The Sea Beggars

by Holland, Cecelia;

  Jan turned his head to look across the mass of people packed into the front of the church. A baby was crying, on the far side of the huge hollow space, but otherwise no one spoke. Their faces were solemn. Men and women and children, there were less than five hundred of them, and the Spanish army numbered in the thousands.

  Lumey began to pace across the desecrated altar again. “Those of you who decide to stay—brave fools that you will be—you have a few other decisions to make. How to make your stand. Where you want to die. The women …” At the far wall he wheeled. The candles on the walls made his stolen garments glitter. “The women have to have some means of killing themselves and their babies before the Spanish reach them.”

  From deep in the crowd came a low moan. Lumey smirked; he liked that. He went on.

  “The seamen must make some provision for destroying their ships. Burn them, hull them; they must not fall into Spanish hands.” He shrugged. “There’s no saving the guns.”

  Jan could hear people crying now, in the crowd. He glanced behind him, where his sister and his wife stood side by side. Their faces were smooth and bland as statues. They were ready. He put out one hand to each of them, and each one quietly grasped his fingers.

  “So,” Lumey called, stamping up the middle of the church. “Now’s the time. Those of you who are going to stay here in this coffin of a town, line up with van Cleef, there, the tall one. Those of you with wits and understanding, come here with me.”

  Jan lifted his voice. “Lumey has his own cast of thought on this; I have another. We Sea Beggars have not set foot in the Netherlands all these years. We know only that the Spanish have taken our homes away from us. Some of these people who have lived here through Alva’s terror can tell us more—how Alva’s ground them down and tried to break their spirit.”

  He looked across the church, wondering if they were even listening to him. Many more were crying now. He cleared his throat.

  “If we run now, before the very name of Alva, then he knows he’s crushed the best part of us. Now, I don’t want to die, and my wife is here, and my sister, and I don’t want them to die, but if we fight here, live or die, we will show Alva he cannot break us. We’ll give heart to every Dutchman locked in the tyrant’s grip.”

  Silence met his speech. He finished, lamely, “That’s all I have to say.”

  The crowd seemed not to move. One or two people came forward to stand behind Jan, joining the defenders of The Brill. A few more followed van Treslong and Dirk Sonoy up the wall toward him.

  Van Treslong came up to Jan and put his hand out. “You could have said something about God, van Cleef. Surely God will help us here. People need to know things like that.”

  Jan shook his hand. “I don’t think God will make this anything special, and from what my sister says He’s offered very little help to any Dutchman, these past three years.”

  The shuffling of feet resounded through the church; the congregation was moving in a dark tangled mass, indefinite of direction. Maybe they were just going out. Someone he had never seen before came up to him.

  “You’re right.” She was an old woman with a hooked nose and no teeth. “I’m too old to live much longer anyway.” She clasped his arm and went to stand behind him.

  Here came Koppelstok, the ferryman, who said, “By God, van Cleef, I thought you were nothing but a bag of wind, like yon priest killer, but you’ve proved yourself to me.” He struck Jan a comradely slap on the arm and passed by him with the others.

  After him a slow parade of people wound, men whose fears and doubts still worked in their faces, and women with their children, white and grim. Jan turned to van Treslong. “We’ll have some with us, after all.”

  Van Treslong smiled at him. “Some. Look you, we have them all.”

  Jan raised his head. The shifting, awkward mass of people had crowded together on one side of the church. They could not fit in the space behind Jan and so they pressed together in the space before him, turned, and faced across the church at Lumey. Between them and Lumey the floor spread wide and empty. The admiral stood wide legged facing them. Behind him were three or four of his own seamen, and no one else.

  Now one of those seamen swore and spat and at a long-legged walk, almost a run, cleared the space between him and the crowd and joined Jan’s side.

  Lumey looked behind him. Saw how few there were behind him. He wheeled. His face was fierce with a new vigor.

