The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  “No,” he said.

  “Then how…?”

  “I happened to be looking through my spyglass,” Drummond said.

  “Your spyglass,” Blandine said. “You happened…?”

  “I have one mounted on the roof of my house,” he said. “To see the ships of the harbor, that sort of thing.”

  “Or to see through the windows of the women in the town. Were you spying on me, Drummond?”

  “No! I mean, that’s not what’s important.”

  “That’s the kind of thing we shall set aside, is that it?”

  “Don’t you see? Someone or something was in your garden! Today, this afternoon. And it looked like…”

  “The witika,” Blandine said.

  “Or someone who meant you to think he was the witika,” Drummond said.

  Blandine leaned over and, elbows on her knees, stirred the embers in the hearth. The flames rose and illuminated her face. Her postures, thought Drummond, can be so like those of a rough-and-ready man, but her features… It was an intriguing mix.

  “There are a lot of things going on right now, things you might not know about,” she said. “Did you hear the African community is missing three children? They have disappeared. No one knows where they’ve gone. No one seems to care.”

  Drummond matched her with revelations of his own. He said, “Do you know Aet Visser believes one of his orphan children has been switched for another? And that the scene that the Imbrock orphan described seeing in the woods, the picture your director general painted so graphically from the pulpit on his day of penitence and fasting, is very close to the scene of a killing that happened in the north?”

  “The Jope Hawes murder,” Blandine said.

  “Exactly,” Drummond said. “There are a lot of pieces of a puzzle lying around and we seem to be the only ones interested in picking them up. How many children have died now? Three? Four?”

  “I know of four gone for sure, either dead or disappeared,” Blandine said.

  “Maybe there’s more.”

  “Maybe more.”

  They were silent for a long moment, both staring at the embers. There were cities revealed there among the coals, fiery foreign hells, countries of the damned.

  “I propose we act together,” Drummond said. “Let us make an alliance of two. I know what you must think of me. But stopping these killings is far more important than our opinions of each other.”

  Blandine could only feel that Drummond did not know the first thing about what she thought of him. And she realized her upset of earlier in the day over his intrusion on her privacy was hypocritical. How had she found him out? By trespassing on the privacy of his rooms.

  “Blandine?” he said.

  “I’m sorry, what is your first name?” she said. Another lie. She knew it well. Why was she acting this way? The man had come to her in good faith.

  “Edward,” he said.

  “I think I am not yet worthy of your first name,” Blandine said.

  He seemed taken aback. “What do you propose?”

  “I shall be Van Couvering to you, no ‘Miss’ necessary, and you shall be simply Drummond to me,” she said. “I also propose that I make the alliance of two some hot cider.”

  “And we leave all that other business aside, Van Couvering?” Drummond said.

  She looked him in the eye. Was there a hint of smile there? “We leave it aside,” she said. She extended her hand.

  They shook on it.

  Ansel snuggled in bed with a pressed rose against his face. The dried flower was spindly, fragile, like a spider’s web. It still smelled faintly of summer.

  His auntie had given him many things. A home not the least. A toy boat. A picture book. But he remained an orphan. She had not been able to give him love, and for that he had to cast his mind back to the few years he spent with his mother. The memory of her faded like a pressed rose. He was left with a dim, half-remembered shape entering a room. But the soul of her, the feeling of her, stayed with him.

  Mommy, Mommy.

  Anse loved to smell his aunt’s roses, the scent of which overwhelmed him during the season, going into or coming from the dwelling-house’s front door. He was a sensitive child, and spent much of his time down at the Strand, dreaming over the voyages he would make someday. He never spoke to his aunt of such things, believing her to be a bit stern when it came to little boys such as him.

  Aunt Sacha had an older son whom she did love. Rik Imbrock lived at home still, serving his apprenticeship, barely and only occasionally, to a shoemaker. Rik had a reputation for roughness. In battle with the Munsee he once drop-kicked the severed head of an enemy high over a breastworks like a Shrovetide football. Or so he said.

