The Sea Beggars (15 page)

The other six buns were part of the day's surprises. Michael loved surprises. He slid the tray of buns into the top oven.

He swept the shop and went out to sweep the street in front. Up the way, past the broom hedge, the wine and oil shop was open, and old Philips was out in front sweeping his part of the street. He and Michael waved to each other. Michael did not bother to smile. Philips was nearly blind. He needed only the gesture. Stooping over the broom again, Michael scrubbed away at the cobblestones. Sometimes it seemed that the older he got the less interesting his life became.

But now here came Melisse, a seamstress who lived down the street above the flower shop, a covered dish in her hand. Michael straightened, his curiosity jumping alive.

Melisse wore a dirty apron over her long sober dress. Her hair was pushed carelessly up under a worn coif, and her long thin face was hollow and baggy with fatigue. Coming up to Michael, she tugged on his sleeve and turned back the cloth over the dish.

“My baby's sick, Michael, dear,” she said. In the dish was a mess of egg and herbs and milk. “Let me set this in your oven, just for a moment, just to cook the goodness in.”

He took the dish; giving a look over his shoulder into the shop, he covered the slop over again. His mother disapproved of charity—and Melisse was gossiped to be a secret Calvinist. Michael smiled at her. “Come back in half an hour.”

“Not too long, now,” she said. “I don't want the egg to be hard; he won't eat it if it's hard.”

“Don't worry.”

“But it must be warmed all the way through. Maybe I should stay and do it myself.”

“No, no, go on, and come back in half an hour.”

Melisse lingered, frowning. Michael took the dish into the shop and set it on the table inside the door. His mother called him. He went back into the kitchen, to help her knead the dough.

Jeanne-Marie hated the sunlight. Her kitchen was like an anteroom of Hell, gloomy and low, the pent air thick with odors of yeast and decaying fruit and old flour and souring milk. The old woman padded on her broad bare feet from the cupboard to the table where she worked, every few minutes fetching up a sigh so tremulous she might have been about to weep. Her clothes were impregnated with flour, and her body shapeless with fat, so that she reminded Michael always of one of her own great floury rolls. When he came into the kitchen she gave him a buffet on the ear.

“What are you doing out there? Who are you talking to? Come work this dough and earn your keep like a decent Christian man.”

Side by side they stood at the table punching and pounding the dough, warm and moist at first, sticking to Michael's hands as he pulled and folded it and pumped it with his arms.

Out in front of the place the door opened.

Michael kept his eyes on the dough. He knew what would happen, every step, like an old dance.

His mother shuffled to the kitchen door and peered out. “Michael!” She waved him frantically over to her side.

“Yes, Mama.”

“Who is that? Is that Moeller?”

He looked. Of course it was Moeller, who came in every day at this time, with his penny, to buy a fruit bun for his wife and a plain bun for himself.

“Yes, Mama.”

“He's a Calvinist. You go and give him what he wants. See he doesn't cheat you.” She pushed him forward out the door. “Hurry up before he leaves and we lose the money!”

While he was giving Moeller a cherry bun and the plain bun, two more regular buyers appeared.

“Good morning, Michael.”

“Hello, Vrouw Arliss. What may I sell you today?”

“Oh, the usual, Michael.”

“Hello, Vrouw Schenck. What may I sell you today?”

“What we always have, Michael.”

He wrapped the buns in soft paper, careful not to smear the sweet filling that oozed from the side. A strange girl came into the shop.

“Thank you, Vrouw Schenck. God be with you.”

“And how is your dear mother, Michael?” Vrouw Schenck loved to talk.

“Very well, thank you.”

The strange girl had gone to one side of the shop and was staring at the loaves of bread left over from the day before. Her long gray skirt was patched, the hem worn, but the stuff was very fine. He craned his neck to see if she wore jewelry.

“Have you heard the latest about Melisse, Michael? I understand her husband has left her again.”

He mumbled something to Vrouw Schenck, his curiosity absorbed by the stranger.

