Accidental Warrior: The Unlikely Tale of Bloody Hal

by Colin Alexander

  “Wait a minute. I thought Martin was the eldest son.”

  “Oh, he is now,” she said. “You tell Johanna’s father not to worry. Richard was older, of course, by seven or was it eight years? Or nine, I forget now. He was killed several years ago, a tragic thing, really. We don’t discuss it here.”

  The maid’s story matched Bel’s. There had been an older Wycliff son and he had been killed. The timing, well, it was not exact, but it could be right. Hal needed to be certain. “What is Master Wycliff’s position now in Nieuw Amsterdam?”

  The old woman’s eyes widened at Hal’s ignorance. “He’s the Commissioner of Tolls, of course!” She continued to prattle on for a while about the Wycliffs and their relatives and their relatives’ children without Hal paying attention to a word of it. Finally, she bustled out of the kitchen, probably bound on an errand that would take her through the front room.

  Hal sat in the kitchen, staring at his hands. What was the truth? Martin Wycliff was the son of the Wycliff who had tortured Bel, the younger brother of the Wycliff who had tried to rape her and whom she had killed. That was all very clear. What was not clear was what Hal should do about it, assuming that he should do anything at all. Martin Wycliff was sitting in the front room. There was a sword buckled on Hal’s belt. An urge was building to take the sword, walk into the front room, and skewer Martin Wycliff. Except that this Wycliff had not—could not have—had any role in what had happened to Bel. He would have been a child himself at the time.

  It would be better to wait for the elder Wycliff to return. The father was guilty, no question of that. But should Hal kill him in cold blood to avenge a scarred girl who had said Hal would be her enemy if they met again? A girl who had not asked Hal to avenge her?

  His thoughts returned to the image of skewering Martin Wycliff. Quite possibly he thought of skewering Martin Wycliff because it was Wycliff, not Hal, who sat with Johanna in the front room.

  These thoughts cycled uselessly through Hal’s mind until the maid reappeared in the kitchen to announce that Johanna was ready to leave. For a brief moment Hal hoped the visit had ended badly, but one glimpse of Johanna’s radiant face as she waited for him by the front door ended that dream. Johanna had had a wonderful afternoon. She was sure that she was in love; she had never felt this way before. In fact, she could not keep quiet about it. From the moment they got into the carriage, she had to talk about how sophisticated Martin was, how cultured he was, how he had seen all the great plays Johanna had only read, how he was being groomed for an important government position, how he played two instruments, and on and on. Since she and Hal were alone, it was Hal who served as her audience. He suffered through her monologue in silence, his rather glum affect unnoticed by Johanna, who rarely paused in her recitation. By the time the carriage brought them back to the fort, Hal felt that the only details of Martin Wycliff he had not heard of were those covered by his clothes.

  “What do you think, Hal?” she asked at the main entrance. “Should I tell my father about it? He’ll probably ask anyway, don’t you think?”

  “I think he’ll ask,” Hal agreed. “You can tell him. Just don’t expect him to listen to all of it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he won’t.” Johanna gave a broad smile that struck Hal like a knife. “Not as well as you did. You’re such a good listener. I’m really very grateful. Good evening, now, Hal Christianson.”

  Hal watched the back of Johanna’s retreating form. ‘Such a good listener,’ was not quite what he wanted to hear. If he had three months of afternoons like this to look forward to as part of Gustavus’ special duty, it might be worth finding out what would make Sergeant Anderson throw him in the stockade, or whatever they used for a jail.

  With a sigh, he headed to the company’s mess, where he ate alone. Then he went to his room, where he stood by the window to watch night fall over Nieuw Amsterdam. Before it was fully dark, he lit the little oil lamp that rested on the table by his bed, then went back to the window. Not long after that, there was a knock on his door.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  “It’s me, Hal.”

  He recognized Annelise’s voice immediately. “Too much to hope it would be Johanna,” he muttered under his breath. Louder, he said, “Go away, Annelise. You can tell me all about Johanna’s schedule in the morning.”

  “It’s not about that. I have to talk to you.”

