The Winthrop Woman

by Anya Seton

  Elizabeth sighed deeply, and listened no more while Daniel continued to read. She rubbed her foot secretly along the ground. It's mine—she thought. I can do as I like here. She looked with passionate gratitude across the rock at the Indians who were giving her this joy. None of them looked back except Keofferam, Telaka's brother, who noted Elizabeth's expression with astonishment. He was a short squatty young brave, lavishly tattooed with black and red dots as befitted a great chief's son. His intelligent gaze was puzzled as he inspected Elizabeth's glowing face, then his lips lifted in a faint smile, as though he had understood. Certainly the other Indians did not. They had no passion for land ownership, nor clear recognition of what they were selling, except that they agreed not to fish within a mile of any white man's weir. What of that? There were innumerable rivers and plenty of fish. If the white men wanted to bestow the warm gaudy English coats for the privilege of building huts and planting com, why, let them. There was room enough for all.

  And so they signed their marks in squiggles and whorls, the four sachems who were selling, and the others as witnesses, using Robert's quill pen and some excellent ink made from sumac berries.

  Robert Husted and Andrew Messenger were the English witnesses. When they had all signed, Jeffrey Ferris gravely requested the addition of a paragraph.

  "Keofferam hath sould all his right in ye above sd. to Jeffere Ferris," witnessed by "Richard Williams" and "Angell Heusted."

  Jeffrey nodded and stepped back satisfied. He had no certainty, at present, of remaining on his little Greenwich plot, but still it was well to have his ownership attested.

  Mianos had not moved during these proceedings; he now spoke to Telaka, who turned to the English. "My father say put the coats on the rock, and we hold powwow."

  "Holy Mary," said Daniel. "Ha' we got ter watch 'em sing, an' smoke that vile pipe wi' 'em? Well, can't be helped."

  He and Robert heaved the bundle of scarlet and blue coats onto the rock. Mianos counted them carefully and stepped aside, beckoning to his shaman. The priest walked forward, raised his arms in invocation, and began to chant. He wore a bear's head over his own and anklets of wooden rattles which he shook rhythmically. The Indians chanted with him. The ceremonial pipe was brought, and passed from mouth to mouth, first to the Indians, then to the white men. "Werritige," said the Indians as they exhaled, which meant, said Telaka, "The bargain is sealed." So the white men said it too—"Werritige." Only Mayn Mianos did not smoke the pipe with them, and when the white folk finally left Elizabeth's Neck bearing their precious deed, Daniel said a trifle anxiously, "I marvel that Chief Mianos held off so. There was something in his eye I didn't care for."

  Elizabeth was walking beside Daniel and she laughed gaily. "Why, you sound fretty as Robert!—Mianos's sons signed, and it's all done, and oh, Dan, think of it! We've bought miles and miles. We own land bigger than the whole of London, as big as all West Suffolk, I believe! We've got meadows and hills and valleys and forests and rivers all our own!"

  "Aye," said Daniel. He gave her a glance of rueful amusement. "And you've got that queer-looking axe-shaped neck ye hankered after, may you enjoy it, me poor lass." And may it, he thought, make up for all else you've missed.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  NEARLY TWO YEARS after the purchase of Greenwich, on the eighth day of April, 1642, Elizabeth was again aboard the Dolphin, Toby at the tiller, and Daniel Patrick beside her in the cockpit. They were bound for New Amsterdam on a momentous mission, and had embarked in a mood of stiff determination which followed weeks of anxiety. While the shallop bobbed down the Sound towards the Dutch capital, nobody spoke for a long time.

  Patrick sat frowning at the bilges, his plumed helmet on his knee. Anneke had polished his captain's helmet and cuirass as best she could and patched his old camlet breeches; nonetheless, his armor shone but dully, the helmet's white ostrich plumes hung bedraggled with age. Elizabeth too had tried to appear elegant for the occasion, and was wrapped in the venerable squirrel-lined velvet mantle she had bought in London, but her best taffeta gown, when unpacked from the chest where it had lain for two years, was cracked along the folds. Moreover, it did not fit, since Elizabeth was seven months pregnant. She wore perforce a loose homespun, which she had dyed a soft orange with sassafras bark. However, her wide lace collar was fastened with Harry's brooch, Robert's gold chain circled her neck. Greenwich should not be entirely shamed by its representatives.

