The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  A paradox, since those same inhabitants were welcomed, carrying heavy loads of furs, especially in the spring and summer months. In these two mid-fall weeks, after the first turn of leaves but before the harvest fair, wilden and handlaers haggled over the next winter’s furs, with trade goods exchanged for a promise of pelts. A hundred thousand beaver skins passed through Beverwyck in a single season.

  Purple seawan streamed like gold. The village population swelled tenfold. When they slept at all, which was seldom, traders stacked themselves four to a bed. They could not often find one to rent. Landlords let every corn-husk mattress ’round the clock, in four six-hour shifts. Tents and lodges encircled the rude streets of Beverwyck proper.

  It wasn’t a circus atmosphere, really. There were no jugglers or players. Trade, trade, trade, that’s what everyone was here for. A single-minded passion seized the whole town. Forget the hunt, forget the harvest, forget eating and sleep.

  Profit was afoot, and the Devil take the hindmost.

  “Yay, dearie, want a job of work?” a prostitute hailed Blandine in passing. “On your back, your beaver’d fetch a beaver easy.”

  Antony made a fake lunge at the offending woman, who cackled and made a dash for her hovel.

  This was Antony’s second year at Fort Orange’s Beverwyck market. When he had accompanied Blandine the year previous, the milling crowds disoriented him, a crush of people so different from the land of his birth. He was repeatedly baited to fight. Blandine managed to extricate him each time, but she hadn’t planned on taking him along again.

  He surprised her by begging to go. “Are you sure?” she asked. “You didn’t enjoy it last time.”

  “I did,” Antony said.

  “You fought, you remember?”

  “So what? Look at me. What’s fighting to me?”

  So the giant came along, and seemed to feel more in his element than before.

  “You’re a big one, now, ain’t you?” the laughing whore taunted Antony. “Come, let us measure it, see if you’re big all over.”

  Antony lifted his blouse, and the prostitute screamed in mock horror.

  Blandine laughed and passed on.

  She was feeling good. What merchandise Blandine still had left, she held back for the climactic market Saturday, the culmination of the annual autumn trading fury (second only to the spring trading fury) that gripped the whole district.

  She had already placed her pelt guns, her hand tools and metal implements, most of her cloth. Her only mistake, she noted for the future, was to ignore the fundamental draw of iron traps. She had none, and could have traded a score.

  She saw indians of both sexes parading through the streets, flaunting the ropes of wampum around their necks that represented so many hundreds of guilders to the visiting Europeans. The dense odor of rum hung in the air along Handlaer Street, the drink being sucked down and traded with equal avidity.

  Houses and shops of red moppen and yellow Gouda brick anchored the town. Blandine could see the tips of merchant masts riding in the Fort Orange harbor. Everyone was here. One last final push. Let it begin. She was more than ready.

  And yet she couldn’t shake off the idea that someone was watching her. It was partly what Antony said about Lightning. But it was also Blandine’s own notion, a physical, prickly sensation that dogged her.

  She stopped to confer with a trio of Mohawk women, translators she knew from her earlier seasons at Beverwyck. Two of them had ax heads suspended over their breasts on necklaces of deer sinew, while the third wore a gigantic spoon from an English silversmith.

  She asked if any of the three had seen Kitane at the Beverwyck market this year.

  “He’s gone mad,” a crooked-toothed woman named Oota said.

  “You know this?” Blandine said seriously.

  “I refused him my body,” Oota said, “and he lost his mind.”

  The other two women hooted with laughter.

  Blandine persisted. “I want to ask him about the killing across the river, the tenant farm boy in Pine Plains.”

  The group fell instantly silent, looking sullenly away from her.

  “Perhaps one of you might know about it,” Blandine said.

  “Nobody talks about that,” Oota said. She pronounced the Iroquois word that meant “taboo.” “You won’t find anyone around to say anything on that subject.”

  Blandine hoped that Kitane would. Throughout those market days, she sought him out. They had been cohorts, she and the Lenape trapper, in a small company of merchants who had journeyed up the Mohawk River to trade during the market weeks of the previous fall.

