1

In the heat of the summer, the great Calvinist preachers went into the countryside, into fallow fields and meadows, and there delivered their sermons under the open sky. From all over the Provinces, pious folk came to listen, whole families, with their children by the hand and their dinners in baskets.

In a barley field near the great city of Antwerp, in Brabant, the preacher Albert van Luys stood up to declare the Word of God. Hundreds of people came to listen; the women sat on the grass in a circle around him, with their little children on their laps, and the men stood behind them in another circle.

Albert van Luys had the true fire of his calling, but the day was hot and long and some of the men had brought beer with them, and gin, and wine in flasks. Some too had muskets, which they fired off now and again, shouting, “Vive les gueux!”

Mies van Cleef had no musket, and drank no more beer than necessary to cool his throat and maintain his strength through the heat of the day. Standing in the ring of men facing the preacher, he dwelt with his whole mind on the sermon: The day of the Lord cometh like a thief in the night. Mies had a wonderful power of concentration. Intent on Albert’s words, he noticed neither the occasional bursts of musket fire nor the shouts of the drunkards; and he realized only gradually that his son, Jan, had slipped away into the crowd.

That annoyed him. He was a merchant, with a large trade and many employees, whom he expected to obey him without flaw. That his son could disobey him pricked his temper like a needle in his flesh. For a while longer, when he was sure Jan was gone, he struggled to keep his interest on the sermon, but the needle pierced ever deeper into his pride and his rectitude, and finally he stepped backward through the ring of men to the empty meadow.

There he paused and collected himself, a lean man in middle age, balding, his clothes as somber as a monk’s and expensive as a prince’s. He cast a look around him. The grass was trampled to a pulp; a fine gray dust lay over everything, even the shoulders and backs of the men watching the preacher, whose ranks he had just left. He shook a layer of dust off his sleeves.

At that moment a crackle of gunfire went up on the far side of the crowd. That told him where to find his son. He strode off around the outside of the circle in the direction of the shots.

The field lay along the Antwerp–Mechlin Canal; boats crowded both banks. On the far side, a gigantic mill creaked and wheeled its arms in the gusty breeze. White clouds streamed across the sky. Mies lengthened his stride, pressed on by these hints of a storm coming up over the horizon: his wife and daughter would not enjoy getting rained on.

“Long live the beggars!”

Another musket went off into the air; a man in a flapping black hat waved his weapon over his head. Near him was Mies’ son, Jan, squatting on his heels beside another man with a gun, asking questions. Mies’ jaw tightened. When he took Jan into a factory with him, or out to the shops, Jan never asked questions. Mies stalked across the beaten grass to his son and taking a handful of his collar pulled him to his feet.

“This is how you value the chance to hear God’s Truth expounded!”

Jan shook him violently off, blushing to the ears; his sun-bleached hair bristled with bad temper. Although he was only seventeen, he was much taller than Mies, which perversely angered his father as much as Jan’s sinful interest in guns and fighting. He struck Jan on the face with his open hand.

“Go back to the sermon!”

“Don’t hit me,” Jan said, between his teeth. Past him, Mies saw the men with their muskets, grinning at them.

“Go back to the sermon,” Mies said, and wheeling marched away again, toward his place in the circle of men.

Jan followed him. Some last shred of filial piety remained in him. It was not enough for Mies; bitterly he wondered why God had sent him this lout for a son, and wasted a keen mind and a heart for truth on his daughter, who would never be anything but someone’s wife.

The sermon was ending. Albert had them in prayers, many in the crowd, even men, weeping for their sins. Mies stopped to look among the gathering for his wife.

Jan stood sullenly beside him. With the briefest of looks into his son’s face, the father said, “Be sure your mother does not learn of your truancy.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy mumbled. His fine white skin still showed the stain of his furious blush.

Now rain was falling. Quickly Mies collected together his family; the sermon had overcome his wife, in whose large-boned frame he saw the pattern by which his son was cut, and she leaned heavily on his daughter’s shoulder. Hanneke too had their mother’s tawny hair and generous size of bone. She smiled at her father as he lifted her mother’s weight from her arm.

“Beautiful,” her mother said, and sobbed. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “When Albert speaks of Heaven, he makes me long so for it …” In a flood of weeping she lost the power of speech.

“What thought you of the sermon, Hanneke?” Mies asked. Supporting his wife on his arm, he led his family toward the canal where their boat waited.

“His style is very fine,” the girl said, “but I think he is not so strong in his reasoning as he might be. There were moments I thought he tried with a great wind of words to blow me over the gaps in his logic.”

Mies laughed, delighted with her composed and critical expression. He reached past his wife, to squeeze his daughter’s hand. “Trust you to yield not to his fulsome blasts, my little dear one.”

Jan burst forward, moving on ahead of them, awkward, as if the size and weight of his limbs outstretched his mastery of them. “I’ll help with the horses.”

It was in Mies’ thoughts to stop him, to remind him of his place, but there was no use in it. He shrugged. “Very well,” he said, to his son’s back.

They got into the flat-bottomed boat, and Mies arranged his wife on cushions in the stern and sat there with her, his hand on the tiller. Their boatman brought the horses and hitched up the long towline to the harness; with Jan to help him, he had the van Cleefs’ boat ready long before the others in the crowd, whose horses neighed and jogged up and down the high bank of the canal while the boatmen cursed and struggled with tangled lines. Stuck in the midst of the fleet, Mies could not see a way clear, and they had to wait for the others to hitch up and move along, to make space for them. Reluctantly Jan climbed down the dusty bank of the canal and stepped into the barge, which dipped under his weight and swung into the boat next to it. He sat beside his sister in the bow, glowering, his eyes downcast, his large square hands gripped between his knees.

Lout, Mies thought, with a hot spurt of anger. The rain was falling harder now. The boats ahead of them were moving at last, and he called to his boatman to drag the barge along the canal, back to their home in Antwerp.

For running off from the sermon, Jan’s father sent him down the next morning to the wharf on the canal behind the silk factory, to work at loading and unloading the boats. Although the work was hard Jan enjoyed it; he liked showing off his strength, and while the rough, voiceless men of the regular crew shuffled up and down the steps, four hands to every bolt and spool, Jan leapt back and forth from the wharf to the factory with the great heavy goods balanced on his shoulders and scorned any help at all.

After he had done this for most of the morning, the foreman of the regular crew took him aside and told him to stop.

