9

“But you can’t,” Hanneke said, and clenched her fists. “I must work—I have no other way of living. My mother—”

The leadman was shaking his head. “You’ve been missing days of work anyway.”

“But I explained that to you—and I do extra work to make up for it—”

His head swiveled from side to side, his expression implacable. “I can’t keep you on.”

“Please!”

He reached for the door, to swing it shut between them, and as he shut it in her face he said, “If I were you, girl, I would not remind people my name’s van Cleef.” The door closed. She was left staring at the stained boards.

He had paid her, at least scrupulous about that, to the last penny she was owed. She held the money in her hand, just barely enough to pay the Kelmans the rent. And then what? They had to eat something. She could not survive forever on the sweet buns Michael gave her. She turned away from the back door of the factory and walked off along the street.

What he had said to her came back; she stood under a tree by the side of the canal and looked into the dark swirling water and knew bitterly that he had let her off because she was her father’s daughter. Mies, what a heritage you have given me. She struggled against her rage at her father, who had left her this misery.

The canal’s slippery water rushed by, deep and dark from the spring rains. She thought of jumping in, of drowning, and getting out of her troubles that way, and enjoyed the idea for a moment: how sweet to sleep. But of course she could not; there was her mother to care for, and God forbade suicide anyway. She would not sleep; she would writhe in Hell. She walked off along the street to the bridge and crossed over.

In the Italian quarter, where most of the banks were, close by the Bourse, she went from shop to shop asking for work, but no one had any jobs she could do. Some of them even laughed at her, not meanly, but in amazement she would ask. Now and then she came on a shop that was closed up, which did not strike her odd, for a while, until she came to the end of the Lombard Street and saw people carrying furniture and goods out of a building and loading them onto wagons to be taken away.

At that she did stop and put this all together in her mind; she realized there was something ominous in this, that the foreigners were leaving Antwerp. For generations, people from all over Europe had been crowding into Antwerp, the hub of the world, and now, for some reason, they were going.

Only a few streets away, toward the river, was the shop of the printer Clement. He would know what was going on, and she went there.

The shop was loud with the clanging of the presses. Clement and several other men rushed about at their work, methodical as soldiers; the paper rattled in their hands and flashed white in the dim room, and as each lever swayed down the great screw presses groaned like monsters. The smell of ink and lead was painful to the nose. She went to the corner by the fire and sat down on the stool. The cat was curled up in the deep padded chair beside the window.

After a while the door opened and Clement’s boy, Philip, came in. Seeing her, he smiled all over his face. Her heart lightened. She hardly knew him; yet he was glad to see her, and he came over to her and sat down on the floor beside her.

“How are you? I haven’t seen you in a long while.”

They talked a little about the weather and the coming of the spring.

“I’ve lost my job,” she said, when the conversation got around to that. “And I can’t find another. Why are the shops closing in the Italian quarter? What’s going on? Something’s wrong.”

Clement’s boy folded his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “Yes, a lot of people are going away.”

“Why? Is there some reason?”

“The Spaniards, naturally,” he said, and shrugged. “What else is there?”

“But they’ve gone,” she said, thinking of Carlos, and realized at once how narrowly she had understood the Spanish power in Antwerp.

Clement’s boy was watching her with wide grave eyes. His hair needed cutting; it fell over his forehead in a wing, and she put out her hand and brushed it back behind his ear. “What have you been reading lately?”

“A book about trajectories,” he said. He looked as if he were still thinking about what they had just spoken of.

“Trajectories. What’s that?”

“How things fall.”

“Really. How odd, an entire book about how things fall. I cannot conceive of that filling even a page.” Her words sounded hollow to her, frantic, planking over a yawning gap in her understanding.

“Well,” the boy said, “that’s the interesting thing about the new science, that the more closely you look at what seems like a simple thing the more there is to see. Why did they throw you out of your work? Because you are Calvinist?”

At that her chest contracted; she faced the dread she had been avoiding. “Yes,” she said.

He put his hand on her shoulder. “My father will help you.”

Hanneke smiled at him. Her face was stiff. If she had lost the one job for her faith, then the chances of her finding another were very slight. She thought of her mother, who complained even now of their poor food and close quarters. I should have taken the canal, she thought, and turned her gaze into the fire.

A few minutes later Clement was sitting down in the chair, the cat on his lap. “Well, Mistress van Cleef, what brings me the honor of a visit from you?”

“She’s lost her job,” his son said. “Because she is a Calvinist.”

Hanneke said, “I can tell him myself, you know.”

Clement’s big black-smudged hand flattened the cat’s back. “Not just that, I am sure—it is the tax.”

“What tax?”

“The Spaniards are requiring several new taxes of us—to pay for the troops they are keeping here. The taxes on goods and land have no bearing on you, but there is a great tax that does, whereby the tenth penny of every sale in the Low Countries must go to the King.”

“Every sale of what?” she asked, not understanding at all.

“Every sale of anything. If a loaf of bread is sold, one tenth of the price must go to the King, or if a keg of beer is sold, or a sheep, or an onion, or a piece of cloth, and so the shopkeepers must raise their prices or cut their expenses in some way, and the easiest way is to let go some of their help.”

She gaped at him, amazed to have her particular disaster so neatly made part of something huge. “Is that why the shopkeepers are leaving Antwerp?”

“Very probably so,” said Clement.

“But then the King must not do it.”

Clement smiled at her; his hand stroked down the cat’s gray fur. “So we must convince him. I can give you work here, if you want it. Not much, and for little money.”

She looked around the print shop; the other printers were away in the back eating their dinners. The floor was thick with dust and bits of metal and scraps of paper.

She said, “I can sweep.”

“No, no,” Clement said. “This is much more dangerous than that. My—” His head jerked toward the rear of the shop. “My assistants are Catholic, or untrustworthy in other ways. I need help in printing for the cause of God.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I can teach you all you must know in a few days. But it is dangerous work, and I cannot pay you very much, because it comes out of my purse, and not from commissions.”

Hanneke turned her eyes toward the fire again. For doing little more than this, her father had gone to prison. Why was Clement not in prison, not dead too? Her mind leapt at that, as if to solid ground. She swiveled her head to look at him, suspicious. Perhaps he was a seducer, who lured people into crimes and gave them to the Spanish. Why would he be so forward in offering help to her, whom he had never known before this?

