled at them. Waving the sword, she charged after them; she took a few steps after one, turned, and went off a little way after another. They ran from her, squealing and crying. Out of breath, she stopped in the middle of the street and brandished her sword at them. Fiercely she snorted through her nostrils at them. They were all gone, hiding behind fences, giggling in the alleyways. She turned and started along the street again.

  At once they were after her; a volley of small stones pocked the dusty street ahead of her, and a sharp pain drove into the back of her knee. She wheeled around and did battle with them once more, driving them off.