23

“Heave!”

The men threw themselves against the rope; with a whir and a groan the block rolled the slack line through and took the weight of the big brass cannon. Jan leaned over the edge of the rampart to watch the gun climb slowly up through the air toward him. With one outstretched hand he motioned the men to pull.

They leaned into the rope, hoisting the cannon, nose first, up into the air, while the three sailors around it supported it in their arms like a great brass baby. Behind Jan there was an ominous popping of wood. He screwed his head around toward the mast they had rigged against the city wall to carry the block and tackle. The mast popped again.

“Avast! Let her down.” Frantically he milled his arms at the four men on the rope.

They let the rope slide. Singing through the rollers, it flew slack, and the cannon sank down toward the ground; but the mast was splitting, end to end, with a scream like a murdered man. Jan leapt down off the wall. The cannon fell in its net of ropes. The men around it took the weight on their arms and it bore them down to their knees, their mouths flying open at the shock. Someone watching wailed. Jan flung himself at the big gun, wrapped his arms around the barrel, braced his legs, and planted himself. The cold weight dropped into his embrace, crushing his shirt, driving him down. He gasped. Other men rushed in around him. With their help he lowered the great gun down to the street.

“Aaah.”

His breath exploded from him in relief. The other men clapped him on the shoulders.

“I thought I was dead,” said Marten. Naked to the waist, he held out his arms, where bands of bruises already purpled the flesh where the gun had fallen. “Until I saw you there.”

He flung one arm around Jan’s neck and hugged him. Jan nudged him away with his elbow.

“Enough of that. We need another sheer. Two masts, this time—lash them together.” He looked up at the rampart over his head, where the gun was to sit. It seemed an immense distance. He thrust off his doubts and pointed to various men of his crew.

“You and you, go fetch the masts. Get sound ones. Marten, bring me thirty fathoms of line—anchor cable, if you can find it.” He wiped the sweat from his face on his sleeve. A long rip opened the white linen from shoulder to elbow. He fingered the edge. “My wife won’t like the looks of that.”

“Your wife is glad enough it’s just your shirt.” Eleanor came up the street toward him, smiling, but pale as the shirt itself. A basket hung on her arm. “I brought you dinner. Have you time to eat?”

He took her up on the rampart to share the meal with her. They sat looking out over the fields outside The Brill. Cows grazed on the meadow grass below the wall. The land stretched flat as a table out to the dike; not a tree grew on it. Jan ate bread and the good yellow cheese of the district.

Two women in white starched coifs were coming along the top of the dike toward the city, baskets on their arms, probably from the onion fields on the far side. A dog gamboled along ahead of them, its head turned toward them. They were townspeople, some of the few who had come back to The Brill after the Beggars seized the town.

He wondered what the rest would do—if they would come back. He hoped not all. The house where he was living suited him very well, and he had no desire to give it up to its rightful owner.

“Who is that?” Eleanor pointed.

Jan shaded his eyes with his hand. Coming along the flat lowland was a troop of horsemen.

“Lumey,” he said. “Back from another raid.”

Eleanor leaned over the basket, looking for the knife, and cutting herself another slice of bread spread fresh butter over it. She wore a blue dress, the cloth smooth and plump over her breast. “Is he your leader?”

Jan moved his shoulders, having no answer he liked to that question. Now that the double file of horsemen was closer, he could see Lumey himself in the lead, his beard bright with ribbons. The gaudy coat he wore was the embroidered vestment of a Catholic priest. The line of prisoners he dragged in his train was doubtless made up of priests. Jan turned his head and spat over the wall.

“Good cannot come of his bloody deeds,” said Eleanor, her eyes lowered.

In his heart Jan agreed with her, but he would not say so; Lumey was their leader, by word of the Prince of Orange, and if they argued with that now, where would they stop arguing? Now they needed unity, of mind, of purpose, of leadership. Lumey gave orders well enough, when the need called for it. Jan stood up, brushing the crumbs from his thighs. As he always did, he turned to look north, where the dike curved around to shut out the sea.

The wind was fierce out of the north today, driving the waves hard against the rocks on the outside of the dike. White fingers of spume flew up over the earthen wall.

“Here come your men,” Eleanor said.

He went down to rig the sheer to the wall and raise the cannon up into place to defend The Brill.

“I have heard,” Lumey said tenderly, “that priests have no balls. What do you say to that?”

He sat in a chair before the first of his victims, a young man in a cassock, his eyes round and glistening with fear. He was tied by the arms and waist to an upright beam of the house. Jan squirmed to see this. The chair he had taken was too small for him. He cast a longing look at the door.

