On this day of the ice-fete, smartly dressed skaters fill the frozen canals off the Rhine. Lysbeth van Hout speeds happily down the canal, surrounded by the lovely winter landscape of Leyden with its lofty churches of St. Peter and St. Pancras in the near distance, windmills spotting the snow-covered landscape farther away.

Then someone stops her -- Martha the Mare, with a harrowing look, to give Lysbeth this warning: "Listen! -- that unless they cast out the cursed Spaniard, a day shall come when the folk of Leyden must perish by thousands of hunger behind those walls!"

Lysbeth, her beloved cousin Dirk van Goorl, and all their fellow townsfolk sit at the brink of peril -- for these are the years of Emperor Charles V, when famine, pestilence and the scaffold will threaten the very fabric of everyday life!