On a golden autumn Sunday afternoon, Pieter-Lucas and Aletta strolled out through the Zyl Poort Gate with their children. The sun shone in a blue sky, drawing half the city out to soak it up. A chilly breeze sent a profusion of bright yellow and red leaves swirling around them.
Pieter-Lucas held little Lucas by the hand and made sure each step landed squarely on the colorful frost-dried leaves.
“Listen to them crackle, son,” he coaxed.
The boy followed his vader’s lead, stomping on each leaf and laughing deliciously. When they’d reached the spot where the Zyl River trekpath turned off and went north, Pieter-Lucas and Aletta stopped to rest on a large wayside stone under a grand old spreading oak tree. They watched the children roam through the accumulation of dancing leaves in the field beside the roadway. Lucas leapt from leaf to leaf, shouting his joy. Kaatje half crawled, half rolled after him, laughing in her awkward attempt to do as big brother did.
“Someday she will walk,” Aletta said as if she were thinking aloud.
“Ja, someday,” Pieter-Lucas answered, wishing he believed it with as much certainty as he said it.
“When God wills it,” she added with an eagerness he believed was genuine.
He squeezed her around the waist and sighed. She snuggled into the protection of his arm, saying nothing, but warming him. “One year ago, it was, on this next to last night of Wine Month that we fled from The Clever Fox Inn along this roadway,” he mused.
“And the next morning we awoke to find the Spaniards had imprisoned us within the walls,” Aletta added.
“The siege of Leyden had begun!” He felt her hand reach up and smooth the curls back from his face.
“Thank God the sieges are over now,” she said. “The Spaniards will not be back. We have plenty to eat, and we all grow stronger every day.”
Pieter-Lucas smiled in spite of himself. “If only I had left you in Dillenburg, you never would have known what it was to hunger after the least little mouse skittering through the scant grass around the corner of the house.”
Pieter-Lucas shuddered at the awful memory of the months since that beautiful night in the moonlit snow when Aletta came to him in the citadel. How could either of them know it would be a year filled with unforgettable sieges and their tragic legacy of hunger and misery and despair?
The first siege seemed awful enough—five long months, altogether, of restricted access and dangerous river-jumping missions and never quite enough peat to keep them warm or enough food to keep their bellies full. But only a remarkably few of the very old, the very young, and the very ill of Leyden did not survive it. Always they knew that Willem and his brothers Ludwig and Jan were raising an army to come to their rescue.
Then suddenly Valdez lifted the siege. He sent his men south to intercept Ludwig’s troops. Willem cautioned the overjoyed Leydenaars that Valdez would be back. But they were too full of joy over their freedom, too confident of Ludwig’s victory, to heed the warnings. By the time they learned that Ludwig had not only lost his battle but also his life, it was too late for caution.
Valdez and his speken had returned.
This time no extra foodstuffs had been stockpiled. All through the summer months when the fields yielded harvest, Valdez kept them shut up inside the city walls, away from their crops. A few times Pieter-Lucas managed to get through to Willem with a message, and when he did, he smuggled choice morsels of bread, cheese, or fruit back in. But that was months before the end came.
Hunger was followed by the plague. Barely in time to rescue Leydenaars from utter despair, the siege ended in the middle of the third night of Wine Month. The waters were finally rising sufficiently to frighten the Spaniards. When a whole side of the city wall collapsed, the Spaniards’ courage broke and they abandoned the city to the stubborn patriots’ wills. In the endless waiting time, though, thousands of Leydenaars had perished. Aletta’s family had barely survived it. Joris’ as well, though on the day of deliverance, both he and Christoffel lay too ill in their beds to greet the Beggars who sailed in on the high tides, bringing food to the famished and hope to the weary.
Pieter-Lucas tossed the leaves at his feet with his toe and said wistfully, “I still wish I had never brought you to this place. I thought it would be a citadel. Instead, it nearly became our burial ground.”
“Pieter-Lucas!” Aletta responded, tugging at his arm. “Have you forgotten that I begged you to bring us here to Leyden? I wouldn’t give you any rest until you promised, remember?”
“I remember that well. But I am your husband. ’Tis my duty to protect you. Instead, I was so intent on finding a meester painter and fulfilling my dreams, and so eager to keep you nearer to me during my travels, that I fear I listened to the wrong cautions.”
Aletta took both his hands in hers. “We cannot know how badly things would have gone had I stayed in Dillenburg. At least this way we were together.”
“Not all of us.” He could say no more, nor did she answer. Surely she was remembering with him that awful night when their second son was born in Harvest month. He came too early and too small, and Aletta had not enough milk in her shriveling breasts to sustain the faint flicker of life. They buried him, and Pieter-Lucas and Aletta wept together that night in their bed. For many more nights they held each other and grieved in silence—and they hadn’t even given the boy a name.
“Our son is safe, my love, beyond the reach of pain and hunger and war.” Her voice wavered. With obvious effort at cheerfulness, she concluded, “Never will he have to suffer a one of them.”
Pieter-Lucas suppressed a sigh. “All the same, it seems that from the moment we set foot in Leyden, God has been destroying our dreams—both yours and mine.”
