The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  They did not have to go far to reach the fog; it was closing in on them again, so dark and dense Jan could see the droplets hanging in the air, roiling up away from the swing of his oars and falling gently onto the back of the man in front of him. The oars creaked; the cable groaned. Steadily they pulled the Wayward Girl on through water as still and glassy as ice.

  Now it was Aart in the bow of the ship, casting the lead to read the depth of water under the Wayward Girl’s keel. His voice reached Jan clearly with each hail.

  “Four fathom and sandy. Four fathom …”

  Jan’s back hurt, and his hands were cramping from the cold and damp and the work, but he never thought of quitting. Better to do something, even something painful and tiring, than to stand up there on the deck and wait. The steady rhythm of rowing made the empty time manageable. The other rowers had stopped complaining, now that they were plying their oars; the silence hung around them like the fog.

  “Four fathom and rising!”

  Jan bent his back, stroking hard at the oars. Abruptly the gloom around him lightened, a breeze touched his face, and with a wild gust of wind the enclosing fog swirled away. Marten, in the stern of the boat, let out a hoarse cry.

  “Look!”

  The fog was shrinking rapidly away across the water, baring the whole coast again, the sea and the horizon around them. There, out in the deeper water, the Spanish were lying like foxes in wait.

  Even as the fog parted like a curtain to expose them, there was a burst of smoke from the side of the nearest galleon, a brief darting flame, and the thunder of a cannon shot.

  “Where’d it go? Where’d it fall?”

  Up in the bow of the Wayward Girl Pieter appeared, leaning out over the bowsprit above Aart’s head. “Row!” he bellowed. “Row, you damned fools—”

  Suddenly between him and the boat something whizzed out of the air and fell into the sea with a great towering splash that soaked the rowers. The cannonball. Jan filled his lungs with breath. The small boat rocked violently on the turbulent waves.

  “Pull!” He leaned forward, sweeping his oars back for a new stroke.

  “They’re firing again,” Marten cried, and stood up in the stern.

  “Pull,” Jan shouted at him.

  “No—we have to—”

  Jan stood up and got him by the arms and jammed him down onto the thwart again, the boat bucking wildly under his feet. “Row, damn you, Marten, or I will throw you overboard!”

  Marten gave him one look from a face white as the seafoam, grabbed his oars, and bent his back. Sitting down, Jan picked up the rhythm again. With a whine and a splash another cannonball tunneled into the sea a hundred yards away.

  “Pull,” Pieter howled, from the Wayward Girl. “Three points larboard, Jan. Make a new course. Pull, you lazy God-forsaken sons of whores! Pull!”

  “Who’s he calling the son of a whore?” Jobst said, behind Jan. “The crazy old bastard.”

  “Up starboard oar,” Jan said. “Stroke larboard oar.”

  The boat swung her bow toward the west. In the distance more cannon sounded.

  “Down oars. Pull.”

  There was a screech in the air like a passing witch and on the big ship a crash of timbers. A shot had hit the Wayward Girl. Jan could hear Pieter swearing, up there in the bow. Far away there was a rattle of cannon shot, too many to come from a single ship: the rest of the fleet was fighting Lumey and the other Beggars.

  “Pull!”

  Another shot hit the sleek water just beyond the ship and bounced over her; Jan saw it bounce again, on the other side, and plow into the shallows. The wind was like an icy hand across his back. He wondered what was happening to Lumey and the others.

  “The fog!”

  The wind died. The fog swept in again, curling around him like the arms of a cold mother, enveloping him in the gloom and wet. He sighed.

  “Three fathom! Rising! Bottom’s rising—”

  From the bow of the Wayward Girl, only half visible in the fog, came Pieter’s voice. “Three points to larboard, Jan—”

  They changed course again. Jan’s back hurt so that he gasped with each stroke; he knew by that how the others were hurting, and he called to his uncle to change the rowing crew. Swiftly, so that the ship would not lose the precious few yards of momentum that made towing her possible, the small boat returned to the Wayward Girl, and Marten and Jobst scurried up the ladder; two new rowers leapt down into the boat.

