Emden
Middle of Harvest Month (August), 1567
The tea was not yet ready, so Pieter-Lucas carried up the water and fresh linens and could not resist the urge to stop and watch the wonderful healer woman at work. Could this angelic creature with the tender touch and calm, quiet spirit really be his own Aletta?
“Please, Pieter-Lucas, go tell the proprietor’s wife I must have the tea now if my patient is to live.”
The urgency in Aletta’s voice roused Pieter-Lucas from his adoring reverie. “I go once more,” he said. He clambered down the ladder and ran for the stairs. “God help us if Vader Dirck finds us trying to spare this despicable man’s life,” he mumbled to himself all the way.
He had reached the proprietor’s wife by the hearth, and she had just laid the little copper kettle of life-giving brew in his hands when he heard the front door of the inn burst open and a woman’s hysterical voice pierce the air.
“Where is my daughter?”
Pieter-Lucas caught passing sight of a distraught woman dashing into the room with a man trailing behind.
The proprietor rushed to the unexpected guests and shouted back, “How should I know?”
“I told you it was a trap, my husband. Ach, ach, ach! Great God, have mercy on us all!”
A man’s muffled voice murmured beneath the jabs of hysteria. “Easy, my wife, easy. Pardon her, please, kind keeper of the inn. My wife is not well…that is, she…she…Come, come, my wife.”
Pieter-Lucas had placed one foot on the long stairwell that led to the floors above when he recognized the voices. Dirck and Gretta Engelshofen had come! “Make haste, jongen.” He urged himself up the stairs. “Escape! But careful…spill not the tea.”
He had almost reached the doorway when Gretta’s shrill words darted from the background and caught him by the heels. “There he is, husband, there he is…” she called out, “the jongen who absconded with her. Stop that abductor!”
Pieter-Lucas dodged into the hallway and ran for the ladder. From below, a confusion of shouting and mad scuffling followed his hasty retreat. By the time he had reached the attic room, he knew they were close behind like a pack of wild hounds closing in on a frightened hare.
“Aletta, Aletta,” he gasped. “Your parents have come.”
“Did Vader see you?”
“They both saw me, and your moeder is howling with madness.”
“Nay, that cannot be. Moeder is no longer mad.”
“Just listen to her screams.”
“But she has been healed.”
“Healed?”
Aletta glanced toward the ladder, then motioned Pieter-Lucas to the floor. “Here,” she ordered, “you give our patient the tea. Make sure he is at least in part awake before you pour it into his throat. I go to Moeder Gretta. She’ll be calm when she sees my face, and I shall keep her away from here.”
It was too late. By the time Pieter-Lucas had dropped to the floor and Aletta had moved Hendrick’s head into his lap, he spotted Gretta Engelshofen’s closely capped head emerging over the horizon of the floor. Recoiling from the enforced closeness of his contact with the man, he poured a cup of goldenrod tea into the cup and watched in disbelief.
“Where has the scoundrel taken my child?” the woman exclaimed between the shoves and grunts that hoisted her little body up and over and into the room. Dirck and the grumbling proprietor came close behind.
So she was healed, was she? Pieter-Lucas shook his head and narrowed his vision of the proceedings to a skeptical squint.
Almost before he’d planted his feet on the floor, the proprietor began dashing about, waving his arms frantically, and jabbering nonstop about his faithful tenant and his own impeccable record as an innkeeper and threatening to call the bailiff to evict this crazed woman.
Gretta, Dirck, and Aletta all ignored him as if he were part of the permanent furniture of the room. Gretta had hardly found her balance and squinted her eyes into seeing in the darkness, when she spotted her daughter and cried out, “Aletta, are you safe? Precious baby, God protect you.”
Dirck reached for her, but she shoved him away, threw herself into Aletta’s arms, and commenced to weep.
“Now, now, Moeder, all is fine.” The young woman did not raise her voice or let it race. “’Twas no scoundrel led me away from Oma Roza’s house, Moeder Gretta, but Pieter-Lucas, our dear lifelong friend who brought me here.”
Gretta stopped crying and stared around the room. She looked at Pieter-Lucas and back at Aletta, her jaw hanging, a look of silent wonder speaking volumes.
