World's End (50 page)

It was late in the afternoon—past four, by Staats' reckoning—when two figures appeared in the distance. Van den Post was one of them, unmistakable in his new, high-crowned, silver-plumed hat and with the gleam of the rapier electric at his side, but the other—well, it wasn't Jeremias. No way. This figure was smaller, far smaller, and slighter too. And there was no trace either of the wide-slung, irregular gait peculiar to the man who'd lost a leg in early youth and communicated with the ground through a length of oak ever since. To a man—and woman—the workers paused to lean on the hafts of their rakes and shovels, steady their teams or lower their scythes. And then all at once, as the figures drew closer, a whisper raced through the crowd. “It's Neeltje!” someone exclaimed, and the rest took it up.

They had to send a boy to fetch Stephanus, who'd retired to the house for refreshment. In the meantime, Neeltje, pale and trembling, fell into her father's arms, while Staats and Douw kept the others back to give them room. Van den Post, with a triumphant leer, swaggered through the crowd to prop one dusty boot up on a log and help himself to a cup of cider from the keg the patroon had provided for the enjoyment of his tenants. He took a long drink, spat the dregs in the dirt and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, and then, with studied insolence, pulled out his pipe and had himself a smoke.

Neeltje's face was wet.
“Vader,”
she cried, “what are we going to do? He's … he's evicted us and taken the boys and still Jeremias won't come.”

Bent over double, looking twice his already considerable age, the former
schout
had no ready answer. Silently cursing the day Jeremias Van Brunt had come into their lives, he pressed his daughter to him, clinging to her as if he were caught in a torrent and about to go under.

“He can't just … he's got no right … after all these years, to just—” Staats sputtered. “We'll fight it, that's what we'll do.”

But now Robideau was there, insinuating his hard, leathery face between them. “What do you mean, he's got no right?” he rasped. “The patroon's word is law, and every one of us knows it. There's nobody here that didn't sign his lease with his wits about him, and I'll be damned to know why
Mijnheer
shouldn't evict the son of a bitch
when I've got to break my back out here in the sun while Mr. High-and-Mighty sits home with a bowl of punch.”

There was a rumble of assent from the crowd, but Staats, loyal as a bulldog, turned on Robideau and warned him to stay out of it.

That was all the Frenchman needed. He took a step forward and gave Staats a shove that sent him reeling back into Neeltje and her father. “Fuck off, cheese-eater,” he hissed.

The obscenity was too much for the virginal ears of Goody Sturdivant, and for the second time that day she let out a doleful whoop and fainted, pitching face forward into the dust with a cyclonic rush of air. In the same instant, Douw and Cadwallader Crane stepped between the antagonists. “Calm down,
vader,”
Douw pleaded, “this isn't doing anyone any good,” while on his end, the scrawny loose-limbed young Crane held fast to the bucking Frenchman with a pair of arms so long and attenuated they might have been hemp ropes wound twice around him. “Let me go!” Robideau grunted, dancing in place and uttering a string of oaths that might have embarrassed a sailor. “Let me go, damn you!”

Thus it was that faces were hot, the crowd bunched and Mistress Sturdivant stretched out in the dirt like a sick cow when the patroon drew up on his pacer, a look of the severest condemnation quivering in his fine nostrils. “What in the name of God is going on here?” he demanded, and instantly the scuffling stopped. Neeltje looked up out of her tear-stained face, Meintje van der Meulen bent to assist poor Mistress Sturdivant, Robideau backed away from Cadwallader Crane and glared angrily about him. No one said a word.

The patroon scanned the crowd from on high, his eyes finally coming to rest on van den Post. “Aelbregt,” he snapped, “can you tell me what's going on?”

Stepping forward with a bow, a wide malicious grin flapping the wings of his beard, van den Post said, “With pleasure,
Mijnheer.
It seems that Van Brunt's criminality has infected his neighbors. Farmer van der Meulen, for instance—”

“Enough!” Stephanus cast a withering glance out over the lowered heads of the farmers and their wives and progeny, then turned back to van den Post. “I want to know one thing only: where is he?”

