The Sea Beggars (18 page)

“Please don't touch me.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the factory—to tell them I am sorry and will work the rest of the day.”

“Don't do that. Aren't you hungry? Come to the bakery—we've made some biscuits. At least come there first, so you won't be hungry.”

He knew how she longed for sweets, and now her face was nervous with indecision and she wavered in her step. Without touching her, he herded her toward a side street that arched over the canal on the way to the bakery, and she went along with him.

“I saw that girl Hanneke this morning,” said Clement's boy, standing on the far side of the press; he reached across the press to take the top of the fresh sheet of paper that his father held out to him, and between the two of them they fastened it to the tympan, which would hold it while the print was being impressed upon it. “She was looking for her mother, all night long.”

“Her mother. Did she find her?”

The boy shook his head. He was small for his age, and grave from so much reading; his face had an old man's solemnity. “I helped her awhile.”

“Good for you,” Clement said.

“I brought her here and gave her some soup.”

“Good.” Clement smoothed the paper on the tympan and reaching to the side lifted the heavy iron frame hinged to the long edge of it and folded it over the fresh paper; this was the frisket, which covered all parts of the paper save that to be printed on. He thought of Mies van Cleef's daughter with a heart that leapt. Of all those men who had helped the Prince of Orange during the troubles, Clement alone remained alive and free. He wondered why the Duke of Alva had not taken him and knew it would not last long. Carefully he folded the tympan and frisket together down over the typeform.

“Why was her mother missing, do you know?”

The boy shook his head. “She did not say. We talked about Copernicus. I like her—she is very clever.”

“Her father was a clever man.”

He ran the inked form under the platen of the press and reached for the long lever that worked it. His son stepped back out of the way.

This letter they were printing came from Orange; Clement meant to have copies of it all around Antwerp by nightfall. The Prince of Orange was marching to the Low Countries with an army. He needed help—the rising of the cities in his favor, the general outburst of the people against the tyrant Alva—and he would not get it. Clement had never known Antwerp so quiet. People stayed indoors now and peeped through their shutters, and at the sound of trouble hid away under the dining room table. Clement raised the press and pulled the typeform out from under it, and unfolded the frisket and the tympan and lifted the printed page up off the pins that held it fast through the whole process. Black and bold, the letters marched like soldiers across the white paper.

This would bring Alva on him, eventually. He shook to think of that—of what would happen to his little boy, alone and cast out, as Hanneke van Cleef was cast out. Yet he could not forgo it; he owed this to the people who had died already, Mies and the others, the hundreds of others. Even if no one read, if no one heeded, yet he had to go on shouting at them: Fight!

He gave the sheet to his son, to hang up to dry, and picked up a clean piece of paper. The smell of the fresh ink as always gave him courage. At least he was doing something. He laid the field of white across the tympan and pushed it down firmly onto the pins.

6

“Haw! Haw!”

The oxen lowed, under the whip; with a squeal of bare axles, the wagon lurched up over the rutted road and jounced down again. The carter stood up on his seat and plied his whip furiously. The oxen were tired, and the road ruined by the unseasonable rains, and the oxen lowed again, protesting.

The Prince of Orange swore under his breath. He looked up into the sky; there was perhaps an hour of sunlight left, and his army still was strung out along the approaches to the ford in spite of his orders. The columns would not march in tight rows. Their disarray had them dangerously spread out over the rough hillside on the German bank of the river. He spurred his horse into a gallop across the road ahead of the oxen and up the hillock beyond, to get a broad overlook of the whole business.

What he saw made him swear again. He had hired mercenaries by the lot, veterans of the French civil wars, and probably he had been too eager for numbers and not keen enough for quality. Half of these men sauntered along in no order at all, swinging their pikes, stopping where they would to talk or rest or drink from their belt flasks. The supply train clogged the main road. The soldiers milled around behind it, and at one wagon they had even gotten into the supplies of food and were sitting up there eating the bread intended for their dinners once they reached the Low Countries.