  Anse tried to stay out of his way. Rik never seemed to smell the front-garden roses.

  The boy laid the pressed rose beneath his pillow and squeezed his eyes shut. He could hear the voices of the adults, downstairs, the pounding feet of the country dance. The endless song of the fiddler kept going ’round and ’round.

  Turn and turn again

  Now the handsome man, now the pretty maid

  We end as we begin

  Put down the fiddle and pick up the spade.

  Sleep would not come to Ansel Imbrock.

  Behind the clouds, the blank sky of a new moon. The grounds of Petrus Stuyvesant’s Great House lay in shadow.

  For Lightning, since he was, or felt himself to be, a ghost, the task was quite easily done. The iron fence around the director general’s residence proved no problem. He floated up and over it in a moment. He crossed the frozen grass, shuffling his feet to obscure his prints. He pressed himself flat between the face of a stone wall and a line of close-planted yew trees, a space no other human being would even notice existed.

  Lightning’s trespass represented mere boastworthy stuff. Proposing the scheme, the master cautioned that the Stuyvesant house was the most closely guarded in the colony. Lightning had not blanched.

  “All the sweeter,” he said.

  It would be a coup, they both thought, and a mystery that would strike terror in the hearts of every person in the settlement, to sneak brazenly past the director general’s domestic fortress with ne’er a how-de-do.

  Lightning made the boy’s yard. Inside, fiddle music, dancing, the vile recreations of the European long-noses. What he would have liked to do was walk through the door of the party and stride to the center of the floor. In all his half-breed glory. Maybe remove his hat for added effect. That would silence them.

  He tested the stability of the rose trellis that ran up the side of the house. A few seconds later, he had scampered up it and was tugging at the bedroom sash.

  As stealthily as mist, he entered the darkened room. Padding across it, he approached the sleeping figure.

  Who proved, to Lightning’s surprise, to be fully awake.

  “Mommy!” the boy managed, and Lightning quickly fastened his hand to Ansel Imbrock’s mouth.

  It had been the master’s idea. Yes, we first let the boy go, to bring back a report to the settlement, to frighten the colonists near to death. But then, how about this? We go back and steal the same boy! They would crap their pants!

  In spite of himself, Lightning had laughed out loud. He noticed that the master said that “we” would resteal the boy, when really he meant Lightning would.

  The master said, completing the joke, that he would be downstairs dancing as Lightning was upstairs kidnapping.

  As it turned out, the boy proved so fear-stricken that he struggled not at all. Stiff as a board, in fact, which caused problems of its own. Halfway down the trellis, the wood laths gave way under their weight. Lightning thought the crash would reveal them, but the fiddle music covered all.

  In the streets, a single late-night pedestrian straggled by, too stewed to notice that Lightning hauled a kid under one arm. The settlement barricaded itself in at night. Out of fear of the witika. Out of fear of him!

  He poked through a
loose log in the palisades wall, far away from either gate, reunited with his pony cart and carried Ansel Imbrock up the island to the Place of Stones.

  His captive did not survive the journey.

  Part Three

  The Place of Stones

  24

  It was Christmas season, and the boys at the Red Lion were telling director-general jokes. The knives gleamed in the rafters, with the pipe haze in the air making the gold in the hafts look like silver, and the silver in the blades look like gold.

  Pim said, “So Milady Pukeface is doing a little country dance with the director general, see, at a holiday party or the like, and she says, ‘Is it hard to dance with that leg of yours?’ And Stuyvesant says, ‘Which one?’”

  Such “which one?” jokes were fast gaining currency in the colony. They would be lost on anyone not living under the iron hand of Petrus Stuyvesant, and they always had an identical punch line.

  Rik said, “They was in bed, in the middle of their rut, and his girlie-love says to him, ‘Oh, M’lord General, it’s so long and hard!’ And Stuyvesant says, ‘Which one?’”