  "Flushing over there—" said Toby, breaking the silence and indicating the Long Island shore with his chin. "One or two English. They get along under the Dutch."

  "Oh, and so will we," cried Elizabeth quickly. "We must. I'm sick of quarreling and uncertainty."

  "Aye," said Daniel. "This is the only thing for us to do. Better be chivvied by Governor Kieft, pigheaded windbag that he is, than by those ferrety Stamford saints. An' Kieft's a whole lot further away from us."

  Elizabeth nodded. They had been over all this many times. "Yet why can't we just be let alone?" she said with a wry little laugh. "It's our land. We bought it. I never thought New Haven Colony and the Dutch'ld each claim us, fighting over us like a couple of hounds with a knucklebone."

  "Well—" said Daniel. "Per'aps we shoulda guessed we'd have to pay allegiance somewhere. 'Twon't really make much difference. Besides, Bess—we may need protection."

  "I can't believe it!" she cried, looking at Patrick with a mixture of fear and indignation. "Our Siwanoys would never harm us, even if they had aught to do with those wretched Laddins but they didn't. I'm sure of it. Besides, don't you believe Mianos? He denied it. And Telaka came to me as she always did, you know that, I trust her. The children love her and her brothers are such good Indians, how would we ever've got our house built without Keofferam and Amogerone? Or lived through last winter—all the game they brought us—you too."

  "I'faith," agreed Daniel gravely. "Just the same, who was it murdered the Laddins?"

  Elizabeth was silent, though she would not be convinced. Because the new-come Captain Underhill, knowing nothing about it, insisted that the ghastly deed had been done by the Siwanoys, and because the Siwanoy brave Powiatoh's mangled body had been found with Laddin in the ravine at the bottom of the great cliff was no proof that Mianos was in any way concerned. She shrank from reviewing the tragedy, but having started, could not stop.

  Cornelis Labden—or Laddin as the English called him—had been an old Dutch rascal, foul-mouthed and steeped in mm, which there was every reason to suppose he sold to the Indians for beaver pelts and wampum. He and a disreputable young woman he called his daughter had wandered to Greenwich last fall and set up a cabin in the uninhabited northern part of the town, near the inland Indian trail which connected the fords on the Mianus and Rippowam Rivers. Labden paid the Feakes a string of wampum for his homestall, and after that they saw no more of him, nor wished to. Robert had been dubious about selling to an unsavory Dutchman, but Elizabeth backed by Daniel had overruled Robert. Their community would exclude nobody on a morals charge, as did the sanctimonious New England towns, as Stamford now with fifty-nine godly settlers was already doing. There should be freedom for all in Greenwich. Besides, Labden's little property was hidden in deep forest, miles from the Feake and Patrick homes on the Great Cove.

  Labden's fate, and that of his woman, might never have been known, except that Robert and Daniel set out for Stamford one day last month to see John Underhill, of whose arrival there they had just heard. The mercurial Captain had led a checkered life since Elizabeth had last seen him in Anne Hutchinson's parlor in Boston. He had been Governor of Dover on the Piscataqua until Dover residents, incited by John Winthrop, had ousted him. Underhill had returned to Boston and appealed against his banishment. Beating his breast and quoting Scripture, he vowed repentance for his early sins. He sprayed the meetinghouse with tears of contrition, and was finally forgiven by the Church. But this availed him little. Winthrop's power had returned; he was about to be re-elected Governor in place of Richard Bellingham
, and his distaste for Underhill continued. The Captain, finding after all no employment in Boston, began to make new plans, when an opportune letter arrived from some old friends of his, Andrew Ward and Matthew Mitchell, now at Stamford. They wrote that being fretted by the Indians, and threatened by the Dutch, they would deem it an honor if so doughty a soldier would settle with them, and become their military leader. Underhill, leaving his Dutch wife, Helena, in Boston, had sailed to Stamford for a quick reconnoitering trip, and was pleased by his reception and the handsome recompense the Stamfordians promised him. He accepted their offer. This news reached the Feake house in Greenwich one morning by means of Toby, who now confined his coasting trade to the nearby Connecticut and Dutch towns, while using Greenwich Cove as a home port.

  Robert and Daniel started off at once on foot to greet their old acquaintance, and gamer news about the Bay. Last summer a Boston pinnace bound for New Amsterdam had brought Elizabeth an affectionate letter from Margaret saying that all was well and that Jack was on an extended voyage to England. But since then they had heard nothing.

