Market day was the busiest day of the week at The Clever Fox Inn. Hiltje left her bed before the sun slipped up over the horizon. In summer that was earlier than she would even let herself figure out. With something less than eagerness, she dressed and patted her tummy. Then she plaited the long thick hair and bound it up in her stiffly starched white headdress.
“The work of an innkeeper’s vrouw is never finished!” she groused, shaking out feather bags and spreading them over the broad windowsill. She checked the glowering sky and continued her conversation with herself. “Rain again! As always—especially on market day. Just for once I’d like to wake up knowing I wouldn’t have to brave muddy puddles and splashing horses in order to fill my kitchen larder and my guests’ oil lamps.”
She moved to the kitchen, where she blew on the reluctant embers in the hearth, coaxing them into life. Her husband’s cloddish feet shuffled across the mud tiles behind her.
“He’s really done it this time!” Joris muttered, standing over her with his apron brushing against her shoulder.
“Who? Christoffel?” she asked without looking up.
“Who else? That featherheaded jongen is going to get himself captured, tortured, killed, who knows what all—and his vader with him!”
“Come, come, my husband!” she sputtered, all the while bustling about the room. Whatever might be bothering him, she still had an inn to put in order and half a houseful of customers to buy provisions for. “Have you any idea how many times we would have buried that son of ours if he had died every time you predicted it as a result of his rash actions?”
Joris crossed his arms across his belly and scowled at her. “One day, when it really happens, you will pay me a mind.”
She stood with hands on hips and repressed a laugh. “Well, don’t just stand there. Tell me, what’s he done this time that you ought to have thrashed him for, but you were too soft? And be quick about it. I’ve got work to do.”
He glared at her without moving a whisker. “I ought to just leave you wondering,” he said at last.
“You could.” She shrugged and grabbed a broom. She knew he never would, though. Nothing was half so important to him as telling her all about whatever was making him fret.
So she swept the floor and waited, and shortly he grunted, “He’s painted a picture of the ragged old Beggar!”
“Oh ja? Did he do a good job?”
“Disgustingly good likeness it is. How could he do such a thing?”
“You sound surprised.”
“After all I’ve told him about the scoundrels, why shouldn’t I be surprised?” Joris stamped both feet on the floor and messed his hair with the agitated fingers of both hands.
“Bah!” Hiltje said with one hand raised. “Beggars just happen to be your son’s heroes these days.”
“Heroes?”
“Come, Joris, you remember how it is with boys. They all have heroes, and by the time they’re twelve or thirteen, it has to be somebody more exciting than a boy’s vader. Tomorrow it may be a gatekeeper, a miller…who knows? Today it’s a Beggar with his eccentric uniform.”
“Uniform?” he exploded. “Baggy breeches, bowls, bags, and pennies in their hats?”
“Who else does he see in uniforms of any kind out here on the banks of the Zyl River? These Beggars are soldiers, Joris, soldiers sailing warships, fighting battles on land and sea, drinking hard, and shouting loud.”
Joris wiped his hands on his apron and held his head high. “I’ve warned the jongen so soundly. Beggars slice paintings to shreds.” He paused, then jabbed the air with a pointer finger and went on. “Next thing we know, he’ll get cozy with that old Beggar. Then while he’s feeling his artist pride all puffed and petted, I’ll come into our hidden studio one day and find the Beggar in there with him. I hope I don’t need to tell you that will be our open doorway to a dungeon or to the point of a sword.”
Hiltje sighed. Her dear kindhearted husband could conjure up the wildest stretches of gloomy imagination. “Joris, Joris,” she said, shaking her head with exasperation. “That old bear won’t let our son get cozy with him. He doesn’t pay the jongen so much as half a mind.”
Joris shuffled uneasily, then muttered, “I don’t trust them.”
“Joris, the Beggars are only after church paintings, not portraits done by some innkeeper’s son to hang on his own walls. They wouldn’t even look twice at either Christoffel or his work.”
“You are no artist, Vrouw! Can’t you see that a man who will destroy the works of an artist’s hands is just as likely to take his life as well?”
Hiltje laughed. “When you close your doors to all the Beggars, I’ll begin to listen to you.”
