The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  Drummond made inquiries about the Godbolts. Through Raeger, he found a probate judge, Eberhard Luybeck, who knew something about the family’s finances. Luybeck wore an ornate, steel-gray wig that framed a doglike countenance.

  “I am considering a business arrangement with George Godbolt,” Drummond told the man. “I am wondering how solid his credit might be.”

  “He don’t do much in grain,” Luybeck said. “Meat’s his custom.”

  Prying information out of Luybeck did not prove easy. The man, like a lot of financial men, held his cards close. Drummond worked on him and discovered nothing more than that the Godbolts seemed to be well-off, as far as anyone could tell. Sausage wasn’t their sole line. They were landlords. Parsimonious in the extreme, as the wealthy sometimes were. But comfortable, nonetheless.

  The threadbare chairs he noticed in the Godbolt great room, Drummond concluded, merely indicated thrift, not poverty.

  “Have you been long in the colony?” Drummond asked Luybeck.

  “May I tell you an amusing story?” Luybeck said, not waiting for Drummond’s response before launching in. “In the early days of New Amsterdam, this was thirty years ago now, the burgomeesters and schepens of this place decided that in order to be a real city we must needs have a lawyer in residence. So they sent to Patria for one. He came, his name was Asmar Schwarthole, he declared himself open for business. None came. He had no paying customers at all.”

  Drummond could see where this was going.

  Luybeck continued, “Counselor Schwarthole became disheartened. He resolved to return to the Netherlands. The grandees of old New Amsterdam could not understand it. Why was there no lawyering business? Then some clever soul proposed that instead of sending the first lawyer home, the colony should send to Patria for another one. The second lawyer came, and do you know what happened?”

  “Plenty of business for both,” Drummond said.

  “Exactly!” Luybeck laughed heartily.

  “Dutch or English, it would be the same,” Drummond said.

  “Your countrymen seem to be in favor with the director general just now,” Luybeck said. “If you have business with the Company, you should strike. I myself have capital, which I let out at nine percent.”

  Drummond politely put the man off. He left Luybeck’s believing that his initial theory did not hold up, the idea that the Godbolts kept William from greed, wanting the orphan’s payments from his inheritance.

  He would have to find another reason, apart from monetary interest, that the Godbolts might go to the trouble of switching one of their wards. And if it were true, what happened to the other child?

  Then again… the rich could be as greedy as anyone else. His great friend Prince Henry Stuart’s avidity at collecting gambling debts taught Drummond that.

  Today would be Drummond’s first attempt at pouring glass into molds. He had the smelter fired and a mix of clean-washed river sand, nitrum and lime heating inside it. An even temperature rise, Bento Spinoza instructed him, was as important as the cooling and annealing. But at last, gazing into the molten admixture, he decided he was ready.

  His orphan helper mopped on the other side of the workshop. Drummond beckoned him over to see the pouring of the molten glass.

  “Do you know how the greatest hero of the Dutch Republic was called?” he asked the boy. “William the Silent. That’s what we shall name you.”

  William Turner always saw his time at Drummond’s as a refuge from the Godbolt household. He loved the cheery atmosphere of the workshop, especially now that the winter snows had come and the stove warmed the air inside so cozily.

  William knew that Dame Rebecca had a worried mind about letting him out of the house. She both mistrusted Drummond and was in awe of him.

  This morning, his mother-not-mother had entered the kamer as William sat at his toast-and-buttermilk breakfast. She looked at him in a way she no doubt considered loving, a frozen smile on her face.

  “William, dear,” she said, hauling him awkwardly up onto her lap. “We love you so much.”

  The warm body smell of Rebecca assaulted William’s nostrils. She hugged him, jiggling his face into her chest.

  “Honey, honey, honey,” she cooed. “You would never say anything, would you? To Mister Drummond or anyone else?”

  Crammed into her pillowy bosom, William nodded.

  “It might be better,” Rebecca Godbolt said, “if you would never talk again. Could you do that, honey? That wouldn’t be too hard on you, would it?”

