by Mike Ashley
“Blimey, Sheriff, it’s me own sleeping blanket,” Dolittle said, taking Tonneman’s attention from the speck in the distance.
Tonneman dug a stuiver from his sodden wallet and tossed it to the old soldier, who caught it expertly.
Dolittle’s face brightened, “I got me another blanket in the hut. You want to buy that one, too?”
Tonneman waved a dismissive hand at the soldier and paced to keep his blood flowing. He would have been on his way back to Pos and the dead woman, but the speck on the Broad Way Road turned into a young man with shiny black hair, a Johnnie by the look of him, swatting his black steed on the flank with his wide-brimmed, abundantly red-plumed, black hat to goad it on. A man in a hurry. He galloped at full tilt, his black velvet cloak flying behind him. At the Gate he reined in his horse.
“Good day, sir.” The-man-in-a-hurry swung his hat first left and then right and bowed from the waist sliding dangerously in his saddle in the process.
“And who might you be?” Tonneman said, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. “We are under curfew due to an Indian war party seen in Johnnie Land.” The traveller was ruddy complected, high of cheekbone, narrow-eyed.
“I am John Lundt from New Haven way. I have just passed the night in Greenwich and there was no sign of any war party.”
“What business have you here?”
“Who is asking?”
“The Sheriff of New-York.”
“There’s a blessing. Would you be so kind as to direct me to the home of my Aunt Margarieta van Lundt?” With another grand gesture, the stranger replaced his hat and slid off his horse, landing splat in the road.
Tuesday, 30 November. Early morning
“There the fool was lying on the ground like Gretchen Goderis, as if he, too, was sleeping in his own bed. Only while poor Gretchen was dead, this buffoon was drunk. I left him with Dolittle to sleep it off. We have more important fish to fry.” Tonneman was standing backside to the Governor’s fire, so close he’d begun to steam, giving off putrid odours as the frost melted from his wet clothing. His boots were caked with mud.
The Governor’s nostrils twitched; he took a lacy cloth reeking of lavender from his sleeve and held it to his nose. “You mean the death of a charwoman?”
Nicholls’s response was so like that of his former boss, Pieter Stuyvesant, Tonneman had to repress a laugh. “It was murder, sir.”
The Governor picked up his dog and laughed when the animal licked his lips. The spaniel, satin eyes shining, stared at Tonneman as if to say, see how grand I am.
“What would you have me do?” The Governor was irritated. He’d just received another missive from Connecticut Governor Winthrop, instructing him on how to govern New-York. Nicholls knew that he had thwarted John Winthrop’s ambition, which was to extend his own domination into New-York.
James, Duke of York and His Majesty King Charles’s brother, had directed that Nicholls take possession of the Island of Manhattan as it was crucial for trading routes. James had no intention of letting New England become supreme in the colonies. Nicholls gave the brocade band a firm tug and somewhere in the house came the faint sound of a bell.
“The Director-General always liked to know what was going on,” Tonneman said, thinking that Governor Nicholls seemed very much at home in Stuyvesant’s Great White House in town, having banished Stuyvesant to the Bouwerie until he was ready to return to The Netherlands. On the other hand, Nicholls was of the sea.
Tonneman, who’d been a sailor as a young man, after his father had lost everything when the bottom had dropped out of the tulip market, knew the call of the sea. But for their guns, he’d actually enjoyed watching the English vessels sweeping through the water with their beautiful milky sails puffed and billowing.
Nicholls’s aide, Captain Geoffrey Hughes, entered with a steaming cup of tea and a platter of biscuits, along with a stack of documents. Tonneman, inhaling the fragrant steam of the strong tea halfway across the chamber, longed for his own hot dark brew and a change of his filthy garments, from which a noxious vapour was rising as the ice melted.
Hughes set his burden down on the fine Dutch desk, then retreated.
“The death of a charwoman is of no importance to me,” Nicholls said, biting into a biscuit.
