The golden glow of morning turned gray before it had passed through the wavery leaded-glass window panes into the drafty old building where the refugees from The Clever Fox Inn had spent the night. Pieter-Lucas awoke on his straw-filled mat on the floor of the warehouse and looked at his vrouw beside him. Blinking at the new day, she looked as bewildered as he felt.
“At least we’re together,” he mumbled, reaching out a hand to caress her cheek.
“And safe, with our children at our side,” she added, her voice a whisper.
“Later on today we can move into the upper story with the printery,” Pieter-Lucas said, stroking his vrouw’s arm.
“Is there room for us up there among the presses and correction tables? And is it warm enough?”
“I haven’t looked myself, but your vader assures me it will work. There are two rooms—one for us and the other for your family. That way the innkeeper and his family can have the ground floor.”
“Will they have always to sleep on this cold floor?” Aletta, the physicke, frowned.
“Nay. The plan has always been to build in a few cupboard beds. I’m sure the men who have so far concentrated on preparing the printery will now do them.”
Aletta sighed. “Ah, my dear husband, how many strange and fearful obstacles have lain in our pathway! Things we never dreamed when we were children playing in the wood across from Prince Willem’s kasteel in Breda.”
“Youth does not include nightmares in its dreams for the future.”
“Nor do they know how faithfully their Vader in the Heaven can take care of them.”
Pieter-Lucas raised himself on an elbow and looked about the room, taking a mental count of bodies on the floor. Except for Mieke, who always slept in the out-of-doors, everyone else seemed to be still resting. Dirck and Gretta and Robbin, and on the other side of the room, Hiltje and Joris and two lumpish, child-sized bodies. Nay, but there should be three. Who was missing?
At this moment Hiltje raised her head and looked over her family. She grabbed her husband, shook him, and shrieked, “Joris, your son is gone!” Her voice bounced around the tall walls and high ceiling of the big room.
Pieter-Lucas held Aletta by the hand, as if she needed his protection from the unhappy voices cannonading the air about them.
Hiltje scrambled out of her place and began rummaging through the feather bags beside her, muttering, “Christoffel, where are you?” Girlish voices protested.
Joris raised himself quickly to his elbows and asked, “And the pictures?”
“Is that all you can think about?” she retorted. “What about the boy?”
“He’s at least big enough and smart enough to take care of himself, but…if the pictures are gone…Ach! Vrouw, you have no idea…no idea at all.”
Hiltje smacked her hands together and squatted down beside him. “You’re right. I have no idea why you can’t forget the paintings for once. All they have ever done is to get us into trouble. Now tell me, where might Christoffel be hiding out?”
“Among the trees at the foot of the citadel. Oh! I must go see what he’s done!” He started to get up but lay immediately back down.
“I’ll go for him,” Pieter-Lucas called out.
Hiltje looked at him as if she’d not known he was in the room until this moment. “Bless you,” she stammered.
“You sure you know where the citadel is?” Joris mumbled.
“That much I cannot miss,” Pieter-Lucas assured him. He nudged Robbin, who was wriggling farther down into his bed. “Want to come along? You’ll know exactly where he is, I’d wager.”
Robbin yawned and ran fingers through his mussed hair. “Ja,” he groused, “I’ll go.”
Pieter-Lucas gave his vrouw a squeeze about the shoulders and whispered to her, “I do believe that man is the painter his son told me about.” He shook his head slowly. “Nobody but a painter talks that way about lost paintings. We’ll be back shortly.”
Minutes later Robbin and Pieter-Lucas were hurrying through the streets. A more pleasant autumn morning one could not imagine. Neither foggy nor raining, not hot, not cold. Leaves of red and gold and crackling dry brown drifted gracefully to the ground all around them, brushing their heads and shoulders.
“I wonder how far away the Spaniards are,” Pieter-Lucas said, breathing deeply of the refreshing air.
“What’ll happen to us when they come?” Robbin asked. “Will we starve?”
