The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  Blandine extracted a wedge of marzipan from her pocket and broke bits of it off to give the children.

  “What is your name, sweetcakes?” Blandine said to the smallest.

  “Tha-bean,” the toddler said.

  The biggest boy laughed. “She means ‘Sabine,’” he said. “She don’t talk too good yet.”

  “That’s all right,” Blandine said. “We will just call her ‘the Bean.’”

  “That’s what we do call her!” the boy said. He leaned across to nuzzle his sister. “Our little bean.”

  “My name, Blandine,” Blandine said to Sabine, pointing to herself. “Your name, Sabine. Sabine, Blandine.”

  The child gurgled happily.

  Soon she had the girl on her lap. They sang a silly song together that Blandine knew from her own toddlerhood, about birds in the air and fish in the sea. Or rather, Blandine sang, and the little one mouthed an occasional word.

  Dik-duk, dik-duk

  Ain’t that how my little chick clucks?

  Kiss-kiss, kiss-kiss

  Don’t my fishy-fish go like this?

  The blistering winter air had rendered the toddler’s cheeks chapped and pink. The Bean gazed up at Blandine with her finger in her mouth, mesmerized and content.

  Then Visser came out of the inner room with Lightning at his side. The orphanmaster appeared startled to find her there, although it was a regular-enough occurrence.

  Aet Visser often seemed surprised, as though reality sprang events on him from wholly unexpected directions. Lightning pushed past Blandine without a word. He chucked the baby, who recoiled from him, and vanished out the door.

  Standing behind the orphanmaster in the inner chamber was his servant, Anna, like Lightning another half-caste native.

  “This is Anna,” Visser said. “Anna is my helpmate, my house servant.”

  Blandine looked at Visser strangely. She had certainly met Anna many times before. Didn’t Visser remember? Had his mind become totally addled by drink?

  “I know Anna, Aet,” Blandine said.

  Anna smiled and nodded and gathered up her brood of chicks from the backless bench in the antechamber.

  “Kiss-kiss, fishy-fish, kiss-kiss!” yelled the oldest boy in a mock-aggressive tone.

  “Paulson,” Visser said, calming the boy. Then, to Blandine’s astonishment, he swept the toddler girl up into his arms, bussed Sabine’s cheeks with kisses and deposited her in Anna’s arms. She had never known Visser to be so demonstrative with his charges. His usual posture was one of affable remoteness.

  “Anna takes them home for me, poor things,” Visser said, a little embarrassed himself by his display. “Corlaers Hook. We heard the parents died from the hot sickness. No other family. Terrible times.”

  Blandine well knew Anna’s story. An orphan herself, Anna had come under Visser’s care very early in life. She now lived north of the town on the East River shore, from where she traveled each day. When she was not cleaning Visser’s rooms, she took care of the four orphans Blandine had been regaling with nursery rhymes. They traveled to Corlaers Hook and back with Anna.

  “Good-bye now,” Visser called as Anna and the children left. “You will come tomorrow to clean house?”

  Anna looked back over her shoulder, giving him an odd look, as did Blandine. Visser acted very strangely today. Perhaps it was not a good idea for her to come.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” Visser said. “I was just heading out the door to the Imbrock woman’s wassail. Would you like to accompany me?”

  “I don’t know that I am in the mood for crowds,” Blandine said.

  “Nonsense,” Visser said, bustling around for his muff and cloak. “You will know everyone there.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Blandine said. “All the familiar faces, with familiar tongues wagging in their mouths.”

  “Never mind, never mind,” Visser said, ushering her out the door and closing up his dwelling-house behind them. “Saint Paul puts it this way, ‘gossips and busybodies, saying things they ought not to.’”

  Visser lived in the far corner of the colony. His makeshift dwelling-house, a crumbling heap of logs and clapboards, appeared ready to tumble into the East River. It had been in that state as long as Blandine could recall. Visser had lived in the place for twenty years, and rarely lifted a finger for its upkeep.