“If the overseer catches you doing that, he will think we ought to be doing it too,” the foreman said. He was a burly man whose bulging forearms jutted out of the frayed sleeves of his shirt.

“It’s not that hard,” Jan said.

They were standing on the wharf, beside the tufted bollard where the canal boats tied up. Behind the foreman, the short steep ladder scaled the canal bank, and along the top of the bank on either side of it the rest of the crew stood watching what went on between their leader and Jan. The foreman crossed his arms over his chest.

“You’re only a boy,” he said, “and you have no family. Likely you will take your wage and spend it on beer and whores. We all have to put bread into our babies’ mouths. If you work so hard, the factory men will think they don’t need all of us, and some of us will be turned off.”

Down the canal, someone yelled; a heavy-laden barge was steering around the bend. Jan said, “You should do a good day’s work for your wage.”

The foreman cocked his fist. “You slow down, or we’ll see you don’t come back tomorrow.”

Jan opened his mouth to inform this brute that he was the son of the factory’s owner, but something warned him against that. He looked up at the row of men on the canal bank above him, their faces in shadow, the sun at their backs. The barge passed behind him, parting the canal water with a low murmur; as it passed, its horn gave a breathy honk.

“Very well,” he said. “I won’t be here that long anyway.”

The foreman smiled and lowered his fist. “That’s a good boy.” His wrist was spotted with old healing sores, flea bites, or scrofula. When he turned to go back up the ladder, Jan saw spots of blood on his shirt. Jan stooped to hoist a bale of carded wool to his back, remembered, and straightened up to wait for help.

That evening he and his father walked home together and his father said, “How did you on the wharf?”

“Fair enough,” Jan said.

“Did you talk to any of the other men?”

“A little,” Jan said, warily. They were walking down the tree-shaded lane toward their street; the sun had just gone down and the birds shrilled and flapped in the branches overhead, revived in the cool after the day’s humid heat.

“Did you notice any one of them who seemed to be”—Mies made a thoughtful face—“a troublemaker?”

“What?”

“One who incited the others to laziness, perhaps, or wild talk.”

“No,” Jan said.

His father shook his head a little, his lips still pursed, as if over some indigestible idea. He said, “Well, keep your eyes and ears open.”

“Am I a spy, then?” Jan asked, furious.

Mies gave him a sharp look. “You are my son. What benefits me does you also, does it not? People who talk sedition are bad for business.”

“No one talked any sedition.”

Mies said, “There are how many on the wharf? Six? Do we need so many?”

That came at Jan too fast to answer; he opened his mouth and shut it again, wondering what to say. Although he had spoken to the other men only briefly, and the foreman had threatened him, he felt the first formings of a loyalty to them.

“Well?” his father asked.

“What will you do if I say no?” Jan said.

His father walked along, square and solid as one of the big linden trees they passed beneath. “They are overpaid as ’tis. To send some off would help me balance my books a little more favorably.”

“They have families. Children to feed.”

“So do I.”

“You’re rich.”

“I am not in business to provide a means of life for half the rabble in Antwerp. What a tender heart you have. Then there are too many men on the wharf.”

“But I am not there always,” Jan said. “When I am not there, surely the work must be harder on the others.”

“True,” said Mies.

They were coming to the end of the street. Soon their house would be in view, the smells of dinner floating from it; Jan’s stomach let out a loud and painful growl. His hunger sharpened something in his understanding of the foreman and his babies.

He said, “What would they do, if you turned them off? Who would care for them? Are they Catholic?” The Catholics gave bread to their poor.

His father laughed. “No, they are good reformed folk, like us, most of them. If we had not settled the issue of the Inquisition, things would be worse than they are in Antwerp.”

“‘If we had not settled’ it,” Jan said, an edge in his voice. “You had nothing to do with that.”

“Men who think like me,” Mies said. “Keep a filial tongue, my boy, or you will see worse than the loading docks.” He frowned at Jan; the older man’s face was hard as a bandit’s. “Keep your ears open down there—I want to know who says what, who makes trouble. Now that you know what to look for.”

Jan shut his lips tightly together. They were at the end of the street; ahead of them, other men were hurrying to their homes, and through the last overhanging linden branches the painted eaves of his house were visible, the carved window frames, the door. In an upper story window a pale oval appeared, his sister’s face. The place seemed more solid to him now, warmer, a refuge. He lengthened his stride toward it.

Mies van Cleef lived with his family in the house his grandfather had built on Canal Street in Antwerp, three streets away from his cloth-weaving factory. The house was three stories high, with big windows facing the street, carvings around the door, and a wall to hold in the yard, opening in a five-foot wrought iron gate. Mies spent a lot of money on his house, to show how God had favored him, and the house was a formidable presence on Canal Street.

Hanneke van Cleef knew this because as people went by the house they always paused and looked up at it with awe and sometimes envy on their faces. She herself saw the outside of the house very seldom. She spent most of her days helping her mother order the servants and keep the place. In the afternoons usually she sat in the front room on the second floor and read, or looked out the window at the street, waiting for her father to come home.

That was when her life began, when Mies appeared, walking up the street of the big linden trees toward his house.

Today she sat in the window, her elbow on the sill and her chin in her hand, her gaze steady on the corner where Mies would appear, although it was still nearly an hour before the church bells would ring out the end of the day. She was tired of reading, and done with her needlework; the day seemed very empty. She missed Jan, too. Usually she had his company in the afternoons but lately his father had been keeping him at work in the factory.

She wished she were a boy, able to work side by side with Mies. Thinking that, she brought a sigh up that sounded through the room.

“What was that?” her mother said, looking in the door.

“Oh, nothing,” Hanneke said.

Her mother came up behind her and set her hands on her shoulders. “A girl should keep busy. Have you nothing to do?” Stooping, the older woman peered out the window over Hanneke’s shoulder. “Oh, look—van der Heghe’s stork.”

Now it was her mother who sighed, watching the angular white bird circle above the chimney of the house opposite and drop to its great nest of sticks. “I’ll set Jan to steal that nest this winter, if I must give him money to do it.”

“Oh, Mother.”

“Well, why should van der Heghe have a stork and not Mies van Cleef?” Her mother straightened, swished at the windowsill with her dustrag, and sniffed. “They haven’t got a penny to part their hair with, I’ll tell you that. All pretense and show it is with them.” She sniffed again. “They don’t deserve a stork.” She marched out of the room, batting at the furniture with the dustrag, although not a visible fleck of dust ever lay long on the van Cleefs’ household.