“A very wealthy charwoman.” Tonneman’s innards growled. He was reminded he had left his house without so much as a bite of bread and cheese, it having been too early for Katrina Root to lay out his breakfast. What he wouldn’t give for a bowl of hot soup. Perhaps he could get some at the jail in the basement of City Hall where Vrouw Root also provided meals for prisoners housed there.
“What say you?” Nicholls demanded.
“This charwoman inherited the van Lundt estate. Former poor charwoman or not, she owned a large estate on the East River and a trunk full of gold guilders. She was out of duffel and into silk to fit her new station before her benefactor was cold in her grave. I’ll wager the suitors, both English and Dutch, were lining up at her door.”
“Balderdash,” the Governor exploded, his face going dark, words flying from his mouth like pieces of shot. “Lord deliver me from Dutch nonsense. Under English law women inherit neither property nor lands. New-York is an English colony. English law will prevail.”
“Our citizens will not be pleased.” English law struck Tonneman as grossly unfair. Every child should have the same share of a legacy.
Nicholls moved on. “And who will now inherit the estate and the gold guilders?”
Ah, Tonneman thought, I have finally got through to him. “I’ll have a little talk with the drunken lout sleeping it off in Dolittle’s shack. He claims to be kin to the late widow van Lundt. I’ll have to break the news to him that she’s dead.”
Nicholls stroked his dog’s sleek head and looked down at the documents on his desk. If there was legitimate kin, the vast estate and the gold guilders would not go into the coffers of the colony’s namesake, the Duke of York.
“Be off and do your duty, Sheriff, and let me do mine, but make well certain this lout is the legitimate heir.” After a pause the Governor added, “If he’s not, there might be a recovery fee in it for you.”
Tonneman kept a bland expression. He knew what Nicholls was offering. “And the curfew?”
“Any sign of this raiding party?”
“Not a one.” Who, come to think of it, had started the ridiculous rumour about an Indian raiding party? A courier? What courier? He had never seen any courier. Was the point to keep anyone from stumbling on the murder and finding the body before the red tails had picked it clean? Or had Stael lied about the courier?
A man stood waiting in the outer room when Tonneman left Nicholls. “Good day, Tonneman.”
“Van Brugge.” Tonneman noted that the miller wore clean clothing befitting an English gentleman and fine leather boots. There was not a flake of mill dust on him.
“Bridge.”
“So you’ve turned back into a Johnnie, have you?” Tonneman wasn’t surprised. Years before, when he’d come to New Amsterdam and opened his mill, Charles Bridge had taken the Dutch equivalent of his name, Carel van Brugge.
“We are an English colony now, Tonneman.”
“We are indeed.”
“What is driving the hawks?”
“Gretchen Goderis is dead.”
“Ah, the illegitimate heir.”
“Legitimate by our laws. There was a will, after all.”
“Our laws.” Bridge practically spat the words. “Our law is English now. Women have no right to property of their own.”
“And a good day to you, too, Bridge,” Tonneman said, with a touch of irony as he stepped outside.
No sooner had Tonneman opened the front door of the Great White House into the bitter wind, than he was besieged by the grumbling populace crowding the Broad Way.
“I have an announcement,” he shouted over the noise.
“Is the curfew lifted?” Sybout Huygens ran the Indian trading post just o
utside the Wall. With the curfew, he was losing money.
Tonneman waved Huygens off. “Gretchen Goderis has been murdered. In the wood beyond the Wall.”
The crowd oohed and aahed. A woman cried out. Babies were hushed.
“By Indians?” someone yelled.
“Perhaps, perhaps not.”
This piece of news gave everyone pause. Tonneman knew that most were thinking more about the van Lundt fortune than the danger of Indians. No one could ever say that his village was not interested in commerce. And money.
“Did anyone see her come into town for the curfew?”
Many glances were exchanged, but no response came.
“Did you see any Indians?” Keyser called out, eager to return to his tannery.
“Not a one,” Tonneman said.
“Then lift the curfew!”
“Yes, yes,” a chorus began. “Lift the curfew.”
“Consider it lifted.”
“You might have told us sooner.”
