Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 2

Amsterdam
June 17, 1636


Anne’s physician’s assistant, or apprentice doctor, stuck his head in the door to her office and hissed, “The queen is here!”

Anne was by now quite a well-established doctor in Amsterdam, with two other doctors in her practice, and was the preferred physician for the rich merchants of Amsterdam.

“Which queen?”

“The queen! Queen Maria Anna! Queen in the Low Countries.”

“Well, show her in,” Anne said, standing. She was an up-timer, but she was also Adam’s wife, so this lady was her husband’s boss’s boss’s wife. And even up-time that meant you stood to greet them.

* * *

A few minutes later, with the door closed and Anne and the queen seated with a tea service on her desk, Maria Anna admitted, “I’m actually here to ask you a favor.”

“A favor?” Anne asked cautiously.

“I would like you to take on an assistant.”

“An assistant?”

“The daughter of a friend of my brother. Lady Maria Amilia Alaveres. She is up-timer crazy and wants to be a doctor.”

“Ah, which brother?”

“The emperor of Austria Hungary. Her father asked my brother, and he asked me and, well, she’s in Brussels now.”

“But you, or rather your husband, is getting ready to appoint Adam to the governorship of the New Netherlands. She wouldn’t be staying with me for more than a couple of months. You haven’t changed your minds about that, have you?”

“Take her with you,” Maria Anna said casually.

Anne Jefferson looked at the Queen in the Low Countries and knew she was being played. “Your Majesty, I am an up-timer and not used to the rules of court, so if I am being too blunt, please excuse me. Are you setting a spy on me or trying to get rid of Lady Maria Amilia Alaveres?”

“Oh, I’m used to up-timer bluntness,” Maria Anna said with a bright smile. “I was well schooled in it during my time with Mary Simpson. And to answer your question, both. Amilia is quite bright and capable, but she is seventeen and almost as enamored of young men as she is of up-timers. And, well, she seems to go out of her way to scandalize the other ladies of the court.

“She will, of course, be sending me regular messages over the radio once you get it set up in New Amsterdam.

“And there is even a third reason. The wife of an assistant to an ambassador doesn’t need female companions for propriety’s sake, especially if she is an up-timer. But the wife of a royal governor does. Even if she is an up-timer.”


New Amsterdam, North America
July 17, 1636


It was hot even in New Amsterdam. Not unusual for late July, but still a hot, sweaty day to be looking over lumber at the lumberyard next to the docks. Being next to the docks didn’t make it cooler either, just muggy. Wolfert Dijkstra pulled a cloth from his belt and wiped the sweat from his forehead. As he did he looked over at the docks and saw that coming down the quay was a crowd just off a ship. No one could keep clothing clean and fresh on a long sea voyage, and with experience you could make a fair guess at how long a sea voyage it had been by how salt-stained the clothing was. This one was long, from Europe at a guess.

“Who’s that?” he asked Joris, the cousin of the owner of the lumberyard.

“Refugees from their so-fucking-Catholic majesties and that traitor Frederik Hendrik,” Joris said bitterly.

Wolfert didn’t roll his eyes. Nor did he try to explain that the Prince of Orange hadn’t had much choice, or that King Fernando was showing himself to be quite tolerant of the Protestants who chose to stay in the Netherlands, which was most of them. He didn’t do any of that, because Joris was a Gomarist “refugee” himself. Which was why he was working for his cousin in America, not running his own carpentry shop back in Amsterdam. And because if Wolfert were to point any of that out, the prices here would go up, and the quality, both of service and the wood, would go down. Hans, who owned the lumberyard, was also a Gomarist, though not as fanatic about it as Joris.

Instead, he finished wiping his face, put the damp cloth back in his belt, and went back to examining planks of wood. There was a knot in this one and it would pop out within a year. He shifted it to the reject pile. These were split planks, not sawed planks. But they were cheaper and they would do for what he wanted. He would use the more expensive sawed planks for the interior molding, but these were to be coated in daub and whitewashed. It was late afternoon and the day was starting to cool a little by the time he finished.

