All the way to Duisburg, Aletta had to remind herself that she was on a mission. A perpetual wind under a canopy of gray clouds chilled her, the jostling gait of her horse unsettled her stomach, and she fought sleep the whole time. At least it gave her a few more hours with her husband.
“If it weren’t for the duties that call us and the war that threatens us,” she called out to him, “we could both go all the way to Friesland.”
“Or better yet,” Pieter-Lucas answered, the wind blowing his words away from her, “we could have stayed in Dillenburg.” He grew sober and shook his head in shuddering movements. “Nay, Opa’s brushes and paintpots are calling from my attic nest at Abrams en Zonen.”
A long way to go for a handful of paintbrushes, Aletta thought. Yet she knew that for some reason, they were almost the life and breath of his passion to paint.
Traveling at a pace slower than Pieter-Lucas kept when alone, they spent a night in the Proud Stallion Inn in Keulen. As the morning of the second day wore on, Pieter-Lucas grew increasingly silent and somber. Trying to draw him out from his aloof distance, Aletta asked, “What shall we name your son?”
He showed a hint of a smile. “Son? Why, Lucas, of course. What else?”
She chuckled. “I thought so.”
“But what if it is a daughter?” His words reached her ears wrapped in wind.
“Kaatje, for her oma! The girl your moeder yearned for and never had.”
“She would have been pleased,” he said, then stared ahead and said no more.
The sun had reached its highest peak in the sky when they passed through the crooked streets of Duisburg, lined with rows of brown lookalike shops and houses. Beyond, they rode across a series of large flat fields, broken only by a settlement of buildings just ahead. The hooves of Aletta’s horse were clopping out a rhythm that seemed to say over and over, “He’s going to war and you’re staying behind…. He’s going to war and…” She shivered and drew her cloak closer to her trembling body.
At the spot where a narrow pathway led off from the main road to the refugee’s farm, Pieter-Lucas brought both horses to a halt side by side. A long ray of sunlight had broken through the clouds and rested on his hands where they held Blesje’s reins. He looked down at the reins, then up at Aletta with a flat unreadable expression.
“Two things I must say before I leave you here,” he said.
Aletta’s heart pounded, eager to hear his voice, dreading his words.
“It still unsettles me to leave you without an experienced healer to watch over you,” he began.
She reached toward him. “But, Pieter-Lucas—”
He laid a finger on his lips and shook his head. “Shh. Hear the rest. I now realize you had to come here just as much as I had to take Yaap’s place. It’s just that I still cannot quite trust Mieke.”
“Not even after her confession?” A part of her agreed with him, but something had happened in her own heart that day when she hugged the thief and offered her God’s forgiveness, something she could not expect Pieter-Lucas to feel.
“I leave you in Vrouw Laurens’ care, otherwise I would not do it,” he said.
Aletta waited. “You said there were two things. What more?”
He squirmed in his saddle and Blesje lifted his hooves and snorted lightly beneath him. Aletta watched the cords tighten in Pieter-Lucas’ neck and the muscles around his mouth twitch. Whatever could be the great struggle tearing him apart?
“If anything happens to me on this trip to Friesland—”
“Nay, Pieter-Lucas,” she interrupted, “you said the message you bear commands Ludwig not to engage in battle for now. If there is no battle, what do you have to fear?”
He shook his head. “’Tis not so simple, Little One. True, my message urges Ludwig to wait, but when it comes to battles, Ludwig is a racehorse, always eager for the contest. Besides, Alva himself is on his way to Friesland—may already be there. Even if Ludwig should follow Willem’s orders, Alva would probably root him out of his hiding place and create a battle.”
“Oh, Pieter-Lucas, he may still heed the warning.” She had to believe the best, even while her heart beat out of control.
For a long moment he smiled at her, his eyes heavy with admiration. Then he added, “Whatever may be—with me or without—you must promise to return to Dillenburg to the care of the Julianas before our child greets the day of birth.”
“Pieter-Lucas, you talk as if you were a foot soldier headed into the thick of a battle. Messengers don’t fight. They return home with news of the battles.”
“Have you forgotten how I became a messenger in the first place?” he retorted.
