World's End (22 page)

“Oh,
vader,
please. Can't you see he's hurt?”

The
schout
went on as if he hadn't heard her, as if she were made of air or paper. “Under the authority vested in me by the lord and proprietor of these lands, Oloffe Stephanus Van Wart, patroon,” he said, his voice gone nasal in official pronouncement, “I hereby inform you, Jeremias Van Brunt, that you are now in custody of the law.”

Jeremias walked the eight miles to Croton. In his filthy blood-stained clothes, with bits of grass and leaves in his hair, and the side of his face swollen to twice its size with the poultice of mud and medicinal herbs Katrinchee had applied, after the Weckquaesgeek fashion, to his open wound. His hands were bound behind his back, as if he were a thief or axe murderer, and a cord cinched around his waist connected him to the pommel of the
schout's
saddle. It was tough going. The nag would quicken its pace unexpectedly and jerk him forward or suddenly slow to a virtual stop, causing him to stagger out to his right to avoid it, the strut digging like a goad at the stump of his leg. Another man would have complained, but not Jeremias. Though horseflies and mosquitoes made him dance with their stings, though he felt light-headed from loss of blood and sick from thirst, though the gash that leapt across his right eye, exposed the bone beneath it and opened up the flesh all the way to the hinge of his jaw felt as if it were being probed with hot needles, he never said a word. No: he just concentrated on the slow, working shift of the nag's flanks and stepped aside when the animal relieved itself.

Neeltje was up front, on her mare. Her father, in a metallic voice, had commanded her to keep as great a distance as circumstances permitted between herself and the prisoner. She'd begun to protest—“He's just a boy,
vader:
he's hurt and suffering”—but that hard cold voice clamped down on her like a steel trap. Resigned, she'd gone on ahead—ten yards or so out in front of her father—but every so often she glanced over her shoulder and gave Jeremias a look of such concentrated tenderness he felt he would collapse on the spot. Either that or go on till he'd circled the globe six times and dug a rut you could drive a wagon through.

As it turned out, he went on. Past the turnoff for Verplanck's Landing and along the river, where it was no cooler, past fields and
forests he'd never before laid eyes on, through the late afternoon and into the quiet of evening. He was fixating on the mesmeric rise and fall of the nag's hooves, no longer alert enough to bother dodging the piles of dung it dropped in his path, when they rounded a bend in the road and they were there. He looked up dully. The lower manor house rose out of the fields before him, high-crowned and commanding, with a rambling long porch out front and a stone cellar beneath it that was itself half again as big as the Van Wartwyck house. The
schout
dismounted, freed Jeremias's hands with a rough tug at the cords that bound them, jerked open a door in the basement wall and thrust him into a cell the size of a wagon bed. The door closed on darkness.

He woke to a light rapping from the outer world, the rattle of key in lock, and then the sudden effulgence of morning as the door pulled back on its rusted hinges. A black woman, who still bore the facial cicatrices of her lorn and distant tribe, stood in the doorway. She was wearing a homespun dress, the lappet cap favored by country
vrouwen
from Gelderland to Beverwyck, and an immaculate pair of wooden clogs. “Brekkfass,” she said, handing him a mug of water, a wedge of cheese and a small loaf, still warm from the oven. He saw that he was in a toolshed, the rough walls hung with wooden rakes, shovels, a moldering harness, a flail with a splintered swiple. Then the door slammed shut once more and he lay back in the straw that covered the earthen floor, chewed his breakfast and watched the sun slice through the crevice between the crude door and its stone frame.

The sun was gone by the time the door swung open again, the darkness of the cell so absolute he had to shield his eyes against the lit taper that was suddenly thrust in his face. He'd been alone with his thoughts through the interminable day, dozing fitfully and jerking awake with a start to sit up and hesitantly examine his swollen cheek or rub the butt of his leg, and over the course of so many dead hours the shock of his confrontation with the
schout
had seeped out of him. In the darkness, in the damp, in the impenetrable solitude of that strange prison, he could feel the rage gnawing at him once again. In their eyes, he was a criminal. But what had he done, really? Lay claim to a piece of land? Try to work it and survive? By what right did the
schout
claim his neat little
bouwerie
—or the patroon his estates, for
that matter? The more he thought about it, the more incensed he grew. If anyone was a criminal, if anyone should be locked up, it was Joost Cats, it was Oloffe Van Wart and his fat-assed
commis
with the leather-bound accounts ledgers. They were the real criminals—the patroon and his henchmen, Their High Mightinesses of the States General, the English king himself. They were leeches, chiggers, toads; they'd got under his skin and wouldn't leave him alone till they'd sucked him dry.

