All the way to Heiligerlee, Aletta clung to Pieter-Lucas and wrapped herself tightly in the glow of the wondrous thing that had just happened to them.
“Aletta van den Garde!” She rolled the delicious combination of names off her tongue and shivered with excitement. “You belong to Pieter-Lucas, now and forever,” she told herself over and over. Each time she said it, she hugged him as if it were the first time and the last.
Their journey led through wild green countryside with no houses or farms, to the accompaniment of sighing winds, rushing water, and singing birds. Clouds billowed and sailed through the skies above, and the air smelled of sea water, trilliums, moldy toadstools, and decaying peat.
But the way proved to be long, and the wind soon penetrated Aletta’s clothes with an inescapable chill. Not accustomed to riding horseback, she grew weary of her precarious position. Even her arms, which for long had ached to hold her new husband, now ached from so long a holding.
Once they’d passed through the village of Winschoten, she thought she saw a streak or two of silver and red flashing through the dense trees. She heard Pieter-Lucas mumble something about soldiers and felt his body tighten in her arms. Shortly thereafter, a pair of men in tattered uniforms staggered across a field off to their left, headed toward a barnlike shelter in the field. One man fell, and the other limped on a few more paces, then fell himself.
Pieter-Lucas turned his head and shouted at her against the wind, “Spaniards!”
“How do you know?”
“Red sashes, dark mustaches, silver helmets. Perhaps the battle is over.”
He urged Blesje on faster. It soon became clear that the fighting had indeed spent itself. The sights and sounds and smells on every side were worse than anything she could ever have imagined. The scene unfolded gradually before her, a mass of weapons and horses and broken bodies. Some were entangled in low tree branches, others sprawled across roadways, and many floated in swampy bog lands. Her ears vibrated to the moans, both human and animal, to the occasional distant clashes of metal against metal. The stench of gunpowder, churned-up peat, blood, and horse manure was almost suffocating. Shuddering, Aletta closed her eyes, shutting out the horrific sight, and buried her face in Pieter-Lucas’ back. Great and merciful God, she prayed silently, help me…. Her words trailed off as ghastly images flew through her head, imprinting themselves deep in her mind, choking her with fear and dread of what lay ahead.
When at last they’d reached the old monastery, Pieter-Lucas helped her dismount. She leaned against him and gasped, “I didn’t know it could be so awful!”
“It’s war,” he mumbled, holding her tight in his arms, trembling himself.
No wonder the Children of God preached nonviolence. Surely God was not pleased with all these cruelties done by men to men. Yet however much one might hate war or pledge to avoid it, what could one do when targeted by Alva’s canons and chased into the peat bogs? But Aletta hadn’t come here to moan about the awfulness of the sight while seeking comfort and protection in her husband’s arms. She pulled away and spoke, attempting bravery. “Where do we begin?”
Before he could answer, she heard a muffled cry from behind her. “Help! Help!” The pleading word echoed over the desolate chaos. Turning, she spotted a Spanish soldier, half submerged in the muck of the bog.
Without another thought, she started toward him, only to feel Pieter-Lucas’ arms pulling her back.
“He needs help,” she protested.
“He is also mired in the muck,” Pieter-Lucas retorted. “He’s far stronger than you, and if you grasp his hand, you shall not save him. Rather, he will drag you under.”
Stunned, she stared at Pieter-Lucas for a hard moment. He looked down, then away. “Besides,” he mumbled, “we’re not here to help Spaniards. Part of the plan in this place is to force the enemy into the bog and not to let him free himself.”
“Oh, Pieter-Lucas,” she cried out. “We must choose, then, only to let Ludwig’s men live?” How much easier life would be if she could have committed herself to stay away from battlefields. That way, she would never have to look the enemy in the eye and try to forget he was a human being with the sort of wounds she had been trained to heal, or wonder if he had a woman at home awaiting his return.
But Aletta had seen the battle’s bloody aftermath. Could she ever forget it?
Pieter-Lucas handed Blesje’s reins to a stableboy. “Can you secure my horse and give him victuals?”