Hanneke turned back to the window, suddenly near tears. Storks and dust, that was all her mother cared about—all she could care about; and that way lay Hanneke’s life too, a house like this one, except probably not as nice, and envy for the neighbors and gossip and never going out. That presumed she married; if she did not, things would be even worse. She pressed her face to the sour-smelling glass, feeling sorry for herself.

In the street below a boy ran, shouting and waving a sheet of paper over his head.

The window kept his voice out. Hanneke watched him hurry past, his paper like a banner overhead. Little boys could run the streets at will, like dogs, and she thought it very unfair that she could not leave the house without her mother, who never wanted to go out at all. Across the way, van der Heghe’s door opened, and the cook came out onto the walk between the rose beds, looking after the boy with his broadside.

Hanneke’s gaze sharpened. The boy was coming back; the cook had a coin out and was buying his broadside. Turning her thumb ring around, Hanneke rapped on the glass, trying to get the cook’s attention.

“Marta—”

The cook read the broadside and yelled. With a flutter of her white apron, she dropped the paper into the street and ran back up the brick walk to her front door.

“Marta!” Hanneke shouted, and rapped on the glass. “What is it?”

Van der Heghe’s door slammed. The boy ran away; the broadside lay in the street, blowing over in the breeze from the canal. Hanneke leapt up out of her chair and bolted from the room.

Her mother was in the back room, putting flowers in a vase. As Hanneke raced by her door, she called, “Johanna! Walk, like a proper Christian woman!”

Hanneke ran down the stairs and to the heavy front door. Her mother’s shrill voice followed her, demanding to know what she did. The door was heavy, a barrier, a bulwark against the world. Hanneke pulled it open and went down the walk to the wrought iron gate.

The broadside still lay in the street, halfway between her gate and van der Heghe’s. From the other end of the street came the shouts and screams of children playing. Hanneke gripped the wrought iron spikes of the gate, wondering if she could coax one of the children to bring her the broadside; but they were far away. She pulled the heavy spring latch backward, pushed the gate wide, and ran out into the street.

“Hanneke!” her mother cried, behind her.

She snatched the broadside up out of the dust and whirled and ran back to her own yard. Until she had the gate shut again, she did not stop to read it.

The title shouted at her: WORD FROM THE KING! She leaned against the gate and scanned the lines of print below that. A low cry burst from her. She read it again, to make sure she understood.

“Hanneke!” Her mother stood in the doorway. “Get in here this moment!”

“Mother,” Hanneke said, and went toward her, both hands out, the broadside gripped in one fist. “Mother, we’re lost—the King has refused the petition.”

“What?”

“The King has refused the petition! They will bring the Inquisition here—”

Hanneke went by her mother into the downstairs hallway, turned, and faced her. “Mother, they are going to try to destroy us.”

Her mother’s face seemed to fall still. She clasped her hands in front of her. “Wait until your father comes home.”

“Mother—”

“Don’t talk to me. Wait until your father comes home.”

Hanneke was struggling against a rising surge of panic. She lifted the broadside again and stared at it. But her mother was right: there was nothing to do except wait. Slowly she turned and climbed the stairs again, to go back to her station, to take up her place, and wait.

Word of the King’s decision came swiftest along the canals, shouted from barge to barge and barge to shore, shouted back again by voices hoarse with disbelief. Jan heard it standing on the third step of the stair up from the wharf.

He said, “Oh, my God.”

The loading crew, some on the wharf, some on the steps above him, said nothing. They let fall whatever they were carrying and turned and ran up onto the canal bank; the foreman, coming from the end of the wharf, brushed past Jan on the steps so roughly Jan lost his balance and nearly fell into the water.

“Wait,” he called, but no one waited.

On the canal, the long low scow whose boatman had called out the news was sliding away toward the next wharf; from that platform, already the men were crying out in despair and anger. Jan looked down at the litter of dropped bundles on the wharf and scrambled up the ladder to find his father.

Halfway across the high-piled yard to the back door of the factory, he stopped. Why was he looking for his papa, like a little boy afraid of the dark? His hands were damp with sweat. What Mies had said to him only a few days before returned to him like bells ringing in his mind: If we had not settled the issue of the Inquisition, things would be a lot worse … In the factory before him a loud voice rose, the words inaudible, but the tone one of outrage. Jan went to the gate and let himself out into the street.

If his father challenged him over leaving his work, he would say he went to spy, as Mies had hinted he should do.

The trouble was that he had no idea where to go to do that. He walked aimlessly down the street, in the opposite direction from his home, into the middle of Antwerp. A tinker passed him, burdened down with pots and pans. At the corner, where this street met the broad thoroughfare that led past the Bourse and down to the river, several women in scarves and shawls were talking intensely together. Jan turned into the great street. A boy ran past him, yelling, “The King’s a bastard!” in French. The usual press of horse-drawn carts and bustling people on foot crowded the street, but here and there the traffic had slowed and knots of people stood around talking.

Beyond the rooftops that fenced the lefthand side of the street rose the single off-center spire of Antwerp’s cathedral. When he saw it Jan’s hackles stood on end. Yes. Swiftly he bent his steps there, to the center of the Catholic faith, to the visible enemy.

He came into the square before the cathedral, into the back of a great restless crowd. Everyone seemed to be staring at the ornately carved stonework of the huge old church. He passed a woman with her little boy by the hand who as Jan went by snatched the child up and hurried away with him.

Along the front of the cathedral the throng reversed itself: in the square they all stood facing the church, but before it were ranks and ranks of men with their backs to it, facing the square. They carried clubs and rocks; they were Catholics. Defending their church. Jan clenched his teeth. He pushed his way through the mob, unwilling to stand still, his heart thumping. He had to elbow a man out of his way and the man wheeled and glowered at him and swore in a keen voice. Others ignored him. Everyone was staring across the little strip of open ground at the Catholics, who stared back at them.

Jan hated them; he did not know how he came to the passion, which seemed to flow through the crowd. He felt himself part of this great wounded beast of a crowd, its expectations poisoned by the King’s treachery. Overhead the cathedral’s offset spire towered up against the rushing clouds; the men ranged before it to defend it seemed tiny by comparison, tiny and insignificant. Jan started forward. All those around him started forward too, at the same time, with a growl like dogs unleashed, and in time with these others, these other parts of himself, he lost his head and flung himself on the Catholics.

