The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

“I do,” Blandine said.

  “I still want you.” He took a deep breath. “I see us marrying, Blandine.”

  Blandine stood still. It was what she wanted. She said softly, “Is that a proposal?”

  “Yes. I want to—” Kees groped for words. “I want to take you away from all this. I want to protect you from gossip and false report.”

  “You are asking me to marry you.”

  “Yes, yes, yes—don’t keep asking me that!” He paced the room, exasperated. This was not the way he expected it to proceed. He wanted it to be more, he didn’t know, more noble than this. He wanted the grateful and loving Blandine he had borne in his mind.

  “It must be—I have conditions.”

  “Ah,” Blandine said. She fell silent.

  “You must give up Antony,” Kees said. “You’ll need no bodyguard when I am your husband. We’ll have plenty of servants. You must cut your absurd ties to these African women.”

  Blandine held her hands out to the hearth fire, as if the room had suddenly turned cold. She abruptly seized the iron and stirred the embers until tongues of flame crawled up the wide-throated chimney.

  Kees knew Blandine wouldn’t like his ideas about her comportment. He had thought the benison of a real proposal of marriage after all these months of courtship—years, really, if you counted their inconsequential childhood fumblings—would render his demands less harsh.

  But now he realized he had misjudged. He had learned as a very young boy what Blandine van Couvering looked like angry. In the schoolyard, she had knocked his ears plenty. And here she was with a poker in her hand.

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, Kitane…”

  “How about Mister Drummond?”

  Kees was taken aback. “Drummond? What has he to do with it? Are you—?” He broke off, dumbstruck at the mere suggestion he could be betrayed.

  For Blandine, everything flipped. The circumstances of her life became roiled and mixed up. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it?

  But she decided no. And she realized the refusal of Kees Bayard had been gradually forming within her heart for quite some time.

  What was she going to do, walk down the aisle with him and then decide it was wrong? Leave Kees standing at the altar?

  “I have known you a long while, Cornelus,” Blandine said. “I have always balanced your faults with your goodnesses.”

  My faults? Kees thought, nonplussed. Mine?

  “But I think overall I have been wrong to encourage you, and for my part to indulge in fantasies of our life together.”

  “Drummond, the Englishman?” Kees said. Good goddamn, he thought. I will strike him down! Then, his mind stirred, he considered the falseness of Blandine. If only she weren’t so infernally pretty, he thought. Blond hair and dark eyebrows, a bewitching combination. She was the strongest person he had ever known, and the most infuriating.

  “I cannot marry you, Kees,” Blandine said.

  Kees erupted. “The word witch has been spoken! Did you know that? Do you know what they do to witches? They burn them!”

  Blandine’s voice went from quiet to quieter still. “Then it is all the more important for a man of your stature not to associate with me.”

  “I defend you and defend you, over and over, to my uncle, to everyone—” Kees began, but Blandine simply walked to her front door and opened it.

  He thought of her as a yellow-haired school lass, their first innocent kiss. She had done so many amazing things since then. He admired her because she made her own way in the world. Not like him, under the thumb of his uncle. A dark thought occurred to him and then passed. How would he survive her rejection?

  Kees retrieved his black felt hat. The door seemed a mile away.

  “If you go down this road, you will be alone,” he said. “Not even God will be with you.”

  “Then what kind of God would he be?”

  In the street, Fantome nickered at his post. Kees passed Blandine in the doorway. He stopped and made as if to kiss her cheek. But she pulled her face away. He felt as though he might cry. A thing he had not done, he told himself, since his best dog died.

  Along the street, moonlike faces at the windows, witnessing the humiliation of Kees Bayard. The girl, he swore to himself, would yet feel regret for her rejection. And the Englisher would be made to pay, too.

  He knew just how to begin his campaign.

  Once again, before anyone else, Tibb Dunbar knew. Prowling the alleys along the Strand, he encountered a sight that beggared his mind. The square-chinned nephew of the director general, a prominent figure in the colony and therefore someone whom Tibb instinctively avoided, stood beside his glossy black stallion, rummaging in his saddlebags and getting himself up in a costume.