The boy, not much older than Robbin, answered roughly, “First show me coins.”
Pieter-Lucas dug into the bag at his waist, producing a coin. The boy snatched it up, then took the reins and walked toward the stable, eyeing them both with scorn. “No place for a woman,” he snapped.
He could not have spoken truer words, Aletta decided. She stayed close to Pieter-Lucas, who was toting her bags and guiding her toward the door of the monastery building. “Got to get you some shelter,” he whispered.
At the door, Pieter-Lucas knocked vigorously. The split door opened at the top and a monk glared at them.
“I must find Count Ludwig. I’ve brought him a healer lady as he requested. Where is your dispensary, where we can receive the men?”
The monk looked down over his nose and said icily, “We have no dispensary.”
“Any room will do—the kitchen or the chapel, or an empty cell.”
“We did not invite the battle to these sacred grounds. If you must wage a war here, you must keep it all outside.” He began to close the door. Pieter-Lucas held it back with a strong hand.
“This healer lady comes to enhance, not to pollute the holiness of your sanctuary. Surely you can respect her need for protection from a misguided bullet or the pike of some madman,” he pleaded.
“Go, young man!” The monk slammed the door.
Pieter-Lucas’ eyes held fire and he began pounding again.
Grasping his arm, Aletta prodded gently, “Can we not find another way? Maybe even an animal shelter of some sort. Men are dying, and we came here not to argue with uncooperative monks. They can hardly be expected to have sympathies for the cause of the Calvinist rebels.”
He yielded to her tugging.
“We could go to the stable,” she suggested.
“To make up beds for dying men in the dunged and vermin-ridden straw? And pay that impudent young lad another coin for each patient we bring in?”
A ponderous question mark hung between them, only partially removed when Aletta spoke. “I could treat them where they lie in the fields. Better than not treating them at all. We have no more time to stand here in doubt. Come, Pieter-Lucas.”
At that moment another monk approached, pulling his hood about his head. He motioned and they followed, moving past a line of plastered cells, stopping at the last apartment. He shoved open the door and ushered them into a small barren room with a crude table and chair and a mat on the floor. A single window with heavy bars and sills the thickness of a man’s hand shed scant light across the room.
“At your service,” the monk said. “You need mats? Blankets? Water?”
“Please,” Aletta responded. “And if possible, some way to heat water and wine and brew some potions.”
“If you have an errand boy, send him to notify Ludwig that we are here,” Pieter-Lucas added.
“I shall do all that you require,” he said, slipping out the door.
Aletta’s hands trembled as she set her apothecary chest on the windowsill. She arranged bottles of wound salve and herbal infusions and set the bag of rags in readiness. “We shall soon need a light,” she said. “Night comes shortly upon us.”
“Here’s a short candle,” Pieter-Lucas said, pointing to a thick candle in its wrought-iron holder on the table. “Good thing we are so near to summer solstice. Otherwise, we might be working in pitch blackness already.”
She felt the admiration in his eyes fixed on her, watching her every move. “Oh, Pieter-Lucas,” she said, “I’m so afraid….” The words didn’t begin to describe what she felt at the thought of helping soldiers—wounded, disfigured, with limbs blown off, faces bloodied, entrails gaping….
“War is wrong,” she said, shuddering. “I never knew it the way I know it now.”
He laid an arm across her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have brought you to this awful place.”
“You didn’t force me to come. I insisted, remember? Besides…” She paused and breathed deeply before going on. “Oma assured me ’twas God sent me here, and He would make me strong. I only hope I can remember that throughout the long and mournful night ahead.”
“Perhaps, since Ludwig is the victor of the day, there will not be so many in need,” Pieter-Lucas suggested.
“But we saw hundreds of bodies out there, Pieter-Lucas—enough to keep us busy for days.”
He shook his head. “Mostly Spaniards, Little One, and mostly already dead.”
She leaned against him and shivered. There were no words for that dreadful soul-piercing, suffocating fear she felt inside. She could only repeat again and again, “It’s wrong, all wrong….”