All he wanted was to hurt them; he struck out with his fists at their faces and felt flesh give under his knuckles, and he kicked at them and his shoes found meat and bone. Around him bodies pressed so tight he could scarcely move. One arm was pinned. He lashed out at the people around him. Throwing his head back he howled like a wolf in rage. Something hard thrust into his stomach.

The wind burst from him. He doubled over, falling to his knees on the cobblestones, and at once feet pounded on his back, knocked him flat, ground him into the pavement. He gasped. Once the air was gone out of his lungs he could not swell his body enough to take in another breath. His face scraped on the cobblestones. Desperately he realized he was being trampled. He surged forward, trying to get to hands and knees, and was knocked down again under the weight of the mob.

His eyes blurred. A sharp pain radiated through his side, and his hands hurt. He lunged upward, strong with a panicky mad strength, and got his feet under him and stood. Blind and stupid from pain, he thrust out his arms ahead of him and tore a way through the surging scrambling mass of bodies. His legs hurt so badly he thought they would give way under him and drop him into the street again, and he knew that would be the end of him and fought with every step to keep upright. Abruptly his outstretched arms milled the air. He had come to the edge of the crowd. Forward he plunged, into an alley between buildings, and fell into the dirt and rolled over until he lay against a wall, protected by the wall, and covered his face with his arms and lost consciousness.

At first it was rage that drove Mies, a red fury; he searched for his son through the streets of Antwerp as if for a deadly enemy. Damn him for running off. Damn him for fighting—because Mies knew that Jan was fighting, somewhere, in the madness that had seized Antwerp this day and that was continuing on into the night. His mind fixed on Jan as if Jan himself had caused the King’s decision.

He walked on and on through the city in his search, through the streets clogged with angry people who fought and shouted and threw stones at one another. Before the cathedral, guarded around and around by armed men, he saw bodies on the cobblestones and heard about the mob’s charge barehanded against the great building, flesh against stone, life against death.

By then the night was falling. In the growing darkness the friendly, familiar city seemed to disappear; the shrieks that sounded in the night were forest noises, the crash of something breaking, the thunder of running feet, all these alien in Antwerp, where now everyone ought to be at home, at supper, reading the Bible, playing draughts. Now Mies began to be afraid.

He found himself a lantern and went on, calling Jan’s name, looking into corners and alleyways, and peering at the faces of every gang that passed him.

Once he opened his heart to fear a thousand fears came at him. Jan was dead, surely, or he would have gone home to eat. Jan had been carried off, or he would not have left the wharf in the first place. Jan was lying somewhere dying, and Mies could not find him to help him—

Someone jumped him, striking him down. Mies rebounded with the energy of dread and despair and laid about him with the lantern. The dark figure of his attacker staggered backward, and Mies leapt at him, roaring. With the lantern Mies clubbed him fiercely down. The lantern’s bowl broke and sprayed oil over the stumbling man, which sprang alight, burning, burning, on his coat, his hair, his arms. Screaming, the man ran off down the street, while Mies panted for breath behind him. Mies flung down the lantern’s handle and went on.

Whatever happened to him, he welcomed; that was God’s will. But not for his son. “Jan,” he bellowed, his voice harsh with fatigue and use. “Jan van Cleef!” And got no answer.

In her bedroom Hanneke’s mother was praying loudly, as if to shout in God’s ears would force Him to hear her. Hanneke clenched her fists in her lap and stared out the window into Antwerp.

The street below was dark and empty. The night lay heavy over the city. Whatever was happening out there she saw no sign of. Her father had not come home; her brother had not come home. There was nothing to do but wait.

Now here came the watch, a little glowing ball of light like a shell around the three men with their halberds. Hanneke sprang up from her chair and ran down the stairs to the front door.

“Hanneke!” her mother shrieked. “Be careful!”

Hanneke opened the door and went out onto the walk to the gate, in her mind cursing her mother: how could she be uncareful in her own garden? She leaned against the iron bars of the gate and pressed her face between them, as she had when she was a little girl, and waited.

The watch went by her, the lantern creaking on the end of its pole, and at the next street corner stopped.

“Ten of the clock,” the watchman called, “and the city’s full of terrors. Stay in your houses, good people of Antwerp, and pray for God’s deliverance.”

Hanneke gasped; she bit her lip. They were walking on, walking away, taking with them their bit of light and their suggestion of news. She put her hand to her face.

“God, deliver us.” From what?

“Hanneke,” her mother called.

She put her hand on the latch. To go out there, to go look, to help, perhaps—

“Hanneke!”

All her life they had kept her here, telling her girls did not go out, girls did not seek the world, girls did nothing. Sit at home and learn to sew, read the right books, wait. She sobbed, her eyes hot with sudden tears, furious at them and at herself for accepting it. The rough iron bit into her hand. She would go out there.

“Hanneke, please—I’m frightened.”

Over her shoulder she looked back at the house and saw her mother in the doorway, the light behind her, her arms stretched out.

“Hanneke! What are you doing?”

“I’m locking the gate, Mother.” Firmly she drew the bolt across the latch and went back up the walk to the house, where she belonged.

The banging on the gate aroused her. She sat up in her chair; she had slumped against the window when she fell asleep. Down at the gate someone stood, rattling the latch and knocking at the bars. She sprang up and ran downstairs to the door.

It was Mies. A glad cry escaped her. She rushed to the gate and threw back the bolt, and her father stumbled in through the open gate.

“Papa!” She flung her arms around him and kissed him.

“Not now,” Mies said. His voice was thick with exhaustion; he pulled her arms down and held her away from him. “Help me.” Turning, he went back out the gate.

“Oh, God have mercy.” It was Jan, lying on the ground beside the wall. Hanneke and her father lifted him up, and the movement brought a yell from the young man like an arrow in the darkness.

“His leg’s broken,” Mies said; he had Jan by the armpits, while Hanneke tried to cradle his legs. “Be careful.”

Jan was crying with pain. Hanneke said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” He was too heavy to handle with any delicacy and with every step she hurt him more. She and Mies dragged him into the house and took him down to the kitchen, in the rear of the first floor, where it was warm.

“Oh, Jan.” She bent over him, his face gray and sunken and marked with horrible bruises.

Mies went around to his feet and pulled his legs out straight, and Jan screamed again. Hanneke took his hand. “I’m sorry.”