  “You’ve had a bad day, dear,” Visser said as they set off along the Strand. “I can tell.”

  As they passed through the town, Blandine declined the necessity of stopping at her home to change into party costume. “I will not stay,” she said.

  “The Imbrock boy will be there,” Visser said. “Her orphaned nephew, one of my wards, actually, and the one who… you know.”

  “Was taken,” Blandine said.

  “Yes,” Visser said. “Our only witness and, I’m afraid to say, never the most intelligent boy in the settlement.” He lowered his voice. “I believe his wits are addled.”

  Sacha Imbrock kept her residence on the opposite end of Pearl Street from Blandine, just around the corner from Stuyvesant’s Great House. She liked to think of her home as the pale reflection of the governor’s great glory. The irregular bricks that clad its exterior walls showed almost black-red, demonstrating that they had come from the first brickyards in New Netherland, thus establishing the Imbrock clan’s primacy in the pecking order of the colony.

  December robbed the front garden of its color, but the canes still displayed plenty of thorns. Acclaimed within the community, assailed by a Puritan few as a frivolous gratuity, Sacha Imbrock’s famous garden plot grew only roses, red, pink, white, yellow and flame orange. One or another of the blooms showed all summer long.

  Visser mounted the shallow stoop with Blandine and lifted the heavy knocker, shaped like the head of a horse. The door swung open. For the first celebration of the Advent season, Sacha had decorated the front of the house with cedar boughs. Rushing Christmas, she knew, but she couldn’t resist their soft needles or their fragrance.

  The initial assault upon a guest’s nostrils came from a huge ham that had been smoked, covered with dried fruits and baked all afternoon in the oven by the side of the hearth fire. Now it was given pride of place on the groaning board that greeted Blandine and Visser as soon as they walked in. Pink, fat-beaded slices taken by the other guests had reduced the joint by half. Daffodil-yellow butter lay mounded on the long oak table next to the ham, with crusty, slash-topped bread ready for the eating.

  On the sideboard, smoked oysters and trout and hard crackers and onions and pickled pullet eggs.

  Aet Visser lit up like a child in a candy shop. He hustled forward, not to the food but to the punch bowl. First things first.

  The Imbrock main hearth-room opened onto a stairwell and another chamber, its curtained bed pushed to the wall to enlarge the space. The result was an irregular rectangle of perhaps forty English feet, peopled now with two dozen couples, assorted children and several specially hired servants.

  Word was the director general might come, if only were it not that he suffered a slight stomach bloat.

  Seated ladies balanced small china plates atop their jewel-toned petticoats, delicately biting on cubes of Holland gouda with white, mouselike teeth. Women as well as men brought long-stemmed pipes languidly to their mouths, an activity that showed off the polished gems with which they adorned their fingers.

  The centerpiece of the evening, without a doubt, was little Ansel Imbrock himself, the witika survivor, trotted out by his aunt Sacha like a prize pony. The adults chattered questions at him and hung on his tongue-tied, yes-and-no answers.

  Had he been ill-used? Did the witika feed on him? Was the beast terrible? Did its eyes shoot fire? Did it display its brazen nakedness?

  Yes, no, yes, yes, huh?

  Visser had his own reason for attending the gathering. Through his sources around the director general, the orphanmaster heard that Ansel had made an absurd charge against Visser. He was sup
posed to have led the orphan boy up the river to meet the witika. Since he, Visser, had a solid alibi for the time in question, Ansel’s claim had tarnished the veracity of the whole story.

  “I still want to know why the boy might have cooked up such a charge,” Visser said to Blandine. But when they approached the crowd of partygoers around Ansel, the orphanmaster’s nerve failed. He hesitated.

  “Another time,” he said, withdrawing back toward the groot kamer.

  Blandine hung on Visser’s arm as they circumambulated the room, punch cups in hand. Blandine noticed most of the guests looked rather quickly away when they saw her. Sacha Imbrock had not readily welcomed them at the door as she did other guests. At last, Blandine and Visser fell silent in a corner. He drank and gorged on punch and ham. She watched the people who were covertly watching her.