  The muddy March thaws and consequent floods had rendered impassable the shore trail along the Sound to Stamford, so Robert and Daniel took the drier northern path. As they turned east through dense forest they smelled smoke, and heard groans and agonized Dutch cries for help. They traced the sounds to the foot of a tremendous granite cliff, and there saw old Labden lying by a brook, his back broken and blood running from his mouth. A Siwanoy brave, Powiatah, reeking of ram, lay crushed and dead beside him. Labden died too in a few minutes, while Daniel bent over him trying to understand the bubbling gasps which indicated that several Indians with tomahawks had pursued the Dutchman who had fled to the concealed top of the thirty-foot cliff, and dodged, so that the Indians, unaware, might plunge over. Only Powiatah had done so, but he had dragged Labden with him as he fell.

  This disaster, though certainly distressing, was not as horrifying to the two Englishmen as the sequel. Labden's last words were of his woman, Gretje. And his fears were justified.

  Leaving the two corpses in the ravine, the men skirted the cliff and on the top saw that Labden's hut was burning. The flames, impeded by the dampness of the wood, had consumed only the back corner of the hut and the men rushed in. Gretje lay on the earth floor near the door, her headless body bound by buckskin thongs. Her head was on the table propped against an iron skillet. Her hands had been cut off, and had vanished. Around each wrist stump had been tied a painted snakeskin such as the Indians used for girdles.

  They had fled from that charnel hut, Daniel as shaken as Robert was, and run the rest of the way to Stamford village. There they had found Underhill inspecting the new house by the Rippowam which the Stamford men had started building for him.

  And Underhill, thought Elizabeth, brash and cock-sure as always, had immediately given it as his opinion that Mianos and all the Siwanoys were on the rampage. He had with great difficulty been prevented by Patrick from a headlong attack on Mianos.

  There had been high words between the two old comrades-at-arms; Daniel, losing his temper completely, had told Underhill to mind his own business, and ascertain a few facts before meddling in other folk's territory, and upsetting relationships precariously established while Underhill was still smugly repenting in Boston.

  John Underhill, secure of backing from the admiring Stamford settlers who resented Greenwich's independence, retorted that Patrick had always been a contentious fool, and a sly Indian-lover to boot, and that it was a good thing that these far-off isolated English towns had now acquired a strong military leader to protect them.

  "And that did it!" Daniel told Elizabeth when he recounted the day's events. "'Oh no, Johnny, me lad—' I cried to him. 'Ye'll not captain it over me an' my lands, nor Robert Feake's neither!' Then an' there I made up me mind we'd go to the Dutch! An' told him so. Mad as a bull he was, and the Stamford men too. Ha!"

  Elizabeth had ultimately agreed with Daniel, though Robert for some time had not. He had shown one of his mulish streaks, and for days kept repeating obstinately, "I am English. Bess is English, we cannot turn Dutch. It won't do. I'm going to put us under New Haven Colony."

  "And answer to Stamford and Underhill for every breath we draw!" shouted Daniel. "Let alone those Puritans at New Haven! By God, Robert, ha'nt ye got your bellyful o' fines and restrictions, an' tithing men an' meetinghouses, an' sour slandering neighbors? Why else did ye come here? The Dutch leave a man be. I've lived wi' 'em, and I know."

  "It's different for you, Dan," said Robert, shrinking from his friend's anger but still persistent. "You're not really English, and Anneke's Dutch. But Bess and I aren't. Imagine what the Winthrops would say if we betook ourselves under the Dutch flag."

  "A pox on the Winthrops!" Daniel roared. "And a pox on you for a faint lily-livered numbskull!" He had been swilling mm steadily since the day they found the Labdens, and his temper—never placid—was dangerous. His fist clenched, his red beard quivered, and Elizabeth, fearing he might hit Robert, had intervened hastily.

  "The Dutch have the best claim to our land, husband. You know that. Remember Governor Kieft's stem letter! If we persist in denying them, it'll be worse for the English, might even start a war.