“Well, he’s not talking,” Lumey said, genially. “We’ll have to see for ourselves.”

He held a broad-bladed fish knife in one hand, and reaching it out he slipped it into the front of the priest’s sober dark gown and with a twist of his wrist slashed it open from the priest’s waist to the hem. The young man whimpered. Against the wall behind him, the other captives mumbled their prayers and strained against their bonds.

Jan said, “You’re mad, Lumey.”

Around the room, the admiral’s other guests agreed with that. Lumey only laughed. With the saw-toothed fish knife, he lifted up half the priest’s garment.

“By God! It was a lie all this time. He does have balls.”

The knife probed the priest’s genitals. Jan’s hand slipped down to his crotch. The small hairs crawled on his nape and the insides of his thighs. Sweat pebbled the face of the young priest; he was staring away, over Lumey’s head, into the darkness, his eyes glassy.

“Well,” Lumey said. “Priests should have no balls. I shall remedy this one’s defect right—now—”

The shriek from the young man’s lips struck through Jan like a shock of lightning. He leapt up out of his confining chair and made for the door.

“Woman-hearted, are you, sailor boy?” Lumey roared in exaltation, and held up the dead parts on the tip of his fish knife. Jan opened the door. The other priests lined the wall beside it; some overflowed with prayers, and one had fainted, and more than one were cursing like seamen. Jan gave them an instant’s sympathetic glance.

“Keep courage,” he said, and went out to the street.

Baron van Treslong was already out there, leaning up against the wall that separated the house from the common thoroughfare, twining his fingers together. Jan stood beside him a long moment before either of them spoke.

Van Treslong said, “God help me, I know they are Papists, but I would save them if I could.”

“We’ve got pistols,” Jan said. “Let’s go back in there and stop this—this—”

“You are still young,” van Treslong said, and taking Jan’s arm he steered him away down the street, away from Lumey’s house, where now as they left another shriek rang out. “Things are still very simple to you, Master van Cleef.”

“They are Dutch,” Jan said.

The dark houses on either side were deserted. Their footsteps rang hollow in the empty street. Van Treslong’s arm was linked with Jan’s, a heavy pressure like a chain. Suddenly he longed for the sea and its simple order.

“If we offend Lumey, he will leave,” said van Treslong. “Together with his ships and crews, and probably several other captains and their ships and crews. And then how will we hold The Brill? Besides, Orange made him admiral. Only Orange can remove him.”

They turned the corner. To the left now was the harbor, where their ships rocked at anchor, their masts gaunt against the starry sky. Jan kicked a stone across the wharf.

“Orange,” he said, scornful. “That nothing prince.”

“Hold,” van Treslong said. “Speak well of the Prince of Orange.”

“Why should I? What does he, but sit in safety at some friendly court and write us letters that send other men out to die? We took The Brill. We have seized our fortunes by God’s grace, not Orange’s.”

“Hold,” a harsh voice called behind them, and they wheeled around, separating. It was the watch, manned by local Calvinists, who walked up toward them under their lantern and peered into their faces.

“Good evening, Captain. Good evening, sir.” Tipped their hats, and went off down the street. Jan watched them go, bouyed up by their respect; he began to feel a little better about Lumey.

Van Treslong came back to his side. “You have never met the Prince.”

“No.”

“Then let me ask you this, if there were a man in all things so unlike Lumey as an angel to the Devil himself—who is gentle even to captive enemies, who thinks ever of the long view and the people’s good, who counts his own advantage last of all his necessaries, and who understands statecraft as a needlewoman does her handiwork—would you not want him to help us make our country free?”

He flung a quick glance at Jan, who shut his lips and would not speak; he saw he was being led along like a child.

“Think on it,” said the baron. “We must make our country free of the King who has always ruled us, free of Spanish law and Catholic order—make a whole new kingdom, as it were, the way a set of carpenters and masons builds a house from the ground up.”

They turned into the broad main street that ran past the town hall to the land gate. Jan shoved his hands under his belt. Van Treslong’s words fascinated him; he had given no thought to any of this before. It had never occurred to him that they would have to shape their country again. It had seemed to him that countries had shapes as people did, from their birth, that could not change.

“Can you do it?” the baron said. “I cannot. I do not know what to do—who should do what the King did, in the old way, or even what it was he did, really. How to order church and state so that both thrive, how to keep the peace without tyranny, how to hear the voices of all the sorts of people, how to make new laws and judge the old ones, how to speak to other countries and have them speak to us—I know nothing of this. Orange knows. He is no soldier. But he’ll make a king.”

