The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  Carsten struggled with himself, cupidity and the question of appearances battling it out. “Wait,” he said. “Perhaps…”

  “I would wish to count her out the money myself, in person,” Blandine said, and she stepped out through the front door, closing it behind her.

  The Fredericz family lived on Tuyn Street, so Blandine turned alongside the canal to head toward her own home. High tide filled the ditch with seawater from the East River, and down below her a few merchants pulled their boats into the narrow canal, one maneuvering a barge piled high with hay. Blandine proceeded quickly, walking into the sharp wind off the harbor.

  “Miss! Miss!” a small voice called from behind her.

  Miep. Blandine allowed herself an inner smile. Cupidity had won out after all.

  Blandine and Miep took mulled autumn cider together at the hearth in Blandine’s rooms, the girl stammering and hesitant. “They told me to come right back,” Miep said.

  “After you collect your wages,” Blandine said.

  “Yes,” Miep said. She savored the cider, though, so warming after the chilly walk through the settlement.

  “Do you know the Godbolt children, Miep? George and Charles, Mary and Ann?”

  “Georgie. They call him Georgie.”

  “All right,” Blandine said. “You went to school with them?”

  “The boys are nice enough,” Miep said. “But the little girls are rude.”

  “It’s usually the other way around,” Blandine said. “And William, the orphan they keep as a ward, do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “He is impossible to know,” Miep said. “He doesn’t speak.”

  Blandine leaned over to the hearth and poured Miep another helping of cider.

  “I should go,” Miep said. “They said…”

  “If I told you of a way to help William, would you do it?”

  The girl looked at her doubtfully. “I don’t believe what Mama says.”

  “What does Mama say?” Blandine asked.

  “She says you truck with the Devil.”

  “You and I both understand that can’t be true,” Blandine said. “You know me well enough, don’t you, Miep?”

  “You treat me better than they do,” Miep said petulantly. “At least you believe I can do things.”

  She seemed on the verge of tears. Blandine took Miep’s head and laid it on her shoulder, petting the girl’s hair.

  “Tell me, Miep,” Blandine said. “Will you help William Turner find out about his real parents?”

  * * *

  When the schout read the prisoner lists, he cited Corporal Jeffrey Shire as convicted of public drunkenness, sentenced to “ride the wooden horse” for an afternoon, two o’clock to close of parade, in the concourse to the north of the fort. The horse in question wasn’t an animal at all, but a wooden rail made to wedge uncomfortably up the guilty man’s crotch and carried by six husky soldiers.

  Stay astride the “timber mare” long enough, and you would feel yourself half split in two. The tailbone would sometimes shatter, and at any rate, sitting down with any comfort would prove impossible for weeks. Shire had a heavy musket tied to each leg for extra weight, a fitting touch, since he had discharged his own firearm several times in the course of a drunken night of revelry, thus disturbing the public peace.

  Director General Stuyvesant, his nephew Kees Bayard and Kees’s friend the resplendently wealthy Martyn Hendrickson gathered together with other colony worthies to witness the commencement of Corporal Shire’s punishment. Not for any enjoyment they might get from the spectacle—Stuyvesant, at least, never seemed to derive joy from any experience whatsoever—but merely to add to the sense of public humiliation.

  The punishment took place in a location worthy of spectacle, directly below the towering earthen ramparts of the fort, in front of the elegant housefronts of Stone Street and Market Street.

  “He should be shorn, he should be shorn!” called out Stuyvesant, seeing Shire’s straggly hair spill down over his shoulders. The schout had one of his boys scramble up the horse, a good twelve feet high, and scrape the man’s head with a dull razor.

  “Taking it well,” Martyn said, smoothing his doublet. He wore his own hair long and wavy, but due to his family’s standing in the colony, no one dared criticize him. “At least he’s not whimpering.”

  Stuyvesant paced, his false leg sounding an uneven rhythm on the packed dirt of the parade ground, leaving an odd track in its dirty covering of snow. “He’s a soldier,” he said. “Pain for a soldier should be mother’s milk.”