When the door opened this time, he was ready. He'd actually sprung up from the ground, a rake in his hand, actually raised it above his head like a tomahawk and kicked the taper to the floor, before she called out his name in a gasp and he felt foolish all over again. “Hush,” she hissed. “It's me. I bribed Ismailia and brought you this.” Neeltje handed him a wooden bowl and pulled the door shut behind her. The bowl was warm and it gave off a smell of cabbage. Jeremias watched her numbly as she bent for the rush candle and held it up to illuminate her face, which was like something newly created from the void. “I hate my father,” she said.

Jeremias clung to the bowl as if it were a stone at the edge of a precipice. He appreciated the sentiment, but held his peace.

“He's so, so” her voice trailed off. “Are you all right?”

He was studying the lock of pale fine hair that had worked its way out from under her cap to cling familiarly to her eyebrow. He wanted to say something significant, passionate, something like
Now that you're here, I am,
but he couldn't find the words. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange in his ears. “I'll live,” he said.

She motioned him to sit and then squatted beside him as he settled back down in the straw and sipped tentatively from the bowl. “I heard them talking,” she said. “My father and the patroon. They're going to leave you down here for another night to teach you a lesson, then the patroon's going to offer you tenancy on your farm.”

Jeremias barely heard her. He didn't give a damn for the patroon, for the farm, for anything—anything but her. The way she talked, biting off each word like a little girl, the pout of her lips, the way her hips swelled out against the seams of her dress as she squatted there: each movement, each gesture, was a revelation. “Ja,” he said, to say something. “Ja.”

“Aren't you pleased?”

Pleased? To have his face slashed and his hands shackled, to be hauled off in ignominy and shut up in this hole while his sister and the boy were left to fend for themselves? Pleased? “Ja,” he said finally.

“I've got to go,” she said, glancing at the door.

All at once the night was charged with the chirring of insects, with doleful cries and the faint whisper of birds on the wing. Jeremias set down the bowl, edged closer to her. Just as he reached out to her, just as he took hold of her hand to pull her to him, she shook free and rose to her feet. Her eyes had narrowed suddenly and she stood cocked on one leg. “Who was that woman,” she said, watching his eyes. “The one at the farm.”

Woman? Farm? What was she talking about?

“She's your wife, isn't she?”

Jeremias came before the patroon the following morning. He was awakened at first light by the black woman with the strange swirling scars about her lips and nostrils. She handed him a bucket of water and a bowl of tepid corn mush, and informed him in a Dutch so crude it was like the dialogue of the beasts that he had better make himself presentable for
Mijnheer
Van Wart. When she'd gone, Jeremias slipped the crude woolen shirt over his head and gingerly laid the side of his face in the water; he held it there until the mud plaster began to dissolve. The water went cloudy, then turned the color of beef broth in a swirl of fragmented leaves, twisted stems and strange dried petals.

After a time, Jeremias sat up and tentatively explored the wound with his fingertips: a crude split ridge ran from his right eyebrow to his chin, rough ground, a topography of scab, pus and wet puddled blood. He explored it, this new grain of his metamorphosing self, ran his fingers over it again and again, till the spots of fresh blood had dried. Then he washed his hands.

It must have been around nine when the
schout
came for him. The door flung back, light surged into the room like the flood tide running up against the rocks, and there he stood, bowed over like a great black question mark against the blank page of the day. “Come
younker,”
he said, “the patroon will see you now,” but there was something odd in the way he said it, something hollow and uncertain.
For a moment, Jeremias was puzzled—this wasn't the
schout
he knew—but then he understood: it was the wound. The man had gone too far, and he knew it. He'd raised his hand against an unarmed and crippled boy, and here was the evidence of it etched in his victim's face. Jeremias rose from the straw and strode out of the cell, wearing the mark of the
schout's
disgrace like a badge.

