The Sea Beggars (11 page)

There was a light in the house, shining out under the door, and through the oilskin over the window. Someone pulled at the oilskin, looking out.

“Who are you?” a hoarse voice whispered. “I don't know you—who are you?”

“Uncle Pieter?” The boy went a step toward the window, which was on the left side of the door.

“Who are you?” the old man cried.

“Jan van Cleef, sir—your brother's son.”

There was a silence; then suddenly the door flew open. “Well, come in,” the old man said sourly.

Jan kicked off his shoes and went into a small bare room, smoky from the lantern on the wall. His father's brother blinked up at him, unsmiling. Lifting a leather-covered bottle, old Pieter took a deep pull at it. He faced Jan again, looking slowly up and down him.

“You're Mies' son? Where'd you get such a size on you?”

“My mother's family's tall, sir.”

“Stop calling me
sir
.” The old man went away across the room and through a door covered with a length of canvas.

Jan looked around him, uncertain. He had seen his uncle just once, years before, when he was only a little boy; Mies had brought him here. He remembered a more respectable house than this, with chairs and carpets and cupboards and maps on the walls. This shabby little house was bare as a mousehole.

“Come on, damn y'!” the old man shouted, and Jan ducked through the canvas curtain and into the main room of the house.

This was rather more inviting. Relieved, he looked around him with a smile. A mat of woven rushes covered the floor, and there was a hearth with a little fire and a pot on a hook over the coals. Two battered chairs and a low table took up the middle of the room. The lamp on it gave off the best light in the room, and to this warm yellow circle Jan went gladly as a child.

“Sit,” his uncle said, taking one of the chairs, and picking up a long-stemmed pipe from a dish on the table.

Jan sat down.

“So.” The old man's gaze poked at him. “Mies' boy. Well, you look a good stout lad. What brings you out this way from Antwerp? Get caught with your hands in the chambermaid's skirts?”

Jan scratched his nose. He was painfully hungry; the old man's sharp inquiry angered him. He said, “My father's dead, sir.”

“Dead.” Above the fringe of Pieter's mustache, his waxen-lidded eyes widened a moment, round with new interest. Almost at once he shuttered them up again. Drew on his pipe. The stomach-turning smoke rose in a spiral above the lamp. “Well, a man who spends his time sitting and thinking will wear out faster than one who works.”

“He was hanged,” Jan said. “For heresy. The Duke of Alva hanged him.”

Old Pieter gaped at him. His hand trembled and the pipe spilled a flutter of ash down the front of his shirt. “Hanged—” He threw his head back and erupted into howling laughter.

Jan started up straight, offended. His uncle roared with mirth, pounded his foot on the floor, and thumped his knee. Gradually the fit faded; he wiped his eyes, chuckling, and leaning one heavy elbow on the table faced Jan again.

“It wasn't funny,” Jan said. His throat filled with rage and grief. “We're ruined, all of us.”

“Well, well.” Pieter looked around him at the ashes floating over his sleeves. “Life's a big joke, boy. A big stupid joke.” He spat into the fire.

“Where's the joke?” Jan cried. “Ten thousand people the Spaniards hanged—”

“All my life,” old Pieter said dreamily, “all my life people have said I was born to be hanged, and only look at my godly brother, Mies, crowned with piety and wealth …” His flat palm struck the table. “Now who went to the gallows, and who sits …”

He spat again. Jan saw the joke; he saw, too, the deep bitter lines along the corners of the old man's mouth.

“He's better off, probably,” old Pieter said.

A little silence spun out between them. Jan's stomach contracted with hunger. His gaze strayed around the room toward the fire; he snuffled hopefully at the air.

“What brings you here, anyway?” Pieter said.

“You said once—remember? Mies brought me here, I was only a little boy, but you said”—Jan licked his lips—“when I grew up, I could sail with you.”

Pieter stared at him a moment; another mirthless laugh rumbled up out of his throat. “Oh, I did, did I? And what are we to sail on?”

“You said—I could—on your ship. Remember?”

Again the wet red laugh. Pieter wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. “Impounded. The
Wayward Girl
. Devil give them plagues and never let them die.”