Aletta added, “You see, we are safe and on a mission of mercy to an injured man.”
“What man?” Gretta demanded.
At this point the proprietor interjected with an air of saucy triumph, “I told you there was a real injured man here. You thought it was a trick. Well, here is your evidence….” He rattled on, pointing toward the patient on the floor.
Pieter-Lucas felt a strange protective impulse well up within him. Dirck Engelshofen must not recognize Aletta’s patient. “Nay, Nay, Heer proprietor, have a care, stand back,” he warned.
Acting on impulse, he curved his body around the sick man’s head, creating a shield between him and the frenzied proprietor, the frantic woman, and her husband, whose eyes Pieter-Lucas could feel boring into him already. Who could ever have convinced him that he would one day try to protect Hendrick van den Garde from anything or anybody—from Dirck Engelshofen, of all men on earth?
Ignoring Pieter-Lucas’ pleas for caution, the proprietor grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked. Pieter-Lucas resisted, but the man persisted and in the process upset the pot of tea and began trampling Aletta’s fragile apothecary preparations.
“Stop, old man, stop it,” Dirck Engelshofen ordered and stepped in to restrain him. “We believe you. It is clear to see a man lies here in great brokenness of body. Let my daughter do the duty you called her here to do. Stand back, stand back.”
Stunned, the proprietor straightened and stood staring at Dirck Engelshofen.
Suddenly Pieter-Lucas felt Hendrick van den Garde’s body stirring next to his breast. He watched the dark eyes open and the fevered lips crack and move. He grabbed the cup of tea which had narrowly escaped the angry proprietor’s rampage and prepared to pour it into the patient’s mouth. But before he would drink, Hendrick uttered one desperate, bone-chilling cry, “Great God, have mercy!”
Silence fell across the dark shaggy-beamed room. Hendrick van den Garde reached for the cup with his parched lips. He drank like a ravenous desert traveler, then fell back into the protective cradle of Pieter-Lucas’ arms. The rhythm of his breathing told them all that once more he slept. The proprietor backed away, padded toward the ladder, and slunk off over the edge of the room. Dirck Engelshofen paced the length of the room and back again while Gretta clung to Aletta in a pool of weak sunlight in the middle of the floor.
She stared at the man on the floor and began to shrink back into the shadows. Then, without a warning, she grabbed her head in her hands, let out a pitiful shriek, and crumpled to the floor. Her husband rushed to her and Pieter-Lucas strained to see and hear the sudden shuffling about.
“I am fine now.” The woman’s voice came clear at last. Dirck and Aletta helped her to her feet. She took four short steps toward the patient and Pieter-Lucas until she stood directly over them. With an expression of profound pity, she continued looking at the unconscious man and said calmly, “That man on the floor once placed a curse on me and turned me into the mad Gretta you’ve all known. And the very sight of his Beggar friends near Oma’s house nearly drove me mad again this day.”
“What makes you say such a thing?” Dirck Engelshofen asked. “You have never seen this man before.”
“Ah, but I have. He speaks with the voice of Hendrick van den Garde.”
“Hendrick van den Garde?” Dirck stooped quickly to the side of the injured man and stared into his placid face. “Hendrick van den Garde, indeed.” He rose to his feet and his eyes met those of Pieter-Lucas. The two men exchanged a flash of bewilderment.
He laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and said, “I don’t understand. Hendrick van den Garde never did you any harm.” His rebuke had no teeth, only perplexity.
“Ah, but he did,” the now-calm woman protested simply.
“You never told me such a thing.” His tone was as indignant as his words.
“I never told anyone because I was not sure what happened myself,” she said. “For all these long years, I’ve held in my mind a confused jumble of memories from that awful day when Hendrick fought with his half brother on the bank of the moat beside the Kasteel stables—the day young Kees van den Garde fell into the water and died.”
“Kees van den Garde fell into the water and died?” Pieter-Lucas blurted the question. Resting Hendrick’s head on the floor, he stood to his feet, thrust his hand into his bosom, and pulled out the tiny portrait he’d salvaged from his mother’s prayer book. With an eagerness that made his heart race, he handed it now to Aletta’s mother. “The man in this portrait, is he the Kees you speak of?”