Pieter-Lucas shrugged and put down the tiny wave of fear that begged his attention. “Leyden has been preparing for this for a long while,” he said. “They have a whole shipload of extra food stored away. It was bound for Haarlem’s relief and never got through.”
“How long will it last?”
“You’re talking like we already have a siege.”
Robbin shrugged. “How do you know we don’t?”
Pieter-Lucas felt a somersault tumbling in his chest. How did he know indeed? Prodded by a fresh urgency, he sped up his pace. “Siege or no siege, we must find your friend. Do you think he’ll be up there by the citadel?”
“Ja! He likes it up there. Until the rumors kept us out of the city, he used to run in here every day and look down on the city. He called it his ‘window on the city’ and was always talking about how he hoped one day he’d see the Beggars defend Leyden through the slits in the citadel walls, like Leyden’s armies used to do in the long-ago days.”
Pieter-Lucas shivered. “I hope we don’t have to see such a thing. You never know how ugly war and fighting are until you see it once. Nothing glorious about it at all! There’s a lot of good reasons why our Children of God refuse to carry arms. War can’t be God’s way—just can’t be.”
“Not even when Alva comes waving a sword at you?”
Pieter-Lucas sighed. “I’ve been struggling with a good answer to that one for almost as many years as you’ve been alive. I still don’t know for sure.”
They were climbing the stairs toward the citadel now. Halfway up, Pieter-Lucas stopped short and took Robbin by one shoulder. “Tell me, Robbin,” he begged, “this boy, Christoffel, he really is a painter, isn’t he? I mean, if the work he showed me was his own, he is a painter.”
“Ja, he’s a good painter all right.”
“Is his vader his meester? Did they have a studio at The Clever Fox Inn?”
“He always told me that was true. And once his vader went away, Christoffel said he wouldn’t paint anymore. He never would explain, refused to talk about it.”
“Did you ever see the studio?”
Robbin looked about as if fearful someone might hear and answered in a whisper. “He never took me there. Said his vader wouldn’t allow it. But one time when I was walking around the buildings, I peeked through the windows of a room at the end. Inside I saw tables and easels with paintings on them. There were pictures hanging on all the walls, like I never saw before, and all kinds of bottles and painter’s palettes. If that wasn’t a studio, I don’t know what else.”
Pieter-Lucas sighed. “Aha! So it must be true. Then Christoffel is hiding out up here somewhere with all the paintings. I wonder what Joris paints that he doesn’t want the rest of us to see.”
They moved on up the stairs in silence and were just ready to go around to the backside of the old tower when Robbin gasped and stopped short.
“Look!” he said in a loud whisper. “The door is open!”
Pieter-Lucas stared at the old weather-scarred door standing ajar. “You think he went inside?” he asked.
“No doubting that. Every time he climbs these steps, he pushes on the door before he goes around to the backside. ‘One day I’ll find it open,’ he says, and looks like he did this time.”
Robbin shoved the door wide open and edged through. Pieter-Lucas followed him into a large grassy enclosure with a handful of trees and a well in the center. A stairway led to a high walkway that ran all the way around and formed a circle of alcoves beneath, where the wall was indeed pierced at regular intervals with narrow slits.
Several groups of people stood on the upper walkway, talking, pointing out across the countryside. To Pieter-Lucas’ and Robbin’s right, in an alcove partially hidden by the stairway, they saw Christoffel. He was sitting on a large stone, peering through an arrow slit and drawing on a canvas. They crept up behind him until Pieter-Lucas could read the large letters across the top of the sheet: THE SIEGE OF LEYDEN HAS BEGUN.
“How do you know the siege has begun?” he asked.
Christoffel answered as evenly as if they’d been standing behind him for hours. “Look for yourself and you’ll see.”
Pieter-Lucas stooped down and looked through the long narrow hole in the stonework. “Spanish troops everywhere!” He whistled. “It’s a siege all right.”
