Abeto Rojo (English Red Larch) is a crossroads village of the Crown of the North, an administrative post of New Amsterdam with no appointed governor, heading a district of crops, livestock and wagon-building. “Two hundred years ago people lived here.”
| Law | Constable Harbrook |
| Spanish entry | Abeto Rojo |
Name and land
The French spelling Baton Rouge may be the same word or a different place, much farther north; this is unresolved. The land is rugged, with rough hills, stone parapets and distant mountains; to the east a canyon of river-cut cliffs. The granite stone lies twelve miles south, almost a day’s walk.
The village
Houses share space with animals “in the Nordic way,” among chickens, fields and orchards. The largest house serves as school, church and everything, with a barbershop that also cuts wood, provisions and tools. The Protestant churches have little ornament. There are an inn with three clay bread ovens and a locked back door, a butcher, a smith, a baker, a burned wagonworks and a “much posher” one that builds the Cataluña’s big wagons.
Trade
Crops, sheep, cows, wagons, smoked goods and chickens pass through. Two industries sustain the district, and both serve as leverage: District 16, with most of the carters’ workshops, which burned in the fire; and the Meliko Stonework quarry, employing whole families (“your family that works at the quarry” is a threat). Notables: Dirty Dutch Mantel (burned wagonworks), Malandro Galicur (merchant), Van Helburg (cloth and fine furs), Charles Bansil (leather), Vargauntas (retired carpenter), Rodar Haderhant (landowner).
Authority
Authority is “rather vague.” Rule falls to elder-like figures: the baker Mango Barba Loren, the quarry boss, the women of the poultry shop and Mother Yalanta’s girls. Harbrook commands four guards, his “deputies,” against “Indians, others, the English”; once armed like butchers, they now carry halberd and spear. Justice pays 50-gold vouchers to equip defenders and for each bandit brought in. Guards disarm and flank with paired spears. Witchcraft is crime and taboo; striking a woman marks a coward. In crisis, women, children and old men shelter in the church with a “strange” priest who intones Petrum mordum novificarum and Malleus Maleficarum.
The fire
The wagonworks fire brought witchcraft accusations, a trial and a fight in the yard, and destroyed part of District 16. “Abeto Rojo is a place that had no guide,” which lets an order settle over it. Beneath runs “an underground network” of masked men “like some of the monks” of the monastery, witnessed by Freeman, a freedman from Barbados in the band.
Conflicting accounts
- The guards bear spears and muskets, crossbows, or halberds and spears.
- Mantel’s wagonworks burned, though everyone expected the Cataluña’s to.
Open questions
- How the network relates to the monks and the order.
- What the “canonicería,” where some guards work, is.
- Population, duties to New Amsterdam, who appoints the Constable, the fire’s cause and the trial’s outcome are unrecorded.