The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  “Rib through the lungs,” said Red Aart, behind Jan.

  Old Pieter’s hand still clutched in his own, Jan knelt there in a trance, waiting for this to end—for the old man to come alive again. The suddenness had jammed up the workings of his mind. He was not ready for it: it could not be.

  “Hey!” Lumey bawled. “De la Marck! To me!”

  Red Aart and Marten charged him. Lumey fled into the back of the tavern, where others of his men were drinking; they rushed to protect him.

  Jan lifted the dead hand to his lips. Bending forward, his face to the floor, he tried to weep off the pressure behind his eyes and could not.

  “Now, hold—hold!” Lumey was shouting. “As God witnesses, I did not mean him such harm. He was cheating me—”

  Jan gathered up his uncle; the blood had pooled on the floor and got all over his shirt. The old man’s limbs flopped and hung down, awkward, like a collection of sticks, the flesh still warm, although the smell of death emanated from him already, the smell of decay. Jan went to the door.

  “Aart. Marten. Call the others.”

  The two big Nieuporters were still standing there, facing Lumey and his men, their faces dark with rage. At Jan’s call they turned and followed him out to the rain.

  In the rain, they buried old Pieter in a graveyard below Plymouth height, within view of the harbor. Jan read from a Bible that Marten brought him. He read, not words for the dead, but Psalms his mother had told him, the first few verses of Genesis, passages from Saint Matthew about the birth of Christ: the sweet music of a world that was only memory.

  The crew of the Wayward Girl stood there crying and cursing, their hats in their hands, while he piled dirt on the old man’s body.

  Afterward, Marten said, “Well, the ship is yours, Jan.”

  Jan supposed this was true. He gave the shovel to Marten, who laid it over his shoulder. Mouse stood by the cross at the head of the grave, his face miserable. Jan put one arm around him. The boy pressed his face to Jan’s side.

  “Will Pieter go to Heaven?”

  “I don’t know, Mouse.”

  “He must go to Heaven. I’ll pray every night. I will.”

  “Ssssh.”

  “Every night and every morning.”

  Jan patted the boy’s back, which was quivering with sobs. The others stood around him, their faces shadowed with their grief.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  Jan shook his head. “I don’t know. I need time to make my mind up.” He nodded to them, ranged before him waiting for his answers, and they nodded back, accepting that he had none. He said, “Go to the town; don’t get in trouble with Lumey. You know Pieter; he did cheat at cards. I’ll be back in a few days.”

  “Where are you going?” Mouse cried.

  “To Salisbury.” Jan started away down the hill.

  The preacher thundered, “And let us never forget, no sin is more abominable to God than the sin of concupiscence, of lust, of fornication!”

  At that, every head in the congregation swiveled around toward Eleanor Simmons.

  She went hot from the top of her head to her collar. Fixed her eyes on the wall above the preacher’s head, and bit her lips to keep from blubbering. The preacher was right—must be right: for surely she had suffered so much, for that one night of joy, that it must be awful to God, that first He led away her lover, and now He turned the whole world against her.

  The preacher was ranting again; he knew the Scriptures less than well, as Eleanor had often reminded him in days when she had some currency in the town, correcting his misquotations and supplying him with chapter and verse. But he made up for the lack of direct communication with God by a full round voice that reached into every corner of the church, and out across the churchyard too. He dwelt at length on the probable punishments for her sin.

  She knew that already. She knew it at night when she lay in her bed waiting for sleep and thought of Jan. He had said he would come back, but it had been two months now, with no word. He had said he would come back. Was he dead? He followed the sea, a dangerous path, and he fought in battles against the enemies of God. He could have died.

  Or maybe he had never meant to come back. Taken her for a light woman and forgotten her at once. She had been to him like a light woman: what else could he believe?

  She would never know, if he were dead. She would never know.

  The congregation knelt to pray, and rose to sing, and she did all with them, but her mind was not on God.

