New York - The Novel by Edward Rutherfurd Read Free Book Online

long.
    “You are right,” she said sweetly. Let him think he was winning.

    The next few weeks went well for Dirk van Dyck. He soon became involved with a group of large merchants who were shipping tobacco to the great blending and flavoring factories across the Atlantic in old Amsterdam. He and Margaretha found themselves being entertained in some big merchant houses where he’d hardly set foot before. He’d bought a new hat and even some pairs of fine silk stockings. In the parlor, the chimney piece had been decorated with handsome, blue-and-white delft tiles. Margaretha had even taken Quash the slave boy, who had run about theplace doing the odd jobs, dressed him up, and taught him to wait at table. When the old dominie had done them the honor of calling, he had particularly complimented them upon the smartness of the slave boy.
    One day in June, when van Dyck was leaving a game of ninepins in a tavern, a young Dutch merchant had addressed him as Boss. And when a Dutchman called you “Baas,” it meant you were a big man, a man of respect. He walked with a new confidence; his wife seemed delighted with him.
    So the quarrel, when it came, took him by surprise.
    It was an evening in July. He was due to go upriver the next morning. Margaretha had known this for some time. So it seemed hardly reasonable to him when she suddenly said: “I think you should not go tomorrow.”
    “Why ever not? The arrangements are made.”
    “Because you shouldn’t leave your family when there is so much danger.”
    “What danger?”
    “You know very well. The English.”
    “Oh.” He shrugged. “The English.”
    She had a point of course. Springsteen the merchant, whose opinions he respected, had put it to him very well the other day. “The English want our fur and slave trade, of course. The tobacco that’s shipped through this port would be worth ten thousand pounds a year to them. But above all, my friend, if they have New Amsterdam, they have the river, and then they control the whole of the north.”
    English aggression had been growing. Out on the long island, the English who controlled the far end had always left the territory nearer Manhattan to the Dutch. In the last year, however, Governor Winthrop of Connecticut had been demanding taxes from some of the Dutch settlements too; and not all had dared to refuse.
    An even bigger scare had come more recently.
    If King Charles II of England was an amusing rogue, his younger brother James, the Duke of York, was another matter. Not many people liked James. They thought him proud, inflexible and ambitious. So it had come as a shock when news arrived: “The king has given the American colonies to his brother, from Massachusetts almost down to Maryland.” That territory included the Dutch New Netherland. And the Duke of York was sending a fleet to America, to make good his claim.
    Stuyvesant had been beside himself. He’d started strengtheningdefenses, posted lookouts. The West India Company, though they sent no troops or money, had ordered him to defend the colony. And the gallant governor was determined, at least, to hold New Amsterdam itself.
    But then another message came from Holland. The British government had promised the Dutch—with absolute and categorical assurances—that they had no designs on their colony. The fleet was going to Boston. Soon after that came comforting news. The fleet had arrived at Boston, and was staying there. The crisis was over. Stuyvesant was already on his way upriver to deal with some problems with the Mohawk Indians up there.
    So when Margaretha used this threat of the English to tell him not to go upriver, van Dyck saw her ploy for what it was: an attempt to control him. And which he did not intend to allow.
    “And my business?” he asked.
    “It can wait.”
    “I think not.” He paused while she eyed him. “You and the children will be in no danger,” he continued.
    “So you say.”
    “Because it’s true.”
    “Does this mean you