  A strange one, that, but one which the urchin recognized.

  Witika.

  The man masked himself in the little walkway behind the dwelling-house of his sweetheart sugarplum, Tibb’s own meat-pie patroness, blond Blandina.

  Yawks, the man had it all wrong. The mask was a stupid flour sack with a pair of black-rimmed eyeholes cut into it. Nobody was going to be fooled by that.

  Tibb guessed the game. M’lord Nephew would play scare-the-lady. No better way to send a woman into your arms.

  Suddenly Kees Bayard turned and caught Tibb staring at him from the shadows.

  Vanish, Tibb thought. But he stayed. Maybe he should warn Miss Blandina. Flour sack or no flour sack, the beast actually looked pretty frightening.

  Tibb’s philosophy: lots of scary things in the world, but not many that were really dangerous.

  “I’m going to a masquerade,” Kees announced, his voice sounding muffled and uncertain behind the mask.

  “I didn’t say nothing,” Tibb said.

  “A masked ball,” Kees said.

  “All right,” said the boy. When an adult was nervous, Tibb knew, it usually meant he was lying.

  Kees jerked the flour sack off his head, displaying his handsome mug.

  “Yawks,” cried Tibb, putting on a look of terror. “Now you’re scaring me.”

  Kees performed a quick lunge toward the boy, who by that time was no longer there, had never been there and would not be there again.

  Blandine knew New Amsterdam intimately. Since she was a small girl, she’d had the run of it. She knew its nooks and crannies, its alleys and yards, which houses had hidey-holes in case of indian attack, which root-cellar doors were left open to trespass. The plan of the entire colony, river to river, wall to Strand, floated in her mind in perfect microcosm.

  When Antony returned from guiding Lace and Mally home, she asked that he escort Kitane back to the Canarsie village. A childish restlessness possessed her, and she suddenly felt elated that she had the whole town to wander in.

  She loved Kees Bayard. Or rather, the girl in her loved the idea of Kees that the girl in her had created. A sense of loss propelled her out into the cold afternoon.

  Blandine knew exactly where she wanted to go. She headed west to the fort, turned north through the market grounds and found Bevers Gracht, the cross street that led to the canal.

  It struck her as interesting that she had remonstrated with Kees for childishness and here she was, spooking around town like a schoolgirl. Blandine skirted along the side of the waterless ditch, fetid now at low tide. Then she left the street through a secret gap in a hedgerow and slipped through an orchard to Edward Drummond’s backyard. The whole circuitous route was as natural to her as breathing.

  She didn’t recall how or why she knew where Drummond lodged. Had Visser told her? That morning after the moon-viewing, so exhausted with happiness, had the inhabitant himself pointed it out?

  At any rate, she knew the place. Tamra Smith lived there when Blandine was young. Back then it had been a family dwelling-house, but it had long been chopped up into let rooms. She thought of going up to the front door and asking if Tamra were home.

  The brick shed in back was a handsome addition. There
appeared something tidy and well-used about the low one-story building. Blandine lifted the latch and stepped inside.

  The interior of the workshop was still warm, although the fire had gone out in the stove. In the afternoon light the brass instruments gleamed like gold in a king’s counting house. There it was, resting upon a velvet stand, the long perspective tube through which she and Drummond had peered at the moon. Other, smaller tubes, a whole collection.

  She ran her fingers over the brass filigree of an astrolabe. Someday she might ask Drummond about the strange triangular device. She had seen them often in the hands of sailors on ships but never understood how one worked.

  Glass. Plates of it, ornate globes made from it, rough-formed opaque lozenges. Shards of broken glass filled a whole wheelbarrow parked in one corner of the shed. Drummond had more glass than an ordinary person could dream of in a lifetime.

  The man was rich, perhaps wealthier even than Kees Bayard. Blandine caught herself. She did not want her thoughts to trend that way.

  She looked out the glazed windows of the shed to the rooms of the main dwelling-house across the yard. With immediate certainty, she realized that Drummond was not at home.

