The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  “A woman,” Jan said, and grunted. “Another mouth, and a weak arm.”

  Van Treslong called, “Open the gate for her; we are in no position to deny people, and it’s cold out there.”

  The sentry went to the winch that worked the gate. Jan went back to thinking about the talk with van Treslong. Suddenly he longed for Eleanor’s company. She had no such unsteadiness of mind as he; when she had decided she was solid in her choice, and she had decided to stay here in The Brill. He sighed, tired of debates. The gate was creaking open. Through the widening gap came a single tall woman with a staff in one hand and a bundle over her shoulder.

  “Welcome to The Brill,” said van Treslong.

  “Welcome to the end of your life,” Jan said, harshly.

  She let the bundle slip from her shoulder to the ground. “Thank you, sirs. I have traveled long to come here; it is very good to have arrived at last.”

  Her voice was familiar. Jan took a step toward her. His heart leapt like a deer startled up from its resting place. “Hanneke?” In the darkness, all he could see was her shape. “Hanneke?”

  She turned to him; she came into his arms. His sister. He brought her body against his like a piece missing from himself, and deep in the embrace they laughed.

  “Why did you come here?” Jan asked. “You walked all across the whole country, to come here and die?”

  “There are worse things than dying,” she said. “Mother died.”

  They were walking up the street toward his new house; van Treslong had discreetly left them alone.

  “Dead,” Jan said. “How?”

  “It’s on my shoulders. I left her alone too much. You know how helpless she was, how she relied on Papa. She was worse, after we left the old house.” Her voice was mild, almost without feeling. Jan wondered at the change in her; she had always been so high of feeling before.

  She said, “They have destroyed Antwerp. It’s a dead city. No one has anything to eat, and people are starving in the streets. All trade’s stopped. The people are so bitter and low of spirit—”

  She stopped, staring away down the street, seeing something she alone could see. Her lips trembled.

  “Why did you come here?” Jan said. “Of all Europe, why The Brill?”

  “God brought me here,” she said. Her voice was soft, but as she spoke it quickened, vibrant. “Just as He brought you and all these other people, to do His work, to build His kingdom on earth.” Her lips curved in a smile that vanished almost before it appeared. “Where else is there in Europe to be?”

  He reached out his arms and she came into his embrace; the warmth of her body shocked him, somehow, as if she burned by the power of her idea. He struggled to see what she saw—something ahead of them, something to gain, to fight for. He saw plainly that it was the past that had driven him here, the past and the losses he had suffered, but the past and the things he had lost could not sustain him. He needed what she had, something to fight for, some idea of the time to come. What van Treslong had: the New Kingdom.

  Jan could not believe it. He was afraid to believe in it, afraid of failing. Of being wrong. But his sister was here, warm in his arms, his sister. He pressed his face to her wind-tumbled hair.

  Hanneke lay sleeping in the second-best bed; Jan drew slowly back from her, reluctant to leave her. Eleanor felt the sting of jealousy. Until now, she had never known he had a sister.

  She lifted the lamp, to light their way, and without speaking they went across the house to their bedchamber.

  Here, she put the lamp on the corner of the table by the big hooded bed and sat on the bed’s edge to let her hair down. Jan came up behind her. She turned her back to him and he took the pins from her hair and undid the braids and spread her hair out over her shoulders. She sat with her hands between her knees, her eyes half-closed, luxuriating in the caress of his hands in her hair.

  He said, “I am sorry I brought you here. To this.”

  “Hush,” she said sharply. It annoyed her that he apologized for it—as if all were his doing, and she had not chosen. He was undressing her now, his hands moving slowly over her clothes, undoing laces and buttons, and slipping off one garment after another. She shut her eyes. He bared her shoulders and bent to press his lips to her skin. He licked her neck and she trembled, alive with desire.

  In a few moments they would lie together in the bed, bringing one another to the fullness, the overflowing completion of their love. For the last time, perhaps. Knowing that, she burned for him, for the immediacy of his touch, for the responses of her body to his touch, alive.