  “Oh, all right. Just a second.” He crossed the small room in a couple of strides and yanked the door open.

  Annelise stood there wearing the same garb he had seen her in before, except the white cotton cap was gone. Her dark-brown hair was braided into pigtails that were then coiled and pinned on the top of her head. Hal guessed that her hair would fall to the middle of her back if she let it down.

  Annelise made a quick sidestep into the room, because Hal was blocking most of the doorway, and ended facing Hal with her back to the wall. A vein pulsated in her neck.

  “What’s this about?” he asked.

  “It’s no use longing for Mevrouw Johanna,” she said. “Even if there were no Martin Wycliff, she is not going to spend her time with a common soldier.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. I saw the way you looked at her this morning; I heard the way your voice dropped when you said her name. I am not a fool. But you’re wasting your time and energy. It won’t happen.”

  “Thank you for coming to rub my nose in what I can also see,” Hal said. “If that was all you came to tell me, the door is still open.”

  “Maybe we should close it,” Annelise said softly. Hal nearly jumped at the words. “Listen to me, Hal Christianson. I know that Johanna is beautiful, very beautiful indeed. I know that you want her. But she will have no interest in a mere soldier and, therefore, it won’t happen, as I already said. Now, I am not as lovely as Johanna. I would be a fool to think otherwise, and I’m not a fool. But to be truthful, Hal Christianson, in the dark and between the sheets, those differences aren’t so important, are they?”

  Hal’s thoughts were a tangle. It would be safer to be rid of her, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to do that.

  “Oh! How plain do I have to make it?” Annelise stamped her foot, exasperated. “Soldiers! Always bragging how they’ll put their ramrod down any muzzle bore they see, anytime, anywhere. Such big talk.” She spun around but instead of leaving, she shut the door.

  She turned back to him and started to unfasten the top lacing at the front of her dress. She pulled it forward to reveal her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. “Are you afraid of me, Hal Christianson?”

  “No,” he managed to say.

  She closed the space between them, her face turned up to his. As she did, she shrugged a little so that her dress fell free from her breasts. Then she leaned against him so that he could feel her warmth through his shirt. Hal never quite remembered who put out the lamp.

  20

  The New Year’s Ball

  “HAL, YOU ARE one dumb schmuck,” he told the ceiling as he lay in bed just after waking up. A couple of long strands of brown hair on the other side of the bed told him that it had been occupied by more than just his imagination.

  The problem wasn’t that he’d had sex with a maid. He would bet that sort of thing happened all the time at this fort, or any other. But, no, I had to go and fuck Johanna’s maid. Of all the possible ways to land himself in trouble, that was probably the worst. His friends at school all discussed the girls they went out with, sometimes in astonishing detail. Would Annelise be doing the same thing with her friends? “He’s not bad,” she might be saying, “once you get him started.” Oh, God, how fast would gossip like that spread? Would she actually tell Johanna? Had she already done so? Would Gustavus fire him? Or worse?

  But, no, that made no sense. Annelise would be in worse trouble than he would. There was no way she would tell Johanna. For the same reason, she would probably not tell anyone else.
Relax, Hal. He didn’t really relax, but it was enough to get him out of bed and into his uniform.

  He reported to Anderson after breakfast. The sergeant then lined up the entire company for drill. It was then that Hal saw just how bad the fight at Nieuwmarkt had been. Where Gustavus had come into Gap with thirty troopers, there were now only twenty in line, including him. Anderson had them form a column, two abreast, and proceeded to march them around the practice field. Then he had them switch from the column to a single-line formation, twenty men wide, each an arm’s distance from his neighbor on either side. They practiced moving as a line, keeping the line even and their spacing unchanged. Anderson managed to find fault with everyone, though none so much as Hal, who was always either ahead of or behind the line and who, when they made a pivot with the line, had a tendency to close up with the man on his left.

  “This is a line of battle, not a town dance, Woodsey! God dammit, I’ll bet you’re no use on the dance floor either. Arm’s length spacing, God dammit!” After that, Anderson’s cursing became more graphic.

