Christoffel had barely peeled off his doublet and crawled only halfway into his bed cupboard when he heard the excited barking of the dogs that guarded the inn. Hurriedly backing out, he landed with stockinged feet on the floor and rushed to peer out the window. The innyard lay in undisturbed array, bathed in the eerie wash of a sparkling moon peering between heaped-up clouds.
“Did Oude Man run away?” he mused. First time he’d ever seen the man so agitated. Something about those strangers at the door did it. They didn’t look dangerous. Not Spanish soldiers or government officials. What was it? Holy men of some sort? They weren’t dressed like clerics or monks, and one was just a boy. Looked like an ordinary traveling merchant with his son.
It shouldn’t matter a clog to Christoffel what the old man did or why. Unless, of course, the newcomers were more dangerous than they looked. Vader Joris didn’t seem worried. In fact, he almost looked as if he expected them, was glad to see them come and bring a halt to the drinking and storytelling. He probably was. Vader Joris didn’t like the Beggars’ wild celebrations.
Christoffel didn’t want Oude Man to go away and never come back. The way he told all those stories about the brave and dangerous life he and the others had was so exciting! It made him want to be a Beggar himself, almost worse than anything—as long as they’d let him carry his charcoals along.
So it did matter what had happened to the old man. Without pausing to put on his doublet, he padded in stocking feet past the cupboard bed where his two sisters slept, grabbed a stool, placed it below the window, and climbed up onto it. Lifting the frame with its precious glass, he pushed the window away and let himself out through the hole. He landed as lightly as possible, then scampered around the house, steering well clear of the kitchen door where he knew his moeder was preparing dinner for the late-arriving guests. With care he darted from one clump of trees to the next until he’d let himself out of the gate. Leaning hard against the giant oak tree that held up The Clever Fox Inn sign, he looked both directions along the trekpath.
He could see the lone figure of a man hurrying away, halfway to the junction with the road that ran to Leyden. Staying close to the trees and shrubs lest he be detected, Christoffel followed. The moon moved in and out behind the clouds, sometimes leaving the way so dark he could scarcely see the figure he pursued. Always the wind blew the river in little swishing slaps against the bank beside him, and now and again a mournful owl swooped into a tree above his head and startled him with its sudden screeching.
From deep inside a voice began prodding, What did you come out here for, jongen? But he shoved it down.
“Got to find my favorite Beggar what’s been chased out of my house. Can’t stop for shivery breezes, eerie shadows, and hooting owls.”
The fleeing man slowed his pace once he joined the Rhine trekpath. He had almost reached the Zyl Poort Bridge before Christoffel came within easy reach of him. Now as the moon shown full on the man’s pointed beard, Christoffel stared hard from behind a clump of bushes. “It’s him all right,” he told himself. Then wiping his hands on his breeches and smoothing down the pell-mell racing of his heart, he sprinted forward. Just before he reached the man, he stepped into a huge mud puddle. The stillness of the evening was shattered with the splash.
Instantly the man wheeled about and faced him.
“Who dares to chase after me?” he demanded in an angry tone and pointed a knife directly at the boy.
Christoffel gasped, covering his mouth with his hand, springing back, stumbling once more into the water. He’d never seen the man like this before! In the back of his mind, he heard the words “Never trust a Beggar” echoing and reechoing!
“Jongen!” the Beggar shouted without pulling back the knife. “What are you doing out here?”
Christoffel opened his mouth, but no words came out.
“You got Dirck Engelshofen’s jongen with you?” he asked, his dark eyes glinting menacingly in the moonlight.
“Wh-who?” Christoffel stammered.
“What do you mean, ‘Wh-who?’”
“I…I don’t know either Dirck whatever or his son, sir. I swear to God and all the holy angels.” Confusion rolled through his chest like a thunderstorm that never stops. He must be calm.
“Humph!” the Beggar grunted. “Then what you doin’ out here in the middle of the night?”
If only he’d put the knife away! Christoffel swallowed hard, wiped his hands on his breeches once more, then looked up and said as calmly as he could, “I couldn’t bear to see you run out of our house by strangers.”
Slowly a hint of a smirk crept over the man’s face. As he stared at the boy, he began to chuckle and twirl the knife in his hand. “What makes you think any strangers ran me out of your vader’s inn?”