She said, “I have my mother to consider. If anything happened to me …”

Clement was already shrugging, leaning back, his big square hands giving the cat a shove that knocked it off his lap. “Your decision. Whatever you wish. Will you have some dinner with us?”

“I must be going,” she said. Perhaps Michael would give her work. She got up to her feet, gathering her shawl around her.

“Can I go part of the way with you?” Clement’s boy asked.

“No,” she said, short. “I have things to do.”

“Please, Hanneke.”

She went between them, going to the door, sure now she was right, and they were a den of traitors. “No.” The door squealed when she opened it; she went out onto the street, into the sunlight.

“Hanneke,” her mother said, waited for an answer, and got none.

Gone again. What a wicked girl. All things had gone to wickedness, since Mies went away.

She went to the doorway and looked out. The sun was going down. The air was moist and blustery, banging at the shutters on the house and pulling the door back and forth in her hand. Rain soon. The wind tugged on the door and she let it go; it swung outward with a crack against the outside of the house. She laughed.

Without looking back at all she flung herself out and down the stairs, down into the yard, and away to the corner in the very back, behind the privy, where she had hidden her helmet and her sword. The helmet hurt her head and so she had padded it with dry grass. She put it on and took the long wooden spike of her sword in her hand and went out to find the doorway.

Where it was, what it looked like, she had forgotten; all she knew or needed to know was that somewhere there was a door, and if she found it and went in she would leave this world and go back into the old world where the bread was soft and there was butter to have on it, and herring for breakfast, and a bed with white linen that she shared with Mies, and from day to day nothing ill happened. So she went off to find that door.

The first raindrops fell sharp on her helmet, rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. She strode down the street, swinging the stick in her hand, her sword.

Rat-a-tat-tat—

Not rain. She spun around, and behind her the mob of small children broke and ran in all directions, screaming.

“The witch! The witch!”

She howled at them. Waving the sword, she charged after them; she took a few steps after one, turned, and went off a little way after another. They ran from her, squealing and crying. Out of breath, she stopped in the middle of the street and brandished her sword at them. Fiercely she snorted through her nostrils at them. They were all gone, hiding behind fences, giggling in the alleyways. She turned and started along the street again.

At once they were after her; a volley of small stones pocked the dusty street ahead of her, and a sharp pain drove into the back of her knee. She wheeled around and did battle with them once more, driving them off.

A dog chased her. She was afraid of dogs and she ran, the children streaming after her, the dog yipping at her heels. Swiftly she lost her breath and wanted to stop but the dog would not stop; it seized her dress in its teeth and tore off part of her skirt. If it caught her flesh in its teeth—

The dark was falling. Her lungs fiery, her eyes blind with tears, she ran around a corner and hid behind a tree.

They seemed to have gone. Somehow they had missed her. She leaned against the tree, struggling for breath. The hammering in her ears drowned all other sound. She longed to sit down.

Slowly the banging in her ears subsided, and below it, she heard the snuffling of the dog, searching for her in the dark.

She howled. Mindless with terror, she leapt away from the tree and ran, and they were all back again, the demons, yelling and snapping at her heels. She lost her sword. Screaming, she hurried down the street, while the hell pack scorched her with their flaming breath and fastened their iron teeth in her flesh. Something struck her hard in the back of the head. She fell. Under the weight of their bodies. Smothering in their fur. She pushed herself up onto her feet and ran on.

“The witch! The witch!”

Desperately she yearned to be home, to be with Hanneke, to have the door to shut after her. She turned into a twisting dark street and ran along it, searching for the house, but all these houses were strange. She was lost. The street climbed under her feet. Wheeling, she looked back, down the long winding way.

Empty. No one followed her. She was alone in the dark.

But when she turned and walked on, suddenly they were back again, leaping from the shadows at her, and she broke into a shambling run. She could feel their breath on her back. Their fangs tearing at her. Ahead the canal bridge. Backed like a camel. Up and up into the night, into the soft rain. She labored up the steep rise in the bridge. Something sprang at her from the dark. Huge. She flung out her arms and embraced it. Hot fur; the stinking blast of its breath in her face. She fell backward and it bore her down, pressing its fur over her face, down forever in an eternal fall.

“The damned Calvinists,” said Michael’s mother, lunging and thrusting with her arms at the grainy dough. “They brought it on us.”

Michael caught the gleam of her eye, watching him obliquely, and knew where this was going. He rolled a handful of dough into a ball, flattened it with his hand on the baking tray, and picking up the jam pot dropped a spoonful of sugary cherries into the center of the circle. He had six more trays to make, and then he could go find Hanneke, no matter what his mother said.

“It’s God’s curse on us for letting them live here,” his mother said loudly. “For not keeping His way and making the damned Calvinists do the same.”

“The Estates haven’t voted for it yet,” Michael said. “Maybe they won’t. Maybe it will never happen.” Not even the Duke of Alva could collect a tax that had been rejected by the Estates.

“Pah.” Lifting the mass of dough into the air, the baker slammed it down again on the floury board with an emphasis that lifted white clouds into the air around her. “If God wants it, it will happen, never mind what the Estates say. And if it happens, boy, you’ll find out what hard work means—hard work and lean profits, because we cannot afford to pay the duke a tenth of our makings.”

She had been saying this now for days, since the rumors and the printed broadsides began circulating that foretold the tenth penny. The other taxes, on land and real property, she did not seem to mind: of course they had little enough of that. But the constant bleeding of one out of every ten pennies the shop took in had her fierce, a lioness, more adamant than Michael had ever seen her.

She heaved up one of her interminable sighs, now, and began dividing the dough to rise. “I pray every night your father will forgive me for bringing his business to this.”

Lately she had been talking much of his father. Michael, who kept the bakery’s books, knew perfectly well that under his mother’s direction the shop had done steadily better than under his father’s, in spite of the equally steady increase in the prices of flour and sugar and fruit, but if he suggested that she ought not to fear his father’s reproaches, she flew at him in a fury.

“Get to work,” she said, as if he were not working. “By God, boy, you’ll know hard work soon enough, soon enough.”

