In her drafty room with the high ceilings and clumsy furniture in one corner of the kasteel grounds, Aletta awoke in excruciating pain. Her head was throbbing and her whole body burned with an intense heatte such as she’d often treated in her patients but never experienced for herself.
With her eyes still closed, she heard a pounding in her ears and, as if from a far distance, the childish prattle of four-year-old Lucas.
“Ach!” she groaned and turned over onto her side, cradling her bulging tummy in both arms. The child beneath her heart thrashed about, stretching the walls of her wombe into discernible little fist balls. “Great and gracious God,” she cried out, “keep this little one safe!” Gently she rocked the child until it settled into stillness once more.
She’d just begun to wonder what she would do with her son when she felt a soft hand on her cheek and heard a tiny voice. “Moeke, wake up!”
Smiling in spite of herself, she pried her eyes open and reached for Lucas’ hand. “Moeke’s sick, jongen,” she managed. “Go get Mieke!”
His blue eyes grew large and round, partially obscured by the straw-colored curls that drooped across his forehead. A questioning expression covered the pudgy face, and he thrust it into hers, landing a trembly kiss on the cheek where his hand had lain earlier.
“Go get Mieke,” Aletta repeated, nudging him back. “Quickly, son, quickly.”
She listened to his feet padding across the floor and realized he could not draw the bolt that held the door. With agonizing effort, she dragged herself from the bed. Nearly overcome with both the pain and a swimming of the head, she crawled on all fours to the door and struggled the bolt and latch free. It was the last thing she knew.
When she came to, she was lying in her bed with a cool compress on her head.
“I sees your eyes a-flutterin’” came a thin pipelike voice from the bedside.
“Mieke! Thank God you’re here.” Through a hot fuzzy haze, she made out the face of the strange little woman with the sharp nose.
She was pulling back the feather bag and asking, “An’ th’ baby—is he a-flutterin’ too? Let me see.”
Aletta grabbed the cover and hugged it tightly around her neck. “Ja, Mieke. He moves. Just believe me.”
Mieke backed off and wiped her wiry hands against each other. “Very well,” she said, “b’cause ye gots to carry him in your belly fer a long time yet.”
“Only a week or two, Mieke. That’s not so long, you know.”
“Anyway,” she muttered, “who knows what dreadful things this heatte might do to him?”
She propped Aletta’s head in the crook of her arm, then reached to the bedside table for a crock of lukewarm liquid and put it to her hot dry lips. Not until she began to sip did Aletta realize how swollen and cracked those lips were.
“Marsh parsley…masterwort…and wormwood?” she asked between sips.
“Fer that ye’ll have to ask Countess Juliana. I doesn’t make the stuff, only pours it down the gullet.”
Aletta had concocted this very potion many times and always marveled at the way her patients consumed the bitter brew with such relish. This morning she understood. The thirst burning in her throat made her ravenous enough to find any liquid a welcome relief, no matter how bitter.
When she’d drained the crock and begun to drowse again, she heard her nursemaid’s piercing voice giving the same kind of instructions she herself had used so many times. “Time now to sleep, Vrouw ‘Letta. Lucas is in good care with the servants, an’ yer Mieke’s goin’ to stay right here an’ lay on th’ fresh compresses, an’ one o’ th’ countesses’ll come by in a couple o’ eyeblinks an’ look ye over good.”
Aletta reached for the woman’s arm. “The instant my Pieter-Lucas comes home, will you promise to bring him to me?” If only he were here to hold her hand and kiss her forehead and fold her in his arms, surely the heatte would scamper quickly away.
Mieke burst into the girlish giggle that marked her presence anywhere she happened to be within earshot. “When yer Pieter-Lucas comes a-gallopin’ through that gate on his horse, there ain’t a body in this whole kasteel what’ll ever need to tell him to come a-lookin’ fer his vrouw. Ye’ll be the first after th’ huntin’ hounds to know he’s home. Now, fergit it all an’ let yer body sleep, do ye hears me?”