Christoffel stood speechless for a long moment. “Why, I watched the look on your face when you saw the man and boy in our doorway. You slid down off the table awful fast!”
Still chuckling, still twirling the knife, the old man said, “You got a lot to learn, jongen.” Then stuffing the knife into its sheath, he said evenly, “You’d best run home to your vader and your idolatrous painting—and let me take care o’ myself.”
Trembling, Christoffel pleaded, “Promise me you’ll come back and tell us some more of your stories!”
The man pointed to his own chest and asked in an incredulous voice, “My stories?”
“Nobody tells them like you do. Tonight when you told us about Den Brill again, I was ready to put on a beggar’s suit and walk out of there with you and never go back.”
The man stood quietly, staring a hole through the boy. Then he reached out and placed a finger under Christoffel’s quivering chin. The boy recoiled at the touch. “Stories are for drinkin’ over and shoutin’ and singin’ ‘Long live the Beggars!’ But beggarin’ is about swingin’ a sword and squeezin’ the life out of a papist priest and smashin’ shiny colored glass windows—and slicin’ altar paintings.”
Christoffel gulped. “I…is that what you do?” He felt rivulets of sweat running down the back of his neck and legs and refused to let his mind paint pictures for him of what his beggar hero had just described.
The man laughed that same foghorn laugh Christoffel remembered from the end of his great performance on the inn table. He wagged his finger under the boy’s nose and roared, “Ja, that’s what we do. Like I say, beggarin’ ain’t for jongens—or for painters! Now, be off to your vader and your paintbrushes. And if I catch you doggin’ my steps again, be it day or night, you’ll not find me half so kind as I am this night. Do you hear me?”
“Ja!” Christoffel nodded and backed up a few steps. Then with one final look at the angry man who was already crossing the Zyl Poort Bridge, he turned and ran for home.
****
With the first appearance of daylight, Christoffel jumped from his bed, pulled on his breeches and doublet, and dashed out into the fresh morning. At the entrance to the stable, his vader met him with a look of perplexed firmness.
“Early, aren’t you?” Vader Joris asked.
Without stopping, the boy tried to squeeze past him through the doorway. “Ja, well, it’s a sunny morning,” he said nervously.
Vader Joris grabbed him by one shoulder and spun him around to face him head on. “Wait a minute here, son. Any time you’re this eager to get to work, you have a plan. You will tell me about it.”
Christoffel squirmed. “Please just let me go. I have some drawing to do today.”
Vader Joris pursed his lips and nodded, obviously in no hurry to bring this conversation to a quick conclusion. “Something I can help you with?”
Stifling a sigh and forcing a smile, he answered, “Nay, that’s all right. I just heard one of the Beggars last night say they’d be moving their last ship out of the harbor soon, and I need one more good sketch.” Surely he couldn’t object to that.
“You’ve already done a hundred paintings since they began sailing in and out of Leyden at the end of Haarlem’s siege. I need you to stay close to home today, maybe make friends with the boy who came in with his vader last night.”
“Vader,” he whined, “I don’t know him, and he probably wouldn’t even like me, and besides, they didn’t come here to visit the innkeeper’s family. Probably traveling through and anxious to be on their way.”
“The truth of the matter is, they’ll be with us for two or three more nights—here on some business with a friend of your moeder’s in the city.”
“Then let me get my work done now and go. Sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back. I just got to get this view to make my collection complete. Besides, this might be the day they sail away. Don’t you understand?”
Vader screwed up his nose, scratched the back of his head, and sighed. “You could take the boy with you.”
“What? You know a painter doesn’t take a stranger along on a drawing spree! Let me go now and I’ll be back!” The last person in the world he wanted to meet was the boy whose vader had frightened his favorite Beggar away.
Vader Joris raised both hands, shrugged, and looked painfully resigned. “All right. All right! But get your work done first, do you hear me?”
“Ja, Vader, that shall I do!” With a sprint, he was off into the stables.
Never had he applied himself with such diligence or speed to the task of brushing the horses and feeding all the animals about the inn. He did not dally to play with the new brood of kittens, nor kick stray pebbles across the skittle field, nor sit in the morning sun and whittle at a stick. He stayed as far as possible from the house and people who could slow him down.
