Betteke de Vriend lay on the pile of straw, freshly rearranged for her by Tante Lysbet. Too weak to raise her head, she pried open her eyes and looked upward at the smeary barred window on the far wall.
“Vader in the Heaven,” she prayed, “I’d be so filled with joy to see just one ray of sunlight streamin’ into this gloomy place—if it might please you to send it to me.”
For more days than she could imagine, her only view into the world outside had been gray, often assaulted with drizzly pellets of rain. She hadn’t seen so much as a patch of blue sky, a white fluffy cloud, or a soaring gull.
With Tante Lysbet for her cell mate and nursemaid, she never lacked for sunshine for the heart. All day long the older woman sat beside her, helped her eat and drink, made her bed as comfortable as possible, and combed her hair. Best of all, she read to her from the sacred sheets Betteke pulled from their hiding place in her bodice.
Yet Tante Lysbet seemed always to carry a heaviness of spirit. Often in the middle of the night, Betteke overheard her weeping and sometimes fuming in agitated whispers. Was she angry with the heavenly Vader? Betteke had never heard His name fall from the former Beguine’s lips, except when she read the pages of God’s Book.
Once more Betteke felt her heart rising to her Vader. If you might be pleased so to do, won’t you lay your warm hand on Tante Lysbet’s shoulder an’ tell her just how much you care for her?
She had scarcely finished the prayer she offered many times each day and sunk down into the deep longing it always brought, when she heard the cell door creak open. Which one of their daily visitors would this be? The servant from the galley had already brought their daily rations. Was it the interrogators come to question Lysbet again?
Every day they asked the same questions about some books they’d found in her treasure box. Tante Lysbet’s answer was also the same. “I never saw any books about witchcraft until you pulled them from the box where you planted them.”
They would grow angry then and threaten to take her to the torture chamber and try her as a witch. But after each visit, Betteke asked her Vader to keep them from doing anything so awful, and so far they’d not done more than threaten.
Betteke opened one eye and squinted out into the dimness. This time it was her daily visit from a priest. The judge had promised it would be so. “Opportunities to repent and be reinstated into the Holy Catholic Religion,” he had offered in a smooth and enticing voice.
Today’s priest was the gentle one who seemed to have a true care for her soul. He seated himself on a block of wood near the spot where Betteke lay.
“Lysbet de Vriend, child, awaken.”
She heard his soft voice, felt his hand shaking her shoulder. Silently she prayed as she did every day. Vader in the Heaven, let me say what you want this priest-man to hear. Then slowly she opened her eyes and watched him lift his arm above her and let the long loose sleeve of his robe hang nearly to her head.
“In the name of the Vader, Son, and Holy Spirit,” he began, “I adjure you to reconsider your ways. You need only confess to me your sin of trampling the host in the Great Church. Gladly will I absolve and reconcile you to the Holy Catholic Religion.”
She did not answer. How could she confess to the lie he insisted was truth?
“Child,” he began again, “the mercies of God do not last a lifetime when we stubbornly reject them, as you have done. Your time comes quickly to a close.”
He paused. Still she did not speak.
“Have you nothing to confess this day?”
Betteke finally looked directly at him and said between coughs, “‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I want for nothing.’ That is all.”
“Poor disillusioned child,” he said. “That is no confession.”
“They are the very words from God’s Holy Book,” she protested.
Shaking his head, he asked, “How many times must we remind you that the reading of that verboden boeck by anyone other than God’s holy priests is a dangerous snare? It has drawn you from the safety of the Church and now plunges you into eternal damnation!”
“Why, then, did the Vader give it to us?” she asked.
“’Twas given only to those men trained in special schools for the priesthood. Only they can read it without seeing wild distortions in its pages.”
“How strange,” Betteke began, halting at each cough. “I find God’s words so clear on every page. It pours like oil of healin’ and joy over the souls of all who read an’ learn to love the Lord our God with all our heart an’ strength an’ soul an’ mind.”
Uneasiness clouded the priest’s face. Abruptly he stood to his feet and paced across the cell, wringing his hands and crying out, “Save yourself from heresy, child!”
When she did not respond, he returned to the block beside her. With imploring eyes, he pleaded, “This is your final opportunity.”
She heard a tinge of terror mingling with the compassion in his voice. “Your intentions are right kind,” she assured him, “but you need not fret over me. My Vader cares for me now an’ always will, even when this body lies cold in the grave. I only hope an’ pray for you the same joy an’ peace an’ daily protection as He gives to me!”
“Benighted child!” He shook his head from side to side, then added in a heavy mournful tone, “I had so hoped that I could rescue you from damnation. I wanted not to believe you were filled with devils!”
From the other side of the cell, Betteke heard a gasp from Tante Lysbet and a desperate plea.
“Speak not so rashly to the suffering girl!”