Aletta tried to nod her answer. But already her eyes were closed and her mind was drifting off into fuzzy-edged oblivion….
****
Pieter-Lucas rode through the gate at the foot of the Dillenburg hill, beneath a gray cloudy afternoon sky that promised thundershowers. The hunting hounds announced his arrival, and his heart tumbled about with acrobatic jubilance.
“We’re home, Blesje!” he told his horse plodding up the long pathway that led to the old multitowered castle. “To you that means the best oats and stables in the world. To me? Aha! Aletta and my son are both somewhere inside those ancient stone walls!”
With undisguisable impatience, he waited in the great hall for Jan van Nassau, lord of the kasteel. When the man came, his round stomach strutting before him, Pieter-Lucas gave him his message from Ludwig with as much haste as he could.
“May I go now to my apartment?” he asked, with one hand on the door handle. “I trust your next assignment will not be so urgent that I cannot at least spend a night or two with my vrouw.”
“Go, young man. Your vrouw is in greater need of you than I.”
Pieter-Lucas hurried across the courtyard to his room with the glorious visions of an eager husband. But when he opened the door, Mieke greeted him with a worried expression and a finger pressed against her lips. She pointed to the sleeping form of Aletta on her bed with her vader at her side.
“Dirck Engelshofen!” he whispered. “What’s he doing here?”
“Your wife’s deathly ill,” Mieke muttered.
“What?” He stared at the little woman with the sheaf of scarf-bound unkempt curls and shoved past her, ordering, “Out the door!”
Standing and going also for the door, Dirck Engelshofen grasped him by the arm and said, “I’ll wait for you outside.”
Pieter-Lucas leaned over his vrouw’s resting body. Grasping her pale sleeping face with both hands, he cried out, “Aletta, my vrouw!”
Her eyes opened and a smile reached out to take him in. “You’re home, Pieter-Lucas, my husband, my love!”
“What is it?” With trembling hands, he smoothed the long tresses of blond hair back from her eyes and kissed her gently.
He felt her weak arms encircling his neck. They held each other in a fragile embrace. Softly her voice spoke into his ear, “At least the heatte is gone, and now that you are back, all will be well once more.”
He searched her sickly blue eyes for the sparkle that was Aletta until he found it. “And the child?” he asked, almost fearing the sound of his own words. She’d lost one child already last year, and in the anguish that followed, he nearly lost her as well. Nay, they could not walk that pathway again.
“The child kicks yet, more vigorously than ever the others did,” she said, smiling, guiding his hand to her belly where he felt the mysterious rolling punching motions that always filled his vader heart with wonder.
He looked up, startled. “Lucas! He is well, I hope?” Nothing must ever happen to that boy, the pride of his life, heir of the stream of paint in his blood.
“Perfectly well, may God be praised! Robbin is with him.”
“Your brother, Robbin? Did he come with your vader?”
Aletta nodded.
“And when did you take ill?” Pieter-Lucas felt a frenzy building in his mind. Surely she hadn’t been ill the whole ten days he’d been away!
“Not many days ago. I slept so much I didn’t count them.”
“What is it?”
“A simple ague. The herbal potions and compresses should have cured it. Yet it has seemed as though without your smile, your embrace, your words, I could not mend!”
He wrapped her in his arms and buried his face in her silken locks of hair. “I shall give you as large a dose of all three as the time allotted to me will allow.”
They held each other in the long silence until he felt her arms slip away and heard her breathing grow deep and slumberous.
He planted a long kiss on her forehead and murmured, “Sleep well, my beloved one—and grow strong.” Then taking her hand in his, he sat gazing into the most beautiful face on earth. How she trusted him! And what if his presence did not help her? Nay, but she must get well—she must.
If only he’d been here sooner! If Haarlem had not fallen, he might have been already moving her to Leyden. Instead, he was still running back and forth between battle posts and Nassau brothers and burgemeesters’ halls. One day soon Jan would go to the Low Lands in person, and then Pieter-Lucas would never have another excuse to return to Dillenburg. Maybe he should take Aletta to Leyden now. Nay! Too dangerous! She couldn’t move for some time after the baby was born anyway. A lot could happen by then. He sighed.