Suddenly the light from the doorway was blocked by a pair of soldiers, one half carrying, half dragging the other across the threshold. Both men were bloody, their uniforms torn. The odor of smoldering gunpowder filled the room.
“There’s a physicke here?” the walking man blurted out.
Pieter-Lucas helped him lay his friend on the mat on the earthen floor near the window. Aletta knelt beside him and winced. One leg was a mass of raw bloody flesh. The man’s eyes fluttered, and blood ran from a gash on the front of his unhelmeted head.
The stronger soldier looked at her with terror in his face. “He’s my closest friend, his moeder’s only son. I promised her I’d bring him home sound and strong. For the love of God, tell me he’ll be well.”
“I shall treat his wounds with the herbal salves God has provided,” she said gently, swallowing hard, not looking at the man. “’Tis only God can cure. Here, tear his trousers from the wounded leg.”
She went for the salve and the rags. The monk stood at her elbow. “Here is water and a basin,” he said. “You can send your assistant for more from the well behind the kitchen when you need it. A fire burns in the courtyard. What can I boil for the infusion you mentioned?”
She handed him a bottle of dried leaves of boelkens herb. “Remarkable for healing inward wounds,” Oma always said.
“Use it all in a large kettle, and when it has bubbled and begins to send forth an aroma, bring it to me by the cupfuls,” Aletta instructed.
She knelt once more by the suffering soldier, where his friend and Pieter-Lucas had removed the clothing from the injured leg. She and Pieter-Lucas applied the salve and bound the leg and the head with long strips of cloth. Finally, she wrapped him in a blanket and said, “Take your rest. As soon as it is ready, your friend here will bring you a refreshing herbal infusion to warm and strengthen you.”
Even as she spoke, his eyes opened and looked straight at her with the hint of an attempted smile. To his friend, she said, “Now, let’s give that nasty gash on your arm some attention.”
“My arm?” he stammered.
“I see blood coming through the hole in your jacket. You’ll not be of any help to your friend if you die of your own battle wound.”
She had scarcely begun dressing the second man’s laceration when another bloody soldier entered the room with a large ragged hole in his jacket directly over his chest. Close behind him another pair of limping men dragged each other through the doorway. She opened her mouth to call out to Pieter-Lucas for help, but he was already busy spreading out the mats the monk had brought and was beginning to attend to the latest victims. When the monk returned with a cup of steaming liquid, she sniffed it.
“Well done,” she said. “Please bring more and help where needed in giving sips to the men as we dress their wounds. We shall soon need another cell for the ones who cannot walk and lamps to enable us to see in this growing darkness.”
“I do what I can, Vrouw Physicke,” he said and shoved his way out between patients crowding through the doorway.
Like a stampede of cattle, the soldiers filled the room with bloody, sweaty, broken bodies. Next, the courtyard filled and then another cell, offered by one more monk. Aletta and Pieter-Lucas moved about among the wounded scattered all over the monastery grounds. With growing expertise, they tore off clothes, dressed injuries, even removed gunshot and bound up broken limbs. A few healthy soldiers now joined several monks, weaving their way in and out, brewing and carrying cups of boelkens herb infusion, dispensing blankets, mats, lighted lamps, and buckets of well water.
Through half the night they worked, until at last no more men came to them. No more loud shouts resounded in the damp night air that hovered over the steamy morass. Pieter-Lucas put his arm around Aletta’s waist, and she felt her whole body collapse against him. “It’s too dark to search any longer,” he said.
“We still have lights,” she reminded him, too weary to go on, yet knowing that as long as men lived out in the bogs, the healer lady must push on to find and cure them.
“You, my love, are the finest and kindest of all women on earth. Yet I cannot let you search further. The terrain around us is more treacherous than you know.”
Too weary to think anymore, certainly too weary to resist, she agreed and let Pieter-Lucas lead her by the light of a candle to a secluded spot behind one of the buildings. “I discovered this place earlier as we worked,” he told her. “Stole a minute to beg an armload of hay from the stableboy and pile it here for you.”
