From Breda to Dillenburg
Late Grass Month (April) and Early Flower Month (May), 1567
Pieter-Lucas awoke from a restless sleep determined to put the past behind him. Long enough Hendrick van den Garde had stolen his peace of mind. Beginning today, he would not allow the fiendish imposter to snatch one more moment of his happiness.
Before him lay a journey grand enough to make him the envy of every burgher’s son in Breda. Such wondrous sights to see! Traveling in a noble caravan! Lodging in ducal castles along the way! Riding each day just behind the prince, near to his family’s coach, often helping Yaap escort the thirteen-year-old Princess Maria! And, wonder of all wonders, the prince himself had offered to let him draw for him—perhaps even paint?
Ja, he had every reason to be excited. He intended to make the most of it all.
On the misty morning when the mass of coaches, animals, and people assembled into something that approached an orderly train, Pieter-Lucas groomed and mounted Blesje with genuine enthusiasm. The confusion and excitement of that incredible drama filled him with dreams and visions far greater than he had ever imagined.
Only once did he have to fight off the torments he had sent from his heart the night before. From some distance, he was watching the prince bid farewell to his only son, Philip Willem, a handsome prince several years younger than Pieter-Lucas. Philip Willem’s moeder, the prince’s first wife, had died when the boy was quite small, and he’d lived most of his life away from Breda. Pieter-Lucas stood at too great a distance from the vader and son to hear what passed between them. But his sensitive imagination filled in the details, the brave attempts of both vader and son to conceal deep emotions, and the last words of a vader’s advice to the boy soon to return with his personal steward to his studies at the University of Leuven.
The fleeting picture revived feelings he didn’t realize still lingered just beneath the surface of his memory. With fresh pain he recalled the loss of his Opa’s vaderly care and the incredible agony of the recent discovery that he had only known an imposter vader.
“Begone!” he ordered the mental intruders. “An important adventure, a matter of life and death awaits.”
With increased concentration, he groomed horses, loaded chests of valuable possessions, assisted ladies into their coaches. His final act, helping Maria, prince Willem’s daughter to mount her fine chestnut horse and fall into line between himself and Yaap, made him feel almost chivalrous.
Once the journey had begun, many natural wonders caught his attention. Forested rolling hills rose out of the sand dunes and flat pastures of his native Lowlands and reminded him of scenes he had often studied in the fantastic paintings and tapestries that hung in the castle at Breda.
On the day that their pathway began to run along the bank of the Rhine River, Pieter-Lucas exclaimed to Yaap, “Prince Willem was right. No Lowlander could have dreamed the half of these wonders. Even our beloved Rhine River runs more majestically here than at home.” Wide and deceptively placid, the ancient river guided their footsteps for days. Here and there, swirling eddies belied the true strength that churned beneath the surface.
Like the Rhine, the mass exodus of Prince Willem’s household and endless line of servants, soldiers, and refugees lumbered steadily along. With what seemed to Pieter-Lucas an increasingly slow pace, the coaches groaned over rutted roadways and rattled over cobbled village streets where dense throngs of townsfolk swarmed around them, shoving, shouting, gaping, bowing to the royal personages. Whenever it rained, both coaches and horses slipped about and sometimes bogged in the mire and great puddles of rainwater.
In the beginning, Princess Maria spent much of her time riding beside her father and seemed little inclined to talk when she graced her escorts with her presence. By the third day, Pieter-Lucas grew restless and surly. “If we’d done this trip alone and on foot, we would have been there by now,” he complained to Yaap as they rode toward the rear of the line, taking a message from the Prince to the captain of his armed ranks.
“You’re right,” the older boy agreed. “My horse and I do it in three days of steady riding.”
“And you don’t have to put up with Princess Anna’s petulant howling spells all the way.”
From the moment they departed from Breda, the prince’s wife, Anna, had poured forth from the family coach an incessant stream of deep-throated howls and hysterical screams. Except when the caravan stopped for the night, the unhappy woman never showed her face but sat huddled in the corner of the coach with her only child, four-year-old Anna. Princess Anna’s shared melancholy clouded the whole trip.
Yaap offered a quick retort to Pieter-Lucas’ bitter comment. “You think the rest of us enjoy the poor woman’s antics?”
“Nay.”
“Then just remember, you can’t have it all. You can be mighty thankful we didn’t leave you back at the castle in Breda.”
“I am, I am.” Pieter-Lucas gulped.