  Kitane proved himself the most competent scout, the best hunter, the most artful trader. He out-handlaer-ed the handlaers and out-natived the other natives.

  Blandine believed she had formed a friendship with Kitane in the weeks along the Mohawk River. When their paths came to part, though, and they said their farewells, the native had displayed a dead core that frightened her. She realized that any real connection with him could exist only on some faraway plane to which she herself had no access.

  It didn’t matter that she was a European-American female and he was an Algonquin male. That wasn’t it. It was more the reality he inhabited, where the trees spoke and the animals were full-on individual beings, with names and voices. That world was simply beyond Blandine.

  Out of that strange realm, she knew, came the demon-beast apparition called “the witika.”

  11

  Drummond traveled upriver by the sloop The Faith, marveling, along the way, at the vastly timbered shore. Here amid bights, hills and reaches (the Dutch called them “racks”) were masts for the king’s navy. Arrowroot and pinweed lower down gave way to black spruce and bog moss as they proceeded up the Northman—a fond name the traders had for the river.

  Mother Mary, what a rich land! Sassafras, chestnut, red oak and white, cedar, elm, water beech, tulip trees, sumac, poplar, hundred-foot jackpines, tangles of grape, sword grass, nutwood.

  At Tappan reach, at nightfall, great fires lit the sky. The river indians had set the woods aflame to clear meadows for planting. The embers spangled the darkness overhead like orange-colored constellations. The scene was magnificent. The underbellies of the night clouds still glowed behind them at midnight, after The Faith left the fires far in its wake.

  As dawn rose, the forests revealed themselves to be painted with autumn in ways Drummond had never seen in England or on the Continent. Glorious colors, a spectacle. The fall leaves were themselves political: Dutch orange contended with English red for supremacy over the woods.

  Why did the great river flow so straight? It hewed to a north-south line, remarkably strict, so unlike the rivers of Europe that Drummond knew, the meandering Rhine, the Seine, the Thames.

  A highway. An arrow-straight river highway to the fur-rich wilderness of the north.

  From the start the Dutch colony followed “Prince Maurice’s River.” Named after Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, the immense waterway that the early Dutch settlers also called Mauritius River offered a route north from Manhattan for traders looking to penetrate the interior. Later it would be renamed the North River, and then the Hudson, after the dead Englishman who discovered the region for the Dutch.

  In America, New Netherland remained a thorn in the paw of the English lion, a sliver, a rude finger, thrust in between and separating the two crown colonies, New England to the north and Virginia to the south. If New Amsterdam and the great harbor represented the stem end of the thorn, then Fort Orange and its trading-post town of Beverwyck were the sharp, pricking point.

  “What does one do with a thorn?” Clarendon had asked Drummond, who well knew that the English chancellor preferred to answer his own questions. “You pluck it out.”

  By the 1660s, nearly all the beaver had been harvested from the valley of the North River. The Dutch traders and native trappers had to go farther afield for their prey.

  Into the impossible depths of the f
orest, where God did not bother.

  Along the North River’s shore, Drummond saw many deer, a family of red foxes, a catamount. The waters swarmed with eels, sturgeon, tomcod. Mostly, though, he noticed the birds: ducks, geese, widgeons, herons, bluebirds, fish eagles in amazing abundance. The sky ran black with a species of dove in great swooping flocks, numberless. Darkness fell at noon as the birds blocked out the sun.

  Drummond slept little on the voyage north. He didn’t feel like it. He stood at the stern, near the wheel, and brooded. The unbroken wilderness that lined the shore appeared able to absorb any perception Drummond might have of it and survive unchanged, intact, immune. If it spoke to him at all, it said only, oh, little man.

  How far did the woods stretch away? The Dutch heard strange place-names from the river indians. Cain-tuck-kee. Ohi-yo.

  And if the wilderness ran on forever, empty of God and man? Where was a place in it for Drummond? The idea both attracted and repelled him. He didn’t want to admit that it made him afraid. Perhaps challenged, he thought, would be a better word.

