The Citadel and the Lamb

Bending over a pile of steamy manure and straw, twelve-year-old Christoffel, son of Joris, dug in with his short-handled shovel and cleared a pathway out through the stable door. He pushed himself erect, wiped his brow with the back of a wrinkled white sleeve, and muttered, “Why on a day like this?”

A hazy sun glowered at him, filtering through the fresh green leaves of the nearby grove of linden trees. The putrid stifling air vibrated with the familiar buzz of flies, the twitter of sparrows, and an occasional mooing from the neighboring pasture. For a long moment he stood still, sighing, “If only the job were done!”

Then he heard it—the sound his ears seemed always attuned to. From a distance, drawing closer, came the faint sounds of water lapping and voices shouting.

Dropping the shovel, he grabbed his knapsack off a peg and bounded down the pathway. Past the skittle field, across the courtyard, and around The Clever Fox Inn, he sprang toward the gate. Beyond lay the Zyl River with its trekpath that would take him alongside the ship to Leyden. Just as he reached out to unfasten the gate latch, he heard his vader calling from the doorway of the inn, “Hei there, jongen! Halt!”

The boy stopped short and spun around. With the toss of his head, he brushed the thatch of dark brown hair back from his face. Already his vader was hurrying toward him, all arms and legs and apron strings flapping.

Christoffel waved toward the ship, which he now saw was only the first in a whole fleet. They were already so close he could hear loud wood-against-wood creaking noises coming from their swaying riggings. “Look!” he shouted. “Five, six, seven of them! All flying the prince’s flag! You coming with me?”

His voice felt gravelly and the final word came out on a pitch as high as the sky where the gulls soared above the ships’ masts and voluminous billowing sails. Motioning toward his vader, he reached again for the gate latch. But Vader was grabbing him by the arm and speaking with that sharp fretful tone that was a part of what made him Joris.

Vader stood with feet spread wide, one hand planted on his hip, and his tummy bulging out beneath his tightly stretched innkeeper’s apron. Christoffel searched the familiar thin face with heavy dark beard, sharp nose, and greasy forehead. The close-set eyes sparkled like black diamonds. Today something was missing, that soft border around the edges of those eyes that almost always looked ready to melt into smiles when least expected.

“Stables don’t wait!” Vader retorted. He shook his head in quick agitated movements.

Christoffel stared at his vader, mouth gaping. “But…they always have before.”

Any time an unusual ship sailed by The Clever Fox Inn, one of a kind they didn’t see every day, it mattered not what activity was at hand. They’d both leave the work at the inn with the women and go. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d been forbidden to go make a sketch.

Truth was, there was nothing in the world his vader would rather do himself than sketch a picture. The two of them made frequent treks into the city together for that purpose. They’d find a spot beside a riverbank, usually in a stand of bushes, and sit on a rock or a clump of grass and draw whatever took their fancy—the pancake lady at the village market or a giant crow atop the sprawling old oak tree down by the Cloister of the White Nuns. Their favorite spot was up against the walls of the ancient circular citadel on a mound in the center of the city. Here they’d look out over the city and draw a church or an expanse of rooftops.

“Inside the citadel there are narrow slits in the wall all the way around,” his vader had told him. “Once used to shoot arrows at invading enemies, I know they’d make great frames for paintings of the city.”

“Do they ever open the door to the citadel and let us in?” Christoffel had asked.

Always Christoffel dreamed of getting inside and seeing the city through the arrow slits. And every time he climbed the hill, he shoved on the door with his shoulder as if begging it to open to him. Always it remained locked, and they had to settle for sitting among the trees outside to draw their sketches. Then they’d rush home and mix colors and paint the scene on a canvas till it hummed and vibrated with life. When Vader had finished one of his paintings, the boy could smell the fresh sea-salty air, hear the insistent calling of the church bells, or feel the squishing of the muddy roads between his toes.