A faint rubbing, scratching sound from the other side of the door told him that Mieke hovered nearby. He must go talk with Vader Dirck. He stood reluctantly, brushed his vrouw’s forehead with one more kiss, and left the room. Each breath went forth like a simple prayer. “Please, God!”
Mieke met him on the other side of the door. “‘Bout time ye leaves her so’s she can get back to sleep. Poor thing ain’t so robustious, ye know. Now, leave her alone till I calls ye, do ye hears me?” She was motioning him away with quick hand gestures and frowning face.
Pieter-Lucas was never sure whether to be amused or irritated at Mieke’s blustery audacity. At least he could rest easy in the assurance that she’d never steal a thing from him or his family, and that was more than he could have said a few years back. Besides, she was a big help to Aletta—had even seen to the birthing of little Lucas and the stillborn child they had called Kaatje.
Dirck Engelshofen approached now, grabbing him by a hand and a shoulder. “Greetings, my son,” he said.
“You’re a long ways from Engeland,” Pieter-Lucas said, returning the hearty handshake. “Aletta says you brought Robbin too. And your vrouw, Moeder Gretta?”
“Ja and ja and nay.”
Pieter-Lucas watched his vader-in-law smile. He was the same straight man that he remembered so well, with each piece of his clothing in perfect order. His hair was graying to match the color of his kindly warm eyes.
“Meaning ja, Engeland is a long ways away, ja you brought Robbin, and nay, your vrouw came not along?”
“Right!”
“When did you arrive?”
“Yesterday, just before Aletta’s heatte left her. When I first saw her, I feared for her life…and with an unborn child? God have mercy!” Dirck shook his head, then went on quickly. “You’re still running messages for Willem, I see.”
“So it goes. I spend most of my days running around the countryside. Guess it’s my part in the revolt.”
“At least you’re not carrying a sword on the battlefield,” Dirck reminded him.
“This war’s got to end before long. A few more massacres like Alva and his son have been carrying out, and there won’t be any Lowlanders left to live in the country, even if Willem managed to wrest it from the Spaniards.”
“That’s what King Philip ordered, you know. Thought he was going to do it overnight…and now, five years later, even Alva grows fearful.”
Pieter-Lucas winced and pulled his shoulders up tight. “I still shudder at the thought.”
“But we heard that the Beggars had taken Den Brill and that Oudewater and Leyden and all of Holland and Zeeland had declared for the prince. They set up their own rule at a meeting of the Estates—in Dordrecht, was it?”
Pieter-Lucas nodded. “I was there, and that’s what they did. But you know as well as I do that Alva is determined to win them back. In fact, before I left Ludwig’s camp two days ago, some messenger brought a statement issued by the duke that when he slaughtered twenty-five hundred nearly starved Haarlemers, he was being gracious.”
“Gracious?”
“Ja! Can’t you see? We should be grateful he left a handful of the poor wretches alive—and frightened enough by Alva’s power to choose him over Prince Willem.”
Dirck shook his head. “Impossible!”
“You never did tell me what brought you so far from home,” Pieter-Lucas said.
“Ah, ja…” Dirck stammered. “First tell me, how safe is Leyden?”
“Leyden? Why do you ask?”
“Remember my friend Barthelemeus?”
“Ja.”
“He has friends there, Children of God. He’s with them now, delivering some books from Johannes.”
“And you’re going to meet him there?”
Dirck nodded, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “We have to move our operation from Engeland.”
“Surely you don’t plan to bring an Anabaptist book business to Leyden now!” Pieter-Lucas frowned.
“We can’t stay where we are much longer. The English are getting wary of us. You know, that’s the way it is everywhere. No Anabaptist printer can stay long in any one place. We’ll always be hunted and chased from one place to another all over this world. Everybody thinks we’re so dangerous!”