He stepped back to watch the young artist at work. Propped up beside the canvas was a large painting of a Beggar with the title underneath, “The Storyteller,” and another of the ships in the harbor. He was using them as models, adding a boat full of the rowdy patriots coming on to the scene from the upper right corner. Pieter-Lucas examined the Beggar carefully, then sucked in a quick breath. It was an amazing likeness of Hendrick van den Garde!
“Is that your special beggar friend?” Pieter-Lucas asked. “The one your vader didn’t want you to paint?”
“What if it is?” Christoffel defended without interrupting his work.
What indeed? It meant the man was still alive. Often Pieter-Lucas had wondered. The last time they had met was out on the shores of the Ems River, after the disastrous battle of Jemmingen—not a happy meeting at all. Since that time, so many battles for the Beggars had occurred that they’d set Pieter-Lucas’ mind to wondering whether the crusty old warrior had survived.
He rubbed his hands together and shifted from one foot to the other and back again. Be gentle, he told himself. Slowly he stooped down again, this time sitting on the rock beside Christoffel. “Tell me what it is you like most about this man?” he asked.
The boy said nothing for a long while and didn’t look at Pieter-Lucas. Finally he said, “He’s strong and brave and tells the best stories I ever heard. If he’d just come back to Leyden, I know he could save us.”
“Did he ever tell you about the image breakings in Breda, when he sliced his vader’s painting to shreds, then attacked the boy he’d always called his son with his knife when the boy tried to stop him?”
Christoffel rolled his eyes in Pieter-Lucas’ direction. Pieter-Lucas felt fire mixed with pain in the glance. “You don’t know anything about my storyteller Beggar!” he spouted.
“I wish I didn’t,” Pieter-Lucas responded. “You know, you’ve painted an excellent picture of my stepvader here.”
“Your stepvader?” The boy glared at him, disbelief burning in his eyes.
Pieter-Lucas nodded. “You heard me, jongen. Now, watch out for him. He can be dangerous. I do know.” Then pointing once more to the scar below his eye, he added, “He carries a sharp knife and isn’t afraid to use it on any artist that gets in his way.”
Christoffel frowned. “He didn’t ever hurt you!” he snapped.
“He was the very one. Made a deep gash in my leg too. I’ll limp from it the rest of my life.”
“So now you hate him!”
Pieter-Lucas watched anguish rankling in the boy’s eyes. “Nay,” he answered, thinking each word into being with care. “I forgave him long ago.”
“You still remember!”
“I can never forget an injury that makes me limp and sometimes causes great pain. But I feel pity for him, not anger.”
“Pity?”
“He’s a hard man, Christoffel, and fearful and angry—and lonely.”
“Then why have you been trying ever since I first met you to turn me against him?”
Pieter-Lucas swallowed hard. What could he say to spare this boy the grief he knew lay ahead for him if he set his eye to following after the ways of the wild and reckless Beggars? At last he said carefully, “Would you rather I let you go on playing with your charming wolf-in-shiny-coat and never warn you of the dangers of his bite?”
Christoffel stared at him, a mystified expression across his face. Then he pulled away and went back to his sketching. After a long moment he asked in perturbed tone, “Why’d you come here?”
“Your vader and moeder are worried about you,” Pieter-Lucas explained. “You didn’t ask their permission to spend the night here. They could only guess where you were. For all they knew, you may have met with a knife-toting Spaniard—or Beggar.”
Christoffel stared at the ground and answered with an impudent reserve, “I can take care of myself. Don’t need to go sleeping with everybody else in that awful old building.”
“I suggest you come with us, Christoffel.”
“I’m not through with my picture.”
“Once you’ve talked to your parents, I’m sure they’ll let you come back and finish. Your vader is a sick man, and your moeder is sick with worry over you. Your vader worries, too, about the paintings. Did you bring them with you?”
Christoffel looked at Pieter-Lucas with a cold agonizing stare. “I can’t tell you.”
“Your vader is desperate to know,” Pieter-Lucas said. “He’s been asking about them since before we left The Clever Fox Inn.”