Today, though, Vader raised a warning finger and wagged it in his direction. Hesitating at first, he began, “It is simply not safe to go running through Leyden with charcoal and paper announcing yourself as an artist these days.” By the time he’d finished, the words were tumbling over each other.

Vader raised both hands now, as if to hold him at a distance. “Son…” He cleared his throat and started again. “It’s just that…that…”

“I know! The Beggars fight for Prince Willem. They’re not our enemies, you know. They often stay here in our inn.”

Joris wagged a finger at him and said, scowling, “And as far as they know, no painters live in this place. Do you understand?”

Christoffel knew that was the rule, but it had never made sense to him. “Why, Vader?” he begged.

“I know. They smash images and glass windows, even make a mockery of sacred chalices and robes stolen from the churches.” Something about their wild escapades excited the boy.

“You’re not afraid to run after such image smashers with your canvases and charcoals?” Vader was nearly shrieking.

“They only destroy church paintings,” Christoffel countered. “What’s so dangerous about letting the Beggars see me painting ships that will never hang in a church, and nobody will ever pray to them?”

Vader twisted his apron into a long fat roll over his tummy. “I just don’t trust anyone who would slice a painting for whatever reason,” he said. “He has no soul for art, and I’ll take no chances on being his next victim or letting my son become one.”

That expression in his eyes! Was it anger? Nay. Sadness? Ja, but there was more. Fear? That must be it. Vader had only looked at Christoffel like this a few times before that he could remember. Mostly it was while they still lived in Brussels. They’d be walking down a street together when he’d just suddenly get that look and hurry Christoffel into a hiding place nearby or off to home. Never would he explain, only demand instant obedience.

He remembered one time when the expression seemed to have a reasonable cause. That was the night Pieter Bruegel, the old artist Vader used to paint with, died. They’d been good friends for as long as Christoffel’s memory went back. The boy was only eight years old when it happened, but he knew that if your good friend died, you must feel bad somehow. And that expression of pain or fear or whatever it was seemed perfectly in order on that occasion.

That was four years ago, and he’d grown up since then. He’d learned all about wars and sieges and soldiers. Who could live in Leyden and not know about them? With Haarlem under siege ever since last Winter Month just beyond the lake to their north, and all the comings and goings of the prince and his men and ships, and inn guests that talked long and freely over their wine, he’d have to blindfold his eyes and stop his ears to miss it.

Vader drew himself taller, squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and said, “You are the son, I am the vader, and when I tell you it’s not safe to go to the city with your charcoal, you will not ask questions. You’ll do what I wish.” Then shooing him toward the stable, he ordered, “Now, off to the job I gave you, and no more dallying.”

He watched his vader trudge back across the green grass and buttercups toward the inn, shaking his head and mumbling, “Crazy jongen!”

For a long while, Christoffel did not move. What was Vader thinking, anyway? He must be having visits from some troubling spirit. Probably he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him, then heard one more wild story from a drunken inn guest and let it turn him to a fright. He did that sort of thing sometimes.

Christoffel’s heart thumped madly. A gigantic tugging was wrenching him, first toward the stable, then toward the city. Back and forth, back and forth…

“How can I keep from going against my vader’s wishes?” he muttered under his breath. “I’ve never seen a whole fleet at once! And all those Beggars! Nay, but I have to go!”

Always he had dreamed of getting close enough to a Beggar away from The Clever Fox Inn that he could paint his portrait in his balloon breeches and ashen gray cape and hat, with a beggar’s bowl dangling about his waist and a long chain with a beggar’s penny swinging from his neck.

From somewhere out in the pasture behind the buildings, a cow mooed. Slowly, with determined steps, Christoffel headed for the stables.

“I’ll do what he demands,” he said to the knapsack on his back. “Then later, when he’s not looking, I’ll slip into Leyden.”

Wondering why his heart still pounded, he added, “I don’t think he really said I couldn’t go once the stable was clean. Besides, I’ll draw in the bushes. Nobody will ever see me!”