  He drew her clothes down around her waist; sitting behind her, he kissed the nape of her neck, and his hands glided under her arms and around to cup her breasts. She trembled. She tipped her head back against his shoulder; her hands slipped down behind her, over his thighs. Let the world end. Tonight they were the world, she and her husband. Standing, she dropped her clothes down to the floor and stepped free of them, facing him, her arms at her sides. He took off his clothes, impatient, his gaze never leaving her. She loved the way he moved, so quick and sure, light as an animal; she loved his body’s lean muscular elegance. Let it all end; this was prize enough, this all-demanding, fragile, mortal love. Ready for him, she stretched out her arms and gathered him to her.

  In the morning the sunlight was yellow as butter; it fell on the tablecloth and gleamed on the crockery and the spoons. Hanneke sank down on the chair beside the window and lifted her eyes to this stranger who was serving her, her brother’s all-unlooked-for wife.

  “Where is Jan now?” She spoke French, as her brother did, to Eleanor.

  “Down by the wall, mounting his cannon there,” the Englishwoman said. She would not meet Hanneke’s gaze; her eyes followed her hands, cutting bread, putting butter and jam beside it, lifting broiled fish onto the plate. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Very well, thank you. I have not slept in a bed in many weeks.”

  “This is a most comfortable house.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Silence fell. Eleanor lingered a moment longer, her hands moving in small purposeless gestures, while Hanneke ate the first bites of her breakfast. She could not look up from the bread. What did one say to a woman suddenly discovered to be one’s sister? She said nothing. Eventually Eleanor went off into the next room, where soon the noise of a great bustle of work began.

  He was not the same Jan, either; he seemed so much older. Hanneke picked a herring bone from her tongue with the tips of her fingers. She should have stayed in Antwerp, a place she knew.

  But the sunlight was so warm, this table so clean, and the food so good—she did know this. She knew it from earlier, much earlier, from her childhood, this order of meals and houses, of calm womanly work. Except it was another woman’s work; not her mother’s, but this strange woman’s work.

  Eleanor came back and lifted away the dishes as Hanneke was done with them.

  “No,” Hanneke said. “Let me do that; I shall help you.”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” Eleanor whisked the dirty dishes out of her reach and into the kitchen.

  Hanneke closed her fist on the linen tablecloth. She felt unwanted here, unneeded. Quickly she got up and went off through the house to the door.

  Before she could leave, Eleanor was there, in her shawl, a basket on her arm, looking elsewhere. When she spoke to Hanneke, her gaze swept her, their eyes meeting for the instant necessary for communication.

  “Are you going out?”

  “I thought,” Hanneke said stiffly, “I would go find my brother.”

  “I am going there. Let me walk with you.”

  They went out to the street together, their eyes directed forward, and walked along with some feet of space between them, to avoid touching at any cost. This street ran over a canal; they had to stop at the bridge, to let a cart pass over, and while they waited they stood side by side, not touching, not looking at each other, certainly not talking.

  Hanneke thought: W
hat does she think of me? She must hate me. She is jealous of me, because Jan loves me. And immediately, she thought, He loves me more than her, and was pleased.

  Before a house on the far side of the bridge was a big wagon drawn by two horses, from which a man and a boy were unloading furniture into the house. A woman appeared in an upstairs window, throwing open the shutters. Eleanor saw this, pressed her lips tight together, and walked on more quickly. Hanneke wanted to ask her what it meant; but now she was reluctant to cross the margin of silence between them and she kept still.

  They went on by a church, with a lofty spire; the doors were blocked with a heap of pews and an altar rail.

  Now Hanneke was full of curiosity. She burned to ask questions of Eleanor, but her pride refused her. She peered down alleyways and over fences and watched every person she saw as long as she could, wondering what they were about. Were all these people Calvinists? The church that was shut up was obviously Catholic, which seemed to imply that there were no Catholics left here.

  Beside her, Eleanor walked with her face closed in behind a prim frown, her basket swaying on her arm. What did Jan love in this ice maiden? Hanneke faced forward again.