She stretched her hand out and laid it on his knee. “Nay, I have not forgotten.” She swallowed hard to keep the tears from spilling. Forcing a smile, she finished, “I only know you will return long before the birth of our child. It’s still many months away, you know,” she added, patting her not-yet-bulging tummy.
He returned the smile. “I hope you are right. In the meantime, may God’s smile light your every day there.” He nodded toward the cluster of roof lines rising out of the pasture.
“The Julianas have stocked my apothecary till it groans,” Aletta assured him. “I even have my own precious garden mint plant to grow as much as I need. And the promise of more of everything with any messenger coming this way. Just pray me Godspeed, as I pray the same for you.”
“That shall I do.” He looked at her for a long time, then jostled Blesje’s reins and urged him, “Get moving, old boy.”
Together they rode on to the farm, still speaking little. But the gloom had lifted, the sun warmed their way, and Aletta’s stomach ceased its churning.
****
Never had Pieter-Lucas approached a trip with so much apprehension. What if he should encounter an unfriendly Alva or his soldiers? What if he could not find his paintbrushes? Both thoughts sent terror running up and down his spine.
On his first night in the stable of a wayside inn, he dismounted Blesje and gave the reins to a stableboy. Out of the corner of his eye, something caught his attention. Through a gaping hole window, a stubbly face stared at him. A faint flickering lamplight revealed simply that the man wore a peasant cap fitted tightly around his ears.
An inexplicable uneasiness gripped Pieter-Lucas. “He’s only a stranger, with no reason to pursue you,” he told himself. But the uneasiness grew into a sense of impending disaster. He checked carefully to make sure he had all his belongings in hand as he scurried into the inn, pulling the door shut with an extra tug.
All through the evening meal, he searched the perimeters of the room but did not see the stranger again. When he was shown to his room, he latched the door, then tied it shut with his rope belt. He crawled into bed fully clothed, even down to his shoes. On this trip, that was the place where he kept Willem’s message to Ludwig, neatly folded and padding the top of his foot.
Sleep eluded him for most of the night. Thoughts of Aletta’s weakness, Mieke’s shiftiness, Alva’s madness, and images of the stranger’s eyes darted in and out of his brain in rapid circular succession. Every time an old timber beam of the inn creaked or the wind set tree branches scratching at the windowpanes, or a cat prowled across the thatch above his head, he was certain the stranger was about to descend upon him.
The tormenting thoughts tossed him from side to side until the light of morning broke and he could mount his horse and move on his way. All day long his mind alerted his eyes for that sly stranger. Every time he passed through a town or a wood, he fancied the man lying in wait for him around each blind corner.
However, the face did not appear. By evening, when he turned into another wayside inn, he had convinced himself that either the appearance was an illusion, or his uncontrolled imagination had made far too much of it.
When he left Blesje in the stable, he mumbled into his ear, “Tonight it will take more than wild fantasies to keep this weary body awake.”
He had barely seated himself at a table in the inn when he spotted a circle of lamplight in the far corner of the common room. Again, something drew his eyes in that direction. One man sat alone at a tiny table. He wore a familiar tight-fitting cap and stared straight at him.
Terrified, Pieter-Lucas rushed off to bed without so much as a crust of bread. Once more he crawled in fully dressed and pulled the covers over his head. This time he slept but dreamed all night of Spanish soldiers chasing him with long curved swords. Their faces lighted by lamps, they looked like the haunting stranger.
The third day he drove Blesje as hard as he dared. Maybe he could outrun the man. That night the stranger did not appear either in the stable or in the common room. Pieter-Lucas hurried through his supper, resisting attempts on the part of a table mate to engage him in conversation. Then he climbed the stairs to his assigned room. With a good sleep tonight he would surely reach his destination tomorrow.
When he opened the door to his room, he heard footsteps coming up the hallway behind him. He dismissed them as of no consequence, but the light carried by his fellow traveler caught his eye. When he cast a hasty glance back over his shoulder, there was that face once more—with the close-fitting cap. Pieter-Lucas burst into his room and again crawled into bed fully clothed.
“Where are Aletta’s prayers and the Godspeed I need just to keep me alive?” he said barely aloud. “God, deliver me from this stranger. Bring me to Ludwig tomorrow and take me back to my vrouw. Please!”
Prayer was of no use! Never had God seemed so far away.