  After the service she went out into the churchyard with the rest of her neighbors and stood to wrap her shawl around her against the blustery wind. The sky was heaped up with mountainous clouds. Did that mean that a storm pounded the rolling sea, away over the horizon? Somewhere, she imagined, a ship rode the wild wave, its sails drenched with rain.

  Something rapped her arm. An old woman stood before her, gray haired, her face a nest of wrinkles around the sharp dark eyes.

  “For shame!” The knobby old finger poked into her face. “For shame!”

  Eleanor’s jaw dropped open. This was Apple Granny, the old drunkard who depended on Stonegate for her daily bread, and here she came to shout shame into her face. The old woman piped up, again, “For shame!” and teetered off toward the alehouse, her head high with righteous indignation.

  Someone laughed, behind Eleanor’s back. She saw the people around her hiding their smiles. All folk she had done charitably with, at one time or another—all people who owed her kindness. Her heart ached at their dishonesty. Pulling her shawl tight around her head, she started home.

  Bernardino De Mendoza, the ambassador from the King of Spain to the Queen of England, was always conscious of a certain anomaly of rank between him and the lady whose court he chose to ornament with his presence. He was a princeling of one of Spain’s most noble houses, his blood enriched by generations of heroes and lords, while poor Elizabeth was only a Tudor, tracing her lineage back a few generations to a Welsh adventurer and a duke’s mistress.

  That she chanced to be Queen of England—a crown to which, in fact, her claim was not altogether perfect, and which, some thought, Bernardino among them, belonged more truly on the Catholic head of the imprisoned Queen of Scots—was an accident of unsettled times, which jumbled mankind out of all order. That she refused to bend to his superior gifts of statecraft and will was more evidence of her generally heretical nature, which would not conform itself to God’s law.

  Now he fixed her with a steady stare, to make her feel his disapproval, and sniffed.

  “The times require bold strokes, Madame. Kings must use all their power to act, or cease to be kings.”

  She kicked over her footstool. “Kings owe their first duty to their subjects, sir, as I should not have to remind you. This slaughter of the innocents in the Low Countries—hundreds of men and women; yes, and children, too, say my informants—is the work of one who cannot presume to model his authority after the loving image of Christ!”

  “These people are criminals. Heretics, rebels. You yourself are not averse to disposing of such human garbage when it accumulates in England. Yet you pretend horror when another monarch, sorely pressed, does the same.” Mendoza curled his lip. “And so betray a small and womanish nature, unfit for manly rule.”

  “God’s wounds,” she said, cold voiced. “If it is manly to seize folk in their beds and herd them to the gallows, then I confess to nothing of manliness. I am told the heretics go to their deaths like God’s own saints, in pride and dignity, while your soldiers slaver over their booty and riot drunken in the streets. I should be ashamed to call such pigs my own.” Her thin, straight shoulders lifted their brocade in a shrug. “But Spanish ways are different, obviously, than most of humankind’s. If you have no other business with our Majesty—”

  “I do, Madame.”

  “Well, then, make haste. The heavy burdens of kingship need no further aggravation of idle time.”

  He sucked in his breath, exasperated.
Her father a Welsh upstart, her mother an English whore, what right had she to moral superiority? The Devil spoke through her, the Devil himself.

  “As your Majesty well knows, there is the matter of the four ships of His Most Catholic Majesty that were seized in Plymouth—”

  “That again.” Her hand flitted in the air. “We have talked over the whole issue any number of times, my lord, and we have made our meanings very clear: those ships are forfeit for the conduct of their crews.”

  “Their conduct! What of the piratical Dutch? Will you go on harboring these criminals, as if they were honest merchants? I tell you, Madame, my king will not long endure these insults.”

  She said, “Your king has already suspended my credit on the Bourse at Antwerp, which, in view of your king’s legendary insolvency, is something of an insult in itself.”