“My dear husband.” She reached up and caressed his prickly cheek.
He was spreading a large cloth over the straw when a rough voice came through the darkness, “So you’ve found your way to the battlefield at last.”
Aletta started! Hendrick van den Garde! There was no mistaking the voice. He had the most unnerving way of showing up always at the right time and place to torment her Pieter-Lucas. Last time it was in Emden when Pieter-Lucas had just found her. For days she and Pieter-Lucas had nursed his wounds, and never once did he give any indication that he even knew who they were. Now this! What was it all about?
Pieter-Lucas stood quickly, the cloth still in his hand. Aletta raised the candle to illuminate the man’s face.
“That surprises you?” Pieter-Lucas asked.
Hendrick laughed and his face gleamed with cynical mockery. “Not at all. I see you brought no sword, just herbs and a healer lady.”
Pieter-Lucas took a step toward the man. Aletta grabbed his arm and tried to hold him back. “Careful,” she cautioned.
With a voice so clear and strong that it had to be hiding a deep-down terror, Pieter-Lucas asked, “You still think I’m a coward, don’t you?”
The old Beggar soldier was moving toward him, his bushy brows, trailing mustachio, and pointed beard framing a pair of wild eyes in the lurid candlelight. “Painter, healer, coward! They will always go together!” he said with a sneer.
Pieter-Lucas’ muscles tightened beneath Aletta’s fingers. She tugged hard on his arm with both hands and whispered, “Calm, Pieter-Lucas, calm.”
“Somewhere in the Gospel records,” Pieter-Lucas said, “I seem to recall that Jesus came to give life, not to take it. You, who claim to be His follower, should be happy to learn that I am determined to imitate His life-saving example.”
“You spineless Anabaptist!” Hendrick spat the words. “Hiding behind Jesus! You’re all cowards, the whole bunch!”
Aletta pushed herself forward. “You seem to have forgotten that not so long ago this brave young man made the choice to save your life. If that was an act of cowardice in your eyes, then you have to live with the meanness of heart that afflicts you. But you will no longer call my husband a coward. Saving lives is his calling, not taking them. It is the bravest work in all the world!”
Aletta watched, amazed, as a look of horror crept over the dark face, and he turned and slinked off into the night, muttering, “Cowards, cowards, cowards…”
Pieter-Lucas took her in his arms and held her till the trembling in her breast grew quiet. “’Twas better when he did not know who we were,” he whispered. He rubbed his nose and lips into her hair and added, “My courageous vrouw.”
Then reaching down once more, he spread the cloth over the straw and eased her onto the makeshift bed. He laid his cloak over her, planted a kiss on her lips, and whispered, “Rest well, my love. For what is left of tonight, I shall guard you.”
She took his hand in hers and smiled a warm contented smile. Her eyelids closed, and as if in a distant fog, she heard his voice saying, “Tomorrow, when our names are written in the priest’s book, we shall have a real wedding night….”
Exhausted, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.
****
Pieter-Lucas sat beside his new bride with his back leaning up against the outside wall of the monastery chapel. Little did it matter that he had not slept since this time last night, neither could he sleep now if he so desired.
The swampy night buzzed with a soft murmuring chorus of cries and moans, mixed with the melancholy sighing of the wind through swamp willows and pines, and punctuated with the occasional mournful shrieking of a swooping long-eared owl. His mind pulsated with images of bloodied bodies—grasping and gasping, maimed and dismembered, dying and glazy-eyed.
One beautiful ray of light darted through each ugly picture. Aletta, his healer lady—gentle, selfless, tireless—moving through the stench and desolation of each battlefield memory like an angel of compassion, dispensing life and hope and wholeness. He reached out and caressed her head with his hand.
“Disturb not her slumber, jongen,” he whispered. Withdrawing his hand, he pushed himself to his feet and paced the length of the wall. Beneath a wide section of windows at shoulder level, he paused and peered through the colored glass panes. Shimmering through the glass, a cluster of blurred, flickering candlelights created a wonderful golden illusion.
