Apre-sunrise mist sprinkled Aletta’s nose and sent a host of fresh damp aromas wafting through the air toward her from all sides. They rose from dusty mud balls on the pathway, from the gray grooved wood and mossy stones of the ancient kasteel walls, from the profusion of summer greenery that flourished in every corner.
“Nothing smells half so delicious,” she told herself as she descended the pathway toward the herb garden and prepared to laugh with the meadowlarks that were singing their antiphonal chorus from the kasteel ramparts and the linden trees.
Instead of laughter, though, she felt a wave of loneliness swell up and choke off the joy that had just sent her tripping down the path.
“If only my Pieter-Lucas would return!” she moaned.
This was her favorite time of day, the weather that delighted her, and she was headed for the most exciting spot in Dillenburg. But none of that seemed to matter at all as long as Pieter-Lucas was still away on some dangerous secret mission. Nothing could ever be right without Pieter-Lucas.
By the time she entered the garden, her face ran with tears. She stumbled down the rows toward a small stone seat she called her Pondering Bench. Almost without a thought, she plucked a sprig of borage, the “gladness” herb, from the shrub at her elbow.
She munched on one of the fuzzy prickly leaves and twirled a cluster of its purple star-shaped blossoms between her thumb and forefinger. Gradually her tears subsided and she began to meander through the garden with its profusion of softly colored blossoms, lifting their faces, caressing their leaves.
“Dear God in the Heaven,” she prayed. “Thank you for so much delicate loveliness—and healing power.”
Then in an eyeblink the sun broke over the horizon in long straight shafts of transparent gold. Just as suddenly, Aletta felt the tears well up and engulf her once more. Longing thoughts of Pieter-Lucas’ heart-melting smile and the protective embrace of his warm strong arms gripped her again and set her fleeing back to the bench, where she buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
Overcome with sadness, she forgot even where she was until the pressure of a hand on her shoulder startled her. She looked up into the concerned face of Juliana von Stolberg. “My dear young woman, why such deep distress?”
Aletta lifted her head and sat straight, clasping her hands in her lap. “I am sorry you must find me crying like a child.”
Juliana smiled. “Nay, to weep is womanly, not childish.”
Aletta daubed at her eyes with the corner of her cape. “I know my Pieter-Lucas shall return soon. It’s just that we have not been married long and I miss him so.”
The countess shook her head gently. “War is a many-fisted bereaver. When it takes not the lives of our sons and husbands, it at least deprives us of their presence and leaves us with a haunting uncertainty that spawns many deep and tremulous tears.”
Still wiping at her eyes, Aletta confessed, “I want to be brave, not petulant or morose. I hope it falls not to my lot to cry the whole way through this war.”
“Tears are God’s medicine,” the countess said. “Every bit as healing as borage or calendula or goldenrod. Some days you will not be plagued by so much weeping and will feel stronger. But when tears do come, flee to this sacred haven and let them flow with freedom.”
Aletta forced a smile to her own lips. “You have soothed my spirits greatly.”
Juliana walked a few paces down the pathway. Bending over a low-growing clump of bright green plants, she plucked off a stem covered with broad pointed leaves. “Try these,” she offered.
Aletta took the leaves, broke one off, and slipped it into her mouth. “Garden mint!” she said. “Ah, but it’s wonderfully delicious!”
“Keep a sprig always with you,” the Healer Lady of Dillenburg said. “Chew on it when you feel distressed or unsettled in the belly. Use it as a plaister when your head gives you pain. Come and help yourself however often you have need.”
The countess smoothed her hands across her apron and picked up her basket. “I go now. The morning sup is served shortly. You will come?”
“I come.” Aletta rose and followed the woman through the garden up to the kasteel. Walking felt good to her bones, and for now, at least, she had no need to cry more.
****
At the end of a crashing thunderstorm, just at sunset, the hunting dogs announced the arrival of Willem and his entourage. Soggy and weary, the men trudged up the hill and met their waiting families beneath the gently swirling flag of Nassau. Their somber faces told the whole household that whatever their secret mission, it had not met with success.
