The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  “That is the moon? That is the real moon?”

  The expression on Blandine van Couvering’s face would have been impossible for Drummond to describe or render. Her lips, parted in excitement, the blush of her cheeks, the radiant pale blue of her eyes, framed by dark, ash-colored lashes. He himself was the moon, poor and lifeless, with no light of his own, merely reflecting her sun.

  The four of them returned again and again to the tube, boy and giant and man and woman, a small colony of the entranced. Drummond taught Blandine to adjust the device so that it tracked the moon’s transit of the sky.

  The night passed. It was cold, but none of them felt it. Drummond had shucked off his bearskin, offering it to Blandine, but she declined. The boy William crawled under it instead, comically moving about, a midget caught beneath a bed-mattress.

  Down the slope, placed well away from the perspective tube in order that its light would not dilute the radiance of the moon, a small fire burned. Every so often, William moved down to tend it.

  It had been difficult to persuade the Godbolts to let the boy out for a whole night, but again, some small flatteries convinced them. Rebecca, at least, became more comfortable with hiring out her ward. William proved extremely helpful to Drummond, silence being an attractive virtue in a servant.

  From time to time Drummond would pose a question to him, trying to unlock the orphan boy’s secrets. William stared at him but never spoke, mute as a millstone.

  Allowing Antony to take over the tube, Blandine and Drummond followed William down to the fire. The boy stirred it into flame and squatted nearby. Drummond threw the bearskin down, and they sat.

  “You have been ill,” Drummond said. Her face, drawn and pale.

  “Yes,” Blandine said.

  “And your arm. Is it stiff?”

  “A wound,” she said. “It’s all right now.”

  “But since Beverwyck, you have been tending to your commerce?”

  “I have been nursing a friend,” Blandine said.

  “An angel of mercy,” Drummond said.

  She shook her head, as if the comment had broken the mood. “I am no angel,” she said.

  “You look it, though.”

  Again, she drew back, refusing the trend of the conversation. “We are not at the king’s court, Mister Drummond.”

  “Oh, they would love to see you at Whitehall,” he said, laughing.

  She tossed her head, unsmiling. “And you? How have you engaged yourself? You made your way to New England, I believe.”

  “New Amsterdam really is a small town, isn’t it?” Drummond said. “Everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

  “A grain merchant?” Blandine shook her head dismissively. “Farro, durum or spelt, which is the best for fermentation of beer? What is the purpose of an apple placed within a tun of flaxseed? Soft wheat or hard wheat for bread making, which has the high gluten? Here in New Netherland, would you counsel planting to sprout in late fall or spring?”

  Drummond was silent.

  “I never believed you were a grain merchant. Nor any merchant at all. You have not the commercial gleam to your eye.”

  “Whatever gleam I have, you have placed there.”

  Blandine snorted derisively at the compliment. “Said the courtier to the king’s mistress.”

  “I find myself checked at every move,” Drummond said. He flopped back on the bearskin, as if flattened by her logic. “If I’m not in trade, what would you suggest is my purpose for being here?”

  “Me? I’m a provincial cousin. What could I know about such a glorious world as yours?”

  “Nevertheless, the whole court would be amused to hear you guess.”

  “Let us leave off the artificiality, please. This night has been so special to me, and now you wreck it. What did you do in New England?”

  Drummond was not about to tell her his business. In New Haven, he had not discovered the regicides. But he had discovered how to discover them. He would return to set the trap, and let others spring it.

  What he had found in New Haven Colony were a great many hard-nosed people. He knew the type well. He had fought against them in the late wars of the Commonwealth. Religious caterpillars who disdained ever to become butterflies. He had not been able to find a decent draft of hard cider in the whole town.

  Antony came and crouched beside them, extending his immense hands, palms out, to the warmth of the fire.

  “This friend of yours that you nursed, did she survive?” Drummond asked Blandine.

  “He. And yes, he did.”

  “The pox, or the hot sickness?”

  “He was afflicted with a malady of the mind,” Blandine said.

  “Ah,” said Drummond. “As are we all.”