“With all respect,
Mijnheer,
he would not come,” van den Post
replied. “Had you given the order to employ force,” he continued, grinning the grin of a man who could survive indefinitely on jellyfish and saltwater, “I assure you he would be standing before you now.”

It was then that Neeltje came forward, desperately pushing her way through the ranks of her neighbors, her face spread open like a book.
“Mijnheer,
please,” she begged, “the farm is all we have, we've been good tenants and we've improved the place ten times over for you—just this year we cleared a full morgen along Blood Creek and put in rye for fodder and a crop of peas on top of it. …”

Stephanus was in no mood to hear appeals to sympathy or reason. He was a powerful man, an educated man, a man of taste and refinement. He looked at Neeltje in her humble clothes, still pretty after all these years, and saw her as she was in that filthy bed with her sluttish mouth and the hair in her eyes, a picture no gentleman should have to carry around with him, and he gritted his teeth. When finally he spoke, he had to struggle to contain his voice; he drew himself up, staring down like a centaur over the powerful sculpted shoulder of the mount that was one with him. “The half-breed and the other one, the loudmouthed boy, are in our custody,” he said, barely moving his lips. “Tomorrow, when my man has completed work on the stocks, they will commence their punishment.” Here he paused to let his words build toward the final pronouncement. “And, I assure you,
huis vrouw,
they will sit in those stocks until such time as your husband comes to this house and goes down at my feet to beg—yes, beg—for the privilege of serving me.”

There were mice in the root cellar, rats, slugs and other lowly things that throve in the absence of light. It was as black as the farthest wheeling reaches of a sunless universe, eternal midnight, and it was damp, dripping wet as the bottom of a deep and lonely grave. Wouter didn't like it. He was eleven and a half years old, and his imagination festooned the invisible ceiling with the leering faces of the imps, demiurges and savage gods that people the quiet places of the valley, with the bloody visage of old Dame Hobby, who'd been scalped and left for dead by a renegade Sint Sink, with Wolf Nysen's flaming beard and butcher's eyes. Huddled close to his cousin, for comfort and warmth both, he took it as long as he could, which is to say about
three and a half minutes after van den Post dragged the heavy timber pallet over their heads, and then confessed that he was frightened. They were seated at the bottom of a four-foot-deep pit dug into the earth of the cellar floor, and the hatch above it was secured by the weight of three hogsheads of ale. “I'm scared, Jeremy,” Wouter said, his voice a thin squeak in that unfathomable dark.

Characteristically, Jeremy said nothing.

“Vader
says they buried the old patroon's brother just out there, in back of the house … what if, if he's still, you know—like a ghost? He could come through the dirt and—”

Jeremy grunted. This was followed by a series of sounds emanating from deep in the hollow of his throat: clicks, chirps, gurgles, the muffled signifiers of a private system of speech. What he said was, “You open your hole, they dump us in this one.”

Wouter couldn't deny the truth of the assertion, but it gave him small comfort. The seat of his pantaloons was soaked through and his crotch began to itch. If anything, the darkness was deeper than it had been a moment before. He edged closer to his cousin. “I'm scared,” he said.

Later—how much later he couldn't say—a medley of homely sounds manifested themselves in the void beyond their cell, and then there was the quick tattoo of footsteps on the pallet above them, followed by the quavering tones of a dry and withered voice. “Here, boy,” the voice wheezed, “put those barrels back where they belong and lift that pallet this instant.” Light shone down from above, faint and diffuse. Barrels rumbled over their heads. “This is simply intolerable,” the voice went on in Dutch, falling off to a nagging murmur, “treating half-grown boys like hardened criminals. …”

When the pallet edged back a foot or two, they stood on cramped legs to poke their heads from the hole like a pair of groundhogs at the mouth of their burrow. Above them, peering into the pit as keenly as they were peering out of it, stood the patroon's stooped and ancient mother, shrouded in black and holding a tallow candle out in front of her like a talisman; beside her, the light leaping from his eyes, was a slave not much older than Jeremy, and what Wouter, in his confusion, at first mistook for an angel of Elysium. But then the angel giggled, and for the moment the spell was broken. “Come up out of there this
instant,” the old woman scolded, as if they'd locked themselves up in that foul airless hole for the sheer irresistible joy of it.

