Chapter Six

The Magic Oranges

MY FIRST WATERZOOI, thinks I, was in Rotterdam, where we sojourned for a sennight while Doña Marisa took to her bed. My lady, or minha Senhora, which is how I sometimes addressed her in Portuguese, became terribly ill of a sudden. She blamed it on the insufferable heat and on the foul odours that arose from the canals. One day, she began to feel better. ‘Tengo hambre,’ said she. And so I, being a good foot-boy, hastened to fetch her a bowl of waterzooi, a fish and vegetable stew made with egg yolk, cream and broth. She pushed me away, grumbling about the disgusting fish odour, and thereafter buried her head half-way into a pot. ‘Tonta!’ her maid chided me, and she thrust the stinking pot into my hands.

Señor Gonzalez believed that his lady’s mysterious illness began in London, where she bought livery for me and Pico, and that her condition worsened in Harwich, where we sat idle, waiting on the winds for five days. When the winds finally veered round, Captain Bridge, the commander of the Prince of Orange, led us in prayer, as was his custom, and only then did he give the signal to weigh anchor and to unfurl the sails. We were nearly three days out at sea in what became a miserable North Sea crossing for us passengers on a crowded packet-boat.

There, becalmed at sea, we floated in murky waters. I waited on deck under a cheerless sky, praying that the gansas would take us to the moon. But the gansas never came, nor did my papai. Things being so, I worried anew. I wished to speak with Doña Marisa concerning our voyage to the moon, but she refused to leave her cabin, except for an airing once or twice on the arm of her cortejo, Señor Gonzalez. Whenever I approached them, he would wave me away; hence, I sat on deck, wearing a gloomy face.

‘There’s them Spaniards,’ Pico half-whispered to me. ‘A pair o’ landlubbers they are.’

‘What’s a landlubber?’ asked I in my disagreeable mood.

‘It’s a looby who doesna like the sea, yer looby.’ Pico pinched me.

‘Yow!’ I rubbed my arm, scowling at my cousin.

Pico proclaimed it a grand voyage, heedless of my misery. He befriended the Chief Mate, who told him many a brilliant story about Captain Bridge’s derring-do’s during the war, including the time the Captain attempted a dangerous landing amidst ice floes.

‘The Prince of Orange shot the ice, and close to Cuxhaven pier it got, but it grounded on a sandbank, and the ice floes threatened to capsize it,’ recounted the Chief Mate. ‘We would have perished at sea if it had.’

‘Gad zookers,’ exclaimed Pico. ‘What happened next?’

‘There was nothing for it but to pray the Prince of Orange hadn’t suffered damage. Once the tide ebbed, the Captain delivered the mail and collected the war despatches at Cuxhaven,’ recalled the Chief Mate. ‘Thereafter, we returned home, where the London papers called him a hero because everyone was desperate for news of the war.’

‘Huzzah! Captain Bridge for ever.’ Pico’s broad grin diverted the Chief Mate.

That evening, I stood on deck, gazing at a big orange moon near the horizon.

‘How many moons are there?’ wondered I aloud, for I had seen the moon wear different colours – grey, blue, red, yellow, orange.

‘There’s many a kind of moon,’ the husky voice of Captain Bridge interrupted my musings. ‘Crescent moon, half-moon, full moon, gibbous moon, new moon – oh, and waxing or waning some are.’

‘Are they different colours, Captain?’

‘Oh, ay!’ He winked at me.

In my mind the earth had all sorts of moons circling round at different times. But only one appeared each night, they each of them taking turns, or perhaps they stood watch at different times? I wondered which moon Domingo Gonsales had visited.

That night, I had trouble sleeping. Where, oh, where could those gansas be? Ai de mim! Having given up my hope to fly on a gansa, I determined that we must fly on our own to a moon. I closed my eyes to summon up my magical powers. A rush of wind swept me higher and higher and higher, but I dared not open my eyes or the magic would end. On a sudden, the flapping of a great many wings drew near, and I landed with a thud on a mound of soft feathers. I leant on the gansa’s neck and wearily so, relieved that the gansas had come for us at last and we would reach a moon. And there, wrapped up in the warmth of my gansa, I dozed peacefully for the remainder of our flight.