He’d just curried the last horse and was feeding the chickens when he heard the Beggars shouting from the inn.
“Ach!” he mumbled. “Got to go now!”
He grabbed his knapsack from its peg inside the stable, then made his way around the edges of the innyard, over the stone fence, and onto the trekpath.
“I’ll get there before they do yet,” he told himself, feeling proud and smug and terribly wise. “I’ll not have to talk to the stranger boy, and the Beggars will never see me where I sit to draw!”
In as short a time as he’d ever made the trip, Christoffel was creeping into his safe drawing place at the base of the ancient citadel overlooking the harbor. Mysterious tales of soldiers raining down flaming arrows on their enemies below sounded in his mind like some stories his beggar friends might tell. Only, Oude Man would have scars on his arms or legs or forehead to prove he’d been there and hadn’t always stayed protected inside the citadel.
Christoffel walked carefully around the section of the wall that overlooked the harbor, searching for just the right view of the tattered old ship. If only he could go inside the citadel and view it through one of the arrow slits! He finally chose a spot that highlighted the ship’s proud bulkhead, intricately carved with lions and sea monsters and twining plants. Once, long ago, it had been gilded with gold and painted with bright greens, reds, blues, and yellows.
Since its last encounter with a paintbrush, it had plowed through many a fierce battle with Alva’s Spanish galleons in the river estuaries and city moats of the Low Lands and with the winds and waves on the high seas between here and Engeland.
So eager for his morning’s venture that his fingers trembled, Christoffel perched on the rock ledge beside the citadel wall and removed the canvas and charcoal from his knapsack. Sturdy willow charcoal sticks they were, well baked in Vader Joris’ oven, perfect for drawing with clear firm lines and for making enough subtle shadings to remind him how it should be painted. Quickly he outlined the prow nudging up against the bridge, the sail-wrapped masts and tricolor flags, the clean-swept decks where a flock of Beggars now swarmed about. He could hear their voices wafting on the breeze, smell the fishy musty harbor smells, watch the gulls soar and dive around it.
When he’d filled in the roof lines and trees and shrubs in the foreground, he held his work at arm’s length and smiled. “Aha! Just the view I always wanted!” he murmured and heard himself singing the martial melody he’d heard so often, “Long live the Beggars! Oh, noble Christian band!”
From behind him, he heard an unexpected echo, “Long live the painter! So keen of eye and hand!”
He turned to see the boy who’d come to the inn last night. Standing several paces behind him, the boy was clapping his hands and laughing vigorously. Dressed in a plain rust brown suit of clothes, a profusion of straw-colored curls protruded out from under his feathered cap with the narrow brim. A mischievous light danced in his gray-blue eyes.
“Who are you?” Christoffel demanded.
“Robbin is my name,” he said with a smug smile, “and you’re Christoffel.”
Christoffel held his painting behind him and swiveled fully around to face his uninvited guest. “Are you the stranger who came to my door last night and frightened away Oude Man?”
Robbin pointed at himself. “Me? Frighten anybody?” He laughed again, his voice like a brook running over stones, sometimes flying off in a high key skyward.
“You knew the old Beggar who was standing on the table telling his story, didn’t you?” Christoffel looked at the boy with narrowing eyes. “You and your vader came to our inn with the intent of chasing him away. What did he ever do to you?”
Robbin raised both hands and protested. “Hei! Halt! I don’t know anybody in this place. Never been here before. Your moeder’s friend didn’t have room to sleep us, so she sent us to The Clever Fox Inn. Believe me, that’s the whole truth!”
“Humph! Just shows how much you know. Your vader knows the old Beggar, all right. Maybe not from Leyden, but from somewhere he knows him!”
Robbin shrugged. “He didn’t say anything to me, and it’s for sure I don’t know him. Look, I didn’t come here to make a quarrel. It’s just that I think we’re getting ready to go get my moeder and come live here, and I was hoping maybe you and I could be friends.”
“Where you moving from?” Christoffel asked, bracing himself against the unknown danger that he felt creeping upon him from this too friendly boy.