“Hunh.” Jan walked on awhile, van Treslong at his elbow and his eyes lowered, thinking of all this—thinking, too, that van Treslong knew a deal more than he admitted. He shook himself.

“Why are we talking like this? There will be no new kingdom. When Alva gets here, we’ll all be dead.”

Van Treslong said, “That’s in God’s hands.”

“You brought us here. Taking The Brill was your idea. Did you plan it all simply that we should die?”

The baron said, “I planned nothing. I only asked of you, of all of us, that we—you put it best, van Cleef—that we be greater than pirates.” He smiled; they were in the main street, beside the canal, and the few houses where people still lived shed the light from the lanterns over their doors in trails across the water. Jan could see the baron’s face in the faint glow. “If we die, yet we cannot fail. Everyone now will know what we have chosen to die for. Others will make the same choice. In time, there will be enough. More than enough.”

Jan said, “A human sacrifice.”

“I hope not.”

“Damn it, I don’t want to die. I just got married.”

“It’s your choice.”

They walked on toward the gate, where voices were rising; Jan at first paid no heed to that, his head heavy with arguments and counterarguments. Reaching the open square before the gate, he caught the voices in his ear and stopped.

“We cannot let you in!” someone was calling, on the top of the wall. “Wait until morning.”

Faintly, another voice answered, unintelligible, from beyond the wall. Van Treslong stepped forward. “What’s this?”

On the top of the wall, the sentry wheeled around. “Captain—my lord—some woman’s come, she wants to join us. Shall I open the gate and let her in?”

“A woman,” Jan said, and grunted. “Another mouth, and a weak arm.”

Van Treslong called, “Open the gate for her; we are in no position to deny people, and it’s cold out there.”

The sentry went to the winch that worked the gate. Jan went back to thinking about the talk with van Treslong. Suddenly he longed for Eleanor’s company. She had no such unsteadiness of mind as he; when she had decided she was solid in her choice, and she had decided to stay here in The Brill. He sighed, tired of debates. The gate was creaking open. Through the widening gap came a single tall woman with a staff in one hand and a bundle over her shoulder.

“Welcome to The Brill,” said van Treslong.

“Welcome to the end of your life,” Jan said, harshly.

She let the bundle slip from her shoulder to the ground. “Thank you, sirs. I have traveled long to come here; it is very good to have arrived at last.”

Her voice was familiar. Jan took a step toward her. His heart leapt like a deer startled up from its resting place. “Hanneke?” In the darkness, all he could see was her shape. “Hanneke?”

She turned to him; she came into his arms. His sister. He brought her body against his like a piece missing from himself, and deep in the embrace they laughed.

“Why did you come here?” Jan asked. “You walked all across the whole country, to come here and die?”

“There are worse things than dying,” she said. “Mother died.”

They were walking up the street toward his new house; van Treslong had discreetly left them alone.

“Dead,” Jan said. “How?”

“It’s on my shoulders. I left her alone too much. You know how helpless she was, how she relied on Papa. She was worse, after we left the old house.” Her voice was mild, almost without feeling. Jan wondered at the change in her; she had always been so high of feeling before.

She said, “They have destroyed Antwerp. It’s a dead city. No one has anything to eat, and people are starving in the streets. All trade’s stopped. The people are so bitter and low of spirit—”

She stopped, staring away down the street, seeing something she alone could see. Her lips trembled.

“Why did you come here?” Jan said. “Of all Europe, why The Brill?”

“God brought me here,” she said. Her voice was soft, but as she spoke it quickened, vibrant. “Just as He brought you and all these other people, to do His work, to build His kingdom on earth.” Her lips curved in a smile that vanished almost before it appeared. “Where else is there in Europe to be?”

He reached out his arms and she came into his embrace; the warmth of her body shocked him, somehow, as if she burned by the power of her idea. He struggled to see what she saw—something ahead of them, something to gain, to fight for. He saw plainly that it was the past that had driven him here, the past and the losses he had suffered, but the past and the things he had lost could not sustain him. He needed what she had, something to fight for, some idea of the time to come. What van Treslong had: the New Kingdom.

Jan could not believe it. He was afraid to believe in it, afraid of failing. Of being wrong. But his sister was here, warm in his arms, his sister. He pressed his face to her wind-tumbled hair.

Hanneke lay sleeping in the second-best bed; Jan drew slowly back from her, reluctant to leave her. Eleanor felt the sting of jealousy. Until now, she had never known he had a sister.

She lifted the lamp, to light their way, and without speaking they went across the house to their bedchamber.

