The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  A tall, slender figure in a wide-brimmed hat loomed up before them—van Treslong, a senior captain, and a nobleman as wellborn as Lumey himself. He called, “Lumey, answer. How did you fare in London?”

  “In no way,” Lumey said calmly. All Pieter could see of him was his tarnished and filthy vestment. “She would not even hear our petition. Ask Jan van Cleef. Ask Dirk Sonoy—”

  “Sonoy is not here,” said van Treslong. “He is refitting his other ship. Apparently you angered him as well as the Queen.”

  A yell went up from the left side of the room. “Down with Lumey! Hang him in with the priests on his own yardarm!”

  Beside old Pieter suddenly Jan moved, rising to his feet; he said nothing, and the others, facing Lumey like wolves ready to spring, did not mark him. They shouted and shoved one another toward their admiral, calling for his blood, while van Treslong in vain waved his arms to quiet them and Lumey glowered and paced across the back wall of the tavern.

  “Down with Lumey!”

  “Down with the Beggars,” Pieter shouted, and beat his boots on the floor.

  Jan strode forward. Taller than any other man there, he moved through them and silenced them by his passage. He came up beside van Treslong and said, “Lumey’s not to blame. His scheme would have worked. The Queen was partial to our suit, until I told her—I”—he looked to see all heard him—“told her it was we who burned the John Calvin.”

  The silence that fell on the heels of these words was breathless, like the air before a storm. Lumey grunted as if someone had struck him.

  “You told her! Why?”

  “I am tired of lying,” Jan said.

  “Knock him in the head!” someone shouted, but nobody moved; a mutter rippled the crowd, intent on Jan and Lumey and van Treslong in their midst. Many had not known before that the Calvin had burned by a Dutch torch; they turned to their neighbors and muttered, “Did you guess? Is it true?”

  Van Treslong himself, his face white, said, “We burned the John Calvin?”

  “You fool!” Lumey beat the air with his fist. “I had her in the palm of my hand!”

  “Lumey burned her,” Jan said to van Treslong. “To throw the blame on the Spaniards, and drive them from Plymouth. It would have worked, maybe, had the Queen not learned the truth.”

  From the rear of the crowd came another shout against Jan. “Take him! Hang him up—he sold our prizes.” A whimper from his left drew Pieter’s eyes: Mouse stood there gnawing his knuckle.

  Van Treslong flung his arms out to silence the uproar. Jan cast a wide-ranging look around the room. Old Pieter coughed. He said to Mouse, “The boy’s a fool.” Yet against his will he warmed with pride at his nephew’s calm courage.

  Mouse said, “We must always tell the truth,” and Pieter knew that Jan could do nothing that the boy would scorn.

  Jan was turning, in the middle of the room, his hair glinting in the lantern light. His voice boomed out, the voice he used to carry orders on the Wayward Girl, and the murmuring crowd fell still again, expectant.

  “I’ll go by your word,” he cried. “I’ll stay a Beggar, if you let me, but if you deem me worthless now, I’ll go.”

  A hush answered him. Mouse leaned forward, his lips moving. Then, like an explosion, an oath burst from Lumey’s lips, and he strode forward and flung his arm around Jan’s shoulders.

  “Stay, by God! One of us!”

  The crowd raised a single thunderous voice in agreement. Van Treslong shook Jan’s hand and hugged him, and the whole of the Beggars pushed forward around him. Old Pieter grimaced. He saw Jan was their darling now, for all his misdeeds, or because of them, as a man loved a woman he could not master. There would be no removing the Wayward Girl from the shadow of the Beggars’ banner. He folded his arms over his chest.

  “We sail tomorrow,” Lumey shouted.

  “Tomorrow.” Jan wheeled, his face suddenly rough with concern. “Have we no more time than that?”

  “Do you want the Queen confiscating our ships too? Let her take the notion, and she will—tomorrow! We leave on the morning tide!” Lumey beat on the tavern wall. “Bring the beer! Bring wine and geneva—the Beggars sail tomorrow; tonight belongs to pleasure!”

  Looking very gloomy, Jan came back to Pieter’s side, and the old man put his hand on his arm. “Changed your mind, I see.”

  “There’s a woman, up in Salisbury.”