  Aet Visser and his Godbolt quandary occupied Drummond’s thoughts occasionally, a mildly interesting puzzle he must solve. A boy who all of a sudden wasn’t the same boy. He felt silly even considering it. What did he care about some minor colonial official and his problems? Drummond was a soldier. He didn’t often have doings with children.

  The whole question would be a waste of his time, were it not for the fact that Drummond needed English allies, English contacts, English friends in the colony, and George and Rebecca Godbolt, Raeger told him, headed up the New Amsterdam community of English settlers. Where they led, the rest followed. That was part of Drummond’s mandate from London, to rally his countrymen to the crown’s cause in the new world.

  He had, the day before embarking for the north, visited the Godbolts. He portrayed the visit as a courtesy call. Drummond’s aristocratic presence inflated George Godbolt like a pig-bladder balloon.

  “We are simple people, sir, and we very much appreciate your condescension,” Godbolt said. His wife, Rebecca, bobbed alongside him.

  “I have heard of your exploits, Mister Drummond, with Prince Rupert during the late wars, and your attendance on poor Prince Henry,” Godbolt continued. “As you see, my wife and I profess the personal faith, but never, in all our years, have we supported the rebellion or the Commonwealth.”

  “Long live King Charles,” Rebecca murmured.

  Drummond let the couple gas on for a bit. The Godbolts appeared visibly distressed when he brought up the name of Aet Visser. George Godbolt, who had been sitting nicely in a spindle-backed chair, sprang to his feet.

  “Aet Visser!” George Godbolt said, “The man is completely addled. He’s not to be trusted.”

  “Husband,” Rebecca Godbolt said, “Mister Visser means well. He does good work. He brought us William.”

  The Godbolt residence showed the unruliness of a household with many children. Dolly, the youngest, had been displayed for Drummond’s gratification when he first came in. Rebecca presented the swaddled, pink-faced infant to be cooed at and chucked, then whisked her away.

  Strolling about the great room, speaking with the Godbolts, Drummond felt uneasy. He pondered what kind of game the orphanmaster might be running. Did Visser have some unscrupulosity afoot with the orphans? It would not be the first time in the history of this misguided world that a guardian mistook his task.

  Drummond felt sure he was being used as Visser’s cat’s paw, enlisted to a task that for some reason the orphanmaster did not want to do himself. The man’s motivations were as yet beyond the reach of Drummond’s understanding.

  His strategy had always been to propel himself into a given situation and then employ his native intelligence to get him out. His intelligence, and perhaps a Scottish flintlock carbine.

  Glancing upward to the unplastered ceiling, Drummond could see the adze marks on the joist rafters that supported the rough planking of the attic floor above. He was brought up short.

  Through a gap in the planking, the eye of a child stared down at him.

  He turned to the Goldbolts. “May I see the boy?” he asked.

  “Our children are at Roeletsen’s school,” George Godbolt said. “Are they not, Rebecca?”

  “All of them?” Drummond asked.

  “Except the baby,” Rebecca said. “And Georgie, our youngest son—he’s six—he’s at home with a catarrh.”

  “Might Georgie be up and about?”

  “Sleeping,” Rebecca said.

  Drummond pointed upward, directing their gazes to the ceiling.

  The Goldbolts stared. “Why, the little imp,” George said.

  “William!” Rebecca shouted.

  The furtive eyeball between the planks vanished.

  A minute later the young gentleman himself stood before him, William Turner, aged six, parents deceased, orphan ward of the Godbolts. He looked up mutely at Drummond from under the mop of his black hair.

  “This is our William,” Rebecca said.

  “It seems he stayed home from school,” George Godbolt explained. “He wanted to keep his brother company.”

  Rebecca had her hand on the child’s head, not as though she were petting him, Drummond noticed, so much as gripping his scalp.

  “A great pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Drummond said, bowing slightly and holding out his hand to the boy. William looked up to both the Goldbolts’ faces before placing his small, soft hand in Drummond’s.

  “How are you, son?” Drummond asked as gently as he could. The boy managed a stiff nod.