In the solitude of their own room, Aletta and her husband sat side by side on the bed. She stroked his tangled curls with her fingers. “I was lonely in this place without you,” she said.
Pieter-Lucas looked at her with a sad, tired smile. “And without you, the whole world is a lonely place.”
She felt a lump rise in her throat and swallowed it down quickly. “Have you been that far?” She managed a laugh, wishing she could entice them both with playfulness.
He grabbed her in both arms and uttered an almost chuckle into her hair. “At least that far, maybe even farther!”
He held her tight while she made laughing sounds and prayed he’d never guess she was crying instead. Were they tears of joy this time? Surely not sadness in this glorious moment of reunion. Yet a melancholy spirit seemed to hold her in its grip.
When he released her from his embrace, he smoothed her forearm with the strong fingers of one hand. Still looking down, she wiped her eyes on her bodice sleeves and watched the plump cords on the back of his hand. They sent shivers of admiring delight down her back.
“I wish,” he mumbled, “I wish I could promise you that I’ll never again be gone so long.”
She lifted her eyes to his and saw in them the same sadness approaching fear that she felt gripping her own soul. “Say it not, Pieter-Lucas. Promises are not made to be broken. It is enough for me to know that the desire burns in your heart.”
“You also need to know,” he added, lifting her chin with his forefinger, “’tis the memory of your waiting arms and radiant smile gives me courage to do the hard things Willem asks of me. And when I return, bone-weary and dejected, the most powerful elixir concocted by the world’s finest herbal healers could not restore me like the smile of your lips and the brush of your fingers through my hair.”
The two young newly marrieds both put away all thoughts of wars and separations and feasted on the admiration in each other’s eyes. He enfolded her in his arms, and for the rest of a long and unlonely night, she never shed a tear.
****
The sky hung heavy, low, and dark on the morning Pieter-Lucas left Dillenburg again. He and Blesje walked with Aletta all the way to the miller’s house in the village. She kept her hand snugly fitted into his and longed for a way to break the awkward silence that had hung between them ever since the morning after he returned from his secret mission. He still refused to talk about the mission. Often in the night he thrashed about on the bed and screamed out in nightmarish terror, “Have mercy!”
Perhaps it was all in her mind, but she fancied that he never seemed quite to look straight into her eyes the way he’d always done. Something was troubling her beloved and changing him into a stranger.
Aletta, too, was troubled. The sudden weeping spells went on, grabbing her when least expected. Further, it grew more difficult each morning to awaken and crawl from her bed. She’d taken to carrying sprigs of the garden mint with her everywhere she went. Repeatedly she nibbled, and mostly it soothed her.
On the miller’s doorstoop, the two troubled young people faced each other. Pieter-Lucas quickly drew her to him and whispered into her hair, “I go not far. I shall return within a day or two.”
Then holding her at arm’s length, he looked into her eyes for a brief moment and begged, “Take good care of my precious vrouw, and…”
“And what?” She searched his face, but it was awash with confusion, and he would not look into her eyes again.
“And…I come home soon,” he said.
Hastily he kissed her, then mounted Blesje and was off. She gazed after him, waving and catching the fewer-than-usual kisses he threw her way. All too soon he rounded a bend in the road, and she could see him no longer.
“Great God in the Heaven, heal my Pieter-Lucas in the wounded places where neither my smile nor the brush of my fingers through his curls seems to reach these days.”
She closed her eyes, stifling the cry coming up from her heart, then knocked at the old chaff-covered door. Once inside, seated by Petronella and holding tiny Maarten in her arms, she could smile again.
“I’m so glad you’ve come this morning,” Petronella said, her eyes big with a hint of surprise.
“You look as if you’re bursting with news.” Aletta felt the tug of a little hand wrapped around her finger.
Petronella laughed. “Indeed I am! Now that I’m feeling better, Maarten and I are preparing to take little Maarten to the church at the foot of the kasteel for his christening.”
“Oh, Petronella!” Aletta caught her breath and spread a smile across her face. “Remember how we used to play with our dolls and pretend we were having them christened?”
“And how we always stood in as godmothers for each other’s dolls?”