  “By God,” he shouted, and his voice boomed in the pitch of the church, “you will not make a coward out of me!” His men behind him, he marched across the church; he fell in with the others around Jan.

  The waiting was the worst, especially at night. The town was different at night anyway. The sailors from the Beggar fleet took over the taverns and drank and ranged up and down the street shouting and fighting and looking for women. They had already gotten in trouble with some of the local people, and in turn their captains got in trouble with Jan, who had thrown the sailors into the stocks. In the morning two of the captains were in the stocks.

  Mouse said, “He carried them there himself. The Baron van Treslong went with him, holding his pistols, to make sure no one tried to stop him.” He giggled.

  Hanneke was staring at the men in the stocks, heads, arms, and legs fastened into the wooden frame. Finally she gave a little shake of her head. “Jan is certainly much changed. A few years ago he would have been in there with them.”

  She went off down the street. Beside her Mouse ran capering like a little goat, his arms flapping. She said, “Who made Jan the master here? I thought Lumey was the master.”

  “Lumey only gives orders when he must,” said Mouse. “That’s why we all obey him.”

  She cast a sharp look at him. Eleanor was right: this boy was keen of wit as any of them. Only his stupid looks gulled the others into believing him dull.

  Now he said, “Do you want to see my secret place?”

  “Your secret place? But if you show me, it won’t be secret anymore.” She had no desire to play childish games with this boy.

  “You’ll keep the secret, won’t you?” He grabbed her by the hand. “Come along. It won’t take very much time. Please?”

  Reluctantly she let him drag her off down the street toward the Catholic church. There was little to do; Eleanor was busy keeping her house, and afterward she and Hanneke were to cook. Jan was working on the wall still. Hanneke let Mouse pull her down the street and into the church.

  “This way.” Still clutching her hand, he drew her after him down the aisle of the church to a little door on one side of the altar.

  Hanneke said, “I don’t really care for places like this, Mouse.” She looked up at the paintings above the altar, of Christ and His angels rising toward Heaven, their robes boiling around them like sea waves. Mouse pulled her in through the little door.

  A narrow winding stair climbed away from them into the top of the church. Now she knew where he was taking her, and she groaned.

  “Mouse, will you make me climb all the way up into the steeple? Oh, Mouse.”

  She followed him up through the narrow channel of the staircase. The air smelled of mildew and dust and there were no windows, the only light coming from far above them, dropping soft and diffuse down through the staircase. Her legs began to throb. The boy scampered on ahead of her like the little animal of his name. She half expected to see a long brown tail whisking along behind him. At last they reached the top of the church steeple, where the bell hung.

  Here there was no floor, only a narrow catwalk along the four walls of the steeple and a threadwork of rafters supporting the bell and the roof. Mouse leapt nimbly from one precarious footing to the next. “Look here! Look here!” On all four sides the steeple was open to the wind and the sun. Hanneke leaned on the sill of one of these windows and looked out.

  “Oh!”

  She had not expected, somehow, to be so high above the ground. The view enchanted her at once. She was looking down on the town, on the s
treets where she had walked only minutes before, as if from a cloud, or from Heaven itself. Over there was the curving line of the harbor, with the blue sea glittering in its lap, and the ships lying at anchor, and the men in the stocks mere dots on the pale brown stone of the street. To her right the river ran, its surface turbulent with the contrary forces of the wind and the tide; she could see all the way across it to the black marshes on its far bank and the mill in the distance.

  Eager now, she scrambled along the wall to the corner, to the next window, to see in another direction; that brought her to face the landward wall of The Brill, where the men were climbing up and down and working on the cannon, whose barrels gleamed in the sunlight like mirrors. She could see beyond the wall to the dry-land dike; beyond that were the onion fields, where several people worked, so small and far away she could discern nothing of them save the rhythmic rising and stooping of their bodies as they pulled weeds.

  From so high, she could easily see the trench between the dry-land dike and the wall of The Brill, where the sea had rolled until the people built the new dike and pumped out the water. There black and white cattle grazed.

