Call Upon the Water by Stella Tillyard

Author:Stella Tillyard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Chapter 15

Nieuw Amsterdam.

August and September, 1664.

Wind from the south, very light.

Great heat throughout the days and nights.

High tide by the Stadt Huys at 5 o’clock in the afternoon.

From there on the Great Level, where we are sitting together by the fire, to here in my house on the Heere Gracht is no distance, just a moment of reordering. The layers of my life lie stacked in my memory. Every day, and in my dreams, they are shuffled. One stratum slides over another, is laid down and brought up again, existing both then and now. Truly we are alive there in my cottage, where your skin is warm to my hand; and truly I am here, walking along Stadt Huys Laan, where a trickle of people soon collects into a crowd.

It is a bright August morning, the 27th of the month. The heat of the day is still at bay, the colors of the city full and brisk. I am wearing a muslin shirt, and no stockings on my legs. Any other clothes would be a folly when the air will soon get close and hot; nakedness would be true propriety. The women have left off their petticoats and stockings. Here is Hendrikje Beck, who lives a few doors down from me, her pale bosom quite uncovered, and here old Cornelia Vort, airing her red calves with a grunt and a smile. She is come with a slave child who wears nothing but loose pantaloons and a shirt with the sleeves cut off. Only the merchant Asser Levy is dressed correctly, as he always is, in black.

Hendrikje talks excitedly, waving a piece of paper.

“Ah, Mijnheer Brunt,” she says when I come up. “Here is news.”

I incline my head, but Hendrikje needs no permission from me to keep talking.

“News from Lange Eylandt, brought this morning with the milk.”

Hendrikje has a farm on Lange Eylandt, though she lives here in the city, letting her son Dirk make the journey each morning across the Oost Rivier with the milk, butter and hard cheese. These she sells to householders all about, is done by midmorning, and then gives herself over to gossip and her pipe.

Yesterday at first light four English ships sailed into Gravesend Bay by Breukelen, and rattled out their anchors to swing with the current. They are not merchant ships, but men-of-war, Hendrikje says, and pauses in her dramatic way. Dirk, up early with the cows, watched everything from a field by the shore.

Once they secured the warships, the sailors wasted no time in lowering a tender from each boat and then soldiers into them, helmets and pikes as well. The ships’ captains must have known that Gravesend Bay has a good firm jetty. The people of Gravesend came out of their houses, some with their guns, some to marvel as the crowd of soldiers grew with each passage of the tenders until they numbered three hundred.

The English soldiers were far too many to fight but they carried no weapons, just sheets of paper, printed in Dutch.

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