All night he lay in one position—as if frozen into a pond—and never slept an eyeblink. If only Yaap had lived, he, Pieter-Lucas, could be in Dillenburg this minute. Or maybe in Duisburg with Aletta, using his paintbrushes and charcoals to help Dirck Coornhert make illustrations for Willem’s pamphlets. That would be serving the revolt without having to limp onto battlefields and take a chance on turning his vrouw into an early widow.
But Yaap had not lived….
At the first hint of daylight, Pieter-Lucas mounted Blesje. Today he was riding along the narrow wooded causeway where he and Aletta had brought herbs to the wounded men of the battle of Heiligerlee, past the pathway that led off to his old sod house hiding place and the spot where he’d seen Yaap gunned down.
As the memories grew stronger and his goal came steadily closer, his fears of the persistent stranger subsided. No more inns to stop at and discover him still following. Pieter-Lucas looked frequently back over his shoulder, then straight ahead toward the long-awaited outline of Groningen against a gray cloudy sky.
“I will forget the trip behind me,” he said to Blesje, patting his mane, “along with the unbearded stranger. Groningen lies within reach, and Ludwig is nearby. I’ll deliver my message, retrieve my paintbrushes, and…return to Aletta.”
****
Delicious smells of savory stew floated over the sultry late-afternoon air from Ludwig’s encampment half a cannon-shot distance from the high-walled city of Groningen. Cannons glared at Pieter-Lucas, forming a wall inside the deep trenches around the perimeter of the village of army tents. Heavily armed soldiers rolled their eyes and lowered their spears toward him as he approached.
“Halt!” three soldiers shouted at once.
“I’ve come with a message for Count Ludwig,” Pieter-Lucas said.
“Know you the word?” demanded one soldier.
“I do.”
“Then put it here,” the guard pointed to his ear and let Pieter-Lucas approach and whisper the watchword that would open the gates to Ludwig’s camp.
“Where will I find him?” Pieter-Lucas asked, still whispering into the man’s ear.
“His tent is the tall one there with the coat of arms of the House of Nassau just below the peak.” He gestured in the direction of the heart of the camp, then let Pieter-Lucas pass over the drawbridge that spanned the defensive trench.
At that instant Pieter-Lucas heard a flurry of scuffling movements by the guards. He turned to see three of them surrounding a now familiar peasant man with a tight-fitting cap. His heart started and he gestured excitedly toward the culprit.
“Seize that man!” he shouted. “He’s followed me for three days. Look at those dark shifty eyes—a Spaniard, a spy, a demon. Search him well and keep him in chains!”
Pieter-Lucas watched in amazement as the man submitted willingly to the chains and let the guard lead him, unprotesting, from the camp. “Why did we never see him all day long?” he asked Blesje. “Must be a spirit!”
His legs continued to tremble as he hurried on past rows of tents, cooking fires, and knots of men sharpening swords, cleaning guns, carrying large pots of water or armloads of wood. Already he could see the tall pointed pitch of the tent he sought, with its coat of arms glistening in the waning daylight. But before he could reach it, his way was abruptly blocked by a mob of soldiers surging toward the commander’s tent.
From his place on Blesje’s back, Pieter-Lucas could see over the mass of waving arms and spears, halberds and firearms, to the Nassau tent, where Ludwig was emerging and raising a hand toward the crowd. The loud angry voices unnerved Blesje and set his hooves to prancing.
“Quiet, old boy, quiet,” Pieter-Lucas urged, patting his horse reassuringly on the neck and backing away slightly. Slowly he skirted the crowd, ever circling toward the tent, hoping to see all without being seen.
Pieter-Lucas surveyed the motley army from his vantage point. No neat uniforms and heavy coats of mail here. Instead, the assortment of Lowland patriots wore an equally assorted array of unofficial-looking garb. Easily he picked out the Beggars, dressed in the ashen gray balloon britches, doublets, and hats, with those ludicrous beggar’s bowls and bags dangling from their necks and waists. But the shouts and protests came from a group of Germans. “Mercenaries!” he told Blesje.
“Ludwig, Ludwig” came the shouts.
“Come and face us, you thief!”
“We want our money!”
Ludwig raised his arms and shouted, “Be still, all of you! Be still!”
The rumbling gradually slowed to a near silence, and Ludwig spoke again. “Let your leader speak for you!”
