T. Boyle - World's End

It didn’t. Jeremias had headed south and east, skirting the big house and making instead toward the van der Meulen farm. Joost and the agent saw where he’d stopped to make water in the snow or nibble a few last withered berries and chew a bit of bark; they saw how the pegleg had grown heavier and dug deeper into the snow. And finally, to their everlasting relief, they saw that the tracks would indeed lead them across the Meulen Brook, past the great plank doors of Staats van der Meulen’s barn and into the warm, taper-lit, bread-smelling kitchen of Vrouw van der Meulen herself, a woman renowned all the way to Croton for her honingkoek and appelbeignet.

If they expected hospitality, if they sought the warmth of Meintje van der Meulen’s kitchen and smile too, they were disappointed. She greeted them at the door with an expression every bit as cold as the night at their backs. “Goedenavend,” said the agent, doffing his hat with a flourish.

Vrouw van der Meulen’s eyes shot suspiciously from agent to schout and then back again. Behind them they could hear the muffled lowing of the van der Meulen cattle as Staats forked down hay from the barn’s rafters. Meintje didn’t return the agent’s greeting, but merely stepped back and pulled the door open for them to enter.

Inside, it was heaven. The front room, which ran the length of the house and occupied the lion’s share of its space — there were smaller sleeping quarters in back — was warm as a featherbed with a good wife and two dogs in it. Flickering coals glowed in the huge hearth and the big blackened pot that hung over them gave off the most intoxicating aroma of meat broth. There were loaves in the beehive oven — Joost could smell them, ambrosia and manna — and a little spider pot of corn mush crouched over a handful of coals on the hearthstone. The kas doors were open and the table half set. In the far corner, an old water dog wearily lifted its head and two white-haired van der Meulen children gazed up at them with the look of cherubim.

“Well,” Meintje said finally, closing the door behind them, “whatever could bring the honorable commis and his colleague the schout to our lonely farm on such a night?”

Joost’s back was not nearly so bowed as when he was mounted, yet he still slumped badly. Working the plumed hat in his hands, he slouched against the doorframe and attempted an explanation. “Van Brunt,” he began, but was cut off by the officious agent, who laid out the patroon’s case against Harmanus’ sad and solitary heir as if he were pleading before a court of the accused’s peers (though of course there was neither need nor precedent for such a court, as the patroon was judge, jury and prosecutor on his own lands, and paid the schout and hangman to take care of the rest). He ended, having in the process managed to edge closer to the hearth and its paradisaic aromas, by attesting that they’d followed the malefactor’s trail right on up to the goude vrouw’s doorstep.

Meintje waited until he’d finished and then she plucked a wooden spoon from the cupboard and began to curse him — curse them —Joost, to his horror, equally indicted in her wrath. They were the criminals — no, worse, they were fiends, cloven-hoofed duyvils, followers of Beelzebub and his unholy tribe. How could they even think to hound the poor orphaned child from the only home he knew? How could they? Were they Christians? Were they men? Human beings even? For a full five minutes Meintje excoriated them, all the while brandishing the wooden spoon like the sword of righteousness. With each emphatic gesture she backed the agent up till he’d given over his hard-won place at the hearth and found himself pressing his buttocks to the cold unyielding planks of the door as if he would melt into them, while Joost slumped so low in shame and mortification he could have unbuckled his boots with his teeth.

It was at this juncture that Staats, bringing with him a stale whiff of the barn and a jacket of cold, slammed through the door. In doing so, he relocated the agent’s center of gravity and sent him reeling halfway across the room, where he fetched up against the birch rocker with a look of wounded dignity. Staats was a powerful, big-nosed, raw-skinned man with eyes so intense they were like twin slaps in the face. He seemed utterly bewildered by the presence of commis and schout, though he must have seen their blanketed horses tied outside the door. “Holy Moeder in heaven,” he rumbled. “What’s this?”

“Staats,” Meintje cried, rushing to him and repeating his name twice more in a plaintive wail, “they’ve come for the boy.”

“Boy?” he repeated, as if the word were new to him. His eyes roved about the room, searching for a clue, and he lifted his mink cap to scratch a head as hard and hairless as a chestnut.

“Little Jeremias,” his wife whispered in clarification.

Joost watched them uneasily. As he would later learn, the boy had turned up some two hours earlier begging for shelter and a bit to eat. Vrouw van der Meulen had at first shut the door on him in horror — a haunt had appeared on her stoep, withered and mutilated, one of the undead — but when she took a second look, she saw only the half-starved child, motherless in the snow. She’d held him to her, bundled him up in front of the fire, fed him soup, hot chocolate and honey cake while her own curious brood pressed around. Why hadn’t he come sooner? she asked. Where had he been all this time? Didn’t he know that she and Staats and the Oothouses too thought he’d perished in the blaze that took his poor moeder?

No, he’d said, shaking his head, no, and she’d wondered whether he was responding to her question or denying some horror she couldn’t know. The fire, he murmured, and his voice was slow and halting, the voice of the hermit, the pariah, the anchorite who spoke only to trees and birds. They’d all been out in the fields that fateful afternoon, hoeing up weeds and clattering pans to keep the maes dieven out of the corn and wheat — all except for Katrinchee, that is, who was off somewhere with Mohonk the Kitchawank. Jeremias had regained his strength by then and was able to get around pretty well on the strut he’d carved from a piece of cherrywood, but his solicitous mother had sent him off to drive away the birds while she and Wouter did the heavier work. When the storm broke, he lost sight of them; next thing he knew the cabin was in flames. When Staats and the Oothouse man had come around he’d hidden in the woods with his cattle, hidden in shock and fear and shame. But now he could hide no longer.

“Jeremias?” Staats repeated, comprehension trickling into his features like water dripping through a hole in the roof. “I’ll kill them first,” he said, glaring at Joost and the agent.

It was then that the subject of the controversy appeared in the doorway to the back room — a thin boy, but big-boned and tall for his age. He was wearing a woolen shirt, knee breeches and a single heavy stocking borrowed from the van der Meulen’s eldest boy, and he stood wide-legged, cocked defiantly on his wooden peg. The look on his face was something Joost would never forget. It was a look of hatred, a look of defiance, of contempt for authority, for rapiers, baldrics, silver plumes and accounts ledgers alike, a look that would have challenged the patroon himself had he been there to confront it. His voice was low, soft, the voice of a child, but the scorn in it was unmistakable. “You looking for me?” he asked.

The following summer, a dramatic and sweeping change was to come to New Amsterdam and the sleepy settlements along the North River. It was a hot still morning in late August when Klaes Swits, a Breucklyn clam-digger, looked up from his rake to see five British men-o’-war bobbing at anchor in the very neck of the Narrows. In his haste to apprise the governor and his council of this extraordinary discovery, he unhappily lost his anchor, splintered both his oars and his rake in the bargain, and was finally reduced to paddling Indian-style all the way from the South Breucklyn Bight to the Battery. As it turned out, the clamdigger’s mission was superfluous — as all of New Amsterdam would know three hours later, the ships were commanded by Colonel Richard Nicolls of the Royal Navy, who was demanding immediate capitulation and surrender of the entire province to Charles II, king of England. Charles laid claim to all territory on the coast of North America from Cape Fear River in the south to the Bay of Fundy in the north, on the basis of English exploration that antedated the Dutch cozening of the Manhattoes Indians. John Smith had been there before any cheese-eating Dutchmen, Charles insisted, and Sebastian Cabot too. And as if that weren’t enough, the very isle of the Manhattoes and the river that washed it had been discovered by an Englishman, even if he was sailing for the Nederlanders.