  “Jan! Come up—get warm—”

  “No,” he said. “You need me here.” He could not bear to return to the ship, to the inaction and the waiting; here at least he had some mastery over what happened to him. With the others he bent his back to the oars again.

  They towed the Girl steadily on through the fog. From the north the boom of cannon sounded again, and the man behind Jan swore and prayed in a low voice. The oars rasped in the oarlocks. Jan’s arms were heavy with fatigue. He braced his legs against the bottom of the boat to take off some of the strain. When he straightened his back, the muscles stabbed him with new pain. Suddenly there was the thunder of cannon, very close, and instinctively he ducked.

  The others wailed. “They’re shooting at us!”

  In the bow Pieter shouted, “Jan! Bring her up to larboard some more!”

  “No,” cried the man behind Jan. “The damned Dons are lying off to larboard—he’ll take us into the middle of them!”

  Jan bit his lip. “We’ll take her to larboard. Up the starboard oars.”

  “He’s mad, Jan—they’ll—”

  “Up the starboard oars!”

  On the heels of his words another cannon shot crashed out, very close, and he heard the rattle and crash of wood breaking, on the Wayward Girl. Someone shrieked in pain.

  “The tops,” said the man in the stern, in front of him. “They must be sticking up out of the fog bank. They’re shooting at us by the mastheads.”

  Jan looked up overhead. At sea level the fog lay so thick around him that he could barely make out the bow of the ship, but overhead it thinned away quickly to nothing; he could even see the sun, a pale feeble eye in the gloom.

  “Pull,” he said.

  They towed the ship on through the grim gray mist. Every few moments the cannon fired, but now the direction appeared to have changed; it seemed to Jan now that the Spanish guns were firing from behind the Girl, not off to one side—not between her and the sea. Another shot hit her stern and he heard screams and saw bits of wood flying through the air.

  His first thought was to thank God that Pieter was up in the bow. The old man was screaming orders at him again.

  “Two points to larboard, boy—tow!”

  “Pull,” Jan whispered; his whole body ached. He wondered if he did any good, rowing when his strength seemed to be gone. “Pull.”

  Another cannon fired; the shot missed.

  “That was farther off,” said the man in the stern. “We’re pulling away from them. The wind’s against them, damn them.”

  Jan sighed. His arms throbbed so he could not lift them again; he sagged forward over the oars, his head down.

  “Jan! Are you all right?”

  He raised his head. “Just resting.” His voice croaked in his own ears. He lifted his gaze toward the sky.

  The fog was being ripped away. The wind was coming back. He held his breath, watching, waiting for the mist to clear. To see where they stood, surrounded perhaps by Spanish ships, or mere yards from the shoals. The wind freshened against his face, blew back and forth in bouyant gusts like the blows of a two-fisted fighter, and peeled off the fog like a blanket, blowing the sea as clear as Heaven all the way to the horizon.

  “We’re free!” A yell went up from the deck of the Wayward Girl. “We’re free!”

  Jan let out a feeble high-pitched cheer. Without willing it, he rose to his feet, braced widespread on the unsteady boat’s bottom, to look around him.

  From the Girl to the western skyline the sea was empty. To t
he east, the coastline fell away in a line of low snowy dunes. Up to the north, the fog was still clinging to the water, and there the Spanish fleet lay, over a mile away.

  “God have mercy on us.” Jan sat down heavily in the boat.

  The Spanish ships were firing; they still had some of the Beggars within range. Too tired now to row, Jan sat there and let his fresher boatmates take them back to the Wayward Girl. The distant roar and boom of battle sounded as if they came from another world. Old Pieter had gotten them out free and safe, although as Jan climbed up onto the ship, he saw broken railings, and a mass of splinters and rigging and cloth where her stern had been. They would have to go ashore somewhere and rebuild. He went up to the mast, where the water keg was, and dipped himself a drink.