“That's what happens to people who don't mind their ways,” said Vrouw Schenck, comfortably. “If she'd only—”

The strange girl was leaving. Michael brushed rudely past Vrouw Schenck, saying, “Yes, yes, you're perfectly right,” ready to stop the girl at the door. But she had only gone to look at the sweet buns. Embarrassed, he faced his old customer again.

“My, my, Michael,” she said, and sniffed. “I can see my friendship's wasted here.”

“Vrouw Schenck, I'm sorry—”

The housewife drew herself up like a strutting pigeon and marched out the door. Michael grimaced. It would not do to lose a good customer. He stood looking at the back of the stranger, wondering why he would risk certain profit for the sake of a new face.

“May I help you?” he said.

The girl turned. She was a little younger than he was, and not pretty. Her pale hair hung down in disorderly braids over her shoulders. She said, “Do you sell your stale bread?”

“We give it to the Church,” he said.

Her face fretted with disappointment, she glanced behind her once at the sweet buns and started toward the door. Michael got in her way. “Wait.” Her dress was rich; he wondered what fate had brought her to search for day-old bread. “Is it for you? Are you hungry?”

From the back of the shop came his mother's sibilant hiss. “Michael!”

He waved at her to be quiet. At his question the girl's face had gone suddenly blank. “I feed it to the birds,” she said, with an edge in her voice that suggested he should keep his interest to himself.

“Michael!” his mother called, in a hoarse loud whisper. “Who is she? Is she Catholic?”

“The Church gives bread to the poor,” Michael said.

The girl raised her pale eyebrows into polite arches. “How very kind of the Church.”

Not a Catholic. He looked her over again, intent, and saw her hands, soft and fine as a noblewoman's. She was making for the door again and he blocked her way.

“Wait. Who are you? I've never seen you before, and I know everybody in this quarter of Antwerp.”

“I've got to go,” she said. “My mother's waiting for me.”

“Michael,” his mother shouted. “Get rid of her!”

“Wait.” He lunged past the stranger, grabbed the nearest sweet bun off the rack, and brought it to her. “Here.”

Her eyes widened, softening her face; slowly she took the bun from him, her gaze unwavering from his, and lifting the bun took a bite. Her hunger overwhelmed her discipline. She stuffed the delicious sweet into her mouth, chewing hard on the sticky mass. Michael smiled at her, triumphant.

“Who are you? Where do you live?”

“Michael!”

She managed to swallow the lump of bread in her mouth. Now that she had eaten of his charity, she could not deny him a little courtesy, and she said, “My name is Johanna van Cleef—I live over in the Swan Street, above the Kelmans' kitchen. Do you know them?”

“Kelman,” he said. “Two buns in the morning, a long loaf at night.”

She was going. He did not stop her, having now some connection with her after she left the bakery. He smiled at her, and, her mouth stuffed with another greedy bite of the bun, she gave him back a broad cheerful grin. She went out the door.

“Michael!”

“Coming, Mother.”

When Hanneke came around the corner into the Swan Street, the Spanish soldier was sitting in front of Kelman's house. Her back stiffened. On straw legs she made herself walk down the gentle slope toward the house; her mother was in that house, her mother.

The Spanish soldier watched her come with his smoldering black eyes. He was very young, her age perhaps, although he had managed to grow a little feathery mustache. He was always dressed in fine clothes, trunk hose and doublet and leather shoes, exotic as a papingo among the plain Dutch people on whom he was quartered. As she came closer, Hanneke's stomach rolled in panic. He had only been here a few days but her fear grew more intense every time she saw him.

Now she was going in the gate, his gaze full of her, his black eyes like the eyes of a jungle animal, hypnotic and evil. She made herself meet his look the whole way from the gate to the door.

Inside, she leaned up against the wall a moment, recovering. He was still there, just the other side of the door. She went back through the house to the kitchen, where the Kelmans' cook hummed over her pea soup, and let herself out the back door, to the little wooden stair up to the attic room.