Here, she put the lamp on the corner of the table by the big hooded bed and sat on the bed’s edge to let her hair down. Jan came up behind her. She turned her back to him and he took the pins from her hair and undid the braids and spread her hair out over her shoulders. She sat with her hands between her knees, her eyes half-closed, luxuriating in the caress of his hands in her hair.

He said, “I am sorry I brought you here. To this.”

“Hush,” she said sharply. It annoyed her that he apologized for it—as if all were his doing, and she had not chosen. He was undressing her now, his hands moving slowly over her clothes, undoing laces and buttons, and slipping off one garment after another. She shut her eyes. He bared her shoulders and bent to press his lips to her skin. He licked her neck and she trembled, alive with desire.

In a few moments they would lie together in the bed, bringing one another to the fullness, the overflowing completion of their love. For the last time, perhaps. Knowing that, she burned for him, for the immediacy of his touch, for the responses of her body to his touch, alive.

He drew her clothes down around her waist; sitting behind her, he kissed the nape of her neck, and his hands glided under her arms and around to cup her breasts. She trembled. She tipped her head back against his shoulder; her hands slipped down behind her, over his thighs. Let the world end. Tonight they were the world, she and her husband. Standing, she dropped her clothes down to the floor and stepped free of them, facing him, her arms at her sides. He took off his clothes, impatient, his gaze never leaving her. She loved the way he moved, so quick and sure, light as an animal; she loved his body’s lean muscular elegance. Let it all end; this was prize enough, this all-demanding, fragile, mortal love. Ready for him, she stretched out her arms and gathered him to her.

In the morning the sunlight was yellow as butter; it fell on the tablecloth and gleamed on the crockery and the spoons. Hanneke sank down on the chair beside the window and lifted her eyes to this stranger who was serving her, her brother’s all-unlooked-for wife.

“Where is Jan now?” She spoke French, as her brother did, to Eleanor.

“Down by the wall, mounting his cannon there,” the Englishwoman said. She would not meet Hanneke’s gaze; her eyes followed her hands, cutting bread, putting butter and jam beside it, lifting broiled fish onto the plate. “Did you sleep well?”

“Very well, thank you. I have not slept in a bed in many weeks.”

“This is a most comfortable house.”

“Yes, it is.”

Silence fell. Eleanor lingered a moment longer, her hands moving in small purposeless gestures, while Hanneke ate the first bites of her breakfast. She could not look up from the bread. What did one say to a woman suddenly discovered to be one’s sister? She said nothing. Eventually Eleanor went off into the next room, where soon the noise of a great bustle of work began.

He was not the same Jan, either; he seemed so much older. Hanneke picked a herring bone from her tongue with the tips of her fingers. She should have stayed in Antwerp, a place she knew.

But the sunlight was so warm, this table so clean, and the food so good—she did know this. She knew it from earlier, much earlier, from her childhood, this order of meals and houses, of calm womanly work. Except it was another woman’s work; not her mother’s, but this strange woman’s work.

Eleanor came back and lifted away the dishes as Hanneke was done with them.

“No,” Hanneke said. “Let me do that; I shall help you.”

“Oh, no, no, no.” Eleanor whisked the dirty dishes out of her reach and into the kitchen.

Hanneke closed her fist on the linen tablecloth. She felt unwanted here, unneeded. Quickly she got up and went off through the house to the door.

Before she could leave, Eleanor was there, in her shawl, a basket on her arm, looking elsewhere. When she spoke to Hanneke, her gaze swept her, their eyes meeting for the instant necessary for communication.

“Are you going out?”

“I thought,” Hanneke said stiffly, “I would go find my brother.”

“I am going there. Let me walk with you.”

They went out to the street together, their eyes directed forward, and walked along with some feet of space between them, to avoid touching at any cost. This street ran over a canal; they had to stop at the bridge, to let a cart pass over, and while they waited they stood side by side, not touching, not looking at each other, certainly not talking.

Hanneke thought: What does she think of me? She must hate me. She is jealous of me, because Jan loves me. And immediately, she thought, He loves me more than her, and was pleased.

Before a house on the far side of the bridge was a big wagon drawn by two horses, from which a man and a boy were unloading furniture into the house. A woman appeared in an upstairs window, throwing open the shutters. Eleanor saw this, pressed her lips tight together, and walked on more quickly. Hanneke wanted to ask her what it meant; but now she was reluctant to cross the margin of silence between them and she kept still.

They went on by a church, with a lofty spire; the doors were blocked with a heap of pews and an altar rail.