When he reached the stable, he stood in the doorway and looked after the ships now vanishing in the distance toward Leyden. His eyes scanned the riverbank that led along the trekpath, looking for bushes to obscure his flight. “By the time I get home, he’ll be feeling better, and he’ll be proud of the picture I’ve drawn and get out the paints and canvas just like he always does. And the beggar portrait? I can hide it for a while.”

Pieter-Lucas van den Garde approached the ancient city of Leyden along the trekpath of the sluggish Rhine River shortly before it would trickle off into the long bank of sand dunes and merge with the North Sea. His lame leg ached and his curls blew in the wind while a combination of excitement and dread pounded in his chest. The mass of steeples and spires, windmill blades, and gabled rooftops stood out sharp and weaponlike against a sky turning to watery gold in the glow of the late summer sun.

He watched a steady stream of farmers and artisans pouring out through ornate gates in the circle of heavy walls that held the city intact. They shoved past him, carrying baskets, pushing wobbly wheeled carts, and, with long willow switches, herding small flocks of sheep, goats, and pigs.

Leyden! City of an artist’s dreams long cherished! However, as on every other occasion when he’d come to this place, today he came not in fulfillment of those dreams but rather bearing a message for a never ending war.

Pieter-Lucas smoothed his sparse mustache with long fingers and let a whistle escape through his lips. “Our day will come yet, Blesje, old boy,” he said, patting his horse on the mane. “We will come back here with my beloved Aletta and Lucas and the new little one just about to join us. Opa promised. So did Prince Willem—once this cursed war is over! At least the city is on his side now, a part of the new Estates of Holland.”

For as many of his twenty-five years as he could remember, he’d dreamed the dreams his grandfather had begun planting in his heart while he was still a child.

“You, Grandson, are born to be an artist.” Pieter-Lucas could hear the words as clearly as if Opa stood once more by his side. Always he would add, “Two things you must do someday. First, after you have turned eighteen, I will send you to Leyden to study with the men who learned from my uncle, the famous artist Lucas van Leyden. There in the Pieterskerk, you will study my uncle’s colorful masterpiece, ‘The Last Judgment,’ that hangs above the main altar. And one day you must go to the city of Ghendt to study the Van Eyck altar painting, ‘The Adoration of the Lamb.’ Every great painter spends time with that masterpiece!”

Just before Pieter-Lucas turned eighteen, Opa died of apoplexy. Soon thereafter, image breakers destroyed Opa’s painting in the Great Church in Breda. Then Prince Willem van Oranje took Pieter-Lucas, along with his noble family and servants, into exile in Dillenburg, Germany. From there he’d spent most of the last seven years running messages. Always as he ran he prayed that Willem’s patriots and foreign mercenary soldiers would soon win back the Low Lands from the control of King Philip of Spain and his ruthless military commander, the Duke of Alva.

In the past year, since Leyden had declared herself on the patriots’ side, Pieter-Lucas often found himself here. He was always running to Willem’s base in Leyden or Delft or to France, where Willem’s brother and military commander, Ludwig, carried on negotiations with the king of France for assistance against Spain, their mutual enemy.

Of course, King Philip did not honor the “legal” declarations of the new constitution of the Estates of Holland. In fact, Alva had spent the whole past year looting and burning and forcing rebel cities to submit to his rule. Mostly small cities they were, not too well fortified, usually caught by surprise.

On this warm and sunny afternoon in what appeared to be a peaceful Leyden, the clear logic of the moment told Pieter-Lucas this city was in no imminent danger. Most of her strongest leaders had firm loyalties to Willem, and she boasted an efficient citizen guard as well.

But the war was not over, and there was still no time for pursuing peace-loving passions, such as searching out a painter or visiting church altars. As Blesje’s hooves clattered over the wooden boards that spanned the protective moat at the Zyl Poort, Pieter-Lucas felt his dreams give place to a vague presentiment of disaster.