Another great tremulous sigh. Michael bent over the dough, ladling jam into the center of another white fluffy square.

The front door opened. His mother threw her head back. “Who’s that?”

“I’ll see.” He went into the front of the shop.

It was Hanneke. Amazed, he circled the counter, pulling off his apron, and at the look of distress on her dear face he stretched out his arms to her, his hands and forearms gloved in flour. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t find my mother.” She put her hands to her face a moment. When she lowered them again he saw the dark smudges of fatigue beneath her eyes and guessed she had been out all night again, searching. She slumped against the counter. “Michael, have you a bun I could beg? I haven’t eaten anything, and I have no money.”

He went swiftly to the tray of buns put out to cool on the end of the counter. “You’re missing work again.”

“I’ve lost that,” she said. She took the bun and began to eat it; he saw how she forced herself to eat daintily, in spite of her hunger, and his heart took an odd beat.

“Michael,” his mother called.

“What do you mean, you’ve lost it?”

She licked the sugar from her fingers. “I have no work anymore—they let me go.”

“You’ll find something else.”

“I’ve looked.”

“Michael!”

“The only task I’ve been offered is to help the printer Clement turn out seditious broadsides.”

“Do you want another bun?”

“No—no, thank you, Michael. You’re very kind to me—I don’t know where I would have gone, save to you.”

“I’ll ask my mother if we can hire you here.”

She turned her face full on him and laughed. Her eyes were old with strain and exhaustion.

“Michael!” His mother poked her head out the door. “Oh,” she said in another tone, and marched out behind the counter, her hands on her hips. “So it’s you again.”

“I’m going,” said Hanneke, and started toward the door.

“It’s all your fault!” The baker waved her fist at Hanneke’s back. “I’ll lose my bakery, and it’s all your fault!”

“Mother—” Michael got between the girl and the door. “Don’t go,” he said to Hanneke, and faced his mother again. “Mother, she’s desperate. At least we can give her some bread—”

“Let me go,” Hanneke said, and put her hand on his arm: the first time he could remember her actually touching him. “I have to find my mother.”

“As well she might be,” the baker said. “The hour’s short for you Calvinists, young woman, very short indeed. What’s wrong with her mother?”

“Don’t go,” Michael said, and clasped Hanneke’s arm above the wrist. “Let me get you some bread to take with you. Don’t go.” With a little shake, as if pinning her to the floor, he went off swiftly through the shop.

“What’s the matter with your mother?” the baker asked.

Hanneke’s fingers twisted in the fabric of her skirts. “She’s gone. I can’t find her. I have to find her.” Her voice rang dull as pewter.

“Run off again, has she? She’s mad as a March hare, that’s the rumor,” said Michael’s mother.

Hanneke licked her lips; abruptly she turned her face away, and her hands twisted and pulled at her skirt.

“Well, now,” the baker said. “You’ve been searching all night, by the looks of you. You should rest. And pray to God to show you the right way, and then you wouldn’t fall onto these things, by God!”

Michael came back, hurrying, his arms laden with loaves of bread. “Here,” he said, and thrust them into Hanneke’s hands.

“What are you giving her?” his mother cried. “The entire store?”

“She’s lost her job also,” said Michael. “She has nowhere else to go, Mother; what do you want of me?”

His mother sighed. Flour lay in the creases of her face, in the wiry tendrils of hair that crept from under her tight white cap. Hanneke said, “Thank you,” in a voice that shook. The bread in one crooked arm, she stretched out her hand to Michael’s mother. “Thank you, Mistress.” Some yards separated them; her fingers reached out to midair. The baker lifted her hand, as if she might take Hanneke’s, and her head bobbed and some mumbled words dropped from her lips. Her hand fell to her side again, without making contact with Hanneke’s, and the girl went out past Michael, out to the street.

Michael shut the door, his eyes on his mother; she surprised him sometimes, which moved him very much—that after so many years his mother was still mysterious to him. She was staring at the door, as if she still saw Hanneke before her; her face had settled into an unreadable mask, not even human, as if cut from stone or made of stones one on the other.

Catching Michael’s eyes on her, she turned toward him. “They are doomed,” she said. “Their time is very short.” Erect as a soldier, she marched back into the kitchen of the bakery, leaving Michael there alone.

“The latest letter from the Prince of Orange!” Clement’s boy raised his broadside over his head and waved it. “Read the latest letter from the Prince of Orange!”

He was walking down the edge of the meadow by the river, opposite the new castle that Alva had caused to be built here, and before him was a sea of people. It was like the fair; everyone was dressed in their finest clothes and carried baskets of their dinner, and jugs of beer, and some were playing music on flutes and lutes, and some were dancing. As if Alva had never come here; as if hundreds of Antwerpers had not danced Alva’s jig in the sky. The boy’s chest swelled with pride and delight at the resurgence of his city.

“Read the latest letter from the Prince of Orange!”

A tall man in a wide-brimmed hat stopped to buy one of the broadsides from him, but others laughed: “That fool!” Orange had disgraced himself. The word was all over Brabant that Orange had sneaked away from his army in France in the dead of the night because he could not pay the soldiers.

Still, it was a good letter, saying things about the people’s privileges and the King’s responsibility to the law. Clement’s boy waved it overhead and called it out, and here and there someone gave him a bit of money and took away the glossy sheet of paper.

The sun was climbing higher into the sky, and already the air buzzed with heat. An early summer, everyone said. The boy walked through the growing crowd, past the families that spread their tablecloths on the grass and laid their babies down on folded blankets and sat to eat and sing, and he wondered why it was that some summers were hot and others were cold, just as he wondered why the wind blew from the north in the winter and from the west in the summer, and why the days were shorter in winter than in summer. The whole world seemed to him an overwhelming question; he could not draw breath for thinking of a new one.

“Read the latest letter from the Prince of Orange!”

There was Hanneke van Cleef. Gripping his bundle of broadsides, he hurried toward her, calling her name. She turned, hearing him, a tall figure, her face marked with strain.

“Hello, Philip.” She put out her hand to him.

“Here.” He gave her a broadside. Worried, he peered into her face; she seemed shockingly older. “What’s wrong? Is it your mother again?”

“She’s gone,” Hanneke said, in a queer flat voice.

