Page 19 of Dawnlands

Johnnie realized that she had survived events that he had never even heard of. “I like you, Rowan,” he said carefully. “And I will be your friend. I will help you in any way that I can.”

She nodded gravely. “When I know what I want, I will tell you,” she promised. “Until then, I will go where Ned Ferryman goes, until my debt is paid.”

“He might lead you into danger,” Johnnie warned. “You don’tunderstand. He is not a good guide for you. He doesn’t believe in kings, he doesn’t believe in masters—”

He broke off when he saw her mischievous smile. “But neither do I. My Massasoit—my king—is dead. I will never serve a master, I shall go with your uncle Ned until I am free and I know what I want to do.”

“And what then?” he demanded. “What—when you know what you want to do?” He was dazzled by her easy confidence:

“Then I will do that.”

AMSTERDAM, HOLLAND, SPRING 1685

It was not hard for Ned, with Rowan like a silent shadow at his heels, to track down James, Duke of Monmouth, to his inn on the Martelaarsgracht of Amsterdam.

“What kind of land is this with no rivers but all the water between banks of stone?” Rowan demanded, horrified. “Is it like Johnnie said—all street and no sky?”

“They’re great ones for building, the Hollanders,” Ned said. “All of this here will once have been tidelands, waterland. But they build a wall against the sea, and then pump the land behind it dry. Every street is a quayside in this town.” It was impossible to explain to one of the People, who lived on an unending continent, that there was not enough land to be had.

“They live all the time in these…?” She had no word for the row of low-browed houses that scowled over the narrow stinking canal.

“Aye,” Ned said.

“They have no woods? They have no fields? They are so very poor, they don’t even have forests?”

“No! This is the wealthiest trading country in the world. Theyused to own all the wealth of the East until we set up our own East India Company—the one my nephew, Johnnie, works for. Even now, they still hold more than half of the trade.”

“They choose this?” she asked incredulously, gesturing to the narrow door that fronted the canal and the glazed window beside it that gave them a glimpse of a low-ceilinged wood-paneled room, and a closed stove with a blue-and-white-tiled surround, a table before the window dressed with a Turkey rug. Ned thought it a fine stone-built house. He stepped back to admire the gables and the upper windows and the painted sign of the merchant householder.

“To an Amsterdammer, that’s a grand house,” Ned told her. “Now, hold your tongue, we’re going into an alehouse to meet a lord and his council.”

He gestured her to follow him down the half dozen stone steps to a narrow wooden door into the wood-floored, wood-paneled public room of the Karpershoek Inn. She hesitated at the head of the stairs, peering into the darkness.

“It’s below the water?”

“Follow me,” Ned said over his shoulder.

A man was sitting at the great table at the back of the room, half a dozen men around him. A beam of sunlight, crossing the gloomy room from the high windows, illuminated the shine on his dark brown ringlets over the white lace collar. Ned recognized, without pleasure, the Stuart family charm and the Stuart good looks. “Wait here,” he said to Rowan. “Better that you hear nothing.”

Rowan stood still beside the stubby newel post of the stairs. Ned, glancing back, saw that she melted into the gloom of the room, just as she would have disappeared into trees when hunting at her home. Ned doffed his hat and approached the table.

The duke looked up, a slight smile on his face. “Come in,” he said, as if he were in his private house.

“I’m Ned Ferryman,” Ned said with a little bow. “From New England. Come to enter your service, if your cause is just and you’ll have me.”

“I’ve no money to pay you,” the duke said honestly.

“I’d serve for the cause alone; if it’s a good one.”

“It seems good to me, but I won’t command any man’s conscience.”

“You would keep England in the reformed faith?”

“I’m the Protestant prince, everyone knows that.” He nodded at the tap boy, who was standing with a cloth over his arm and a jug of beer. “Pour this good man a drink.”

The boy set a mug before Ned and went out, closing the door behind him.

“I’ll serve you if you wear the green ribbon,” Ned said. Green was the color of the Levellers, the radicals of the old Cromwell army. These days it was worn by the men who drank at the King’s Head in London, talking of freedom and of the rights of men. To every Englishman, it meant the right to his own religion, to his family, to his own land, and legal limits on the power of the king.