The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  Blandine always thought she detected a loneliness behind Martyn’s unfocused eyes and brandy-slurred speech. Although the two of them could not possibly be more different in circumstance and outlook, they each had lost both parents. Martyn would never think of displaying vulnerability, but Blandine perceived it in him nonetheless. She recalled when she and Martyn were young, rattling about the settlement, lost and but shallowly rooted. Or perhaps she was just reading her hurt into his.

  “I have just seen Lace and Mally,” Blandine said.

  “Ah, the Africans again,” Kees said. He disapproved of Blandine’s friendship with the two women. It brought up troubling memories of the Mahican raid.

  “I come with bad news,” Blandine said. “A little girl in the African community has gone missing.”

  “And what is your bad news?” Martyn asked.

  “For pity’s sake, Hendrickson,” Kees said. But he laughed in spite of himself.

  “You are unfunny, sir,” Blandine said to Martyn, and crossed the yard to Aet Visser. She stopped beside him, waiting for him to finish his business.

  With Visser was the orphanmaster’s frequent shadow, Lightning, a half-caste Esopus indian who prided himself on his European father. Lightning dressed as a Dutchman, spoke as a Dutchman and wished desperately to be a Dutchman. Blandine found him repulsive. As if sensitive to her feelings, Lightning faded away when she approached, crossing over to join Martyn Hendrickson.

  Visser stood resting a hand on the shoulder of one of his wretched orphans. These boys were healthy enough, he thought, feeling the bones beneath the boy’s threadbare shirt. They’d serve anyone well as field hands.

  The orphanmaster turned to his former ward.

  “Miss Blandina,” he said. “This is not a place for you.”

  “How much for that one over there?” Blandine cocked her chin at a young orphan boy.

  “Please, it’s not that way,” Visser said. “I merely guide my wards toward gainful employment.”

  Blandine poked Visser in his belly, where the heavy clink of money bags sounded.

  The orphanmaster nodded, acknowledging her point. “We must live in the real world,” he said, sighing.

  “The real world,” Blandine repeated. The orphans looked like a collection of stick figures, leaning against one another for support. From the streets and workhouses of Patria to a hard-labor existence in New Netherland. She loved a part of Aet Visser. But not this part.

  “The Africans report a child of theirs lost or disappeared,” Blandine said. “Lace and Mally have gone frantic.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You know? What do you mean? I just heard of this.”

  “The boy has been gone a good week now,” Visser said.

  “The boy? What boy?” Blandine said. “This is a little girl.”

  Visser took Blandine’s arm and moved her to the far edge of the yard. “We must speak of this, but not now,” he said. “We’ll meet at our usual venue, after sundown, and have our sup.”

  There was nothing Blandine could do. She left, her heart rending. If her life had played out differently, she could have been among the orphans lined up for work, getting pawed over like cattle.

  The Hendrickson house beetled above her as she stepped out into the snowy muck of Market Street.

  5

  Edward Drummond stayed with Margrave well into nightfall, supervising the unloading of his instrument case, his lenses and lens-grinding tools, purchased in the shops of London’s Long Acre and Chancery Lane, crated and couched in beds of wood shavings and straw.

  “That one, there,” Drummond said of the coffin-sized wooden crate containing his prized brass perspective tubes. “Have a care.”

  The porter bumped the crate down the wharf.

  Drummond said to the man, “Is there a glassworks?”

  “A glassworks?” Drummond might as well have asked, Is there an elephant?

  On his way from Switzerland to meet Margrave in Rotterdam, he had time for a detour to Rijnsburg, to the laboratory of Benedict Spinoza, the lens grinder. He picked out a set of plano-concaves, a pair of lovely biconvexes, a concavo-convex, extremely fine work, the man was a magician, plus a disassembled treadle apparatus, in order that Drummond might better learn to grind his own.

  At the dockside warehouse, he questioned the factor. “You keep a watch?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All night?”

  “My man lives atop the stairs,” the factor said.

  Drummond stuck an English guinea into the man’s hand. “I’ll send word where to deliver my crates. Keep them safe.”