  When she did, she saw something in the street ahead that made her gasp, and stop in her tracks, and Eleanor stopped beside her.

  “In Heaven’s name,” Hanneke said. “What is this?”

  From the eave of a tall house on their left, half a dozen naked bodies hung. A little group of children in the street before them were staring up at the corpses and throwing rocks and chunks of dirt at them.

  “What does this mean?” Hanneke cried.

  Eleanor turned toward her, her eyes full on her, the first time she had looked Hanneke in the face. “Those are the men that Lumey took and killed. Lumey, the admiral of the Netherlands.” Her voice trembled with indignation. “He is a beast, and they must do without him. It is the greatest test of us, of our cause.”

  Hanneke had not expected to hear her speak of a cause. She turned her eyes from Eleanor to the hanging men. “Who are they?”

  “Priests. Catholic priests. Lumey has a special hatred of them. He does ill to every one he finds, and he goes about seeking them whenever he can.”

  “We shall not make the kingdom with deeds such as this,” Hanneke said.

  Eleanor gave her a piercing look. “No. That is my concern exactly.” She reached out a long thin hand to Hanneke.

  Jan’s sister took it and was surprised by the hard rough palm, the feel of bones sharp under the skin. She said, “We are women. We see some things more clearly than the men do.”

  “Tell the men that,” Eleanor said, acidly.

  The two women went on together, side by side, down to the harbor, where several men sat in the stocks. Eleanor had brought them bread and beer, and water to wash their faces with. Their heads and hands pinioned in the stocks, they could not feed themselves, and the two women fed them. Eleanor told Hanneke what each man had done to earn his punishment. Hanneke wiped the dribbled beer from their chins with her sleeve.

  The harbor was quiet. A few ships rocked at anchor; a little crowd of children loitered in the shade of the nets drying by the wharves, waiting for the women to finish with the prisoners and leave them helpless again to the children’s tormentings. Hanneke walked along the stone seawall, looking out toward the horizon.

  “That is our ship,” said Eleanor. “The Wayward Girl.”

  “What a name,” Hanneke said, and laughed. “She’s very pretty.”

  “Old Pieter named her, I am sure,” Eleanor said. “Your uncle.”

  “I never met him.”

  “Jan loved him. And from what I hear of him, none was more fond of wayward girls than he.”

  Hanneke laughed again. The two women walked along the edge of the harbor and soon found themselves outside the town, passing below the end of the land wall at the spot where the sea and the river mingled. On the dike that held the sea out and kept the land below the wall of The Brill, they walked along enjoying their newborn companionship. Eleanor clasped her arms over her breast; the sea wind fluttered the loose ends of her headcloth.

  “You spoke of a kingdom,” she said. “What do you mean?”

  Hanneke said, “God means us to make a New Kingdom on the earth, where godly men and women shall live in peace.”

  “You know this.”

  “I am certain of it.”

  “Then you think we shall withstand Alva, when he marches on The Brill?”

  “God will decide that,” Hanneke said. “If we fail here, He will raise up someone else, somewhere else.”

  Eleanor said nothing for a while. The dike was just wide enough for the two of them to walk abreast along the top; on the one side was the singing rowdy water of the sea, and on the other the barren low salty earth reclaimed from the sea.

  Eleanor said, “I am not afraid. I don’t know what will happen, which is, as you say, in God’s hands. I am not afraid, whatever might come.”

  They had reached the sluice gate, a wooden patch in the stone and earthen dike. The ropes were rotten and crumbling to dust. Hanneke put her foot on the top of the sluice gate, to see if it would hold her weight, and the wood cracked a warning. She stepped back, turning toward Eleanor.

  “I think we have come all we can.”

  Eleanor was looking across the dry land. “Here comes Mouse.”

  “Who is he?” Hanneke watched a small figure running toward them from the town.

  “A lad from the ship. They all think he is half-witted, but he seems whole enough to me—only a little off the center, as it were.”

  Hanneke laughed at the choice of words. “So are we all, somehow.”

