by Mike Ashley
“Good man.” Tonneman studied the murder weapon, turning it over and over in his hand.
“I tried the same thing,” Pos said, “but it’s not talking. Maybe a little beer would help.”
“Have a look in the taverns for Stael.” Tonneman was grave. “But if you drink more than one beer . . .”
Pos winked at him. “I’m as good as my word. Where will you be?”
“It’s time I talked to the other sot, John Lundt, who’s sleeping himself sober in Dolittle’s guard post. Unless he too has crawled off.”
Tuesday, 30 November. Noon
“Sorry, old girl.” Venus swung her head around and nipped at his shoulder as Tonneman re-saddled the weary mare.
The winds had calmed but Tonneman still sniffed snow in the air. Even with his belly full, his clothing clean and dry, he was not content, what with a murder so soon after the English took the town. He whistled through his teeth as he rode back to the Broad Way Gate and the sentinel hut. His mood changed quickly when he found Dolittle and the man who called himself John Lundt, breeches down, throwing dice over who would enjoy the charms of Honore, Sweet Lips’ newest whore, who was dancing half naked around the gamblers, egging them on.
Swinging his cudgel, Tonneman ended the game like Samson in the unholy temple, very nearly breaking the heads of the gamblers as they scrambled to escape the club. He sent Honore on her way with orders to tell Sweet Lips that she and her girls were banned from New-York for a week because of Honore’s transgression. “But she’ll be angry with me,” Honore said, draping herself over Tonneman, her red, unbound hair lashing his face.
Tonneman pushed the whore away. “I’m depending on it. I don’t judge you for your trade, but I will not have it interfering with me, my work, or my town.”
Honore dressed quickly. As she left she stuck her tongue out at the Sheriff. He laughed, kicked Lundt and told him to get dressed. He didn’t even bother to talk to Dolittle; mercifully the soldier was Nicholls’s problem, not his.
Pos stumbled out of the Rocking Horse. He could hardly see straight. In every tavern he’d set foot – and there were more than a dozen just on Pearl Street and the Broad Way – no one would tell him anything unless he put down a stuiver for a beer. Pos wouldn’t have had it any other way. And stuiver for stuiver, tankard for tankard, no one had seen Stael since the previous day.
The Broad Way was teeming with riders, carts, commercial activity. It was giving him a headache. He was leaning on the hitching post when with a bleary eye he caught sight of a slightly built boy in black garments across the road staring at him intently.
He beckoned to the boy, who had taken on the aspect of a deer, with its soft eyes and shy manner. Horse piss. A deer in a black suit. Pos shook his head, wiped his eyes. The boy was not a deer, but in fact, one of the Jews, and he was opening his mouth to speak.
Pos stood up as straight as he could while holding tight to the hitching post.
“The Sheriff,” the boy said. His beard was like fine moss.
“Not me. Tonneman.”
“Heer Levy told me to find the Sheriff or his Deputy.”
“You have found his Deputy. Captain Pos, at Heer Levy’s service.”
“You must come at once to his tavern. It is very important.”
Levy’s tavern, where Pos had not thought to go, was at the Water Gate. Pos’s spirits brightened. “Lead on, boy. Let’s see how good Jewish beer is this month.”
Tonneman and a subdued Lundt rode through the Broad Way Gate and into the countryside beyond the Wall. Snow, soft as meal, began to fall, seeming to hesitate for a brief moment in the heavy clouds before spilling to earth.
“Tell me again,” Tonneman said. “In what way are you related to the Widow van Lundt?”
The young man leaned sideways and vomited. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and edged his horse even with Tonneman. Tonneman repeated the question, but he was distracted by Lundt’s eyes. For the first time he noticed that they were two different colours. One blue as Delft tile, the other green.
“My dear departed father was her brother . . . ?” Lundt’s voice drifted into a question.
They were riding again when Tonneman remarked, “The Widow van Lundt was born a Dircksen.”
The young man looked momentarily puzzled, then brightened. “You didn’t let me finish. I mean, my dear departed father was her brother-in-law.”
Tonneman grunted. He turned Venus onto a curved road. They’d reached the van Lundt estate. The manor house looked deserted. No smoke from the chimney, no light in the windows. There was light, however, and chimney smoke coming from the much smaller house a distance beyond the manor, where Jacobus Oopdyk, the estate manager, lived with his old mother.