“If he comes here, I’ll tell him.”
“You know he can’t come here, Christoffel.”
“Then send my moeder. I’m not leaving this place—not for anything.”
Pieter-Lucas peered over the boy’s head and into the shelter of the alcove behind him. Back in the corner, under the stairway, he spotted a crumpled feather bag with the end of a long rolled package protruding from one corner. So that was it. The paintings were there, and Christoffel was hiding them.
“It’s going to get cold sleeping out here, jongen,” Pieter-Lucas said.
“I got my feather bag and a roof.”
“What about food?” Robbin spoke at last.
“I brought some with me from home,” he snapped. “Now go away and leave me to draw my picture.” When they didn’t move, he repeated, this time with a vigorous shout, “Go away!”
Pieter-Lucas nudged Robbin’s shoulder and together they returned the way they’d come.
“I think I saw the roll of pictures,” Robbin whispered when they had reached the street below the hillock.
“That’s our secret right now, can you remember?”
Robbin looked up at him, his eyes jumping with question marks. “What’ll happen if we let it out?”
“We’ll make an enemy out of the boy, that’s what.”
“Ach! He’s not nice to us anyway.”
“He’s afraid, Robbin.”
“Of what? We didn’t threaten him.”
Pieter-Lucas thought a bit before he said more. “There are some things we don’t know about this boy or his vader.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but I think if I did know, his actions might make perfectly good sense. Now, Robbin, you say nothing to anyone, do you hear?”
Robbin shrugged. “If you insist.”
By the time they’d reached the warehouse, the streets were filling with people. Some stood in tight little groups and mumbled in serious tones. Others ran together and shouted hysterically. All were excited, and the mood was decidedly black and heavy. Two words seemed to be on every lip—“speken” and “siege”!
Pieter-Lucas felt Robbin moving closer to him as they walked. The boy tugged on his sleeve and asked, “What are speken?”
“It’s a nasty word for Spanish soldiers,” Pieter-Lucas explained. “They are our real enemies here. Christoffel and his family are our friends. No matter what you hear or see, always remember that!”
Robbin didn’t answer.
He’s not so sure, Pieter-Lucas decided.
****
Hiltje made her way through the crowded streets of Leyden, looking straight ahead. Not once did she hear the dreaded word marrano, as she had heard so mercilessly cast at her the last time she walked here. Instead, the whole city was abuzz with gossip about the Spaniards who guarded the city. In her mind she could picture them clearly—helmeted and corsleted, with broad shiny swords and dark bushy mustachios, blocking the passage of any who would go outside the walls.
“We’re captives!” she mumbled to herself as she prepared to climb the steps at the bottom of the citadel hillock.
For how many weeks had she been unwelcome in the city, afraid to set her foot inside the gate? And now she could not go back out. Strange and frightening it was. They might starve to death before this thing was over. She shook her head as if to put it all from her and climbed on.
At the top, inside the doorway, she stopped and caught her breath. How often she’d heard stories about this place. Never had she actually stood inside these walls before. “Only in times of danger!” She looked about the ancient courtyard, remembered, and shuddered.
She moved softly toward Christoffel until she stood behind him. For a long while she said nothing but studied the sketch he was creating. Formations of soldiers spread out in circles beyond the city walls, and in the distance, a fleet of beggar ships sailed down the Zyl River where it ran past a blackened piece of ground with small plumes of smoke rising up.
“Is that what you see through your arrow slit?” she said at last.
Without turning to look at her, Christoffel replied, “Look for yourself.”
Not at all sure she wanted to see it, she crept forward, then stooped down and gazed through the arrow slit. There were no beggar ships, but otherwise it was as he had sketched it. Her eyes were drawn to the line of trees along the riverbank trailing off into a haze. Everything in her refused to believe that the black swatch of color out there was the spot where she’d been born, grown up, raised her family.
A shiver ran down her backbone. It couldn’t be. Ignoring the lumps rising in her throat and threatening to bring tears, she turned to face her son. For a long moment she shook her head and stared at him, putting on her sternest possible scolding countenance.