  Hat, doffed. Forelock, tugged. Plus a stiff-cocked bow. Perhaps the guinea had been too much.

  He saw his impedimenta safely warehoused and then, at nine o’clock, left the docks and proceeded down Pearl Street into the heart of town.

  One reason to tarry about Margrave was to divest himself of shipmate Remunde, who possessed an inquiring sensibility, and thus might well disrupt Drummond’s purpose in New Amsterdam. Send Gerrit home to his Gerta, and leave the questions behind.

  Drummond must appear a simple grain merchant, newly arrived, in search of his lodgings. He possessed letters of trade that would present him as such.

  One thing he enjoyed about the Dutch, perhaps their best characteristic, was that they were always too busy with their single-minded scurrying after profit to pay anyone else much mind.

  The contemporary wisdom: “The Dutchman is a lusty, fat, two-legged cheese worm, a creature so addicted to eating butter, drinking fat drink and skating on ice that all the world knows him for a slippery fellow.”

  Well, yes. But they were not all that way. Bento Spinoza, for example. A superior man in every aspect.

  On his walk into the town Drummond saw himself clearly transported to the land of the cheese worms. A brawling, ruddy, crapulous bunch, snuffling along like pigs after truffles. The streets of the colony were alive even well after dark.

  The new world, as far as Drummond could see upon first blush, was much like the old. Only dirtier.

  If he squinted he could have been on any minor main street in a Kenmerland countryside village, in the muddy outer precincts of Assen, say, or Hunz.

  Not the Flanders of the Van Eyck brothers, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt van Rijn or even the Brueghels. New Amsterdam felt more like the pig-gravy-and-sausage hamlets in the backwaters of the Zuider Zee, where the peasant boys stared at you gape-jawed, never having seen a human being they didn’t know from the cradle.

  But no one stared at him here. Drummond, in his experiences in service to the crown, had attempted to perfect a posture of transparency. After periods of trial and error, in Amsterdam, the Hague, Paris and London itself, he found it a not difficult skill to possess.

  Pull down your hat brim. Meet not the eyes of any passerby. Appear unlost, resolute in direction, with no hesitancy. Wear a dark cloak that swathes any identifying clothing. Keep to the marge.

  Drummond once walked past a night watch in Bruges, passing within three feet of his lantern. Then a cohort, George Post, trailing behind Edward, waylaid the man and asked if he had seen anyone abroad in the street just now. The night watch had sworn not.

  Invisible. Perhaps, only a shadow.

  Ahead, spilling a rowdy clientele out into the bright pool of its window light, Drummond saw the Red Lion tap house.

  His man Raeger would be there.

  “And you, how are you keeping yourself?” Aet Visser asked Blandine.

  “I leave soon for the Beverwyck market,” Blandine said. “I need to go in order to pursue my trade, and I’ll be gone for at least two weeks. But I’m worried, Aet. The Africans can get no one to care about the fate of this child.”

  Visser patted her hand. “I will look to it,” he said.

  “Will you?” Searching the man’s lumpy face. The bulbous, comical nose had taken on the crimson hue that intensified whenever Visser downed more than one brandy.

  B
landine sat with him in the chimney corner of the Red Lion, on Pearl Street a block from the Strand. A rough tavern, a sailor’s haven frequented also by decadent gentlemen, but a place Blandine knew as a second home. Literally, since her dwelling-house lay just across the street.

  Blandine’s time at the Lion went far back. She accompanied her father there as an orange girl, hawking to the clientele fresh citrus fruits her parents shipped in from the West Indies. She once brought into the Lion a bright green parrot from Curaçao. A fistfight broke out as patrons vied with one another to buy the bird.

  Her parents allowed her to keep her earnings from the tap house, and this was her first introduction to the thrill of trade. Blandine’s French Catholic mother had met her Dutch Protestant father in Flanders. Both made their living buying and selling, along with her Amsterdam uncles, establishing the Van Couverings as a thoroughly mercantile family.

  Blandine took many of her meals at the tap house. The Lion was renowned for the quality of the tobacco it sold, and the interior was as hazy as the fog-shrouded air outside. She could barely see across the room.