A horse and cart stood in front of that house while Jacobus Oopdyk and his mother unloaded provisions they had obviously purchased while they were quarantined in town. As Tonneman and Lundt dismounted, Oopdyk left the labours to his mother and walked toward them with that rolling gait that proclaimed him a former sailor.
“Halloo, Tonneman. What brings you here?” Though he wasn’t known as a drinking man, Oopdyk’s knobby red nose and his face, a collection of damaged veins, belied the fact. Oopdyk with his broken teeth was no souse. But he was a fighting man ready to take the smallest word or the slightest remark as an insult.
“Ah, you’ve come about my late mistress, the heiress,” he said with a vulgar laugh. “And who’d be this dandy Johnnie giving me the evil eye?” He stared at young Lundt as if challenging him to combat.
“You didn’t like poor Gretchen?”
“Poor?” Oopdyk sneered and spat. “Poor? Nothing poor about her. She saw to that, didn’t she? Made herself an heiress, then told me to get out. She had plans, she said, and they didn’t include me and my poor old mother.”
“You don’t say?” Tonneman glanced beyond Oopdyk to where his mother was carrying a heavy bag of meal into their house. No sign that they were in the process of moving out.
“Can we get on with this? I demand to know where my kinswoman is.”
“It distresses me to break the sad news, but your kinswoman van Lundt died well over a month ago,” Tonneman said.
“Good heavens! What a terrible shock! Dear Auntie van Lundt.” Lundt swayed against his horse, fumbling for his nose cloth and then made a show of dabbing non-existent tears from his eyes.
The performance stopped even Oopdyk from speaking.
Tonneman rolled his eyes heavenward. God save him.
“It’s very cold standing out here.” Lundt whining, tucked his lace-trimmed nose cloth away. “I’d like to sit by a warm fire and think about this sad occasion.”
“Your dear auntie left her property to her maidservant, Gretchen Goderis. If you are the proper heir, why did she not leave it to you?”
“We had not seen each other for years,” Lundt said, retrieving his nose cloth once more and sobbing into it. “Besides, didn’t you say that this maidservant is dead?”
“Oh, yes,” Tonneman said. “Very dead.”
“Has any other heir stepped forward?”
“None. Unless we consider yourself.”
“Ipso facto.” Lundt gathered himself together and strode to the front door of the house. “I am the rightful heir.” With a self-satisfied smirk he ended with, “I will not trouble you further, Sheriff.” He turned to Oopdyk, who had followed him to the door. “Consider yourself rehired. I’ll have a fire and some victuals. I’m tired and hungry.”
Oopdyk’s face lit up. “Thank you, sir, fine sir,” he said, bowing and scraping.
“Not just yet, I’m afraid,” Tonneman said. “This problem must be adjudicated by your aunt’s attorney-at-law. There was a will.”
A crafty expression appeared on Oopdyk’s gnarled face. “Now that you mention it, I do remember the Widow van Lundt speaking about her long lost nephew.”
“Get out of here, Oopdyk.”
“I’ll have the house made ready for you, sir, don’t
you worry.” The knobby-nosed man ran off, loudly calling the good news to his mother.
When Tonneman turned back to Lundt, he saw Lundt entering the house. The Sheriff hurried after and found Lundt, playing the Burgher, inspecting the great room with its heavy Old Country furniture and Eastern rugs.
“Very nice,” Lundt murmured, pleased.
“We’ll have to ride back to town,” Tonneman said, but he too was impressed by the opulence, by the portrait paintings on the walls. Everything seemed to be in place, no sign of disturbance. “We have to talk to the lawyer for the estate.”
“It’s not right,” Lundt said, petulantly. “You heard the man. He knows I’m the legitimate heir.”
“Oopdyk knows what’s in his purse and his belly, nothing more.” Tonneman paused in front of a portrait of a youthful woman and a child, a boy of perhaps two years with a moon-shaped face, hooded eyes, and a vacant smile. He recognized the woman as a much younger Margarieta van Lundt, but the child? To his knowledge, the van Lundts had been childless.