‘Wake up! Land ho!’ Pico shook me.

I found myself sitting on a dock. I rubbed my sleepy eyes, wondering if our gansas had, indeed, taken us to a moon.

The tide having been favourable, we tacked up the reddish waters of a river to reach Helvoetsluys, where lived town-dwellers called Dutch. Doña Marisa pressed a lace handkerchief to her nose – ‘qué mal olor’ – and she declared this place unhealthful, for the canals here stank during the summer. The foul odour did not signify much to me. Why, everyone knows a moon stinks of cheese. I raced with Pico down the path to explore the small merchant-town with its clean streets, its gabled houses with peculiar mirrors hanging near the windows and its curious, round people – the men dressed in bulky breeches, long coats and three-cornered hats, the women dressed in short petticoats shaped in the form of diving-bells, and lined, straw hats that resembled small umbrellas.

‘Pah! The men smoke on the streets, just like the moon men who smoked ivrywhere,’ observed Pico.

‘Look! Look!’ I pointed. ‘A moon boy is smoking a pipe.’

‘Ivrybody smokes, ’cept the namby-pamby girls.’ Pico snickered.

‘Fie! I can smoke. I’m a foot-boy,’ replied I.

‘Yer still a girl, an’ yer canna smoke,’ rejoined he.

We continued on our way, mindful of the Dutch labourers driving wagons and sledges. I thought it strange to see work horses treated with such kindness, for they each of them walked with a lively step. But the strangest thing to me was that no one begged on the streets. And none of the poor children walked about shoeless or one-shoe’d like the children I had seen in York. Here, the children wore wooden clogs shaped like little canoes. No misery. No poverty. No cruelty to animals. The Dutch must surely belong to the race of moon-folk; at least I thought so.

At the entrance of Hobson’s, an inn frequented by English, I came upon an elderly Dutch man serenading his horse between puffs of his pipe. ‘T sijn de starren (puff), Neen mijn lief (puff) wilt noch wat marren.’

‘Viva!’ I greeted him, wondering what he had sung in his musical moon language.

‘Goedemorgen,’ returned he, as he fed the horse a slice of ‘brood’. As a token of friendship, he gave me a slice of brood, which I thanked him for, and he taught me how to say ‘danke je’.

I peered at the old man. ‘Are you the man on the moon?’

‘De maan (puff, puff)?’

‘De moon?’ I tilted my head to one side.

‘De maan. Ja (puff).’ He resumed his serenade, ‘T is de maan…’

Oh que gosto! What joy! I had reached a moon paradise. And so I congratulated myself on having spoken with my first moon man and eaten my first moon bread. Later, after I had breakfasted on my first moon eggs at the inn, Señor Gonzalez, with Captain Bridge by his side, summoned Pico.

‘Gracias for your service as foot-boy,’ Señor Gonzalez placed his hand on Pico’s shoulder. ‘However, I can no longer employ you. You must return home with Captain Bridge.’

Pico groaned in misery. With a grip like iron, the Captain led Pico away, unmoved by my cousin’s pleas and angry complaints. Oh, to be rid of my tormentor at last. I own that this piece of news made me happy at first. There, on the wharf, sat poor Pico dressed in his black and orange striped livery and cocked hat, soon to be exiled in his own country, while I, Sofia-Elisabete, a true explorer, would seek adventure on a moon.

‘Adeus, Pico!’ I waved my cap at him.

Doña Marisa sighed. ‘Pobrecito.’

‘We still have your foot-boy, mi amor.’ Señor Gonzalez gave her a secretive smile.

We embarked on board a trekschuit, a moon barge towed by a horse at a small trot. Riding astride the horse was a moon lad – the luckiest lad here on this moon – who got to blow a horn whenever he needed to signal for the raising of draw-bridges or to warn of passing barges on the canal. The moon land beyond as far as I could see appeared flat with no hills in sight. Here and there a spinning windmill or a farm-house with green shutters dotted the flat landscape. And everywhere I looked, the trees were laden with apples in the most brilliant hues of green and red. No wonder the moon-folk did not starve; for, they could eat as many apples as they wished.