His imagination carried him quickly inside. There would be paintings on the walls, images in their niches, all the altar furnishings he’d grown up with in the Great Church of Breda. They’d been destroyed on that fateful morning of the image-breakings in Breda, and he’d missed them ever since. In the little church in Dillenburg, there were only a few carved icons, and in Hans’ hidden church in Emden, no works of art had ever decorated the walls, nor would any ever be allowed.
“God, did you forget I am an artist?” he pleaded. “If only I could creep inside and let my soul soak up the beauty of the colors, the forms, and spirits fleshed out in paint.”
Perhaps when daylight came he could take his bride in with him. They would enlist the services of a priest, and this tiny haven in a sea of misery would become their final bridge to an official marriage. Once she’d finished attending to the needs of the wounded, they’d go back to Emden to retrieve the painting and Opa’s brushes from the attic room where he’d left them before they moved on to Dillenburg, and…
Pieter-Lucas pressed his nose against the colored windowpane and gazed with renewed longing into the chapel. When would he ever be free to give his life both to the glorious multicolored paints that surged through his blood and to that sleeping woman who impassioned his every breath? First, he must tell Ludwig that he could not fill Yaap’s cap. Would it be enough reason for this unmarried military man that Pieter-Lucas had just married a vrouw and that Countess Juliana awaited their arrival in Dillenburg?
Turning his back on the chapel, he leaned against the glass window and looked up into the sky. Already it was brushed with a thin wash of pearly light. Rising up out of the hush around him, he heard the sound of a loud heavy sob so near that it startled him into renewed wakefulness. Coming from the chapel! He wheeled around and pressed his nose once more against the window glasses, trying first one color then another. He could make out no movement. “But it comes from inside,” he told himself.
Who among the dead could have been so important as to bring mourners into this place? Count Ludwig? The darting thought grabbed him by the throat. He recalled that all through the night, the commander had not shown his face in the room where the healer lady he had requested worked. Now that he thought about it, Ludwig’s soldiers had been remarkably somber for having just won a battle against Alva.
Before he realized he was moving, Pieter-Lucas had crept around the corners and stood before the chapel doors. He gripped them at the spot where time and hands had worn a smooth handle. Gently, fearing his own breath, he pulled the door back a crack.
Colors and fragrances rushed to greet him, and he yearned to surrender to the allure of the glowing sanctuary. But his eyes sought out the weepers until he spotted a single bare-headed mourner on the front kneeling rail, just behind two bodies lying on battle litters before the altar. Cautiously he crept inside and let his stockinged feet carry him quietly toward the litters. The weeping had stopped now, and except for an occasional sniffle from the mourner and a snapping crackle from a candle flame, the musty-fragrant chapel had grown silent.
About halfway between door and altar, Pieter-Lucas stopped. He watched from the back as the man on the kneeling rail pulled a piece of paper from his helmet. Unfolding it, he began to read aloud, punctuating it with more sniffles and occasional wails.
“Highborn, heartily beloved son, Ludwig.”
A letter to Ludwig from his moeder, Juliana? The voice did sound like Ludwig’s. Then Ludwig was the mourner, not the mourned. Feeling like a boorish intruder into the private sanctuary of another’s agony, Pieter-Lucas retraced his steps. The continuing reading followed him down the aisle,
“With heavy heart I have heard how great is the danger and how heavy the business that confronts you there. May the Holy Trinity protect and shelter you…. I beg of you, my heartily amiable son, that you might live in the fear of the Lord, so that the enemy in these violent and dangerous times will not creep up on you. What I can do for you through prayer, I shall not spare any diligence to do.”
When Ludwig finished reading, he folded the letter up and stuffed it again into his helmet. Then, resting his arms and head on one of the litters, he sobbed out, “Great and merciful God, why Adolph? So young, with so much to give to the revolt! Why did you take him now, God? Why?”
Adolph! Pieter-Lucas gasped. He’d reached the door again and was pushing it with his shoulder when one of its hinges uttered a shuddery creaking sound.
“Who goes there?” the voice of Ludwig shouted after him.