“Water,” Mies said, as if to speak more syllables than necessary was beyond his strength. He bent over his son’s body; cloth ripped in his hands. Hanneke went to find water.

When she came back, the cook had come out of her room behind the oven and was kneeling beside Mies to inspect Jan’s leg. There was no room for Hanneke. With the cup of water in her hands she stood uncertainly watching them. Behind her a small noise turned her attention that way.

Her mother stood in the hall doorway, in her dressing gown, her nightcap over her hair. Her gaze fell on her husband and her son, and she cried out.

“Mies! Is he—” She rushed forward, flung herself against her husband’s back, trying to reach her son. “Is he dead? Is he—”

Mies thrust out his arm to push her away. “Stand back! Give me room, woman—Hanneke, take your mother up to her bed. Where’s that—” Twisting around, he saw the cup of water in her hands and grunted. “That’s not enough. Take your mother. Cook, fetch some water.”

“Mies!” his wife screamed. “Is he hurt? Is he dead?”

“Take her, Hanneke.”

Hanneke clasped her mother’s arms. “He’s alive. He has a broken leg. Come along.”

“Oh, God in Heaven.” Her mother broke into floods of tears. “Oh, my God—why did I ever have children? Why did I ever have babies?” Sobbing and heaving for breath, she let Hanneke draw her away toward the stairs. On the stairs, going up to her bedroom, she seized Hanneke’s arms with her cold hands.

“Don’t ever leave me, Hanneke. Don’t ever go. Please don’t ever leave me.”

“I’m not leaving, Mother. Come along.”

“Don’t ever leave me alone.”

Hanneke looked down over the stair rail, into the hall, where now the servant girl had come up from her bed to stand and look curiously into the kitchen; Hanneke wanted to go down there as much as she wanted life—to see, to help, to do. Her mother clutched her tight.

“Don’t ever leave me.”

“I won’t, Mother.” One arm around her mother’s shoulders, she led her up the stairs to her bedroom.

The rioting in Antwerp did not go on beyond that same dawn, but the city was hot for more trouble, ready for any excuse. To keep peace in Antwerp, the center of the Low Countries, the heart of northern Europe, the Governess sent the one man she knew could do the job, the man she hated and feared most of all: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange.

Magnificent in his brocaded coat, riding a splendid horse, followed by a great retinue of servants and aides, the Prince rode into Antwerp late on an August Sunday. Many said that was a mark of his lack of piety, that he traveled on the Sabbath, but others said it was a mark of his wisdom, because he came into the city on the one day when everyone in Antwerp would be free to come watch his entrance. Certainly the streets were packed with people. But it was not a welcome they gave him. No one cheered; no one waved banners or gave speeches in his honor and presented pageants likening him to ancient heroes. They stood along the streets and watched him ride by, accepted his easy smiles and raised right hand without any answers of their own. Everybody knew there would be trouble, and everybody, Catholic and Protestant alike, expected to see William of Orange on the other side.

“Did you go?” Jan asked. He sat in his bed, propped up on pillows, his bad leg stretched out on more pillows before him. Hanneke sat next to the bed on a stool. Between them lay the draughts board. She reached for one of her checkers.

“Father said not to,” she said.

“But you did go.”

“Mother was sleeping. He came in by the west gate, it was only a little way off.”

“Oh, Hanneke,” Jan said.

“I had to go! I’m so tired of being kept here like a caged animal—” She set down the checker almost at random. “I was only gone for a little while.”

“What if I’d needed you?” he said, and taking one of his men jumped three of hers in a giddy charge across the board.

“Jan!”

“What if I’d needed you and you weren’t here?”

She leapt up, her temper swollen, and, having no other outlet, driven to tears. “Why is it always I who must be here?”

“You needn’t,” Jan said. “Just tell me when you go out, so that I don’t call for you and alert the whole house that you’re gone. Understand?”

She came back to the stool and sat. “Yes, you’re right.”

“I’m all behind you,” he said, smiling at her. “Go out all you can. Otherwise how am I to know what’s going on?”

“Oh, you’ll be walking soon.”

They had decided that the leg was not broken, only disjointed at the knee. Bandages swathed it like a babe in the cradle.

Hanneke bent over the draughts board. “Anyway,” she said, “the day after tomorrow is Assumption Day, you know.”

“Oh, really. I had forgotten.”

She advanced one of her men. He was ahead of her now by three pieces and she had to be cautious. “The word is that the priests went to Orange and asked him if they should still have the procession, and he said they ought, to make things seem as usual.”

Jan chewed his lip. He moved a man, and Hanneke moved again. “Are you going out to see it?” he asked.

“I will if I can. Mother naps every day in the afternoon.”

“If anyone looks for you I will say you went out to pick me a pear,” said Jan.

He put out his hand, and she took it in a conspirator’s grasp. After he made his next move she jumped four of his pieces.

Albert van Luys raised his fist into the air. “The King has declared war on us! We must defend ourselves and our faith—all over the Netherlands. God’s people are rising in arms against this devilish King and his ministers—”

Among the several dozen men ranged behind him in the council chamber, fifteen or twenty loosed cheers of support for him; but most of them sat silent and unmoved. The Prince of Orange kept his face expressionless. He saw the task before him as one of building a wall—he had to find the right matter among these people and put those pieces together into something whole and solid to stand against the fate sweeping toward them like a North Sea storm.

He leaned over the table, his forearms pressed against the marble top, and looked into Albert’s blazing eyes.

“Yes, you are right,” he said. “There have been riots in a hundred places, people have broken into the churches and destroyed the paraphernalia of the Catholic faith, and everyone in the Low Countries is up on his toes, ready to fight.”

He widened his gaze to sweep the mass of men behind Albert, seeking out those who had not cheered his call to war.

“But my information is that even here in Antwerp as many of these eager warriors are Catholic as Protestant.”

“Traitors!” Albert cried.

“Oh, sit down, you loudmouth,” called one of the men behind him.

A grumble of agreement sounded in the wake of that, and here and there men turned to their neighbors and began to argue. The chamber filled up with discordant noise. Albert folded his arms across his chest and set his jaw. He stayed on his feet, but he said no more, staring at Orange. The Prince wondered how much he knew—if he had heard of the Beggar army that was marching on Antwerp even now and whose leaders had sent a message on ahead asking him to open the city gates to them and give them refuge from the Governess’s army coming hard on their heels.