Now Hanneke was full of curiosity. She burned to ask questions of Eleanor, but her pride refused her. She peered down alleyways and over fences and watched every person she saw as long as she could, wondering what they were about. Were all these people Calvinists? The church that was shut up was obviously Catholic, which seemed to imply that there were no Catholics left here.

Beside her, Eleanor walked with her face closed in behind a prim frown, her basket swaying on her arm. What did Jan love in this ice maiden? Hanneke faced forward again.

When she did, she saw something in the street ahead that made her gasp, and stop in her tracks, and Eleanor stopped beside her.

“In Heaven’s name,” Hanneke said. “What is this?”

From the eave of a tall house on their left, half a dozen naked bodies hung. A little group of children in the street before them were staring up at the corpses and throwing rocks and chunks of dirt at them.

“What does this mean?” Hanneke cried.

Eleanor turned toward her, her eyes full on her, the first time she had looked Hanneke in the face. “Those are the men that Lumey took and killed. Lumey, the admiral of the Netherlands.” Her voice trembled with indignation. “He is a beast, and they must do without him. It is the greatest test of us, of our cause.”

Hanneke had not expected to hear her speak of a cause. She turned her eyes from Eleanor to the hanging men. “Who are they?”

“Priests. Catholic priests. Lumey has a special hatred of them. He does ill to every one he finds, and he goes about seeking them whenever he can.”

“We shall not make the kingdom with deeds such as this,” Hanneke said.

Eleanor gave her a piercing look. “No. That is my concern exactly.” She reached out a long thin hand to Hanneke.

Jan’s sister took it and was surprised by the hard rough palm, the feel of bones sharp under the skin. She said, “We are women. We see some things more clearly than the men do.”

“Tell the men that,” Eleanor said, acidly.

The two women went on together, side by side, down to the harbor, where several men sat in the stocks. Eleanor had brought them bread and beer, and water to wash their faces with. Their heads and hands pinioned in the stocks, they could not feed themselves, and the two women fed them. Eleanor told Hanneke what each man had done to earn his punishment. Hanneke wiped the dribbled beer from their chins with her sleeve.

The harbor was quiet. A few ships rocked at anchor; a little crowd of children loitered in the shade of the nets drying by the wharves, waiting for the women to finish with the prisoners and leave them helpless again to the children’s tormentings. Hanneke walked along the stone seawall, looking out toward the horizon.

“That is our ship,” said Eleanor. “The Wayward Girl.”

“What a name,” Hanneke said, and laughed. “She’s very pretty.”

“Old Pieter named her, I am sure,” Eleanor said. “Your uncle.”

“I never met him.”

“Jan loved him. And from what I hear of him, none was more fond of wayward girls than he.”

Hanneke laughed again. The two women walked along the edge of the harbor and soon found themselves outside the town, passing below the end of the land wall at the spot where the sea and the river mingled. On the dike that held the sea out and kept the land below the wall of The Brill, they walked along enjoying their newborn companionship. Eleanor clasped her arms over her breast; the sea wind fluttered the loose ends of her headcloth.

“You spoke of a kingdom,” she said. “What do you mean?”

Hanneke said, “God means us to make a New Kingdom on the earth, where godly men and women shall live in peace.”

“You know this.”

“I am certain of it.”

“Then you think we shall withstand Alva, when he marches on The Brill?”

“God will decide that,” Hanneke said. “If we fail here, He will raise up someone else, somewhere else.”

Eleanor said nothing for a while. The dike was just wide enough for the two of them to walk abreast along the top; on the one side was the singing rowdy water of the sea, and on the other the barren low salty earth reclaimed from the sea.

Eleanor said, “I am not afraid. I don’t know what will happen, which is, as you say, in God’s hands. I am not afraid, whatever might come.”

They had reached the sluice gate, a wooden patch in the stone and earthen dike. The ropes were rotten and crumbling to dust. Hanneke put her foot on the top of the sluice gate, to see if it would hold her weight, and the wood cracked a warning. She stepped back, turning toward Eleanor.

“I think we have come all we can.”

Eleanor was looking across the dry land. “Here comes Mouse.”

“Who is he?” Hanneke watched a small figure running toward them from the town.

“A lad from the ship. They all think he is half-witted, but he seems whole enough to me—only a little off the center, as it were.”

Hanneke laughed at the choice of words. “So are we all, somehow.”

Again she and Eleanor looked one another in the face; again a sympathetic understanding passed between them. Mouse ran up to them, a shaggy-headed cross-eyed boy the age that Clement’s boy had been.

“This is Jan’s sister,” Eleanor said to him; she laid her arm around his shoulders. Now she spoke Dutch, slow and stumbling.