“Go back to work,” Tonneman growled, tensing his body against the wind. “Except you, Keyser. I have a job for you.”
Keyser, small and wiry, a hard drinker, more belligerent than most, was immediately suspicious. “What kind of job? I’m a busy man.”
“Horse thieves! Horse thieves!”
The citizens, who’d begun to drift off to their various labours, stopped to watch the blacksmith, Dirk Baalde, running toward them, hollering like a wild man. Baalde, who maintained a forge inside the Fort, had arms and legs like tree trunks; his red beard was stained with oily soot. Tonneman didn’t like Dirk Baalde. He was a cruel man, to horses and to people.
“They’ve taken my Gretchen.”
Tonneman was shocked and surprised. He had no idea that Gretchen Goderis had anything to do with Baalde. “I don’t know how to tell you . . .”
“That damn mare is always slipping her reins however I tie her. Someone has stolen her, for sure. And the cart she was hitched to as well. I told Pos last night. She’s a bay. What have you done about it, Sheriff?”
“Nothing,” Tonneman admitted. “But you can be assured we intend to scour the village and beyond for her.” And, he thought, perhaps when we find Gretchen the mare and her cart, we’ll find they were used to carry Gretchen the former maidservant to her death.
He told Keyser to fetch Gretchen Goderis’s remains to the churchyard for burial. “And tell Pos to meet me at City Hall.”
“I want to be paid in shillings.”
“Which I do not have in my purse right now. A stuiver will have to do.”
“I want shillings.”
“One shilling. Submit your reckoning and I’ll see it’s paid.”
As the crowd dispersed, Tonneman hurried toward City Hall. Who was it had brought news of the band of Indians? He had to get things done before he could go home for clean, dry clothes and bread and cheese.
Instead of going to City Hall, he headed for the King Charles, the tavern formerly known as the Pear Tree.
The Sheriff had seen Willem Stael there often enough, and it was where he would start looking for the post rider, who carried the post among the Dutch settlements as far north as Beaverwyk. Since September and the English take-over of New Amsterdam, Stael was doing the same from New-York to New Haven, where he met the post from Boston and exchanged letters.
Stael was the one who had told of a courier warning about the Indian threat. Had he lied? If, so, why?
It had gotten colder, but the weather mattered not to the children, who screamed as they played their hoop games along the shore, nor to the old woman, her skirts grazing the incoming tide, who was digging for clams with a long shovel.
Tonneman breathed in the fragrant beer and gin aroma of the King Charles, which he still thought of as the Pear Tree. He remembered when he and Hendrik Jansen Smitt and Joost Zoelan would drink and talk through soulful nights until they became ghosts of themselves with the dawn.
He shook off the memories, good and bad, for the business at hand: Willem Stael himself. With a few well-placed thumps, he ejected Stael’s outraged companions; it was obvious from the coins scattered about that Stael was paying the fare. The drunken sot didn’t even chase after the vagrant English penny that fell from his leather purse and rolled off the plank table to the floor, where a fellow drinker artfully hid it under a wet boot.
Tonneman seized Stael by the collar, lifting the little man out of the tavern and onto Pearl Street. The yellow dog, sleeping near the back door roused itself and began to bark.
“Good day to you, Sheriff.” The post rider was slobbering drunk. “Just getting my throat wet before my next ride to New Haven.”
“Any wetter you’ll drown.” Tonneman set the little man on his feet, but Stael’s feet wouldn’t support him and he collapsed on the ground, a clump of wet rags. Almost immediately, such a great snore arose from the clump, that the yellow dog showed his teeth. Tonneman nudged the drunken post rider with the toe of his boot. Dead to the world, for a time at least.
Hearing Tonneman’s roar of frustration, Arent Evertsen, the owner of the King Charles, came running to the door. “What’s ailing you, Tonneman?”
“When did Stael get here?” The Sheriff bent over the sleeping post rider and detached his leather purse. All English money. A considerable amount that the fool hadn’t yet drunk away.
“Well . . . I didn’t notice. Not long since I opened.” Evertsen was wary, his eyes on the money. He’d obviously kept open after hours.