“You would be the first to complain! They are, after all, good customers.”
Hiltje gathered up her market basket and headed for the peg on which her cape hung beside the door. “If you did not take their coins and give them a table and a bed in your inn, Christoffel would have no opportunity to watch and listen to them sitting around laughing, singing, telling their boastful yarns, guzzling down hefty kegs of Delfts beer.”
“But we have to eat to live!”
“Which is why I go now to the market,” she said, pulling her cape around her shoulders and slipping into her street shoes.
She crossed the threshold out into the rain, looking over her shoulder at Joris. He stood in the middle of the floor, reaching out a hand as if to stop her. With effort she ignored the strong yearning to console him. But he’d get over it, and she had work to do.
****
Hiltje made her way as quickly as possible around the stalls of the old market, filling her basket with freshly caught halibut, oil for the lamps, a pot to replace one broken by her younger daughter, Clare. She had not intended to stop at the weaver’s stall today. She had no needs there, and though the rain had let up, it drizzled yet, and she needed to get home.
But she did have to pass that way, and as she did, an unusual rich brown shawl with bright darts of sun yellow caught her eye. Fabrics always turned her head—especially the kind she could wrap herself up in. She could spend all day here, looking at the way they were constructed, feeling their softness or roughness, imagining how well they would protect from the cold, the rain, the snow.
She moved toward the weaver’s stall, her eyes drawing her to the beautiful piece. Captivated by its exquisite beauty, she reached out and stroked it, then crumpled and released it again and again. Soft and finely woven, its scattered shafts of light lifted her spirits, and the fat thick fringe that finished all the edges felt like warm silky kitten fur on her rough hands.
“Just what I need for a chilly day when my spirits are sagging,” she mumbled to herself.
Only half looking up, she asked, “How much, Magdalena?”
Not until the weaver’s wife failed to answer did Hiltje realize she had other customers. Strangers they were. Two men and a young boy of about her Christoffel’s age. Magdalena was spreading out several pieces of cloth for them to examine. As they looked they spoke little and soon thanked her for her time and walked away.
“How much, Magdalena?” Hiltje repeated.
The short woman with graying hair showing around the edges of her cap lifted her eyebrows and went on folding up the items the strangers had looked at. “More than you can pay me, Hiltje.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, trying to sound indignant.
“That one is very expensive. My husband made it of some of the finest woolen yarns he has ever found. I told him when he did it that Hiltje would be stopping by for a gaze. Here, put it round your shoulders, friend,” she went on, a wide smile lighting up her face.
“Nay,” Hiltje countered. “Not over my wet clothes. My mind tells me just how it would feel and how it would look and…” She sighed. “How long can you keep it for me while I collect enough coins to make it my own?”
Magdalena lifted her eyebrows, pursed her lips, and said, “For you, Hiltje?”
“Ja, for me!”
Magdalena stood staring at the fabric for a long moment. Then she lifted her head and met Hiltje’s gaze with an inspired sparkle in her faded blue eyes.
“Those three men that just left us,” she began with a touch of excitement quivering her voice, “did you notice them?”
“You mean the two men and a boy?”
“Ja, they are the ones.”
“Well, what about them?”
“A suggestion is forming in my head. They’ve come to Leyden on business of their own—something my husband will help them with. As usual, he expects me to give them lodging under my roof. Two of them, that is. The third is on some other kind of mission and says he must move on before the day is half spent. But I already have several guests, and to be plain about it, the house is full to the rafters.”
“So,” Hiltje felt a thrill of excitement running through her body. “How many nights’ lodging at The Clever Fox Inn will it take to pay for the shawl?” She fingered the fabric with a feeling approaching ownership.
“Probably two or three, with meals and Delfts beer. That is, if your Joris will allow it.”
“Has he ever before turned away one of your guests?” Over the years that they’d been here in Leyden, it did seem as though Magdalena and her husband entertained a lot of strangers. Just what their business was Hiltje neither knew nor cared to know. It was enough that Magdalena’s overflow was always good for Hiltje’s business.
“Nay, he never has,” Magdalena agreed. “But always before we have paid him in coins.”