“You’ll have that delivered to the site by tomorrow before noon?” he asked Joris, who nodded consent.

The walk home was a bit over a mile. He glanced at the sun. It was late. Nailah, his children’s nanny, would have already fed the children. Sofie was four, and Daniel had just turned two and his favorite word was no. Wolfert’s wife, also Sofie, died giving birth to a third child, which was why he’d bought Nailah’s contract. He had to work and the children needed to be looked after.

Nailah had been brought in by the Dutch West India Company in 1633 and sold to Wolfert at auction. She was a half slave, a semi-official status that meant Wolfert allowed her to work for herself when she wasn’t busy taking care of the children. She got to keep what she made, could buy real property, and even sue if the need should arise. She was a young woman with a small but growing Dutch vocabulary and quite pleased that she’d ended up here, not on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean. Those places were horrors from all reports. She took in laundry, and was working hard to put together enough to buy her freedom.

As he walked down the street, he thought about the problems caused by the immigration of so many Counter-Remonstrants, but didn’t come up with any answers. He turned a corner and saw Mulder’s Tavern and Boardinghouse. He could use a meal, and Brechtje Mulder made a good brew.

* * *

“Welcome, Wolfert,” Brechtje called with a smile. “What brings you to this end of town?”

“Lumber. I have a wagon full of it to be delivered tomorrow. Spent the better part of a day selecting and sorting.”

“Well, I guess if you’re going to be designing and building buildings, you will have the occasional need for lumber.” She gestured to a small table in a corner with two chairs. “Sit. I’ll bring you some food.”

She then called out, “Lijsbeth! Stew, bread, and some of the roast pork.” Then, drew a mug of beer from the cask behind the bar and brought it over.

Brechtje set the beer on the table and sat in the other chair, turning it so she could keep an eye on the main room while they talked. Only Brechtje and Lijsbeth worked in the tavern and boardinghouse. Lijsbeth was indentured. “So how is the Bakker place coming?”

The Bakker place was the project Wolfert was working on now. It was to be a two-story house with a cobbler shop on the ground floor and a residence on the second. He was using several of the cheat sheets from Grantville, translated into Dutch in Amsterdam, and arriving here over a year ago. The house would have a flush toilet and water pumped into the kitchen and a Franklin stove. The Bakker family had two of the Higgins Number Three sewing machines, the ones used for sewing thick leather, and a fair budget for construction.

“Fairly well, except prices seem to be going up every day.”

From across the room there suddenly came loud arguing, and Brechtje jumped up to go take care of the problem. Wolfert got up and followed her. He was a fair-sized man, and reasonably well-muscled, because he didn’t just design houses. He built them, and ofttimes that meant climbing up on the roof to install the tiles himself.

He didn’t interfere. It was Brechtje’s tavern, after all. But he was there to back her if needed. The argument was over one of the five points of Calvinism. Wolfert wasn’t exactly sure which one.

“Irresistible grace doesn’t mean God will choose a Jew if He wants to. It means He won’t want to.

If He wants a Jew, the Jew will stop being a Jew, and—”

“Gentlemen, if you wish to continue this dispute, take it outside. People are trying to eat here,” Brechtje told them.

“What matters food, if the soul be lost?”

“Whether the soul is lost is up to God, you Arminian!” shouted the other man. Wolfert stepped up beside Brechtje.

“I’m not an Arminian, you fool. You don’t understand the five points of Calvinism.”

“Outside!” Brechtje repeated.

They went, and then Brechtje needed to go around the dining room, comforting her customers. The place was busy. It usually was. It was both a tavern and rooming house with several rooms on the second floor. It was well situated and kept Brechtje busy.

But arguments like that were getting more common. When she got back to the table, Wolfert asked, “Were they roomers or just diners?”

“Those two were diners. They eat here a couple of evenings a week, and usually agree that the rest of us are going to hell, and that they don’t have to treat us fairly because they are chosen of God.” Brechtje sighed. “Putting up with them is part of the job, but they can make it difficult.”