Leaning close, half looking over his shoulders and lowering his voice, Robbin answered, “We’ve been in Engeland for a long time. But my parents don’t like it there. They say it’s not home, and besides, my sister lives in Germany.”
Christoffel looked the boy over. Skinny legs and arms, sharp nose and small chin. Probably not too good at heaving manure but could be a good runner. Warily, he muttered, “You really want to live here?”
Robbin shrugged. “I don’t know yet. We’ve lived so many places I don’t know where home is, except with my parents.”
Christoffel sighed and wondered if they had anything in common to be friends about. “Can you paint a picture?” he asked at last.
Robbin laughed. “Nay, not too good at that. My sister’s husband is, though—paints and draws and carves the most perfect little animals you ever imagined from a block of wood. I write poems to go with the paintings.” He reached out toward Christoffel’s canvas. “Let’s see, what can I do with your picture? Maybe something like,
Decks all scrubbed, flags a-fluttering in the breeze,
The stout and mighty ship strains its anchor as it heaves—
“Nay,” Christoffel protested, raising a hand. “Not now.” Then quickly, eager to change the subject, “Can you ride a horse?”
“When I get a chance,” Robbin answered.
“How’s your skittles game?”
“Always wanted to learn. Would you teach me?”
“Maybe,” Christoffel grunted. Then he watched his strange visitor reach into his pocket and pull out a scuffed wooden top and an eelskin whip. With nimble fingers, he wound the thong of the whip tightly around the top. Then with a flared twist of the wrist, he threw it to the ground and sent it on a gliding spin across the hard-packed dirt of the pathway that ran around the citadel. With a skill Christoffel didn’t want to recognize, he whipped it into a long spin. When at last it stopped, Robin held up the whip. “Here, you do it,” he challenged, a triumphant smile lighting up his thin face.
Christoffel took the whip with sweaty fingers, and picking up the now silent top, he wound it tight. Top spinning wasn’t the thing he did best. At least he’d done it enough so he could send it spinning toward his challenger—wobbling just a little, but moving.
“Here, let me try it again,” Christoffel begged.
The next one went better—more fun than he’d expected. Before he knew it, he and the new boy were laughing together over the top and its lively gyrations up and down the pathway.
Then just when Christoffel managed to send it on a perfectly smooth spin, Robbin nudged him with his elbow and begged, “Can I watch you paint your picture?”
Christoffel ignored him, cheering on the top. “Look, it’s not wobbling a bit!”
Robbin was not looking. “I can always do the best poems while I watch the painter.”
“You missed it, dumbhead!”
“Nay, I saw it. Really good, but I was just thinking about the poem to go with your picture. Can I watch you paint it? Please!”
Christoffel stood glaring at the boy. “Nay!”
“Why not?”
If only the boy would go away! Everything was fine as long as they spun the top. But to take him into the studio? That was too much! Besides, Vader Joris had one rule he never, never broke or even bent the tiniest bit—nobody was ever allowed into his studio.
“My meester won’t let you in his studio ’cause you’re not a painter,” he said.
“Oh!” Robbin backed away.
Christoffel began stuffing his things into his knapsack. Aware that Robbin was chattering on about finding somewhere else to paint, he tried not to listen. Then his ears picked up the loud shouting of the Beggars, and he looked down to see the sails on the ship loosening and the ship slowly turning around.
“They’re leaving!” he muttered. “Toward the Rhinesburger Poort.”
“Who’s leaving?” came Robbin’s voice from behind him.
“The Beggars!”
Grabbing his knapsack, Christoffel bounded to his feet and skittered down the hill and into the street. In no time he ran up alongside the old creaking ship on the trekpath. The Beggars were waving at him and he shouted back, “Long live the Beggars!”
He followed through the street until the Rhinesburger Bridge was drawn. Robbin trotted along at his side, chattering all the way. Christoffel ignored him. At last the ship began moving through the harbor on the final stretch of its journey beyond the city. As he gave the ship one last wave and shout, he saw Oude Man standing on the aft deck shaking a fist at him and shouting. The wind blew the man’s voice back into his face, and Christoffel could not make out a word.
He stood watching till the ship had slipped over the horizon and the harbor buzzed with its normal daily sounds. Then jabbing his unshakable companion in the ribs with an elbow, he snarled, “It’s all your fault!”