“They took your ship?”

“Impounded her.” Pieter sucked on his cold pipe, his eyes half-closed. “So, you see. Mies was hanged, and I, I sit and think.”

Jan looked around again at the dreary room. Suddenly his mood slipped away into despair; he imagined the Duke of Alva, looking in through a window in the roof, laughing at him. He put his hands up to his face, longing for Hanneke, for his home. His stomach growled.

“Got the bear in you,” Pieter said. “Well, well.” One hand moved, starting to point to the pot on the hearth, but the gesture died. He nodded to Jan. “There's a mess in the pot. I'll get you a stoup of the juniper, to warm your gut.”

“Thank you,” Jan said, going toward the fire.

“There she is,” Pieter said. “Yon by the careening beach.” He braced his elbows on the top of the river wall, his eyes directed across the quiet water toward a little single-masted ship.

“What are they doing to her?” Jan shaded his eyes with his hand. The
Wayward Girl
looked rather like a fishing boat. Her hull was round as a bowl at stern and bow, her fore decks flush with the main deck, a little sterncastle standing up over the rear end of her. A third of the way from the top of her mast, the jack yard of a gaffsail jutted out like a cocked thumb. Men worked on her.

“What are they doing to her?”

The old man shrugged. His pipe in his hand, his gaze on his lost ship, he sank into his reveries. Not tall, yet he was stout through the body, with heavy shoulders and a neck thick as a yardarm. When he fell into his daydream, he seemed to shrink inside his clothes.

Jan looked over the river toward the
Wayward Girl
. Her hull appeared freshly painted. The sun flashed on a bright bit of metal by her mast foot.

“She seems pretty good to me.”

“Just careened her,” the old man said. “They ought to be towing her out to a deep mooring some time soon.”

“They're refitting her?”

He looked at her more closely, wondering what the Spaniards had in mind for her. Like most Dutch boys, he had sailed all his life, although in nothing larger than the river-going flyboats that plied the canals and the broad Schelde. The
Wayward Girl
had a clean, trim look not entirely attributable to her new paint and lack of rigging. She looked fast and handy as one of the gray sea gulls that swooped and glided over the harbor around her. The
Wayward Girl
. He loved the name. In a flash, he knew he loved the ship.

Now the Spaniards had her. He sucked on his teeth, wounded in his newborn heart.

“Couple times,” the old man said softly, “I've thought over swimming in, at night, and banging a hole in her, so the dirty devil won't get his hands on her, but—”

In one of the tall houses behind them a window rattled open. A shrill female voice shouted, furious. Jan was eyeing the ship, his mind dreamy; not until his uncle pulled on his sleeve, tugging him off down the street, did he realize the woman was yelling at them.

“And don't come back!” she screamed, now that they were moving. “I'll set the watch on you. Riffraff! Dirtying up the street all day long in front of decent folk's houses …”

Jan's ears burned and he shoved his hands deep under his belt and hunched his shoulders and did not look around him. He followed his uncle quickly down the quayside toward the harbor, away from the
Wayward Girl
.

Pieter van Cleef had never had a wife or a child: only his ship. As long as he had the
Wayward Girl
, he needed for nothing else, not a way of making a living, nor a good name for himself, nor something to love, but when he lost her he was transformed into a miserable old man, his days empty and overcast with longing.

He wondered what Jan made of him. Beside him the boy walked along humpbacked, his gaze lowered to the ground, his shoes knocking on the pavement. He walked with a loose stride that threw him off-balance a little. He was still growing. When he became confident in his size he would move better.

If he grew. Probably he was hungry. He was always hungry.

Pieter led them away down the street toward the market. He was used to getting along on very little to eat, but a boy like Jan needed good round meals.

He squared his shoulders a little. After weeks of doing nothing he felt better having someone to care for.

It was Friday afternoon and the market was loud with people in from all over the district to buy fish. Pieter walked down the edge of the crowd, looking for any face he knew. By the angle in the street, where the bulkheads spread the river into the open water of the harbor, two men in wide-bottomed trousers were laying out mussels by the bucketful on a streaming bed of kelp.