  She leaned her arms on the sill, smiling. The sober industry and obvious accomplishments of these people cheered her.

  “Hanneke,” Mouse said, beside her. “What’s that?”

  She was watching the cattle; for a moment she did not look up, not until the sun, striking some bright metal, flashed a signal into the edge of her vision.

  She raised her head. Mouse was tugging on her sleeve and pointing out past the dry-land dike, toward the dark mass of trees that marked the edge of the distant marshes. She squinted. Something was moving there, vast and indistinct, the sun sparkling here and there on it.

  She gasped, swelling her lungs with breath. It was an army, a force of marching men, with the sun striking light from their armor and their pikes. It was the Spanish army.

  “Hanneke!” Mouse cried. “Hanneke—what is it?”

  “Go.” She wheeled toward him, catching him by the shoulders. “Run and tell my brother—” Her gaze sped by him to the bell. “Go and tell my brother that they come!” Leaning back into the window, she curled her arms out over the sill to hold herself, braced her back against the wooden frame, and swung her feet out to the bell and pushed.

  Mouse leapt by her, reached the door, and vanished down the long tube of the staircase. Hanneke thrust with her feet at the bell. Heavier than she expected, it hardly moved at all at first, and she grunted with the effort of pushing. Slowly it swayed away from her, and she relaxed, let it swing back toward her, soundless still, and pushed it away again. She felt the clapper strike the metal wall beneath her feet, and the deep voice woke.

  Bong—bong—bong—

  She twisted to look over her shoulder, out past the wall of The Brill, toward the army that crept toward her. Still far away, it lapped up over the land like a foul tide.

  Bong—bong—bong—

  Below her, in the street, people were running now, shouting, screaming. Running toward the wall, and on the wall she saw more people rushing about, tiny specks of movement. Between them and the advancing flood of the Spanish army lay only the barren ground, the onion fields, the dry-land dike over which now those people who had toiled outside the wall were running home to safety, the women from the onion fields, the boy with his black and white cows.

  Bong—bong—bong—

  Her gaze stuck on the broad shallow trench of reclaimed ground between The Brill and the dry-land dike. The sea had rolled there once. Ever eager, it lapped and bit even now at the dike that restrained it, longing to roll there again. She lifted her eyes toward the evil tide of Spaniards creeping over the land toward her. Her heart was hammering. Swinging away from the bell, she jumped toward the door and the stairway down.

  24

  Jan heard the bell toll; he sprang up onto the truck of the gun he was outfitting and looked east. What he saw raised the hair on his head and put a coiling snake of panic in his belly. Two long columns were making their way up the road toward him, visible to him now only as two rows of pikes beyond the dry-land dike. Even without seeing the pennant above them, he knew who they were.

  He leapt down from the gun. The women from the onion fields were racing in toward the gate, their faces white, wailing with fear at what they had seen coming after them. A boy with a stick dashed out to herd the cows on the barren ground together and bring them inside the wall.

  “Marten! Man the gate. When everybody’s in, bar it fast. Where’s Lumey? Jobst, fetch van Treslong here. Where the devil’s Lumey?”

  He went along the rampart, from gun to gun, making certain of the supplies of powder and shot by each one, with his own hands checking the lashings that bound each cannon to its truck. Around him everyone seemed to be going mad. People screamed and shouted and ran up and down the wall; he had to push men out of his way to get to some of the guns. On the street below the wall a crowd was growing, their faces lifted toward him, pale and frightened. Mouse was fighting his way through the press of bodies, and down the street behind them Hanneke was running toward the gate.

  A great yell went up from the wall beside the gate; the men there had seen the Spanish coming.

  The rampart trembled under pounding feet. Jan turned, standing by the last of the cannon; there were too many people on the wall, and he shouted to them to clear it and let only the gun crews stay on the quaking wooden rampart, but no one heard him. The gate was opening to let in the women from the onion fields and the boy with his black and white cows.