Hiltje looked first at the shawl, then into her friend’s face and said knowingly, “Remember, my Joris is a lover of beautiful things, especially when they drape around his vrouw.” She nodded her head and chuckled. “In spite of all his grumbling, he has the kindest, softest heart you ever dreamed of. Of course he will allow it. It’s not as if we have a long line of folks waiting at our gates these days. War keeps people at home, unless they’re soldiers—Beggars and such.”
Already Magdalena was folding the shawl, helping her friend stash it under her cape, where she held it firmly beneath the wing of her arm. Hiltje felt her heart soar!
“I shall love to see you wearing it,” Magdalena said, a huge smile covering her narrow face with its sharp chin and nose. “When the men have finished their business for this day, I send them on to you.”
“Not before time for the evening meal is all I ask. And for your kindness, I give you gratitude.”
Hiltje hurried home across a soggy landscape pierced now and again with a shaft of sunlight. “Just like the shawl next to my heart,” she breathed and quickened her steps.
****
With two messages from Willem’s brother Jan in Dillenburg tucked away in his doublet—one for Paulus Buys and another for Willem—Pieter-Lucas accompanied his vader-in-law and Robbin to Leyden. Here he helped them find Barthelemeus and their Anabaptist weaver friends. Then he bade them farewell, delivered Paulus’ message in exchange for another for Willem, and slipped back out into the rain-slickened streets.
Dirck Engelshofen’s words followed him with each step: “When we’ve moved our printery to this place, you must bring Aletta and the children. We will yet find a way to put this family back together.”
Pieter-Lucas had smiled, slapped the older man on the shoulder, and hurried off. He had no need for his vader-in-law to coax him to bring his family to Leyden. He’d planned that far longer than Dirck Engelshofen could guess. The thought of finally living in the shadow of his famous Lucas van Leyden ancestor made the paint course madly through his blood. Instinctively he grabbed for his brushes and sighed. If only he could go straight back to Dillenburg and get them!
Ach! But Opa’s promises and Vader Dirck’s dreams were still only dreams. Aletta had just given birth and would not be ready to travel for weeks. Besides, the only artist Pieter-Lucas had found in Leyden was a boy with enthusiasm and promise. Most ominous of all, Haarlem had just fallen to Spain, and there were rumors about Leyden being next, and…
It was enough. Now was no time for dreams. Pieter-Lucas still had messages to carry to Willem in Delft. He’d hardly turned his mind into the channels where it belonged when he realized he was passing by the large plain door of the Pieterskerk. Unbidden, his heart quickened with a vision of what lay just beyond his reach. Inside those doors Lucas van Leyden’s great work, “The Last Judgment,” hung above the altar and begged him to come sneak just a peek. How often Opa had reminded him of his obligation to look at it, to learn something of the nature of his own inheritance. ’Twould only take an eyeblink of time. No need to study it now, but he was so close. He had to see it before he could move on.
Trembling, he looked back over his shoulder as if he expected someone to be watching there to pounce on him. He grasped the huge iron handle, heaving at the heavy door and shuddering when it squeaked. Leaving his shoes at the door, he glided over the cold grave-slab tiles. He shivered in the cool dampness and stared about him in the dim light of the cavernous old building with its endless aisles and vaulted ceilings.
Led by the scent of burning candles and incense, he hastened toward the high altar flanked by ornately carved pulpits. It was set off by a broad, intricately carved rood screen of the kind he’d once watched the image breakers topple to the floor with malicious glee back in Breda. Eagerly his eyes scanned the wall up behind the altar just beneath a delicate pattern of colored-glass windows, which let in jeweled blotches of light—pale yellow, deep rose, forest green, and blue the shade of Aletta’s wondering eyes.
“It’s gone!” he whispered and stared harder, unwilling to believe it. “Nay! It has to be here!”
He crawled up into the forbidden altar area and brushed past the rows of choir stalls till he stood with hands grasping the edge of the white-clothed altar. The wall gaped with nothingness, and a handful of lightning-shaped gashes marred the plaster.