  Blandine herself repudiated smoking. She had smoked at age twelve, but now at twenty-two she had given it up as a habit unfit for her moral universe. She still made room in her universe, moral or otherwise, for the Lion’s beer and hard cider.

  She sat with a mug of October bock squarely in front of her, tugging and releasing a stray blond curl that trailed at the back of her neck. Another habit, but one of which she was hardly aware.

  Cats wandered the floor of the taproom, all of them scrawny and defiant. A litter of kittens rolled around in the sawdust under the bar. Blandine watched, marveling that the animals didn’t get flattened by the red-heeled shoes of the drinking gentlemen.

  Monday night, past nine o’clock, the weekday closing hour ordained by the director general, strictly enforced in the taverns along the Strand. But somehow the Lion had a magical dispensation to avoid the curfew.

  Mostly sailors in tonight, dockworkers, factors. In an L-shaped casino annex hanging off the tavern’s back end—“the Lion’s Mane,” wags named it—Martyn Hendrickson held forth with dice, drunk and losing. His companions of the bosom, Ludwig Smits, Pim Jensen, Rik Imbrock, the usual crowd, egged him on.

  In the Mane, they drank Humpty Dumptys, an English import, brandy boiled with ale. The half-indian who went by the name of Lightning matched Hendrickson Humpty for Dumpty, hat tugged down low over his eyes.

  The Lion’s smoke-stained overhead beams were pockmarked with dozens of confiscated blades sunk deep into the wood, jackknives, hunters, kitchen cutlery, shivs, adzes, razors, hatchets, a silvered partizan minus its shaft.

  The tradition began, legend had it, when a wilden struck one of the timbers with his battle-ax. The array of knives made for a pretty sight, but had a practical use as well, in the event of riot.

  The gambler Pim had a blade out of his pocket and sharpened it on a whetstone. If he made a move to use it in the Lion, the knife would end up confiscated and embedded in the rafters. But he would, and did, employ it readily outside the tavern.

  The Company imposed a jail term of six months for anyone drawing a knife in a fight. The measure failed to deter blade-men such as Pim and the other sailor-gambler-rowdies in his crew.

  Martyn Hendrickson shrugged off the pretty whore hanging on him, the better to throw the bones. Hendrickson comported himself as a self-conscious libertine, returned a year past from a sojourn in Paris but still flaunting his debauched tastes. As he tossed the dice, he shouted for help from “accursed God” loud enough that those in the taproom could hear him.

  Martyn and other members of his circle were among the many men Blandine had to fend off while spending her evenings in the Lion. Hendrickson was so wealthy he believed he could do what he wished. With her or anyone else. But Blandine always held her ground.

  “Go upriver on your commerce,” Visser told Blandine.

  “And what of the African girl-child? You mentioned a missing boy?”

  “I will let you in on a secret,” Visser said. “An inquiry is already under way. Other children have disappeared. There may be a slavery ring at work. I consult closely with the schout and the director general.”

  Visser tapped his finger alongside his nose: This is just between us.

  “And Piddy Gullee, she will be among those looked into?” Blandine could have added, “Even though she is poor and an African,” but that went unsaid.

  “All will be well, child,” Visser said. He was a master at telling people what they wanted to hear. “Really, go about your trading. I know you have great anticipation of it.”

  She searched the orphanmaster’s eyes. She did not quite trust him to be truthful with her. He turned away, looking thirstily across the room, gesturing for a refill.

  An event of the last summer tugged at Blandine’s mind, holding out a hint that somehow connected with Piddy’s disappearance. The son of a settler had been killed upriver. She could not quite put her finger on it, but she felt a link there.

  “I will look in on the Africans, you can rest easy,” Visser said.

  “I am friendly with Lace and Mally,” Blandine said. “They’ll be heartened by a visit from you.”

  The tall Englishman, the one Blandine had seen at the rail of the arriving ship that afternoon—she had discovered it was not Sea Serpent, but Margrave, out of Rotterdam—entered the tavern and stood as if posing, his face an insolent mask, eyes adjusting to the gloom and smoke.