  As they went in, Hanneke ran out. She had an ax in one hand. Jan shouted at her, but she did not hear him; she started purposefully across the barren ground toward the sea dike. He leaned over the wall and bellowed her name.

  She wheeled, raising her face toward him, and waved her free hand.

  “Hanneke! Where are you going?”

  “To open the dike,” she shouted.

  “Hanneke!” He twisted his head to stare a moment at the dike. It was a good idea to open it, but in the course of their march the Spanish would reach the far end of the dike too soon. They would kill her. Someone else would have to go.

  When he turned back toward her to order her inside again, she was already running away toward the dike.

  “Hanneke!” he screamed. “Hanneke, come back!”

  She wheeled once more and waved to him. He filled his lungs and shrieked her name, gripping the top of the wall with both hands, leaning out toward her. She waved, her white arm raised like a flagstaff. Oh, Hanneke. Turning, she ran lightly toward the dike.

  “Hanneke!”

  He turned and bore into the crowd pressing up against the wall, clogging the rampart. If he could reach the gate, go after her. He cast a fearful look toward the Spanish. Their pikes jabbed the sky just beyond the land dike; they were gathering there, under their fluttering banners, as leisurely and confidently as hunters after game. He clawed at the people in his way. Swiftly he glanced over his shoulder at the figure of his sister, running toward the sluice gate.

  “Captain! Captain!” Someone rushed at him with questions.

  “Jan, over here!”

  She was too far away now. She was gone, and the Spanish were before him, and people were shouting questions at him. Now here came Lumey, climbing the ladder to the rampart. Jan wheeled.

  “Get all these people off here! Only the gun crews can stay on this part of the wall. Get the rest of these people down on the street and arm them.”

  Some of his crew were nearby and turned at once to do his bidding. He gave one last look toward his sister, now small in the distance, still running, her hair falling free of her headcloth, bright in the morning sun. He faced the Spanish. They were here at last; now finally he would know the answer to the questions that ached in his heart. He gathered himself, made himself think he might die, and to his surprise found himself ready. Let the Spaniards come. He turned toward Lumey, red-faced, stamping down the rampart tow
ard him.

  Don Federico drew rein, signaling the columns behind him to stop. Ahead was a low earthwork; over the top of it he could see to the little town beyond, built on its flat promontory between the river and the sea. Its landward wall was an old wooden rampart, built in an earlier, more barbarous time when people fought with clubs and arrows.

  The Spanish general folded one arm over his saddlebow and looked from one side of the battleground to the other. There were people running across the fields outside the wall to the gate, and a comical little herd of cows, cantering in the bony awkward way of cows, hurried over the flat ground away from him; so the Spanish army had been noticed. Good. It would inspire fear in the enemy, perhaps even lead them to surrender at once.

  His horse stamped, impatient. The slow march here from the far side of the island had scarcely stretched the stallion’s legs, cramped after the long ride in the barge. Around him, behind him, the ranks of soldiers shifted their feet with a manifold clinking of corselet and helmet and talked in low voices, excited, pointing to their target.

  Don Federico, to his satisfaction, saw an easy victory here. The wall would stop nothing, not even the charge of infantry, who would break through that gate in moments, and there could be no more than a few hundred defenders in the whole town. No matter that Federico had only half an army, del Rio’s troops from Antwerp having inexplicably failed to appear.

  Alva was wrong, though, for once. He had misjudged the seriousness of this problem. The Brill was more important than an invasion from France of poorly led foreign troops. If this town were allowed to stand, even to go lightly punished for its insolence, all over the Netherlands other towns would rise against the Crown. Don Federico intended to prove himself, here, more valuable than his father wanted to think: here he would throttle a genuine revolt.

  He summoned his aides. “I see no difficulty in this. We will mount an assault on the main gate. Don Diego, I command you, take your musketeers over to that high ground”—Don Federico pointed to a long low earthwork extending along the riverbank, north of the town—“and prepare to give us an enfilading fire to cover our advance.”