He sighed. He knew the urgent message he carried had something to do with Haarlem, a neighboring city to the north. For eight months now Alva’s son, Don Frederic, had held Haarlemers prisoners in their own streets. Determined not to surrender, never losing hope that Willem and his forces would relieve them, the citizens had hung on. But eight months was an unthinkably long time to go hungry and to sustain constant assaults from a besieging force.

“Relief must reach Haarlem soon,” Willem’s brother Jan had moaned when he put the message into Pieter-Lucas’ hand in Dillenburg and sent him on this mission.

Nobody needed to tell Pieter-Lucas of the urgency of the plight of Haarlem. Back in the dead of winter, one of his missions had taken him into the city smuggled in a cart of straw and manure. He’d watched the people with hollow cheeks and swollen bellies and felt a wrenching of his gut. If only he’d had a barrow load of bread to put into their grasping hands.

Now, in the middle of summer, Pieter-Lucas urged Blesje over the maze of cobbles and bridges that followed the river into the heart of Leyden. He tried to forget Haarlem and remember his dreams. He watched a smattering of stray chickens, pigs, and dogs roam through the ground cover of market-day refuse in search of an evening meal and tried to imagine himself and his vrouw living here, buying their food and pots and clothes in this very market. But as he guided his horse through the now empty marketplace, the dreams he’d so often dreamed with delight were draped with a heavy blanket of chilling fog.

“Begone!” he yelled out, addressing he knew not what. Demons of fear? Or simply an imagination tormented by the bone-wearying long journey? Whatever, he must be freed from it. A messenger dared not to let despair put the sword to his ribs.

Looking up he saw at the end of the market street, anchored in the waters of the Rhine, a line of tall warships. From every spirelike mast and from each bow, Willem’s tricolor flags—orange, white, and blue, with the Nassau lion—rippled in the wind. The ships swarmed with loud shouting men in balloon breeches.

“Beggars! Returned from Haarlem?” Pieter-Lucas gasped. Had the end of the siege come? If the prince’s forces had managed to take the city at last, why were they here? They should be in Haarlem, distributing food to the starving survivors.

Visions of hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, twiglike arms, and grasping fingers filled his mind. He shuddered. Nay, but Haarlem couldn’t have fallen. The patriots’ plans for the final rescue were so well laid. Jan had seemed so certain. Nearly blinded by the maddening thoughts his memories inspired, he turned the corner. Just a few more paces to the town hall where he’d find Prince Willem.

Suddenly Blesje’s hoof caught on a protruding cobblestone, and the pause in his rhythm caused Pieter-Lucas to look down. There, sitting on a large stone among a stand of shrubby bushes, he saw a boy of about twelve or thirteen. Dark locks of straight hair hung beneath his flat tam, and he leaned over a canvas, busily sketching an outline of the fleet of beggar’s ships before him.

Pieter-Lucas brought Blesje to a halt, leaned over, and shouted at the boy, “So Leyden has an artist!”

With a start, the boy grabbed his work, pressing it to his chest. He cast a wary glance over his shoulder toward Pieter-Lucas.

Pieter-Lucas whistled. “What a sketch!” He watched caution melt into a hint of a smile.

“Like it? Who wouldn’t? You’re going to take it home and paint it, aren’t you?”

Pieter-Lucas loosened the cord on the little pouch dangling from his belt. Almost trembling with excitement, he pulled out a worn paintbrush and held it up for the boy to see. “I have paint running through my blood too,” he offered with a smile, “even as you do.”

The boy’s dark brown eyes grew suddenly large. From somewhere in their depths, Pieter-Lucas could see and feel the kind of kinship only painters see and feel in each other. “It’s a long story,” he said. Then leaning over the edge of his horse until his cheek lay alongside the sweaty mane, he said with a confidential air, “If I weren’t on my way to the town hall on an urgent errand, I’d sit down and let you teach me what you know about drawing ships. Can you wait till I come back?”