Gretta took the miniature canvas in her slender fingers. Pieter-Lucas watched her face. A look of pleasant recognition set it aglow. “Ja, ja. Oh, ja! Kees van den Garde was such a good man,” she said with admiration. “He loved so to carve with his little knife. Left his mark in the Great Church, he did.”
“‘The Birdseller!’” he said eagerly. “My Opa showed it to me.”
Gretta’s face was awash with a dreaming puzzled expression. “Your vader used to say again and again that no van den Garde would ever be free from an artist’s prison cage. Your Opa scolded him for it many times, but he never seemed quite to believe otherwise.”
Pieter-Lucas stared long at the portrait in his hand before putting it gently back into its place in his doublet.
“If only I could have saved Kees from Hendrick’s ill will,” Gretta said, near the verge of tears.
“Do you mean Hendrick shoved my vader into the water?”
She wrinkled her forehead and rubbed it distractedly. “I…I do not know for sure,” she stammered.
Pieter-Lucas felt a violent throbbing drumming in his chest. A tumbling array of angry faces, blood, Beggar’s chants, and biting dungeon chains swirled through his brain. Leering over him, he fancied Hendrick’s shiny parade knife pointed straight at the spot over his heart where he had hidden the portrait. Impulsively, he grabbed the woman by both arms and demanded, “Hendrick killed my vader, didn’t he?”
Gretta hung her head, wept, and nodded ever so slightly. “Perhaps.”
“But didn’t you see it?”
“I saw something…” She hesitated, stopping with an open-mouthed pause.
“What did you see?” he demanded.
“I…I…” Her wary eyes moved from Pieter-Lucas to Dirck to Aletta and back to Pieter-Lucas.
Dirck put his arm around his wife’s waist and challenged the boy, “Take care, young man. She will tell us what she wants us to know.”
“It’s all right,” she said evenly. “For years I’ve struggled to remember just how it was. Not until God’s people prayed for me in the assembly room at our friends’ house and dear old Oma and her Hans cared for me with such long and tender patience did I regain enough soundness of mind to bring it back. Even now, not all is perfectly clear.”
Pieter-Lucas released his grip on the woman’s arms. “Then you must tell me, what part is clear? I have to know!”
“It happened so,” she began. “I was heavy with you, child.” She nodded toward Aletta. “On a late afternoon as I passed by the stables on my way home from market I heard Hendrick shouting at his brother. A tragic premonition gripped me. Even you, my child, stopped still in my womb and did not move again until that evening when you were born. I had long known something tragic would one day happen between those two half brothers.”
Dirck spoke up now. “There had always been trouble between them.”
“Why so?” Pieter-Lucas asked.
“Well, you see, Hendrick was not your Opa’s son,” Dirck replied.
“Hendrick was not Opa’s son?”
“Nay, Hendrick was fathered by a lusty castle guard before your Oma’s marriage.”
“How…?” Pieter-Lucas felt the blood rising in his face and a knot forming in his stomach.
Dirck Engelshofen explained. “Your Opa, who loved your Oma with a deepest possible affection, married her immediately. But while from the beginning he treated Hendrick as his own son, the boy both envied and despised Kees.”
“How so?” Pieter-Lucas asked.
“Kees was obviously a child after his vader’s own heart—one more artist trapped with the name van den Garde but with no desire to join in the ranks of the Kasteel guard.”
Pieter-Lucas felt the knot in his stomach tighten with each new sentence. “Despicable, nasty, heathen wretch!” He spat the words at the man he had so recently tried to protect. With great effort he restrained his feet from kicking the crumpled man he so detested across the room, down the stairway, and out of his life once and for all. But, nay, first he must hear the rest of the story.
Gretta picked up the account where her husband had left it. “One thing Hendrick envied of Kees more than any other—the love of your moeder, Kaatje. After you were born, Pieter-Lucas, it seemed more than Hendrick could endure. It was as if he simply must have Kaatje for himself. We all saw his intentions—all, that is, except your moeder.”