The weather being fine, as it always is on a moon, the three of us – Doña Marisa, Señor Gonzalez and I – sat on a bench near the stern instead of inside the roef, the main cabin, where the moon men smoked their pipes, their constant companions. Señor Gonzalez, being the dutiful cortejo, shaded his lady with her parasol, while I, being the dutiful foot-boy, fanned her whenever she required a breeze. ‘Tengo hambre,’ said our lady, and so her dutiful cortejo sliced up a big red apple for her to eat.

‘The Dutch have the sweetest apples on earth, but there’s nothing sweeter than a Valencia orange,’ Señor Gonzalez spoke with pride.

‘Ah, but nothing can compare to a magic orange,’ returned she.

My eyes widened with wonder. ‘A magic orange?’

‘Ah, sí. There once lived a wealthy man named Senhor Soares,’ Doña Marisa began. ‘He owned a quinta, a large country house, which was surrounded by a thousand orange trees. Harvest after harvest, his laranjeiras produced the best, the sweetest, the juiciest oranges in all of Portugal. He bragged to everyone that the nectar of a Soares orange was as sweet as a spoonful of wild honey that melted on your tongue and dissolved into your heart.’

I wrinkled my brow. ‘My oranges never tasted like honey.’

‘An orange is not an orange unless it comes from Valencia,’ claimed Señor Gonzalez.

Doña Marisa nodded her agreement, and she continued her story. ‘There was only one thing that Senhor Soares, a widower, treasured above his precious oranges, and that was his beloved daughter, a lindissima named Jacinta, who wore orange blossoms in her long black hair, which she plaited and coiled high atop her head.’

‘Did her mamãe love her?’ wondered I.

Doña Marisa shook her head. ‘She died shortly after Jacinta was born. One day, a handsome Spanish nobleman named Don Luis de Luna arrived at the quinta. He had journeyed from Cádiz to inspect Senhor Soares’s laranjeiras, because no Spaniard could believe that the Soares orange could best a Valencian orange. Don Luis became enchanted with Jacinta, and they secretly met one evening under their trysting tree, one of the orange trees in the Soares grove. He tantalised Jacinta with an orange that he held in his hand, heedless of her admonition that “an orange is gold in the morning, silver at noon, and lead at night”.’

This confused me. ‘Why is the orange gold?’

‘An orange tastes best in the morning, and, as such, it is better for your health and digestion to eat it then,’ Señor Gonzalez told me. ‘Whereas noon-time is the second-best time of the day to eat an orange. But one should never eat an orange late at night when it could harm your health.’

I scratched my head. ‘Why did Jacinta wish to hurt her belly then?’

Doña Marisa sighed. ‘Jacinta was in love with Don Luis. So she peeled the orange, and when she divided the segments in half for them to eat, she found nestled inside a brilliant and rare orange diamond worth many, many gold escudos. Qué maravilla! In exchange for this exquisite diamond, Don Luis gave her an ancient key, telling her it was the key to his heart.’ Doña Marisa clasped her hands as if in prayer, her gaze heavenward, her lips curved up in a blissful smile. How silly she looked.

I wondered at her fascination with this thing called a diamond and a really old rusty key. ‘Did the diamond make the orange taste bad?’

‘Ay, Dios mío!’ Doña Marisa frowned, and she pressed her handkerchief to her forehead.

‘Foot-boy, have you ever seen an orange diamond?’ inquired Señor Gonzalez.

When I shrugged at him, Doña Marisa proudly showed me her ring, in the centre of which sparkled an orange diamond, the colour of fire.

‘Did you find it inside an orange?’ I asked her.

Señor Gonzalez chuckled, but he abruptly stopped when Doña Marisa gave him the evil eye for whatever reason. It was then that I noticed a diamond ring on Señor Gonzalez’s finger.

‘Señor Gonzalez, was your diamond inside an orange?’

He grunted. ‘Dios mío! I had to peel many an orange for a lady to get this diamond.’

‘Picaro!’ Doña Marisa called him a rogue.

‘No te preocupes, mi amor. I shall peel oranges only for you – now and always,’ said he in an audible whisper to her.