Pieter-Lucas straightened and lifted Blesje’s reins. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He prodded Blesje down the street to the town hall, where he tied him to a post. He was just opening the heavy old doors when he heard the furious galloping of horses down the Breestraat. Two horsemen stopped abruptly, tethered their horses, and bolted through the doors, shoving past Pieter-Lucas.

“Haarlem has surrendered!” they shouted. “The bells are tolling, and the people have flung themselves upon the mercy of Don Frederic!” Their voices echoed through the cavernous hall, bouncing off the high ceilings and smooth stone floors.

Pieter-Lucas followed the men into the council chambers, where Willem sat at the head of a long table with a group of city leaders and Beggars. Several men were jumping to their feet, crying out with distressed unbelieving gasps and barraging the newcomers with “why’s” and “how’s.”

Willem held his head in his hands, shaking it from side to side and uttering a low agonizing moan. “I knew it. I knew it…. Ach! God have mercy! Ach! Ach! Ach!”

Pieter-Lucas felt ashamed that he could even think about sketching ships while men’s lives were being snatched from them for no good reason. Chastised, he moved quietly to his prince’s side. He reached into his doublet and pulled out the thin document he’d brought from Dillenburg. His fingers searched the wax that held the paper closed, tracing Jan’s seal. It was a personal ritual he repeated each time he delivered a message, a tangible reminder that for now he must remain a messenger of the House of Nassau. He’d never wanted to become one, could never think of himself as one. He only played the part because during these dark war days, Willem needed him, and it was the one thing he could do for his vaderland.

Without looking up, Willem spoke, and the room grew instantly hushed. “What were the terms?”

“Don Frederic promised that no punishment would be inflicted except upon those who in the judgment of the citizens themselves deserved it. He offered them full and ample forgiveness!”

Willem spoke again, his calm voice heavy with the sighing of a broken heart. “They had no more choice. The enemy intercepted our messenger pigeons and foiled our last attempt to rescue them.” Still shaking his head, he repeated again and again, “May God have mercy! May God have mercy!”

“Have you any idea what has happened since the surrender?” asked Paulus Buys, pensionary for the province of Holland.

“As we left the city, we heard the Spanish officials issuing orders to all inhabitants to surrender their arms in the town hall,” said one of the men.

“They were herding the men into the cloister of Zyl and the women into the cathedral,” added the second.

Willem leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs out before him and, keeping his head lowered, said, “Preparing for a blood bath. Alva and his son, Frederic, hold strange ideas of the meaning of that word forgiveness!”

Pieter-Lucas felt a shudder pass around the room. No one spoke for a long moment. One by one the men seated themselves again and looked to Willem, as if expecting to hear some words of wisdom to the unspoken question that hung heavy in the air: What now?

“Your Excellency,” Pieter-Lucas ventured at last, “a word from your brother Jan.” Willem glanced up with a start and took the note. As he broke open the seal, sounds of approaching shouts came from the streets. The rest of the men in the room stirred restlessly while Willem ignored the noises, giving Jan’s letter his total attention.

By the time he was folding the letter and putting it into his doublet, the voices had reached the street beneath the hall. “Willem van Oranje!” an angry crowd shouted. “Weakling! Coward! Come and face us!”

Pelting stones were assaulting the outside of the building, and Paulus and the city leaders were moving toward the doorway.

“Nay! They’ll listen to me,” Willem insisted, walking steadily out of the room, past the arms outstretched to restrain him. With the leaders at his side and all the others in his wake, he climbed the stairs to the upper level, where he walked out onto the balustrade.

At the sight of him, the crowd burst into a tirade more ferocious than before. “Weak-handed, mealy mouthed Prince!”

“Haarlem?” The entire crowd took up the final name and chanted it ferociously around the square. The name echoed off the tall step-gabled buildings and sent a chill into Pieter-Lucas’ heart. Was Leyden with Willem or against him…?