“Do you recognize these people?” Tonneman asked Lundt, who was holding an ornate silver candelabrum close to his breast.
“No.” Lundt resumed inspecting his inheritance.
“Well, your dear auntie van Lundt is the lady.”
Lundt opened a large kas, then closed it. The women’s dresses inside didn’t interest him. But the bottles and glasses in the low cabinet opposite did.
Foregoing a glass, he drank from the bottle. The perfume of brandy filled the air as Lundt wandered back to the painting. “I wouldn’t have known her that youthful.”
As good an answer as Tonneman expected. He tried again. “Who might the child be? You, perhaps?”
“I hardly think so,” Lundt said, his words slurred. “That is obviously an idiot child.”
It was Tonneman’s own thought.
They headed back to town with the wind swirling the snow around them.
“Halloo, halloo,” Dolittle called as they approached the Broad Way Gate. They could barely see him for the snow, nor hear him over the wind. “Tonneman, you are to go at once to the Jew’s tavern.”
Tuesday, 30 November. Early Afternoon
Sitting on pilings above the water line of the East River, was Asser Levy’s slaughterhouse, the stink almost as foul as Keyser’s tannery. Levy’s slaughterhouse, butcher shop, and tavern were positioned immediately inside the Wall.
Pos had tipped over the horse trough in front of Levy’s tavern while Levy and four other Jews formed a human barrier to keep the curious away. As Tonneman came close, he saw the missing post rider Willem Stael, lying like a dead fish in the icy water from Levy’s horse trough.
Tonneman sighed. For a former drinking man the Sheriff was usually tolerant of drunkards. But, by Christ, today had been too much. While Lundt gaped, Tonneman dismounted.
“Dead?”
“What else?” Pos said. “A drowned or frozen drunk is what it looks like. Should we be suspicious?”
Tonneman turned Stael’s sodden body and rolled back the collar of his coat. “What do you think, Deputy?”
“Marks on the back of his neck.”
“As if someone held him down till he drowned.”
From behind them, came a distinctive moan. They turned to see fear on Lundt’s face. He was gripping the reins, hands trembling. Tonneman cocked an eyebrow at Pos. Without comment, the Sheriff and his Deputy turned back to the corpse.
“Come, lad.” Pos motioned to a young Jew. “Help me get this fool out of there.”
The youth backed away, holding his palms up in front of him.
Tonneman shook his head at his Deputy. “You’re asking the boy to commit a sin.”
Asser Levy’s black eyes burned. He nodded. “The Sheriff is correct.” The butcher was one of the original twenty-three Jews who had settled in New Amsterdam after leaving Recife in Brazil in ’53. A respected man of the Book, he spoke for the Jewish Community.
“Will you send one of these men for Keyser?” Tonneman asked Levy.
“I will. But you must remove the dead man yourself. The dead are unclean and corrupt. No one of my people can touch the water trough. This trough will be burned and I will have a new trough built.”
“Have you found my horse and cart?” Baalde shouted, ploughing through the onlookers.
“Not yet, Baalde, can’t you see we have a dead man here?”
“So, he’s dead. The dead must wait on the living. I am a citizen and I demand you –”
“Let the Sheriff do his job,” came another voice. Bridge pushed people aside and looked down at the drowned man.
“Another country heard from,” Pos muttered to Tonneman.
“The Governor would like to know what you’re doing about . . .” He tilted his head at Lundt, who was slumped low in the saddle, face hidden.
“I’ll let the Governor know as soon as –”
“You may let me know and I’ll tell the Governor.”
Tonneman avoided looking at Pos, who had made a rude noise. “As soon as I have investigated, you can be sure the Governor will get my report.” He raised his voice. “It is now time for everyone to go about his business.”
The crowd slowly dispersed. Though snow still drifted lazily downward, the sky was beginning to reveal fragments of clouds. “Pos, get yourself to New Haven. If you drink too much and fail to come back in one week, you’ll get no wages till St Nicholas comes around.”
Pos sniffed. “One week will be a miracle in this weather.” He meandered to his horse. After a turn that was not a hundred yards down the road, Pos gleefully pulled out his flask for a quick nip, not so much out of thirst but for the mere joy of having his own way. Having slaked his mirth and his thirst, he spurred his steed into a steady gallop for the post road.
