The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  “He says we should take you along. He says she likes them dark but she loves them tall.”

  “What did he mean by that?” Jan asked, startled.

  Lumey threw an arm around his shoulders. “Don’t you want to be the Queen’s lover, boy?” He laughed into Jan’s face and beat him over the shoulders and hugged him. “We’ll leave at dawn.”

  Lumey and Sonoy and Jan hired horses at the hostelry in Plymouth and took the road to London. The farther they got from the sea the more Jan wished he had not come. The road was wild and lonely, traveling through stands of forest and heath, and over hills higher than any he knew in his own country, and from Lumey’s remarks he guessed he was being brought along on this adventure as a bait to tempt the lusty and rapacious English Queen. He longed for his ship, where he was master.

  They spent the night at an inn, where they all lay down together in a bed so full of fleas and bedbugs Jan could not sleep for his and his companions’ scratching.

  “It’s a longer journey than I remembered,” Lumey said.

  They went on, following the old Roman road, straight as a ruled line across the round bare hills and plains. In the afternoon the sky darkened with ugly gray clouds.

  “God spare us,” Sonoy said. “I’d rather sleep in a hedgerow than another bed like the last, but if it rains we’ll drown in the ditch.”

  “No fear of that,” said Lumey. “Yon’s Salisbury—I know a lady there, a widow, who keeps a good house, and takes in all who need her charity, for the fear of God. We’ll go weep at her door, and she’ll give us a clean bed and a dish of supper, mark me.”

  The rain began. They rode through a steady downpour to a house called Stonegate. There Lumey knocked on the gate, and a porter let them into a little courtyard, already splashy from the rain.

  The charitable lady had taken in too many beggars; there was room in the old house for only two more. Lumey grandly volunteered Jan to sleep in the stable, since he was of common birth.

  The stable was snug and dry, and warm from the beasts lined up along either wall. Jan sat on a pile of old hay listening to the rain on the thatch overhead and longing for the sea and his ship; he felt himself a different person here, so far from his work and the people who knew him. An old gray cat came up, purring, and rubbed against his arm, and he took her on his lap and stroked her. She warmed him, and he talked to her a little, mostly about Lumey, who was a fool and worse, and felt comforted.

  The light faded. He was hungry, and lying in the dark with the cat rumbling away on his knees he wondered where he should go to eat. But then a woman came into the stable, a lantern in one hand and a dish in the other.

  She spoke to him in English, and he shook his head, sitting up, eager, his nose working at the smell of beef and onions emanating from the covered dish. She set the lantern down between them.

  “French, then, have you? Good. I am Eleanor Simmons, and Stonegate is my home.” She put the dish before him. He moved toward it so quickly the cat leapt out of his lap.

  “You are very kind,” he said in French. “I am sorry to impose myself on you, with no warning, and so late in the day.”

  She smiled at him. “Not at all. You give me the opportunity to serve God.”

  She was a tall, thin lady, some few years older than Jan himself, much younger than he had expected from Lumey’s description of her as a widow. Her hair was brown and her face plain, not homely, raised from homeliness by the refinement of good birth and gentle manners. He tried not to eat too fast, although the food was delicious. When he was done he put the dish down for the cat to lick.

  “You have a goodly appetite,” she said. “Are you a sailor also, like the lord Lumey de la Marck?”

  “Yes—we sail together.”

  “How exciting that must be—to travel over the sea to so many different places.”

  Jan wiped his fingers on his sleeve. “I cannot say, lady, since in my sailor’s life I have seen no place but Nieuport and Plymouth.”

  “Well, perhaps you shall see others.” She ran her hand over the cat’s arched back between them.

  Was that why she lingered, to hear of foreign places? He lay back on his elbow, his mind leaping from thought to thought for one sufficiently entertaining to keep her here; he had no wish to lose her company.

  “I should like to go to the New World,” he said. “Someday, maybe—”

  “Oh, yes.” Her face brightened like the moon rising. “The names are enchanting, are they not? Cartagena, and Mexico, and America—”

  “Dangerous waters,” he said, pleased at her enthusiasm for this talk. “And the Spanish mean to keep us out. But someday I’ll go. There’s silver and gold, I’ve heard, lying in the beds of streams like paving stones in the streets of Antwerp, and the people are docile as cattle.”