Through an open doorway, Pieter-Lucas watched the prince raise his hand and heard him offer a clear unflinching defense. “We have done everything according to our means. God is my witness.”

“Bah!” shouted the people with contempt. “You fight the iron-fisted duke with mittens. All you ever send to any city’s rescue is too little and too late!”

The words echoed around the streets, in a hundred voices of peasants, merchants, soldiers, children.

Willem spoke again, “I cannot tell what tomorrow will bring. I can only assure you that we go forward in whatever strength and wisdom God provides.”

“I shall always stand with those who stand,” Willem shouted. “Every man must put his trust in God and prepare to wield his own sword. We surrender not until Alva knocks us senseless to our graves.”

The crowd rumbled on among themselves like a roll of thunder overhead, no longer addressing the prince. While Willem retreated, Pieter Adriaenszoon van der Werff, Chief Burgemeester of Leyden, lifted his hand and addressed the people with authority. “The sun is about to set beyond the Witte Poort. You must go, each to his own house, remembering the prince’s admonitions. Then, before you pillow your heads, gather your families around your hearth and give thanks to God that He has spared us for one more day and pray He shows mercy to our suffering brothers and sisters in Haarlem.”

Pieter-Lucas followed Willem into the council chambers. He watched him seat himself again at the long table, pull his writing pen and inkpot from his belt, and begin to write, mumbling as he formed the words.

“My most honorable brother, Count Ludwig,

On this, the twelfth day of Hay Month, the city of Haarlem surrendered to Don Frederic and his emissaries. I had hoped to send you better news; nevertheless, since it has otherwise pleased the good God, we must conform ourselves to His divine will. I take the same God to witness that I have done everything possible, according to my means, to succor the city. Press on, dear brother, and I look with eagerness to the day when you can come here to add your succor as well.”

Methodically, ignoring the roomful of men, Willem blotted the ink and folded his paper. Then he touched a ball of sealing wax to the flame of a nearby candle and let a blob form on the letter. Finally, he pressed his signet ring into the wax, stared at it for a moment, then handed it to Pieter-Lucas.

“Carry this as quickly as you can to Ludwig. I shall answer Jan within a day and send word by another. But Ludwig needs to know now—and move accordingly.”

Moments later Pieter-Lucas urged Blesje through the streets where people stood in knots on corners and gave themselves to lively conversations. He heard a low rumble of voices and an occasional outburst of distant shouting filling the air. As he rounded the bend by the harbor, he searched the bushes for the young artist and found not a trace. All through the city he kept his eyes on the prowl. Perhaps he’d been frightened by the uproar of the mob.

“Who was he, anyway?” he asked himself. “How will I find him again? And what of the meester that teaches him?”

With a sigh and a heavy reluctance to leave without the thing that had so elusively escaped his grasp, Pieter-Lucas guided Blesje once more through the Zyl Poort and across the bridge. He looked back with an aching yearning. Life always seemed to bring him so near to the passion that drove him that he could feel it in his fingers, taste it on his tongue. Then, just when he’d begun to breathe the air of the coveted promise, something snatched it from under his nose and took away his breath.

“Very well, Blesje, on we go,” he said, wishing his horse would talk back, argue with him, persuade him to turn around and go looking for the boy, for the painting in the church, for a place to bring his wife and Lucas, and…If Blesje could know anything at all, he would know how important it was for Pieter-Lucas to teach his son, to help him pass on the paint flowing in the blood. But Blesje simply plodded on, headed out across the broad-channeled landscape of soggy pasturelands, flourishing gardens, and groves of trees bearing tiny unripened apples and pears. The sun was nearing the horizon. He must ride hard to reach Delft and the safety of an inn before stick-darkness would make further travel difficult.

When he’d reached the bridge where the Zyl River flowed into the Rhine, he looked north. Not too far distant down the trekpath, he spotted a lone figure walking. “It’s a boy, Blesje,” he gasped. “Dark hair and a tam, knapsack on his back. Our young artist? I wonder if he goes to the inn just beyond that next grove of trees—The Clever Fox Inn, I think it’s called. No time to follow.”