Pieter-Lucas did not turn back, but even as he shoved his feet into his shoes waiting outside, the door swung wide, and Ludwig was looking at him with a dazed expression glazing his eyes.
“Ach, jongen,” he said.
“I beg your forgiveness, Excellency,” he stammered. “I meant not to disturb your holy moment. If only my healer lady and I could have helped your brother!”
“No one could save him. The bullet and sword made quick work of his young life. He suffered not. ’Twas God, our Vader’s time.” Ludwig dropped his head to his chest and fought to regain a nobleman’s control.
“I am truly sorry,” Pieter-Lucas said. Then not knowing how more to console the man, he asked, “And who lies on the other litter?”
“Count Aremberg, Alva’s commander.”
“Thank God ’tis not another of your leaders,” Pieter-Lucas exclaimed.
“We lost very few men in this battle,” Ludwig said. “If only all our battles might be like this one, the Low Lands will be back in our hands in no time.”
Pieter-Lucas started to walk toward the corner. “I shall awaken the physicke so we can return to our ministrations,” he said.
“Very well. Only, for you, I have a more pressing job this day.”
“More pressing than attending to your wounded men?”
Pieter-Lucas watched a small half smile tug at the man’s mouth. “That’s the healer lady’s job. I send you to Dillenburg to bear the news of our victory”—the smile melted away and he sighed—“along with the sad tale of Adolph’s decease.” Ludwig shook his head slowly. “The first of my moeder’s sons to die. May he also be the last to give his life for our cause.”
Pieter-Lucas’ heart raced and he felt dampness amidst the hairs on his hands and forehead. He shifted his feet, then stammered, “Your Excellency, I cannot go today.”
“Why not?”
Pieter-Lucas opened his mouth, intending to tell this commander of all Willem’s forces that he could not take Yaap’s place, that he must go back to Emden and retrieve his paints and wedding picture and be on his way to Dillenburg. Instead, he heard himself stammer, “I…I cannot leave the healer lady. I must stay and escort her safely from here when her work is finished.”
Ludwig waved a hand in the damp cool breeze. “I shall protect her. I know how soldiers are, but even they will respect an elderly woman.”
Pieter-Lucas gulped. “You do not understand, Your Excellency. The healer lady you requested did not come. She sent her attractive young assistant.”
Ludwig stared openmouthed. Before he could speak, Pieter-Lucas went on. “And she is my vrouw!”
“Your vrouw?” Ludwig exploded. “You didn’t tell me you had a vrouw!”
“When last we talked, I didn’t.”
“But that was only yesterday.”
“I know. Yesterday she was still my betrothed. We were to wed later this week. When she had to come with me, our clergyman married us and sent us on our way.”
Ludwig scratched his head and looked Pieter-Lucas up and down, saying nothing. Then he stroked the point of his beard and let a long soft whistle escape through his lips. “God have mercy! As if the war itself didn’t load me with enough concerns.”
“Forgive me, Your Excellency. Prince Willem and your sister, Countess Juliana, knew of our intention to marry. When I left Dillenburg last year in search of my bride, the countess invited me to take her back to live in the kasteel.”
Ludwig did not answer.
“Perhaps another messenger could go this time,” Pieter-Lucas suggested.
The count shook his head. “Without Yaap, only you can go to Dillenburg.” He paused. “Can your bride travel in haste with you?”
“She is strong of body and agreeable in spirit,” he admitted with his lips, while his heart and mind protested. “But what of her unfinished herbal ministrations?” he asked.
“Ja!” Ludwig sighed. “Alva’s revenge will be swift and bloody, and I shall need every man whole as soon as possible.”
Both men stared speechless at the ground while a meadowlark filled the air above their heads with his plaintive song. Ludwig looked up at last and threw him a questioning glance. “Did anyone give you assistance last night as you worked?”
“Indeed, by the time we had stopped, a considerable force of monks and soldiers was helping with our task.”
“Can they be trusted?”
“All those who worked at our side seemed to be men of compassion.”
Ludwig sighed. “Know you where to find them?”