The priest lifted a hand in her direction and ordered, “Protect her not in her heresy, lest you share her fate.” Then kneeling beside Betteke, he gestured with open hands. “Tomorrow you meet your maker. If the God you have been deceived into blaspheming sees fit yet to show mercy, you will prepare for that meeting. So great is that mercy that one of His sacred priests will be here at daybreak to take your confession and absolve you of your sins before you be led away to execution.”
He paused, as if waiting for a penitent’s pleas to rise to him from the straw. Instead, Betteke wiped a tear from her eye and said softly, “If tomorrow is the day determined by my Vader, then I go. I weep only because He gives me no more time to beg of you to let Him be your shepherd too.”
Without another word, the priest turned from her and shuffled out of the cell, his shoulders drooping.
Betteke let her body go limp as a spasm of coughing seized her. The more she fought to be still, the more furiously it overpowered her. Lovin’ Vader, her heart cried out, give me strength.
At that instant the coughing monster sent a knife piercing through her chest. It wrenched up a dark bloody phlegm and expelled it from her mouth in huge hot clots. She reached out with wild hands and felt the eager grasp of her nursing friend and the gentle pressure of her other hand caressing her forehead, smoothing back her damp matted hair. Somewhere through the fog, the pain, and the hacking of the cough, she heard Lysbet’s golden voice.
“Rest, my child, rest.” The calming words were followed by a nearly inaudible angry complaint. “If only they’d bring me more black mullein or a broth of garden cummin!”
Betteke grabbed at Lysbet’s hand and whispered a pair of lines from the sacred pages. “‘With the increase of my innermost anxious thoughts, my Vader’s consolations make my soul unshakable.’”
With the last drop of energy oozing from her body, Betteke pried her eyes open. The face hovering over her was blurred, but from across Tante Lysbet’s shoulder, she saw a long broad band of sunlight coming toward her from somewhere up and beyond the window. It spread steadily until it bathed her face. “Hearty thanks, Vader.”
She offered Tante Lysbet a weak smile.
“Fear not,” she managed to whisper, then closed her eyes again.
Her coughing ceased; the heatte and the pain vanished. Softly, effortlessly, she felt herself slipping away into a deep trancelike sleep. A joy such as she’d never known possessed her….
****
Tante Lysbet watched the tension drain from the weary body, listened to the breathing grow rattled, watched its rhythm ebb.
She took both of the girl’s limp hands in her own and whispered, “Merciful God, let your angels rejoice in releasing her from all the suffering—now!”
Instantly there came from Betteke a long shuddery sigh and the parched lips moved slightly. Lysbet leaned close enough to hear the words, and in her fancy, she heard strains of music with them. “My Vader, my Shepherd…”
Then the music stopped and the lips and the rattly breathing fell silent. Lysbet held fast to the hands and strained to hear one more cough, one more sigh, to see the faintest flutter of an eyelid, to feel a whisper of a breath.
Nothing came.
When she heard Roland call out twenty-four bells, she reached into the girl’s bodice and lifted out the sacred pages nestled against a still warm chest.
“The way that simple unlettered child could read these words and understand them put even a priest to shame! What a wonder!”
With trembling fingers, Lysbet closed the lifeless eyelids. She’d never seen that face so peaceful. “Thank God, at last Betteke is free of pain and coughing spasms,” she said.
After a long vigil with wonder, she wiped a tear from her cheek, then pulled the cloak up over her friend’s head. Retreating to her own corner, she held the handful of pages and sobbed the rest of the night through.
****
The blackness of a long night was succumbing to the promise of dawn as Pieter-Lucas and Aletta rode into Dillenburg. In Aletta’s mind, the past four days ran together into one blurred picture of horizons jogging to the rhythm of a horse’s gait or undulating with the bilious pitching of a ripple-slapped boat. Day ran into night like a painter’s palette stirred with a pointed stick. Faces and village streets, forests and bogs, all accompanied by savory stews, hunks of dried bread, wild berries, and handfuls of cool well water—she could no longer sort them out in her bone-weary mind.
The exhausted travelers found the little village slumbering at the foot of its kasteel-crowned hill. Turning from the trek path on the banks of the Dill River, they started up a steep and winding roadway.
“In daylight the old fortress is more beautiful than you can imagine,” Pieter-Lucas said.
Aletta scrutinized the looming outline above them and tried to imagine the colors of the walls, the trees, the clouds, the sky overhead. A single brilliant star hovered over the silhouette of a large tower and twinkled as if to celebrate their arrival.
“I believe you,” she sighed.
As if in the fog of a deep dream, she rode up the hill beside her husband, tired, apprehensive, eager. About halfway to the top, without warning, a loud chorus of hunting dogs from inside the walls broke both the silence and her dreamy ponderings. “Do they greet all guests so?” she asked.