  “He don’t speak,” Rebecca said. Mute, yes, but to Drummond’s eyes, William Turner looked perfectly healthy.

  “We find the boy a great help in our business,” Godbolt said.

  “Visser mentioned that you are in preserved meats,” Drummond said.

  “Hams and wurst,” Godbolt said, with obvious satisfaction.

  A family of sausage-makers, for Lord’s sake. Drummond concluded that the suspicions of the orphanmaster were ridiculous. The Godbolts should be praised, not accused.

  He looked into William Turner’s dark eyes. Drummond considered himself a fairly good judge of character. Something in the boy’s gaze spoke to him. He picked up his beaver and prepared to take his leave.

  “I am sometimes in need of a responsible boy to help safeguard my optic equipment, my glass lenses and other scientific instruments. Would you consider making William available to me once in a while for that purpose? I can provide a small stipend.”

  “He has many responsibilities with us at home,” George said.

  “Of course,” Drummond said. “Well, think on it.”

  “You will tell the orphanmaster…?” Rebecca said.

  “That his fears are unfounded,” Drummond said.

  “Yes, thank you,” Rebecca said.

  They shook hands, George Godbolt opened the door for Drummond, and that had been that. A fool’s errand. From nothing came nothing.

  Caught up in preparation for his journey, he had not thought much about William Turner. But the boy’s silent, open-eyed gaze must have stuck in his mind, because now, at the rail of The Faith, he decided the whole incident had been a little strange.

  He tried to dismiss it from his thoughts. What was the boy to him, or he to the boy?

  But he might yet speak to Aet Visser about it. If he remembered. If Visser was still riding this particular hobbyhorse when Drummond returned to Manhattan. If Drummond survived his arduous trip upriver, to Beverwyck, overland to New Haven and back to New Amsterdam.

  First, he had to inquire as to a murder.

  12

  “It’s very much spoken about,” Drummond said. “We heard of the killing down in the capital. The story has gained great currency.”

  His host, Adias Hendrickson, looked uneasy. “I wish it had not,” he said.

  “Yes?” said Drummond. “And why’s that?”

  They sat before the he
arth in the Hendrickson dwelling-house on the east side of the river, near the northern frontier of New Netherland, but still south of the Dutch trading outpost at Beverwyck.

  The great room was the largest Drummond had seen in the new world, at least twice the size of those on Manhattan. It was filled with an array of chairs and tables draped with Turkey rugs to rival the furnishings of any English gentleman.

  The floorboards beneath Drummond’s boots had been cut of yellow virgin pine, from a tree that had to have been the width of a wagon.

  The place had an undeniably male atmosphere. No wallpaper or curtains graced the room, only whitewash and plain wooden shutters. A wolfhound curled up near the hearth and lifted its snout lazily whenever Drummond moved. There were no women anywhere around.

  The patroon Adias Hendrickson owned a massive swath of wilderness that extended east from the North River all the way to Connecticut. The heart of the territory of the Esopus tribe, recently the site of much war and bloodshed.

  In Europe, such holdings would have established Hendrickson as a lord. Here, they only seemed to make the man nervous. He appeared worried over indian trouble and angry at encroaching settlers from New England.

  Drummond kept to himself the private knowledge that Hendrickson’s days as a local aristocrat might be numbered, as the New Netherland colony’s days were. Soon enough the entire new world would be English.

  We will relieve him of all his landed worries, Drummond thought.

  “I am interested in the tale,” he said out loud. “I came across a pamphlet in New Amsterdam.”

  “Lies,” Hendrickson said.

  “Then I wonder if you might regale me with the true story.”

  “The less said about that business the better,” Hendrickson said. “A bloody awful crime.”

  The room lay in fallow darkness. The candles guttered, and the only real light came from the flaring embers of the fire.

  Drummond persisted. “I ask your pardon, but I have reason to ask,” he said. “You see, I am an Englishman, and upon arriving on this coast, I found the tale much bruited about, and my countrymen blamed for a horrible murther.”