“Whyever did you leave us all and hide out here?” she demanded. “Your vader and I were worried that something dreadful had befallen you.”
He motioned toward his feather bag pile and said without a show of feeling, “I had to save the paintings. You told me never to let anybody see them, and I couldn’t keep them a secret in that big building with so many people.”
“Son,” she began at last, “right now we have more to fear than the discovery of your vader’s paintings.” If only they had left them in the inn and let the flames consume them. Must Joris always be so tied to those fanciful pictures? Ja, he must. If she’d had any idea, years ago, what it would be like to be married to a painter, she might never have done it. Not marry Joris? Ach! The most impossible idea of all!
Christoffel’s scowl told her he was a true son of his vader. Neither could he see anything more important than the paintings.
“I think that at this moment your vader’s accusers are far too busy worrying about the siege and what it will do to them to bother about him anymore. Besides, the people we are living with are our friends.”
“What makes you so sure?” Christoffel asked, his voice tight.
“From the day they came to stay with us, they have shown us every kindness. Aletta has spent her days searching out herbal cures to restore your vader to robustious health. Mieke has come into the city every day to buy bread for us. When Pieter-Lucas was warned of the trouble from the glippers, he could have hastened to take his family out of harm’s way and left us to our own plight. And Magdalena and her friends took us in and gave us a place to lay our heads.”
“Pieter-Lucas doesn’t like Oude Man,” Christoffel said sulkily.
“Who’s Oude Man?”
Christoffel threw a startled glance at her. “The Beggar that tells all those wonderful stories. Here he is!” He held up a painted portrait of the surly old man. So many times Joris had complained about it that she felt she must have seen it, though this was her first glimpse. A perfect likeness indeed!
“Why doesn’t Pieter-Lucas like him?”
“Says he’s attacked him once with a knife. I don’t believe it, do you?”
Hiltje sighed. “Attacking people is what Beggars do, you know. They’re soldiers, but Pieter-Lucas is supposedly from the same army, so why would a Beggar attack him?”
Christoffel shrugged. “He said it had something to do with a painting. He’s a painter too. Did you know that?”
“So I’ve heard. I suggest you take Pieter-Lucas’ warning and watch out for any man that wears a uniform and carries a sword.” She reached for his feather bag, adding, “Right now you are coming with me.”
He snatched the bag from her. “I like it out here!”
“Nay!” she insisted, standing to her feet and grabbing the bag back. “Now, hand me the roll of pictures. You bring the rest and follow me home.”
“We’ve got no home,” he muttered.
Slowly he handed her the long rolled package without looking at her. She encircled it with the feather bag and trudged out around the well, down the stairs and through the streets. She didn’t look, but she knew the boy trailed behind her. She could hear his shuffling feet, his heavy breathing, and something that sounded almost like restrained sobs. She swallowed a few sorrowful lumps of her own and moved on.
****
Christoffel lagged behind his moeder—not far, but always behind. Not that he didn’t know where she was going or how to get there. Nay, she had the pictures, and right now he was not at all sure what she might do with them. He had to guard them.
The building she entered was big and stern-looking, with a brick facade and only four windows across the front—two on each level. He’d seen it many times from the street but never been inside. He knew it would be dark and glowering and unwelcoming. He walked through the door that Moeder held open for him and lowered his head, as if expecting some heavy cloud to envelope him.
He found himself in one large room with bags and sleeping mats scattered around the floor. Moving about among them were all the people he expected to find here. A fireplace on the back wall held a low-burning fire, where his sisters and Mieke were cooking something in a large pot. Beside it ran a stairway to the upper story. No cupboards for beds or anything else to make it look like a home. He would go back to the citadel at night, he decided. At least there he could breathe the fresh air and get away from so many people.
In the middle of the room, Vader was sitting up on his mat and looking in his direction. “Come here, son,” he called out.