“That I shall do.” Pieter-Lucas paused. “But first, I have one more difficulty.”
Ludwig looked at him tentatively. “About Willem’s pamphlets?”
“Nay! Although, I think I must take time to leave them in Winschoten.”
Ludwig nodded. “I am of a mind to believe you should. We will need all the local support we can muster in these days to follow. What is it, then?”
Pieter-Lucas cleared his throat. How much did he dare divulge? Simply, he told him of the Children of God connections of Aletta’s people and of Dirck Coornhert’s warning about an official marriage.
Ludwig stood silent for a forever moment. “Tell me, have you and your new bride been rebaptized by this preacher?”
“Nay.”
Ludwig puffed a sigh of relief and ran his fingers through the hair on the back of his head. “Take care that you tell no one else what you have just told me. Among these Beggars, it could go ill with both of your lives—and mine—if you spread such word.”
“I understand, Your Excellency. I say nothing.”
“There is a clergyman in our camp who will do this thing for you if I ask him to, but it must be swift so you can be on your way.”
Ludwig paused, then thumped Pieter-Lucas in the chest with his forefinger. “Just remember, as long as you serve this revolt, you must keep yourself from rebaptism and all other radical rituals.”
“That I shall do,” he promised. There was no way he could tell Ludwig that this would be his first, last, and only trip in service of the revolt. Not now.
“Then go, rouse your bride and instruct the monks. I shall bring the clergyman and meet you here as soon as possible.” He paused. “One thing more. You are the only man who could ever take Yaap’s place! Don’t forget it.”
Pieter-Lucas managed a faint painted-on smile and a dazed nod.
****
Aletta awoke to the sound of whispering winds, cawing vultures, and nearby voices. A damp mist lay on her hair and the cape that covered her body. Her legs ached and she shivered slightly, giving way to a shallow cough.
“If I were in a real bed, I think I should be perfectly content to stay here for the rest of my day,” she told herself.
The rising sun was coloring the sky with the promise of a new day. She sat up and stretched her arms above her head, yawning deeply. The voices stopped and Pieter-Lucas appeared around the corner. He knelt beside her, smiling and kissing her forehead. With a finger laid against his lips, he urged, “Come, my love.”
He reached out a hand and lifted her to her feet.
“I hope we find our patients improved this morning,” she said, still chasing the sleep from her eyes. “And not too many new ones that we missed with the fall of darkness.”
Pieter-Lucas took her by the shoulders and said, “Count Ludwig has other plans for us today.”
“Other plans?” She sensed a cloud hovering over the adoration in his eyes.
He pushed her hair back from her face and stroked her long free-hanging tresses. “I’ve a long story to tell you as we travel.”
“We travel? Back to Hans and Oma?”
“We go to a place you’ve never been before, a place I’ve longed to take you.”
“Where? What? You hide all the keys under your hat,” she teased.
He held her face in his hands again and laughed. “Ludwig is sending us to Dillenburg,” he began, and without withdrawing his hands, he grew sober and finished, “to bear news of the victory of Heiligerlee and the death of Count Adolph.”
Gasping, she grabbed his forearms. “Oh, Pieter-Lucas, was he one of the wounded we treated last night?”
He shook his head. “Nay. He died on his horse in the field.”
In the long silence that followed, she nursed a weeping in her soul. At last she asked, “And what of the wounded men we came here to help?”
“The monks who assisted us last night will carry on.”
She shook her head and tried to clear away the cobwebs of confusion. Would life’s plans always change so drastically? She watched concern spread across Pieter-Lucas’ face.
“We must travel at a much faster speed than either of us would wish. I told Ludwig you were strong and agreeable.”
She tried to imagine what it would be like to sit atop a horse on such a long trip. “How many days?”
“Only three or four,” Pieter-Lucas said carefully, “if we stop at night to rest briefly. But first, before we can leave, we have one more matter to settle.”
“Ja?” She braced herself for yet another disturbing revelation.
Pieter-Lucas held her in the circle of his arm. “Ludwig has gone to summon his army preacher to do one more wedding.”