  The director general knew the intimate contours of pain, thoroughly and indelibly. In an engagement with the Spanish on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, almost a decade ago now, a papist cannonball screamed through the air to tear off his right leg. He leaned on his sword, staring downward. Nothing remained but tatters and bloody shreds, no foot, no shin, just a tangle of dangling, threadlike nerves, veins and arteries.

  He sank his stump into the sand of Blauwbay Beach and woke up a few hours later on a surgeon’s table aboard his flagship. What followed were agonizing months—years, really—of recovery, learning to walk again with the ridiculous peg they fashioned for him, every step pure torture.

  So don’t talk to him about pain.

  Newly shorn and properly righted, Corporal Shire felt his timber mare hoisted by six strong men, quick-marching around and around the parade ground. By the tenth round, he began to let out short, propulsive moans on the downstroke of each stride. Blood showed on his trousers.

  “He bleeds like a woman,” Martyn noted.

  “Uncle,” Kees said, “there may be more barbering to be done in your jurisdiction.”

  “Yes?” Stuyvesant said. He made ready to leave the parade ground, where dozens of spectators had now gathered to jeer at the corporal. Shire knew many of them. He didn’t blame them. He would have jeered, too, were he in their place. But Stuyvesant certainly didn’t have time to see the man endure the whole four hours of his punishment.

  “A long-haired Englisher,” Kees said, “by the name of Drummond. Needs to be cut down.”

  “Drummond?” the director general said. “Why do I keep hearing that name?”

  He looked around. “Godbolt!” he shouted, summoning the man from where he stood with a group of scarlet-heeled grandees. George Godbolt hustled over.

  “Weren’t you talking about one of your countrymen by the name of Drummond?” the director general said.

  “Yes, M’Lord General,” Godbolt said, bowing his head to show his deference.

  “A papist, I think,” Kees said. “Or at least, definitely of the English royalist faction. Wears his hair like a lion’s mane, imitating his High Mightiness.”

  “Ex more,” Stuyvesant said. “No crime in that.”

  “Against none but fashion,” said Kees, and Godbolt laughed.

  Stuyvesant did not join in. “I’ve made inquiries,” he said, “and Drummond seems to be a simple grain merchant. Enterprise is to be encouraged in the colony, by landsmen and foreigners alike.”

  “A grain merchant who has never made a trade,” Kees said.

  “He does nothing but sit and toy with his glass lenses and perspective tubes,” said Godbolt. “He has a spyglass mounted upon the roof of his dwelling-house.”

  “Has he?” the director general said.

  “For what the purpose? We have to ask ourselves,” Godbolt said.

  Interesting, Martyn Hendrickson thought. He himself had often wished for the ability to focus on people’s activities without their knowledge.

  “As you, Godbolt, can attest, we have many English friends,” Stuyvesant said. “At times I feel my own countrymen turn against me, claiming no responsibility for the settlement’s defense beyond that of their own single homes. But the English residents in my jurisdiction I can always count upon. In the late Esopus war, I asked for volunteers and got four Dutchmen and forty Englishers.”


  Godbolt stared at his feet. He had not been among the forty.

  “There are Englishers, and there are Englishers,” Kees said. “All I suggest is that Drummond’s activities warrant looking into.”

  “This is perhaps a private affair between you,” Stuyvesant said. Kees’s mother, the director general’s sister, had complained of Kees being thrown over by the Van Couvering girl for this Drummond fellow.

  “He is in constant communication with factions in New England,” Kees said.

  “Is this true?” Stuyvesant asked, his interest pricked at last.

  “I could shed some light on this.” Martyn smiled. “Soon after he arrived in the colony, Mister Drummond made a journey up the North River and stopped for a visit to our patent. He spent a night with my brothers on the estate, went to Beverwyck and then continued on east, to New England.”

  “Why wasn’t I told about this?” Stuyvesant said.

  “It didn’t seem important at the time,” Martyn said. He examined his fingernails. “Drummond said he needed merely to purchase some horseflesh, and our plantation proved the most likely place to do that.”