“She was taken in by him? How could she trust him?”
“God only knows the answer to that. Immediately when Kees died, she sold all her possessions and took you, jongen, to live in the Beguinage. She even claimed she made some private vows in the church on Christmas morning, the very day Tante Lysbet first came to stay with me. Soon, however, she tired of so cloistered a life. No doubt she found it difficult to keep a small son in the Beguinage. And Hendrick, playing the ever present charmer, plied her with smooth words and gentle promises. In short time she allowed him to woo her away from her private vows with God and into public ones with Hendrick.”
“Did no one warn her?”
“Many of her friends tried. Willfully oblivious to her danger, she would only say, ‘A Beguine takes no binding vows.’ She never understood.”
Almost beside himself with rage, Pieter-Lucas arranged and rearranged the patterns and colors of each new revelation on the canvas of his mind. The mysterious pieces of the picture his moeder had begun to paint for him from her deathbed seemed at last to fit. Only one scene remained detached, alone on the sketch pad.
“But you have yet to tell me exactly what you saw when the two brothers fought behind the stables.” He must place this scene, too, on the canvas.
“I can try. Neither of the men saw me, and from my obscured vantage point behind a huge linden tree—the one originally planted to mark the corner of the old Beguinage before it was moved to Annastraat—I could not be certain what I saw.”
“But you did see my vader killed?” The boy was growing impatient with the calm and detailed recitation.
“It looked to me as if Hendrick shoved Kees hard against the brick wall, and then the younger man cried out and splashed into the moat. I screamed and Hendrick fled, yelling out as he ran, ‘Curses on you.’ When I did not hear Kees swimming to safety, I rushed to the spot as quickly as possible—I was foolish enough to fancy I could rescue him. But already his body had disappeared into the icy waters with only a line of bubbles to suggest the spot. Terrified, I fled, and by the time I reached home, the pains had begun in my belly. Aletta was born that night, and from that time I could not remember how it had all happened.”
“Hendrick van den Garde was never tried for his deed?” Pieter-Lucas felt the familiar cry for revenge stirring about in his heart once more.
“Hendrick convinced the whole city—even your moeder—that he had tried in vain to rescue his brother.”
Dirck held his wife close. “If only you had told me…”
“Ach, but I feared Hendrick van den Garde’s ill temper. Besides, from the day Aletta was born, I was already having headaches off and on, and every time I thought about it, I became confused. Maybe Hendrick had told the truth and it was an accident. After all, I had not seen it really…and each day the scene grew more and more unclear.”
By now the woman was weeping once more, and Aletta tried to quiet her. “Sit down and be still, Moeder. That is enough.”
Pieter-Lucas looked at the man beneath his feet. So, just as he had begun to suspect, it was not the Calvinists who taught Hendrick van den Garde violence. Rather, it was he who taught them instead. Gone were the protective urges he’d felt so briefly. In their place, the inner voice taunted, “You listened to Aletta’s advice and spared your vader’s murderer!”
He clenched his fists. An irresistible urge to strike out at the pitiful-looking creature swept over him. Do it now, jongen, before you lose your nerve. Exhilarated by the energies that fed his anger, Pieter-Lucas fancied himself all alone with the helpless wounded man and yielded his whole being to the dreams he had nurtured and the opportunity he had sought so long.
He dropped to his knees beside Hendrick, murmuring with pent-up delight, “Murderer!” He spread his fingers cagelike and went for the man’s neck. The sinewy cords felt dry and leathery in his grasp and he braced himself to tighten his fingers slowly. For one long waiting moment, he stroked the inner monster now purring with incredible satisfaction and savored the revenge that grew stronger with each rise and fall of Hendrik’s heaving chest.
He began to squeeze. His fingers felt the warmth and steady pulse of life under his control. Suddenly, from some far corner he heard another voice calling to him as if through a deep midnight mist. “You are no murderer.”
Involuntarily, he felt his grip slacken. A cold sweat broke out all over his body. It trickled down his arms through the long blond hairs on the back of his hands and onto his victim’s neck. The inner monster’s voice came through only faintly in choking gasps. “Finish…the…job!”
