It was at this juncture that Staats, bringing with him a stale whiff of the barn and a jacket of cold, slammed through the door. In doing so, he relocated the agent’s center of gravity and sent him reeling halfway across the room, where he fetched up against the birch rocker with a look of wounded dignity. Staats was a powerful, big-nosed, raw-skinned man with eyes so intense they were like twin slaps in the face. He seemed utterly bewildered by the presence of commis and schout, though he must have seen their blanketed horses tied outside the door. “Holy Moeder in heaven,” he rumbled. “What’s this?”
“Staats,” Meintje cried, rushing to him and repeating his name twice more in a plaintive wail, “they’ve come for the boy.”
“Boy?” he repeated, as if the word were new to him. His eyes roved about the room, searching for a clue, and he lifted his mink cap to scratch a head as hard and hairless as a chestnut.
“Little Jeremias,” his wife whispered in clarification.
Joost watched them uneasily. As he would later learn, the boy had turned up some two hours earlier begging for shelter and a bit to eat. Vrouw van der Meulen had at first shut the door on him in horror — a haunt had appeared on her stoep, withered and mutilated, one of the undead — but when she took a second look, she saw only the half-starved child, motherless in the snow. She’d held him to her, bundled him up in front of the fire, fed him soup, hot chocolate and honey cake while her own curious brood pressed around. Why hadn’t he come sooner? she asked. Where had he been all this time? Didn’t he know that she and Staats and the Oothouses too thought he’d perished in the blaze that took his poor moeder?
No, he’d said, shaking his head, no, and she’d wondered whether he was responding to her question or denying some horror she couldn’t know. The fire, he murmured, and his voice was slow and halting, the voice of the hermit, the pariah, the anchorite who spoke only to trees and birds. They’d all been out in the fields that fateful afternoon, hoeing up weeds and clattering pans to keep the maes dieven out of the corn and wheat — all except for Katrinchee, that is, who was off somewhere with Mohonk the Kitchawank. Jeremias had regained his strength by then and was able to get around pretty well on the strut he’d carved from a piece of cherrywood, but his solicitous mother had sent him off to drive away the birds while she and Wouter did the heavier work. When the storm broke, he lost sight of them; next thing he knew the cabin was in flames. When Staats and the Oothouse man had come around he’d hidden in the woods with his cattle, hidden in shock and fear and shame. But now he could hide no longer.
“Jeremias?” Staats repeated, comprehension trickling into his features like water dripping through a hole in the roof. “I’ll kill them first,” he said, glaring at Joost and the agent.
It was then that the subject of the controversy appeared in the doorway to the back room — a thin boy, but big-boned and tall for his age. He was wearing a woolen shirt, knee breeches and a single heavy stocking borrowed from the van der Meulen’s eldest boy, and he stood wide-legged, cocked defiantly on his wooden peg. The look on his face was something Joost would never forget. It was a look of hatred, a look of defiance, of contempt for authority, for rapiers, baldrics, silver plumes and accounts ledgers alike, a look that would have challenged the patroon himself had he been there to confront it. His voice was low, soft, the voice of a child, but the scorn in it was unmistakable. “You looking for me?” he asked.
The following summer, a dramatic and sweeping change was to come to New Amsterdam and the sleepy settlements along the North River. It was a hot still morning in late August when Klaes Swits, a Breucklyn clam-digger, looked up from his rake to see five British men-o’-war bobbing at anchor in the very neck of the Narrows. In his haste to apprise the governor and his council of this extraordinary discovery, he unhappily lost his anchor, splintered both his oars and his rake in the bargain, and was finally reduced to paddling Indian-style all the way from the South Breucklyn Bight to the Battery. As it turned out, the clamdigger’s mission was superfluous — as all of New Amsterdam would know three hours later, the ships were commanded by Colonel Richard Nicolls of the Royal Navy, who was demanding immediate capitulation and surrender of the entire province to Charles II, king of England. Charles laid claim to all territory on the coast of North America from Cape Fear River in the south to the Bay of Fundy in the north, on the basis of English exploration that antedated the Dutch cozening of the Manhattoes Indians. John Smith had been there before any cheese-eating Dutchmen, Charles insisted, and Sebastian Cabot too. And as if that weren’t enough, the very isle of the Manhattoes and the river that washed it had been discovered by an Englishman, even if he was sailing for the Nederlanders.
Pieter Stuyvesant didn’t like it. He was a rough, tough, bellicose, fighting Frisian who’d lost a leg to the Portuguese and would yield to no man. He hurled defiance in Nicolls’ teeth: come what may, he would fight the Englishers to the death. Unfortunately, the good burghers of New Amsterdam, who resented the West India Company’s monopoly, eschewed taxation without representation and hated the despotic governor as if he were the devil himself, refused to back him. And so, on September 9, 1664, after fifty-five years of Dutch rule, New Amsterdam became New York — after Charles’ brother, James the duke of York — and the great, green, roiled, broad-backed North River became the Hudson, after the true-blue Englishman who’d discovered it.
Yes, the changes were dramatic — suddenly there was new currency to handle, a new language to learn, suddenly there were Connecticut Yankees swarming into the Valley like gnats — but none of these changes had much effect on life in Van Wartwyck. If Oloffe Stephanus throve under Dutch rule, he throve and multiplied and throve again under the English. The new rulers, hardly known as a nation for an affinity to radical change, preserved the status quo — i.e., the landlord on top and the yeoman on bottom. Oloffe’s wealth and political power grew. His eldest son and heir, Stephanus, who was twenty-one when Stuyvesant capitulated, would see the original 10,000-acre Dutch patent expanded more than eightfold when William and Mary chartered Van Wart Manor in the declining years of the century.
As for Joost, he performed his duties as before, answerable to no one but old Van Wart, who continued to exercise feudal dominion over his lands. The schout worked his little farm on the Croton River that lay within hollering distance of the lower manor house, harvested in season, went a-hunting, a-fishing and a-crabbing according to the calendar, raised his three daughters to be mindful of the laws of God and man, and satisfied his employer with the promptness and efficiency with which he settled disputes among the tenants, tracked down malefactors and collected past-due rents. For the most part, things were pretty quiet in the period following the English takeover. A few Yankees threw up shacks in the vicinity of Jan Pieterse’s place, where they would later draw up a charter for the town of Peterskill, and Reinier Oothouse got drunk and burned down his own barn, but aside from that nothing out of the ordinary cropped up. Lulled by the tranquillity of those years, Joost had nearly forgotten Jeremias, when one afternoon, in the company of his eldest, little Neeltje, he ran into him at the Blue Rock.