He had spoken to an assembly of the great Catholic men of Antwerp that morning. Now he faced a room full of Calvinists and Lutherans and probably Anabaptists too, and he wondered briefly if there were any use in it, or if he ought to have them all arrested and held until the danger was past.

They were still locked in their small private arguments. Albert swung toward them, raising his arms high.

“Prepare yourselves. The conflict is coming. Soon God Himself shall appear in the sky and ride at the head of our army to destroy the Anti-Christ Philip and usher in the Golden Age!”

The Prince watched the faces of the men before him and saw how they closed against that rhetoric, and his heart quickened with new confidence. They did not want to fight, these burghers and merchants and tradesmen; they had too much to lose. His mind leapt to find a way to use that to his ends.

One of them was standing up.

“Your Highness.” This man bowed stiffly from the waist. A slender man of middle height, dressed in black, a touch of silver at his throat. A face as hard as a soldier’s. “Give me leave to speak.”

“Speak,” said the Prince, with a smile at the imperious command in that voice.

Like Albert, like all of them, this man spoke in French, the official language of the Low Countries. He said, “In the fighting for the cathedral, a few days ago, my only son was nearly killed. There are boys like him, who want to fight—young and ignorant men, not the paladins of God—only boys who fight anyway, whenever the chance arises. It is not God’s way to use such instruments.”

The Prince cleared his throat; this was a very fine point, subtle as a shadow, to be made in the face of such broad and sweeping passions. He said, “May I ask your name, sir?”

“I am Mies Willem van Cleef, your Highness; I make and sell cloth. I am a good churchgoing God-fearing man, as everyone here can testify, but I doubt when the final battle for the world comes that it will be fought by green boys, with stones and clubs.”

“Traitor,” Albert cried. “Spaniard!” With a swirl of his robes he stalked out of the council chamber.

The gathering stirred, as men turned to watch him go, and some even got to their feet to follow. Mies van Cleef stood facing the Prince still, his face grim and his back to where Albert had been. Many men shifted in their places and muttered and moved, but no one followed Albert out the door and the Prince took heart from this.

He said, “Your point is very well taken, Mijnheer van Cleef. I hope your son is well now.”

Van Cleef’s head bobbed briefly in a kind of courtesy.

“Let us work together, then,” the Prince said, “to find some way to protect our young men from one another.”

Another man rose in the crowd behind Mies van Cleef. “Did you wish that, your Highness, you ought not to have allowed the Catholics to go ahead with their procession on Assumption Day.”

A growl went up from twenty throats, agreeing. The Prince put his hands down on the veined marble top of the table.

“I had in mind the old adage that to keep the peace it serves best to act peacefully.”

“We are not at peace,” said Mies van Cleef.

“You think the city on the verge of strife?”

Half a dozen men called, “Yes, yes—”

“Then should we not put armed men around the streets, to keep order? Will you help me keep order here?” The Prince ran his gaze from face to face. “They will listen to you—the respected and powerful men of their own faith.”

Neatly trapped, none of them said anything. Mies van Cleef sat down again. The man who had spoken against the Assumption procession stayed on his feet, and the Prince nodded to him.

“You, Master Clement, your services are uniquely necessary to this task before us.”

“You know me,” said Clement de Vere, looking startled.

The Prince smiled at him, and in a mild voice said, “I know you all.”

He looked each one in the face again, to let them feel this, that they could not escape from him in anonymity. Mies van Cleef grunted and crossed his legs, one over the other.

“Master Clement is a printer,” said the Prince. “The finest Protestant printer in Antwerp, and we shall have great need of his presses to keep the people aware of what is happening and of what is expected of them. We shall also need guards, watchmen for the city’s safety. Can I rely on you? Will each of you arm yourself and undertake to give time—much time, I am afraid, knowing you all to be busy men—to keep the peace in Antwerp? To preserve Antwerp from destruction?”

Their faces were blank. They were thinking about it. Still no one had walked out. He leaned forward, ready with his most weighty argument.

“Destruction it will be, if Antwerp should rise as other cities are rising. Heavy blows will call forth heavier yet, from the Spanish monarchy—and they say that even now the King has ordered the tercios of Italy to prepare to march north under the leadership of the Duke of Alva.”

“Alva.”

That name struck them. They straightened, their faces tight with new apprehension. Mies van Cleef uncrossed his legs. Did he see his only son battling with sticks and stones against the greatest warrior in Christendom?

“Will you help me?” said the Prince of Orange.

“I will,” said Mies van Cleef, and rose, the first of all, and came forward to shake the Prince’s hand.

Dressed like a doll in glittering clothes, a jeweled crown on her head, the little black image of the Virgin rode in her car at the head of the Assumption Day procession down the crowded streets of Antwerp. Hanneke watched her from the steps of the Guildhall, where standing higher than the people before her she could see over their heads. She had never seen the famous Antwerp Virgin before. It was smaller than she had supposed. Why was it black? Very old, it was, and silly in its fancy clothes. Priests pulled the car along, and other priests scattered incense before and after it. Troops of boys in white, with candles, sang in the car’s wake. After them came scores of common people, praying, scourging themselves, some walking on their hands and knees, doing penance for their sins.

Hanneke bit her lip. Something in this reached even into her Calvinist heart, some ancient longing. The crowd before her stirred; the image was passing directly before them now.

“Mollykin, Mollykin,” someone called, in Dutch. “You are taking your last walk.”

Laughter in the crowd. The priests ignored it, hauling the car along with ropes over their shoulders. It seemed heavy, although the figure itself was no bigger than a baby and even the jeweled clothes could not weigh so much. Now the singing boys were going by, their candles held upright before them. Too young for discipline, they slid their gazes toward the crowd and some hurried their pace, running into the ones ahead of them. Frightened.

Now here came the penitents, and these suffered much for their faith. The crowd pelted them with rotten fruit and clods of earth and shouted curses and jibes at them. Hanneke slipped down from her vantage point and went away.

She had to be back at once, before she was discovered gone. Yet she longed to stay out here in the city. The excitement in the crowd charged her with vitality. Something great was happening here, an undercurrent of passion, of rising intensity, that she felt along all her nerves, a giddy expectation. As she went through the streets she looked curiously at the faces she passed. Into the shops and doorways. There seemed many more people than usual out in the street. She stopped on a corner, to look around her, and a boy thrust a broadside into her hand.

“I have no money—”

He was already running off. She looked down at the long heavy sheet of paper.