“Far better to listen to the princess howl for a few hours a day than to face the wrath of the Duke of Alva and end up becoming his torch on the market square.”
Pieter-Lucas shuddered.
“Personally,” Yaap went on, “I’m thanking my lucky stars I’m not married to the likes of Princess Anna.”
Later that afternoon, when the noble lady had been screaming with especial spitefulness, young Princess Maria joined Pieter-Lucas where he rode alone behind the family coach. With surprising openness, she confided to him, “Princess Anna screams because she doesn’t want to go to Dillenburg.”
“She doesn’t?” Pieter-Lucas asked.
“Nay, she says it’s too plain and dull a place.”
“Plain and dull?”
“I fear she is quite ill.”
“And you, Your Highness,” Pieter-Lucas asked, “do you want to go to Dillenburg?”
“Oh, ja, I do!” For the first time, her face brightened. “It’s a beautiful old castle on a high hill, with hills all around and trees and magnificent gardens and statues and dogs and a pet monkey.”
As she talked on, something in her manner seemed at last untethered. “Besides, Oma lives there, along with Oom Jan and his wife Tante Elizabeth and all their six children.” She paused and actually smiled up at Pieter-Lucas before going on as if she feared she might forget somebody. “Then there’s Oom Hendrick—he’s about your age, I think—and Tante Juliana, and who knows how many other cousins and relatives and noble neighbors’ children living there to attend Oma’s school. Sometimes Oom Ludwig stays there between journeys around the Lowlands! Of course, Tantes Maria and Anna and Elizabeth and Katarina and Magdalena are all married and live elsewhere with their husbands and children. Oh yes, finally there’s Oom Adolph. They say he has gone to live in the court of the king of Denmark.”
“Say, but your vader has a great, large family!”
“And have you met them all?”
Pieter-Lucas grinned and shook his curls. “Nay. I’ve never been to Dillenburg.”
“Never? Not even once?”
“Never, not even once. I have only met the members of the family that have come to Breda. Count Ludwig, of course, I’ve seen and talked to many times. He spent many hours with your vader in the Kasteel in Breda. I’ve even carried messages to them in Ludwig’s apartment on the far side of the castle court, near the new chapel.”
“And Oma?” Maria’s eyes brightened.
“Your Oma, Countess Juliana von Stolberg?” he asked, not waiting for a reply. “A lady of the noblest sort. I remember once, soon after Prince Willem brought Anna as his new bride to live in Breda, the countess came for a visit. I thought she was most austere when I first laid eyes on her.”
“My Oma, austere?”
“Well, I was much younger then, and she so tall and straight and sober when she moved about in front of all the people. Then one day I saddled her horse and led it to her in the castle courtyard. She spoke kind words to me, and I saw gentleness in her face, just like I see in the prince, your vader.”
“Then she was no more austere?”
“Never again.”
“And the others? Did you meet them when they lived in Breda?”
“A stableboy meets everyone who visits his prince. All those that stay for a spell pass through the courtyard many times. I remember Count Hendrick and the Countess Magdalena when they lived there just before the riots last summer. Most of all, I remember their sister, the younger Countess Juliana.”
“You do!” Then, before he could answer, she added in a confidential aside, “She is my favorite, you know.”
“Oh, ja? I suppose she might be my favorite too. You see, she saved my life.”
“She saved your life?” The girl’s voice registered controlled surprise. “You must tell me about it. I love to hear stories of my tante’s exploits.”
Tell her, indeed. What should he say? That his imposter vader had nearly finished him off in an image-breaking riot and that without Juliana’s help he would have died in the Beguinage? Fine story for a refined young lady fresh from the palace of the governess in Brussels.
Slowly, he chose his words, being careful to hedge around the borders of the nasty details. “It happened last summer when I had been in a serious accident,” he said. “How your tante came to be involved, I never knew. I only know that I awoke one day in the dispensary of the Beguinage to discover this beautiful woman hovering over me with a whole apothecary of miraculous medicinal cures.”
“That was my Tante Juliana doing what she does best.” Maria could scarcely contain her excitement within the bounds of noble propriety.
“So I had always heard. But until she dressed the wound in my thigh and made me drink some nasty-tasting potions that soothed me in spite of their bitter bite, I did not know how true the rumors were.”
“Was that all?”
“What more to say?”
“Did you not feel strange tinglings in your leg and surges of miraculous energy raising you from your sickbed to go out and do battle once more with whatever it was that felled you in the first place?”