His promise having pleased her, she resumed her story. ‘Thereafter, the two lovers continued to meet in the evenings under their trysting tree, where Don Luis enticed Jacinta with an orange, and each time she divided the orange in half, she would find an orange diamond nestled inside. But alas, on the evening of their twenty-second tryst, the enchantment ended, and no more glittering orange diamonds were to be had. Don Luis took his leave with alacrity, never to return to Portugal, he being all the richer with twenty-one orange diamonds tucked away in his bolsa.’

‘He didn’t love her,’ declared I.

‘That dog,’ muttered Señor Gonzalez.

Doña Marisa shushed her cortejo. ‘Poor Jacinta. Finding herself with child, she feared her papai’s wrath, for he would surely send her away to live in a convent…’

‘I lived in a convent when I was a bebê,’ remarked I. ‘There’s a wheel for the foundlings that goes round and round…’

‘Sí, sí,’ Doña Marisa interrupted me. She pinched the bridge of her nose for several seconds as if she suffered from head-ache. When she had calmed herself, she concluded her tale. ‘One starry night, Jacinta leant against the trysting tree, contemplating her sad lot, when a drunken Gallego labourer stumbled upon her presence. Unbeknown to them, Senhor Soares had seen them standing together underneath the trysting tree. He raged at his daughter, declaring her ruined and lost for ever to him. He forced her to choose between a vow of poverty, imprisoned behind the bolts and bars of a convent, or a vow of poverty, married to a poor Gallego labourer. Jacinta determined that her fado, her fate, was to marry this poor Gallego, and marry him she did, and several months later she gave birth to a girl – a girl christened Maria Isabel but whom she would always call Marisa.’

A girl named Marisa! My eyes became round as saucers. I begged her to tell me more about the girl Marisa, but alas, she pronounced that I would have to wait, and if I were a good little girl, perhaps she would tell me another tale. Sensing my disappointment, she explained that we must needs disembark – ‘Mira! We have reached Rotterdam.’

We floated into a maze of canals, passing under many a picturesque draw-bridge, when we came upon a landing-place near a tree-lined promenade. From there, we hastened to find lodgings at the Maréchal de Turenne, an inn kept by an Englishman who took pride in its Dutch cleanliness – gleaming windows and floors, polished furniture and grates, snowy-white linens and what not – for everything was clean and perfect on a moon.

Fatigued, Doña Marisa disappeared into her bedchamber for what would be a sennight, to be attended by Josefina, her lady’s maid. With Doña Marisa indisposed, and there not being much need for a foot-boy, I was allowed to do as I wished. But soon I became lonely. Oh, how I missed Pico, the master planner for our adventures. I wandered outside the inn, where I sat on a bench and moped.

‘Goedemorgen, jongetje,’ the maid greeted me, and pretty and charming she was in her white mob cap, short blue petticoat, white apron and wooden clogs. Armed with soap and a pail of water, she proceeded to attack the street with her scrubbing-brush, and with such great violence, to wash it clean. Between her bouts with the dirty street, the maid Grietje told me that she came from nearby Gouda, where she had learnt the secret of making stroopwafel.

‘Jongetje! Little boy! Want you a stroopwafel?’ Grietje reached into the large pocket tied to her waist. She handed me a small cloth, wrapped inside of which were two thin wafers with a syrupy filling in between.

‘Danke je.’ My countenance brightened now that I had a sweet and sticky treasure. ‘Do you have gooseberry tart?’

‘Ja, ja – kuisbessen-taart.’

Soft giggles erupted behind us. Twin girls, who appeared to be the same age as me, inclined their heads together, speaking in audible whispers of ‘een kus, een kus’.

Grietje laughed. ‘Niesje and Kaatje want kissen you.’

‘I’m not a boy. I’m a girl,’ declared I, having forgotten that I wore my nankeen breeches and red jacket.

‘Jongetje, jongetje,’ the twins chanted as they skipped round me.

I stamped my feet – left, right, left, right – but to no purpose. They considered me their beau, their namorado, and they insisted on calling me Hendrik. They followed me everywhere, these children of the innkeeper. Soon, however, I found that being Hendrik brought me unexpected pleasures. Hendrik voiced a command, and the twins obeyed him. Hendrik strolled the Boompjes Quay, a promenade along the River Maas, and the moon men would nod at him, as if they all belonged to the same moon men fraternity. Hendrik requested stroopwafel whenever he wished for one, and the kitchen maid would make it for him. As the boy Hendrik, I had become golden.