  “Oh,” Pieter said, and sniffed. He drew his hand back, envious. “There’s a wench in this, is there? I might have known. Well, choose, boy-o, choose—the wench in Salisbury, or the Wayward Girl.”

  Jan drew back, his face furrowed with indecision. Mouse hung by him, looking up adoring into his face. “Will you go? I’ll stay with you.”

  Jan laid one arm around the boy’s shoulders and hugged him up against his side. Pieter grunted. He had never seen his nephew so open with the half-wit boy before. Van Treslong walked up to them.

  “You did us a great favor, Master van Cleef—the Queen would have guessed the truth, sooner or later, anyway. We’ll see you at the council, after supper?”

  “I—” Jan licked his lips. His gaze fell on Pieter, something in his eyes pleading, or just hurt. The old man reached out his hand and gripped his nephew’s arm.

  “I cannot rule the ship without you, boy-o.”

  Jan heaved up a sigh from a depth great as the ocean floor. He nodded, first to Pieter, and next to van Treslong. “I’ll be there.” With one arm he hugged Mouse against him; with the other he clasped his uncle’s hand.

  13

  The fog lay thick over the flat water and bundled itself around the topmast so that Jan could hardly see the bottom of the lookout. He walked down the deck to the wheel, where the glass was swiftly running down to its last grain of sand, and stood waiting for the moment to turn it. The piercing cold had driven most of the crew belowdecks; behind him, in the shelter of the poop deck, Red Aart and Mouse were huddled over an iron caldron of hot coals.

  “We’ve lost her,” Aart called. “She’s gone. Let’s make for the open sea.”

  “When Pieter says,” Jan said.

  In the ship’s log he was writing: Four bells. Thick fog, no wind. Slack tide. Sandy bottom at five fathoms. Sound of breakers to starboard, no land visible. Searching for Spanish merchantman.

  It was almost the same entry he had made four hours before. Lifting his hand to the bell rope, he rang out four strokes, turned the glass, and closed the log.

  “I hate lying off a coast like this in the fog,” Aart said.

  “When the tide begins to make we’ll have to stand out to sea,” Jan said; he squatted down beside him, sinking into the little aura of the coal pot, his hands spread to the feeble warmth. “Another half hour of this and we’ll be gone.”

  Aart muttered something under his breath. Mouse edged a little closer to Jan, who slid his arm around him.

  He thought now, as he always did when some business of the ship did not hold his mind, of Eleanor Simmons, back in England. What she must think of him, when he had promised her to come back and now had been gone for six weeks without word. He wondered if he would ever go back. He longed to see her again, but the space between them—in time, in distance—seemed too great. Maybe she would have forgotten him. He stroked his fingers through his hair, thinking he should forget about her.

  He would never forget her.

  Behind him, the hatch flew open, and old Pieter put out his head. “Any sign?”

  “Nothing,” Jan said. “No change.”

  The old man walked up onto the deck. He wore a blanket around him for a coat. Tipping back his head, he sniffed at the air. “Where’s the wind?”

  “No wind.”

  Pieter scratched his armpit through a gap in the blanket; his fingers were lumpy from the cold. A low rumble of half-spoken oaths left his lips. Heavy-footed, he walked down the deck toward the bow, to talk to the leadman. Jan went to the starboard rail. Sometimes the fog seemed to muffle the sound of surf
, but now he could hear it plainly: big waves breaking, two cable lengths away.

  This was a bad coast, this Friesland coast, and he wanted away from it. They had come up here chasing what Lumey had declared to be a rich fat Spanish hen, and promptly lost her in the fog, and now Lumey was off somewhere with his ship, and half a dozen others of the Beggars were scattered along the coast, trapped in the windless fog, waiting.

  He tramped down the deck after his uncle, who stood with the lead in his hands, examining the traces of the bottom stuck in the wax plug at the end of the weight. Just as Jan reached him, the sound came through the air of a distant cannon shot.

  Pieter flung his head up. “Did you hear that?”

  “Northward,” Jan said. “Damn.” There was still no wind. He took the lead from Pieter, who went swiftly away toward the stern, and gave it back to Marten, who was throwing the line.

  “What’s the last cast?”