“Just might defeat them all with your swords, eh?” Pieter-Lucas felt the irony grip his soul. No Child of God would ever carry a sword, and the whole world knew it.
Dirck smiled. “Humph! The only sword we use is the Bible.”
“That’s what they fear most,” Pieter-Lucas suggested.
“Papists fear it, ja. But Calvinists and Lutherans? They use the Bible, too, you know. They die for possession of it just like we do.”
Pieter-Lucas thought for a moment. “I know that. In this Lutheran household where we live, the Bible is read at every meal and is much revered and mostly lived by. And the now-Calvinist brothers, Willem and Ludwig, trust its power as well. Then there’s Dirck Coornhert who’ll never join himself to any group but firmly believes every man should use the Bible as an ethical guidebook.”
“Then why is it, you think, that Lutherans and Calvinists, as well as Papists, keep us running across the face of the earth?”
Pieter-Lucas cleared his throat. “I tell you, I’ve asked myself that question a lot of times in the years I’ve been working for the revolt while still keeping my vows to never carry a sword.”
“So? Find any answers?”
He waved a finger in his vader-in-law’s face and said, “Ja! I’ve decided it’s because nobody uses the Bible in the same way we do. For all the rest, it’s a sword, next to the swords of the prince and the military commander and the laws of the land. Whichever is strongest at the moment rules. For the Children of God, it’s the sword, prince and law, all wrapped up in one. We have no other sword.”
Dirck Engelshofen nodded his head, slowly at first, then vigorously. Taking Pieter-Lucas by both shoulders, he looked at him with an expression of awed respect. “Well said, brother! Well said!”
From over the hillside just behind them, Pieter-Lucas heard a little voice being wafted on the soft afternoon breezes. “Vader! Vader!”
He turned and gazed down the pathway that led through a rolling sea of rippling grass and little splotches of wild-flower colors across the hillside.
“Hei!” he said, rubbing his hands together with glee. “I see a pair of boys coming toward us up the hill—your son and mine!”
He ran down the pathway, never stopping till he reached his own Lucas chugging with all his strength, pumping fat little arms. He leaned over and swooped the boy up to his chest and hugged and kissed him and held him like he’d never let him go.
“Lucas, my Lucas!” he cried out. The boy’s sweaty arms barely reached around his neck, and his kisses got landed in all kinds of places from ears to chin to nose to the cheek end of his mustache.
“Vader, you’re home!” he squealed with as much delight as if he hadn’t seen him in a year. After all, Pieter-Lucas remembered, when you only have four years behind you, even ten days can feel like a year.
“You’ve been running all over the fields, haven’t you?” Pieter-Lucas asked. “And who’s your new friend?”
Lucas pointed to his companion. “Oom Robbin!”
Pieter-Lucas reached out a hand to his wife’s little brother. “Welcome to Dillenburg,” he said.
“Thank you,” Robbin responded, gripping Pieter-Lucas’ hand firmly.
Pieter-Lucas hadn’t seen the boy in years. He couldn’t remember how many. “What are you now, ten years old?”
“Twelve!” Robbin corrected, a shy grin covering his face. “I was seven last time I saw you.”
“Nay! I can’t believe it!” Pieter-Lucas looked at the boy. He’d grown taller, though he was still slender and sharp featured. He had eyes that snapped and toes that never stopped tapping.
Lucas pushed his vader’s cheeks with both hands until he’d directed his eyes to look straight at him. “Can you make Moeke well?”
“Making her well is God’s work, jongen.”
“Mieke says bein’ quiet helps.” The boy’s eyes grew wide with concern.
Pieter-Lucas smiled. “Mieke’s right. Moeke needs lots of quiet. And in the morning, maybe we can go down to the garden and draw her a picture.”
“Ja, ja, ja!” Lucas clapped his hands, then hugged and kissed his vader once more. “Will that help too?”
Pieter-Lucas rumpled the boy’s hair, smiled, and said, “Just might.”
The little party trudged up the hill with the sky glowing like burnished gold all around them.