The boy pressed himself shyly to her side. “Hello,” he mumbled.

“Hello, Mouse,” said Hanneke.

He looked up at Eleanor; his neck was dirty. He said, “Jan says you are to come to him on the wall with his dinner now.”

Eleanor patted him on the shoulder. “Run and tell him we are coming.” She smiled over his head at Hanneke. The boy raced away toward the wooden wall of The Brill, and the two women, arm in arm, walked after him.

“Were they all infantry? Did you see any cannon?”

The newcomer chewed the mouthful of bread he had been eating; he claimed to have walked all night and day to reach The Brill, coming from the mainland. He also claimed to have seen several columns of Spanish soldiery marching north, pikes on their shoulders and helmets on their heads.

The bread swallowed, he said, “I saw only what I told you, sir. I know nothing of armies; I saw only the soldiers and their pikes.”

Jan clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, you came here in time to learn something more about armies than that, anyway.”

“I am ready to fight.” He was a young man, in a plain brown coat, with steady eyes—only one of the trickle of people who had been coming into The Brill now for days.

“You’ll need a place to stay.” Jan turned, scanning up and down the rampart, where his crew were busy mounting the cannon; they had taken guns from every ship in the Beggar fleet to defend the land wall. Marten was fifteen feet away, sawing a hole through the top of the wooden rampart to push the muzzle of a long gun through.

“Marten!”

“Here.” The sailor straightened.

“Take this fellow home with you,” Jan called, “and see he’s cared for.”

“I will.” Marten raised one arm. The stranger started toward him, pulling off his coat as he went.

“Can I help you?”

Jan faced out over the wall, looking east, toward the mainland. He folded his arms along the top of the wall and leaned his weight on it, frowning. This man was not the first to report to him that a Spanish army was marching north. Somewhere, beyond the low flat horizon of the dike, lines of soldiers were pounding the roads to The Brill, thousands of them, hardened troops who would kill everything they found. Men like Lumey. He thought of Eleanor, in the hands of a man like Lumey. Or his sister, or Mouse, or for that matter himself.

In his head he ran up a list of the people in The Brill who could fight: the Beggars themselves, about four hundred men, counting even Eleanor and Mouse; the local people, like old Koppelstok, the ferryman, who was helping on the rampart, and the other Calvinists, who sometimes seemed more zealous in breaking into their Catholic neighbors’ houses and stealing all they could than in preparing for a desperate fight; and the steady incoming flow of Calvinists from other parts of Zeeland and Holland and even the farther Provinces. How many of them there were he could not judge accurately, but he knew he was hopeful in supposing that more than five hundred people stood against the Spanish army.

And his guns. He dropped one hand to the brass culverin by his side. She was his favorite, his first love, and while the other captains had sent the oldest and least trustworthy guns off their ships to the wall, he had brought this long beauty because he was proud of her and would make the Spanish afraid of her. He slapped her cold hard side. Probably they had no guns, the Spanish army. Looking east, into the bleak distance where the dun-colored earth met the overcast sky, he strained his eyes to see the first pricks of their weapons, and he smiled.

“All the make-believe is over,” Lumey shouted. He paced across the front of the church, where the altar had been. The church being the only place in The Brill large enough for all the people, they had called the meeting there. “The Spanish are marching our way, thousands of them, armed and practiced at their arms.”

He whirled around to face them, his new vestments swaying around him. A devilish priest, Jan thought, and smiled to himself.

“So,” the old pirate shouted. “Now’s the time when all men must choose, and choose well, for once and all. Do you stand here and let the Dons have you, or do you go to sea and live to fight again?”

Jan turned his head to look across the mass of people packed into the front of the church. A baby was crying, on the far side of the huge hollow space, but otherwise no one spoke. Their faces were solemn. Men and women and children, there were less than five hundred of them, and the Spanish army numbered in the thousands.

Lumey began to pace across the desecrated altar again. “Those of you who decide to stay—brave fools that you will be—you have a few other decisions to make. How to make your stand. Where you want to die. The women …” At the far wall he wheeled. The candles on the walls made his stolen garments glitter. “The women have to have some means of killing themselves and their babies before the Spanish reach them.”

From deep in the crowd came a low moan. Lumey smirked; he liked that. He went on.

“The seamen must make some provision for destroying their ships. Burn them, hull them; they must not fall into Spanish hands.” He shrugged. “There’s no saving the guns.”

Jan could hear people crying now, in the crowd. He glanced behind him, where his sister and his wife stood side by side. Their faces were smooth and bland as statues. They were ready. He put out one hand to each of them, and each one quietly grasped his fingers.