WAR! the top row of print read. WAR! WAR! WAR!

That raised every hair on her head stiff as wire. Her gaze flew down the page.

There was an army coming—two armies. A swarm of Beggars out of the west country was hurrying toward Antwerp; an army of Catholics pursued them, much outnumbering them. Her heart galloped. Folding the broadside into quarters, she stuffed it under her apron sash and went on through the streets to her home.

“Lackey!” Jan shouted. “Traitor! Spaniard!”

Mies clenched his teeth; he fought the urge to strike at his son’s red contorted face. “Sit down. You’ll hurt your leg.”

“My leg is perfectly well!” To prove it Jan walked in a little circle around the room. “How could you do this, Father? The fate of the whole world hangs in the balance—”

“The fate of the world,” Mies said heavily, and sat down in his chair. He leaned on the arm, looking around him at the shelves of books, and wondered again where Hanneke was. Always she was here when he came back, like a piece of the furniture, waiting for him. His son stormed across the room to face him again.

“The time has come to choose, Father—to choose between God and truth and all the evils of the past. You can’t just say it’s too dangerous. You can’t really mean to put the factories and the piles of cloth and the money before God.”

Mies shifted in the chair, his fingers tight around the ridged wooden arm, his gaze not meeting Jan’s. He said, “I see no sign that God is asking such a choice of me.” Mercilessly he refused to hear the inner voice that whispered Jan was right.

“Jan!” His wife appeared in the doorway. “My dear husband. What is this unseemly shouting? I am sure you can be heard even in the street.”

“Where is Hanneke?” Mies asked her.

“God is calling us,” Jan said, bending forward, his hands curling before him into fists, “to join the army of Christ. If we turn our backs now—”

“Jan,” his mother said. “You must not speak to your father in that tone.”

“He’s a traitor!” Jan roared, and stalked away across the room. Indeed his leg seemed much sounder, although he still limped.

Mies said, “We must preserve Antwerp. Thousands of people depend on us—” Hollow these arguments, meaningless even to him; the only meaningful one the one he could hardly find expression for: his abhorrence of disorder, his vision of the world dissolving into chaos in the acids of hatred and intolerance. Downstairs the door to the street opened and shut.

“You should be in bed,” his wife was saying reproachfully to her son. “Your leg is still so sore and swollen—”

“Mama, I’m fine,” the boy bellowed, and wheeled on Mies again, his eyes shining, his cheeks streaked with tears. “You will not join us? You will not answer God’s call?”

“God’s call,” Mies said, “is for harmony and peace. Not for—”

“Spaniard!” Jan jerked back his head and flung it forward, and through his pursed lips flew a gout of spit that sailed across the space between them and struck Mies on the cheek.

His mother screamed. Mies gripped the arm of his chair, stiff with rage, his ears roaring, his mind at a white boil. Before him stood his son, weeping.

“Father!” Hanneke rushed into the room and sank down beside his chair. “How dare you?” she shouted at Jan.

“Do you know what he’s done?” Jan said to her. “He’s joined the Spaniards! He’s taking arms against God—fallen in with the Prince of Orange and the Governess, the tools of this world—”

Mies sprang up from his chair, swiped at his cheek, and shouted, “Go! Get out—get away from me, you Godless impious wretched son, you ungrateful devil!”

“You’ve made your choice, Father.” Jan walked toward the door.

His mother threw herself on him, seized his arm, crying, “Wait! Wait!”

“Let go of him,” Mies shouted. “You saw what he did—how he treats his own father. Let him go, Griet!”

Jan was struggling to reach the door; his mother clung to him with all her strength, and he had to drag her weight along with him. Hanneke caught Mies’ hand and pressed it to her cheek.

“Father, please—where will he go? Father, please.”

Mies lowered his suspicious gaze to her. “Where were you?”

“I—”

She lost her breath, but in the red flames that suddenly kindled in her cheeks, in her lowered eyes, he saw what he dreaded to see, that she too disobeyed him, that she too broke from the order of the household and did what must not be done. He thrust her away.

“God is coming,” he said. He went to the window, to the light and air, his back to his family. “And He will find impious sons and bold unruly daughters, and all system fallen away.” He put his trembling hands on the windowsill and leaned his weight on them. Unaccountably his own eyes burned with tears. He shifted his body, finding himself fearful of resting on the window frame, as if weakened by the weakness of its inhabitants the house itself would not hold up its master’s weight. Behind him a door slammed. His wife burst into uncontrollable weeping. His daughter sank into a chair and began to pray.

In Antwerp all normal life stopped. The Prince of Orange and his recruits patrolled the streets, hoping to keep order by their presence and example, but in the crackling heat of an August night, with phantom armies approaching on every wind of rumor and the wretched poor turned out idle on every corner, a mob of folk shouting that Christ was coming burst into the great cathedral and tore the holy images from the walls, broke the altar, chopped open the shrine of the Virgin with an ax, and hacked the little black doll to pieces. They stole her precious clothes and the outfittings of the altar and tried to set fire to the cathedral itself, although the massive building withstood the feeble torches without a lasting mark. Then the mob ran through the streets of the city, shouting their visions of the coming of Christ and throwing pieces of the broken icons into Catholic gardens, and went to attack a monastery next.

The Prince got there first, with a few of his helpers, and they stood between the screaming Calvinists and the monks huddling and praying in the chapel, and by calm words and the power of command the Prince got the crowd going elsewhere.

Among those who stood beside him that night was Mies van Cleef, the cloth merchant, who searched the crowd with his eyes and yet seemed afraid of seeing something there.

That night passed, and the next, and the next, with no more incidents, although sometimes in the night huge crowds gathered, some Calvinist, some Catholic, and prayed and heard preaching and made loud talk in the streets. Everyone knew an army was marching toward Antwerp, the Beggar army, with a horde of harassing and tormenting Catholics at its back.

On the day when the Beggar army first came in sight of the city walls a mass of Calvinists gathered at the gate, all armed with pitchforks and clubs and pieces of stone torn up from the street pavings, prepared to go out and join them. The Prince went to put himself between them and the gate and ordered them home.

“You must not leave the city,” he shouted, trying to lift his voice above their clamorings. “You’ll be destroyed. The Governess’s army is twice as many as the Beggars and you combined. They are mounted, heavily armed, well led; the Beggars are a rabble. Stay here—do not destroy yourselves.”