  “Five fathom,” Marten said. “What’s going on? Have they found the bastard? Can I get a relief? The cold is biting me, Jan.”

  Jan raised his eyes to the top of the mast, where the fog screened the lookout; it seemed as thick and motionless as before. “Stay awhile longer,” he said. Pulling off his thick woolen mittens, he thrust them into Marten’s hands and went at a trot after his uncle.

  Pieter had gone to the aft hatch. Pulling it open, he yelled down belowdecks, “All hands! All hands up!” Coming up even with him, Jan heard again the distant bellow of a cannon, to the north.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked Pieter. The old man struck irritably at him with the back of his open hand.

  The crew rushed up onto the deck, exclaiming at the cold and the fog. Pieter paced up and down past them, striking his palms together.

  “You hear that?” he cried, when the cannon boomed again. “Lumey has her, the devil. He’ll cut her down and take all her loot, and give us nothing but a laugh for our trouble, unless we can get there and help him. There’s no wind, so we’re going to lower away the small boat and tow the ship.”

  At that the crew with one mouth let out a howl of outrage. Pieter’s gaze slashed at them. “We’ll change rowers every half hour. Three men to a crew. Aart, Henryk, Jan, you go first.”

  The others bellowed again, furious; Jan went down the deck to Marten in the leads, to retrieve his gloves.

  They hitched a cable to the bow of the Wayward Girl and stretched it out to the ship’s boat, and the first three men began to row. Jan was glad of the work. At least it gave them some control over the position of the ship, now that the tide was beginning to make. He took the center oars, because he was the strongest, and set the pace for the others; the hardest part was the first dozen strokes, as they strained to drag the Wayward Girl into forward motion. Once she was creeping through the water the rowing grew easier.

  Another cannon shot boomed out, and another.

  Jan thought of Eleanor Simmons again; he wondered, should he die here, if she would ever know. If she even thought of him now, back in her tower in Salisbury.

  “Wind,” Aart said, in the stern, hoarsely.

  Jan lifted his head. Against his cheek the air stirred, cold as iron.

  “Keep pulling,” he said.

  From the bow of the Wayward Girl came another hail. “The bottom’s shoaling! Four fathoms and rising!”

  That was Pieter’s business. Jan kept his back into his work, listening to the crash of the surf off to his left now, and to the occasional thunder of the cannon behind him. The wind was too feeble to drive the ship, but it was blowing off the fog; strips and streamers of it gusted by on the rippled surface of the sea, and patches of clear air showed around the boat.

  “Slight of four fathoms and rising!”

  “Sail ho!” someone screamed, from the bow of the Wayward Girl, and pointed.

  Jan twisted around to see. Up there, through the thinning fog, the topmasts and spars of Lumey’s ship were coming visible, although the hull still lay buried in mist. She was dangerously close to the shore. As Jan watched, a red flame spurted from her side, and the rumble of her cannon rolled across the water toward him.

  “Pull!” He leaned into the oars.

  They rowed some dozen or two dozen strokes more, groaning with effort, and suddenly the wind turned and blasted full into Jan’s face so hard it froze his cheeks.

  “Up oars.”

  They raised their oars. On the Wayward Girl, the crew were rushing back and forth across the deck, trimming her mainsail. The canvas slatted and cracked full of the wind, and the ship drove forward, biting into the sea; the sound of the water rushing past her forefoot was like music. On the deck they were reeling in the cable. Jan raised his arm over his head, more a cheer than a signal, delighted.

  “Sail,” Aart cried, in a voice that creaked with alarm. “For God’s love, Jan—”

  Jan looked about. Nearly even with the surface of the water, they could see only a few cable lengths around them. The fog was thinning to nothing in the freshening wind; the sky was turning blue. Whitecaps broke on the tops of the waves.

  Out to sea, in the dissipating fog, patches of white stood above the waves, eight or nine of them, ten or twelve, squares of white with red crosses on them. Spanish ships. His back tingled.

  “It’s a trap,” Jan said.

  He wasted no more time looking at the Spanish ships. Bending to the oars, he swung the small boat around and made for the Wayward Girl. Without word from him Aart and Henryk doubled to their oars.