“Image breakers!” he gasped. Inside, his stomach churned like the never ceasing roll of a threatening thunder in an ominous gray afternoon sky. Memories of Opa’s painting, “The Anointing,” being yanked from the wall and shredded into a hundred slivers before him on the floor at his feet haunted him. Each remembered thrust of Vader Hendrick’s parade knife pierced like a bolt of lightning in the storm intensifying in his gut.
What was this? A family curse of some sort? Nay! “The Last Judgment” had to be here somewhere, and he’d find it if it was the last thing he did. Blinded by his inner tumult, spurred by desperation, he dashed from the altar up and down the aisles of the hollow old church, searching every side altar. The little moans that escaped from his throat echoed around the walls and pillars. His search revealed nothing but more blank scarred walls.
Vader Hendrick used to tell him that the sacred altars in the papist churches were inhabited by demons. So back in the Great Church of Breda, Vader Hendrick wrenched the paintings and other sacred trappings from their places and ground them to shards into the floor. This morning Pieter-Lucas stood at the last of the altars with hands hanging at his side and heart racing topsy-turvy in his doublet. He felt as if all the demons of hell had been loosed to chase him through one more desecrated place of cold stones and suffocating incense.
He rushed out into the drizzling street and did not look back at the church. Nor did he look carefully ahead of him as he rounded a corner and headed down the street where Blesje waited in the stables. In his rush he bumped soundly into an oncoming traveler. Reaching only to his ear lobes in height, the person he collided with let out a loud “Ugh!” then sputtered, “What’s your hurry?”
“Sorry, jongen,” Pieter-Lucas stammered, grasping the boy by both arms to steady him. One look at his tam cap now knocked ajar and his knapsack hanging from one shoulder, and he gasped, “Jongen! It’s you again—Leyden’s painter!”
The boy stared at him with perplexed eyes. Before he could speak, Pieter-Lucas was demanding, “Tell me, have you ever seen ‘The Last Judgment’ that once hung above the altar in the Pieterskerk?”
The boy pulled himself free from Pieter-Lucas’ grip, wriggled into order, and answered, “Why do you want to know?”
“From the time I was just a little fellow, my opa used to tell me about that great painting. His uncle Lucas van Leyden painted it. Opa promised to bring me here someday and teach me some secrets of the painter’s art from it. He died before he could keep his promise, and I’ve been trying ever since to get here and see it. Today I get into the church and find it’s been wrenched from the wall by some image breaker!” He couldn’t believe he trembled so at the thought of it.
The boy laughed. “Didn’t belong there anyway!”
“Why not?”
“Paintings aren’t meant to be prayed to.”
Pieter-Lucas looked at the face upturned before him. Some sort of Calvinist was he? Surely not an Anabaptist! “You don’t talk like a painter!”
The boy shrugged. “That’s what my vader tells me, even though our studio is filled with my paintings.”
“Your studio? Is your vader your meester?” Pieter-Lucas caught his breath. He watched the boy still grinning, studying his expressions, clearly enjoying holding him in his grip as if dangling him over a precipice.
“My vader has strange ideas,” he drawled and pursed his lips. “Gets upset when I paint things he doesn’t like.”
“Did he like the ship you were drawing down at the harbor?” Pieter-Lucas watched carefully each expression, eager to understand this precocious artist.
“Ships are approved. We’ve painted a whole fleet of them. It’s the Beggars that make him furious. I did one of my favorite Beggar and he found it. You should see how he flew into a rage over it.”
Pieter-Lucas nodded and stared harder than ever at the boy. “I understand that kind of rage.”
The boy’s face clouded. “You do? Aren’t you a servant of Prince Willem?”
Pieter-Lucas stirred quietly for a moment. “I am, but that doesn’t make me a lover of Beggars.” Then pointing to the long arched scar below his left eye, he added, “I found myself at the piercing end of a beggar’s knife once. Mark my word. A painter can’t be too cautious of those wild creatures.”
The boy shrugged and threw him a cocky self-assured look. “Just don’t get between a Beggar and a church painting. That’s all you have to watch for.”
Pieter-Lucas gulped, then laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder and looked squarely into his mischievous eyes. “’Tisn’t so simple, jongen. I can’t take time now to tell you my story. But if you’re smart, you’ll heed my warning: Beggars are never the friends of artists—never! Don’t trust them, jongen!”