Pieter-Lucas chuckled. Except for her ornamented robes, her noble aloofness, and the touch of sharpness in her features, this girl reminded him of Aletta at that age. “Nay, I’ve no such wild tales to tell. Only that from that day onward, I grew steadily better, which was more than all the Beguines could accomplish with their herbs and poultices. My moeder always said ’twas Countess Juliana made me live.”
Maria smiled and sighed enormously. Neither of them spoke for a few moments. The sounds of the caravan blended with the subdued liquid roar of the river nearby, creating an almost hypnotic lullaby. Pieter-Lucas looked at Prince Willem riding up ahead, moving steadily along, apparently ignoring the whole performance. What must the prince feel as he plodded on, fleeing for his life to the unending accompaniment of his wife’s drunken insults and complaints hurled at his back?
Pieter-Lucas found himself drawn by a feeling of overpowering pity. In the past year or two, he’d watched his prince weighted down with some heavy loads of care and sorrow as he came and went through the stable. But surely, never had he seen his shoulders droop so.
Pieter-Lucas’ look turned to a stare, then dissolved into a mental image of Opa’s desolate painting of “The Wilderness.” The lonely figure dubbed “The Anointed One” sitting beneath the desert shrub in the midst of the swirling sand…Could it be? It was a likeness of Prince Willem van Oranje.
And what was that verse at the bottom about the one anointed who must first languish in the wilderness? Could Opa have written this with the prince in his mind? Surely Opa had a prophet’s gift. Somehow, he must have actually known what would happen to the prince—and to Pieter-Lucas as well. Pride mingled uneasily with fear. Too much to sort out for now.
One thing he could see and do. Riding with a prince who knew the meaning of more pain than Pieter-Lucas ever dreamt existed in this life, he would make one resolve: Never again would he complain about the pace of this journey or the terrible wailing of a “mad” princess.
Princess Anna’s sudden shrill scream from the coach behind them shattered the silence that had accompanied them for some time now. Even Blesje started. Princess Maria guided her horse near to Blesje, leaned as near to Pieter-Lucas’ ear as possible, and spoke with wonderful softness, “I must tell you of my plan.”
“Are you sure you ought to tell me?” Pieter-Lucas warned her, always fearful that his unbidden association with this special noble household might lead him into some dreadful trap.
Maria ignored his question. A stray shaft of sunlight illuminated a tuft of golden hair protruding from her tight headdress, and her sparkling eyes looked steadily into his. A combination of warmth, excitement, and serious concern beckoned him to listen. “Please promise you will tell no one. I’m not sure my scheme will work, and I do not want my vader’s household to laugh at me. Nor would it do for Papa to know and build false hopes only to be dashed.”
Never had he been asked to guard a princess’ secret. Nor had he the slightest idea of what sort her secret might prove to be. “Nay, but I would have no reason to tell it.” His answer felt clumsy, like the gait of a coach on the rutted road. A bit more easily he added, “Only be sure it is proper for you to pass it on to a stableboy before you say a word.”
“Stableboy or no, I must tell someone what stirs in my mind. And since you have known my tante’s healing touch, none can better appreciate my words.”
She sighed, then held her head aloof for a time, as if searching for the right words to couch her thoughts most effectively. At last she leaned once more toward him and said, just above a whisper, “My plan is this. I will ask my Tante Juliana to prepare a cure for the madness of my vader’s wife, the Princess Anna.” She paused and looked at him, inviting his approval.
“Ah,” he responded with a start, “but it is dangerous to call your stepmoeder mad. That she is ill, we must all agree. But mad?”
“Oh!” the girl said, as if to cover the uncontrolled exuberance with which she had spoken. Then her face turned solemn, and she did not look up for a long space. When she recovered, she seemed to choose her words more carefully. “Whatever you call the thing that plagues her, I feel so certain that Tante Juliana can help. Her herbs can do anything, if she puts her mind to it. Think you not that it is true?” she asked.
What herbs in all the world could cure this woman’s mad drunkenness and selfish ravings? Especially, if she was as so many believed, simply a wild, unbridled donkey in need of a stern whip. How often Pieter-Lucas had heard the complaint from some visitor coming through the stables. “She reads too many romantic storybooks, drinks too much wine, throws too many costume balls, casts her eyes at too many men.”