Tonneman waited until Bridge was no longer in sight. The man was an irritation, his nose up Nicholls’s arse. More interested in feathering his own nest than anything else. “As for you, my lad,” Tonneman told Lundt, whose colour, though decidedly green, was no match for his peculiar eye. “We’re going to pay a visit to your dear late auntie’s lawyer.”
Lubbertus van Dincklagen, one-time Vice-Director-General under Stuyvesant, was an old comrade of Tonneman’s. They’d been schoolmates at the university in Leiden in ’37.
As usual, the corpulent lawyer was dining. “Tonneman, my friend. How good to see you. Come out of the weather. Bring your friend, too. Would you care for some roasted lamb?”
Without waiting for an answer the lawyer called, “Helga.” Immediately a plump, young maidservant appeared. Tonneman wondered if the old reprobate was tupping the girl. Old and gross as he was, he was also rich. Who could blame a poor maid for ambition? On the other hand, in spite of his girth women had always been attracted to Lubbertus.
“Two more plates and two goblets for my friend Tonneman and his friend. I didn’t get your name, sir.”
“Lundt, he claims,” Tonneman said, before Lundt could respond.
Lundt looked wounded. “That is my name, sirs. For truth.”
The girl served the Sheriff and Lundt sizeable portions of meat and potatoes. Lundt attacked the food and drink with gusto.
“Young Lundt has an appetite,” was van Dincklagen’s only comment.
“For more than food, I reckon.”
“Lundt, you say?” van Dincklagen said, as he filled his pipe. “Now there’s a familiar name.”
“This young fellow claims that his dead father was the Widow van Lundt’s brother-in-law.”
“Very interesting,” Lubbertus said. “With Gretchen Goderis so soon demised, how serendipitous your arrival, young man.”
“I most certainly do not know any Gretchen Goderis,” Lundt said.
“When I drew up Margarieta van Lundt’s last will and testament, she informed me that she had no living blood heirs and instructed me to designate her loyal maidservant Gretchen Goderis as sole heiress of the entire van Lundt estate. There was no mention of a nephe
w.”
“I am betrayed,” Lundt said. He broke into a sweat and swayed in his chair. “It will not go well for me.”
“What do you mean, ‘it will not go well for you’?” Tonneman demanded. What was Lundt afraid of?
The young man rose in his chair, then fell back, his head in his hands.
“There, there, young man,” Lubbertus said. “All is not lost. We will need some verification of your story.”
“I have sent Pos to New Haven for that very thing,” Tonneman said.
“I am a lawful citizen of New Haven,” Lundt said, sitting up. “I’m sure there’s been some dreadful mistake.”
“Well, let us suppose there has been,” Lubbertus said mildly. “While we wait to hear from New Haven, you shall be a guest in my house.”
“One can only hope you will not regret your hospitality,” Tonneman told Lubbertus as he took his leave.
Tuesday, 30 November. Mid-Afternoon
The snow had stopped and the sky was clear. Only a small amount had settled on the ground. Tonneman hoped Pos would have an easy ride to New Haven and that he would return with Lundt’s true history.
Tonneman was perplexed by the painting he’d seen on the wall in the widow van Lundt’s house. Who was that child and what had become of him? Tonneman was walking toward home, leading Venus, when he was hailed by young Conraet Ten Eyck, the nine-year-old son of Tonneman’s good friends, Antje and Conraet, whose home was on Coenties Slip.
“Hallo, young man, and what is the news?”
“You’re to come home with me at once, Tonneman,” the boy said. “No questions asked.”
“May I ask but one question?”
“No.”
“Ah, you’re sounding more and more like your mother every day,” Tonneman said.
The Ten Eyck house was warm, the air filled with smells of sugar and spice. Antje was taking cookies from the oven while Racqel Mendoza in mourning cloth sat near the fire, her dark eyes and olive skin making a lovely contrast with the fair infant Pieter Ten Eyck, Tonneman’s godchild, gurgling in her arms.
“Don’t stand there letting the cold air in,” Antje said. “Close the door.” She smiled to see how Racqel and Tonneman could not take their eyes from each other. “Sit awhile and talk to my guest.” She took the infant from Racqel and put him in his cradle.