Unnerved, trembling, he tried once more to fix his grip. But his fingers slipped with the sweat, and a wave of nausea swept over him. Just then, a pair of strong arms tackled him around his chest and pulled him tumbling to the floor. Startled, he heard his assailant saying in his ear, “You are no Beggar, nor the son of a Beggar.”
Dirck Engelshofen said that? Pieter-Lucas struggled against the older man to a sitting position. Grabbing him by the doublet flaps, he demanded, “You knew all along that I was no Beggar, didn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And…you knew Hendrick van den Garde was not my vader.”
“I knew it better than you.”
“How, then, could you accuse me of being a Beggar and the son of a Beggar?” Pieter-Lucas felt fire in his bones and his eyes and a strength in his arms he did not know he possessed.
“I called you neither a Beggar nor the son of a Beggar!” Dirck Engelshofen protested.
“Nay, but you did.”
“I see that you heard me not well. I only said that for that time of trouble, I dared not allow my daughter to associate with any member of an image-breaker’s household. I was careful not to call you the son of a Beggar.”
Pieter-Lucas tightened his grip on Dirck’s doublet flaps and fought to stay his body from trembling. But the older man obviously trembled as well. “So,” Pieter-Lucas said with a sneer, “no matter how innocent I was, you found me guilty enough by association to send me away from your threshold to wander these long months in frantic search of the love of my life?”
“I only tried to save The Crane’s Nest, my family…”
“Your reputation!” Pieter-Lucas interrupted. “Cowardly crane! You dropped the stone so quietly that no one heard you.” He spat out the accusation and left it hanging in the short distance between them.
A groan escaped from Hendrick on the floor nearby, and Pieter-Lucas felt Gretta’s hand tugging at his. Without a word, she put his hand into Aletta’s. Then, taking her husband by one hand and Aletta by the other, she pulled them all to their knees beside Hendrick van den Garde’s sleeping form.
“This is no time for accusations and explanations,” she said. “God’s book tells us to ‘be toward each other friendly, merciful, forgiving, even as God in Christ has granted forgiveness to us.’ ’Tis His message for this sacred moment.”
What was so sacred about it? Only the soft hand of his beloved lying intertwined in his fingers kept Pieter-Lucas from bolting free. But Gretta Engelshofen had only begun.
“Ever since God restored my mind and filled my heart with so many good things in the fellowship of the brothers and sisters in this place,” she said, “I have longed for this opportunity, but never thought that it could be.”
She bowed her head and closed her eyes, and Pieter-Lucas, squirming, still sweating and breathing heavily, heard from her lips an astounding prayer.
“Almighty God,” she began “who hast forgiven me so much, Thou hast put it into my heart to forgive this man the evil which he has done against not only me and my family, but against our dear Pieter-Lucas here and his family, most of whom have already passed on into Thy heavenly arms. We implore Thee to forgive Hendrick van den Garde for the blindness of his heart that has not allowed him to know the greatness of the evil he has done. Touch Thou also his body and restore him to full health, that he may be given from the abundance of Thy mercy one more opportunity to seek Thy forgiveness and do Thy bidding for the remainder of his mortal life. In the name and through the finished work of Thy Son Jesus Christ, Amen.”
Gretta laid a hand on Hendrick van den Garde’s and gave it a gentle squeeze.
How could she? Pieter-Lucas shuddered. But the answer was ringing in his ears. “Almighty God…Thou hast put it in my heart to forgive…as God has forgiven us….”
This God Gretta just talked to, the God who puts forgiveness in people’s hearts, was he not the same God Opa Lucas had loved and taught Pieter-Lucas to revere? The God who anointed him to paint? Could He be real, after all?
Great and merciful God! A stunned Pieter-Lucas heard the words move through his mind, winging their way heavenward. Could such a God also put it into his heart to want to forgive the murderer of his vader? From a dark, distant corner of his mind he heard the faint voice of his inner monster whimpering, “You vowed never to forgive.”