One man’s voice rose above the uneasy calm. “We must be paid if we are to stay and fight your battles!”
From all around the calls sounded. “Gold, gold! We want gold!”
“You shall be paid all the gold coming to you,” Ludwig shouted.
“When?” came the leader’s sarcastic challenge.
“Soon,” Ludwig answered.
“Nay! Give it to us now!”
A barrage of shouts echoed around the camp. “Now! Now! Gold now!”
“We prepare for war now!” Ludwig shouted. “With fortifications to build and swords to sharpen, how dare you speak of pay? We lie in the path of thousands of Alva’s well-aimed pistols and halberds. When he finds us grumbling, unprepared, and forces us to surrender, think you for a moment that he will allow you the luxury of keeping a bag of gold tied around your waist?”
A loud hissing arose from the troops, followed by more shouts. “Gold now! Gold now!”
Ludwig waved his arms for attention. “When you have captured Alva and taken his booty, we shall have spoils in abundance!”
The leader retorted, his voice fierce and fiery, “If we are to fight, we must be paid NOW!”
Ludwig thrust his face toward the leader. “My paymaster has no money to pay you now!”
The crowd surged like one angry sea of weapons and fists and erupted into a shower of guffaws, jeers, curses. The leader of the mob raised a fist to Ludwig’s face and challenged, “You bring us gold from the paymaster by morning, or we shall force his hoarded stores from him and be gone.”
“Where will you go?” Ludwig asked.
“We shall find a commander who will fairly distribute the booty of battle and pay his troops the value of their services.” The man’s words came out in angry spurts.
Pieter-Lucas had drawn up nearly to the tent now. He slipped off his horse and waited in the shadow of the tent next to Ludwig’s.
Suddenly one of the mercenaries darted in front of Pieter-Lucas, pistol raised, and pointed it directly at Ludwig. Almost before Pieter-Lucas had seen what was happening, he heard a gruff shout and a scuffling of feet from behind him. A Beggar soldier tackled the would-be assassin, knocking first the pistol, then the man to the ground. The two men rolled in the dirt until the Beggar was kneeling with one knee pinning down his opponent. In his other hand, he fired the pistol toward the heavens.
Then he turned it toward the man who had first aimed it at Ludwig and began haranguing, “You mercenary little fox! It isn’t your vaderland that’s being trampled by some arrogant foreign friend. All you care about is gold for your bag. It matters not a clog to you whether we win or lose, live or die.”
He fixed a burly hand around the throat of the German soldier and snorted, “You fool, if I hadn’t stopped you, you would have put an end to our leader and started an uproar that would have destroyed you and your greedy countrymen. Lest you think we are weaklings in this army, let me warn you that we would have blown you to bits and scattered your parts to the wild beasts of the fields. Then what would you need of gold?”
He spat at the man. He spat again and again and again!
By now, a regiment of guards had arrived and were shackling the attempted assassin with chains. The whole horde of mutineering rebels had dispersed and vanished.
Ludwig said to the Beggar, “A job well done.”
He was preparing to enter his tent when Pieter-Lucas stopped him. “Your Excellency, a message from Count Willem.”
Ludwig gave him a quick glance. “Another one?”
“Ja, Your Excellency,” Pieter-Lucas said, handing the letter to him.
Ludwig muttered, “Come in,” and led the way.
Pieter-Lucas tethered Blesje to a tent peg and followed the count inside the tent, where the distraught commander seated himself at a low table. Nicolaas, one of the messengers Pieter-Lucas had gone to Brussels with, stood in silence behind the table. The two messengers nodded their greetings.
“Not still insisting that I retreat to Delfzijl and refuse to fight with Alva, I hope,” Ludwig groused as he broke the seal and ripped the letter open. Hurriedly he read it, all the time mumbling to himself as if he had forgotten that anyone was listening, “Ach, Willem, Willem.” He slapped the letter on the table and exploded, “Will he never understand? Alva is an iron man and must be handled with iron. He knows no other language! And Willem thinks I’ll sit in Delfzijl and wait till he’s ready to fight in the south? He would keep us here for an eternity. He’ll never move until a bag of gunpowder is ignited beneath his stool! Too late! Too late!” He pounded a fist on the table, then grabbed his pen and, after dipping it in the inkwell, began scribbling across the page.