  She was a spy. She left the shed, crossed the yard and tried the back door to the ground-floor rooms. Open. She had not been inside the place since her childhood friendship with Tamra Smith, who seemed so exotic because she was English.

  Another Englisher lived here now. In the silent, deserted great room, the bricks of the fireplace were still warm, and embers glowed behind the fender. On a table in the corner, two cameos, by different artists, of two very pretty women. Blandine felt a flare of jealousy until she decided they must be Drummond’s sisters.

  She would meet them back in England. Nan, Kate, Edward would say gallantly, I would like you to meet my new wife, Mrs. Edward Drummond.

  Please, please, m’ladies, call me Blandine, she would say in her best English, curtsying. And they would. It would be a great thing, the beginning of a deep friendship among the three of them. She always wanted sisters. She had but one, and lost her.

  She caught herself. Nan? Kate? Blandine, what are you thinking?

  An interior door led into the man’s best chamber. Such a rare luxury, in the colony, a room dedicated only to sleeping. On the bed, she saw the bearskin robe, the one she had given him, flung over a feather mattress. The place smelled of bear and wine and tobacco and spices and the human male. Delicious.

  She recalled seeing a perspective tube erected on the dwelling-house’s roof, with a ladder leading up to it, so she went back outside (leaving everything exactly how she found it, except for turning one of the wig stands the opposite way to the wall).

  Blandine wondered at herself. What was she doing? She climbed to the roof. The perspective tube was one of the smaller ones, a spyglass, really, the kind that Drummond said were mostly for military men to use. He had it mounted on a tripod and aimed into the town.

  She bent down and put her eye to it.

  An opaque blankness. She adjusted her gaze, and then the image popped into view. She could not tell exactly what she saw at first. With a sinking in the pit of her stomach she realized what it was.

  Her dwelling-house. Her windows. Her rooms on Pearl Street.

  Drummond had been spying on her.

  Drummond hurried along the canal, crossed a bridge at Brouwer and headed down the street toward Blandine’s dwelling-house. He felt upset and worried about what he had just seen through the glass.

  Actually, the sight had been so strange, so unexpected, that Drummond mistrusted his own eyes. Standing on his rooftop, playing his spyglass over the ships moored in the East River road, he had suddenly swung around, on impulse, and searched out the two-story clapboard house on Pearl Street where Blandine van Couvering rented rooms.

  A whim, really, nothing more. He had been thinking of the woman, and the spyglass simply represented a playful way to render her closer.

  Bending himself to the eyepiece, he adjusted the aim until he fixed on what he wanted. But as Blandine’s home swam into view, he found he had focused on something very different than a common unpainted Dutch dwelling-house. Standing in the backyard of the place, gloomed in by shadow, a figure stood motionless. Its tall, shapeless body was indistinct, but its face was clear enough, even to Drummond’s sight from a quarter mile away.

  Not a face at all, but a mask with blank eyeholes and a cruel slash for a mouth.

  Drummond had never seen one before, but he felt sure he was looking at the witika.

  Tall, towering, beyond any human stature. The being seemed to float without walking, moving forward.

  Taking the rungs of the ladder three at a time, Drummond rushed downstairs, through his ground-floor rooms and out into the late afternoon hubbub of the street.

  Halfway down Pearl Street, he met Antony and the river indian Kitane, coming along the other way.

  “Is she home?” he demanded of the giant, nearly frantic.

  Antony shook his head. “I don’t know where she went,” he said slowly. Distress appeared on his face. He was uncomfortable not being sure, for once, just exactly where Blandine van Couvering was.

  “She told me to take Kitane home,” Antony said, gesturing to the native.

  “I saw something, I just saw something,” Drummond said. “At her house.”

  “When?”

  “Now!”

  “You were there?” Antony asked.

  “No,” Drummond said. “Or, yes. I was looking through the perspective tube.”

  Antony pulled a long look at Drummond.

  “It was the monster, the goblin thing,” Drummond said.

  “You saw the witika?” Antony said.