“What’s all my fault?”
“The old Beggar knows your vader—Dirck somebody, right?”
“Ja!”
“Well, they’re enemies for some reason. So when the Beggar saw you with me and recognized you from last night, he thought I’d brought you down here to spy on him. He’ll never come back to the inn, and I’ll never again hear him tell his wonderful stories.”
“Sorry,” Robbin muttered. “Like I said, I never saw him before. Looks like he might be a kind of dangerous man to have around.”
Christoffel worried a pebble with the toe of his shoe, kicking it ahead of him as he walked. “Look, why don’t you just leave me alone?” he groused.
“I guess you don’t want to be my friend, then?”
Christoffel didn’t look up but thought hard for a long minute. “Nay!” he mumbled. “I never invited you to come trailing after me in the first place.”
“Very well!” Robbin said with a saucy tilt of the head. “I’ll go find one somewhere else.”
Without another word or glance in Christoffel’s direction, the boy with the wild blond curls scurried off toward the market.
“Good!” Christoffel shouted at the figure already disappearing around the corner. “And don’t bother to come back!”
With a huge sigh and a smug laugh, Christoffel clapped his hands and took off running toward home. “Got to get out of here quick before he changes his mind.”
****
It was late at night when Pieter-Lucas arrived in Delft and found Willem headquartered in the picturesque old building that had until recently housed the nuns of the St. Agatha cloister. Shut up in a small room in the far corner of the upper story, Willem sat alone, bent intently over a pile of papers on a large wooden table. A single oil lamp burned before him and cast elongated shadows on the plain white plastered walls.
“Greetings, Your Excellency,” Pieter-Lucas said.
“Ah, you’ve brought me a message.” Willem looked up, and the lamplight turned the deep wrinkles on the tired face into almost eerie shadows.
“Two of them,” Pieter-Lucas said, putting the sealed documents into his prince’s outstretched hand. “One from your brother Jan and another from Paulus Buys.”
“Not more news of disaster, I hope.” Willem quickly devoured his notes, looked up, and said simply, “Go to your rest for the night. I shall call you in the morning when I have new notes ready.”
Pieter-Lucas slipped quietly out into the damp silence of the old “holy place” down the long hall and stairway to the kitchen, where he found a cook to give him a cup of soup and a crust of bread. Shortly he was sleeping soundly between soldiers, armed guards, and servants in the large sleeping room a few paces down the hall from the prince’s room. All night long he dreamed that he was bringing Aletta and the children to Leyden. They were waylaid, first by robbers, then floods, and finally by a crowd of angry Beggars swarming off the ship in the Leyden harbor.
He awoke suddenly to the sound of excited voices. “Wake up! The prince needs every armed man in this room.”
The room was dark yet, but one look out the single high window told him the sky was already turning pink in the east. He raised up on his elbows to see men scrambling to their feet, pulling on breeches and doublets, grabbing swords and spears, and stumbling out the door.
What danger could it be? He pulled on his breeches and padded across the room. Opening the door a slight crack, he peered out into the hallway. A crowd of soldiers and guards swarmed the way between their sleeping room and Willem’s. Pieter-Lucas could make out two or three men in the middle, dressed in the dark capes and wide-brimmed hats of Baltic merchantmen.
“Merchantmen visiting the prince in his bed at dawn?” he muttered to himself.
“Smells like a rotten eel, if you ask me” came a voice from behind him. He turned to see one of the kitchen servants sitting up on his sleeping mat, hair sticking up in all directions.
“What happened?” Pieter-Lucas asked, running fingers through his own curls and putting on his cap.
“Don’t know,” the servant said, yawning and lying back down. “Heard somebody say something about supplies for Ludwig’s troops.”
“At this hour?” Pieter-Lucas shook his head.
“Ah, they comes and they goes at all the hours of the night in this place,” the servant drawled. “Might as well go back to sleep.”
Pieter-Lucas could not think about sleep. Whatever the business of the strangers newly arrived, they would give Willem something to write to his brothers about—or the burgemeesters of who-knew-which city, and Pieter-Lucas’ services would soon be required. Besides, if the eel was rotten, how could he sleep while his prince was in any sort of danger?