How long he stayed on his knees wrestling with the enticements of revenge he had no idea. When at last he looked up, he saw through misting eyes that Aletta had taken her place as physicke again. He watched her fingers search the man’s wound and prepare and apply a fresh dressing. He felt a new kind of urge tugging at his heart. Was he actually beginning to care what happened to this miserable wretch? Impossible!
“Be still,” he addressed the monster. The tormenting words shriveled and sank out of his reach.
The sensation of some magnetic presence drew his gaze upward till he found himself staring into the eyes of Dirck Engelshofen. The last time he had searched those gray eyes they’d glinted with hard steel. Now they brimmed with kindness and warmth.
Before he knew what was happening, Pieter-Lucas was on his feet. Dirck Engelshofen laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “When I chose to save my family, I let fear destroy my powers of reason. I had no idea you loved my daughter so much. Can you forgive me?”
Pieter-Lucas blinked his eyes as if to clear away a heavy mist that hung over the scene before him, so filled with surprising revelations and strange new emotions. Minutes ago, he had asked Opa’s God to put it in his heart to forgive Hendrick van den Garde the sin of murder. How could he not now forgive Dirck Engelshofen, whose only offense against him lay in a strong desire to protect his family? He looked the older man squarely in the eye and said, “What’s to forgive? You were simply protecting the love of my life and bringing her into the safety of this place.”
With firm arms, the two men embraced. Pieter-Lucas heard the older man say, “Thank you, son.”
Son? Did Dirck Engelshofen really call him son? A thrill ran through the young man, setting him aflame with unabashed passion. Holding firmly to the arm that had just embraced him, he pleaded, “Tell me, since the danger is now past, how soon may I claim your daughter for my bride?”
Aletta’s vader gasped, then opened and closed his mouth. “Why…well…that depends,” he stammered, at last.
“Depends on what?” Pieter-Lucas felt the blood rising to warm his face, and he stared at the man before him like a cat eyeing a mouse attempting to escape.
Dirck Engelshofen shifted nervously and did not look directly at him as he cleared his throat, then edged cautiously into his answer. “There are two things the suitor of my daughter must promise before we can begin to consider his proposal.”
“What two things?” he shot back the query.
“First, that you will not tote a sword for Prince Willem, or any other.” He glanced up and paused, his eyes insisting on a reply.
Pieter-Lucas spread both hands in open palms toward Aletta’s vader and spoke with calculated control, “My hands were made for sticks of charcoal and the paintbrush. Paint runs in my blood. One day my Opa’s words may come true, and I shall spend my life painting.” He pointed to Hendrick and added, “That man on the floor at our feet is the last van den Garde to carry a prince’s sword.”
The boy rubbed his hands together, moved a bit closer, and asked, “What was the other promise?”
“Second,” Dirck Engelshofen said with more obvious ease, “you must cease roaming around the countryside.” He lowered his head slightly in Pieter-Lucas’ direction and added with a mock severity, “You know, a man must teach his restless feet to be still if he would take care of a wife.”
Pieter-Lucas laughed. “I will not set a foot outside of Emden until I do so with my wife duly betrothed and by my side—as soon as I can locate, in Emden, some means of livelihood for sustaining her.”
Dirck Engelshofen appeared deep in thought for a moment, then said deliberately, “I know of no one who will pay you a styver to paint a picture in this north country. But I did hear the owner of our printshop recently bemoan the fact that he had not been able to locate a trustworthy cartoonist.”
Pieter-Lucas sucked in his breath to feed the wild visions that darted through his mind. “Is it possible that I might be considered?”
Still maintaining his sober composure, the older man pursed his lips and nodded. “I will speak to him for you.”
“Then it is agreed that we may marry soon?”
“As soon as proper arrangements can be made.” With a chuckle and a sweep of his arm in the direction of Aletta, Dirck Engelshofen added, “Provided my daughter will say ja.”
Aletta jumped up quickly and wrapped her vader in a spontaneous hug. “Thank you, Vader, thank you!”
Then, turning to Pieter-Lucas, she laid her hand on his and whispered through broadly smiling lips, “Your anointing is not dead, Pieter-Lucas!”
He enfolded both her hands and pressed them to his chest. “Nor are the vows we made in the birch wood!”