“Eh. Marten.” Pieter nudged the crinkled seaweed with his foot.

The younger of the two straightened up, smiling, and put out his hand. “Hello, Captain. Good afternoon to you.”

“Have a good haul?” Pieter said. His cheeks felt stiff from the unnatural act of smiling. He avoided the frowning look of the older man.

“The mussels are Protestant,” Marten said, and laughed.

“Hush,” said the older man, Marten's father. “Keep your fool's tongue.”

Pieter scratched his jaw. “Don't suppose you have any bit of work for an old man who needs something for his gut.”

“No,” said Marten's father, harsh. “No charity for pirates.”

“Father,” Marten said, objecting. He stooped over the heap of mussels and began shoveling the shells into a bucket.

“I said no!”

“Well, now,” Pieter said, edging away. “I don't want to put strife between a man and his son—”

“The catch is half mine,” Marten said, with a glare at his father, and brought Pieter the bucket.

“Thank you,” Pieter said. Another thing that came unnaturally. He carried the bucket off down the street; behind him Marten and his father argued in loud voices.

Pieter's nephew had wandered off. Presently he reappeared, and, the tide being in, they went across the street to the wharf. Pieter sat down on the wharf, his legs over the edge, took out his knife, and reached for a mussel.

Jan got his own knife. They sat there with the bucket between them, opening the mussels and eating them off the shell. After a few mussels had slipped down his throat, Jan reached into his shirt and took out a sausage, bit off a chunk, and held it out to Pieter.

The old man goggled at it in surprise. “Where did you get that?”

“Back in the market.”

“Someone gave it to you?”

“I stole it.”

“Stole it.”

Pieter snatched the long brown sausage out of Jan's hand. Springing up onto his feet, he brought the sausage down like a club over Jan's head.

“Hey,” Jan cried, recoiling under his raised forearm. “What's the matter?”

“Never steal from your own people!” Pieter smacked him again with the sausage and whirled and flung it end over end out into the harbor. In the cloudless air above him a gull let out a scream of greed and sailed toward the splash.

“I'm hungry,” Jan shouted.

Pieter shoved the mussels at him. “Eat.” He sat down, shutting up his knife into its whalebone handle.

“I need more than this!”

The old man glared at him. “I didn't ask you to come here.”

Jan's face was stiff with bad temper; he looked very young, and much like Mies, who, although delicate and high-minded as a nun, had often shown a choler fit for a fighting man.

“I don't need you,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”

“You don't steal from your own kind, you big square-headed fool,” said Pieter.

“I'll steal from anybody who has anything!”

“Not from your own people.”

“My people. They aren't my people—where were they when my father—”

He gulped, his face red and swollen with rage. Pieter poked his finger at the boy's chest. “You have to live here, you fool—if they think you're a thief, you'll get nothing but hard looks and blows!”

“You sound like my sister.” Jan got halfway to his feet; he was running away. Then to Pieter's amazement he fell back sitting onto the board of the wharf and burst into tears.

“Oh, there, now,” Pieter said, uneasy.

The boy wept voluminously as a woman, all his feeling gushing out in rivers, his hands over his face. Pieter watched him a moment. He preferred the boy's rage, which he could argue with. Finally he put out his hand and touched Jan's shoulder.

“There, now,” he said again, feeling foolish.

Jan shook his head; tears splattered his shoulders. “Hanneke,” he cried, in a broken voice. “Hanneke. I want Hanneke, and Papa, and my mother. I want Hanneke.”

Pieter stroked his back, keeping at arm's length from the unseemly storm of feeling. “Come on, now. A man doesn't cry.”

“I'm sick of being a man!”

Mumbling sounds like words, Pieter patted his back a little more; he wondered what sort of water ran in Jan's veins, that he cried for his sister, a big strong boy like this. But now he found himself thinking of his brother, Mies, hanged in Brussels, and of the
Wayward Girl
, and his eyes began to ache painfully with tears of his own.

None of that, now. He got heavily up onto his feet. “Well, let's go find something fit to eat.” With either hand he grabbed the pail of mussels and his nephew and towed them off down the street.