  “That guy,” said Martyn, “I’d like to take him down a peg or two.”

  Always well-hated not only in the settlement but in New Netherland as a whole, Stuyvesant in the winter of 1663 engendered outright hostility. Discontent veered toward open rebellion.

  The man was just so damned high-handed. Stuyvesant’s sins were manifold, chief among them a relish for draconian modes of punishment. For the theft of cabbages, he had a man’s ears sliced off, “the better for him to resemble the bounty he stole.” The gibbet, stocks and whips of New Amsterdam all saw steady use.

  Add to that a prickly religious intolerance. The director general ordered a Quaker to hang suspended by his arms with heavy logs attached to his feet, afterward having the man chained to a wheelbarrow and whipped for days with a bull pizzle. Stuyvesant persecuted Lutherans and Baptists equally, refusing to recognize any religious entity other than the Reformed Church.

  He taxed, demanded obeisance, conscripted troops. The Dutch in Patria had recently managed to throw off a yoke of tyranny, kicking out their Spanish overlords and establishing the Republic after eighty long, torturous years of war and resistance. That example lay fresh in the minds of the Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam. If their countrymen back home could do it, why couldn’t they?

  Ludwig Smits said, “The witika snatches Stuyvesant from his bed and drags him off into the woods. The beast proposes to eat M’lord General for dinner. ‘I usually begin with a leg,’ the witika says. And Stuyvesant says, ‘Which one?’”

  Ross Raeger heard the jokes, and knew what they meant.

  “Stuyvesant is finished,” Raeger told Drummond. The two of them sat in the little cubby off the Lion’s second-floor stairwell landing. The holiday festivities in the taproom below seemed to have taken on a quality of desperation. A man had only a single throat down which to pour brandy. Much the pity.

  Drummond agreed with Raeger’s analysis. A politician, he thought, could survive unpopularity, scandal, mutiny, being caught with his hand in the till. Humor, no. Satire was the great killer of power.

  “If we dance in here—” Raeger began.

  “When,” Drummond interrupted.

  Raeger nodded, smiling. “When we dance in here, Stuyvesant will exhort the citizens to fight, brave Dutch stalwarts against the invading English. And he’ll propose to give them a good stiff leg up their arse if they don’t. To which they’ll respond—”

  “Which one?” Drummond said, and both men smiled.

  Raeger had called Drummond over to the Lion for a coded letter, received from England on Sea Serpent, concealed inside a shipment of window glass. They were perhaps the only two people in the whole colony not talking about the Imbrock snatching: the poor orphan taken, terrorized, escaped, only to vanish again, disappeared from his very bed with the cream of New Amsterdam society wassailing just one floor below.

  Drummond puzzled through the code in the letter Raeger presented to him.

  “The king proposes to give us to his brother,” he said.

  “Us?” Raeger said.

  “America. All land between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers.”

  “And New Netherland?” Raeger asked.

  “The thorn is to be removed from the lion’s paw.” The letter, written in a simple cipher of transposed Latin, addressed Drummond personally, from Clarendon via his spymaster, George Downing. King Charles II grants colonial land rights in America to his brother James, Duke of York. Dutch rights to said lands negated.

  “It’s happening, then,” Raeger said.

  “It is,” Drummond said.

  “Do they deign to say when?”

  “Well, you know how it works. The king puts his ‘Carolvs Rex’ to a piece of paper in the Privy Council, and it’s up to others to carry out his wishes.”

  “You and me, in other words,” Raeger said.

  “We are mere foot soldiers in a very large army,” Drummond said.

  “What would be your guess?”

  “I don’t know how and I don’t know when,” Drummond said. “If you put a pistol to my head and made me speculate, I’d say an invasion flotilla from England arrives here this summer.”

  He thought, suddenly, of Blandine van Couvering. What would she do when New Amsterdam went English? And how would she respond to Drummond’s own role in an English takeover? Would he and Blandine—new allies—become enemies?