“William!”

Straight and handsome on his dapple gray horse, Orange's brother Louis cantered up and saluted him. “What do you think? Over there's the best campground.” He pointed across the river, at the smooth green hollow of the meadow beyond the ford.

“If we can get to it,” said the Prince. “Here. You go down there and get those men off the wagon. Lead them up to the river's edge and wait. I'm going down to see the ford. We have to cross the wagons first and we may need to use the men to do it.”

Louis wheeled his horse and galloped down across the slope; he rode boldly, if not elegantly, and all the men loved him; as he passed, they cheered him. He raised one arm in answer. William smiled, pleased with his brother, and trotted away down to the river.

Swollen by the recent rains, it ran full to the high bank, the water muddy and swift, and on the far side it overflowed the bank and stood among the reeds and grass of the low ground. The Prince sharpened his eyes for a long look across at the campground. Its green allure might be deceptive. Perhaps it was marshy too. He pressed his horse around toward the wagon train.

Now the vanguard of his disorganized army was meeting the river's edge. For nearly a quarter of a mile on either side, the few horsemen let their mounts drink, and the soldiers were sitting down on the bank and dipping their hands and faces into the rushing water. The heavy ox-drawn wagons were still lumbering along the road, and would be over half an hour getting here. The Prince looked fretfully at the sky again, where the sunlight was already waning, and returned his glance to the river. He did not want to cross that rushing water in the dark.

With a wave to the wagons to stay where they were, he turned his horse and rode into the river. The water was deeper than he expected. His horse stiffened and tried to back off but he spurred it forward and after a few steps the horse put its head down and splashed across.

The water surged up to its belly. The Prince lifted his feet, mindful of his freshly polished boots, and the horse snorted and plunged through the deep. The current struck it. Its hoofs slipped, and it spun around to keep from falling. The Prince caught his saddle with his free hand. If he fell off his horse in front of his whole army he would hear about it all his life. The horse recovered, its ears pinned back, and bolted for the far shore.

Shaking and snorting, it trotted up through the marshy flooded bank. The Prince tapped it with his spurs, and it set off at a rocking canter across the green meadowland. The edge of the meadow was damp, but as the ground climbed away from the river, it dried out: a good place to camp. Near the center of the meadow, he turned to go back.

“No! Damn it!”

All along the river, without orders, without discipline, his army was crossing after him. The first of the wagons was plunging into the swollen current where he had just nearly lost his seat. He galloped back toward them, shouting to them to stop.

They ignored him. The foot soldiers were wading out into the brown water, using their pikes for props. One or two of the horsemen had reached the center of the stream, and even as he watched one rider lost control of his horse and fell with a splash into the river.

“Go back—” On the far bank, Louis was galloping up, to stop the wagons, but two of them had already rolled out into the ford. The oxen bellowed. Perched on the high seat of the first wagon, the driver rolled his whip out across the sky and shouted curses. The wagon lurched. The lead ox went down to its knees, dragging the other with it, and the wagon floated up off its wheels and swung around downstream on the surging river.

A wail went up from the army. Louis was charging to and fro, through the low brush and trees along the bank, turning back the men at the edge of the river, but too many had already gone into the water. The wagon was floating off downstream, dragging the panicked oxen after it. The driver looked around once, threw his whip to the left, and dove off to the right. The submerged wheels of the wagon hit the bottom, the current pushed the upstream side high into the air, and the whole wagon tipped over, spilling barrels and bundles of camp supplies into the water.

The Prince rushed his horse into the river, headed downstream of the wreck, where half a hundred men were struggling in the stream. “Seize hands,” he shouted. “Make a line across the current—we can save some of it—”

Some of the men heard him; in the center of the stream a barrier of linked arms and bodies formed, chest-deep in the forceful rushing current. Others ignored him. They scrambled for the shore, wailing and cursing as they went. He forced his mount over the slippery river bottom toward the line of men who were obeying him. His horse lost its footing and fell, and he clung to the saddle with hands and legs, his breeches soaked, the river banging his back. The sky wheeled madly over him. Abruptly the horse lurched back onto its feet again. He swung it around, forcing it back toward the men in the center of the river.

