The basket was still lying there in the mud at four that afternoon when Joost Cats climbed down from the bony back of Donder, his purblind nag, and smoothed the seat of his sweat-soaked and tumultuous pantaloons. He’d spent the morning in Van Wartville, mediating yet another dispute between Hackaliah Crane and Reinier Oothouse — this time over the disposition of a lean, slack-bellied sow the Yankee had caught rooting up his seed onions — after which he’d hurried home with a pair of Jan Pieterse’s best Ferose stockings for Neeltje on her birthday. As he led the wheezing nag into the barn, thinking of how Reinier Oothouse, in his cups, had gone down on his knees before the Yankee and pleaded for the sow’s life like a father pleading for his child (“Don’t kill her, don’t hurt my little Speelgoed, she didn’t mean it, never been naughty before, anything, I’ll pay anything you ask”), his two youngest burst from the house, arms and legs churning, faces lit with the joy of disaster. “Vader! Vader!” they cried in breathless piping unison, “Neeltje’s gone!”
Gone? What were they talking about? Gone? But in the next instant he saw his wife at the door, saw the look on her face and knew it was true.
Together, led by the fluttering Trijintje and intoxicated Ans, they rounded the corner of the barn to hover over the spilled basket, the tracked and muddy earth, the shattered eggs. “Was it Indians?” Ans shouted. “Did they kidnap her and make her their white squaw?”
Bent like a sickle and stroking his puff of chin hair, Joost tried to picture it — naked red devils slipping from the weeds to bludgeon his defenseless little Neeltje, a rough hand cuffed over her mouth, the stinking hut and moldering furs, the queue of greasy randy braves jostling at the door. … “When?” he murmured, turning to his wife.
Geesje Cats was a dour woman, hipless, fleshless, wasted, a woman who bore only daughters and wore her troubles at the corners of her mouth. “This morning,” she said, her eyes stung with dread. “It was Trijintje — she found it, the basket. We called and called.”
The mud was puckered in dumb mouths that told the schout nothing. Staring down at the sad upended basket and the spill of egg yolk that seemed to claw at the earth like the fingers of a grasping hand, he relived the scenes of violence and depravity he’d encountered in his seven years as schout, drowned men and stabbed men floating before his eyes, women abused, bereft, violated, bones that poked through the flesh and eyes that would see no more. When he looked up he was shouting. “You searched the orchard?” he demanded. “The river? The pond? Did you inquire at the patroon’s?”
Startled, shamefaced, his wife and daughters lowered their eyes. They had. Yes, vader, yes, echtgenoot, they had.
Well, then, had they gone to the de Groodts, the Coopers, the van Dincklagens? To the inn? The ferry? The pasture, the stable, van der Donk’s Hill?
A light rain had begun to fall. Ans, ten years old, began to sniffle. “All right!” he shouted, “all right: I’ll go to the patroon.”
The patroon was supping, bent low over a plate of pickled beets, hard cheese and a shad in cream sauce he was glumly forking up as if to remark the disparity between this and Zuider Zee herring, when Joost was shown into the room. The patroon’s unburdened hand was bandaged against the knife thrusts of his gout, and his face was flushed the color of a rare wine. Vrouw Van Wart, a woman given to the denial of the flesh, sat stiffly beside him, a single dry crust before her, while his brother’s widow and her daughter Mariken perched on the hard bench opposite her. The Jongheer, in a lace collar the size of a wheel of Gouda, occupied the place of honor at the foot of the table. “My Savior in Heaven!” cried the patroon. “What is it, Cats, that couldn’t keep?”
“It’s my daughter, Mijnheer: she’s disappeared.”
“How’s that?”
“Neeltje. My eldest. She went out for chores this morning and there’s been no trace of her since.”
The patroon set down his fork, plucked a loaf from the pewter dish before him, and turned it over in his hand as if it were the single telling bit of evidence left behind at the scene of the crime. Joost waited patiently as the florid little man split the loaf and slathered it with butter. “You’ve, er, contacted the, er, other tenants?” the patroon gasped in his dry, windless voice.
Joost was beside himself with frustration — this was no time for the niceties of leisurely inquiry. They had his daughter, the heart and soul and central joy of his existence, and he had to get her back. “It’s the Kitchawanks,” he blurted, “I’m sure of it. They snatched her”—here his voice broke with a sob—“snatched her as she, she—”
At the mention of Indians, the Jongheer was on his feet. “I told you so,” he roared at his father. “Beggars in their blankets. Aborigines, criminals, vermin, filth. We should have driven them into the river twenty years ago.” He crossed the room in two great strides and lifted the harquebus down from the wall.
The patroon had risen now to his gouty feet, and the ladies pressed powdered hands to their mouths. “But, er, what’s this, mijnzoon?” the patroon wheezed in some alarm. “What are you thinking?”
“What am I thinking?” the Jongheer shrieked, the blood rushing to his face. “They’ve raped an honest man’s daughter, vader!” The harquebus was about as wieldy as a blacksmith’s anvil, and twice as heavy. He raised it over his head in a single clenched fist. “I mean to exterminate them, annihilate them, pot them like foxes, like rats, like, like—”
It was then that a knock came at the door.
The deferential head of the tattooed slave appeared between the oak door and the whitewashed wall that framed it. “A red man, Mijnheer,” he said in his garbled Dutch. “Says he’s got a message for the schout.”
Before either patroon or Jongheer could give the command, the door flew back and old Jan stumbled into the room to exclamations of excitement from the ladies. Jan was wearing a tattered cassock, out at elbows and shoulders, and an ancient crushed caubeen with half the brim missing. His loincloth hung from his hips like a tongue, his legs were spattered with mud and his moccasins were as black as the muck in the oyster beds of the Tappan Zee. For a long moment he just stood there, swaying slightly, and blinking in the light of the candles hung around the room.
“Well, Jan,” the patroon wheezed, “what is it?”
“Beer,” the Indian said.
“Pompey!” Vrouw Van Wart called, and the black reappeared. “Beer for old Jan.”
Pompey poured, Jan drank. The patroon looked befuddled, the schout anxious, the Jongheer enraged. Mariken, who’d been Neeltje’s playmate, looked on with a face as pale and drawn as a mime’s.
The old Indian set down the cup, composed himself a moment and began a slow shuffling dance around the table, all the while chanting Ay-yah, neh-neh, Ay-yah, neh-neh. After half a dozen repetitions, he sang his message — in three tones, and to the same beat:
Daugh-ter, sends you,
Her greet-ings, neh-neh.
And then he stopped. Stopped singing, stopped dancing. He was frozen, like a figure in a clocktower after the hour’s been struck. “Spirits,” he said. “Genever.”
But this time, Pompey didn’t have a chance to respond. Before he could so much as glance at the patroon for his approval, let alone lift the stone bottle and pour, the Jongheer had slammed the Indian into the wall. “Where is she?” he demanded. “Is it ransom, is that what you want? Is it?”