Pieter-Lucas and Nicolaas exchanged arched-eyebrow expressions. As they all knew, the Nassau brothers were as different as the turtle and the hare. Willem preferred a battle well timed and organized as a part of a total campaign rather than a repeat performance of the hasty and risky adventure of Heiligerlee. They all knew that with Alva at the head of his own troops another such risk could only fail.
Ludwig sputtered over his work, then folded and affixed a wax seal to it. Before he’d finished the job or looked up, he said, “Nicolaas, prepare to carry this to Willem immediately. I need whatever money and troops he can spare and certainly no more letters begging me to sit in Delfzijl.” His voice rose to a frenzied pitch.
He handed the message to Nicolaas with a hasty, “Dally not along the way.”
Turning to Pieter-Lucas, Ludwig said, “And as for you, jongen…” He paused, tapping his finger on the table. His head was bowed, and he did not smile.
“Ja, Excellency,” Pieter-Lucas answered, “at your service.”
“There’s a fleet of sea Beggars nearby, in readiness should I need their assistance from the water.” Grabbing his pen and another sheet of paper, he began scribbling once more. “Here, take this note to Emden.”
Pieter-Lucas took the note and fingered the still-soft sealing wax. How might he find a way to go on to Abrams en Zonen? Perhaps later! He started toward the tent door.
“Wait!” Ludwig thundered. “If you can wait until evening, I shall give you more messages. There is a handful of men in Emden who might yet be persuaded to contribute to our cause. God only knows we could use it!”
“I shall be glad to wait,” Pieter-Lucas said. He left the tent in search of a pot of stew for his belly. Tonight he would do his duty and tomorrow be reunited with his most precious of earthly possessions.
****
Before the sun set, Ludwig sent Pieter-Lucas off with enough letters to his friends in East Friesland to keep him running for several days. Pieter-Lucas stopped at the guard post on the edge of the camp and inquired about the peasant with the piercing eyes.
“Just want to be certain he’s not going to follow me from here,” he explained.
“Worry not,” the guard assured him, “he’ll not follow you.”
“You locked him up, then?”
“Nay, we put a sword in his hand and assigned him to a regiment.”
“What? What kind of feeble story did he give you?”
“Our commanders interrogated him well. He’s a defector from Alva’s troops. He came all the way from the Low Lands on his own in search of Ludwig’s army.”
“I know how far he came,” Pieter-Lucas spat the words, “in my shadow. Just be sure you don’t let him out of these gates.”
“Merciful God,” he mumbled to himself. He slapped Blesje’s reins and set off fuming into the horse’s ears, “Warfare turns men’s minds soft!”
Pieter-Lucas shivered in the foggy-damp morning air and slipped across the protective moat. First a messenger, now a collector of war monies! And retriever of paintbrushes?
****
The morning after Pieter-Lucas delivered Ludwig’s message to the scruffy little fleet of Beggar troops, he made his way quickly into Emden. Each clopping step released a host of memories—some pleasant, some maddening, but all as vivid as if he’d left here yesterday.
Almost a year had passed since he first came this way in search of the girl of his childhood dreams who had become the passion of his manhood. Today he searched for his other consuming passion—brushes, canvases, and paintpots.
“Almost as much hangs on finding my paints as once hung on finding my Aletta,” he told himself as he passed through the city gate and headed toward Abrams en Zonen. In a world where the sword continually threatened to separate him from everything that he held dear, he had to be reunited with his brushes.
“It’s all I have left to remind me of Opa’s anointing,” he muttered, “whatever good that may do me when this war is over.”
When at last he stood before the old printery building, Blesje’s reins in hand, his heart beat thunderously. Wiping the moisture from his hands, he knocked loudly on the door of the section where Aletta and her family had lived. No answer came. He peered in the windows. No curtains hung there; no signs of life greeted him.
Running next door to the section of the building where Johannes lived, he tried again, but with the same silent response. Surely Johannes had not fled as well! Pieter-Lucas returned to the street. He stared up at the floors above but saw nothing more than windows reflecting afternoon light and softly stirring branches of the spindly ash tree that stood between the house and the street.
With Blesje in tow, he dashed around the row of houses and down the back alley until he reached the hidden stairway he’d used so often. As always, the way was enclosed with dark walls, but today dangling cobwebs attempted to block his passage.