“Nonsense! Stael couldn’t have gotten this drunk this fast.”
Evertsen looked bemused.
“Where did Willie get all the money?”
“How would I know?”
“I’m not concerned right now that you were serving after hours.”
“Come in and we’ll have a pipe,” Evertsen said, suddenly full of goodwill.
“I’d rather have something hot,” Tonneman said, heading directly to the fire.
“Rum.”
“Food.”
“Rabbit stew.”
“Good.” His backside nearly normal, Tonneman turned to warm his front.
“And a beer?”
“How would you like my knife up your arse? You know I gave up the drink. Fetch my rabbit stew.”
“As you say.”
When the tavern keeper didn’t move, Tonneman shouted, “Now.”
They sat on two empty brandywine barrels near the fire. Evertsen filled his pipe while Tonneman shovelled in the stew. It was terrible but it was hot. The yellow dog lay at their feet, his tongue occasionally darting out for any drops of gravy Tonneman let fall.
Sated, Tonneman filled his pipe. “Well?”
“Someone else went to New Haven, not Stael,” Evertsen said.
“Another post rider took his place?”
“I suppose.”
“Who?”
Silent, Evertsen made a show of lighting their pipes. They breathed in the rich tobacco.
“Then why does Stael have all this money?” The Sheriff patted Stael’s purse.
Shouts rang out for Evertsen to fill empty tankards. The tavern owner stood. “Maybe someone paid him for the privilege of taking his place.”
And why would someone do that, a warmer, dryer, less hungry Tonneman thought, as he walked through the noisy tavern to the street. He’d have to wait till Stael was sober to get his answer.
The sun glared in his eyes as he stepped outside. For a moment he could see nothing. When his vision cleared, he saw that the bundle of rags called Willem Stael was gone.
“It’s a bloody conspiracy,” he shouted. He was alone on the street, the only sound the lap, lap of the water, driven by the icy wind, hitting the beach.
He led Venus into her stall, gave her water and oats, and removed her saddle. His hurried brushing of her damp coat was far less than the dependable beast deserved.
Only then did he enter his house. No warmth greeted him. The fire Vrouw Root had left hours earlier was
barely smoldering. He added a good sized log and it came to life. Under a cloth were a slab of cheese, a fragrant loaf of bread, and a mug of buttermilk. As always, the good Vrouw had filled a pitcher with fresh water, which he held now to the fire to melt the ice crystals, then poured into a basin. After a wash-up and a change of clothing he chipped the icy veil on the buttermilk, and eased his wolfish hunger, banishing the vile taste of Evertsen’s stew. Pos arrived as he was finishing.
“No beer?” The Deputy set his knapsack on the floor.
“No beer, what is worse, no post rider.”
“Stael?”
“He was slobbering drunk in the King Charles treating everyone in sight to brandywine.”
“Ah,” Pos said, cutting himself a wedge of cheese.
“Yes, and he had a purse full of English money.”
“Where –?”
“Don’t ask me. I left him sleeping under the pear tree, hoping the cold would sober him up.”
“Or kill him.”
“That, too,” said Tonneman. “Evertsen said Stael was talking about someone paying him not to take the post to New Haven. That someone may have taken Stael’s place.”
“Let’s go to the jail and beat the truth out of him.”
Tonneman slammed the table. “Your fool of a Sheriff didn’t watch close enough and the scoundrel had a chance to walk away.”
“Horse piss.” Pos lifted his hat and scratched his head. “Dirk Baalde claims someone stole his bay mare and a small cart.”
“The better to carry a dead woman unseen to the wood?”
“Practical.” Another head scratch from Pos. “Maybe not dead? Alive and even talking. But why would she go? Did she go willingly?”
Tonneman agreed. “No problem with Keyser?”
“Always a problem with Keyser. He wants to be paid a bounty because I took something from the body and what was left of poor Gretchen’s clothing wouldn’t make a nose rag.” Pos reached for his knapsack and brought out the mismade arrow.