  “No, we are not all. Really, your frivolity grates upon me at times. The man was entirely beside himself. He suffered from horrible delusions. He attacked me. He bit me.”

  “Your friend bit you?”

  “Yes, he did. He is a river indian, a famous Lenape trapper. A man with great personal dignity. And this madness gripped him. It is common among his people. They call it witika, and a fancy convinces them they are eaters of human flesh.”

  Drummond sat up. “What did you say?”

  “My friend—”

  “Kitane,” Drummond said.

  Blandine looked surprised that he knew the name.

  “His fame is widespread,” Drummond said.

  “Kitane thought he had been turned into a cannibal,” she said. “By a demon that his people believe haunts the woods.”

  “He babbled about all the men he had eaten,” Antony said. “He said he had cooked and consumed Petrus Stuyvesant.”

  “Our director general,” Blandine explained.

  “I know who Stuyvesant is,” Drummond said, exasperated.

  “I told him that the director general lived, and that I had seen him on Pearl Street not a month past.”

  Antony said, “Kitane told us he had eaten the director general and then crapped him out.”

  “What I saw walking down Pearl Street was Stuyvesant transformed into Kitane’s excrement,” Blandine said.

  Antony laughed, and Blandine laughed, too, slightly embarrassed.

  “What was it you said?” Drummond asked. “The word for the demon?”

  “Witika,” Blandine said.

  “Witika,” Antony said.

  “I have heard that name only recently.”

  “In New England?”

  “No,” Drummond said. “Well, yes. They are inflamed by rumors of it there, too.”

  He had in fact seen a pamphlet in New Haven, the exact mirror opposite of the one shown to him by Raeger that first night in the Red Lion. In place of the English plot against the Dutch, this one had the parties switched. But it used identical language. “A faithful account of a bloody, treacherous and cruel plot by the Dutch in America, purporting the total ruin and murder of all the English colonists in New England.”

  “Kitane, he attacked her,” Antony said. “But he didn’t attack me.”

  “No?” Drummond said.

  “No. Do you want to know why?”

  Drummond looked over at him. “Because you are too big to eat.”

  Antony laughed heartily. He was beginning to fall in love with the Englisher.

  They took the warmth of the fire and then walked back up the slope to gaze at the moon through the perspective tube some more.

  “Can this see other things?” Blandine asked. “Make things on land far away appear close?”

  Drummond trained his tube on the waters of the East River, the waves frosted by moonlight. They all took turns looking.

  He said, “Look there,” swinging the tube around so that it was pointed at the dark patch of forest to the north of them. “Someone has a fire in the woods.”

  A tiny orange flame, a league or so up the island, just in from the shore at Corlaers Hook.

  He adjusted the tube, stared, adjusted some more. “I had it, a
nd then I lost it.”

  “Let me,” Antony said.

  He put his eye to the lens. Forms moved through the darkness, backlit by firelight. One of them towered hugely, taller than Antony himself. But then he bumped the apparatus, and lost the vision altogether.

  “I got only a brief look,” Drummond said. “It appeared to be indians. Were you troubled by wilden on your way here?”

  16

  Earlier that afternoon, a gentleman approached an orphan as the boy walked among the bustle of the docks.

  “Ansel Imbrock,” the gentleman said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I am Anse,” the orphan said.

  “Do you know me?” the gentleman said. “I’m the orphanmaster.”

  Anse stared up at the man, who towered over him. He could not quite see his face, which was wrapped in a scarf against the cold. Mister Visser, Ansel’s champion, had once given the boy a dried apricot. Perhaps, this day, he would have another.

  “Come along, Ansel.” The orphanmaster turned on his heel and set off. Anse had to hurry to keep up.

  Ansel Imbrock often strayed to the wharf on his way home to Auntie’s house. One day, he swore to himself, a seven-year-old’s boast, I’ll sail away in a tall ship. I will be a captain, and my sloop shall be very fast and be called God’s Truth. Last month he had seen a ship named that at the New Amsterdam pier, and he liked the ring of it.