  Again she and Eleanor looked one another in the face; again a sympathetic understanding passed between them. Mouse ran up to them, a shaggy-headed cross-eyed boy the age that Clement’s boy had been.

  “This is Jan’s sister,” Eleanor said to him; she laid her arm around his shoulders. Now she spoke Dutch, slow and stumbling.

  The boy pressed himself shyly to her side. “Hello,” he mumbled.

  “Hello, Mouse,” said Hanneke.

  He looked up at Eleanor; his neck was dirty. He said, “Jan says you are to come to him on the wall with his dinner now.”

  Eleanor patted him on the shoulder. “Run and tell him we are coming.” She smiled over his head at Hanneke. The boy raced away toward the wooden wall of The Brill, and the two women, arm in arm, walked after him.

  “Were they all infantry? Did you see any cannon?”

  The newcomer chewed the mouthful of bread he had been eating; he claimed to have walked all night and day to reach The Brill, coming from the mainland. He also claimed to have seen several columns of Spanish soldiery marching north, pikes on their shoulders and helmets on their heads.

  The bread swallowed, he said, “I saw only what I told you, sir. I know nothing of armies; I saw only the soldiers and their pikes.”

  Jan clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, you came here in time to learn something more about armies than that, anyway.”

  “I am ready to fight.” He was a young man, in a plain brown coat, with steady eyes—only one of the trickle of people who had been coming into The Brill now for days.

  “You’ll need a place to stay.” Jan turned, scanning up and down the rampart, where his crew were busy mounting the cannon; they had taken guns from every ship in the Beggar fleet to defend the land wall. Marten was fifteen feet away, sawing a hole through the top of the wooden rampart to push the muzzle of a long gun through.

  “Marten!”

  “Here.” The sailor straightened.

  “Take this fellow home with you,” Jan called, “and see he’s cared for.”

  “I will.” Marten raised one arm. The stranger started toward him, pulling off his coat as he went.

  “Can I help you?”

  Jan faced out over the wall, looking east, toward the mainland. He folded his arms along the top of the wall and lea
ned his weight on it, frowning. This man was not the first to report to him that a Spanish army was marching north. Somewhere, beyond the low flat horizon of the dike, lines of soldiers were pounding the roads to The Brill, thousands of them, hardened troops who would kill everything they found. Men like Lumey. He thought of Eleanor, in the hands of a man like Lumey. Or his sister, or Mouse, or for that matter himself.

  In his head he ran up a list of the people in The Brill who could fight: the Beggars themselves, about four hundred men, counting even Eleanor and Mouse; the local people, like old Koppelstok, the ferryman, who was helping on the rampart, and the other Calvinists, who sometimes seemed more zealous in breaking into their Catholic neighbors’ houses and stealing all they could than in preparing for a desperate fight; and the steady incoming flow of Calvinists from other parts of Zeeland and Holland and even the farther Provinces. How many of them there were he could not judge accurately, but he knew he was hopeful in supposing that more than five hundred people stood against the Spanish army.

  And his guns. He dropped one hand to the brass culverin by his side. She was his favorite, his first love, and while the other captains had sent the oldest and least trustworthy guns off their ships to the wall, he had brought this long beauty because he was proud of her and would make the Spanish afraid of her. He slapped her cold hard side. Probably they had no guns, the Spanish army. Looking east, into the bleak distance where the dun-colored earth met the overcast sky, he strained his eyes to see the first pricks of their weapons, and he smiled.

  “All the make-believe is over,” Lumey shouted. He paced across the front of the church, where the altar had been. The church being the only place in The Brill large enough for all the people, they had called the meeting there. “The Spanish are marching our way, thousands of them, armed and practiced at their arms.”

  He whirled around to face them, his new vestments swaying around him. A devilish priest, Jan thought, and smiled to himself.

  “So,” the old pirate shouted. “Now’s the time when all men must choose, and choose well, for once and all. Do you stand here and let the Dons have you, or do you go to sea and live to fight again?”