  Kitane let out a moan. As much as any man with Lenni Lenape blood can pale, he paled. Then he bent at the waist and vomited over Drummond’s shoes.

  “By the bowels of Christ!” Drummond shouted.

  “He’s sick,” Antony explained.

  “No joking,” Drummond said.

  “He thinks he’s being stalked by the goblin.”

  Drummond stomped the cruller puke off his feet. No one paid the trio any mind. The colonists had seen many men empty their stomachs in the street before. It was a common-enough occurrence.

  One person who happened to be passing by did notice him. “Mister Drummond?” said his old Margrave shipmate Gerrit Remunde.

  “We have to—Let’s go!” Drummond said. He ran off toward Pearl Street, not waiting to see if Antony and the stricken Kitane would follow, leaving Remunde looking puzzled.

  He found Blandine’s dwelling-house empty, its mistress not at home. In the yard behind her rooms, nothing. The afternoon shadows had cast themselves farther across the garden, that was all.

  “The beast has taken her,” Drummond said.

  “No, no, she was just here with Kees,” Antony said.

  “Kees Bayard?”

  “We were together not fifteen minutes ago, and then she sent us out.”

  Drummond and Antony searched the premises. The rooms, and then the garden. Kitane didn’t help. He stayed seated on the back steps that led from the yard to the door into Blandine’s groot kamer. He still looked queasy.

  Antony and Drummond walked the yards, the paths behind the yards, the little narrow alley leading down toward the shore. Nothing. They returned to Blandine’s garden empty-handed.

  Antony stared at Drummond strangely. He didn’t have to say what he was thinking.

  “It was here, I tell you,” Drummond protested. “It was this house, this yard. Look!”

  He pointed northeast across the settlement. He could pick out his own rooftop, where the brass perspective tube propped on its tripod reflected a glint of the setting sun.

  “Tell me,” Drummond said. “Did Kees Bayard have time to dress himself up as the witika?”

  “The witika is no man,” Antony said. “No natural man, anyway.”

  Drummond paced the yard again, then bent
down to examine the ground.

  A series of impressions marked the soil along the edge of the yard, pushed an inch deep into a soft loam of the garden.

  “Well, it wasn’t the beast,” he said, loud enough for Kitane to hear. “Or if it was, the creature wears European shoes.”

  22

  Four dark-haired, dark-eyed children sat on the backless bench, their feet swinging well above the floor. Aet Visser had a small chamber off the groot kamer of his house, a waiting room of sorts for his orphans and their minders—anyone who needed to transact business with him on a given day.

  Blandine had seen these particular legs dangle here before. Visser told her that they were all members of one family, fathered by a white colonist and an indian woman, then abandoned when the couple moved far up the river, never to be seen again. Her brusque dismissal of Kees (Blandine was afflicted with cruel second thoughts) coupled with Edward Drummond’s baffling betrayal of her privacy had rendered her wholly out of sorts. Woebegone as she was, Blandine felt as though she should be sitting on the bench with the children. Bad little girl, bad!

  The door to Visser’s groot kamer remained closed. She wanted badly to see him. As ridiculous as she knew him to be sometimes, with his slurring, stumblebum ways and his too-rosy complexion, she needed him. He was the one she turned to, as close to a parent as she possessed since her own had perished.

  Visser had maps pinned up on the walls of the antechamber. She always liked to peruse them, although she had little idea where on the globe the lands depicted lay. The soft greens and pinks and blues of the maps inflamed her imagination. She had often thought of commandeering a ship, any ship in the harbor, embarking for whatever realm to which the journey would take her.

  Do it. Do it now. Get far away from this little settlement, so close and suffocating.

  “Do you like the pictures?” said the handsome little boy at the end of the bench. He was probably about eight or nine.

  “I do like them,” she said. “Very much.”

  Next to him sat three girls, in descending order of years, with the smallest only about two or three. At this toddler’s age Blandine had been safe in the arms of her mama, singing and waddling around in her warm wool jumper and insisting that she be able to fry the doughnuts in the kitchen alongside her mother. She was a big girl!