  Encompassed in the warmth of his not-mother’s body, William had an early memory of his real mother. Her bathing him, kissing the top of his soapy head.

  Then came the pinch. Rebecca twisted the flesh of William’s arm. The good mother had turned bad.

  “Because it would be very, very naughty of you, you’d be an awful little boy, if ever you said a word.”

  Rebecca pushed him roughly away.

  “You’re thinking on it, ain’t ye?” Suddenly snarling now, her face in a grimace. He backed away from her. He had seen storm winds blow in suddenly before, and knew what was coming next.

  “What’s your name?” Rebecca shrieked, pummeling him about the head with a Bible. “William!”

  Bam! “What’s your name?” Bam! “William!” Bam!

  Until she was breathing hard and sank down again in her straight-backed chair.

  “Go to the attic and catch flies,” she said. “Stay up there. Don’t say a word.”

  No, I won’t say a word, William-not-William said silently.

  An orphan’s prayer soars to heaven like a lark, say the French. But in this wicked world, perhaps the steeple of heaven stands empty, its landlord closing up shop, so that there is no one to hear prayers, be they sent from orphans or anyone else.

  William would not speak. Until that time—he was planning it, carefully, cunningly, during the midnight hours—when he would open his mouth and the words would spill out. Then there would be ears to hear.

  “Aet Visser is a fool at cards,” Martyn Hendrickson said to Drummond. Though he knew well who Hendrickson was, Drummond was a little surprised to be addressed casually by the man.

  They watched the hapless orphanmaster losing at Bone-Ace in the Mane. In twenty minutes since Drummond arrived, Visser took the bone only a single time and never once hit thirty-one.

  Clearly, part of the reason for his poor play was the man’s drunkenness. Everyone in the Lion felt extremely comfortable and content that evening, since English-style roast beef was on the menu. The tapers flared high with the vapor of brandy in the air, only to be snuffed back down by the thick tobacco smoke. Visser drank gin.

  “How do you read him?” Drummond asked Martyn.

  “Visser? He’s as honest as men come, but then again, when you get right down to it, how honest do men come?”

  “He has information on every orphan in the colony at his fingertips?”

  “Ah, yes,” Martyn said. “They are his bread and butter. And perhaps a little of his marmalade jam, too.”

  At the table, Visser lost to Pim Jensen again. He wore a dirty and rumpled doublet, and looked as though he had been at it for a long time. After his day of glass-pouring, Drummond had dropped off William Turner at the Godbolts and come to the Lion to see Raeger. But he was distracted by the gaming in the Mane.

  Drummond had witnessed the world’s best gamblers at play, including Prince Henry, a demon at cards. Bassett was Henry Stuart’s game, and he could win a hundred pounds on the turn of a queen, only to lose it in the next hand. Drummond knew the action well enough to understand the play was not really about winning and losing.

  It was about faith and belief.

  The field of battle and the gaming table. Drummond once stood beside an officer, a good man judged by all to be lucky and deserving, only to see a dressed-stone cannonball take off his head. Every soldier learned the harshest lesson of battle in ways that reordered his very soul: Luck had nothing to do with it. Random
ness ruled.

  The gambler wanted to believe differently, that the world held some secret order to it, one that would accord him a special measure of good fortune. Every play tested the gambler’s faith in that belief.

  At the table in the Mane, Visser rose up and sat down again, as if forgetting what he was doing. “Shall we move on to La Bête?” he suggested, slurring his speech. “Let’s move on to the Beast.”

  Martyn laughed, commenting to Drummond, “A different game, but the same player. He is in no shape to keep track of the play.”

  “It is difficult to believe that Visser can keep track of anything, let alone dozens of orphans in the colony.”

  Martyn focused his intense green eyes on Drummond, who found himself wondering if Hendrickson ever bathed. He had encountered the man several times as a colony grandee, with whispers of great wealth surrounding him. Martyn always moved within a cloud of overpowering French eau. Drummond knew nobles at Whitehall like that, who thought their scheisse was perfumed, and no one dared to tell them otherwise.