Then came what he most dreaded, a messenger from the Beggars, asking him to open the gates of Antwerp to them, to give them refuge. From atop the wall beside the gate, the Prince of Orange looked down at the exhausted messenger, riding bareback on a farm horse, and told him no.

“You must let us in,” the messenger called, in a voice flat with fatigue and hopelessness. “They are eating us alive. We need shelter—food—we’ve come so far—”

“I cannot give Antwerp to you,” said the Prince. “We must preserve something of our country in the face of this madness.”

“You are our only hope.”

“Then you have no hope. Go; I cannot help you. None here can help you, but only Christ our Lord. Go, before you are pinned against these walls and slaughtered.”

“Go where?” the messenger cried.

“Go home.”

“We have no home.” The messenger reined his limping plow horse away and rode off down the slope.

At that a wail went up from the Calvinists packed into the street inside the gate, and they lunged forward, broke the gate, and spilled out onto the road and the green slopes along the road, rushing to join the Beggars. The Prince seized the nearest horse and galloped through their midst to their head.

“Stop—go back—you’ll be slaughtered!”

Alone, he put himself between them and the Beggar army, now creeping into view along the rounded horizon, and seeing him the mob slowed and stopped.

“Go back.” He spread his arms, as if he could herd them all back into the city. “Go back—don’t give the Governess’s army the excuse to attack Antwerp.”

Someone bolted forward from the mob, trying to rush past him, and he swung his horse to block the man’s way. “Go back—please—I beg of you.”

The man struck clumsily up at the elegant figure on the horse that stopped his progress. The Prince warded off the blows with his arms. “Go back—go back—please—I implore you.”

At that a sigh went up from the mob, when they saw him shielding himself from the blows of the Calvinist, not fighting back, not striking down his attacker, and pleading for his attacker’s own safety; they even found the power to raise a cheer for him, and turning they made their way back into the city.

A few stole away, hanging back from the fringes of the mob. Most of them returned to Antwerp; the great gates closed, and the bar went across them, and the city shut itself to the Beggars. And after that there was no more trouble.

Jan gripped a pole in both hands, his breath coming harsh and short between his teeth; his eyes were itching with dust. Far down the plain the Beggar army was streaming into view over the horizon. He straightened, prepared to be overcome by the majesty of their appearance—ready to see God’s angels in the sky above them. His skin tingled, and his blood thrashed in his veins; at any moment, he knew, something great would happen.

Nothing happened. Far off over the plain the Beggars were running along the road and over the meadows beside it. They kept no order; they wore no armor or insignia. No banners flew over them. No angelic light shone around them. Hesitantly he started forward through the knee-high grass, clutching his weapon, his injured leg throbbing painfully with each step.

A trumpet sounded, far away. He wheeled. This was the beginning, at last, the horns of God blasting on the plain of Armageddon. Now he could see horses galloping up over the rolling land. He called out, raising one arm straight over his head, and ran forward to meet them.

A few strides later he stopped in his tracks.

The horsemen were riding down the Beggar rabble. Not joining them. Not supporting them. Tiny in the distance, they hacked with their swords at the fleeing backs of the army of God. They were the royalists, then, the Catholics, and they were killing with impunity.

Jan let out a low cry. He broke into a run again, headed toward the nearest group of the Beggar army. His leg gave way and toppled him into the grass, and he rose and went on, sobbing for breath, his vision yellowed by the dust that rolled in clouds under the feet of the Beggars and their killers.

Ahead of them a hundred Calvinists were rushing along the road, but the royalist horsemen were rapidly overtaking them. He was too far away to help. Too far away even to die with them. He stumbled over something in the grass and went to his hands and knees, and turning to see what he had fallen over found a body on the ground.

He lunged up onto his feet and raced on, but they were drawing away from him. The enemy horsemen, striking and wheeling, rode on faster than he could run. He passed a man in tatters who writhed and gasped on his back in the slimy grass. Out of breath, his lungs choked with dust, Jan slowed to a walk and then stopped, his gaze on the horsemen, still small in the distance.

They were riding off; their trumpets blared again, a tinny little spangle of noise in the silent afternoon. Gradually he heard the other sounds around him, the whisper of the wind in the grass, the twittering of insects, the croaking of the day birds. A butterfly flapped by him. Slowly he turned and spread his attention around him. He was surrounded by a lot of men, dead or dying, scattered in the grass. No army. No angels, no glory of God, only a litter of bloody meat in the August sunshine. He moaned; a noise he had never heard before and did not mean to make rolled up from his belly and leaked out between his lips. He thought what he saw should burn his eyes out. That would be better. That would mean something. Slowly he dragged his feet back to Antwerp.

“Oh, Who cares?” Jan said. He flung his hand out, loose muscled, flopping his arm down on his knee. “It’s all a damned lie anyway, Hanneke.” He folded his other arm over his face.

His sister backed away from him, to the door of his room; she wondered what had happened to him outside the walls of the city. Since he had come back he had said nothing. She went out the door to the corridor.

The housemaid was singing in the room opposite. The warm odors of dinner drifted through the house. Slowly Hanneke went down the stairs to the second floor.

Through the open door to her parents’ room, she could see her mother, sitting on the tall canopied bed, combing her hair. Her mother smiled at her brightly, like a child, the long brown rope of her hair hanging over her shoulder. Hanneke went on to the sitting room, looking for her father.

Mies was there, in the old chair by the fire. Slumped down into his seat, he did not move when she came in, or look up, or speak to her. She stood a moment waiting for him to notice her. His face was slack and dull as a drunkard’s. Aghast, she wondered if he were drunk. He never said a word to her; if he saw her there, he ignored her utterly. She could not think what to say to him. And what if he were drunk? She went down the room to the window.

Night was falling. The sinking sun cast its light against the tall front of van der Heghe’s house across the street, gilding the windows. Hanneke looked by habit for the storks in their nest on the chimney.

She gasped. The birds were gone. The nest was knocked halfway off the chimney top. Bits of stick and straw littered the roof line. She turned toward her father, to share this evil, but he was staring into the fire, inaccessible. She looked out again at the house opposite, wondering what had happened—where the birds had gone. It was too early for them to have flown away south. Africa, she had heard, that was where they went for the winter. The name sounded in her mind like a meaningless incantation, a curse in another language. Suddenly she was fighting back tears. She turned blindly to the bookshelf, to find something to read, to forget herself in.