Her mother was sitting in the window, staring out. The floor and the top of the table and the cupboard bed were spread with bits of clothing, books, and linens. Hanneke closed the door. She had to fight down a surge of hot anger at her mother, who ignored her and began to sing.

Taking off her shawl, Hanneke hung it up on the hook by the door. The room was smaller every time she came back to it. The two women had little enough—a few bundles of clothes, a box of books, a chair, a chest full of embroidered linen for Hanneke's dowry—but with space so dear it all had to be neat, or the room was a chaos. When she did not go out roaming the streets Hanneke's mother spent the day opening drawers and boxes, taking out her possessions and laying them about, and there was never anywhere to step or sit or even to stand.

Hanneke said nothing to her mother. She set about cleaning up the room.

Her mother broke off singing. “Where were you?”

“Out,” Hanneke said.

She folded the linen bedsheets intended for her wedding night and laid them back into the cherry wood chest her father had given her when she was twelve. She hated touching these things, seeing them, thinking about the blasted world they tied her to.

“That boy was here again,” her mother said.

“What boy?”

She knew which boy: Michael Rijnhardt, the baker's boy, who had been coming into Kelman's backyard every day to look up at the window of Hanneke's room.

“I hope you threw something at him,” Hanneke said.

“He looks like a very nice boy.”

“He's a Catholic.” Hanneke slammed the chest lid shut. Her gaze traveled the room, littered with the fragments of their past life. “Mama, why can you not keep all this shut away?”

“Have you seen Jan?”

“No, Mama.”

She lowered her eyes to the chest; whenever she thought of her brother a hard lump formed in her throat. She rubbed her fingers over the deep carved roses on the lid of the chest. She would never marry now. When she was a little girl she had always assumed someday she would find a handsome charming man who would fall entirely in love with her and take her for his wife, but now she knew she would never marry. No one wanted the daughter of a hanged man. When she felt the familiar stinging in her eyes she scrubbed angrily at them with her hand. What right did she have to cry? Roughly she got to her feet, lifting the chest, and heaved it up onto the shelf beside the cupboard bed.

“Help me, Mama.” She stooped to gather up the books strewn about the floor.

“Do you know where Jan is?”

“No, Mama.”

Her mother climbed down from the window, reached for a book and put it away in the box, reached for another book. Hanneke gathered up the mess around her. Her brother had not come to see them for some time. He was gone, she thought; she had the sense of an emptiness in the city that meant he was gone. She sighed. A soft sound behind her brought her gaze back to her mother. The old woman sat with an armload of her husband's books clutched to her breast and wept. Hanneke tore her attention away. Her mother's grief frightened her. This mirror of her own fear made her fear more real. Furiously she busied herself putting away the rest of the books. After a little while, behind her, her mother began to sing again.

He had been gone too long; his mother would scold him like a child when he got back to the bakery. Michael scuffed his shoe through the inch of new snow that lay over the cobble street, his gaze pinned to the door of the factory. The sun had set over half an hour before and the snow thickened the night as it fell. His mother was right; he should be there to help her, and not standing here in the street like a mooncalf. As he turned to go, the door opened.

Hanneke came out under the little white lantern that hung over the factory door and pulled her shawl up over her head. In the steady silent downsifting of the snow she was only a shape, but Michael recognized her at once; although he had known her only a few weeks he knew her in every nerve end, every sense, as the only thing worth knowing. He went forward to meet her, and she stopped and frowned at him.

“What are you doing here?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I couldn't help it—it bothers me that you must walk home alone after dark.”

“Please, Michael.” She walked on past him down the street.

Michael fell into step beside her. Longing to take her by the arm, to guide her and protect her; certain of the rebuff if he tried. It was that distance between them which gave his feeling for her its electric poignancy. He wondered sometimes, if she had accepted him, if he would not have swiftly tired of her.

She was cold. The snow fell on her head and shoulders and she shivered.

“Will you take my coat?” he said humbly.

She shook her head.

“Must you work so late? All the other women have since gone home.”

“I must sweep up after them,” she said. “That's my duty there.”

“What times are these,” he said, “when such as you must work.”