The boy laughed. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t paint church pictures!”
“Like I said, don’t trust them, or you will get hurt! Speaking of church pictures, do you know what happened to ‘The Last Judgment’?”
“Ja, I know right where it is.”
“It’s not destroyed, then?”
“Nay!”
“Can you tell me where I can find it?”
“Ja, it’s at the St. Jan’s Hospital.”
“Can you take me there some other time?”
He grinned. “I could, but it won’t help you any.”
“What do you mean?”
“They wouldn’t let you see the painting anyway.”
“Why not?”
“You might slice it with your knife.” With a disinterested air and a shrug, the boy walked away, whistling as he went.
Pieter-Lucas stared after him. “Arrogant jongen!” he mumbled. Then he rushed to the stables and was soon across the Koe Poort bridge and halfway to Delft, musing as he went, “I hope he pays a mind to what I told him—or he could pay for it with his life!”
****
A large red sun slipped near to the horizon on the edge of the pasture beyond the Zyl River and cast long shafts of golden light in through the murky glass windows of The Clever Fox Inn. One shaft caught Christoffel squarely in the eye where he sat on his three-legged stool in the corner of the raucous dining room.
The tables stood at random angles, each crowded to capacity with an assortment of tipsy seamen. All wore ragged gray doublets and balloon britches and sported tricolor flags and shiny beggar’s pennies in their caps. Around their necks hung wooden bowls and from their waists, dark brown bags, crude wine cruses, and long curved swords in plain leather sheaths.
Christoffel eyed the whole bunch, grinning. One day yet he would draw their picture just as they sat here tonight with tankards in hand, shouting, singing,
Beat the drum gaily, rub a dow, rub a dub;
Beat the drum gaily, rub a dub, rub a dow;
Beat the drum gaily, rub a dow, rub a dub;
Long live the Beggars! Is the watchword now.
An uproarious round of shouts and foot stompings ensued, and Christoffel joined in, clapping, jumping to his feet, cheering them on.
“Tell us the story of Den Brill!” shouted Christoffel. He’d heard this story from these same men more times than he’d counted. But he could never hear it one time too many!
“Den Brill! Den Brill!” he joined in the chant with the men, stamping out its rhythm with cloddish feet in the rushes that covered the old clay tiles.
On the first of April
Alva lost his Brill!
Christoffel joined, too, in the loud cheers that followed. He knew the rhyme well—a play on words it was. Den Brill (The Eyeglasses) was the name of a small sea town on the North Sea that Alva had under his power until the sea Beggars sailed in and captured it on the first of April 1572.
The men tipped up their tankards and guzzled down boorish draughts of Delfts beer—the best Vader Joris could buy. Then they swiped at dripping beards with the back of tattered sleeves and grinned broad gleeful grins.
“Tell us the story, Oude Man,” they shouted, all shoving one older man to his feet.
“Ja, Oude Man,” Christoffel echoed. Nobody told stories like he did. He made them brave and adventurous enough to stir any boy’s blood.
The man scowled at his audience, stood to his feet, and took one enormous puff on his long-stemmed pipe. Something in his fierce countenance made Christoffel think of the words of the stranger he’d met today in Leyden. “Never trust a Beggar.”
Christoffel lifted his head and laughed. That stranger didn’t know this Beggar!
“Looks just like my opa,” he mumbled. “Dark, fierce, and strong, he has a voice big enough to make a whole building tremble.”
The man was squinting out at them all with small eyes and patting a paunchy stomach, holding a tankard in one hand and pipe in the other. He cleared his throat and began. “It happened on a gloriously lucky day! The Queen o’ Engeland had chased us from her ports, and we was a-driftin’ homeward, a-fumin’ and a-wonderin’.”
The men moaned in unison and repeated after him, “a-fumin’ and a-wonderin’!”
He puffed once more on his pipe, and while the smoke swirled round his head, he went on with his story. “Then the winds o’ Providence reached down and blowed us wildly, straight for the port o’ Den Brill. Nobody was expectin’ us—’specially not Alva. Didn’t have a single Spaniard waitin’ for us in the town!”
