I walked back to the Prins Willem, hastening my pace as the snow began to fall in earnest. By the time I reached the inn my shoulders were coated with a layer of snow and the dirty snow in the streets had been covered with a fresh blanket of white. It was so dark that some of the shop keepers had already lit the torches outside their premises at midday. Although I had not been carrying out Walsingham’s original instructions, sitting in corners listening to the gossip of soldiers, I felt that I had gained far more valuable information from my visit to Ettore Añez. Clearly both van Leyden and Cornelius Parker were men who needed watching.
For the next two days it snowed without ceasing, a steady, relentless fall. At first there was little wind, but toward the end of the second day a stormy gale blew up, driving the snow into drifts against the sides of buildings until in some places they reached nearly to the height of the windows. Few people stirred outside. Some of the soldiers still came to the inn during the evening, but Niels Penders told me that they were men billeted in the town. Those quartered in the camp outside Amsterdam were confined to their tents, and a wretched time they must have been having out there in the bitter cold. Inside the inn we were kept warm by roaring fires in every room, the food was plentiful, and clearly the inn had a cellar abundantly stocked with beer and wine and even a form of aqua vitae.
I visited Hector several times a day, but the stable was solidly built of brick and the grooms had a fire in their room at one end, whose warmth filtered through to the horses. Confined to the inn, with no one to talk to except the innkeeper and his family and nothing to occupy me, I grew irritable with boredom, but there was nothing for it but sit out the storm. I wondered where Berden was – still in Den Haag, or perhaps caught by the storm on his way back to Amsterdam. In the afternoon of the second day, a carter who had struggled to the inn with a load of logs told us that the canals were freezing. News I did not welcome. It seemed we would have a bitter ride toward Parma’s troops, then a journey to the coast before we could meet our ship for the return journey. That was, if Berden ever returned and we could manage to ride anywhere at all. So thick was the snow by now that I feared being trapped in Amsterdam for weeks, until the thaw came.
The night of the second day of blizzard, I lay in bed listening to the wind howling round the corners of the building with a viciousness that seemed almost animate. Every so often there came a crash as a tile was ripped off the roof of the inn or one of the nearby buildings. There had already been a leak in the roof, Marta Penders told me, requiring buckets up under the eaves. It was close to a chimney, so the heat of the fire melted the adjacent snow, sending it dripping through the hole where two tiles had been torn away. All day and all night the bucket had to be emptied at regular intervals, for there would be no chance of mending the roof in this storm.
At last I slept and when I woke the world seemed strangely silent. The wind had dropped and light was filtering in around the shutters of my window. I crossed the floor, wincing at its icy touch on my feet, and opened them. A low red sun cast its light over a glittering snow-covered town, The wind had vanished. The snow was no longer falling. Down below I saw a workman, bundled up in a thick cloak, a scarf wound round his head and hat, making his way slowly across the square and leaving the first footprints to mark it, except for the feathery patterns of birds’ feet which were lightly etched on the surface. Away to the right I could see the canal, no longer a body of water shifting and stirring, but a solid road of ice. Even as I watched, I saw a group of young men sit down on the bank and strap skates to the soles of their boots, then laughing and shouting they launched themselves out on to the frozen canal, dipping and swooping across the ice. My heart lifted at seeing them and I longed to be able to glide like that, as swift and free as a bird in the air.
A few minutes later another group arrived, families with young children, carrying large round trays like the ones used to bring in huge joints of meat to the inn dining parlour. To my amazement, I saw parents setting the trays down on the ice and lifting children – quite small children, some as young as three or four – on to the trays. All the children were carrying pairs of stout sticks and once on the ice they began to propel themselves along by thrusting the sticks against the ice, almost as if they were rowing a boat. The youngest children did little but spin round and round on the spot, but the older ones, more skilled, were soon skimming along the ice at extraordinary speed, darting in amongst the skaters. At any moment I expected to see a collision, but it seemed both the skaters and the children were used to this extraordinary form of sport. I laughed at the spectacle, the boredom of the last few days quite banished as I dressed warmly and went downstairs. I thought that if I could not join in, at least I could go and watch the fun on the canal.
Everyone seemed cheered by the change in the weather. It was still bitterly cold, but the sight of the sun after the darkness of the blizzard was itself enough to raise one’s spirits. I spent the morning watching the sport on the canal, then after dinner decided to try once again to find the beggar and discover whether he could tell me more. Ettore Añez had given me his view of Cornelius Parker, but I wondered whether the beggar knew something else, something perhaps from the back streets of the town which would have been hidden from a merchant, a dealer in precious stones.
As I crossed the square I saw women turning away from the public well. Although I could not understand their speech, from their gestures it was clear that the well was frozen. Underfoot the top layer of the snow had also frozen into a hard crust which crunched and shattered under my feet, so that they sank into the softer snow below. It reached to my knees. Soon my boots and stockings were soaking and my legs felt as icy as the canals, but I ploughed on until I reached the church where I had first seen the beggar. He was not there.
A small crowd of local people was emerging from the church, shaking the hand of the minister and calling out brief greetings to each other before hurrying away to the warmth of their homes. As the minister went back into the church, I followed him.
Most of the people of Amsterdam I had met knew some English, so I spoke to him in English, hoping that he would understand.
‘Dominee, may I ask you about one of your parishioners?’ There was no evidence that the soldier was one of his parishioners, but it seemed a reasonable guess.
He turned and smiled politely. ‘What do you wish to know?’ His English was almost without any accent.
‘A few days ago I spoke to a former soldier, who was playing a pipe and begging outside your church. We spoke about Sluys. I am a physician from England who cared for many of the survivors. I thought I would speak to him again, but he is not there now. Perhaps it is too cold.’
I knew that I was being deliberately misleading in mentioning Sluys, but felt I needed to give some reason for my interest in the man.
‘I know the man you mean, Mijnheer. He does indeed live in this parish, though he rarely attends church. His sufferings, I am afraid, have turned him from God. His name is Hans Viederman.’
‘And you say he lives nearby?’
‘He does. If you turn right outside the door of the church and follow the narrow passage that runs along our outside wall, there are a few small houses on the other side. Hans’s house is the last of these.’
‘Does he have family?’
The minister shook his head sadly. ‘When he came home from the fighting, with . . . his legs like that . . . crippled, his wife left him and took their little boy with her. She has gone to live with her parents in a village about five miles from Amsterdam.