One day, while we children sat near the entrance of the inn, Hendrik lazing with his feet atop the bench and eating stroopwafel, the twins playing with their dolls – cleaning them, dressing them, grooming them, for Dutch girls’ hands are never idle – I espied a familiar-looking boy wearing Dutch boy’s clothes and smoking a pipe along with other Dutch boys his age. When this boy sauntered towards me, puffing on his pipe and setting his three-cornered hat a bit jauntily to one side on his head, only then could I credit my eyes.

Pico boasted to me, ‘I gave old Captain Bridge-y the slip (puff-puff).’ He had earned some coppers by guiding English travellers in Helvoet, traded his livery and cocked hat for Dutch costume, clay pipe and tobacco, eaten apples that he snatched from orchards, slept on a flat boat in the canal and thereafter footed it to Rotterdam in hopes of finding work of some sort.

‘What’s that yer eatin’, Soofia-Eee?’ Pico licked his lips.

‘I, Hendrik. Want you a stroopwafel?’ pronounced I in the curious English spoken by the Dutch.

‘Yi, Hendrik.’ Pico gobbled up the stroopwafel. ‘Wheer’s them Spaniards?’

‘Doña Marisa took to her bed,’ I told him.

‘Landlubber.’

‘I gave her waterzooi…’

Pico made a face. ‘Pah!’

‘…and she put her head into a pot.’

Pico convulsed with laughter. ‘Yer a rum ’un fer givin’ her that stink o’ fish stew. Give her erwtensoep – pea soup. The travellers always ask fer it at Hobson’s.’

Eager to be in Doña Marisa’s favour once more, I fetched a bowl of Dutch pea soup for her dinner, but she grumbled that it smelt like green canal water. And bury her head into a pot again she did, just like with the waterzooi. ‘Tonta!’ Josefina shook her finger at me, and she handed me the stinking pot when her mistress had done with it.

The next day Pico announced he was in ‘need o’ munny’. He formed an idea for us children to turn somersaults near the road where the carriages passed by. We rushed to the roadside with childish glee, and when Pico gave us the signal, we rolled head over heels – once, twice, thrice. Sure enough, the foreign travellers in the carriages laughed at our tumbling act, and they gave us five sous. Feeling emboldened by his success, Pico directed me to beat my drum while we sang a few verses of ‘Rule, Brittania’ for some red coats, who cheered for good old England and tossed us a generous handful of sous.

When, on the following day, we gathered on the roadside to perform our tumbling act, and for me to beat my drum, something singular happened. An assortment of painted wagons drawn by old horses approached us. On closer inspection, Pico counted fifty or so brown-skinned, dark-haired men, women and children who rode in the wagons or walked besides the horses, and one fine-looking man, he being the leader, the ‘duke’, who rode astride a horse.

‘Waterloo teeth! Waterloo buttons! Waterloo musket balls!’ the gipsies shouted. This caravan of gipsies had come from Brussels, where they had scavenged stuff from Waterloo, all of which things they offered for sale. Not understanding the meaning of this, I asked Pico why Waterloo had a goodly amount of stuff, and he explained that this stuff had once belonged to soldiers – tens of thousands of them – who had perished in a bloody battle a few months ago. This confused me. Did not moon men live for a thousand years?

I questioned the twins. ‘Is this a moon?’

‘De maan? Ja, ja – de maan,’ the girls replied together, for they always agreed with whatever Hendrik said.

‘Yer dunderheads, this isna the moon.’ Pico seized my cap, and he rapped me on the crown of my head with it.

He had no sooner done so, than Grietje came to retrieve the twins. ‘De Zigeuners,’ exclaimed she with disgust, as she hastened the girls away, their wooden clogs clattering on the broad stone street. The gipsies ignored her rudeness, as if they had become used to such treatment wherever they roamed. But the whole thing struck me as odd. Were not peace and friendship a part of the creed of good moon-folk?