A shout of “Long live the Beggars!” rose from the tables all around, and tankards clinked, and loud sounds of guzzling and foot stomping once more filled the air.
They all paused and waited till the old man began again. “We gave the town exactly two hours to surrender. And did the abominable papists ever scurry to try to escape! But we got ’em all.”
From the far end of the room, a younger voice piped, “We raided their idol-hole churches!” Shouts followed from all over the room.
“Smashed their images!”
“Sliced up their fancy altar paintings!”
“Turned the windows into slivers.”
Christoffel watched his vader frown directly at him, then slink off into the shadows. This part of the story brought Christoffel more pleasure than all the rest. While it was an awful thing to think about paintings being destroyed, deep down inside he knew that paintings and statues were not supposed to be worshiped. He’d learned it from his old oma. Before she died, she’d told him a hundred times that God had given Ten Commandments and the second one said you should not pray to anything you could make with your own hands. Surely what the Beggars did in the churches was right. Why couldn’t Vader see it? Had Oma never told him?
The old man was in control once more. “It was just like going back to 1566 and the image-breaking fever. So long we’d been badgered about, we was like men nearly starved into a frenzy—ready for any little crumbs of victory what might fall from the duke’s fancy tables. The sacking of this place was more like the king’s own spread. It fed our lean blood with a strength what had to be divine!”
With one voice, the crowd burst again into song, the same tune as the first stanza:
The Spanish Inquisition, without intermission—
The Spanish Inquisition has drunk our blood;
The Spanish Inquisition, may God’s malediction
Blast the Spanish Inquisition and all her brood.
Vader Joris was pacing the floor now, hands clasped behind his back, a frown knitting his brow. It was almost more than the man could do to keep from stopping his ears with greasy fingers and shouting orders to his guests to cease their uncouth rowdiness. Christoffel knew his mood well. Christoffel had heard him and Moeder discuss it more than once. Moeder always won. “It’s the business, my man, the business!”
The men were all on their feet dancing around the room now. The old man had stationed himself on the table and went on with a wild abandon. “We loaded our choice loot, gleaned from the churches and abbeys and cellars, onto our beautiful beggar ships and sailed down the Hollandse delta in rare style. In marvelous madness we shed our ragged beggar’s uniforms and replaced them with rich holy robes, glittering vestments, cowls, and mitres. We swarmed over our ships like a flock of crazed priests, bowing and scraping to one another, calling our beggar brothers, ‘Your Holiness.’”
They burst into the final stanza of the war song that came so easily from their lips:
Long live the Beggars! Wilt thou Christ’s word cherish—
Long live the Beggars! Be bold of heart and hand;
Long live the Beggars! God will not see thee perish;
Long live the Beggars! Oh, noble Christian band.
The old man lifted his tankard high and laughed a deep foghorn laugh. But before he had brought the vessel to his lips, he stared openmouthed at the doorway, a look of shocked terror freezing him into momentary inaction. Then suddenly he shrunk downward and slid off the table, burying himself between his now silent companions.
Christoffel looked toward the door where two strangers had just entered the room. One, a tall straight man, solemnly surveyed the situation. Beside him a boy of about his own age stood gripping a large black bag in his right hand.
Vader Joris moved officiously across the room. With a wave in the direction of his rowdy guests, he announced, “The feast is over! Now off to your rooms, and remember, we run a respectable resting haven here.” Then he wiped his hand on his apron and reached out to welcome his latest guests.
Christoffel sat in stunned silence and watched as the Beggars tumbled clumsily, grousing and jostling one another, from the room. Normally Vader left the rowdy bunch till half of them had collapsed on or under the tables before insisting that they cart one another off to their rooms upstairs. In the confusion Christoffel searched for the old man who’d been filled with such unquestioning bravado one moment and had turned so fearful the next. But he’d managed to obscure himself completely. What was he running from?
Christoffel glared at the newcomers with pinched eyes. “What have they done to him?” he mumbled. Then, before his vader could arrest him and insist on his offering the boy any sort of hospitality, Christoffel slipped out into the hall and hurried to his cupboard bed on the back wall of the family room. Tomorrow would be soon enough to face this one.