  “Don’t know if it’s frostier inside or out,” Visser said, taking a drink of his punch.

  The matronly partygoers talked behind their hands about Blandine. Her rejection of a marriage proposal had instantly made the rounds. Who was she to throw over a man like Kees Bayard?

  Martyn Hendrickson approached them, evidently the only guest with the confidence to do so.

  “Miss Blandina,” Martyn said, bowing. “Visser.”

  “Mister Hendrickson,” Blandine said.

  “What a story the boy has,” Martyn said, nodding his head to where Ansel held court.

  “Fantastic,” Visser said, his mouth full.

  “Yes, we plan to speak to him very soon,” Blandine said. “To find out the particulars of his tale.”

  “I would be quick about it, if I were you,” Martyn said. “He’s about to disappear upstairs to bed.”

  “The poor boy must be completely worn out,” Blandine said. “I wonder at his aunt parading him about.”

  A fiddler began to stomp out a rustic Scottish reel.

  “Would you join me for a country dance?” Martyn asked.

  The younger couples among the crowd eagerly took to the groot kamer’s cleared center space. The fiddler sang with a reedy voice:

  I live by twa trades, sire, I live by twa trades

  If you ask me what they are, I say the fiddle and the spade

  The fiddle and the spade, sire, the fiddle and the spade

  One is for the landlord, the other is for the maid.

  As she and Martyn performed the steps, Blandine caught whiffs of her dance partner’s French perfume mixed with body odor and the smell of brandy. The dissipated life. In spite of her reflexive dislike for Hendrickson, she felt sorry for him. All that glorious possibility, wasted.

  “Where is your man tonight?” Martyn asked.

  “Perhaps with his uncle,” Blandine said. “They are very closely tied.”

  “No, no, I mean your English man,” Martyn said.

  Blandine colored. “I could ask you where your lady is, but I have the idea she may be down by the Strand,” she said.

  He laughed. “Miss Suzy does get around.” And he spun Blandine in a circle that made her petticoats fly.

  Aet Visser, too, had taken a partner, dancing with the hostess. But perhaps dancing was too fine a word for the man’s wild flailing. Other guests broke off to watch him, unable to choke back their laughter.

  As she left Martyn and came off the floor, Blandine thought of Kees. She recalled with fondness his childlike enthusiasm for dancing, and hoped she would not see him at tonight’s wassail. Ordinarily she would attend a party like this with him. She imagined Kees coming into the Imbrock house, crossing the great room with Lilith Camber on his arm, or perhaps Maaje de Lang. Bitter, bitter, the betrayals of men.

  Here came Maaje herself, pushed by others to be bold enough to approach her.

  “Blandine,” she said, ignoring Visser. “You are without Kees tonight?”

  “And he is without me,” Blandine murmured. Maaje, her courage all used up, simpered, turned and ran.

  A smattering of applause broke out around the stairwell. They were sending the boy Ansel upstairs to bed, baffled and sheepish from all the attention.

  “He will not sleep tonight,” Visser prophesized. “I know him. He’s something of a mooncalf.”

  Blandine’s visions of Kees had unsettled her.

  “I must go,” she said.

  “D’ye mind if I stay?” Visser said, his mouth crammed full of cake.

  “You’re ridiculous,” Blandine said. “But you’re good.” She kissed him on his reddened, grizzled cheek.

  Outside full dark had fallen, a pre-solstice winter dark, cloudy on this night and unilluminated by stars. Blandine proceeded along Pearl. She had never seen the town so emptied. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock, but it felt like midnight.

  Again the feeling crept across her that she had had in Beverwyck, of someone watching. She tried to shake it off but it only came on stronger. Every shadow in every doorway gave birth to a man.

  In the harbor off the wharf, the carcass of an enormous porpoise floated, bumping up against the pilings of the pier. Waterfront rats jumped on and off the fleshy corpse, grabbing a morsel, leaping away, guzzling it down, going back for more. Much like the Imbrock sideboard.