Yet, he dared not say anything so rude. How could he crush the spirit of a girl with so much hope in her heart? Instead, still hedging and careful not to show overmuch enthusiasm lest he give false hopes, he said, “If half the stories I have heard about Countess Juliana’s marvelous apothecary chest are true, your wish may well be granted.”
Indeed, if half the stories he had heard were true, then might he also find with this noble physicke lady a cure for a truly mad woman—Aletta’s Moeder Gretta? In such a case, how could Dirck Engelshofen refuse the hand of his only daughter to the young man who should bear such a cure? The thought set his heart to racing.
Vaguely, Pieter-Lucas realized that Princess Maria was still talking, but he no longer listened. For the deep desire of his heart that had brought him so much pain filled his thoughts at last with the first glimmer of hope he’d known since further back than he could remember.
Princess Maria roused him from his deep thoughts. This time her clear voice was singing a light and hopeful melody. His wilderness, too, had its angel—one little princess who dared to cherish secret hopes.
****
Once Prince Willem’s caravan turned from the river toward the rising sun, Pieter-Lucas felt they had entered another world. Each day the hills that had rolled so gently on the western bank of the river seemed to rise higher and stretch, ridge upon ridge, farther and farther until the escalloped purplish horizon on all sides shimmered in a magical haze.
At times the road led up steeply, then down. Often it followed sparkling streams of water that babbled and sprayed over rough beds of rock between gentle hills and grassy meadows carpeted with flowers of every shade of purple, pink, white, blue, red, and gold.
On the morning they left their lodging place in the old city of Siegen, Yaap told Pieter-Lucas, “By noon we should reach the Dill River, which means tonight we lodge in Dillenburg.”
“Dillenburg!” Princess Maria, riding now between the two young men, clasped her hands at her breast and smiled. “I can hardly wait!”
“Nor do you have to wait much longer,” Pieter-Lucas reassured her.
Cherry and plum trees in full blossom greeted the long caravan as they followed the Dill River on the final stretch of curving, meandering dusty road. Princess Maria chattered continuously about the castle, the monkey, the herb garden, and her cousins, many of whom she had never seen but had memorized their names well enough to recite them without hesitation. Princess Anna, who had screamed all through the morning hours, fell finally into a welcomed sullen silence.
“There it is.” Yaap pointed to the vista that opened before them just around a shrubby rock hillock.
“Is he fooling me again?” Pieter-Lucas asked Princess Maria. Would he never learn when to trust his friend’s exclamations?
“Nay, that’s it. Dillenburg! Hurrah!”
Straight ahead, and just across the river, a tiny red-roofed village huddled at the foot of a shrub-covered promontory. Hugging the side of the hill, a simple stone church pointed its spire to the huge castle above. Its dark stone walls and dull green roof blended with the high-rising ramparts that covered the top of the hill.
“Prince Willem’s birthplace? His home?” Pieter-Lucas could scarcely believe they’d arrived at last, and he felt completely mystified by the strange feeling that in some way he himself was coming home.
“The Castle of Nassau-Dillenburg,” Yaap countered.
“Oh!” Maria squealed her delight.
The imposing fortress that crowned the hill rose up from its broad base as if it had grown there in the course of centuries of sun and rain. In the rays of the afternoon sun, its rough gray stones glowed smooth and golden, its spires glinted like beacons of light, and its blossoming fruit trees ringed the ramparts like a delicate lace ruff.
It seemed to Pieter-Lucas that the lumbering caravan moved more slowly than ever now. They crossed the Dill, then groaned up the hill, sending clouds of dust to mark the steep roadway that led around to the far side of the castle. From above them, a chorus of hunting hounds sounded a welcoming alarm, and a stream of people poured from the castle to meet the travelers on their final approach.
Pieter-Lucas craned his neck to see the top of the fortress walls above him as they entered through an enormous stone gate.
“It’s called the Field Tower,” Yaap informed him.
“And out there, the herb garden.” Princess Maria pointed off to the left, where an ordered arrangement of foliage in muted shades of green, red, purple, white, and gold shimmered in the late afternoon breeze.
“Breda’s Kasteel was never so huge!” Pieter-Lucas felt himself the size of the mice that haunted the underground storage caverns in the prince’s palace in Breda. And Princess Anna called this dull?
To the rhythmless din of excited voices, they passed through a small forecourt under the shade of a spreading linden tree, then rattled across the stagnant moat on a timber drawbridge and found themselves on a broad underground corridor. Passageways led off in all directions.