“Remember the sweets and little cups of pretend wine we begged from our moeders?”
“And how we would spread them on the big old stone in the garden courtyard of my vader’s house on a rare sunny day? Oh, Aletta, we had big dreams.”
Aletta gulped back an unexpected flood of tears and said, “Indeed we did!”
“But nothing could compare to the wonder of having our own real babies.” Petronella was eyeing her with especial keenness. “Are you all right?”
“I’m sure I am,” she tried to assure her friend. Why more crying at such a happy moment? Perhaps it was because she had heard the Children of God talk so much about believers’ baptism that the whole idea of christening a baby left her more than a little confused. But this was her childhood friend, and they had waited and prepared for this day all their lives. Was the anticipation of those happy hours now to be clouded by some sort of religious shadow?
Petronella’s eyes registered concern. “You must be well, dear Aletta. It would never do for the baby’s godmother to be ill—or sad—at a christening.”
“Nay,” Aletta said. She looked at the baby sleeping contentedly in her lap, his face resembling a painting of an angel she’d once seen in the Great Church in Breda. Lifting her gaze to her friend, she added, “This godmother shall be neither ill nor sad at Maarten’s christening.”
“That’s a promise?”
“A promise from my heart.” Aletta laid her hand on Petronella’s, closed her eyes, and waited for the latest wave of sadness and tears to pass.
****
Pieter-Lucas pursued his path with an unusual combination of eagerness and dread. Well before nightfall, he found Dirck Coornhert in a rented attic room above the cobbler’s shop in Duisburg.
“Welcome, jongen,” the man said, motioning him to a seat at his table. The table was big enough for only two people and completely covered with a clutter of papers, an empty tankard, a crust of bread, and a quill pen in an inkpot.
“A cartoon!” Pieter-Lucas exclaimed. “I didn’t know you were an artist.”
“Engraver mostly,” Coornhert said. “For years I earned my livelihood creating plates for an artist. But you came with a message!” He extended his hand.
“Ja,” Pieter-Lucas muttered, straightening quickly and removing the message from his doublet. He handed it to his friend and promptly went back to studying the drawing. “At least sometimes you draw as well as engrave,” he said, forgetting that the older man had turned his attention to more pressing matters.
Coornhert grunted, then laid the message on the table. “Ja, when there is no one else, it falls to me.”
Pieter-Lucas looked up. “That happens to you too?”
“These are not quite the ideal times, you know, when we can have things the way we’d like them.”
“Nobody knows that better than I,” Pieter-Lucas retorted. Leaning forward, he looked hard at his host and asked, “Tell me, why is it that God puts paint in a man’s blood, then separates him from his tools and consumes his life with more important things, like ugly evil wars? What pleasure does He gain from tormenting us so?”
Coornhert spread his hands out on the drawings littering the table. “No honest man can give you real answers to why questions about God. I only know that nothing will ever be more important than whatever it is God has set to running in your blood, and I don’t believe He finds delight in tormenting us.”
“Why, then, does He make us wait?”
Coornhert shrugged and raised his hands, palms upward. “His whys for you are not the same as His whys for me. When you need to know, He’ll tell you.”
“Ach!” Pieter-Lucas hung his head and strained to hear the silence of the room above the thunderous beating of his heart. Without looking up, he spoke at last in a hushed voice. “Ten days ago I witnessed the beheading of Egmont and Hoorne.” He paused and watched Coornhert shake his head ever so slowly and heard a low soft moan come from deep within the man. “Ever since, I have been plagued with nightmares of the executioner dragging me to the scaffold, pointing a sword at my breast, roaring, ‘Decide whether you will fulfill Yaap’s mission like a man or go back to your paintbrushes and the Anabaptist cowards.’
“’Twas bad enough to see it one time, but every night…I am never free from it. I awaken screaming, and God only knows what my dear vrouw thinks or hears. I can neither tell her where I’ve been nor what I dream.”
“Why not?”
“Already she fears greatly for me to be out roaming around the countryside on dangerous missions. If I told her my dreams, she’d never rest again. Nor can I tell her where I’ve been, for Willem insisted our mission must be kept secret.”