She sat down suddenly on the ground, looking around her, her arms draped over her knees. With one hand she poked the loose threads of her hair back under her headcloth. Her dress was of fine material, worn so threadbare that holes were opening up in the skirt. Clement’s boy held his breath a moment out of sympathy. He wished he were older, to comfort her like a man.

She said, “I’ve never found her. Not since that night. It’s been days and days—I don’t think I will ever find her.”

“She’ll come back.”

“No.” Hanneke shook her head. “She’s gone and I’ll never know what happened to her.” Her voice was colorless as water.

“I’ll help you look for her. I’ll—”

“There’s Michael,” she said, more happily.

He looked where she was looking. A tall young man with a basket slung around his neck was walking down across the muddy grass toward them. In the basket were sweet buns: a baker, a peddler. Hanneke was getting up. She was going to him. With a pang like a tooth in his heart, Clement’s boy realized that this was her lover.

“Come on,” she said, looking down at him. “Come have a cake—they’re very good.”

He shook his head, too jealous to speak, his eyes burning.

“Come along.” Stooping, she reached for his hand, and he jerked it away and hid it under his knee. She stared at him, her brow puckering; an instant later, the peddler called her, and she went toward him, without a backward look. Clement’s boy clenched his fists together. He had never felt like this before. Slowly as an old man, he got to his feet, collected his broadsides, and went off through the crowd.

“The latest letter from the Prince of Orange!” His eyes hurt. He wanted to kill her and the peddler both. “Read the latest letter from the Prince of Orange!”

“When will the Estates meet?” Hanneke asked, and licked the sugary taste from her lips.

Michael was handing out buns and taking in money as fast as his hands would move. The crowd around him jostled and laughed and fought for space in the line. “At noon,” he said. “By that time, there ought to be thousands of people here.”

“All of Antwerp!” A jovial man with a fringe of red-yellow beard nodded to them, taking buns and pouring coins into Michael’s palm. “We’ll show them they cannot tamper with our trade.”

“Look.” She pointed across the crowd, toward a wagon where a man was standing, his arms raised over his head. “A preacher. There’s going to be a sermon.”

“The crowd’s made them brave,” Michael said.

He had sold the last bun. Shrugging off the straps of the basket, he slung it on one arm, and they walked down the field toward the river.

“A sermon,” Hanneke said. “It’s like the old days.” She could not help but smile; it seemed everything was changing and soon would be as it had been.

Although when she thought of that she shrank from thinking how it really had been.

“Come and let’s go dancing,” Michael said.

“I’m not supposed to dance.”

He snorted at her. “I think you’d be much happier if you were a Catholic.”

“That’s no reason to be one thing or another. To be happier.”

“Why can’t you dance?”

A troop of boys ran by them, a dog gamboling along beside, yipping and patting at the children with its forepaws. Hanneke watched them run off. “It’s frivolous.” She looked for Clement’s boy, wondering if he were still bound to his task of distributing weighty messages. The odd look he had given her when she last saw him remained in her mind.

“At least we can listen to music.” Michael took her hand.

“This is very serious business.” She did not take her hand away. It was pleasant to touch him, to have him with her, to have him love her. She smiled at him, and their eyes met; something warm passed between them. She felt her feelings gather and focus, and looked away before he could see. He squeezed her hand. They walked down toward the castle, where the Estates of Brabant would meet to vote on the new taxes.

Luis Del Rio, governor of Antwerp, stood on the upper balcony of the castle and looked out over the great crowd before his gates and frowned. He said, “They would not lift a hand when we were carrying off their friends and neighbors. Only threaten their purses and they rise in righteous indignation like pigs deprived of their slops.”

His aides murmured behind him. He leaned against the side of the doorway, watching the dancers. In spite of himself he was drawn to these people, to their easy gaiety, to their high spirits. Animals, they were, indiscriminately reveling in the joys of this world. Spiritual matters seemed beyond them. Yet like children they were hard to hate.

It would be easier for him if he could hate them. He turned his back on them and went into the warm room inside the door.

His aides stood around waiting for orders. The two men from the Estates whom he used to present his demands were standing rigidly before the fire, their hands behind them, and their faces very long. When del Rio came in, they fidgeted; they would not meet his eyes. He gestured to a page to shut the door.

“Now,” he said. “The real task begins.”

“Excellency—” The first deputy took a step forward, his hands appearing in front of him, to make pale gestures against his dark clothes. “Perhaps you ought to postpone the issue of the taxes. Especially the tenth penny. The people are much incensed …”

Del Rio went to his desk, near the middle of the room. “The matter is not in my hands. The Duke of Alva requires that we raise these taxes to pay the army.”

The second deputy cleared his throat. “Excellency, there is—we cannot …” He glanced at his fellow. “I don’t really see how we can expect any success in this matter now.”

On the desk was the charter for the taxes, written in red and black ink, handsomely decorated with ribbons and seals, a very elegant document. Del Rio picked it up but did not read it; he knew what it said.

He asked, “What time would be better? Orange’s army has been chased out of the Provinces into France. Alva has saved you again from destruction. How better to show the gratitude of Antwerp, of all Brabant, than by voting him this present of money?”

Two or three of his aides said, quietly, “Long live the Duke of Alva.” The two deputies did not echo it.

“Excellency,” said the first deputy, his hands performing delicate arabesques before him, “with such a mob before the gates, it were hard enough to entice the Estates to vote for something they wanted, but to vote for something that repels them—”

“Repels them? Are they so ungrateful that they will not give even this modest acknowledgment of the Duke of Alva’s great work?” Del Rio tapped the document. “If not for Alva, Orange would have invaded the Provinces! Tell them that. You would have seen again the horrors of sixty-six—churches sacked and looted, holy relics smashed, priests murdered.” He thrust the document at them. “Do you think safety comes cheap?”

The deputies swallowed simultaneously, their throats working; they looked at him dumbly, like chickens waiting to be axed. He snorted, angry at them. If they would not take his arguments, there was small hope the Estates as a whole would listen. He kicked the desk.

“Then hear this, if you will not hear good sense. Alva is free now. He’s been gone, off at the borders, keeping Orange from burning down your homes around your heads, but Orange is gone now, and Alva will come back.” He walked up before the two deputies and put his face into their faces. “Do you understand?”