The messenger and his horse stood still, hiding just behind a drooping willow tree, and watched while the boy walked on, turning into the yard of the inn.

“Leyden does indeed have an artist,” Pieter-Lucas said. “We shall find his meester next time.”

With a freshly born lilt in his spirit, Pieter-Lucas nudged Blesje into a trot across the steamy amber-colored countryside.

Joris could not sleep. No cooling breezes brought relief from the heat on this most unusual night. As he lay tossing in his straw bed at the back of the inn, he wondered whether there were visiting spirits, as well, hovering in the oppressively warm and humid air about him. And every time an abrupt snore issued from his wife’s side of the bed, he started like a man cringing on a battlefield.

“I know that naughty jongen of mine ran off to Leyden against my orders today,” he mumbled to himself, combing his hair with sweaty fingers. “My vader would have thrashed me with a whole broom of willow switches if I’d defied him so. Why, then, couldn’t I do it to Christoffel?”

“Because you’ve got your moeder’s soft heart instead of your vader’s soldier one” came the muffled answer from his wife.

“Hei! Vrouw Hiltje! One minute you snore, the next you interrupt my conversation with myself,” he sputtered. “Don’t you think I should have met him in the roadway with a scowl and a broom and scolded the fear of God into him?”

“What? You’re softer than I am. What will ever become of the jongen with such soft parents?”

“Nothing matters so long as he gets to Leyden to draw the pictures he wants. He learned it from you.”

“And you go on feeding him his victuals when he comes straggling home long after the cows have stopped mooing for the night and the inn guests have abandoned their greasy plates for refilled tankards.”

“Not this time. But I told him not to go, and he did it anyway, and you didn’t punish him by sending him to bed supperless. What shall I ever do with the boy, and what will become of him? Oh me! Oh me!”

Both stopped talking, and Joris lay for a long while listening to the chorus of swamp frogs croaking in the drainage ditch behind the barn and the dull rhythmic beating of his heart in his troubled chest. Hiltje resumed her occasional snoring. The sleepless innkeeper got up from his bed and crept out through a series of doors and into the night. To the light of a gigantic flat-sided moon, he stole across the barnyard to the stable.

He stepped gingerly past the sleeping horses and climbed up into the hayloft. Slowly he crawled to the far corner and pushed open the door meant to let in the hay. Tonight it let in the moonlight. He rummaged in the straw until he’d pulled up a velvet bag. Pulling the cord, he reached inside and drew out a large piece of cloth. He draped it over his head, taking care to frame his face just right. Fingering the long silky fringes around its border, he imagined himself transported into an elegant synagogue, with richly adorned walls and fragrant candles and the large scrolls in their cases, all painted with lilies and grape vines and pomegranates. Resting now on bended knees, he folded his gnarled hands and bowed his head and muttered softly, “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is One.”

After a pause, he went on. “Yahweh, God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in times like these, so evil and fraught with demonic intrusions at every corner, I confess to the great and many errors of my ways and most of all to not teaching my son in Thy holy precepts. Nevertheless, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Thy presence, oh, Yahweh. Bless now thine errant servant with sleep and preserve my dear son, who shall remain nameless in my prayers. For robed in this shawl and praying the Sh’ma of my moeder—may she rest in peace—I tremble even to pronounce so Christian a name as the one I myself gave to the boy in my most deeply nighted years. Amen!”

After a long and pleasant moment of quiet contrition, Joris removed his prayer shawl, replaced it in the bag, and buried it beneath the straw. Then he closed the hay door, and as quietly as he’d come, he slipped back into the inn and lay down beside Hiltje. She interrupted the rolling murmur of her snoring to say, “Sleep well, husband.”

He put his arm about her, felt her body snuggle into his embrace, and fell fast asleep.

Chapter One

Leyden

12th day of Hay Month (July), 1573