“You wait here,” he told Blesje, tying the horse’s reins to a post and dashing up the stairwell. At the top he found the secret door tethered with a long chain. Scarred, splintered, and without a handle, it stood ajar! By stretching thin and tall and pressing hard against both door and frame, Pieter-Lucas managed to shove his body through.
One cursory glance around the empty rooms confirmed his fears—Abrams en Zonen was gone! He scrambled up the stairs into the attic room. Worktables, cabinets, straw bedroll—nothing remained but a few straws mixed with balls of dust and here and there a trail of mouse leavings across the floor. He rushed to the corner next to the window where he’d stored his brushes, pots, and canvases. The empty walls and steeply sloping roof screamed at him!
“Nay!” he screamed back. “There has to be something left. Johannes, where did you go? What did you do to my brushes, my paints, my wedding canvas?”
For a long stunned moment he stared at the nothingness, trying to take it in. He dashed down the stairs and searched all the rooms—every shelf and counter—and the living quarters on the ground floor where nothing remained but the cupboard beds. On one stairstep near the street door, he found a small stick of wood.
“A paintbrush!” he gasped and snatched it up. He rolled it around in his fingers and felt its familiar smoothness.
“It’s been chewed ragged at both ends,” he said and felt a rage building inside.
He stooped and sifted through the dust and mouse leavings until he’d gathered up five pieces of bristle. He held the pitiful scraps in one hand and said with bitterness, “This was more than a paintbrush.” Then lifting them skyward, he screamed out, “God, is this all that’s left of my anointing? Then you can have it!”
Hurling every scrap to the floor, he fled down the alley stairs and did not look back. Fury numbed his brain. He mounted Blesje and urged him through the streets. He had no idea where he was going or why. When at last he came to his senses, he was knocking on the door of Hans’ house.
“What am I doing here?” he said aloud. “Hans has fled to who knows where.”
He’d not yet remounted Blesje when he heard Hans’ voice. “Pieter-Lucas!”
Pieter-Lucas stared at him. “I thought you were gone. Not sure why I came here…wasn’t thinking….”
“Pay it no mind,” Hans said, grabbing out and pulling him inside. “God brought us back, and now here you are. Come in and rest your bones.”
Like a dumb farmer’s ox in tow, Pieter-Lucas followed. Once inside, he grabbed at Hans’ arm and shouted, “Where’s Johannes and Abrams en Zonen?”
“They all fled to Engeland.”
“Did they take everything with them?”
“Why, I…I don’t know,” Hans stammered, a look of alarm spreading over his face. “Here now, come have a seat and let me give you a bowl of soup.”
“What good is soup when your anointing is stolen, turned into rubble, mouse-eaten?” He let go of Hans’ arm and stood staring beyond the man into the room where he’d fought so many battles just to gain his vrouw.
“At least sit down, Pieter-Lucas,” Hans begged, nudging him at the elbow, “and tell me what this is all about.”
Still in a daze, Pieter-Lucas followed until he was seated on a bench at the long table. He spread one hand on the surface of the table and felt each familiar grain and unevenness. While he smoothed the timeworn wood, he began to talk. “Remember the night I came to you begging for a wedding date and you sent me home with a promise of an answer in one more week?”
“Ah, how much I wanted to give what you asked, then and there.”
“I went home that night and began to paint a picture for Aletta. It was my wedding gift to her, filled with all our dreams for each other. I worked on it every night for all the months until I left with Willem’s pamphlets. The night before I went, I put the final touches on my masterpiece, and the next morning hurried off to do the thing I knew in my bones I had to do. I expected to come back that night, and we were to be married five days later.”
Hans sighed. “That was the night the world turned bottom side up.”
Smoothing the table now with both hands, Pieter-Lucas went on with his story, not looking at his host. “The weeks since then have been filled with the joys of marriage and the pains of separation from my bride in the mission thrust upon me. But always I’ve cherished one hope that when I came back to Emden, I would retrieve my opa’s paintpots and brushes and Aletta’s wedding canvas, and that someday God would let me paint again. Today I returned through a broken lock into the printshop building and found nothing but a mouse-eaten handle and a handful of stray bristles mixed with dust balls and mouse leavings.”