“Your Excellency—”

“If we do not have these taxes by your good will and free, my men, we shall have them by force, as what is due us. Do you understand?”

The deputies’ eyes shone. Their lips pressed together in thin lines like old unhealed wounds.

“Are you threatening us, your Excellency?”

Del Rio let out a roar of angry laughter. He struck the man before him on the chest. “Yes! That’s what I am doing.” Wheeling, he walked away across the room. “God, what does it require to move these people—not sense, not right, not God or king—”

His aides murmured, agreeing with him, as they always agreed with him. The two deputies bowed and took the document and backed toward the door.

“As your Excellency requests.”

“I do not request,” del Rio said. “I require.” His hands on his hips, he strolled across the room again toward the door onto the balcony. Through the frosty glass he could see down onto the field, where now men on horseback were riding toward the castle. The deputies to the Estates were arriving. As they rode on, the people swept up around them, surrounded them, blocked their path, and shouted and waved papers at them. In their midst the deputies raised their hands, yielding.

Del Rio put out his hand to the cord of the drapery. They were stubborn as stone these people, even the Catholics. With a pull on the cord, he drew the brocaded drapery shut across the glass doors.

“The deputies!”

The roar that went up from the people around her seemed to lift Hanneke a little off her feet. She wheeled with them, toward the castle; like them all, when she saw the men in the doorway, she shouted. On her left Michael gripped her arm. They rushed forward, with the others, toward the castle.

“What’s the vote?” The outcry began at the head of the crowd and spread backward through the whole mass of people, every voice joining the yell. “What’s the vote?”

In the doorway the smiling man with the beard raised his hand for quiet. Hanneke held her breath. She clutched Michael’s hand tight and got an answering squeeze from him; suddenly before her, she saw Clement’s boy and leaned forward to catch him by the shoulder and pull him back beside her, her arm around him.

“The vote—” cried the man in the doorway. “The vote is no!”

The roar that greeted this went up like thunder. Hanneke flung her arms around Michael and hugged him, and whirling she caught Clement’s boy and lifted him up off the ground.

“We’ve won! We won—we won—”

The boy’s arms went around her neck and he hugged her with a strength that surprised her. An instant later he was scrambling out of her grip and running off through the crowd.

“We won!” She seized Michael’s hands and kicked her feet in a celebratory dance.

“I thought dancing was evil,” Michael said. “Who was that? That little boy.”

All across the field, the gathered people of Brabant were cheering, drinking, dancing; a gun went off somewhere, and she even heard a cheer of “Vive les gueux!” Hanneke drew her hand from Michael’s, wanting some distance back between them.

“The printer’s son. Clement the printer.”

“That Calvinist you told me of.”

She nodded. “I’m going home, Michael, if you don’t mind.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

She started away along the edge of the crowd. The preachers were getting up on the wagon again, off by the river, and most of the people were pushing off in that direction to hear the sermons.

“He offered me work, once,” she said, thinking of Clement. “Maybe I ought to go there and help him.”

“That will get you in trouble.”

“I’m in trouble now, Michael. I have no money and no work and no family.”

“I’ll give you bread.” He seized her hand. “I’ll marry you.”

“Michael.”

“Then you will have a family.”

“Michael, your mother will never consent.”

“Will you marry me?”

She looked at him, her head tipped back, and studied the fine honest architecture of his face. Mies would never have considered it—a baker’s son, a Catholic, no fit husband for the daughter of Mies van Cleef! When she thought of Mies her mood turned heavy. She turned away.

“I can’t marry you, Michael. Or anybody. Not now.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I just can’t, that’s all.” No way to explain to him how she felt, stripped of everything, home and family, and even her first feeble efforts at caring for herself: as if she herself were nothing, and if she married him what would she become but a shadow of him? And she did not love him. If she had loved him, then she would have been strong enough to marry him, but she did not.

She said, instead, “Clement’s son is so clever—you should meet him.”

“A little boy?”

“He’s very clever, and reads all the time, and has the most interesting ideas.”

“He’s nine or ten years old. I’m a grown man. Why are you turning me away like this?”

They were walking along the canal now, on the path that led over the edge of the bank. Ahead a house leaned out over the water, reflected in the smooth surface, and a swan fed in the swampy weeds below the wharf. Hanneke kicked a stone into the water.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait until I …”

When she made no more of it, he said, “Until what?”

“I don’t know. But I will, when it’s happened.”

“I’m a grown man, Hanneke.”

In a flash of understanding, she saw that he had to insist on that because he did not entirely believe it—that he wanted her to marry him because grown men married. She looked up at him, feeling something of a new kinship with him, each struggling with the hollows in their lives.

She said, “Thank you, Michael.”

“For what?” he said roughly.

She laughed at him, took his hand a moment, and stood up on her toes to let him kiss her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I hope.” Before he could answer, she ran off down the bank of the canal, toward the opening to the Kelmans’ street.

“There’s Antwerp,” said the man beside Carlos. “I wish it were Burgos. And me with silver in my purse.”

Carlos muttered an indefinite sound in his throat. Ahead the flat foreign plain gave way to a cluster of spires and towers and red-tiled roofs. The sky was overcast and a raw wind blew, but his heart lightened as if the sun burned bright.

“I’ll lay down this stick off my shoulders,” said the man marching with him, “but I wish I were doing it in Burgos.”

“I’ll do it gladly in Antwerp,” said Carlos.

The sergeant behind them shouted, “Keep the step! March! You—Miguel, Carlos—if you can’t talk and march at the same time …”

They marched in tight ranks, all feet in unison, with a boom like a giant striding over the flat land. Heavy on their shoulders the pikes rode all at the same angle. They had not been paid in months, but their pride kept them soldiers.

Up ahead, some long-throated fellow began to sing, and they all sang.

“Ho! Bring the fairest ladies—

Here comes the tenth!

Ho! Bring—the deepest kegs—

Here comes the tenth!”

They had not fought at all this campaign, only marched. Carlos was sick of marching. His boots needed mending and the broken sole had rubbed a blister into the ball of his foot. He raised his eyes to the clutter of red roofs ahead of them, the end of the long road, the color bright against the slate-colored clouds, and his heart warmed again with glad recognition.