“So,” Lumey called, stamping up the middle of the church. “Now’s the time. Those of you who are going to stay here in this coffin of a town, line up with van Cleef, there, the tall one. Those of you with wits and understanding, come here with me.”

Jan lifted his voice. “Lumey has his own cast of thought on this; I have another. We Sea Beggars have not set foot in the Netherlands all these years. We know only that the Spanish have taken our homes away from us. Some of these people who have lived here through Alva’s terror can tell us more—how Alva’s ground them down and tried to break their spirit.”

He looked across the church, wondering if they were even listening to him. Many more were crying now. He cleared his throat.

“If we run now, before the very name of Alva, then he knows he’s crushed the best part of us. Now, I don’t want to die, and my wife is here, and my sister, and I don’t want them to die, but if we fight here, live or die, we will show Alva he cannot break us. We’ll give heart to every Dutchman locked in the tyrant’s grip.”

Silence met his speech. He finished, lamely, “That’s all I have to say.”

The crowd seemed not to move. One or two people came forward to stand behind Jan, joining the defenders of The Brill. A few more followed van Treslong and Dirk Sonoy up the wall toward him.

Van Treslong came up to Jan and put his hand out. “You could have said something about God, van Cleef. Surely God will help us here. People need to know things like that.”

Jan shook his hand. “I don’t think God will make this anything special, and from what my sister says He’s offered very little help to any Dutchman, these past three years.”

The shuffling of feet resounded through the church; the congregation was moving in a dark tangled mass, indefinite of direction. Maybe they were just going out. Someone he had never seen before came up to him.

“You’re right.” She was an old woman with a hooked nose and no teeth. “I’m too old to live much longer anyway.” She clasped his arm and went to stand behind him.

Here came Koppelstok, the ferryman, who said, “By God, van Cleef, I thought you were nothing but a bag of wind, like yon priest killer, but you’ve proved yourself to me.” He struck Jan a comradely slap on the arm and passed by him with the others.

After him a slow parade of people wound, men whose fears and doubts still worked in their faces, and women with their children, white and grim. Jan turned to van Treslong. “We’ll have some with us, after all.”

Van Treslong smiled at him. “Some. Look you, we have them all.”

Jan raised his head. The shifting, awkward mass of people had crowded together on one side of the church. They could not fit in the space behind Jan and so they pressed together in the space before him, turned, and faced across the church at Lumey. Between them and Lumey the floor spread wide and empty. The admiral stood wide legged facing them. Behind him were three or four of his own seamen, and no one else.

Now one of those seamen swore and spat and at a long-legged walk, almost a run, cleared the space between him and the crowd and joined Jan’s side.

Lumey looked behind him. Saw how few there were behind him. He wheeled. His face was fierce with a new vigor.

“By God,” he shouted, and his voice boomed in the pitch of the church, “you will not make a coward out of me!” His men behind him, he marched across the church; he fell in with the others around Jan.

The waiting was the worst, especially at night. The town was different at night anyway. The sailors from the Beggar fleet took over the taverns and drank and ranged up and down the street shouting and fighting and looking for women. They had already gotten in trouble with some of the local people, and in turn their captains got in trouble with Jan, who had thrown the sailors into the stocks. In the morning two of the captains were in the stocks.

Mouse said, “He carried them there himself. The Baron van Treslong went with him, holding his pistols, to make sure no one tried to stop him.” He giggled.

Hanneke was staring at the men in the stocks, heads, arms, and legs fastened into the wooden frame. Finally she gave a little shake of her head. “Jan is certainly much changed. A few years ago he would have been in there with them.”

She went off down the street. Beside her Mouse ran capering like a little goat, his arms flapping. She said, “Who made Jan the master here? I thought Lumey was the master.”

“Lumey only gives orders when he must,” said Mouse. “That’s why we all obey him.”

She cast a sharp look at him. Eleanor was right: this boy was keen of wit as any of them. Only his stupid looks gulled the others into believing him dull.

Now he said, “Do you want to see my secret place?”

“Your secret place? But if you show me, it won’t be secret anymore.” She had no desire to play childish games with this boy.

“You’ll keep the secret, won’t you?” He grabbed her by the hand. “Come along. It won’t take very much time. Please?”

Reluctantly she let him drag her off down the street toward the Catholic church. There was little to do; Eleanor was busy keeping her house, and afterward she and Hanneke were to cook. Jan was working on the wall still. Hanneke let Mouse pull her down the street and into the church.