  They stroked madly across the narrowing water. Jan knew what had happened: Lumey’s fat rich Spanish hen was a lure, and had gone to ground here in this filthy shallow water to draw the Beggars after her. Only the fog and the failed wind had kept the rest of the Spanish fleet away from them for so long. Rowing in under the lee of the Wayward Girl, he could hear the men shouting on her deck, could hear Pieter bellowing orders. As he climbed up the rope ladder to the deck, he threw a quick look over his shoulder, toward the sound of the breakers, and saw the long boiling rows of surf not three hundred yards away.

  “God damn it!”

  He reached the deck and went with long strides to his uncle’s side, by the wheel. Pieter was staring off to sea, where the Spanish ships were waiting. Jan went a few steps past him to the poop deck and climbed the stair, to see up and down the coast.

  There to the north was Lumey’s ship, and another, maybe Dirk Sonoy’s, and inshore from them the Spanish hen. She had gone aground in the shallows, and the two Beggar ships were nearly into the surf around her; Sonoy’s ship was struggling to tack off into deeper water, and Lumey was coming about. They had seen the Spanish trap no quicker than the Wayward Girl.

  South of them were two or three more Dutch sail, victims of the lure. Greedy, Jan thought, and shook his head: if they had not towed the Wayward Girl in after the sound of cannon they would be in a better place now, not pinned up against a treacherous shoaling coastline, with the tide making and the wind driving them north.

  Pieter said, “They can wait, the bastards. Look at them.”

  The Spanish were not coming in after their prey. Drawing sometimes twice as deep as the Dutch ships, they were better off standing out and waiting until the tide and the wind and the wild surf drove the Dutch out to meet them. Jan swallowed the panic in his throat. He cast a quick glance behind him again at the beach; beyond the surging line of the breakers, the barren sand rose into steep gray dunes, frosted with snow. Not a good place to be shipwrecked.

  The old man came up beside him.

  “We have to run for it, boy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Pieter nodded his head to the north. “The bottom’s coming up fast—almost three fathoms now. A couple more hours and the tide will shove us up onto the beach. We have to get out of here.” He turned, looking south now, and pointed. “Back there.”

  Jan looked where his uncle’s hand indicated. Behind them the coast curved gently around to the east, flat and dull, fringed
with long white rows of breakers. Patches of fog still clung to the sea there.

  “Where are we going?” Jan asked, puzzled. “The wind’s dead wrong. The bottom’s shallower there than here, by the way the waves break—”

  “Into the fog,” Pieter said. “Get back in that boat and row.”

  “You’re mad,” Jan said. “The wind will blow the fog away, and there we’ll be, naked as babies. Look at the Spanish, man—” He flung his arm out toward the Spanish fleet; his gaze followed. There were many ships, rocking with the waves, their red-crossed sails slatting in the wind, which was dying once more.

  As the wind died, the fog swelled again, rolling out across the sleek water, burying ship after ship in its thick clammy advance. He swallowed. “Very well. Whatever you say.”

  “Damned right,” his uncle said, staring at him. “Get back in that boat and row.”

  Jan walked back to the side of the ship, where the boat was drawn up; half a dozen of the crew stood there, shivering in the cold and staring out toward the line of Spanish ships. Red Aart leapt toward him.

  “What are we going to do? What’s going on? Jan, I say we beach the ship and wait.”

  Behind him, Marten said hoarsely, “I say run for it! If we charge the Dons maybe we can break through.”

  “There’s no wind,” Jan said, brusquely. “Marten, Jobst, come with me.” He swung one leg over the rail of the ship and groped with his toe for the ladder.

  “Where are we going?” Marten and the other man came after him.

  “To tow the ship. Come on.”

  “To tow the ship—how fast can we do that? They’ll slaughter us! Where are we going? Pieter’s mad. He’s gone off his head. It’s that tobacco, and the gin, and his age …”

  But they were following him down the ladder, into the little boat. He sat on the center thwart and reached for the oars, his chest tight. Trust old Pieter, he told himself.

  Aloud, he said, “The old man’s gotten us through before. He’ll do it again. Pull!”

  They bent to the oars and rowed hard; when the cable tightened and took the weight of the Wayward Girl, the small boat jerked like a caught fish, losing all its forward momentum. They put their backs to the oars again.