“All guests—friend or foe,” Pieter-Lucas assured her. “I cannot imagine anyone sneaking onto these grounds unnoticed.”
Now roosters were crowing as well, and the landscape before them brightened quickly. A fresh breath of life shook Aletta awake, and she sat straighter on her mount. Just as they came to the stone tower gate and guardhouse, the first rays of sunlight lit up the whole sky. The tower where the stars had so recently sparkled was no longer a shadowy outline. She saw clearly its matching tower of similar size and shape, along with an array of lesser towers and walls and parapets.
“A place for creating fantasies!” she whispered.
Everything moved quickly after this. They passed through a series of imposing stone arches, across a moat, and entered the walled fortress, now glowing golden in the rising sunlight.
“The Julianas’ famed herb garden,” Pieter-Lucas said, pointing to the left and down at the foot of the hill inside the wall.
“Where you draw those wonderful pictures of the herbs?”
“The very place,” he said.
Aletta gazed at the large area ringed by lindens, oaks, birches, and a low stone fence. In the dawning light, she reveled in the beauty of the neatly ordered garden and its muted tones of indistinct colors. “Oh, Pieter-Lucas,” she exclaimed, “I should be happy if they would simply give me a bed in that garden.”
Pieter-Lucas laughed. “Until it rains—or snows. Then I think you would be clambering at a doorway into the kasteel.”
Shortly the roadway led underground, a gigantic tunnel climbing steeply until it opened into a spacious courtyard. A large and colorful flag, displaying the coat of arms of the House of Nassau with its crowned lion, sword, and darts, fluttered in the breeze from atop the main building. Nothing else stirred in the early morning air.
Pieter-Lucas dismounted and helped Aletta do the same. She watched him tether the horses to a post near the imposing old carved doors at the base of a tower-crowned building.
“First we find Prince Willem and his moeder,” Pieter-Lucas said, slapping Blesje’s flank. “Then I’ll settle you in your stable.”
Just then a small side door opened and a portly man stepped out. He had a dark pointed beard and a mustache and carried a large ring of keys. He blinked briefly in the light of day, then looked at them. A quick recognition lit his face. “Good morning, jongen,” he offered. “You have come back at last. But so early in the morning?”
“Aha!” Pieter-Lucas said, moving to join him. “So good to find someone awake. I have two urgent messages from Count Ludwig—one for Prince Willem, the other for his moeder, the Countess Juliana.”
“Come, enter the hall, and I shall bring them word of your arrival.”
The man ushered them into a large room. It was dark and chilled with the sort of dampness held fast by ancient stones rarely touched with the warmth of a roaring fire. They sat on a long low bench beneath a row of high narrow windows that opened onto clouds scudding across a pale blue sky.
Aletta snuggled up close to Pieter-Lucas, grabbing his arm in hers and leaning her head on his shoulder. He gripped her with his other arm and leaned his head against hers. She felt his curls brush her forehead and whispered, “I love you, dear man.”
“And I you, beautiful vrouw.”
He squeezed her arm, and for a long moment they held each other. Aletta was nearly drifting off to sleep when a quick shuffling of feet on the other side of the room brought both young people to a hasty start. They sat erect.
Prince Willem! Aletta blinked. She’d seen this man many times in Breda, but always at a distance as he rode his horse through the streets or walked in his garden across the River Marck from the wood where she and Pieter-Lucas played. Never had she been in the same room with him.
He’s fully dressed, she noted. The black cap that hugged his head, the white starched ruff, the black jacket with chains of gold brocade—all were in the precise order one would expect of a man freshly come from his dressing chamber. Yet the anxious expression on his face and the heavy droop of his shoulders told her he’d probably been awake all night long.
Along with Pieter-Lucas, she rose instantly to her feet and greeted her prince with a curtsy.
“Welcome to Dillenburg,” Willem said, his voice tight. “I see you brought along…your new bride?” The faintest hint of a smile spread across his face.
“Ja, Your Excellency.” With eyes sparkling, Pieter-Lucas presented her. “Aletta, daughter of Dirck Engelshofen, the bookseller, is now my vrouw.”
Willem gave her a half bow and a smile. “Welcome, Aletta, vrouw of my trusted servant.” Then, his face turning sober, he looked directly at Pieter-Lucas. “I expected Yaap with news from Friesland. You come in his place?”
Pieter-Lucas moved uneasily from foot to foot. “That I do.”
“He is occupied with other errands for my brother, then?”
Aletta sensed her husband’s anguish. Hesitantly, as if trying at one time both to swallow and expel his words, he gave a simple answer. “I wish that were true.”
“What, then?” Willem’s response came quickly.
“He lies buried in a Frisian bog.”
“Nay!”
“Felled by the bullet of a Spanish soldier. I witnessed it myself, felt his dying breath upon my face as he gave me the message that he carried to Count Ludwig.”