Captivated by the exotic gipsies, Pico and I followed their roving caravan. They encamped at a field a quarter of a mile from town, where they sold medicines and lured the curious with fortune-telling. When the gipsy acrobats strung up a tight rope, I quick marched to the scene, eager to join them. I shifted my drum to my back, and before anyone could stop me, I climbed up the ladder to reach the rope.

With my fingers and toes tingling, I balanced myself on the taut rope. There, six feet above the ground, with one of the gipsies standing underneath me to catch me, I turned fearless. I rope danced half-way across, beating my drum, and to much applause, for I had attracted a wide crowd. ‘Hoezee!’ the onlookers cheered. Buoyed by their encouragement, I handed my drum to the gipsy and thereafter amazed everyone with my best trick – roasting the pig – by laying myself upon the rope and swiftly turning round and round ere I dropped into the gipsy’s arms. ‘Hoezee! Hoezee! Hoezee!’ the crowd chanted.

My triumph complete, the gipsy lifted me high above his head. With the broadest of grins, I waved to the cheering crowd. How I wished to be adored so for ever! And how those coppers rained down on us! Puffed up from my brilliant feat, I searched for Pico to show him the five sous I had earned, when I observed him take to his heels to hide behind a wagon.

‘There you are, foot-boy,’ Señor Gonzalez grasped my arm. ‘You have made Doña Marisa most anxious.’

‘Señor Gonzalez?’ I started at the sight of him. ‘I rope danced with the gipsies and…’

‘Los gitanos?’ He glowered at the gipsy rope dancers, and with a fling of his capa over his left shoulder, he commanded in a sharp voice, ‘Vámonos!’

He strode back to town, with me scurrying behind him, when a Dutch official demanded to see our passport. ‘I am Señor Gonzalez, escort of Doña Marisa, and we travel with servants,’ explained Señor Gonzalez, showing our papers. The official cast a suspicious look at him and then at me with my drum perched on my back, until Señor Gonzalez pointed out that our passport had been signed by the Dutch minister in London and countersigned by the Dutch minister in Rotterdam.

Once the official had returned our passport and let us alone, Señor Gonzalez grumbled ‘voto a Dios’. He complained that he had been stopped ten times since our arrival in Rotterdam. When I asked him why, he mentioned that an age ago this country was known as the Spanish Netherlands until the Dutch revolted, led by their king, William I of Orange, and that is why many of the Dutch still disliked the Spanish. Yet, somehow that didn’t discourage the Dutch from trading with the Spanish. ‘Dinero, dinero, dinero. They love our money,’ concluded he in ill-humour.

Señor Gonzalez declared his need to be quit of this ‘foul-smelling’ country, and when we reached our inn, he advised me that we would be departing Rotterdam two days hence. This struck me into a panic. If Pico was right that Rotterdam and its town-folk didn’t belong to a moon world – what with everyone hating each other and arguing over money and killing each other in a war – how, then, would papai find me? Ai de mim! Cousin Annie had forgotten to tell me the rule for running away when I could not be found.

My mind in a muddle now, I rushed out of doors. I found myself at the bank of the green canal, and there, in my lonesome and pitiful state, I wept for half-an-hour, for I had been too long from home. Oh, how I missed my papai, my mamãe, my puggy and my Scarborough home and everyone else and everything in it. ‘There’s nothing more beautiful and noble than the sight of Scarborough,’ papai would often say to me.

I remembered how mamãe would dress me in my pink night-dress with whimsical embroidered roses – each rose having a pair of eyes to watch over me while I slept – and the warm home feeling it always gave me when she put me to bed. I remembered how papai and I would ramble the sands of the North Bay and how he would let me run barefoot, and when I had done prancing up and down the shore, he would tickle me by brushing the grains of sand from in between my toes. With a grieving heart, I trudged back to the inn, now that my crying spell had come to an end.

It occurred to me later that I must needs bother Doña Marisa, the landlubber-ish invalid, to write another letter to papai. The next afternoon I tap-tapped at her door, this time bearing a gift of hot and fresh stroopwafel. To my dismay, Josefina refused me entrance, no matter how much I pleaded with her. ‘Vete!’ she dismissed me with a wave of her hand. In her bad English, she told me I was a ‘no good penny’, sure to return with food to make her mistress ill, whereupon she shut the door in my face, cutting off my cries of ‘Minha Senhora! Minha Senhora!’