  “And he went on to Massachusetts?”

  “New Haven Colony, I think,” Martyn said.

  “Tell me why a grain merchant would visit New Haven,” Kees said, “where they grow no wheat, and import none to make beer.”

  “I want to add in one other thing, if I may, M’Lord General,” Godbolt said. “Full moon last, November third, on the night of the day that Ansel Imbrock was first taken, this Drummond was seen coming in through the land port at dawn. At dawn, M’Lord General. He came from parts north. He carried with him some equipment, or perhaps weapons, in concealing boxes.”

  Corporal Shire shrieked in pain as one team of carriers dropped the wooden horse to the ground, with another team immediately taking it up again.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Stuyvesant said. “I must take this all under advisement.”

  I will put a runner on him, the director general thought. One of the Pavonia indians, perhaps. This man Drummond needs looking after. Stuyvesant turned his back to leave the parade ground just as the screaming corporal rode by.

  The gentleman in the scarlet heels proceeded through the settlement to the wharf district, where he entered into the mazelike, chockablock neighborhood of huts and cabins bordering on the pier warehouses.

  He passed along the back of a teetering clapboard dwelling-house that was originally two floors but which was now collapsing into one. Lashed to the leeward side of this structure, scaling up a moldy, weathered wall of rotting wood, a stairway led to what was left of the upper story. The winds off the river smelled strongly of decay, and the whole effect was one of enduring poverty and neglect.

  The gentleman knocked at a board-and-batten door at the top of the stairs and entered without waiting. Inside all was gloom and damp. A woman sat bent over a rickety table at a window. Another form, older, more decrepit, could barely be discerned beneath the covers of a moth-bitten bed in the opposite corner.

  “Do you have them?” the gentleman asked.

  “They are finished,” said the woman at the window. She was young, although you could barely see it, bundled as she was against the winter cold. Beneath a knitwork cap her eyes shone clearly, gray and alert. Only a few sticks of firewood lay beside the smoky fire in the hearth.

  With fingerless leather gloves she lifted a small box from her table. His eyes fell on the gobs and dabs of color on a palette that lay before her, next to the handful of brushes that seemed to be all she had to conduct her business. Spread around the room, laid out on every surface, drawings on planks of wood.

  These painted portraits, likenesses of the good citizens of New Amsterdam, served as the only amelioration of the depressing atmosphere. The gentleman recognized a few of his acquaintances, figured among the art. They had been commissioned for a few stuivers each from the petite, ragged woman standing before him, the colony’s lone portraitist, Emily Stavings.

  In any other part of the world, it would be considered outlandish for a female to render pictures of people, landscapes, anything. Women simply did not enter the trade. But here on Manhattan the Dutch gave women freedom to become artists alongside men, just as they were encouraged to act as merchants or ship factors. For Emily, portrait-painting was not a vocation so much as a calling.

  The gentleman opened the box Emily gave him. Inside, fitted into an ingenious series of slots, pieces of glass gleamed in the dim light. The gentleman eagerly attempted to extract one and pricked his finger in the process. He swore an oath.

  “Yes,” Emily said. “I have cut myself, too. You have to hold them like this, do you see?”

  She held one of the glass lozenges by its edges. The gentleman had himself provided the small transparent rectangles to her, each one inch by three, not lenses but window glass. She would never have had been able to afford the precious material herself.

  The gentleman took the shard from her, crossed to the window—parchment, he noticed, not glass—and held it up to the fading afternoon light.

  An image of a demon stared out at him.

  “Very fine,” he said. “You have the detail exactly.” Some blood from his pricked finger smeared on the miniature.

  “I had difficulty getting the paint to stick to the glass,” Emily said. “I finally discovered if I mixed the pigment with glue, that would do.”

  With increasing excitement he went through the slides one after another. “Some would say you have this business almost too well. As though you have met up with Old Scratch himself, perhaps bargaining for your soul.”

  Emily shook her head. “I merely executed what you told me.” It had been the strangest commission she had ever received, on a surface she had never tried. She could not understand to what use the final product might be put.