****
Only a few drops of dew still clung to the grasses along the roadway when Pieter-Lucas started down the hill into the early morning sun. In one hand he held the tiny hand of his son and shortened his own steps to try to keep pace with the little fellow’s vigorous strides. How often when he was away had Pieter-Lucas dreamed of these treasured moments when he and his son would go out in search of something to draw.
“We going to draw a flower in Moeke’s garden?” Lucas asked, his voice like a soft clear bell in the expectant hush of the newborn day.
Pieter-Lucas chuckled. To a four-year-old who came to the herb garden almost every day with his moeder, of course it was “Moeke’s garden.” She let him carry the basket into which she piled leaves and blossoms as she snipped and told him about what each one was good for as they sniffed the aromatic fragrances.
“Whatever you think Moeke would like best, jongen,” Pieter-Lucas said. “You’re going to give it to her, you know.”
“Will it make her well again?”
Pieter-Lucas sighed. He remembered a time when life had seemed that simple to him too. At this moment, he wished with all his heart for it to be so. There was hope. Already, Aletta looked better than she had when he arrived home. In fact, they’d left her sitting up in a chair, no longer lying in the bed. He rumpled the blond curls atop Lucas’ head. “At least it’ll make her feel better.”
“I know! I know! Let’s do her fav’rite flower! C’mon! Faster!” Lucas was tugging hard on his vader’s hand now, coaxing him into a run.
They hurried through the break in the hedge, and a chorus of sparrows, blackbirds, and cuckoo birds greeted them. Pieter-Lucas let the boy lead him down the pathway to a thorny bush covered with a profusion of single-petaled wild roses.
Lucas plopped his chubby body on a large stone bordering the pathway and patted the spot beside him. “Sit ’side me, Vader,” he instructed.
Pieter-Lucas removed the pouch from his belt and extended the cord as far as it would go. He took his assigned place, then pulled a pair of charcoal pieces gently from the bag and let Lucas turn the bag bottom-side up. A sharpened reed pen, a worn paintbrush, a small square paint-splotched palette, and an assortment of corked containers of ink and paint tumbled onto the hard-packed dirt at their feet.
“So this is her favorite flower in all the garden?” Pieter-Lucas asked, pulling a smallish square of canvas from his doublet.
“They make her smile really big.” Lucas was already reaching for the canvas and the charcoal.
“First,” Pieter-Lucas said, “show me which one we are drawing.”
Lucas rushed to the bush and picked out a clump close to the ground with one fully opened blossom surrounded by a ring of buds in varying stages of flowering.
“This one,” he said, then hurried back to his seat.
Pieter-Lucas watched him spread the canvas out on his leg, take a stick of charcoal in his hand, and hold it just above the canvas. Looking up, eyes big with eagerness, the boy begged, “Help me, Vader.”
Pieter-Lucas held the warm firm hand in his own and felt a lump in his throat. ’Twas a time long ago when his own grandfather had done the same for him, guiding his unsure fingers across the page. He remembered how always he knew just what he wanted to draw, but in the beginning his fingers seemed to fly off in strange directions. Little by little, as Opa helped him, he felt them grow stronger.
He’d never forget the first day he drew an object all on his own, and it came out the way he wanted it. A sparrow, it was, hopping about on a thin layer of grimy snow left over from winter. He’d painted it with a wash of color, then taken it home to show his moeder.
Gently Pieter-Lucas guided the fingers cupped beneath his hand along the rounded contours of the delicate petals and a long heavy stem.
“Vader! Vader!” Lucas squealed. “We made a rose! Oh! Can we make it pink?”
With growing delight, Pieter-Lucas helped the boy mix the right colors on his palette. Then using the old brush that had once belonged to his own grandfather, he let him cover the blossom with a pearly pink. Next they mixed a tiny splotch of golden color and, using a twig, filled the center of the blossom with bright dots of golden pollen-laden stamens. Finally, dipping his reed pen into the bottle of ink, Pieter-Lucas guided the little hands once more to outline it all with a thin dark line.