  Bernardino blew out the breath in his lungs, seeking in his mind some new argument; he stared at her a moment, as if he might push her over by his look alone, and moved away, making a little circle, thinking. The room was cold and empty, of the morning, the carpets rolled up, and the flowers drooping in their vases. Thin cold shafts of sunlight cut through the dusty air to the floor. Tonight all would be gay here again, dancing and drinking and magnificent dress. It was hard to think well in a stripped room.

  “These Dutch Beggars are rebels,” he said, falling back on an old argument. “They are blasphemers and criminals who defy their lawful king. As a crowned personage, you must see the danger in the precedent of encouraging their rebellion.”

  She blinked at him. Her face was unreadable; behind that expressionless mask she might have been daydreaming, or praying, or making up a list of court appointments. He clutched his hands together in front of him, longing for a bludgeon and the right to use it.

  “They carry letters of marque,” she said. “Authorities from the sovereign Prince of Orange.”

  “Himself a rebel. The enemy of my king, whom you have already affronted by seizing the four ships. If you support his enemies, Madame, the King will have no choice but to take you for an enemy and proceed as his honor dictates.”

  She stared at him awhile, sleek as a cat. Her copper hair was smoothed and curled under a band of pearls and diamonds. She wasn’t even really pretty. Her subjects all said she was, of course, but they were blinded by her devilish, deceitful acts, or by their own ambitions.

  She said, “You may convey to our dear brother Spain our compliments and best wishes for his health and well-being, and you have our leave to go.”

  He glared at her. His sex, his blood, and his brain made him superior to her; how then did he always seem to take her orders? The Devil in her. And God was trying him. He bent his neck stiffly in as slight a bow as he could get away with and turned to go, walking out past a little crowd of servants hurrying in to make the room ready for the evening’s revels.

  Elizabeth muttered an oath. The King of Spain was slow to act but once he took up a plan he kept it in his teeth like the bull’s nose in the bulldog’s jaws. She had her spies in the Low Countries; she knew how desperate was the cause of Spain. She knew how the Sea Beggars were throttling the Spanish lines of supply.

  She loved them for it. Spain bestrode the world like the brazen man of myth. To defy Spain at all was madness, but to succeed …!

  She could not defy Spain. Without allies, without wealth, she had to creep like a little mouse in and out of the chinks in the giant’s armor, trusting to his indifference to preserve her. She dared not draw the full onslaught of King Philip’s rage down on her little kingdom.

  With a silver bell she summoned a page and sent him for Leicester.

  There was much to do before she could sit down to her joint of mutton and her ale. Her cousin Mary Stuart was petitioning her again, which had somehow to be dealt with—the Queen of Scotland, who had fled from her enraged subjects into England and now enjoyed Elizabeth’s hospitality in a situation Elizabeth preferred not to think of as a prison. Her cousin was a fool. See what came of marrying. Part Tudor, she was: maybe there was the root—her tendency to marry and to kill.

  Elizabeth laughed to herself. Her father had always fascinated her, a safe enough interest now that he was dead. Sex and death, the twin powers of the King. Well, there was another, which was money, but that was not nearly so enticing.

  Speaking of sex, here came Leicester, stepping high over the roll of carpet down the middle of the floor.

  “Ma’am,” he said, bowing.

  “Robin, I asked you to send to Plymouth for news of the Dutch but I have heard nothing, and I fear you have undone me again. Bernardino was just here in audience, round as a bagpipe with Spanish wind.”

  “Ma’am, I have a man in Plymouth; I get the news every other day. The Beggars are in port again, refitting and revictualing.” He turned the footstool upright and put his booted foot on it. His brow was fretted with ill temper. “It’s you who’s undone me. You give me these trivial errands—I waste my time doing no more than to put beads on a string …”

  She made a sound in her chest. “They are here, are they? That’s unfortunate.” Certainly Mendoza would know of that. Still, every coin had two sides: perhaps there was an advantage to be made here.

  “Yes, and rowdy, too,” Leicester was saying. “One killed another in a brawl in a tavern, and word is they are quarreling wherever they meet.”

  “God’s death.”