  Up north, more cannon fire crackled. Pieter came up beside him.

  “They’re buying iron,” he said, in a voice greasy with satisfaction.

  “We should go help them,” said Jan, and dropped the dipper back into the keg.

  “The wind’s wrong,” Pieter said, pleased. He thumped Jan on the back. “You did right well, boy-o.”

  Jan winced, his back muscles cramping from the blow. “So, unfortunately, did the Spanish, it seems like.”

  “Never mind them.” Pieter thumped him again. “We’ll go off to Plymouth.”

  “To Plymouth.” He thought of Eleanor Simmons, and his heart leapt. He looked away to the southeast, toward England. “I’m going to bed. Wake me when my watch is on.” He stood a moment looking to the southeast, thinking of her, and went below to sleep.

  14

  William of Nassau had been born in Germany, the son of a poor and minor nobleman; it was only the unexpected death of a cousin that made him Prince of Orange. When he fled from Alva he went back to Dillenburg, where he had been born and grown up, to the home of his parents, where his younger brother now was count.

  The castle was centuries old. His mother had kept a school there for young noblewomen; as a boy he had shared his ponies with them. From the window of the hall he looked out over the vineyards and hayfields west of the castle and saw an orderly world, where things were laid out in rows and tended by the seasons, a world full as a shell of its nutmeat, with no room for change.

  He leaned on the window’s wide stone edge and wondered if the Dutch would change.

  All Europe was laughing at him. He had stolen away from his army in the dead of the night, because he could not pay them and they were threatening to take him prisoner and hold him to ransom. His own wife made a cuckold of him with stablemen and shopkeepers. What right had he to think he could save the Dutch?

  He turned his back to the window and looked around the hall. The furniture here was older than he was, older than his father and his grandfather, heavy square pieces of oak, time stained nearly black. On the floor were rush mats, except at the end by the hearth, where the family was accustomed to sit; there an ancient carpet was spread carefully on the floor flagging. Here he had learned his lessons at his mother’s side, reading from the Bible, writing letters on a slate with a piece of chalk. Here he knew what he was: a humble man.

  He went up the stairs to the next floor, to the room where he and his brothers had slept as children. Here they had said their prayers at night—Lutheran prayers, because his parents were devout Lutherans; only when he went to Brussels to become the Prince of Orange, at the age of nine, had they consented to let him be baptized a Catholic, because otherwise he would not have entered into the great inheritance. Standing in the doorway of the long low-raftered room, he wondered now at their reasoning. If they had truly believed in their faith, why would they have been willing to see a darling child give up his salvation for a great name and a heap of treasure?

  They were Lutheran still. It was Luther’s Bible that rested on the table by the bed at the far end of the room—the bed where William of Orange was now to spend his nights.

  He remembered battling his brothers with pillows in this room, before their mother came to tuck them into bed; remembered solemn oaths, taken in the moonlight through the window, to keep faith. To small boys faith was only a word. He had not argued when they told him henceforth he would have to go to Mass.

  He turned from the room and climbed the stairs again, steps worn hollow in the middle, too narrow and steep for safety. At first the Mass had delighted him—the pomp, the ritual—as his new clothes delighted him, his fine new horses, his wonderful new palace, his new friends with their long magnificent names. He had learned the new confessional with enthusiasm. But when he had it learned and there was nothing else new in it, he lost his pleasure in it, and at the same time he could not find the way back to the faith his parents had taught him.

  Slowly he resumed climbing the stairs into the highest part of the castle. The steps were so treacherous that no one came here anymore, except on one occasion: perhaps it was the very arduousness of the climb that kept alive the tradition that when a countess of Nassau was to be delivered of her children, she should be led up here, into this ancient room beneath the roof of the castle. He went into the room where he had been born and stood in the middle of it. The sunlight flooded in the three windows and filled the room. There was nothing else, save an old bed and a little table all hacked and chopped with knives. He and his brothers had gone at it with their belt knives one day, and his mother had threatened to whip him for it because he was the oldest. His father had said, “No, let them be. I did so myself when I was their age.”