Lucas clapped with excitement, transferring blotches of pink and gold from one hand to the other. Looking up at his vader, a smile wreathing his face and a line of black ink smudging his cheek, he said, “It’s goin’ to make her well, Vader.”
Pieter-Lucas gave the boy a squeeze and tried to smile. Someday he must learn that it takes more than a painting to heal a sick moeder, that sometimes nothing can heal her, that God is capricious and takes whomever He wills—and whenever…. But…not now! Pieter-Lucas couldn’t bear to ruin all this childish innocence and implicit faith. Besides, soon enough Aletta was going to mend and there would be no need to talk about the “what-if-not’s.”
He smiled down into the radiant face. “I’m sure it will,” he said.
When all had been put back into its place, vader and son trudged up the hill, the boy waving his masterpiece in the breeze. Halfway there, Lucas stopped and tugged the breeches on Pieter-Lucas’ leg.
“Carry me, Vader,” he begged in a tired voice.
Pieter-Lucas gathered the boy into his arms and let him lean a tousled head on his shoulder. “Lucas,” he whispered into the boy’s ear, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll tell you again every day you are alive. You have—”
“I know, Vader,” he interrupted, “‘paint running through your blood.’” He paused, then added, “What does that mean?”
Pieter-Lucas chuckled. “It means you will always love to paint pictures more than anything else on earth.”
“Oh!” He sighed. “Are we almost home, Vader?”
“Almost.”
“That’s good, ’cause I think Moeke needs her picture pretty quick.”
And someday soon, Pieter-Lucas told himself, I will take this boy to Leyden to learn what I do not know. Opa would not have it any other way.
****
Aletta spent most of the morning up and about. She’d just crawled back into bed, weighted with weariness, when she heard voices and feet at the door. Seconds later, the door flew open and Lucas scampered toward her, waving a painting.
“Moeke, it’s your fav’rite flower. Vader says it’ll make you well!”
He shoved the canvas into her hand and stood with a smile of anticipation on his upturned face.
“Ah, but it’s beautiful!” she exclaimed. The lines and colors blended together with smudges on the now wrinkled canvas.
Lucas wriggled with delight, then climbed up onto her bed and nuzzled into her arms. “I love you, Moeke,” he muttered, “and now you can get well, ja?”
She took the boy in her arms. “As God wills it,” she said while she and her husband exchanged knowing smiles over the curly head.
****
For the rest of the day, Aletta slept less and talked more. Come nightfall, she crawled into bed rejoicing that her strength was indeed returning.
“Your cheeks glow once more with their lively color,” Pieter-Lucas said when he kissed her good-night. “Just the way I want to remember you as I travel about the countryside tomorrow.”
“Let’s not talk of tomorrow and parting,” she mumbled just before slipping into a deep sleep.
She dreamed unsettling dreams. When she awoke several times in the night, she could not remember what she had dreamed but dreaded going back to them. Sometime before daylight she came to with a painful start. Not a head pain this time. Rather, strong invisible fingers constricted her abdomen and seemed to suck the breath from her. She gripped the bed with both hands and stifled a cry.
“Nay, God, not the baby now. Not yet!” she whispered.
As suddenly as it had come, the pain subsided. She could not go back to sleep. Her mind whizzed around in dizzying circles of “What if’s?” What if the baby came too early? More than once in her herbal healer duties she’d helped deliver an early child. Tiny enough to hold in the palm of her hand, gasping, unable to get enough air. She could never forget the dreadful sight such infants presented or the dagger it sent through her heart to watch them lose the struggle and wither in her hand.
But this child wasn’t so terribly early. Nor did he need to be too early to die. Her last one had died before she ever gave it birth. What if this one died while Pieter-Lucas was gone? What if she herself died as Moeder Kaatje had done? She could never forget that awful morning when she sat at the bedside of Pieter-Lucas’ moeder, holding her hand, listening to her horrendous tales about vows and dying babies and a vengeful God.