“Ho! Bring—the little virgins—”

“I’ll never see Burgos again,” the man beside him said, in a miserable voice.

Carlos spat. “Stop juicing over it. If you took a mind to it you’d make Burgos of any village.”

“My girl’s in Burgos.”

“My girl’s in Antwerp.”

He had thought of her every night before he went to sleep, her shy diffidence like a deer’s; perhaps by now she loved him. Her white thighs like columns against his. He had slept with her in his heart every night since he left Antwerp.

“You’ve got a woman there? Is she local?”

He nodded, swelling with modest pride at the note of envy in his comrade’s tone.

“Is there room enough for two?”

In midstep he wheeled around, twisting from the hips up, and swung the butt end of the pike in a short half circle that ended between his marching partner’s legs. Miguel shouted, stumbled, dropped his weapon with a clang, and fell. Carlos gripped the ten-foot pole of his pike with both hands; with the heavy double-edged head off-balance the pike strained like a living thing in his fists. He tamed it, grunting at the effort, brought it up again obedient on his shoulder, like a woman. Behind him the sergeant was beating and kicking and cursing the luckless Miguel to his feet. Carlos, smiling, smoothed his fingers over the satiny ashwood pole and marched along to Antwerp.

All the way across the city, Hanneke thought of her mother, wondering where she was—if she were alive, if lost and hungry and cold somewhere (although it had been two weeks now since she left, and if she were alive, somehow she must have fed herself). If Hanneke would ever know what had happened to her. That tormented her above even the thought of her mother dying, like turning the page of a book halfway through a sentence and finding nothing but blank paper.

She went across Antwerp to Clement’s shop and stood at the door, remembering that she had been short with him when he offered her work before and that now the need for her might be over. She lifted her hand to knock but the door opened before she could touch it; there stood the little boy Philip.

He smiled wide as a player’s mask. “Hello, Hanneke. Papa—” Turning, he called into the shop, “Papa, it’s Hanneke.”

Heavy footsteps sounded in the dark depths of the shop. She said, “May I come in?”

“Of course.” The boy stepped aside to let her by.

Now her heart was beating faster. She had to find work, or she would starve; she had to have this work of Clement. He stood there, in front of the foremost press, wiping his big hands on a filthy cloth, his face all in shadow. Forbidding, like a minotaur. She had never found him so before, but now he had something she wanted.

She said, “May I talk to you, sir?”

“Hanneke. Please sit down.” He came toward her, with his big stained hands gesturing toward the fire and the chairs there, and as the light from the front window swept up over his face he became, again, a friend. “What can I do for you, Hanneke?”

First they sat down, and the boy ran for bread and beer and a piece of cheese and even some old apples, dry but still good-tasting, and a knife to cut them with.

“The baker has cherries,” she said, eating. “Can you imagine? Where they come from I cannot know, so early in the year.”

“In Antwerp anything can be bought,” said Clement.

“These are bright red ones, too,” she said. The harmless words made a bridge between them; dreading to ask what she had come here to ask, she needed this contact, this friendliness. He gave her a sliver of the cheese to go with her apple.

“Can I help you, Hanneke?”

“I need—” She raised her eyes to him. “I need work. I must have some way to live.”

“Hanneke.”

“I know the need is past—now that we’ve beaten Alva—but I will do anything. Sweep, and scrub—”

“Beaten Alva,” he said, in a voice with a peculiar ring. He sat back on the stool, his hand on his hip. “Alva is coming here.”

She lifted her head, startled. Into her mind sprang Carlos’ image.

“We have not beaten Alva, girl, not by a long haul. There’s a long way to go before we’ve beaten Alva.”

“But—I thought …” She put the cheese down on the plate, thinking miserably of Carlos.

“We have only declared the war open, as it were,” Clement said. “Now he will try to have by force what he could not get by asking, and we must show him that we will not yield to force.”

She was staring at him; the low firelight painted his cheek above the beard. His voice was quiet and well modulated, like a schoolmaster’s. She remembered once before when words he had spoken had opened her mind up to this, to see the problem huge, her experience of it only one tiny part of something spanning thousands of lives. She sucked in her breath. In her mind she saw a vast landscape, peopled with tiny figures, each in torment, each fighting or running or praying or thinking: the Low Countries. Into that crowd her mother had vanished, and her brother. In it she must find her part.

“Then you do need me,” she said to Clement.

His beard parted in a smile. “I need your help, Hanneke.”

“Then I will help you.”

“But if I were you, girl, I would go. And I would go now, before Alva comes, because when he comes—”

He reached out his arm to the side and took his son in against him, to lean against him.

“Because when he comes there will be such an evil on this city we may none of us escape.”

“Are you staying? And Philip?”

“Yes,” Clement said. “We’ll put our lives in God’s hands.”

“Then I will stay too, and help you,” she said.

“Very well. Come and I’ll show you around the shop.”

She stood up, to follow him; her gaze fell on the little sliver of cheese on the plate. Quickly she picked it up and ate it, going after him.

She worked all day sorting type, learning to read the letters backward, and getting her hands dirty, in spite of her surreptitious efforts to wipe off the worst of the black greasy ink that worked its way into the lines of her palms. She did not want Clement to think she was too fastidious for this work. At the end of the day, she swept up the shop for him—a task he usually left undone—and made a great heap of the dust and scraps of paper and rubble in the street outside the door. At last, tired but feeling better than she had in some while, she went back toward the Kelmans’ house.

It was too far, she thought, as she walked. She would have to find a place closer to the shop. Cheaper, too. Or perhaps Clement would let her sleep in the shop; there was room, by the fire, and she could pay him a little for her meals. Do extra work for meals.

Thinking up a line of reasoning to convince him of this, she passed the old elm tree at the corner of the Swan Street and walked toward Vrouw Kelman’s house, and from behind her Carlos pounced on her.