“This way.” Still clutching her hand, he drew her after him down the aisle of the church to a little door on one side of the altar.

Hanneke said, “I don’t really care for places like this, Mouse.” She looked up at the paintings above the altar, of Christ and His angels rising toward Heaven, their robes boiling around them like sea waves. Mouse pulled her in through the little door.

A narrow winding stair climbed away from them into the top of the church. Now she knew where he was taking her, and she groaned.

“Mouse, will you make me climb all the way up into the steeple? Oh, Mouse.”

She followed him up through the narrow channel of the staircase. The air smelled of mildew and dust and there were no windows, the only light coming from far above them, dropping soft and diffuse down through the staircase. Her legs began to throb. The boy scampered on ahead of her like the little animal of his name. She half expected to see a long brown tail whisking along behind him. At last they reached the top of the church steeple, where the bell hung.

Here there was no floor, only a narrow catwalk along the four walls of the steeple and a threadwork of rafters supporting the bell and the roof. Mouse leapt nimbly from one precarious footing to the next. “Look here! Look here!” On all four sides the steeple was open to the wind and the sun. Hanneke leaned on the sill of one of these windows and looked out.

“Oh!”

She had not expected, somehow, to be so high above the ground. The view enchanted her at once. She was looking down on the town, on the streets where she had walked only minutes before, as if from a cloud, or from Heaven itself. Over there was the curving line of the harbor, with the blue sea glittering in its lap, and the ships lying at anchor, and the men in the stocks mere dots on the pale brown stone of the street. To her right the river ran, its surface turbulent with the contrary forces of the wind and the tide; she could see all the way across it to the black marshes on its far bank and the mill in the distance.

Eager now, she scrambled along the wall to the corner, to the next window, to see in another direction; that brought her to face the landward wall of The Brill, where the men were climbing up and down and working on the cannon, whose barrels gleamed in the sunlight like mirrors. She could see beyond the wall to the dry-land dike; beyond that were the onion fields, where several people worked, so small and far away she could discern nothing of them save the rhythmic rising and stooping of their bodies as they pulled weeds.

From so high, she could easily see the trench between the dry-land dike and the wall of The Brill, where the sea had rolled until the people built the new dike and pumped out the water. There black and white cattle grazed.

She leaned her arms on the sill, smiling. The sober industry and obvious accomplishments of these people cheered her.

“Hanneke,” Mouse said, beside her. “What’s that?”

She was watching the cattle; for a moment she did not look up, not until the sun, striking some bright metal, flashed a signal into the edge of her vision.

She raised her head. Mouse was tugging on her sleeve and pointing out past the dry-land dike, toward the dark mass of trees that marked the edge of the distant marshes. She squinted. Something was moving there, vast and indistinct, the sun sparkling here and there on it.

She gasped, swelling her lungs with breath. It was an army, a force of marching men, with the sun striking light from their armor and their pikes. It was the Spanish army.

“Hanneke!” Mouse cried. “Hanneke—what is it?”

“Go.” She wheeled toward him, catching him by the shoulders. “Run and tell my brother—” Her gaze sped by him to the bell. “Go and tell my brother that they come!” Leaning back into the window, she curled her arms out over the sill to hold herself, braced her back against the wooden frame, and swung her feet out to the bell and pushed.

Mouse leapt by her, reached the door, and vanished down the long tube of the staircase. Hanneke thrust with her feet at the bell. Heavier than she expected, it hardly moved at all at first, and she grunted with the effort of pushing. Slowly it swayed away from her, and she relaxed, let it swing back toward her, soundless still, and pushed it away again. She felt the clapper strike the metal wall beneath her feet, and the deep voice woke.

Bong—bong—bong—

She twisted to look over her shoulder, out past the wall of The Brill, toward the army that crept toward her. Still far away, it lapped up over the land like a foul tide.

Bong—bong—bong—

Below her, in the street, people were running now, shouting, screaming. Running toward the wall, and on the wall she saw more people rushing about, tiny specks of movement. Between them and the advancing flood of the Spanish army lay only the barren ground, the onion fields, the dry-land dike over which now those people who had toiled outside the wall were running home to safety, the women from the onion fields, the boy with his black and white cows.

Bong—bong—bong—

Her gaze stuck on the broad shallow trench of reclaimed ground between The Brill and the dry-land dike. The sea had rolled there once. Ever eager, it lapped and bit even now at the dike that restrained it, longing to roll there again. She lifted her eyes toward the evil tide of Spaniards creeping over the land toward her. Her heart was hammering. Swinging away from the bell, she jumped toward the door and the stairway down.