“It seems to be an invasion of Counter-Remonstrants,” Wolfert said.

“I wouldn’t mind so much if they would just feel superior, but they seem to think that their special relationship to God means that honesty and decency need not be given to those not of the Select. They also have a tendency to short on the bill. You have to watch the Select.”

* * *

After he finished eating and left, Wolfert again wished that he hadn’t had to take out that loan to start his building business. He built good houses, but his profits were barely enough to live on and keep up the payments on what he owed to the moneylender. And he couldn’t saddle Brechtje with his debt. He just couldn’t.

Even assuming she’d have him. Brechtje was a good woman, kind, with a friendly word whenever he stopped in, but Wolfert wasn’t sure how much of that was for him and how much was for the customer. She was also quite attractive and had turned down a proposal from Herr Gruber since her husband died.

Meanwhile, the invasion of the Counter-Remonstrants was not as good for business as it might be, because too many of them only wanted to deal with others of the Select. And all of them expected special treatment because they were the chosen of God.

So Wolfert lost business to church members who did shoddy work, overcharged, and got away with it because the reverend insisted that only members of the congregation should be employed. What the Counter-Remonstrants had managed to do was drive up the price of pretty much everything that he used in the construction of buildings, making it harder to make a living.

They caused other problems as well. New Amsterdam was a polyglot community with a generally easygoing attitude. The Counter-Remonstrants were less tolerant of Catholics and Jews, not to mention the natives, many of whom were out-and-out pagans. That was bad enough, but they were increasingly insistent that the government, which was the West India Company, become less tolerant as well. They wanted to turn New Amsterdam into a New World version of the tightly knit and cohesive towns they’d come from in the Dutch seven provinces.

Which was making it harder to clear his debt and get to a position where he might ask Brechtje to marry him.

He got home about then. Nailah greeted him and told him the children had eaten and been put to bed.

Nailah was dressed to go out, and as soon as he was in the house she was out of it, on her way to meet her beau. He was a nice lad; another Counter-Remonstrant, but, unlike so many of them, was not belligerent about his religious views. Eduart Jansen worked as a day laborer for Wolfert.

“Go ahead, but don’t you let Eduart take advantage of you.”

Nailah said something in the African tongue she spoke, and from her tone Wolfert probably didn’t want to know the translation. Nailah was a Christian now, but she wore her Christianity somewhat lightly and often harkened back to the beliefs of her tribe in Africa.

* * *

Brechtje watched Wolfert go and didn’t shake her head. She liked Wolfert, and for practical reasons she needed to get married. Just she and Lijsbeth weren’t enough to run this place, and with the amount of new construction and new devices since the Ring of Fire, you couldn’t hire good workers for love nor money. That meant that you had to buy contracts of indenture, or slaves, or half slaves. There were immigrants pouring into New Amsterdam, but mostly they weren’t poor and desperate for work. Mostly they were people from the Dutch provinces who were moving because their side had lost and they were not reconciled to the new situation. But no one had driven them out, which meant they’d had the time and opportunity to bring their goods and their money.

Brechtje was aware of all that in the back of her mind, and she’d even read some of the new books on economics that were showing up all over the place. These days it seemed that every ship brought as many books as people and that was a lot of books. And even more pamphlets and the cheat sheets that were so popular these days.

But mostly she was thinking that the inn was just too big, she needed help, and didn’t know how to get it. She’d refused Herr Gruber, and not just because he was a grubby little fat man with dirty hands that wandered where they shouldn’t, but because she knew that the only reason he was offering marriage was to get his hands on the inn. And if she married him it would stop being her inn. Wouldn’t even be their inn. Instead, it would be his inn, and he would probably sell it.

She also knew Wolfert’s situation, and even respected him for not wanting to saddle her with his debts. But in spite of those debts, she wished he would stop trying to protect her and ask. She figured the two of them together could retire the debt soon enough.


Back | Next
Framed