She screamed. He had her arms, he was dragging her off across the street, into the shelter of the tree, to do what he had done there once before. For some reason her mother leapt into her mind; for her mother’s sake she could not let this happen again, and she struck at him with her fists, kicked at him, and tried to bite him. Her mother—

“Hanneke,” he said to her, in a voice choked with exertion. “Hanneke—” Crooning. She writhed from side to side in his grasp. His clothes pressed against her face. She was losing; he was bearing her down under him on a pile of dead leaves. She lost her footing and fell. No—she tore one arm free and groped wildly around her on the ground for some weapon, while he pulled her skirts up, his breath in her face, while his hands stroked her legs. He murmured to her in his language. His hand was against her body between her legs, poking his fingers in there. She gathered herself to scream, and her searching hand found the cold hilt of the dagger in his belt.

She drew the knife up over his back and plunged it down, and he stiffened with a jerk, his head snapping up. A groan escaped him. She struck again, pushing him back, and rolled out from under him. Struck again. Again. In the dark he thrashed there on the leaves, gasping, at her feet. He said her name again, loving and hopeless, and shuddered and lay still.

Hanneke backed away from him; she opened her hand and let the dagger fall. Her dress was covered with blood. He was dead, and she had killed him.

She went down on her knees beside him, her hands out to him, but she could not bring herself to touch him. She had killed him. Whatever he had done to her shrank to nothing in the shadow of what she had done to him. She had sent him on to God, Who would deal with him as He had decided, long before Carlos was ever born—his life, his dream of himself swallowed up in the great plan. All gone. Whatever he had been was gone.

Slowly she got up. What she had just done changed everything. She could not go back to Vrouw Kelman’s. When the watch found Carlos’ body they would go to the Kelmans’ first, and Hanneke was covered with blood. Nor could she go to Clement—lead them to Clement; and as she stood up, shaky on her feet, and went out to the street, she realized she could not go to Michael either. She walked a few steps in one direction, turned, and went the other way. It did not matter now where she went. Her legs trembled so that she could barely stand. Slowly she made her way off into the city.

When the dawn came she was sleeping in the doorway of a shop near the gate. The sound of marching feet jarred her from her dreams, and she raised her head, her eyes sticky with unshed tears and blood splashes and lack of sleep, and watched the first few ranks of soldiers tramp down the broad street past her.

The sun was rising. The horizontal light struck their round helmets and the edges of their pikes in ripples, like sunlight on the water. The pikes feathered the air. They marched in step, their arms swinging in unison, so that they seemed not to be individual men but one great beast that crawled along the street on thousands of legs, piercing the air with thousands of spines.

Now a banner passed her, a square of cloth that fluttered in the wind with a heavy thumping crack, on it the quartered arms of Spain—Leon and Castile and Aragon and Portugal, the lions, the castles of fairy tales.

She got to her feet. More ranks of soldiers swung past her; they sang, and some shouted at her, and a few made lewd gestures with their fingers. She wondered if they saw she was covered with blood. What they would do if they knew it was Spanish blood.

Another rank of flags was approaching, three huge banners held up by men on foot, while behind them a man on a black horse banged away at two drums slung across the withers of his mount. In his wake came a single rider.

She took two steps closer. The tall figure held her fascinated gaze, his hair shining silver under his flat black hat. He sat straighter than the pikestaffs on his horse. No decoration relieved the black sobriety of his coat. He might have been a Calvinist, so plainly did he dress. His spurs chimed with each step of his horse.

Alva, she thought. That is the Duke of Alva.

She sank back into the doorway, her eyes following him as he rode off down the street. Evil has come here, she thought, remembering what Clement said, and knew it was true.

The trumpets blared again, ahead of him, behind him; their brass voices echoed off the buildings on either side. Alva rode with one hand on his hip, the reins slack in the other, his eyes aimed straight ahead, through the forest of pikes.

No one had come to greet him. No cheering throngs crowded the street of Antwerp, no schoolchildren performed pageants of welcome, no official made speeches of formal gladness at his coming. Only the cold faces of the buildings watched the entry of the Spanish army.

If his heart raged at the insult, his face would not show it. Trained from babyhood in the service of the King of Spain, he knew better than to show what he felt. He would avenge the insults soon enough; the gilt-trimmed buildings with their ornate stepped roofs and elegant glass windows might stand proud against him now, but he would shame them low as hovels soon enough.

A horseman was trotting up the side of the street toward him: one of his officers. Beyond, through the spreading bare branches of the trees, the high towers showed of the new castle where the Estates met. He touched his lips with his tongue. The excitement in his guts tightened and coiled like a spring. The young officer wheeled his horse around to ride beside Alva’s and saluted.

“His Excellency Luis del Rio is waiting at the castle to greet you, my lord.”

Alva’s head bobbed once. “Very good. You may tell him we will meet him at once.”

The young man saluted and reined his horse around and galloped away. Alva’s horse tossed its head, wanting to follow, but the duke kept to his slow walk. Only now he let himself smile.

His men filled up the broad field before the castle, rank on orderly rank, and opened a lane between them to the main gate. Alva rode down into the castle, through the unfinished wall, into the newly paved courtyard.

Luis del Rio was waiting there, in ceremonial dress, with his aides behind him. When Alva dismounted, he stepped forward, his smile stiff.

“Welcome to Antwerp, your Excellency.”

“You may make me welcome,” Alva said, pulling off his gloves, “in a more substantial way. Have you done my orders?”

“Yes, your Excellency. Even now—”

Del Rio gestured toward the gate. Alva turned. Through the gate he looked back up the field, up the broad straight lane between his troops.

Down that lane little groups of his men were coming, and in their midst each group led a prisoner, a halter around his neck. Alva smiled.

“I thirst,” he said, and instantly a young man leapt forward with a cup of cold wine.

As he drank, the first of his prisoners marched into the courtyard. Seeing del Rio, the man called out, trying to break from his captors’ arms. “I am a deputy of the Estates! You can’t do this to me …”

Seeing Alva, he lost his voice. His eyes blinked rapidly. Rapidly he was hustled off into the castle.

One after another, by twos, by threes, the other deputies were brought to the castle. Alva stood watching them enter. Every man who cried out, every indignant word, fell like balm upon his soul. Patient as a mother, he waited for the last laggard vote to appear, to complete his gathering of the Estates.

They could not bring them all; some had escaped, hearing of his coming, and some lived outside Antwerp. But they brought enough, and in the end, with two pikemen standing beside each deputy, they signed the proclamation Alva had brought with him, announcing the royal tax on the tenth penny of every sale in Antwerp.