  “A new world,” she said. “New chances—new beginnings.” Her fingers ruffled the cat’s thick fur. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that only a hundred years ago no one even knew it was there—as if God were saving it for … someone.”

  Speaking in another language, perhaps she said not what she meant; but Jan was struck by the look on her face, by the depth of feeling in her voice. He thought, She longs for something new. At the same time he became aware, intensely aware, that they were alone together. That he could stretch his hand out and touch her.

  She raised her eyes suddenly to meet his, and he clenched his fist in the hay at his side.

  “You think I’m foolish, don’t you,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Of course not. You have taken me in, and given me to eat; I think nothing but gratitude.”

  The other thing, that was sin, and an insult to her; he hid his fist down deep in the hay.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Jan van Cleef. My ship is the Wayward Girl.” He spoke the name in Dutch and then in French.

  “How pretty,” she said, and smiled. Now she was going; she got to her feet, took the dish from beneath the cat’s rasping tongue, and reached for the lantern. “Shall I leave this here?” She drew her hand back.

  “Yes—I’d like the light.”

  “Be sure you don’t burn the place down, will you?”

  “I shall, lady. Thank you.”

  “Good night.” She went away. He watched her go; the cat curled up in his lap again, vibrating with contentment. After a moment Jan lay back in the straw.

  Before dawn Eleanor Simmons took a basket of bread to a poor family in the village under her hill, and walking back through the grass, soaked by the rain that had ended only a few hours before, she passed by the place that gave her house its name: four huge gray stones set on the bare windy plain, one fallen flat, two upright, one lying on top of the uprights like the lintel of a gate, a stone gate.

  She hated this place and these stones. The village people came here for trysts and other wicked purposes, and she was sure that the antique pagans who had built it had used it for something awful, for sacrifices, or lewd rites. The stones seized on her imagination, and raised the devil in her; whenever she passed by she found herself envisioning those lewd rites.

  She refused to surrender to it, and tried to avoid them. Whenever her course took her past the stones, she went unswerving by them, and warred with her mind all the way. Today she kept her thoughts pure by thinking of the Dutch seamen who had spent the night under her roof, the grateful receivers of her kindness. Especially she thought of the tall young man, whose name she had, unfortunately, forgotten.

  When she went into her courtyard, they were standing there with their horses, ready to go. She went up to them, smiling, to have their thanks and farewells.

  Lumey kissed her hand, and Sonoy bowed and spoke of God’s good mercy shown through her, which made her heart fat with pleasure. By his horse the tall young man stood silent, and when his friends turned to mount he mounted too, without a word to her.

  She stepped back, downcast at that. They rode out the gate. Her mood sank lower; she had th
ought she had made a good impression on him, bringing him to eat with her own hands and talking to him of his voyages; she felt the reproof like a cut. But as he rode out the gate, he turned and smiled and waved his hand to her, and her spirit soared up again. She went into her house, happy.

  12

  While Lumey and Sonoy were talking to the Queen’s secretary, Jan went to look around her palace.

  There was to be a pageant here, or an execution; workmen were building wooden stages in the garden, and on strings between the tall trees and over the little artificial watercourse they were hanging lanterns and swags of colored cloth. Across the lawn from the stage, a cluster of men were struggling to make a fountain work. Jan went closer to watch. They had the ornamental top of the fountain pulled off and were fitting pipes together in the base. The pipes ran away up the slope in a trench through the green grass, with the sods piled up beside it, leading to a huge wine tun. They were trying to make the fountain flow with wine.

  Not an execution, then, unless these English were more ghoulish even than the Spaniards.

  As he walked away, they got the pipes connected. A red spurt of wine gushed up from the fountain’s throat, and the workmen cheered.

  The palace itself was a patchwork of old and new buildings, strung together over the hillside. He walked back into the gallery where he had left his fellow Beggars, to find Lumey shouting red faced at the secretary and Sonoy pacing up and down nearby, shaking his head.