  “I’ll be out of a job,” Raeger said morosely. “Maybe I’ll stay on.”

  “In the king’s hands, this town will boom,” Drummond said. “I’ve never seen a better natural harbor anywhere.”

  At the end of Clarendon’s letter, a two-word addendum: “Crawley mort.” So the regicide Drummond had tracked down to a Catholic town in Jura was no more. No details given, but he could imagine the scene. Three or four black-garbed assassins (there never seemed to be any shortage of such men) slipping into William Crawley’s apartment at dusk. A struggle, the man overpowered.

  Strangling was Clarendon’s preferred method of dispatch, in order that the death-warrant signatories might experience some of what the executed king might have felt, pressure at the neck. Drummond often wondered how much the second Charles himself knew about the extermination of the regicides. Probably very little. He was, after all, the “merrie monarch.” Clarendon did not think it necessary to trouble the king with the messy details of revenge carried out in his name. It just… happened.

  And Drummond, did he feel guilt? After all, as the finger-man, he had fingered Crawley. Common law had it that he was as culpable as the men who actually did the deed.

  But he felt surprisingly cool about it. Drummond once styled himself a Cartesian, and he saw the events in which he took part as a mechanical process, pure and ineluctable as the escapement of a clock. The moment Crawley placed his seal on Charles I’s death warrant, the process began (this happened, then this happened, then this…), which led to Drummond’s visit to Jura, which in turn led to those lean and hungry men making their visit.

  Thought of the regicides made Drummond consider a task he had left unfinished.

  “I have to go back to New Haven Colony for that damned trio of judges,” he told Raeger. The crown never sent Raeger anywhere. They were content to have the man impersonate the role of a tapster, and post regular reports to London on the dispensation of the colony’s troops.

  “You can go by water this time, can’t you?” Raeger said. “I don’t think the harbor will ice in for a few weeks yet.”

  “I am relieved not to make the journey overland again,” Drummond said. “The last time nearly killed me. I thought I would be eaten by bears.”

  Raeger said, “An unobtrusive little coastal sloop, you should be able to make New Haven in a day.”

  “After Christmas,” Drummond said.

  Carsten Fredericz made Blandine wait. She had come to the home of Miep and her parents on a
simple holiday courtesy visit, but upon arriving had been treated coldly. Greeted at the door by Carsten, who then vanished and left Blandine standing alone in the family’s great room.

  The Fredericz dwelling-house had been enlarged, in the manner of many homes in the colony, with a second great room, the “best chamber” built directly on the other side of the chimney, doubling the size of the living space. In spite of indian attack and plague, horrible weather and failed crops, notwithstanding its own internal divisions, New Netherland thrived beyond anyone’s expectations.

  Blandine heard furious whispering from behind the best-chamber door. Carsten and his wife, Blandine thought, debating the suitability of their daughter associating with such a controversial figure as Blandine van Couvering. This after they had previously begged and begged Blandine to take their addle-minded daughter on as an apprentice.

  The door of the best chamber swung open, and greeting Blandine was not Carsten, nor Miep, but the mother, Meike. “Miep won’t be able to come out,” she said.

  “Ah,” Blandine said. “I wanted to see her. I have a small Christmas gift for her.”

  “She is indisposed,” Meike said. Blandine tried to imagine how a little snip of a girl like Miep Fredericz might qualify for the regal term indisposed. She noticed the mother could not meet her eye.

  “Is she ill?” Blandine asked gently.

  Carsten thrust himself into the room. “You’d best leave now,” he said. Meike placed her hand on his arm, restraining him.

  “It’s just that I have a present for her. May I leave it?”

  “No gifts from the likes of you!” Carsten said, almost shouting.

  “Please, Carsten,” his wife murmured. “Be civil.”

  Blandine tightened her blue shawl around her shoulders. As Aet Visser observed, a cold wind blew through the New Amsterdam colony, both outside and inside the dwelling-houses. She turned to go.

  “I also have her wages,” she said.