  The gentleman did not stop. At least, Anse believed he was a gentleman. He wore the shoes with scarlet heels, and only gentlemen wore those. Besides, he knew the orphanmaster’s business.

  Up Lang Straet, away from the busy wharf to the more boring area of warehouses and idle small-boats.

  “Mister Visser, sir?” Anse said. “I should tell my auntie.”

  “Your auntie knows already,” the gentleman said. “Hurry.”

  He directed Anse to a rowboat moored to a finger pier. The man’s hat brim shielded his face. “Get in,” he said. “There shall be chocolate where we’re going.”

  Anse did as he was told. He had never tasted chocolate, but he had heard of it. “Mister Visser?” he said.

  The gentleman did not reply. He shoved the skiff into the shallows. Anse clambered into the sheltered nest of the high-gunwaled bow. By the time he turned around, the man already heaved at the oars. Anse saw only the blank expanse of his back.

  “Sir?” No answer.

  A sailor must be stalwart. If he ever were to become a captain, Anse had to learn to weather the harshest conditions at sea. The wind blew up the East River from the bay, and the waves showed whitecaps farther out on the water. The golden light of sunset faded upon the hills of Breukelen.

  The gentleman pulled north, keeping to the Manhattan shore, far past the palisades wall. The farms and dwelling-houses became less regular, and patches of forest showed between the plantations. Soon, nothing, no sign of human habitation. Anse had never been this far from town before.

  Whatever could Mister Visser want with him up here? Ansel knew that somewhere, he owned property passed down from his father. The orphanmaster had solemnly told him so. That must be it. He was being taken to see his land.

  He wanted to inquire of the gentleman if it were necessary to make the journey at dusk, when the cold came on with the autumn dark. Anse decided to stay stalwart and silent.

  Putting up the oars, the gentleman hooked a lantern onto the trammel, lit it with a twist of punk and then used the same wavering flame to ignite his pipe. Rich, molasses-tinged smoke wafted up from the stern. Anse loved the smell of a pipe. It recalled to his mind the smell of his dead father.

  “Mister Visser?” he said timidly. No reply.

  A gigantic moon rose, but its light offered him no comfort. Instead, the world became ghostly, unreal.

  They drifted with the tide. The shoreline poked out here, and there was a house, but they passed it. The gentleman worked the oars again and they put in at a tiny cove. Before Anse could look at him the man splashed past and climbed up the ragged tideline on the beach, where the soil had been eaten away by the waves to expose a jumble of stones.

  “Sir,” he called out, as soon as he clambered from the skiff onto the beach. “I don’t want to go.”

  The gentleman, about to enter the forest, turned to him. Anse found it difficult to see his face in the gloom.

  “Could whoever we are to meet come here? I don’t want to go.”

  “Then you’ll be left,” the gentleman said, and abruptly he disappeared into the darkness of the woods.

  Sailor that he was, captain that he would be, Anse did not believe he could handle the skiff alone. Quickly, he scrambled through the fringe of rotted seaweed on the shore, climbed up the overhanging tideline and entered the forest.

  The gentleman was already far ahead. “Please, sir,” Anse said. “Wait.”

  Onward they plunged, on no path that Anse could discern. He fought off the slap of branches from the gentleman’s passage in front of him.

  Fear, real fear, not just the uneasiness that had gripped him since stepping into the skiff, but outright terror, closed about Anse’s throat like a strangling hand. He could no longer summon the temerity to call out. He felt short of breath, either from being scared or from the exertion of making it through the undergrowth, he couldn’t tell.

  A shred of hope. A light shimmered in the woods in front of them. The black outline of the gentleman’s form blocked it out, it reappeared, was gone again, then resolved itself into a familiar sight that warmed Anse’s heart.

  Firelight.

  It would all be fine.

  The undergrowth was thicker than ever. It took an agonizingly long time to reach the fire ring. When they did, the gentleman simply strode through the circle of light.

  “Wait here,” he said, gesturing to a log set on the ground amid a circle of pounded wooden stakes. He wore his hat brim pulled down over his eyes.

  “Sir?” Anse said. “Mister Visser?”