  She pulled on her rings, annoyed. They really were only pirates, as Mendoza said. The pages came in, bringing armloads of fresh flowers, which they took around the room, in and out of the sunlight.

  “By Heaven,” she burst out, “why are my choices ever between one thing half evil and half good, and another half good, half evil? Damn these motley Beggars!”

  “I say, send an army into the Low Countries,” Leicester cried, and jumped up, all fierce enthusiasm. “I’ll lead them. We’ll make short work of Alva.” His face glowed.

  “Oh, you will,” she said, between her teeth. “Hold, sirrah; you look the strutting roister-doister, sirrah.”

  His cheeks darkened red with temper, but he bridled himself, standing still before her. She scowled at him. “Where would I find the money? Where the men? You’d send Englishmen to die in foreign lands as lightly as that, would you? God’s death! I love my countrymen more than that, I hope.”

  “I’m tired of running errands,” he said, and his gaze slipped away from hers.

  “That’s the nature of ruling,” said Elizabeth. “We are all running the errands of the kingdom, me no less than you. You may serve with a merry heart or a melancholy, but you must serve, or matter not.” She wiped her hand over her face, watching him, gentle again toward him, who suffered so much for her sake. “And serve one another as well, that’s one comfort.”

  “You make a fool of me.”

  “Tchah.” Impatient, she waved him off. “Begone. You annoy me.”

  “As you will, Madame.” He swept her a bow full of flourishes and marched out.

  Robin, she thought, but did not call him back. She leaned into her throne. The musicians had come in, with their viols and tambours, their lutes and pipes. She would call him later and they would dance. He was good at dancing. He had no mind for statecraft: he could not separate himself from the larger good; he saw only what affected him.

  She loved the Dutch and hated Spain, but for England’s sake she had to threaten what she loved and yield to what she hated. Well, well, the time would come when things would right themselves. She put out her feet to the stool, where bonny Robin’s foot had been. She could wait. She only hoped the Dutch could wait as well.

  19

  There was a child sick in a poor man’s hut at the edge of the village, and Eleanor spent the morning there, nursing the baby and holding the exhausted and hysterical mother’s hand. At noon, when the child died, Eleanor walked home again, feeling the world heavy on her back as a fiend from Hell.

  She stopped at the standing stones to rest. The sun h
ad burned off the morning’s mist and the stones were hot to the touch. Moss and lichens grew on them. She rubbed her fingers over the leathery edge of one green-gray patch, her mind on the pitiable baby dying in her cradle. It was wretched to see children suffer. They did not understand; they could not fight back against the demon eating them up. Gone to God, she was, the child. Her lips cracked from fever, her eyes crusted. Eleanor put her hands to her face, despairing.

  When she lowered her hands again, a figure moving down the hillside caught her eye.

  She straightened, reaching for the basket at her feet; it would do no good to her reputation to be seen loitering here, in this place of sin. Her eyes sharpened. This was no one she knew, walking down the path from Stonegate House, none of the local people, none of her servants. A moment later a glad cry burst from her, her body knowing him before her mind dared recognize him.

  “Jan!”

  She stood rooted where she was. He strode up the path toward her, smiling. He wore no hat and his pale hair was like tow in the sun. He came up to her as casually as if they had parted only that morning and said, “Well, hello, Mistress Simmons.”

  She put out her arms to him, and he gathered her up and kissed her firmly on the mouth.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, I thought you were never coming back.”

  He sat down on the stone where she had been, still holding her hand. “I was at sea.”

  “Can you stay? Are you here forever, now?”

  He pulled her down beside him, his arm around her waist. “Forever! That’s a longer-time than I can think of.” His gaze searched her face; taking her by the chin, he looked deep into her eyes. “You look so pretty, prettier than I remembered.” He kissed her again.

  She put her hands on his chest and held him away. “Pshaw! Do you take me for a light woman? I want to know what you intend for me. Are you staying with me, to marry me, or will you go off again and leave me here to the humiliations of my neighbors?”