  A prinked peacock, Blandine thought, in his doublet of black brocade, with slashed sleeves, hair worn long and ringletted, in slavish imitation of King Charles. No doubt the man found the present public house and the whole Dutch outpost itself a shabby mirror for his vanity.

  Blandine glanced at Visser and realized he was watching her watch the Englishman. In spite of herself, she blushed, and then tried to hide her blush behind her pewter tankard. Visser pretended not to notice, but Blandine caught the twinkle in his eye, the wretch.

  The orphanmaster made an elaborate show of petting his dog. Visser kept a tiny white terrier tucked inside his coat, no more than a couple kilos of fluff, nestled against his belly bulge above his thick leather belt.

  Maddie. The dog was so meek that when he set her down among the taproom’s kittens she merely stood there and trembled. She needed Aet Visser’s care as the orphans did.

  Across the room, the peacock fanned his tail and spoke to the tapster, presenting him with a token. A coin? No, a short length of knotted rope.

  The barman immediately turned, disappeared into the back and returned with Ross Raeger, the Lion’s owner. Raeger and the Englishman went together into the upstairs gallery.

  “I have to go,” Blandine said to Visser. “The schout will come for curfew.”

  “Have a last beer,” Visser said. He waved at the server.

  Blandine stayed. And by this small decision, she considered later, her fate sealed itself as firmly as an iron-jawed trap.

  6

  “They are in Connecticut or Rhode Island,” Raeger told Drummond. “Probably New Haven. Or, anyway, Goffe was seen there, public as you please, strolling the Green.”

  William Goffe and his father-in-law, Colonel Edward Whalley, had both placed their seals on the death warrant for Charles I. Now, evidently, they hid in the American colony to the north. Among his other tasks in the new world, Drummond had come to fetch Goffe and Whalley to justice. Rumor had it that a third king-killer, Colonel John Dixwell, was with them.

  “I told Clarendon that I should better land in Boston,” Drummond said.

  “Massachusetts is a vast realm of ignorance,” Raeger said. “They still believe that New England might be an island.”

  “But Boston is closer to the New Haven Colony, is it not?”

  “No, no, Manhattan is much preferable,” Raeger said. “If you ship into Boston Harbor, disembark, they make a mark next to your name, pretty soon the sheriff comes to interview you
, he brings along a dominie.”

  By dominie, Raeger meant a cleric—probably, in Boston, a Puritan, the kind of man Christopher Marlowe, in one of his plays, called “a religious caterpillar.” Drummond could never pass muster with such a soul. He’d be smoked out as a Catholic, even though he hadn’t heard a te deum in years.

  He sat with Ross Raeger in a four-by-four cubby at the landing of a flight of stairs. A second wood-paneled stairway wound upward to the few rooms the Red Lion let out to boarders. Tobacco smoke filtered from the noisy taproom down below. At Raeger’s elbow was a Judas window he could slide back to surveil the scene in his ground-floor bar.

  Drummond and Raeger were confreres, had been in London together on Oak Apple Day, the twenty-ninth of May, the birthday of the second Charles and Drummond’s, too, the day the monarch took back the English throne.

  A glorious time to be alive. A few months later, England’s spymasters sent Raeger out as an agent-innkeeper to keep an eye on Dutch doings in New Netherland. Now, as host, the man laid out roast chicken, sliced venison, potatoes, fat chunks of smoked salmon. Drummond stared down at the spread, disbelieving the size of an oyster offered to him, nearly a foot long. New world bounty.

  On the table also, two small lengths of rope, one from Raeger and one from Drummond, both tied in an elaborate wall-and-crown knot. Drummond had placed his down, and Raeger answered with his. Their code, the pass-sign, the emblem of the Sealed Knot.

  The Society of the Sealed Knot devoted itself to the English monarchy. During the Civil War, to be caught with a wall-and-crown on your person meant immediate hanging. The knotted rope indicated Drummond was present to meet Raeger on the king’s business.

  Raeger brought out the good Canary sack, in order, he announced, “that we need not drink the vile Holland gin.” Which, from the sound of drunken voices, the louts and bullyboys in the taproom downstairs were pouring down their throats as though the world might end.