  “We’re chasing eels with herring nets,” he said when Jan came up to him, which Jan took to mean they had come all this way for nothing.

  “Two weeks!” Lumey shouted, storming up between them. “Maybe she will see us in two weeks!”

  Through the nearest door into the long sunlit gallery came two pretty little boys in lace collars, the first carrying a hat with a long white feather, the second carrying a wooden head, topped by a fluff of black hair. As the boys ran past Sonoy, the black hair flew off and landed at Jan’s feet. He jumped back away from it, startled. The boy snatched it up, plopped it back on the wooden bulb of the wig stand, and rushed on down the gallery.

  “What’s going on here?” Jan wheeled around toward his friends.

  “There’s a disguisers’ ball tonight,” Sonoy said. “The Queen hosts a German prince, here to offer marriage to her.”

  Lumey was shouting at the secretary again. Sonoy pulled on his beard, his mouth curled into a thoughtful purse. “There are times,” he said, “when a loud noise makes only an echo. Let’s go.”

  Jan was watching a parade of pretty girls go giggling by him, their arms piled up with flowers. A powerful perfume lingered in their wake. He wondered where they found flowers so early in the year. Sonoy got him by the arm.

  “Let’s go!”

  “Where’s …” Jan twisted to look behind him for Lumey.

  The big pirate was still screaming in the secretary’s face; now the Englishman jerked up his arm in a signal, and all around the gallery the men in orange velvet who flanked the doors came forward. Lumey stood his ground against them.

  “I’ll have you know I am a baron of the German Empire—”

  Unfortunately he issued this declaration in Dutch. The English guards strode on toward him, six men, six big men, their hands on their small swords. The first two to reach Lumey hooked their arms through his and heaved him toward the front door. Lumey let out a roar of indignation. He wrenched one arm free and flung his fist at the guard on his other side.

  Jan started forward to help him; the other four guards were closing fast with him, drawing their swords. Sonoy rushed past them all. Snatching up a little stool as he passed, he dashed in between the guard who held Lumey and Lumey himself.

  “For the John Calvin!” he cried, and clubbed Lumey over the head with his stool.

  Jan shouted, amazed. Lumey collapsed on the floor at his feet, and Jan took a step forward, straddling him, to defend him from the guards. Sonoy gave the stool to the nearest man in orange velvet, who gaped at him, dumb.

  The secretary said something crisply, motioning the guards away. Sonoy turned. “Bring him,” he said to Jan, and walked away to the door.

  “Why did you do that?” Leicester stalked away from the window, his shadow long before him. “Valiant warriors for the faith, true hearts in our own cause, and you turn them off. You are afraid, aren’t you?” He wheeled toward her, his face flushed with the intensity that served him in place of thought. “You’re afraid of Philip.”

  “Everyone is afraid of Philip.”

  “That dog. That meeching monk. He lost us Calais; you know that.” Fierce as a cheetah, he stalked toward her where she stood in the window overlooking the gate yard. “The Bloody Queen went to help the Hapsburgs, and so we lost Calais. The Dutch could be our chance to recover our empire! Don’t you see that?”

  The English Empire: one city. One lost city. She put her shoulder to passionate Robin Leicester and turned her eyes toward the Dutch pirates, down by the gate. The two still upright were laying their unconscious fellow across his saddle. She would have to have the story of that; no guards of hers had escorted them out of the palace, as they would have had they taken force to the Dutch. She laid her hand on the white windowsill. The tall fair man held her interest, who had carried the other out on his shoulder. Her father had carried her around on his shoulder.

  “The Dutch deserve our help,” said her bonny Robin, still prowling the room behind her in his excess of male vigor. “They fight our enemies and they are alone. I do not understand why you refuse even to see them.”

  She knew something of the Dutch, and something more of Philip of Spain; to meddle between them would need a steady hand and a keen eye, and a willingness to settle for very little in the matter of reward. Now the Prince of Orange’s navy was riding out the gate, an opportunity checked. Or a temptation safely avoided. She turned toward Leicester, who saw no value in ambiguity.