  Hal wondered how he had managed to learn to walk by himself. But by the time the drill was done he was doing better, as he had done two days before. With no other duties, he was then free to do as he wished, Anderson’s only restriction being that if he went into town, he had to be back by dark.

  Finally, he had time to look for someone who knew about Magicals!

  The guards at the gate let him through without question. The uniform of Nya Sverige was all the pass he needed. Once through, however, he faced the same problem he had had when he came off the dock. Nieuw Amsterdam was not a single city. It was more a collection of towns, stitched together along its wide avenues. Each area had its own center, where shops and industry were located. Some had signs in English, others in Dutch. Styles of dress seemed to go with the language on the signs and in the streets. From his first day leaving the dock, Hal knew he would be restricted to English-speaking areas, but he felt stymied even there. He could not just google ‘Magicals’, or ‘Magical experts’, or ‘shops with books on Magicals.’ He could not bring up a map that would lead him through the winding streets to his destination. Had he ever been able to do that? Or was it like his dream of the wizard who would send him home with a wave of his wand? Hal wanted to scream his frustration at the people in the street who walked past without noticing him. The idea kept forming that he should run back to the fort and forget all about Magicals and New York City and a different world. He should tell himself that this was all the reality there was.

  He took a deep breath and forced down the rising panic. Stay focused, Hal. You’ve come this far, you can see it to the finish.

  There was only one way to find out what people knew about Magicals. He would have to ask them. Maybe, in a crisp uniform, as a soldier of a foreign power, if he kept his voice peremptory, he could get away with questions he would never have dared to ask the Slades or Captain Hayry.

  He asked shopkeepers and their customers; he asked random people in the street. He checked every shop on one street, then those on the next street and then the street after that. The answers were all variations on a few themes: Magicals were children’s stories. They did not exist, beyond their role in instilling proper behavior into those children. The main alternative story he heard was that they were agents of Satan sent to lure churchgoing men and women from their proper paths in life. It depended who he asked: those he thought of as English were inclined to credit Satan, while Dutch or others went for children’s stories. A third set of people would press their lips together, avert their eyes, and hurry off. Whether that was because they knew something they would not speak of or because they feared associating with anyone asking about Magicals, Hal couldn’t tell.

  It didn’t really matter. None of it helped him. He stopped when he reached the main wall of Nieuw Amsterdam.

  Anderson had held forth on the topic of the wall in the mess. During the plague years, the inhabitants had labored to turn it from a wooden palisade into a wall of stone and brick, believing that the added strength of the wall could compensate for reduced manpower, should the town need defending. Over the years they had added both height and thickness to the wall, although they never built seawalls to guard its flanks the way the lower tip of the island was encased. Eventually, though, the wall had become a limitation to the town’s growth and people began to build north of it. Now that he was in the city, rather than seeing it from the river, he realized that the northern area was distinctive, with houses built mainly of wood and only English heard on the streets. It was, perhaps, as large again as the entire area to the south.

  Anderson always scoffed at the wall, as he had done the day Hal reached the fort. Too many houses were built too close to it in the event it actually had to be defended, and it wouldn’t stand up to modern cannon anyway.

  Hal looked through the gate at the streets beyond and sighed. There was no time to go north of the wall that day. He’d have to find a way to check the Dutch-speaking areas too, although maybe he needed another approach altogether for that. Haarlem, assuming it corresponded to the Harlem he remembered, would be on the northern part of the island. If he could find a way to get there and back he could buy Oort a beer and ask him.

  In any case, it would all need to wait for another opportunity; today his time was up.

  • • •

  Usually two days a week, sometimes three, he would accompany Johanna out of the fort. Most of the time she went to Wycliff’s house, where Hal would sit, bored, in the kitchen. Other times, she would visit shops in the town. Those days were more pleasant for Hal, since he did not have to think about Martin Wycliff with Johanna, but there was no chance to ask anyone about Magicals and little more chance to speak with her. She was inclined to talk only about the wares in the shops or, worse, about Martin.