Christoffel left his street shoes at the door and picked his way across the cold floor, feeling the pointy rushes through his stockings and wishing with his whole heart that he was back at the inn. Vader reached up to him and without smiling asked, “You did bring the paintings, did you not?”
“Moeder has them, wrapped up in my feather bag,” he said, motioning toward her where she stood on the other side of him.
“Let me see,” he told his vrouw.
When she’d removed the long roll, wrapped in a sheet of heavy brown paper, she placed them in his outstretched hands. Christoffel watched him take them, a smile of pleasure and almost worship lighting up his face.
“They’re all here?” he asked Christoffel.
“All the important ones,” he said.
“How do you know what’s important?”
Christoffel bristled. “The ones you had on the walls and the easel and…” He knelt down in the rushes, looked directly into the man’s watery eyes, and added, “And the one without a face.”
“Ah!” Vader sighed and drew the package up in both arms, hugging it to his breast.
For a long moment Christoffel stared at his vader. He knew he’d grown thin since his illness. But this was the first time he’d looked at him up so close. How old he looked! Almost like Opa—and the Oude Man Beggar. The familiar face was wrinkled and layers of saggy skin hung loosely around his jowls and cheekbones. It frightened him.
He glanced up to see that Moeder no longer stood over them. Then leaning toward his vader, Christoffel asked, “How we going to keep them hidden in this place with all these people?”
Still clutching the pictures, Vader looked around the room and sighed, “I still don’t understand why they took us away from our home. If we’re lucky, it won’t be long and we can go back to The Clever Fox Inn again.”
Christoffel felt something stick in his throat. Vader didn’t know the inn had been burned? Nor was he going to be the one to tell him.
“I had a good hiding place out in the citadel,” Christoffel offered, “where I could sleep at night and keep the pictures all wrapped up in my bag in the daytime.”
“You can’t stay out in the cold, jongen. What happens when it rains?”
“My spot was hidden from view, dry, sheltered from the weather.” He leaned over and whispered into his vader’s ear, “It was inside the citadel!”
Joris started. “Inside the citadel?”
Christoffel stared at his vader. He looked for all the world like some pitiful, half-witted old man. How could he tell him the truth? Yet how could he not?
“It’s a time of danger,” he said to the rapid beating of his heart. “Leyden’s under siege!”
The man’s eyes grew wide, and he began stuffing the package down under his bedcovers. “Ach, my son,” he wailed. “If the Spaniards are at the gate, our danger is much greater than you know. They threatened me, you know.”
“Who threatened you?”
“Those men—glippers—what came to me at the inn before we left.”
Christoffel frowned and probed his memory for any such event. “You were dreaming, Vader,” he said.
“Nay, it was real. They told me if I didn’t let them put their soldiers in the inn, they’d lock me up in the tower dungeon—in a special cell reserved for…Ach!” He crawled down under the covers, and all Christoffel could hear was his muffled voice, moaning, “Nay, they cannot find me here, don’t you tell them….”
Christoffel stood to his feet and trembled. He felt an arm on his shoulder and looked up into his moeder’s face. “Is he mad?” he asked in a whisper, afraid to hear the words. It was bad enough just to think them.
Moeder looked brave, he decided, but he knew she was fearful too. She patted him on the arm and said in a quavery voice, “He says strange things, jongen, because his head was injured.”
“Moeder, we must find a place to hide the pictures—and Vader. If only we had a bed cupboard.”
“The men that own this place are going to build cupboards.”
“They’d better make it soon!”
Together they looked down at the lumpy form still wriggling under his covers and moaning, “Nay!”
Christoffel felt fear well up inside. If only he were a little boy again and could hide in his moeder’s apron and cry. Instead, he felt her grab him by both shoulders. “Promise me, son,” she said earnestly, “that you will not run away again. I must count on you to be a man and protect me.”
He felt her arms hugging him, and he was hugging her back, even letting a few tears dribble onto her dress. Whatever else might happen, he now knew he could not go back to the citadel to sleep.