He slipped out the door into the low-ceilinged hallway, still crowded with soldiers and guards shifting on restless legs. They broke the silence with a periodic grumbling between themselves, mostly about interrupted sleep, and punctuated it with an occasional jostling of spears against each other.
The wait grew long, until Pieter-Lucas’ lame leg began to hurt, and he entertained a few grumbling thoughts of his own. When at last the prince’s door opened and the merchants marched back through the lines of now attentive soldiers, he managed one more glimpse of them passing by.
Baltic merchants? he asked himself. With those dark faces and mustachios, I would guess they were Spaniards with shifty eyes and some mischievous mission having nothing to do with the sale of army supplies or any other sort of goods.
His heart beat wildly. As soon as the procession of visitors and their attendant guards had passed, he rushed to the door of the prince’s room. The guards that met him there would not let him enter.
“The prince is not ready for you yet,” one guard said, and the spears the men held high made their word believable.
Shortly, though, the door swung open from the inside, and another guard stepped through. He turned toward the sleeping room and nearly ran into Pieter-Lucas.
“Ah!” he cried out in surprise, “just the man I search for. Prince Willem asks for you.”
He ushered him quickly into the prince’s room, where candles were burning from every corner. The prince sat at his table, his nightcap still covering his head, scribbling on a paper before him.
“Excellency, you called for me,” Pieter-Lucas said with a short bow.
“Ah, jongen,” he mumbled without looking up.
Willem had known Pieter-Lucas for so many years that even yet now at times he called him jongen. Always it stirred something deep and warm in Pieter-Lucas, made him feel as if he had a vader looking after him.
“I need you to take these messages to my brothers for me.”
“I am at your service—and the service of your armies.”
Willem went on writing, mumbling as he scratched his pen across the paper, “Baltic merchants, indeed! Spanish soldiers! I knew it before I saw the whites of their eyes.” After a long pause, he wailed, “Forty thousand guilders to buy a city! Ach, me!”
Pieter-Lucas snatched each disconnected line. For what seemed forever, he waited and watched and tried to make sense of it. He was only a messenger, and it was not always his privilege to know the nature of the messages that he bore. Sometimes it was not even good for him to know. This time he already knew too much to let it lie easily.
With a heavy sigh Willem laid down his pen, folded the letters, and sealed them.
“Is it a trap?” Pieter-Lucas ventured hesitantly.
Willem eyed him, frowning. “I think not. The men were Alva’s unpaid troops—mutinying soldiers from Haarlem. Such things happen all the time. All the same, my soldiers will not quickly leave the impostors without a hole-peeping presence.”
“Strange!” Pieter-Lucas muttered. “Ludwig’s men mutiny before a battle. They refuse to fight till they have coins jingling in their pockets. Do Spaniards always mutiny after a battle?”
Willem nodded. “Always! Something in their blood is eager for the victory, they rush forward pell-mell and win the battle, then mutiny and render their general’s victory fruitless. I still can’t believe they offered me Haarlem—for only forty thousand guilders of unpaid wages for the soldiers Alva left to guard it.” He shook his head.
“Then you will do it?” Pieter-Lucas felt his heart leap with hope.
“It might as well have been a million!” the prince moaned. “Even if we managed to raise the money, nothing would come of it!”
“You think they could make good on their offer?”
“If enough of the soldiers occupying the city are in agreement with the idea, and Alva doesn’t learn of it soon enough to stop them.”
“Would they?”
Willem grunted. “What I expect is that Alva will scrape the money from some helpless victim’s barrel, quell his mutiny, and not only keep Haarlem locked up but proceed to put the siege in order against Alkmaar as well.”
He picked up the messages and handed them to Pieter-Lucas. “One to Ludwig in France, the other to Jan in Dillenburg. They need to know this latest reason for watchfulness.” He smiled briefly. “Carry them as quickly as possible. And in Dillenburg, take a moment with your vrouw. I pray God every day that this war will soon end so you and all our men can return to your families.”
“Before the children are grown?” Pieter-Lucas heard the words escape from his heart.
“Before the children are grown.” Willem nodded with a half smile.
Pieter-Lucas bowed, then hurried out into the newborn day.