  But the gentleman had already stalked out of sight.

  A small voice echoed Anse’s. “Sir!” it cried. “Sir?”

  Anse peered into the darkness. “Sir?” the piping voice said again. “Mister Visser?”

  An echo? With a jolt, Anse realized he was not alone. Two children, two African children, vaguely familiar from the streets of the town, sat piled together at the other side of the fire ring.

  They shivered in the November cold. Somebody had pulled all their clothes off, leaving them stark naked. Anse felt embarrassed for them.

  One of the children, the bigger one, a boy of about Anse’s age, had a rope loosely tied around his neck. A much younger girl sprawled across his lap. At her feet lay a small dolly.

  “Will Mister Visser come?” the boy said in his curious piping sing-song. He grinned. There was something wrong with his face. It was swollen and bruised and caked with blood, which turned his smile into a gaping, twisted hole. His little sister slept soundlessly, as though she would never wake up.

  “Sir? Sir? Sir?” the boy repeated, still with the same mocking voice.

  Another sound, from the darkness. “Dik-duk, dik-duk.”

  The beast strode out from the forest and walked directly into the fire! Standing upright amid the embers, a hundred feet tall!

  The demon wore an immense mask, and sparks of fire shot from its mouth. It kicked through the flaming logs and lunged at Anse.

  That was enough. Anse yelled and fled into the woods, floundering and thrashing in the undergrowth.

  Late the next afternoon, Ansel Imbrock stumbled babbling into the guardhouse at the director general’s bouwerie, far up the island from the settlement. The boy had gotten turned around in the darkness, and wound up going north instead of south, away from town instead of toward it.

  When the schout questioned the child, Ansel churned up details of the scene that hadn’t fully registered at the time.

  The doll by the fire. The strange indian symbols, including a circle-and-cross sign painted in blood on the fo
rehead of the African boy. The absolute stillness of the little girl.

  Fear rendered Anse Imbrock imbecilic. He constantly muttered to himself about God’s truth. They had trouble getting a straight story out of him.

  The schout decided part of the boy’s tale was an obvious lie. Aet Visser had not led him away from town. He took no skiff ride up the East River. No one witnessed Ansel Imbrock that afternoon in the company of any Dutch gentleman. The orphanmaster was ascertained to be elsewhere. The boy was simply an orphan, known as a runaway, spinning tales to cover his feckless wanderings.

  But the fire ring in the woods rang true. The resemblance to the bizarre scene that Hannie de Laet described was uncanny. No one had been able to discover the wilden ritual site she stumbled upon while mushroom picking. But here was the same tale told over again, recounted in confused snatches by poor little Anse Imbrock.

  The schout knew well what it all meant. He must raise the hue and cry.

  From the wilderness north, the witika had now slouched south to haunt New Amsterdam.

  In London, Charles II chartered a new American colony, naming it Carolina after his murdered father. Spain found itself newly afflicted with its own monarch, also called Charles II, the product of a hundred years of Hapsburg inbreeding, a deformed and weak-witted descendant of Joanna the Mad. At Whitehall, Pepys overheard James, Duke of York, say that he would wear a wig, afterward gleaning from court gossip that the king avowed he would also wear one. A style was born.

  Milton completed his epic Paradise Lost and sold the copyright to his publisher for ten pounds. The mathematician, philosopher and inventor of roulette, Blaise Pascal (“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room”), died in a room in Paris.

  Buxtehude took his seat at the great confectionary pipe organ of St. Mary’s, in Helsingor, Prince Hamlet’s home city. On the boards: Theatrum Mundi, “the world as stage.” Molière’s Tartuffe was produced for the first time.

  The American missionary John Eliot, who oversaw the excommunication of Anne Hutchinson (he declared the number of deformities on the body of Hutchinson’s stillborn baby corresponded with the exact number of her heresies), translated the Bible into the Algonquin language of native Americans. The Harvard Puritan Michael Wigglesworth published his apocalyptic catechism, The Day of Doom. Eventually, one out of every twenty people in New England owned a copy.