“She is not here,” Vrouw Kelman said, when Michael knocked on her door. “Carlos is gone, too.” She clutched her dressing gown tight over her breast; her face was older than her years with strain. “Something’s wrong. Did you hear the soldiers pass this morning? Something is awfully wrong.”

Michael said, “She’s not here? When did she leave?” But already the housewife was shutting the door. He turned and went down the walk to the gate.

He started away toward Clement’s shop. Maybe she had stayed there the night. He remembered how she said he might give her work there.

When he came out onto the broad street before the Bourse, there were soldiers everywhere, banging on the doors of the shops and marching along the street. He swerved to avoid them. They were after the Calvinists again. Two of them were dragging a bearded man out of a doorway. He turned quickly to keep from seeing that.

In Clement’s shop he found the printer hunched over his big press, listlessly setting the bits of lead into the frame.

“Have you seen Hanneke?” Michael asked.

Clement shook his head. “They took my boy,” he said.

He lifted his face, smudged with black ink. Through the stains, tears like drops of lead coursed in an unceasing stream.

“Who took him? Why?”

“The soldiers. He was out carrying around broadsides of the Prince of Orange’s letter—they took him to the castle.”

Michael’s throat was dry. He swallowed down his doubts and panic and carefully unkinked his knotted fists. He said, “They’ll let him go. He’s only ten.”

Clement covered his face with his long blackened hands. In Michael the urge grew to reach out and comfort this wretched man whose heresies had doomed his only child. But he had to find Hanneke, and he went away.

He wandered from quarter to quarter of the city, never finding her. Once a double file of soldiers marched past him, and he stood in a doorway and watched them go by, hating them with an intensity that frightened him. Men like him, Catholics like him, subjects of the same king. What had he to fear from them? Yet he knew they were his enemies now.

In the German quarter, where the breweries were, he overheard people arguing about the tenth penny, whether foreigners had to pay it, whether Alva had the right to levy it on them. On the door of the greatest brewery was a broadside of Orange’s letter against the tax. Michael stared at it, thinking of the little boy who had brought it here. A big tow-headed German went up to the door and ripped the broadside down. Balling it up in his fist, he flung it into the gutter. Michael walked quickly away.

He crossed the Grand Place again, no longer empty. All across the wide cobbled square, men were unloading lumber from wagons, and hammers were beating nails into wood. The ringing of the hammers echoed off the high fronts of the buildings, with their extravagant gilt decoration, their multitudes of windows that glared back the sunlight. Michael walked through the midst of the rising structures in the Place; he refused to think about them, standing like a new city all around him. As he reached the far side of the square, the clamoring rhythms of the hammers approached each other, met for a few strokes of accidental unity, and diverged again on their separate courses. Michael plunged down a side street, looking for Hanneke.

At noon Michael still had not come back. His mother swore under her breath, using a favorite oath of her husband’s, and pulled shut the shop door. There were three little and two big loaves left on the racks and she piled them on a tray and took them into the back, to have for dinner when Michael finally did come home.

She emptied the till into a sack and put it under the counter. With a damp cloth she scrubbed the racks until they gleamed.

While she was sweeping the floor, her mind still occupied with grumbling at Michael, who spent all day now with that Calvinist girl, there came a knocking on the door.

She looked through the front window. A man in an odd green coat stood under the bakery sign. Only after she opened the door did she see the squad of soldiers in the street behind him.

“What do you want?” she said loudly, to cover the fluttery panic in her belly.

“The tenth penny of your receipts.” The man in the green coat pushed his way in past her, into her shop.

“Not from me,” she said, backing away from him, the broom between them. “I’ll not pay your Spanish tax.”

He went to the till. Behind him the six soldiers marched single file in through the door. The baker wound her fingers around the haft of her broom, the inside of her mouth pasty with fear, while the tax collector rummaged through the till and the drawers around it, looking for money. Abruptly she thought of Michael. What if he came back now? What if he got in a fight with these soldiers?

The tax collector wheeled on her. “Where is the money?”

“I have no money,” she said. “I sold nothing today.”

“I want the tenth of your receipts for the past week.” He loomed over her, his arms swinging at his sides. “And every week hereafter I shall expect the same amount, or better.”

“One tenth of nothing is nothing,” said the baker stoutly. “I’ve had the shop closed this week. I’ve sold nothing.” He was too near her; suddenly she found it hard to breathe. She started past him into the back of the store. “You’d better go. I have nothing for you.”

He caught her by the arm. Painfully tight, the grip brought her up stiffly onto her toes, tears in her eyes. “One more time,” he said. “Where is your money?”

“I have no money,” she said.

He dragged her toward the door. Her arm was numb to the shoulder, and a stabbing pain crossed her chest. “I’m a good Catholic,” she cried, and stumbled on the threshold. The soldiers surrounded her. The tax collector had a rope. She gasped. But surely they were only trying to frighten her. They would not really hurt her. “I’m a good Catholic,” she said again, and they put the rope around her neck.

She screamed. Michael, she thought. Michael—“I’m a good Catholic,” she said again, and they hauled her up to hang by the neck from the sign of her bakery shop.

Since Alva had first entered Antwerp, his soldiers had been busy rounding up a flock of victims. Two days after his entry into the city, when the gallows were ready, he had these people taken out into the Grand Place and hung. Hanneke watched in the crowd.

They brought Clement’s boy to the gallows and pulled him up by the neck, but he was too light to die that easily. He swung at the end of the rope, screaming, until the executioner jumped up and caught the boy’s legs and hung his whole weight from them, and so the boy died.

Hanneke went down by the river. She did not weep; there were no tears left in her. There was nothing left in her at all. She had nothing, neither father nor mother, neither home nor hearth. Alva had scoured away everything save her life from her.

When she reached the gate of the city, swarms of people were already flowing out through it. They carried bundles of clothing and food on their backs and their children in their arms. Their faces all seemed the same to her, blank and dull with the pitiable things they had seen. No one spoke. The little children cried and stretched out their arms toward Antwerp, but their parents walked on, their backs to their city and their past. Hanneke walked with them, going east, toward Germany.