“God will always win!” Those were the woman’s final words before she slipped into death’s sleep, while in a crib nearby lay her dead child, the last of God-only-knew how many.
Aletta’s thoughts were interrupted by yet another grabbing pain. She felt the beads of sweat forming on her brow and heard a little cry escape from her lips. Pieter-Lucas stirred beside her. Before the iron fingers would loosen their hold, her movements had brought him fully awake.
He leaned over her and demanded in an anxious voice, “Is the child coming?”
“Nay, not yet,” she insisted as the pain vanished, leaving her limp and damp.
“But you’re having pains! What do they mean, then? What shall I do?” He was spouting questions, while from the other side of the room, Lucas whimpered in his sleep.
Aletta reached for his arm and patted it as calmly as possible. “Just lie down and wait. Such pains often come long before the child.”
“How long before?” He still hovered over her in the dark, his breath warm across her face.
“Who knows?” she said. “Sometimes days or weeks before the time. Like dancers practicing for a festival, so they can do it right when the moment arrives.”
He spread the wide fingers of his large hand across her belly. “Does he still kick?”
“Ja, Pieter-Lucas. This child is not like Kaatje.”
“Should I go get Mieke? Or one of the countesses?”
“Simply lie down and be still before you bring Lucas wide awake and howling for the whole Kasteel to hear.”
Slowly he lay down beside her and took her hand in his. “Lie down and be still? That I shall do. Sleep? Never. I stay wide awake to get you help when the pains come again.”
Aletta smiled and lay her head on Pieter-Lucas’ shoulder. “You have a heart most gracious and kind, and I give our God thanks each day for such a devoted husband. But you may sleep soundly, my love. No child will ask to be birthed this night.”
She had scarcely finished her sentence when she heard her husband’s breathing grow heavy and promptly fell asleep herself. How long the quiet lasted, she never knew. When she awoke once more, she found herself in the fierce grip of a more intense childbirth pain than before. Already she was screaming out.
Pieter-Lucas jumped from the bed with a start. “I go for the countess,” he said, his words tumbling from his mouth.
Aletta grabbed the covers around her and held on, yelling for what seemed an endless moment of anguish. When at last it left her quiet, limp, and dripping with sweat, she heard a voice not her husband’s and felt a wiry hand on her forehead.
“I knowed it’d be this night.”
“Mieke,” Aletta murmured. She opened her eyes and saw a lamp burning on the table by the bed.
“I’se been a-sleepin’ outside the door, jus’ a-waitin’ fer this moment. Done sended your man to the kitchen fer some hot water. Th’ cook, she knowed it was a-comin’ too—I telled her. Now, let me see what goes.” And Mieke was throwing back the covers. Not at all the way it was supposed to be done. But she’d learned from Aletta, who had learned from an old lady and from Tante Lysbet’s herbal book and from having to do it herself.
One quick look and Mieke let out a shriek. “Th’ head’s as big as a bowl already. Another pain or two like that one, an’ you’se goin’ to be a-birthin’ a baby, Vrouw ’Letta.”
Hardly had she finished her report when the next pain tore at Aletta. Mieke perched herself on the end of the bed and waited, urging her patient to “Push, push, easy now! It’s coming!”
When the pain subsided, Aletta felt another hand on her forehead and heard another voice, this one quiet and smooth. “I’ve a soothin’ broth for you when this is over.”
“Jus’ one more pain, and I can grab ’im by the shoulders,” Mieke said with undisguised excitement.
Then the final pain came. Through the haze of mind and pain so searing it made her nearly numb, Aletta felt the child slipping from her body and heard Mieke’s shout of triumph, “It’s here! A girl!”
The wild choking sobs of an infant followed. A more beautiful and welcome sound Aletta had never heard. No weakling, this one, ready to wither in her hand.
“God be praised!” she mumbled and reached instinctively out to take a measure of the bloody body of the child, now thrashing about on her tummy while the women attending her tied and cut the navel cord that had bound them together for these many months.