  Nary a soul around. She couldn’t understand it. The Advent season normally featured much visiting and crowded streets, even late into the evening.

  Blandine felt a hand on her arm. She startled and drew back. “Miss Blandina,” a voice from the shadows murmured.

  Martyn Hendrickson, her dance partner from the wassail.

  “A dreary affair,” he said. He wouldn’t let go of her arm. “I had to leave. And you, I think, they drove away.”

  “I hate them sometimes,” Blandine said.

  “I hate them all the time,” Martyn said. His sour breath washed over her.

  “Heading for the Strand?” she asked.

  “This way,” he said, retaining his grip on her arm. He pushed her into a tiny alleyway that the settlers called the Box.

  I can surely handle Martyn Hendrickson, Blandine thought to herself. If he doesn’t break my arm.

  “Demons abroad,” Martyn hissed. “I would not want you harmed by them.”

  A tower of cooperage and wooden crates blocked their way. “I can take care of myself,” Blandine said.

  “Ah, yes, you are your own woman, aren’t you?” Martyn said. “Nevertheless, the problem with looking for demons is that you very well might find them. Hmn, Blandina? Always looking into this witika business?”

  She thought of Pim, warning her off the Africans. Kees, telling her to leave her concerns about missing orphans alone. Visser saying that her fears would be assuaged. And now Martyn.

  She wrenched free, stepping backward to the street.

  Martyn leaned toward her, and she flinched, but it was only to buss her cheek.

  “Come by the house on Market,” he said pleasantly. “I’ll have the servants make sure you get a bundle of tea.”

  Martyn slipped past the heaped-up barrels and disappeared down the dead end of the Box. Blandine thought she knew every nook and cranny of the island, but evidently, Martyn Hendrickson knew a way out that she didn’t.

  A shaken Blandine hurried on her way, looking behind her repeatedly as she went. But Pearl Street remained deserted.

  She approached her dwelling-house.

  There, in the dim corner beside her stoop, a figure slouched, huge, taller than any man. As Blandine stepped back, it lunged forward. She choked off a shriek.

  Antony. “I’m back,” he said. “I saw Kitane safely home.”

  “You startled me,” Blandine said. She realized the encounter with Martyn had thoroughly jangled her nerves.

  “You have a visitor,” Antony said.

  Kees, Blandine thought. Come to renew his plea.

  23

  Edward Drummond waited for Blandine in the groot kamer. He jumped to his feet when she came in. He had been sitting in front of the fire, which he had let die to embers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said q
uickly. “Antony allowed me to come in.”

  Blandine crossed to her kas and put up her shawl. She didn’t know how it would sound if she tried to speak, so she remained silent. Her heart and mind each pulled in several different directions of their own.

  “I had to speak with you,” he said.

  “Drummond,” she began. Not “Mister,” not anymore.

  “Please,” he said. “Hear me out.”

  She hesitated, and then sat beside him by the hearth.

  “I understand that you think me a superficial sort of man,” he said. “That maybe I have tried too quickly to express my feelings for you, and you resented that.”

  “It would help if you did not try to tell me what I think or feel.”

  “What I want to say, if we could set all that aside, the misunderstandings that can develop between a man and a woman, what possibilities I might feel and you reject—”

  “Drummond!”

  “—If we could set all that aside,” he said again, “there is a thing going on here, in this town, in this colony, and it’s something important that needs to be dealt with.”

  Blandine’s heart fell and rose at the same moment. Here she thought for a fleeting moment that perhaps she was going to get her second marriage proposal of the day, and instead the man was proposing only that they “set all that aside.” All what?

  But there were indeed strange happenings in New Amsterdam, events distressing and confusing, and her heart rose at the thought of someone else, some paladin arriving to help her deal with it.

  “I saw something this afternoon that made me think you might be in danger,” Drummond said.

  “What was that?”

  “A figure in your garden, in disguise, some sort of man or monster, very strange.”

  “You were here in my garden this afternoon?” Blandine asked, already knowing the answer.