“You told me.”
“May my soul be condemned if I did wrong, but I must have a vader’s counsel, and I trust you, Dirck Coornhert, above all other men I know. If you betray me, I am betrayed. Better than to go on this way.”
“What do you need from me?” Coornhert asked.
“I must know the truth. Am I a coward just because I hate war as the Anabaptists hate war? Or would I be a coward if I refused to fulfill Yaap’s mission? Or, worse yet, would it be an act of cowardice to go on in Willem’s service simply because I fear to say him Nay or because to love one’s vaderland means fighting for it?”
The white-haired man leaned back in his chair, stretched a leg out into the room, and looked hard into Pieter-Lucas’ eyes. “When you shut your ears to all the voices and search your own heart, what does it say about the matter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ja, jongen. Deep down inside, you do know exactly what you believe. Else you would be easily led astray by every new suggestion coming along.”
“That I am. Hence my great confusion.”
“Nay, you are not led down side pathways. Rather, you resist them, every one. You are but confused in the hearing and not quite trusting that that which God has put within your heart is right. Now tell me, if you could be free from all the tormenting voices, what course of action would you pursue?”
Pieter-Lucas stared at his own fingers, tapping a dull rhythm on the table.
“Just say it,” Coornhert urged.
“I believe,” he began hesitantly, “that the cause of Willem and Ludwig, the cause of rightness and goodness and freedom must be God’s way—and ’tis my appointed part to fulfill Yaap’s mission. At the same time, God created my hands to wield a paintbrush, and I could never bring myself to allow them to be stained with another man’s blood.”
Coornhert sighed. “Just as I thought.”
“What did you think?”
“You and I are agreed on this matter.”
“And we are not cowards?”
Agitation sparkled in Coornhert’s uneasy eyes. “Jongen, remember this. A pathway is not cowardly simply because it is less trodden. It often demands far greater courage to tread on the lonely trail than the thronged highway.”
“Greater courage?”
“To some of us is granted the vision to see beyond the clear horizons of our day. We shall not often find the words to explain that vision. Nor shall we find many who will understand or sympathize. Yet in our hearts we’ll know that for us ’tis right, and we can do no other.”
Courage indeed! Pieter-Lucas sighed. “And where shall I gain the courage to tell my vrouw that for this moment God has appointed me to fulfill Yaap’s mission?”
Coornhert laughed. “Where do you gain courage to perform the mission?”
“I’ve no idea whence it comes. I only do what must be done each day. But my vrouw must know my intentions. Since I returned from the ghastly beheading, we’ve scarcely talked to each other at all. I felt such a coward that I could not even look her in the eye. I know this distresses her, for she lives on the verge of weeping these days.”
“Go home, jongen, and exercise the courage God has planted in your soul to tell your vrouw all she needs to know. And fear not that you have caused her tears. Any man who sets his course by his vrouw’s tears will surely end in shipwreck.”
Pieter-Lucas ran his fingers through his hair. “You speak wisdom, kind friend.”
“Now I must write Willem an answer and send you on your way. While I write, can I ask of you to run a short messenger’s errand for me?”
“Gladly. Just tell me what and where.”
“Your friends Meester Laurens and his vrouw have settled on the northern edge of the village with a nest of like-minded folk who take in Lowland refugees like themselves. Could you find the schoolmaster and tell him I have a surprise for him?”
“Ja! What sort of surprise?”
Coornhert smiled. “Remember that strange woman who wanted me to buy the meester’s Bible?”
“Mieke! What’s she done now?”
Coornhert gestured toward a stack of books near the fireplace. “I have bought all these from her.”
“And she’s used every stuiver to buy food and shelter for the schoolmaster and his vrouw, ja!” Skepticism colored his voice with sarcasm.
“My friends who give them lodging tell me that she has.”
“Are they his books, stolen from his house, like the Bible?”
Coornhert nodded. “I am sure of it. I know he will be overjoyed to be reunited with them. He has been put to work teaching the refugee children. Surely he can use them well. When you find him, make no mention of the books. Simply tell him I wait to talk with him.”