The goods spilled from the tipped wagon were floating downriver, kegs and folded tents, and even a cooking pot bobbing on the current. He reached the line of men just as the first of the goods reached them. Leaning out from his saddle, he caught an outstretched hand, and a barrel struck the man he was holding and tore him out of the grip of the Prince and drove him under the water.

The others screamed. Breaking their cordon, they fought and struggled with the river, trying to reach the safety of the land. The Prince shouted at them but they heard nothing. Another barrel smashed into a man wading waist-deep in the water and carried him off into the center of the river.

The Prince's horse neighed. Thrashing the water, it bolted for the bank, and the Prince made no effort to stop it; there was nothing more to be done anyhow. Ahead of him the last of the soldiers were dragging themselves up the bank, and the goods lost from the wagon were floating swiftly away out of sight down the river. He rode up after his men to the dry land.

Louis came up to him. “Are you all right?”

The Prince took the napkin he held out and wiped his face. “God's bones. What a disaster.” He looked upstream, at the disorder of his army, scattered all over the low brushy hillsides; some had already begun to make their own camps here. On this bank near him two or three men lay exhausted and soaked on the ground, gasping for breath. The second wagon to enter the river was stuck halfway into the ford. The Prince shook his head, low spirited. If this was a harbinger of the whole campaign, God was about to try them all very sorely. He gave the dirty linen back to his brother and rode up to help haul the stranded wagon back to land.

Neat as a housewife's sewing box, the Spanish camp covered the lower slope of the hill, its fires in rows, its tents in circles around the fires, its men fed and at their work, some standing sentry duty, some cleaning their weapons, some already asleep. The Duke of Alva rode down between two rows of the fires, looking over the camp. Beside him his son, Don Federico, waited for his father's comments. The night had not quite fallen, and he had not eaten; he was hungry. He knew he would get nothing until his father had assured himself of the camp's perfect security.

“Where is Orange?” Alva asked.

“Across the river, two leagues away,” said Don Federico.

His gaze fell on his father's hand on the reins. Alva's hands were bony and the veins stood up like ropes, an old man's hands. He was an old man. Why then would he not stay in an old man's palace and let his son do his work? Don Federico looked in the other direction, across the slope, where in the deepening twilight the fires gleamed in rows like golden stitches in a velvet cloth.

“He hasn't tried to cross the river yet?” asked his father.

“He tried,” Don Federico said. “The river is still high from the storm and he lost a wagon and some men. It was very disorderly.”

He sniffed, disapproving of such incompetence even in his enemies. All soldiers had to know how to do certain basic things, or they were not soldiers.

“Well, you've done a good job,” Alva said. “As usual. Thank you very much.”

“I don't understand why you had to come out here at all,” Don Federico said. “I am thoroughly capable of handling the entire campaign. You could have stayed in Brussels and done the larger business of governance.”

Side by side on their fine-bred Spanish Barbs they rode down the lines of fires toward the center of the camp, where the commander's tent was set. Behind them came their aides. Don Federico beckoned, and one of his young men dashed up and saluted.

“Go see that the table is set and the dinner ready when his Grace my father dismounts from his horse.”

“Yes, Excellency.”

“No need for anything special for me,” said Alva. “I'll just have some plain soldier's fare. A hard biscuit and a cup of soup.”

Don Federico would have a roast hen, fresh bread, butter, wine, and pears with cheese. He slapped his thigh.

“Why are you here? What if there's a rising in one of the cities, in support of Orange—what will you do then?”

“There will be no rising,” Alva said comfortably. “They are too afraid. What do you intend to do about Orange?”