Wouter glanced at Jeremy. His cousin's stony profile showed nothing, but the fist of his Adam's apple rose and fell twice in rapid succession. Then, cool as the patroon himself, Jeremy stepped lightly from the pit and stood before the little group gathered in that larger cellar with its kegs of ale and cider, its firkins of butter, its buckets of milk and wheels of cheese set high off the floor on rude wooden racks. Wouter was scared and disoriented, images of the grave rising up again to play tricks with his eyes: old Vrouw Van Wart could have been a ghoul wrapped in her winding sheet, the slave some tarry servant of the devil and the girl—well, the girl was clearly a heavenly intercessor come down to do battle for his soul. “Out!” the old woman suddenly squawked, seizing his ear in a ferocious grip, and then he too was up and arisen from the tomb.

The old woman gave him a reproachful look, her jaw set, lips faintly trembling. “Don't you understand Dutch?” she demanded.

Shamefaced, on the verge of tears, Wouter was trying to stammer a reply when the girl began tittering again. He stole a quick glance at her—the broad, full-lipped grin, eyes that overwhelmed him, the abundance of her hair beneath the cap that perched like a butterfly on the crown of her head—and looked down at his feet. He didn't know it at the time, but this was to be his introduction to Saskia Van Wart.

“No matter,” the old woman wheezed, softening a bit. Then she turned to the slave. “You, Pompey,” she said, recovering her voice, “take them into the kitchen and see that they're fed. And then I want you to put some straw down here in the corner for them,” indicating a space along the wall, “—and don't you give me that look. I don't care what my son says—until he banishes me to the woods I'm still mistress of this house.”

The next morning, early, the jellyfish man came for them.

Van den Post was wearing
grootvader
Cats' plumed hat and rapier, and a discomfiting emotion lit his eyes and played at the corners of his mouth. “Up,” he barked, kicking at them as they lay in the straw, and Wouter saw it in his face—the look of a boy with a sharp stick and a cornered rabbit.

He led them out of the penumbral gloom of the storage cellar, through the bright and vivid lower kitchen with its paradisiac aromas, its sour-looking cook and glowing hearth, and then out into the explosion of light that was the morning and the world all around them. Shielding his eyes and blinking, half-asleep yet, Wouter hurried to keep up with the
schout:
he didn't see the stocks until he was on them.

Pine. White and fresh and with a smell of resin to it. Four footholes under the lower cross bar, four wristholes beneath the upper. Behind the frame, a bench. Or no, it was just a log, crudely trimmed, rough with bark and bole, so green it must have been standing yesterday.

At first Wouter didn't understand. But as van den Post lifted the crossbar, a taut smile fixed on his lips, Wouter's emotions got the better of him. He wanted to protest—what had they done? He'd only talked, spoken up to the patroon, told the truth. They hadn't stolen anything or hurt anybody. It was only words. But he couldn't protest: he was too frightened. All at once he felt as if he were choking. Strangling. The air wouldn't pass his throat, there was something heavy in his chest, and it was rising, rising, ready to burst—

It was then that Jeremy made his break.

One moment he was standing there beside Wouter, gazing with his sullen green eyes on the contraption before him, and the next he was streaking across the cornfield like a white-tailed deer with the bloody mark of the catamount on its rump. Jeremy was a wicked runner, as quick and lank and fleet of foot as the intrepid chieftains he counted among his ancestors. This was Mohonk's son, after all, and though Mohonk may have been a degenerate, a miscegenator and a disgrace to his tribe, he was nonetheless as much a familiar to these hills and valleys as the bears, wolves and salamanders themselves, and a runner of the very first water. And so, kicking up his heels, flailing his bony legs and pumping his bony arms, Jeremy Mohonk—son of Mohonk son of Sachoes—called up the spirit of his ancestors and beat a path for the sanctuary of the woods.

What he hadn't figured on was the tenacity of van den Post, the eater of jellyfish. Without a thought for Wouter, the hyperkinetic
schout
threw off hat and rapier and lit out after Jeremy like a hound. They were twenty paces apart at the outset, and twenty paces apart they remained, as first the Indian, then the
schout,
disappeared into the woods at the far verge of the field.