  With a shiver she recalled the gentleman coming to her with the job. She welcomed the work, any work, and was extremely adaptable as to subject. She could not afford to be picky. These were like miniatures, and she had done miniatures many times before.

  What troubled her was the trance that the gentleman entered into when he described the pictures he wished Emily to paint upon the individual pieces of glass. In a spill of words he described fangs, glaring eyes, fierce claws. His respiration became rapid, his eyes glazed over.

  But he had promised her a full guilder in advance, and another upon completion of the work. Not seawan, either, but real coin. Now he seemed quite happy with the result, and carefully reinserted the slides into their slotted box.

  “You will come to see your pictures displayed?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” Emily said. “I have Mother.” She indicated the lump of blankets on the bed.

  “Perhaps it is better,” the gentleman said. “You will speak to no one about this.”

  A command, not a question. Emily reached out and patted the man’s breast, smiling a desperate smile. “Is there anything else I could do for you?”

  The impulse seemed an inexperienced stab at the coquettish, the effect, the exact opposite. The man reached hurriedly into his purse. “Thank you, no. I must leave.”

  “I don’t know if you saw,” Emily said. “The image of the Lord Christ Our Savior?” She tapped the open box, indicating the last painted-glass slide in the bunch.

  “Yes?”

  “I rendered him with your face.”

  He gave her two guilders instead of one. She looked at the gold in her hand and impulsively reached out to embrace him, smearing his cheek with an awkward kiss.

  The gentleman appeared horrified. Grabbing his little box, he fled down the rickety stairs as though he were pursued by the very demons Emily had painted upon the rectangles of glass.

  25

  Aet Visser liked to visit the work yard on High Street, behind Missy Flamsteed’s taproom on the Strand. He’d pass out dried fruit, talk with his wards, attempt to convince the ones who were not under his authority to come inside the fo
ld. Sometimes he brought his strange half-indian companion, Lightning, with him, other times other men in scarlet heels.

  Tibb Dunbar, also known as Gypsy Davey, made himself scarce during such visits. He counseled his High Street followers to do the same.

  “They ain’t no friends of ours,” he growled, talking about Visser, Lightning, adults in general, scarlet-heeled or not.

  Not all boys listened. An orphan child named Dickie, sickly and meek, newly arrived in the colony, did not know enough to wipe the dirty snot off his face, much less how to negotiate the perils and pitfalls of a parlous world.

  Dickie was seen leaving the work yard with a gentleman who some said was Aet Visser and who others swore was the half-indian Lightning. It didn’t matter. The two of them, the orphanmaster and his shadow, who all the orphans called “the Crease” for the ugly runnel on his head, were thick as twins.

  “They probably promised him a Christmas gift,” Tibb Dunbar said, taking a deep suck on his pipe. “We won’t be seeing little Dickie again.”

  And they didn’t.

  Sinterklass—Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas—came to New Amsterdam in early December, arriving with a ship that sailed all the way from Patria laden with toys and other gifts. Children laid out their shoes on the hearth the night of December fifth. The next morning, they would find them filled with nuts, sweets and, for a fortunate few, gold coins.

  Sinterklass himself rode slowly down the Broad Way and along Pearl Street on a stolid white mare, fairly gleaming in his long, draping robe, pearly beard and tall red bishop’s hat and miter, brandishing a golden crosier with a curled top. He had apples for everyone, hard candy, frosted nuts.

  But these treats were only a precursor to the grand feast celebrated the following day, December sixth, when wealthier colonists served roast goose and potatoes and kool slaw drenched in vinegar and melted butter. Sinterklass was the patron saint of children, doling out gifts to the well-behaved, though everyone got their share regardless of how naughty they had been.

  Each child knew the story of the three little orphans during a terrible famine, how a malicious butcher lured them into his house, slaughtered and carved them up, then placed their remains in a barrel to cure, planning to sell them off as ham. Saint Nicholas resurrected the three boys from the barrel by his prayers, bringing the orphans magically back alive through the power of faith.