  Here he had been born, in this little room no finer than the hovel of a peasant in the field.

  That was honest. That was true. So he had learned, in the years in Brussels, attending on the Emperor, going to Mass, dancing with elegant ladies, carrying messages, waiting politely behind his master, lest his master need a pen, a book, a napkin. All those manners were the husks of life, the outward appearances; life itself was of another nature entirely.

  He had found that in the Dutch people, busy at their work, at their games and dances, their hands stained with their earth, their faces brown from the sun, people like his parents. The people who cheered him in the streets, who made up poems in his honor, who loved him from the moment he appeared among them, a foreign boy, shy and frightened, come to be their prince.

  He laid his hand on the table, where he and his brothers had cut the edge into deep notches.

  He could give up now, and no one would think him less. They all thought very little of him anyway, after his humiliations in the field. He could stay here in Dillenburg and live out his life in peace.

  If he went back, what was there? Death, surely, and dishonor, and humiliation. The King of Spain was his lord. To war against him was the oldest crime, Lucifer’s crime. Thus would many see what he did.

  There was another ancient crime, particular to the wild tribes who had settled in this region and become the Germans and the Dutch, the only capital crime in ancient times: to flee from the field of battle.

  He thought of the Dutch, their mild, kindly ways, their tolerance, their natural optimism. Nothing seemed more at odds with these people than the Spanish and the Inquisition. They would resist, in their ways, because it was their nature; and because it was their nature, the Spanish would destroy them.

  Out through the window he looked on the warm green fields of Dillenburg, the neat cottages, the spire of the church, as he had from the hall window; but from this height he could see beyond all this tidy order. He saw beyond to the wildness that surrounded it, the thickets and trees and stretches of meadow that lay to the west. That way was the Netherlands. Even as he looked his heart quickened. He knew he would not desert them. No one else would come to their help, but he would, although he knew it meant his death.

  “I will keep faith,” he said, low voiced. In that voice he and his brothers had sworn childish oaths, long ago, in this room. Now he swore an oath to the distant wildness, to the horizon, to the tormented lands beyond. “I will keep faith. We shall die together, you and I. I will come back.�
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  15

  Late into the day, Michael lay abed, not sleeping; getting up seemed so hard, and for what? To put his clothes on, to eat, to drink, to fill up the day with nothing, and to sleep again? The curtains over his bed were drawn tight, and the sun never penetrated into the room. It was like twilight always, and he lay there and dozed now and then and let his mind wander into safe, old memories.

  One afternoon there came a banging on the door that would not go away. He dragged himself out of the bed and slowly put on his shirt, hoping that whoever it was would get discouraged and go; but the banging continued, and shoving his feet into shoes he went forward through the kitchen and into the front of the bakery, and opened the door.

  Out there were Spanish soldiers. He swung the door shut, but the man at the door caught it by the edge and held it.

  “Are you the baker?”

  Michael folded his arms over his chest, afraid; had they come for him now? He looked beyond this man to the row of soldiers in the street. The only one on horseback wore a helmet with a plume. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms, staring at this exotic figure.

  “Are you the baker here?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m the only one left.”

  “Come out here.”

  “Why?” Michael scrubbed his palms up and down his upper arms.

  “Come out here, on order of the governor of Antwerp.”

  That was the man in the helmet. Michael stared at the white plume again; slowly he went out the door and into the street.

  “You are the baker?” The governor said to him.

  Michael nodded, looking around at the soldiers. The sun was bright enough to make him blink. The shadow of the bakery sign lay flat and black in the street before him.

  “Then why are you not baking?”

  Michael swallowed. His gaze fell to the soldiers in their neat row, and to the shadow of the sign in the dust. They were reminding him of what he wanted more than anything to forget, and for reminding him, as much as for their greater guilt, he heated with a fresh-awakened anger.