T. Boyle - World's End

Well, all that was about to change.

He planned to live at the upper house himself till the weather turned, tightening the reins on his tenants and putting things in order so he could install his dunderhead of a cousin in the place without having to worry about its falling to wrack and ruin. In a decade’s time he’d want the house for Rombout, his eldest boy, and when he passed on himself, the lower house — and the Cats farm — would go to Oloffe, his middle son, and Pieter, the youngest. But for now he was here with his family to live beneath the roof of the fine old stone house his father and uncle had raised not thirty years ago, and he meant to put all his energy into it. Old Ter Dingas Bosyn, the commis, would look after the lower house and the goods due in from Rotterdam at the end of the month, and he had Cats to see to things in Croton as well. And then, of course, it wasn’t as if he were going into exile on a desert isle or anything — the lower house was no more than half a day’s ride, if something should come up.

It took him a week to get settled. His mother, who’d been living there alone, was cold and irascible, and he spent the first several days trying to disabuse her of the notion that he’d come to turn her out to her martyrdom among the beasts of the wilderness. Then there was Vrouw van Bilevelt, the housekeeper, who took every suggestion as a personal affront, regarded Pompey and Calpurnia as cannibals in Dutch clothing, and fought bitterly over every cup, saucer and stick of furniture Hester brought into the house. And finally, there was the sticky question of the de Vries. It was they — Gerrit Jacobzoon de Vries, his wife and two cretinous sons — who’d managed the farm all these years — and managed it badly. On the very first night, after a dinner of stewed eel and cabbage charred into the pan out of spite by a murderous-looking Vrouw van Bilevelt, Stephanus summoned Gerrit de Vries to the front parlor. He began by saying how much he appreciated the long and honorable service Gerrit had given him and his father before him, sketched in his plans for the upper house and mill, and ended by offering him a new farm out beyond the van der Meulens’ place, on the same terms he’d offer any prospective tenant — a stake in building materials, livestock and farm machinery, all improvements descending to the patroon, quitrent due in November.

De Vries was struck dumb. His face flushed; he turned his hat over in his rough hands. Finally, in his peasant’s Dutch, he managed to stammer, “You — you mean, start all over again?”

Mijnheer nodded.

The rest was simple. De Vries spat at his feet and the patroon had van den Post show him to the door. The following morning, after thirteen years at the upper house, the de Vries were gone.

Once all that had been settled, the patroon set van den Post to work on the farm and ordered the carpenter to begin reroofing the house and hauling stone to frame the two-story addition that would more than double the size of the place. Then he turned his thoughts to road building. And widening.

It was on a fine hot August morning, while the blackberries ripened in the woods, the corn grew sweet in the fields and the crabs crawled right up out of the bay and into the pot, that the patroon called on his tenants to give him the labor that was his due. By eight o’clock they were there, gathered in front of the house with their carts and teams, their axes and shovels and harrows. The patroon, dressed in flowing rhinegrave breeches and a sleeveless silk jerkin, and mounted on the sleek Narragansett pacer the schout had brought up from Croton for him, acknowledged each of them with a lordly nod of his head — first the van der Meulens, old Staats and his son, Douw, who leased his own farm now; next the Cranes and Ten Haers and Reinier Oothouse’s boy, who’d taken over after the delirium tremens softened his father’s brain; and finally, the Lents, the Robideaus, the Mussers and Sturdivants.

All told, there were nearly two hundred people living on the Van Wart estate, upper and lower manors combined, but the majority of these were gathered along the Hudson in Croton and sprinkled inland along the Croton River. Up here, on the northern verge of Stephanus’ estate, there were only ten farms under cultivation, and a total, at last count, of fifty-nine souls — excluding, of course, the ragged band of Kitchawanks at Indian Point and the twenty-six free subjects of the Crown who lived at Pieterse’s Kill, on plots the trader had sold them for fifty times what he’d paid for them. Ten farms. That was four more than there’d been in his father’s time, but in the Jongheer’s eyes it was nothing. Not even a start.

He’d been buying up land to the east from a degenerate tribe of the Connecticuts, and to the south from the Sint Sinks. And by skillful recruitment among the dazed and seasick immigrants who staggered ashore at the Battery with little more than the wind at their backs and stuffed-up noses, he’d managed to find tenants for nearly all the choice Croton plots — and he would find more, a hundred more, to domesticate the wild lands up here. What he wanted was nothing less than to amass the biggest estate in the Colony, a manor that would make the great estates of Europe look like so many vegetable patches. It had become his obsession, his overmastering desire, the one thing that made him forget the paved streets, the quiet taverns, the music, art and society of Leyden and Amsterdam. He looked out over the sun-burnished faces of the farmers who’d come to build him a road — a road that would bring swarms of beholden peasants up from the river to fell the trees, fire the stumps and plow up the ground — and for the briefest moment he saw it all as it would one day be, the hills rolling with wheat, onions sprouting from the marshes, pumpkins and cabbages and crookneck squash piled up like riches, like gold. …

But then one of the farmers cleared his throat and spoke up, and the picture was gone. It was Robideau, a bitter, leathery Frenchman who’d lost an ear in a calamitous brawl outside the Ramapo tavern, which mysteriously burnt to the ground a week later. Robideau sat high up on the hard plank seat of his wagon, his close-set eyes gleaming, the whip lazily flicking at the flies that settled on the blistered rumps of his oxen. “And what about Van Brunt,” he said. “The pegleg. Where’s he?”

Van Brunt? For a moment the patroon was confused, having so successfully suppressed the memory of that ancient and unseemly confrontation that he’d forgotten Jeremias existed. But in the next moment he was back in that miserable hovel, the schout laid out on the hard dirt floor, Jeremias Van Brunt defying him, challenging him with a crude aboriginal weapon, and slim pretty dark-eyed little Neeltje regarding him from her bed of sin. You don’t own Neeltje, Jeremias said. And you don’t own me.

“It is because he’s married to the schout’s daughter — is that why he gets special treatment?”

Van Brunt. Yes: where in hell was he? Stephanus turned to the schout, who’d come up from Croton the previous evening to oversee the road work. “Well?” he said.

Cats was bowed nearly to the ground as he shuffled forward to make his excuses. “I don’t know where he is, Mijnheer,” he said in a voice so halting and reluctant he seemed to gag on each word. “I’ve informed him, and — and he said he would come.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” The patroon leaned forward in his saddle, the great billowing folds of his breeches engulfing his stockings, his buckled pumps and the stirrups too. “That’s very generous of him.” And then, straightening up again so that he towered over the schout like an equestrian monument come to life, he cursed so vilely and emphatically that young Johannes Musser snatched a hand to his mouth and Mistress Sturdivant, the stoutest woman in Van Wartwyck, fainted dead away. “I want him here within the hour,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth. “Understand?”