Dirck Coornhert gave him quick directions, and Pieter-Lucas hurried out into the early evening still flooded with midsummer daylight. A warm new calmness seeped in around the edges of the musty questions that had nagged at him so long. Was it possible, after all, that he could be certain of the rightness or wrongness of a thing even while the reasons remained a mystery to his own heart? If so, he was ready to go home and tell his vrouw all she needed to hear.
****
Pieter-Lucas found Meester Laurens in a large low building on the edge of the refugees’ farm. Ten to fifteen students, mostly boys in assorted sizes, were seated at an equally varied assortment of small tables. The man looked up from the student he was helping and came quickly to him.
Grabbing him by the hand and squeezing his shoulder, Laurens led him to a secluded corner at the back of the room.
“Heer Coornhert asked me to bring you a message,” Pieter-Lucas said.
“How so?”
“He has a surprise for you.”
“For me?”
“Believe me, Meester, you will be glad you answered this call. How wonderful that you are teaching again—using the thing that runs in your blood, eh?”
Laurens folded his hands across his chest and rested them on his belly. “Ah, but God has made my most cherished dreams come true!”
“And your vrouw?”
“Vrouw Laurens finds herself happily busy day and night, clothing the destitute, comforting the homesick, and trying the best she can to scrape up herbs to heal the many maladies that follow these refugees across the fields.”
“Are there no herbalists in this place?”
“Bah! Practitioners of ancient superstitions is what they are. Take it from a schoolmaster, descended from a long line of schoolmasters,” he said, thumping Pieter-Lucas on the chest, “there has to be more to healing the body than waving a few sprigs of good luck purslane and hanging button leek on the gate to protect from evil spirits.”
“Indeed there is,” Pieter-Lucas retorted. “You should see the herbal garden of the Julianas in Dillenburg. Willem’s moeder and his sister are teaching my Aletta to tend that garden and mix and dispense healing potions from all the herbs that grow there.”
“Would to God we had such women in this place.”
“But your vrouw has skills of this sort, has she not?”
“Only what necessity forces her to learn. You won’t believe what a helpful assistant God has provided for my vrouw in that most unlikely of all persons, Lompen Mieke.”
Pieter-Lucas shook his head. “Nay, I can’t believe it.”
“I admit she is a strange one,” Laurens mumbled. “She will still never sleep inside a building nor eat at a table with another soul. No one knows where she stores her belongings or whether she has any. Yet every day, all day long, she lingers at Adriana’s elbow, never asking what needs to be done but always doing it.”
“Who knows what she is up to?” Pieter-Lucas suggested. “You and I both know the likes of this sly woman does not change for the better.”
Meester Laurens gripped Pieter-Lucas’ lapel in a thumb and forefinger and drew up close. “I said exactly the same thing to my vrouw when Mieke first began to follow us. But ever since the maiden Betteke wielded God’s Sword against her evil heart in the prison, Mieke has changed in ways you and I would never believe possible.”
Pieter-Lucas frowned. “What do you mean by God’s Sword?”
“The Bible, jongen. That Betteke had a way of reading it that made you expect to look up and see God sitting there in the room speaking the words himself.”
Pieter-Lucas shook his head. “I still don’t believe even that could make a difference in a woman like Mieke.”
Laurens raised a hand. “You are just like me. You have to see it for yourself. Well, I see it every day. And she begs my vrouw to keep on reading to her from the Book. It’s powerful, jongen, powerful!”
Pieter-Lucas shrugged. Often he’d heard Children of God claim that they’d been changed from wicked sinners to godly people by reading the Bible. But he had always wondered. He hadn’t known them before this supposed change took place.
“Mark my word.” The meester was wagging his finger at him. “If Alva and Philip, along with every clergyman, nobleman, and man of war in our vaderland would become experts in the knowledge and use of this powerful Sword, the revolt with its bloodshed would end in an eyeblink.”
Neither man spoke for a long moment. Suddenly Pieter-Lucas realized the students were growing rowdy on the other side of the room, and their meester was rubbing his hands on his breeches.
“Well, well, I intended not to give you such a lesson. I hear my students need some attention. I go to them now and to Coornhert later. Blessings on your travels—and your bride’s herbal studies.”