  That left plenty of days, though, when after drill with Anderson he could go into town to search for leads to Magicals, or to those who knew about them. Those expeditions always ended the way his first attempt had: with nothing. No matter where he looked, whether north or south of the wall, no matter who he asked, no matter how he asked the questions, nobody would talk.

  He made far more progress with Anderson. The repeated drill refined his movements so that, on the practice field anyway, he looked the same as any of Anderson’s veterans. But looks were not everything. For all the time they practiced at the fort, the company never fired a shot. The Provis would never permit it, one of the men told Hal. They were not about to have people firing inside their fortress. The result was that no matter how good Hal looked carrying a rifle, he knew he couldn’t hit anything with it unless he swung it as a club. Anderson probably knew that too, but all he said to Hal was that he was starting to look polished.

  Of course, polish a coward and what you got was a polished coward was Hal’s thought.

  It is possible that Hal could have continued in this routine indefinitely, were it not for the New Year’s Ball. Hal had heard talk about the Ball—it would have been hard to avoid it as the end of the year approached—but he assumed that Gustavus would take Johanna himself and he would have the night off. Annelise disabused him of that notion in peremptory tones on the afternoon of December thirty-first.

  “Of course, you are involved in the ball!” She stamped her foot, as she usually did when she felt that Hal was being dense. “You are Johnna’s escort! Stupid soldiers! All of you the same. No brains, except in your cocks and not much there either.”

  Hal colored, but kept silent. Arguing with Annelise was futile.

  “You have to know about the ball. It is the most important event in society anywhere north of Florida, that is for sure, and probably south as well.”

  Annelise told him that an invitation was proof of belonging to highest level of society, whether by birth or money was irrelevant, and for a foreigner an invitation was a clear signal that the individual was a favored guest of the government. The first New Year’s Ball had been held in 185
9 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s sailing up the river that bore his name. With one exception, it had been held every year after that at the governor’s mansion, a huge, multi-story expanse of white brick that adjoined the southern wall of Fort Stuyvesant.

  “I was at the last ball the old governor held before the revolt,” Annelise said. “Oh, I was not invited, of course, it would be silly for me to even pretend, but my minnares was and she brought me along. I was seventeen then.” Annelise’s voice softened and her eyes looked to a faraway point as she described the elaborate, bejeweled outfits, the ice sculpture of a savage at the entrance to the mansion, the food, the music and the dancing. To her, it had been one night of heaven on earth. She seemed to forget she was talking to Hal. For his part, Hal was less interested in Annelise’s sudden, dreamy state than in a quick calculation: the woman he was sleeping with was half again as old as he was. He swallowed hard and missed part of what she was saying.

  “Then there was the revolt and the Provis took over,” she continued. “That year, nine years ago, there was no ball.”

  Hal could read between the lines of her story. The Provisionals, then in the process of slaughtering as many of the old Dutch aristocrats as they could lay hands on, thought the ball an inappropriate symbol. A year later, though, the ball was back. The moneyed merchants of Nieuw Amsterdam and neighboring areas, whether English or Dutch, had ridden out the war with most of their wealth intact—at least, those who sided with the Provis. They still saw the ball as a chance to show off their standing and present their sons and daughters to the mighty. The Provis, too, after a year in power, had felt more secure and were anxious to show everyone that Nieuw Netherlands was a stable country under their rule. There were differences, of course. The Grand Patroons of the Hudson Valley no longer came into Nieuw Amsterdam the week before the ball to give parties at their town houses. They were all either dead or hiding with the governor’s youngest son in New France to the north. The language of the ball was now English, rather than Dutch. The reception line was no longer dominated by the resplendent costumes of the governor and his retainers, although, admittedly, the more years passed from the revolt, the less the dress of the Provis resembled the severe military dress they had once favored. None of these differences bothered the attendees. The ball let them play their personal politics and indulge their fantasy that they were the elite of the cultural capital of the world, forgetting for the night that Boston and Fort Christina had greater wealth, while the French in Québec and the English Virginians in New Jamestown commanded greater forces.