  “Two hundred and twelve,” Martyn said.

  “What?”

  “There are two hundred and twelve parentless children on the Orphan Chamber rolls in New Netherland.” He pulled a solemn face. “Of late, a line has been drawn through the name of one or two.”

  “I am interested in one that is alive,” Drummond said. “William Turner.”

  He again felt Martyn’s penetrating gaze.

  “Are you a gambling man, Drummond?”

  “Not with a deck of cards,” Drummond said. “I don’t trust anything that a Frenchman designed.”

  “Dice? We don’t use knucklebones here, do you know? We have ’em out of the antler bones of the whitetail.”

  He picked up four dice from a cup on an otherwise empty green baize side table. The cubes, carved from the rosette of the deer antler, shone with a high-polished gleam, the pips painted on the die with coal-tar ink. At an inch square, they were larger than the four-sided sheep-bone dice Drummond had seen in Europe.

  “Venus, Vultures and Dogs?” Martyn asked. “Or perhaps Hazard?”

  He clacked the cubes together in his cupped palm, lending the movement a practiced air. Theirs was a private game in a corner of the Mane. No spectators. Most of the boys—Pim, Ludwig, Rik and the rest—were too busy watching another spectacular plunge by Aet Visser to pay Drummond and Martyn much mind.

  “I make it a rule never to play when I don’t know the stakes,” Drummond said.

  “An English guinea against what I know about Aet Visser and William Turner,” Martyn said.

  Drummond looked across the room at Visser. Any information from that quarter would likely be a confusing meld of half-truths and self-serving pronouncements. The well-connected Martyn Hendrickson could conceivably turn out to be a better bet.

  “Your toss or mine?” he said, slipping out from the pocket of his waistcoat one of the coveted new golden English coins, much favored in the colony.

  Twenty minutes later, Drummond had triumphed, four games to two. Martyn had a pair of shiny guineas in his pocket, and his opponent possessed a much clearer idea of Aet Visser’s operations.

  One, according to Martyn: Visser knew the names and particulars of almost every orphan in the colony, not only New Amsterdam–born children, half-indians and the foreign-born, but also Africans—enslaved, half-free and free. That included the three orphans missing from Little Angola.

  Martyn pronounced their names: Piteous Gullee, William Gessie and his little sister, Jenny. When Drummond looked strangely at him, Martyn explained: “I’ve been charged by the director general to look into this affair.”

  Two: Visser had only a weak alibi for the stretch of time when Ansel Imbrock was taken. The dominie vouched for him, but the times did not exactly correspond. It was conceivable that Visser had been in the woods, as the boy himself alleged.

  Three: William Turner was heir to a considerable inheritance from relatives in England, which was the reason Visser moved against the Godbolts: he wanted to take charge of the boy himself.

  Four: colony gossipmongers had Visser keeping a whole sheepfold of his own bastards, north of the wall.

  The new English guineas were machine-milled of the purest African gold (from mines along the Gulf of Guinea, hence the name), worth twenty shillings, with a profile of the second Charles stamped into the obverse (“Carolvs II Dei Gratia,” read the inscription, “Charles II by the grace of God”).

  “Your English monarch,” Martyn said, admiring the fresh yellow metal. “Is he really as meaty as all that?”

  In the land of seawan, the gold piece was king. Martyn Hendrickson, from the wealthiest family in New Netherland, had no need for more pretty coin. Still, even a rich man stoops to pick up a penny now and then.

  Information for gold. Both Drummond and Martyn counted it a fair exchange.

  21

  Kees Bayard trotted Fantome toward Pearl Street. He withheld his riding crop, since the stallion did not really need any encouragement to keep a brisk pace.

  Kees liked to make an impression atop a horse, but on this chill December afternoon, few onlookers were out and about to admire him, and the ones that were kept their heads down to avoid the biting wind off the bay. He did tip his beaver to two old biddies and one young one, the red-nosed Maaje de Lang, who smiled worshipfully up at him.