“And my greetings to your vrouw.”
No sooner had Pieter-Lucas stepped out into the lingering twilight air than he heard the patter of approaching feet and looked up to see Mieke hurrying toward him.
“So, your vrouw’s a healer lady now,” she said, walking beside him.
“Who told you?” Pieter-Lucas snapped.
“I heared ye say it yerself.”
“How dare you go hole-peeping on conversations where you’re not invited?”
“God’s put me in the healin’ work in this place, an’ whatever anybody says that kin help the sick’uns what come to us fer help, I’se goin’ to do it. Can ye bring yer vrouw here with ye when ye come again—with a satchel full o’ herbs from that wonnerful garden ye was a-talkin’ about?”
Bring Aletta here? Never! He ignored Mieke, but she followed and at last grabbed on to his arm and begged, “Please, Pieter-Lucas, if’n ye got even a touch o’ the love o’ God in yer heart fer the human creatures He’s done made, ye’ll bring her here—or at least some o’ her herbs. Please!”
Without intending to, he looked quickly toward the girl. Her eyes captivated him. They were neither wild nor dull nor seductive—not the eyes of a street thief with dishonest plans to hide. Instead, he saw warmth and compassion.
He jerked his arm free from her grasp and bolted toward the road. “I shall see what I can bring you next time,” he shouted as he fled. Never that he could remember had he so blatantly lied to anyone just to get them off his track.
He heard her thin piercing voice call after him, “God’ll bless ye fer yer kindness!” The words pounded around his brain in a storm of haunting, vibrating echoes of guilt.
He had to get away from this place—NOW. Mattered not that it was night. Once he’d picked up Coornhert’s reply to Willem’s message, he’d travel through the darkness and reach Dillenburg by morning. The pounding of Blesje’s hooves across the countryside must overpower the memory of Mieke’s words and pleading face.
****
All through the night, Pieter-Lucas drove Blesje as hard as he could go. The sun had scarcely risen when he rode up the hill and through the gate to the music of the hunting dogs. He stabled Blesje and rushed to his room, where he found his vrouw drowsing on the edge of wakefulness.
“Pieter-Lucas, you’re back!” she cried, throwing her arms around his neck.
When he’d kissed her fully awake, he stroked the hair back from her face and spoke while his heart beat wildly. “My love, I must tell you something. NOW!”
“Are you well?” she gasped.
“Ja, love, my body is well. It’s just that ever since my secret mission, I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you the one thing I know you don’t want to hear. I couldn’t bear to break your heart, and yet it seemed that my silence kept you constantly in tears.” He paused and watched her quiver in his arms.
“Tell me, Pieter-Lucas, tell me,” she begged. Something in the adoration of those deep and wonderful eyes gave him the courage he sought.
“I fear,” he began, “that until this war is over and Leyden is freed from Alva’s iron fist, I must give myself to Yaap’s mission.”
He felt each word like a dart as he said it and looked for her to wince. Instead, she reached up and caressed his cheek with her hand. “Oh, Pieter-Lucas, my love,” she said, unsmiling but without weeping, “I knew you would.”
“Did I tell you in one of my nightmares?” he blurted.
“Nay, my love. It was just so clear to see. Willem needs you and you’re a brave man. If you didn’t do it, I’d be disappointed in you.”
“Then you’re not angry or distressed?”
“Sometimes, ja. But out on my Pondering Bench among the Julianas’ precious herbs, I have talked long hours with God about it. I’ve learned that when He knows it’s time, He’ll let you come back to my side and to your painting. In the meantime, I know He’ll protect you whenever He takes you away.”
For a long and tremulous moment, he stared at her in amazement. “What a wise and extraordinary vrouw I have! I shall do my best never again to make you weep.”
Smiling, still caressing his cheek, she said, “When I weep, my love, be not so quick to think you caused it. To weep is womanly and healing as well. Now, let us talk no more about it but enjoy the precious moments given to us.”
Pieter-Lucas took his vrouw in his arms and soon fell into a weary traveler’s satisfied slumber.