The rest of the activity around her blurred into confusion and one enormous struggle to stay awake long enough to see her new little daughter’s face, give her suck, and show her to her husband. But when the kindly old lady from the kasteel kitchen had put a cup of warm nourishing broth to her lips and she’d swallowed only a few mouthfuls, she drifted in and out of awareness until Mieke nudged her awake.
“Vrouw ’Letta,” the sharp voice startled her. “Here she is—th’ pertiest little baby girl ye ever goin’ to see—an’ as hungry as she is beautiful!”
Wrapped securely in a long length of soft warm cloth, only a red howling face showed. Mieke laid the child carefully in her arms. “Now, fer Heaven’s sake, give her somethin’ to eat b’fore she starves to death!”
“Thank you, Mieke,” Aletta said, opening her bodice and guiding the little mouth to a waiting breast. The first drops began to flow, and after a couple of difficult starts, the newborn finally began to suck and swallow it down. Aletta laid a kiss on the forehead and sang softly, her body swaying to the rhythm of the lullaby, “Suja, suja, slaap.”
The first meal completed, she lay the child down and pulled her snugly up next to her heart. Gently, eagerly, she unwound the swaddled wrappings. “Must be sure nothing’s missing,” she mumbled. With misting eyes, she stared at the marvelous little body now slumbering beside her and whispered, “As beautiful as any newborn I’ve ever gazed upon!”
Carefully she wrapped the legs together. As she did, she thought she felt a stiffness in the right foot. With gentle fingers, she massaged it, trying to tell herself it flexed just like the other foot. Surely it was the strangeness of her fancy following the painful ordeal of the birth—for everything else was so perfect! It must be right. Nay! Nothing could be wrong—nothing!
She fought off a creeping fear and finished rewrapping the child. Then hugging her tightly to her breast and kissing the cleansed, oiled forehead, she sang once more, “Suja, suja, slaap…”
Halfway through, she closed her eyes and let tears trickle down her cheeks. “Dear God in the Heaven,” she prayed silently, “did you not hear when I asked you to keep her safe?” Lost in quiet anguish, she waited and rocked her baby…and listened for an answer that did not come.
When she opened her eyes again, Pieter-Lucas sat beside her, looking down into her face and smiling broadly. “May I see our daughter?” he asked.
Slowly she leaned her own body with the child’s as she lowered her to the bed. In the process she wiped her tears on the swaddling cloth and did not look at her husband.
“She’s perfect,” Pieter-Lucas said, his voice hoarse with wonder.
Shaking off the fearsome thoughts, Aletta forced a smile and said, “It all happened so fast. She couldn’t wait! So eager to hear her vader’s voice, she was.”
“She wasn’t too early, then?”
Aletta swallowed down fresh tears threatening to spill out. “Only earlier than I expected,” she said. She must not let her husband know of the fear that tormented her. He would be going away again today, and she could not let him carry this burden along. “You see,” she said, smiling, “she breathes, she kicks, she suckles. Not like any too early child I ever saw.”
“Thank God,” he breathed, then grew still. They both stared at the child lying on the bed between them. Her little chest rose and fell in perfect rhythm, and now and again the eyelids fluttered and the mouth twitched. Pieter-Lucas’ fingers played absently with the baby’s chin.
Aletta felt his hand on hers and heard his voice. “You are tired, my love. Let me put her in her crib and you rest.”
She looked up at him and, trying to smile, said, “First she needs a name.”
“So she does.” A startled little grin played at the corners of his mouth.
“Can we call her Kaatje?” Aletta’s heart pounded as she said it. It was the name they’d given to the girl stillborn to her a year ago. Yet she so much wanted a girl to bear Pieter-Lucas’ moeder’s name.
“I know my moeder would be pleased,” Pieter-Lucas said.
“And you?”
They searched each other’s eyes for a long and penetrating moment. Then both smiled, and she knew their hearts agreed. Looking again at the child between them, Aletta began and Pieter-Lucas joined her instantly. “Welcome, beloved Kaatje!”