Willem hung his head. Aletta sensed in his silence the struggle of his own heart. At length he looked up. “Ludwig and Adolph have faced Aremberg in battle, then?”
Pieter-Lucas paused. “Five days ago at Heiligerlee.”
“Heiligerlee?” the prince asked. “I should have expected Winschoten or perhaps Groningen. But a battle in a cloister?”
“Count Ludwig did not intend to stage it there,” Pieter-Lucas answered. “Aremberg came more quickly than he anticipated.”
As he talked, he pulled two packets of post from his knapsack and held one out to the prince. “I am learning that battles go not always as their commanders plan.”
Sharp darts of alarm registered in the prince’s brown eyes, and he came closer, grasping the document offered to him. “The news is not good, then.”
“Our God smiled upon Ludwig in battle, Your Excellency. Heiligerlee was, after all, the ideal field—deadly for an enemy unfamiliar with the treachery of a peat bog. But you must read Count Ludwig’s words for yourself. Not all give cause to rejoice.”
Willem tore away the wax seal and ripped the paper open. Intent, somber, he appeared to devour the words in much the same way Aletta imagined a hungry beggar would attack a hunk of dry bread, tearing it with his teeth, chewing and swallowing as if nothing else in life mattered. She watched the drooping of his shoulders, the sad lines in his face. What herbs did she carry in her apothecary that might help to take away the heaviness?
Nay, foolish one, she reprimanded herself, remember you not where you are? This was the household of the two Julianas. Besides Oma, no greater herbal healer ladies lived anywhere. With them to attend to this man, their own flesh and blood, what need would he ever have for Aletta’s services?
The prince had finished the letter and stood staring at it. His silence and bowed head bespoke numbness and shock. At last he asked, “Saw you the body of my brother Adolph after the battle with your own eyes?”
“Ja, Your Excellency, I did,” Pieter-Lucas answered.
“On the battlefield, with the blood still on him?”
“Nay, rather laid out in state at the altar of the chapel in the monastery.”
“And what of Count Aremberg?”
“I saw his body as well. I watched Count Ludwig take this trophy from his neck. He asked me to bring it to you.” Pieter-Lucas had pulled the heavy gold chain from his satchel and laid it in Willem’s open trembling palm.
Willem held it straight before him, the chain draping over his fingers, and the golden lamb swinging lightly from the hanger that girdled its middle. “We—Aremberg and I—were once brothers of a sort,” he mumbled. “Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece, committed to protecting the rights and the peace of our countrymen—together!”
Slowly, he lifted the chain and put it around his own neck, letting it come to rest atop the identical chain already hanging there.
“If only Adolph and Aremberg could serve the cause as sacrificial lambs, sufficient to end this war and stop the bloodshed!”
He fingered the two chains, then murmured, “But Alva will never stop until King Philip’s death sentence has been fulfilled.”
Willem looked up at his messenger and reached out a hand. “Give to me my moeder’s letter. I take it to her.” Then under his breath, he muttered with a huge sigh, “She told us Adolph would not return. She knew. Ach, why Adolph?”
In the dim light Aletta thought she saw a pair of tears sparkling, one on each of the prince’s cheeks. She felt a wash of tears sliding down her own face as well.
“I’ll instruct the steward to show you the room where you may rest from your journey and refresh yourself for the next,” Willem said flatly without looking at them. “Later, when I have consulted with my moeder and my brother Jan, I shall call for you.”
Aletta watched her prince trudge out through a high archway in the wall and felt the weight of each step penetrate like an arrow into her soul. She grabbed Pieter-Lucas by the arm and squeezed. “What next journey?” she whispered. “You are no messenger.”
Pieter-Lucas encircled her waist and drew her close. “Yaap is no longer here to do it.” His voice sounded tight, distant.
A dart pierced her heart. “You didn’t promise to take his place, Pieter-Lucas?” She looked up into his eyes and waited for him to reassure her it was not so.
“N-nay.”
“Why will the prince call you, then?”
Still holding her in his arm, he shifted restlessly and did not look at her as he answered, “We are living in his household, and it is a time of war. There may be times when…when he has no one else to send.”
A great shuddering loneliness swept over her. Her family had fled to Engeland so she could be with this man. How could he bring her to this strange place, then leave her here? Her body began to shiver.
She felt his forefinger stroke her cheek and looked up into the warm wonders of his smile. “We have not to think about it now, my love. These hours belong to us alone.”
The two stood in silence, eyes probing eyes beyond the smiles and words to the deep places of each other’s souls. She watched pain and admiration wrestle for supremacy. Did his pain make his admiration more intense? Or was it admiration that gave sharpness to the pain? Either way, she knew that as long as he breathed, he would always make her feel protected, treasured, cherished.