Cats escorted him around the corner to the kitchen/dairy room, where milk, butter, cheese and other foodstuffs were stored, and where the patroon's servants did most of the cooking for the household. As soon as they stepped in the door, the black woman materialized from the shadows to flay Jeremias' broad back, his shoulders and arms and the seat of his baggy pantaloons with a birch broom so stiff and unyielding it might have been cut yesterday. Then a second black—this one a slight, stoop-shouldered male with a kinked cube of hair that stood up off his head like a toque—led them up the stairs and into the family kitchen above.

This room was dominated by a big round oak-plank table, in the center of which stood a cone of sugar and a blue vase of cut flowers. A painted cupboard stood in the corner beside a heavy mahogany sideboard that must have been shipped over from the old country, and the fireplace was decorated with blue ceramic tiles depicting biblical themes like the salification of Lot's wife and the beheading of John the Baptist. Jeremias took it all in as he stood at attention just inside the basement door. The
schout,
plumed hat in hand, slumped beside him while the black knocked respectfully at the door to the parlor. A voice answered from within, and the slave silently pulled open the door and turned to them with a grin that showed off the sharp, filed points of his glistening teeth. “De patroon he see you now,” he said, stepping aside with a sweep of his arm.

Jeremias glimpsed walls hung with portraits, massive blocks of dark oiled furniture, real tallow candles in silver sconces, a carpet of woven colors. As he limped forward, the
schout
at his side, a high rectangular table came into view, and he saw that it was laid out for tea, with silver service and cups of painted porcelain that might have graced the slim, smooth hands of Chinese emperors. The beauty of it, the elegance and refinement, overwhelmed him, choked him with a nostalgia as fierce and cleansing as a spoonful of horseradish. For a
moment—just a moment—he was a young boy in the bosom of his parents, sitting down to Martinmas tea in the parlor of the burgomaster of Schobbejacken.

All at once he became conscious of the harsh rap of his pegleg on the floor, of his filthy shirt and pantaloons and the torn stocking that hung in tatters from his calf: he was passing through the patroon's kitchen, entering the patroon's parlor, and he began to feel very small indeed. Compared with the van der Meulens' modest little farmhouse or Jan Pieterse's dark and drafty store, the place seemed inexpressibly grand, a sultan's palace sprung up in the wilds of the new world. In truth, the house comprised but six moderate-sized rooms in its two squat stories, and it was a far cry from the burghers' houses of Amsterdam and Haarlem, let alone the great estates of the gentry, but to one who lived in a dirt-floor hovel with a thatched roof and split-log walls that dripped sap, to one who drank from wooden mugs, plucked bits of stringy rabbit from the pot with his fingers and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, it was opulence itself. For all his desperation, for all his anger and resentment, Jeremias was awed by it, humbled; he felt weak and insignificant—he felt guilty; yes, guilty—and he slouched into Van Wart's parlor like a sinner slouching into the Sistine Chapel.

The patroon, a pale fleshy little man whose features seemed lost in various excrescences, was sunk deep in a settee lined with pillows, his gouty foot propped above the level of his eyes on a makeshift buttress composed of two beaver pelts, a feather duster, the family Bible and a copy of Grotius'
Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechtsgeleerdheid,
all piled atop a sagging corner chair. Beside him, looking as bloated and pontifical as the next-to-biggest bullfrog in the pond, was the
commis;
in the
commis'
lap, like the Book of Doom itself, sat the accounts ledger. The moment Jeremias laid eyes on them, his humility evaporated; in its place, he felt an intoxicating rush of hatred surge through him. He didn't want to farm, care for his sister, make his fortune or wrest Neeltje away from her father—all he wanted at that moment was to snatch the
schout's
sword from him and run it through the pasty grublike bodies of
commis
and patroon, and then lay waste to the place, gouging the furniture, shattering the crockery, dropping his pants to defecate in the silver teapot… but
the impulse died before it could take hold of him, died stillborn, supplanted by a breathless gasp of surprise. For Jeremias suddenly realized that patroon and
commis
were not alone in the room. Seated in the corner, silent and motionless as a snake, was a man Jeremias had never seen before.