New York - The Novel

believed. He pointed his arm along the line of the Milky Way. “Her spirit has traveled along the path of stars to the twelfth heaven. She is with the Maker of all things.”
    She was silent for a long time, and he wondered if she were still awake. But then, in a sleepy voice, she said: “I think of you often.”
    “I think of you too.”
    “If you cannot see me, you can always hear me.”
    “Tell me how.”
    “When there is a little breeze, listen to the voice of the wind sighing in the pine trees. Then you will hear me.”
    “I will listen,” he said.
    The next morning they made their way down to the water and found the two Indians with the big canoe. There they parted and Dirk van Dyck went home.

    Margaretha van Dyck waited three weeks. It was a Sunday afternoon. Her husband had been reading a story to their children, and Quash the slave boy, in the parlor while she sat in a chair watching. These were the times she liked him best. Their son Jan was thirteen, a strong boy with a mop of brown hair, who admired his father and who wanted to follow in his footsteps. Dirk would take him to the company warehouse, explain the workings of the ships, the ports they called at, and the trade winds their captains had to follow. But Jan also reminded her of her own father. He had less waywardness of spirit than Dirk, more love of the counting house. She thought he’d do well.
    They had lost two other children a few years ago to a fever. That hadbeen a terrible blow. But the compensation had been the arrival of little Clara. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, she was now five years old, and looked like an angel. A wonderfully sweet-natured child. Her father adored her.
    As for Quash the slave boy, he was coming along very well. He was about the same age as Jan, and had been allowed to play with him when he was younger. He was very good with Clara, too. But Quash knew his place.
    And watching her husband contentedly reading to his family, Margaretha thought that perhaps her marriage might still become a very happy one, if she could make some small adjustments.
    So after the reading was over and the children had gone to a neighbor’s, and her husband had remarked that he’d need to make another trip upriver soon, she nodded quietly. Then she sprang her trap.
    “I was thinking, Dirk, that it’s time you joined a syndicate.”
    He looked up quickly, then shrugged.
    “Can’t afford it.”
    But she knew he was paying attention.
    Dirk van Dyck had a talent for the fur business. A quarter-century ago, when the West India Company still monopolized the trade of the port, he would have been a more significant figure. But since then, the economy of New Amsterdam had opened up and expanded hugely; and it was the golden circle of leading families—Beekmans, van Rensselaers, van Cortlandts and a score of others—who formed the syndicates to finance the shipping of tobacco, sugar, slaves and other growing commodities. This was where a man could make a fortune. If he had the price of entry.
    “We may have more money than you think,” she said quietly. We: a team, husband and wife. She made it sound as if they shared the money jointly, but they both knew it wasn’t so. When her father had died six months ago, Margaretha had inherited; and under the terms of her prenuptial agreement, her husband had no control over her fortune. Nor had she let him discover how large that fortune was. “I think we could invest a little in a syndicate,” she added.
    “There is risk,” he warned.
    She knew. Some of the largest investors in the colony were rich widows and wives. She had consulted them all.
    “No doubt. But I trust your judgment.” She watched him consider. Had he guessed her plan? Probably. But it was hardly an offer to be refused. He thought, then smiled.
    “My dear wife,” he answered in an affectionate voice, “I am honored by your trust and I will do whatever I can for our family.”
    It had been the richest woman in the colony, a widow who’d just taken her third young husband, who’d given her the advice. “Don’t rule your husband. But arrange the conditions in which he will make his choices.” It would not take long, Margaretha judged, for van Dyck to get a taste for larger transactions. And for the busy social life that went with them. He’d soon be too occupied in New Amsterdam to go running after Indian women in the wilderness. And once he became accustomed to his new life, he’d also be too afraid of her