“Roads up to the various apartments of the old castle,” Yaap explained. “Dozens of them.” Playing the part of guide that he always seemed ready to assume, he pointed out an assortment of doors he said led into the underground prison cells and casements.
“It’s like a whole village all its own, up here above the people’s village,” Pieter-Lucas exclaimed.
“You haven’t seen the half. Look ahead, we’re coming out now into the main courtyard.”
The corridor climbed steeply and opened into a large cleared space, presided over by a large and colorful display of the coat of arms of the House of Nassau and ringed by stone buildings that rose high as the fortress walls that had dwarfed them all on the other side of the moat. The courtyard swarmed with people, horses, coaches, hunting hounds, and children.
“Makes Breda look like a roadside shrine.” Pieter-Lucas whistled and rolled his eyes to take in the looming horizons of his new home. His gaze rested at the doorway to the great hall where Prince Willem had reined in his horse. A row of figures moved toward the coach as the prince dismounted and greeted them. A roundish man with a pointed beard and nose, a high forehead, and mustache like an inverted smile stood with his moeder, a stately grayed woman in simple black velvet gown with a ring of silver keys hanging from the cord around her waist.
“There’s Oma,” Princess Maria announced, “with Oom Jan beside her, and Tante Elizabeth and Tante Juliana. Oh! Oma! Tante Juliana!”
In the flurry and bustle that followed, Pieter-Lucas and Yaap helped Princess Maria dismount, then moved back, putting a space between themselves and the noble family. They watched brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins mingle together in a blur of color and a whir of voices.
The prince leaned into his family coach as if coaxing his wife and youngest daughter out to greet the family. But Princess Anna did not emerge. The painful lack of expression on the Prince’s face when he descended from the carriage at last spoke of disappointment, resignation, defeat.
The prince had barely begun to present his refugee companions to their noble host and hostess, when a single horseman pounded his way across the cobbles and through the crowds, ignoring all the rest and stopping abruptly before the prince. His hasty dismount and bow were hardly completed before he began to speak in rapid, emotion-charged words.
“Your Grace, Prince Willem, I bring you sad news. Count Brederode has fled to Emden. His men, trying to follow him by ship across the Zuyder Zee, were delivered over to Count Meghen by the treachery of their pilot and were arrested and hanged in the town square of Harlingen. Only the noblemen were spared, taken to Brussels and imprisoned.”
A stunned silence brought the blur and whir to a stop. A dark cloud shut out the sunshine. From Prince Willem’s family coach rose a curdling howl, and Anna’s deranged voice screamed out into the untimely quiet. “It’s all over! Brederode’s fled! We’re lost, undone, condemned! Treacherous husband, cowardly fool! It’s all your fault! We’re condemned!”
Pieter-Lucas stood beside his horse, trying to grasp what he had just heard. Brederode’s men hanged? Brederode’s men? Hendrick van den Garde? The two names rang through his brain and roused that strange, wild monster of vengeance that, in recent days, had lain drowsily in the far recesses of his mind. In his calmer moments, if he ever recalled the dreadful force, Pieter-Lucas feared what it might one day lead him to do. But once the monster had been aroused, all fear gave way to a sort of wild anger that controlled him completely—his body, his mind, his raging feelings.
Unaware of any other human presence, totally forgetting where he was, Pieter-Lucas dashed to the side of the messenger. He grabbed him by a sweaty brown sleeve and demanded, “And Hendrick van den Garde, was his body among the hanged?”
“I…I know not Hendrick van den Garde,” the messenger retorted, pulling his arm free. Sweat poured off his glistening face, down over his unkempt beard, and through the stringy hair matted against his forehead.
Pieter-Lucas felt a panic rising up to stop at nothing. Not thinking what he did, he grasped the messenger’s doublet at the throat and shouted, “Nay, but I must know. You must tell me.”
“Was he one of Count Brederode’s Vianen troops?” he cried out.
“Ja, hear,” Pieter-Lucas gave way to the angry impulses now roaring in his heart and deafening his ears. “Despicable, cruel, violent follower of the Great Beggar.” No other subject could cause him to spit his words so forcefully out.
“Then consider him hanged. If he was no nobleman, your man—Hendrick did you say?—did not escape.”
Pieter-Lucas stood glaring at the other man for a long moment. Then he loosened his grip and dropped the messenger’s arm. As quickly as it came, the anger left, leaving his legs weak and trembling, his hands clammy, and his lips dry. He felt the limp in his left leg more keenly than he’d felt it for many months.