Aletta gasped. “’Twas God sent deliverance to us. Willem’s men pierced the dikes and prayed and waited, but God sent the winds and high tides to raise the water and make the wall collapse. God has not destroyed us!”
“I don’t know…” he stammered.
“And when I’d lost my head and run away to the Beguinage, ’twas God sent Mieke to me with the right words to bring me back. Thank God for Mieke!”
Pieter-Lucas shrugged. “Thank God for Mieke, indeed! Without her out there beside me on that bridge promising to bring you to me, I fear I would have thrown myself into the river along with your note.”
“Oh, can’t you see it, Pieter-Lucas?” Aletta begged, her smile warm and coaxing. “God has brought us to another new day! Our dreams will yet come true!” Her words formed a tender thread of hope tugging at his heart. How he wanted to yield to them. But he’d put faith in bright new days before, and always their blue skies had filled up with the clouds of God’s anger.
“What of my search for a meester to teach me to paint? Besides, you have no herb garden since you left the Beguinage. And our children…” He stopped and swallowed down one more choking lump. “Oh, Aletta, how much they’ve suffered!”
“They’re young. They don’t even remember it now, Pieter-Lucas. Look at them. Lucas gains new strength each day. Kaatje’s eyes are regaining their sparkle. My own body feels alive again. And you, my love,” she gave him one of her adoring blue-eyed looks. “You have never looked better. Above all else, we have a Lamb!”
The thread was growing stronger. In spite of himself, he chuckled.
Aletta laid her hand on his arm. “There was one other surprising thing God did at the lifting of the siege.”
“You mean Hendrick van den Garde?” His heart warmed at the reminder.
She smiled and shook her head slowly. “I never expected that the sound of that name would ever bring anything but pain,” she said.
“Nor did I.”
Something in their last encounter had left a lingering ray of unexpected warmth. It happened the day the wall collapsed and the Beggars swarmed into the city in their flat-bottomed boats loaded with food. Every waterway in the city was lined with starving people, and as the boats passed through, the Beggars tossed or handed food into twiglike fingers. Pieter-Lucas was receiving bread and cheese and a fish from a Beggar when he looked up and saw it was Hendrick.
Even now he had to swallow a huge lump in his throat and fight back the tears just thinking about it. “For the first time since I was a boy the size of little Lucas,” Pieter-Lucas mumbled, “that man gave me nourishment instead of scorn.”
“The look in his eyes,” Aletta said, “a mixture of awe and horror. I wasn’t sure whether he was angry or just recoiling from all the misery of starving people around him.”
“Nay, it was something else, Aletta. He’s a tough soldier who’s seen plenty of misery—caused a lot of it by his own violence—yet he always walked away chuckling.”
“I think it was because he recognized you, Pieter-Lucas. No matter how tough a man is, when he sees the man he raised as his own son starving to death, it has to touch him.”
Pieter-Lucas rubbed his hands together between his knees and shook his head slowly. “I really think it was Lucas.”
“Lucas? What did he have to do with it?”
“You didn’t hear Hendrick’s question to me when our eyes met?”
“Nay!” She looked at him with startled curiosity. “The boat was moving away in your direction, you know, and I was already breaking the bread and giving a morsel to Kaatje.”
“He pointed to Lucas and asked, ‘Is he my grandson?’”
“Ah, Pieter-Lucas, what did you say?”
“The only thing I could think to say with my half-starved brain—‘Vader Hendrick, meet my son, Lucas van den Garde.’”
“You called him Vader Hendrick?”
Pieter-Lucas looked down into Aletta’ s eyes and saw the wonder sparkling. “I did,” he answered, squeezing her hand.
“What did he say?”
“I couldn’t understand the words he mumbled, but I’ll never forget that he smiled without mocking me.”
Aletta covered her mouth with both hands and shook her head pensively. “God put a softness in him, even if it may have been only for that flickering moment.”
Pieter-Lucas struggled in silence with the mixture of anguish and hope that the memory inspired. Finally he nodded. “Ah, what would I do without you by my side?” He took her in both arms and held on as if his next breath depended on their embrace.
“May you never need to find out, Pieter-Lucas.”
Lucas was running toward them, waving a large gold-veined crimson oak leaf in his little hand. He stopped, throwing himself into Pieter-Lucas’ lap. Then holding the leaf up just beneath his vader’s nose, he said, “Vader, look, I found autumn! Can we paint it?”
“It’s in your blood, isn’t it?” Pieter-Lucas smiled down at him. Then he nudged Aletta with his shoulder and mumbled, “And in my blood too. Maybe Joris and Christoffel can spare a few drops of paint.”
“You know,” Aletta suggested, “Joris is a great painter. He once assisted Bruegel in his studio.”
“Pieter Bruegel?”
“Ja!”
“How do you know that?”
“Hiltje told me once.”
Pieter-Lucas felt a tremor of exuberance tumbling in his soul. “He could be my meester yet.”
Lucas was pulling at his doublet tails, begging, “Can we go now, Vader, can we?”
Pieter-Lucas nodded to his vrouw. “I don’t know, Moeke, can we?”
Aletta scooped up Kaatje, who was clambering at her skirts. “How else are we going to save the memory of this golden autumn day?”
Pieter-Lucas and his son laughed and stomped on crackly leaves all the way home.