  “You heard their story complete. Tell me the lines of it again.”

  “I had it only in the echo, but even so it heats my blood, as it will yours.” He crossed the room toward her, walking from the shadow into the light. “Outnumbered and outgunned, they fought the Spanish to a standstill on the Channel seas until a storm scattered them, and the galleons took refuge in Plymouth Sound. Next, the Dutch appear”—his hands made sails in the air—“and stand between the Dons and their escape. Night falls, and under the shield of darkness, the Spanish flame the greatest of the Dutch ships, nearly murdering all on board.”

  She chuckled at him. “I think you need a theater for your full effect, my lord. Still, you are right, it’s a serious matter. I’ll send to Plymouth for an edition in English. And now, sir—”

  She held out her hand to him, and with some little grace he gave her his arm to rest her fingers on. They left the room.

  Jan drew rein and looked back up the road; beyond the rooftops of the houses that crowded around its walls, the palace of the English Queen raised its bannered towers into the sky.

  “Come along,” said Sonoy. “A slow foot makes a long road.”

  “Captain—” Jan faced him over Lumey, still hanging like a roll of carpet over the saddle of his horse. “A disguisers’ ball—everyone will wear a costume. Isn’t that right?”

  Lumey groaned. Sonoy put one foot on his friend’s backside and rocked him back and forth. “Yes, that’s what it means.”

  “Then why can’t we go?”

  Sonoy’s gaze rose to meet his. Lumey was moving now, his head bobbing over the stirrup. Chimes sounded down the road; a beer wagon was rolling up the way toward them, the horses’ harness merry with brass bells.

  “We haven’t got any costumes, for one thing,” Sonoy said.

  “We do,” Jan said. “We could go as seamen. What’s wrong with that?”

  “If we’re caught, that’s the end of our suit with Elizabeth.”

  “It seems to me our suit’s at an end already.”

  He looked back up at the p
alace again; the wall hid the bunting and lanterns in the garden from him, the stage, the fountain gushing wine, the improbable flowers, the pretty girls. When night came, and the lanterns glowed, and the girls laughed and danced on the lawns …

  “I’m going,” he said. “I have a clean shirt in my bag.”

  Face down on the saddle, Lumey thrashed, and a yell erupted from him. He heaved himself upright, grabbing for the pommel of his saddle, missed his hold, and fell into the street. Sonoy murmured in sleek satisfaction.

  “Mortified, by God.” He swung down from his horse and hauled Lumey onto his feet. “Rise up, rise up, the wind’s fair and the sea won’t wait forever. Young van Cleef has a notion to storm the Queen’s fancy evening.”

  “What?” Still groggy, Lumey swung his head from side to side. “What?”

  Fool. Jan galloped away down the road toward London.

  Lady Jane Dudley was dressed as Diana, with a crescent moon in her hair and a sheaf of arrows on her back; Elizabeth was one of her huntresses. In the moonlight the white gowns seemed to shine like silver. Pleased, Elizabeth drew back by the arbor to see everything whole.

  In among the new-leafed trees tied with flowers of silk and paper, in the patchy glow of the lanterns, her court strutted and preened like a flock of Byzantine birds, all jeweled and ribboned, made tall by strange headdresses and wide by extravagant padding. There by the fountain was someone—Gilbert—got up as Caesar, in a long white gown like a nightdress, a wreath of laurel on his thinning hair, and two fellows trailing after him with bundles of sticks. He went bowing and posturing through a crowd of wood nymphs and fools in clocked hose, stranger than any of Caesar’s triumphs. King Solomon backed out of his way, stiff under an enormous crown of ostrich plumes that swayed perilously whenever he moved; behind him, blackamoors held up the litter on which Sheba reclined, her dress flashing and fiery with jewels.

  In another part of the garden was a troop of Brazilian aborigines, nude but for strategic placements of feathers and gold. Greeks and Arabs were everywhere, drinking and boisterous, and even some animals—a lion, walking upright with a mane of golden wire, and a unicorn going about properly on all fours, casting glances here and there from glowing eyes.