Vexed at being cast off, I stamped down the stairs, carrying my basket of stroopwafel. I, Hendrik, ordered the twins to bring me paper and pencil, and so they did. Together we wrote a letter to my papai. I told him Rotterdam was no good and push on we must to the Land of Cuckoos. I knew not where this cuckoo-land might be, but the twins had heard their papa speak of it with Señor Gonzalez. I drew a large heart, inside of which I scribbled the word ‘mamãe’ for my dear mamãe in Scarborough. At the bottom of the letter, the twins sketched a picture of themselves, writing their names Niesje and Kaatje under each of their likenesses.

I folded up the letter, and I addressed it to ‘Colonel Fitzwilliam, British Army’. Surely the army could find him on the road somewhere, searching for me and the perfect world in a moon. I asked the twins to get me a wafer to seal the letter with, but they knew not what I meant. Then I remembered the stroopwafel. I broke off a small piece, wondering if it would do. I removed one side of the wafer to reveal the warm, syrupy filling, and I pressed this sticky wafer onto the letter to seal it.

‘What are you zuinig.’ The twins nodded with approval.

‘Ja, I am thrifty,’ declared Hendrik, impressed with himself.

We sat within, facing the large window in front of the inn, Hendrik beating his drum, the twins playing with their small knitting needles and balls of bright orange yarn. I kept a look-out for a red coat by glancing at the two spying mirrors that hung outside the window, these framed mirrors giving me a clear view of all that passed on the street. We heard a Frenchman shout out, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ By and by, the disgruntled prisoner came into view, hooked to a pole and steered to gaol by a guard. Next came a match girl with a pole slung across her shoulders – the large balls of stick matches dangling from each end of the pole. Half-an-hour passed when I sighted a British officer striding towards us, his gait crisp, his air of authority so similar to my papai’s. I ran outside the inn, where I saluted him soldier-like with a pull of my cap. He halted before me, curious about this foreign drummer boy.

‘Your name, drummer boy?’ asked he with an officer-politeness.

‘I am Drummer Boy Hendrik. Do you know Colonel Fitzwilliam, the son of Lord Matlock?’

‘Och! I do, indeed.’ The officer grinned. ‘I, Captain O’Sullivan, served under him in Portugal.’

I gasped. ‘What was he like?’

‘The former lieutenant colonel, now Colonel Fitzwilliam, was and is a worthy, excellent officer, a valiant soldier and a warm-hearted friend beloved by all who know him.’

I stood proud, with my chin lifted. ‘Captain, could you give him this letter?’

The Captain examined my childish scrawl and the sticky wafer seal ere he placed the letter inside his coat pocket. ‘Depend on it, drummer boy, I shall fulfil my commission.’

‘Thank you, Captain.’ My heart filled with gratitude.

The officer set off, happy to have this commission, methinks.

When the morning arrived for our leave-taking, Niesje and Kaatje began to weep, and miserably so, until Hendrik deigned to let them kiss his cheek three times, which seemed to ease their sorrow. Hendrik, being a brave boy, never shed a tear. The twins gifted me with a pair of wooden clogs, each clog bearing their names on it so that I would not forget them. In return, I gave them a picture I had sketched of us riding the wafer sails of a windmill that I had named ‘De Stroopwafel’, having learnt that all the windmills in Holland are christened with names.

‘Vaarwel!’ Grietje and the twins waved at me as our diligence rumbled away. ‘Adeus!’ cried I, with mingled feelings of loneliness and wistfulness at the loss of my Dutch friends. I waved back at them for a long while, because I, along with the snappish Josefina, had been placed in the basket seat located at the rear of the carriage. ‘Siéntese!’ Josefina chided me, each time I stood up to wave. When we lost sight of the inn, only then did I allow the hot tears to tumble down my cheeks. Dressed now in my striped livery and cocked hat, I took up my duties again as foot-boy to Doña Marisa, whose sickly countenance, by the bye, still looked a bit green to me, like the colour of pea soup.