CHAPTER TEN

Standing alone in the street, Suzanne let her own tears fall. She was weeping with relief for Judith, with impotent rage at a world where the worst of men brutalised women. She was weeping for herself and all that had been lost.

She allowed herself a few moments of weakness, then she wiped her eyes. Enough. She was not some green girl, afraid of her own shadow, she had a task to accomplish. Judith was relying upon her.

But what if they didn’t believe Judith? A young woman with no money and no influence, brought here to be married to a man she had never met? What if they thought Judith had wielded the knife having invited Driek to her lodgings?

No matter. She had to try.

Suzanne took a breath of cool night air, pulled back her shoulders and set out, her racing thoughts keeping pace with her steps. She doubted there would be anyone in the VOC administration buildings at the harbour at this time of night. Wiser to head to the Castle – not that any of this was wise. She would speak to the night watch and make her report. Then, the matter would be out of her hands. She had no choice but to report Driek’s death, just as she had to believe that, in this frontier land, there would be justice.

The bell began to toll the mournful hour. Four o’clock and nothing’s right with the world, Suzanne thought, but she didn’t turn back.

Adriaan Van Dijk listened to the hour fading into silence.

He was cold, his feet damp from tramping up and down outside the walls. Though a high-ranking and valued member of the administration, he took it upon himself to do this guard duty once a month, so as not to drift too far from the experience of the common soldier. Tonight, he was regretting his decision. He looked up in the direction of the bell tower, willing time to pass more quickly. Only two hours more and his watch would be over.

Adriaan shifted the musket in his hand, adjusted its position on his shoulder, then turned and retraced his steps along his section of the walls between the Leerdam and the Oranje bastions. At least by this time in the morning, when the taverns and flophouses were quiet and all decent citizens were in their beds, Adriaan could hear the sound of the waves lapping on the shore and against the jetty, and that reminded him of home.

Like so many men, far from their native lands, his sentimental thoughts took him back to his mother and his childhood in Rotterdam in a narrow townhouse close to the dam. His father had worked for the VOC in the Rotterdam Chamber, an administrator not a fighting man, and expected his four sons to follow the same path: Adriaan’s eldest brother had been a soldier, killed during the Rampjaar, the disaster year of 1672 when Britain and France had nearly overrun the Netherlands; his second brother had been lost at sea when his ship went down just a year later; the third, no more than a few months old, had been taken in the plague that swept through Rotterdam in the cold early months twenty years prior to that. Though he had loved his mother dearly, Adriaan knew she had quickened him into life to replace the child she had lost. Sometimes, at night, when she was tired or had soothed her nerves with laudanum, she had murmured the name of his dead brother rather than his own as she rocked his cradle.

Adriaan turned back towards Leerdam. He was alone now, the last remaining member of the Van Dijk family, and he supposed he might as well be here as in Rotterdam with his ghosts. But he missed the old country and was resolved, when his service came to an end, to go home and build a different life for himself.

A less lonely life.

Suzanne peered through the mist at the Castle, shimmering in the drizzle.

‘Choose wisely,’ she muttered.

Whomever she approached might make a difference to the outcome: a dismissive, impatient man would react differently to someone more prepared to listen to a foreigner – and a woman, at that. For all that her Dutch was fluent, they would hear her French accent and mistrust it. Although the first Huguenot refugees had been welcomed, in recent years France had been making attempts on the United Provinces and the Netherlands was becoming increasingly protective of its borders and resentful of those seeking sanctuary: a drain on resources, too many mixed allegiances, too many spies in the pay of the French king. A shared religion did not make them Dutch.

Suzanne stared at the Castle walls. There were two sentries at the main gate. She rejected approaching them, thinking she would have a better chance explaining herself to one person alone. She headed instead for the section of the walls closest to her where a solitary guard was on patrol, his weary steps suggesting that he might be slower to put his finger on the trigger.

Suzanne stepped out to where she might be seen.

‘Mijnheer, if you please,’ she called. ‘Could I speak with you?’ She saw him stop and turn, as though expecting a trick. His fingers tightened on his musket, though the gun remained on his shoulder. ‘I have come to report a crime.’

He pointed his musket in her direction. ‘Show yourself.’

She took a careful step further into the light.

‘Who else is with you?’

‘No one,’ she whispered, and heard him catch his breath.

‘You walked across open land alone without a lamp, are you deranged?’ He kept the gun trained on her. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Suzanne Joubert, I arrived on the China last afternoon with my grandmother.’

‘A refugee?’

‘No, we paid our own way.’ She held up her hands. ‘I am not armed.’

The soldier hesitated, then let his musket down. ‘What is it you want, juffrouw Joubert?’

‘I have come to report a murder.’

‘What! Do you take me for a fool?’

‘Not at all. Some two hours ago, two men – one a sailor from the China by the name of Driek Holsteen, the other unknown to me – forced their way into the lodgings where eight orphans from the same ship are billeted. Both men were inebriated. When the stranger tried to take advantage of one of the girls, Judith Verbeek, Holsteen intervened. In that struggle, he was mortally stabbed.’

‘This is a very grave allegation.’

Suzanne met the sentry’s gaze. He had a pale but determined face, with kind eyes. Startlingly blue, the colour of cornflowers. Wearing the distinctive long blue jacket with red lapels and lining of the VOC regiments, with white breeches and stockings, he was a man of perhaps thirty years, though with the air of one who spent his life behind a desk rather than on the battlefield.

‘It is, nonetheless, true,’ she said. ‘We need help.’

‘What is your part in this?’

Suzanne had been wondering how to account for her presence. If she admitted that a few overheard words and female intuition had led her there, he would not take her seriously.

‘I heard men talking outside my window. Their words concerned me. Judith and I became friends during the crossing. I wanted to be certain she – and the other girls – were safe. None of them has ever left Rotterdam before. It is hard for them.’

The soldier’s eyes widened. ‘Rotterdam, did you say?’

‘Yes. They come from the orphanage there and have been brought here to become part of the Colony as wives. Judith, as the oldest, acts as a guardian to them.’

‘Grey dresses,’ he said softly, with a new tone in his voice, almost wistful. ‘I remember . . .’

He turned to look up to the bell tower as if assessing the hour. Then, to Suzanne’s astonishment, he took her by the elbow and steered her back towards the town.

‘Show me.’