“A Calvinist marriage this time?” In spite of herself, she felt a chuckle in her soul.
“Probably Lutheran. Ludwig’s family is German, you know.”
Excitement mingled with fear. Clearly, this ceremony would be no more like her dreamed-of wedding than the first. Aletta pulled up her hair and fastened her headdress, then arranged the ringlet curls around her face.
When they met Ludwig and his clergyman at the chapel door, the plans were laid with haste. They dared not use the chapel for the ceremony. Already the monks were angered that these wild troops had defiled their sanctuary with the body of a Protestant nobleman.
“We must take our ceremony out of doors,” Ludwig said.
“We’ve just the spot,” Pieter-Lucas announced. “The place where we spent the night outside the colored glass windows behind the altar. We can even see the candlelight.”
In no time, the wedding party stood in order. The clergyman turned his back to the window, with Pieter-Lucas and Aletta facing him and Ludwig a bit to the side.
The clergyman held a book and went through a ceremony quite different from that which had accompanied the process the previous day. “Beloved young ones,” he began, reading from the book, “you come here to me this day, seeking holy matrimony….”
When Aletta heard the eagerly awaited words, “What God has joined together let no one sever in two pieces,” she offered her most deeply felt smile to her bridegroom and he returned the offer. Never had he looked more handsome. At Pieter-Lucas’ insistence, the battlefield clergyman recorded the date and place and names in his book. Their marriage was now official in the eyes of the whole world.
“We must leave at once,” Pieter-Lucas said.
“First your instructions and messages,” Ludwig retorted.
Aletta held tightly to the hand of her husband-indeed. Treading softly across the cold smooth tiles, they followed the bustling count into the chapel. Above the altar she noticed a simple crucifixion with flat figures painted in screaming colors. The room felt candle warm and smelled of musty woodwork, pungent incense, and dead bodies.
Ludwig was beckoning them toward a litter before the altar. “Come, children, you must see clearly for yourselves, that you might bear firsthand witness that Adolph is indeed among the fallen.”
They stepped forward. Aletta forced herself to look at the still features, the pale rigid hands. If only she could have washed his wounds and spread on the salve his own sister would have applied had she been here! But it was not to be.
Walking to the second body, Ludwig motioned them once more to follow. “You must tell them also that you have seen the body of Count Aremberg.”
Aletta shivered. Why must this be so important?
Ludwig answered her unspoken question. “For many years we were friends. He and Willem served together on the ancient council of ruling noblemen—the Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece.”
Ludwig reached out to the body and picked up a long chain with a golden image of a fleecy sheep hanging limp from a ring around its belly. “Take this to Willem. Tell him we took it from Aremberg’s neck. We will give him a nobleman’s burial.”
He placed the ornament in Pieter-Lucas’ open palm. For a long moment Ludwig stared at the dead count, then murmured, “How religion and war have divided us!”
After a pause he pulled himself erect, facing Pieter-Lucas and Aletta. “Now, make haste. I give you two letters—one for Willem, the other for my moeder. I only wish I could deliver them in person. Rather, I must remain here to nourish the fruits of our victory lest they be trampled under the foot of Alva’s steed.”
Pieter-Lucas and Aletta mounted two horses brought by Ludwig’s stable men—Blesje and one other. Side by side they rode along the causeway that cut its way southward through the silent smoldering battlefield. An unhindered sun glinted on a thousand pieces of deserted armor strewn across the fields and shimmered on the wings of a thousand swooping vultures.
“It grieves me, my love,” Pieter-Lucas said, “that we could not have begun our long-dreamed-of life together in a place far removed from this stench of war…and that my gift for you lies in Emden!”
Aletta smiled and spread an arm to the blue sky above, where mounds of fluffy clouds appeared white and glistening as if around the edges of the world. “Let us thank God we have each other, and we are at last alone.” In her heart she nurtured dreams of a spot of solitude in some beautifully wooded meadow along the way, a place where birds would sing and she and her beloved would dance for a glorious hour among the grasses and bright spring blossoms.