  It was this argument which eventually wore down Robert's resistance, joined to his innate dependence on Elizabeth's judgment and his fear of Daniel's disapproval. Moreover, at this time he developed blinding headaches, and his nightmares returned. They did not seem to be based on the horror he had seen in the Labden hut, as might be supposed, but from his muttered cries at night, Elizabeth deduced that he was again bedeviled by the old mysterious trouble in London. During the last week she unwillingly recognized some signs of the "strangeness" which had been absent for two years, but ascribed this to the headaches for which she dosed him unavailingly with witch-hazel. When Toby's Dolphin yesterday entered the cove, and the expedition today had been decided, it was clear that Robert, though no longer opposed, was not well enough to go. He had been wan and moaning with headache at dawn today when they sailed off towards New Amsterdam. Anneke and Joan were tending him, and caring for the younger children.

  "Sit down i' the bilges! Hold fast, and keep outa my way!" suddenly commanded Toby, tightening sail and pushing the tiller hard over. "Ben, watch it!" he called to the bow. Elizabeth crouched, holding on to the combing, but Daniel said sharply, "What for?"

  "Hell Gate," said Toby. "Fall overboard then, if you wish."

  Daniel looked ahead at a narrow stretch of boiling waters, where a small Dutch sloop was pitching and churning violently, while the skipper with a steering oar tried to free his craft from a whirlpool. Daniel sat down in the bilges. "Do we have to go through that?" he called to Toby, who did not bother to answer but plunged into the roaring rapids cannily steering close to a large rounded point on the Long Island shore, where the current ran freer. The Dolphin grazed a hidden rock, then shot through the tide-rip like an arrow, and settled down in quieter waters near a long splinter of an island where swine were grazing.

  "Good for you, Toby!" cried Elizabeth, exhilarated. "No wonder 'tis called Hell Gate. And what a fine sailor you are!"

  "Chancy run-through at this tide, couldn't a done it later—" said Toby, his heavy freckled face indicating recognition of Elizabeth's compliment. "Now we'll soon be to the Fort," he added with satisfaction. Toby approved of this mission. He liked the Dutch and enjoyed himself at New Amsterdam. They had a dozen taprooms, overflowing with rich food and a variety of potent liquors. Also most of the mynheers were easygoing and liberal with their guilders. They'd buy all the beaver and otter pelts Toby could pick up, and pay well besides for messenger service between the Long Island settlements and Manhattan. There had, however, been some recent awkwardness since Director General Kieft had demanded the submission of the Feakes, and had his request ignored. Toby had found his New Netherland markets shutting against him. On his last visit the schout, or sheriff, had rescinded his trader's license and w
arned him away from the Fort until the matter of his uncle's allegiance should be settled. So Toby had needed no inducement to make this trip.

  As they skimmed down the East River and neared Manhattan's tip, the water traffic thickened. They passed Indian dugouts with pointed stem and bow, heavier built than the New England canoes. The paddling Indians, clothed in wildcat and wolfskins, with lopsided hair arrangements, also looked different. "Hackensacks, Raritans, or mebbe Mohawks from way up the North River," said Toby indifferently in answer to Elizabeth's question. "There's a ship in from Holland!" he added pointing. "My pelts'll fetch a good price soon as you and Patrick've cleared us."

  So filled was the harbor with shipping—sloops, yachts, canoes, shallops and barges—that at first Elizabeth did not see the great high-pooped West Indiaman, riding at anchor near the Breucklen shore. When she did, she looked from its ensign to the larger counterpart on the Fort's flagstaff, a piece of cloth with horizontal red, white and blue stripes fluttering in the breeze.

  Elizabeth, accustomed to the English cross of St. George, thought that this neat tricolor did not look like a flag at all, and was dismayed. Oh, what are we doing! she thought. And to Daniel she cried sharply, "I think we must be mad! We can't give Greenwich to Holland. Robert was right. Let's go back!"

  The two men stared at her in astonishment. Toby shrugged and steered for the landing. Daniel said soothingly, "Me dear girl, ye're talking nonsense. 'Tis late days fur patriotic qualms. What's more, we can't help ourselves. Can't go it alone in case o' trouble."

  The Indians again, Elizabeth thought, annoyed. Daniel had changed, grown jumpy and crotchety as an old woman. It was the drink perhaps. She knew Anneke was worried.

  "Bess," said Daniel, watching her. "Stop sitting there all broody. We'll have no chopping an' changing now. Ye're a smart woman, and used to your own way, but ye ha'nt allus got good sense and ye'll take orders for once."