Pieter-Lucas grew silent. His whole body quavered. He tapped the table with the fingers of his right hand one at a time, as if counting off days or weeks or battles, or…
Hans cleared his throat. “What will you do now, Pieter-Lucas?”
“I’ve missions to run for Ludwig, and when his battle with Alva is over, I return to Duisburg, where I left my vrouw administering herbal cures to refugees. I take her back to Dillenburg where the Julianas can care for her until the birth of our child. As long as the war goes on, I am a messenger for the House of Nassau, filling the bloody cap of my friend Yaap, who was gunned down by a Spaniard before my eyes. Beyond that…?”
Pieter-Lucas felt a gut-wrenching passion to hear his former teacher say, “Blessings on you!” Instead, he heard Hans let out a long slow breath and ask, “So you are a part of the revolt now?”
Pieter-Lucas cringed. “I only run messages,” he said, “and try to save lives.”
“Patriots’ lives, ja. What of the Spaniards? War is destructive, jongen—and wrong.”
Pieter-Lucas squirmed. When he and Dirck Coornhert talked about it, it seemed so clear. Now sitting across the table from this man committed to nonresistance in all its forms, he had no more answers. Clasping his hands on the table before him, he said at last, “I know war is wrong. I also know the only way it can be avoided in the Low Lands is if all citizens will bend the neck to Philip and the popish Church.”
Hans raised a hand and shook his head. “Or if all who follow Scripture instead of men’s traditions will continue to meet in secret and love not their lives more than the Lord Jesus Christ, their Savior.”
“That’s martyrdom!” Pieter-Lucas jumped up and leaned both hands on the edge of the table.
“Oftentimes it is just that.”
“And if all believers are martyred, think how short will be the life of the church.”
Hans nodded. “So it would seem.” He ran his fingers through his beard and went on. “But God has some secrets not readily understood or imagined by the mind of man. Jesus himself said, ‘I will build my church and the gates of hell will not overpower it.’ Nothing—nay, not even King Philip and his duke—can ever wipe out the true church of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Pieter-Lucas paced the floor behind the bench on which he had sat. “And think you that God never uses the arms and revolts of men who call themselves by His name and read His Book to their households?”
“I’ve asked that question long myself and can’t yet quite see how it can be.”
“Why not? Especially when Alva points a determined sword at all forms of religion but his own? What do we do? Lie in his pathway and let him lop our heads?”
Hans nodded. “I know what you say. I’ve thought about that too. It’s just that in the Book, Jesus said it so clearly. ‘Blessed are the peaceable’—not the makers of war—’for they shall be called the Children of God.’”
Pieter-Lucas continued pacing. At last he stopped and leaned both hands once more on the table. Looking Hans squarely in the face, he said, “I’ve not learned the Book as you have, and I suppose that someday I must read it for myself to find all the words that God has said about this. For now, I cannot but believe there is some justice in Prince Willem’s cause. His Bible-reading moeder claims it’s smiled upon by God.”
Hans stood and faced Pieter-Lucas. “One day, perhaps you’ll see it more clearly. Until then, Pieter-Lucas, you will not yourself carry a sword, will you?”
He sighed. “Nay, I shall not wield a sword.” He paused and watched relief spread over his companion’s face. “I promised Dirck Engelshofen, and I cannot go back on my word. But more than that”—he shook his head—“to take a life would make of me a son of the despicable, violent Hendrick van den Garde.”
Hans laid an arm across Pieter-Lucas’ shoulders. “None is so courageous as the man who refuses to kill when all around him are trusting the sword to bring about the things God designs to do through peaceful means—prayers, healing acts, paintbrushes!”
Pieter-Lucas started. “I’ve heard those words before. I’m not yet sure what they mean. While I search for answers, though, I must go on delivering messages, collecting money, helping send Alva running home to his king with tail between his legs and licking his wounds.”
Both men headed for the door.
“Have a care, young friend,” Hans said. “As you pass through the midst of the melee of a battlefield, you may find it difficult to keep from falling into the pitfalls of war. They have a way of miring your feet and turning you into the soldier you vowed never to become.”
Pieter-Lucas hurried out into the late-afternoon air. “I could never kill a man…never,” he muttered to Blesje as he went. “I am a messenger and nothing more!”