  “Ladies,” Kees said.

  “We come from trousseau-making for Elsje Kip,” Maaje said, apropos, as far as Kees could tell, of absolutely nothing.

  “Women and their weddings,” he said grandly, and put Fantome into a canter.

  “Will we see you at the wassail?” Maaje called after him, but he was too far away to answer.

  He passed across the stone bridge over the canal and proceeded down Pearl Street. Blandine stood on her stoop as Kees approached and dismounted, tossing his reins over the iron fencepost.

  “Come inside,” Blandine said. “I’ve just been putting out the chicken bones from supper.” She clutched her blue shawl around her.

  Her great room sparkled, as usual. It was an attribute Kees loved about Blandine, her good Dutch homemaking skills. Odd in an orphan, when you thought about it, but praiseworthy nonetheless.

  “Hot cider?”

  “Please,” Kees said. A look of annoyance crossed his face as he glanced out the window to the backyard. Gathered around a brazier near the lean-to in the garden were Antony (naturally) and the two African women, Lace and Mally, pulled up on stools of turned wood.

  Farther down the yard, another of Kees’s least favorite individuals slouched against the garden wall, the big, strapping indian trapper, Kitane. Blandine had met him in the north and insisted on further association with the man whenever he came to town.

  Kees had no use for him. Antony, at least, protected Blandine when she walked abroad. But Kitane did nothing for anyone but himself. The first mark against him was his insolence. Even now, the buck appeared to be staring directly at Kees.

  As much as Kees admired the way Blandine cleaned a hardwood floor, he despised the promiscuity of her friendships.

  “What kind of a circus do you run here?” Kees said, taking the mug she offered him, a pained expression on his face. She had spiced the cider with cinnamon, exactly the way he liked it.

  “They are nothing for you to worry about,” Blandine said.

  “Kermis is over,” Kees said. “They can all go home.”

  “What’s the matter, Kees? You are peevish.”

  “Nothing is the matter. Not with me.”

  She took his meaning. “I see. You do not like the way I am talked about in town.”

  “I am surprised you know anything about it. You usually keep your own counsel. To a fault, I might say.”

  Blandine crossed to the back door and opened it. “Antony,” she said, “perhaps Lace and Mally need some help with their burdens home.”

  Antony saw Kees in the room behind Blandine and immediately understood.
He and the two women gathered up bundles of linen and passed out of the garden by the gate. A grim-faced Lace and Mally waved to her as they left.

  The indian stayed, still staring impudently into the interior of the house.

  “Him,” Kees said.

  “Kitane has been ill,” Blandine said.

  “For heaven’s sake, you can’t be nurse to the world.”

  Kees edged past Blandine in the doorway and called out. “You there! Move on!”

  “Kees, please,” Blandine said. “He is my friend.”

  “That is exactly the point. Why must you have such friends?”

  “This is my house, my rooms, my garden. What is the matter? Tell me what concerns you.”

  Kees closed the door, slamming it a little too sharply for Blandine’s taste. She turned her back on him and stood gazing into the hearth. He went to her.

  “Please, my darling,” he began, but she shrugged his hand from her shoulder. “I come not to harm you, but to help you.”

  “So much is on my mind right now,” Blandine said.

  Kees understood. She meant her expectations of their marriage.

  “I don’t think you do know what they say about you in town,” he said. “The gossip is vicious. They use dangerous words against you.”

  “People will always talk about a single woman.”

  “This is serious. There is this insistent friendship of yours with the Africans—”

  “The Africans have three children missing!”

  “What concern is that of yours? Let the blacks take care of their own.”

  Blandine snorted. “Pim Jensen just told me that, too, and he’s not a good man.”

  Kees took her by the shoulders and turned her to him. “You have to look to your behavior, especially at this time. This business of the hobgoblin has the whole town in a panic. Think of us. Think of me.”