“Sooo…” he mumbled, “King Philip’s men have gotten me the vengeance.” He felt a smile form in the corners of his mouth. His heart began to beat like the roll of summer thunder, and his temples throbbed with a heady rhythm. He clenched his right hand into a tight round fist and watched the flesh of his arm harden and bulge. “Vengeance, at last,” he said the word firmly, softly, and felt it warm his whole being.
“Pieter-Lucas, my friend,” a soft feminine voice interrupted his heavy thoughts. He looked at Princess Maria standing beside a taller young lady with the familiar smiling face.
“Are you well?” she asked.
Pulling himself up to his full height, he straightened his shoulders and countered, “Very well, thank you.” Not in a long, long time had he felt so well indeed. A strange, enormous sensation of unconquerable strength coursed through his body, turning the scene before him fuzzy and removing it oddly from his reach.
As if from some faraway fogbank, he heard the princess say, “Here is my Tante Juliana, the one who saved your life.”
“A hearty welcome to you!” Juliana said.
“My pleasure.” Pieter-Lucas managed an awkward bow and a smile and pulled himself back to the moment. “Here’s hoping my life shall not again need saving while I sojourn at Dillenburg.”
“Indeed, that should not be necessary. Instead, I have fine plans for you here.”
“For me?”
“For you and your drawing pens.”
“My drawing pens?” His knees trembled and the fuzziness dissolved.
“That is, if you care to bring your brushes and canvases and browse with me through my moeder’s herb garden,” Juliana said. “I’ve a marvelous plan for a printed herbal with drawings. ’Tis a venture that lies near to my heart. But there is time enough to talk of that later.”
Time enough indeed! Pieter-Lucas exerted his best efforts to produce one more convincing smile and told himself that now that vengeance had been won, he should be content to draw and paint for the princess.
“Ja,” he offered with dazed lameness. “Plenty of time.”
****
From high in the stone wall of an ancient castle bedroom, a small single window framed the black velvet sky, studded with diamond pricks and a faint crescent of a moon. Pieter-Lucas passed the night on his bed in this ancient Dillenburg room in a turmoil of conflicting thoughts.
So much had happened on this day. So many ideas and challenges had presented themselves for his response. One thought above them all intruded with determined fierceness. Hendrick van den Garde was dead, hanged on a gallows by the shores of the Zuyder Zee! Ugly rebel, senseless heretic, merciless imposter—none ever deserved such a death any more than this vicious murderer. He had seen the glint of murder in the man’s eyes that fateful morning in the church.
He should be glad that vengeance had been served! Exceedingly glad! Overjoyed!
What, then, persisted in stirring up discontent and anxiety in him? Was he grieving as if his own vader had been exposed to the elements and shame on those gallows? Surely this was not grief!
“I will rejoice,” he said aloud, as if to dismiss the tormenting thoughts.
Once more, he recognized the familiar stirrings of the inner monster baring his fangs in ugly, mocking laughter. “Nay, but you shall not rejoice,” it taunted, “for you were robbed of the joy of tying the noose around that spiteful neck with your own strong hands!”
“I am no murderer, nor the son of a murderer,” he retorted. “’Tis enough that the deed is done and I will rejoice!”
All night long he fought with his delusions. At times sharp images from the dream that had terrorized him in the Beguinage stabbed at him. Dirck Engelshofen hitting him over the head with that huge book, absconding with Aletta into the storm! Hendrick leering over him with the sharp knife poised above his head! Opa stricken by lightning and sinking into the gaping earth….
He jerked himself awake. “Nay, nay, nay!” He beat at his bed with a frustrated fury. “Hendrick van den Garde has been hanged! Juliana’s herb garden will yield a cure for Gretta Engelshofen, and I will move on.”
He yanked the covers over his head and wailed softly, “Aletta, oh, my Aletta. I shall find you, and you shall be mine!”
From somewhere out in the darkness, a dog howled, and from an apartment on the other side of the Dillenburg grounds came a mournful answer. The familiar wail of Prince Willem’s perpetually distressed princess was muffled only slightly by thick, tapestry-clad walls.
A chorus of roosters crowed, the black velvet lightened into a gray sky, then blue. Celestial diamonds faded away. Pieter-Lucas rose from his sleepless bed and shook Yaap awake.