The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  “You play advocatus diaboli,” Drummond said. Devil’s advocate—an apt formulation, given the imagery of the fright show the night before.

  “I am being accused as a witch, Drummond, because I am paying too much mind to this matter. You would do well to look to yourself.”

  Drummond extracted a small metallic item from his doublet and passed it to Blandine. A miniature pistol.

  “Tap action,” Blandine said briskly. “I’d say forty caliber. Is it French?”

  Drummond looked at her strangely. “Good Lord, Van Couvering, is there anything you do not know?”

  “Papa was a gunsmith,” Blandine said, smiling. “It’s a pretty piece.”

  It was indeed French. Filigreed silver, with its thumb-style applewood stock checkered with inlaid silver wire. The pistol had, she noted, a sliding safety. It fit neatly into the palm.

  “You have a pocket in your muff?” Drummond asked.

  The muff Blandine carried was gigantic, still not as big as Drummond’s, but made of beautiful silver fox fur.

  “Put it in there,” Drummond said.

  “A loan,” Blandine said.

  “A gift,” Drummond said.

  “I’m not sure I can be taking gifts from you, Drummond. That might put us on a whole other level, could it not? Next thing, you’ll step up to a ring.”

  “All right, woman, a loan,” Drummond said, exasperated. “You know who gave me that? Look at the engraving.”

  Blandine examined the barrel jacket of the tiny pistol. “Charles Rex,” she read.

  “The king,” Drummond said.

  “I know that,” Blandine said.

  “In recognition of my service to the crown.”

  “Oh, I am a republican,” Blandine said, making to return the pistol. “I cannot possibly take such a priceless royalist piece.”

  “Shush,” Drummond said, pushing the gun back at her. “The king directed me to give it to a woman someday, and now I have.”

  “Well, in that case,” Blandine said, and she slipped the pistol into her fox fur muff. If nothing else, she could trade it for at least a half dozen beaver pelts.

  “Now that that’s settled,” Drummond said.

  “Yes,” Blandine said, “now that it’s settled, what next?”

  “I knew a man in Holland, a lens grinder, a very fine man,” Drummond said. “He told me something that stuck in my mind. He said that everything a human being does is necessarily entirely insignificant. But it is very important that he do it anyway.”

  “All right, we’re important,” Blandine said. “Where do we start?”

  “I should think we should start at the beginning, don’t you?”

  “Jope Hawes,” Blandine said.

  Drummond proposed a trip to the north, to the Hendrickson patent, but this time approaching from the direction of Connecticut. “I would like to speak with the Canaan landsman who discovered the Hawes boy dead.”

  “Then go on to talk with the mother,” Blandine said.

  Visions of an intimate sleigh ride up the frozen Fresh River naturally occurred in Drummond’s mind. He and Blandine, under the single bearskin.

  “If we go,” Antony interjected, “I can drive the sleigh.”

  Drummond’s vision abruptly vanished. A merry company. Just the three of them.

  Perhaps, he thought, they might stop off at New Haven first.

  “I have accounted for all of my charges but one,” Aet Visser reported to the director general. “His name is Richard Dunn, and he came in on Sea Serpent, his father dying on the crossing. His mother dead in Plymouth, before they ever departed for the new world.”

  “The foot may be his?” Stuyvesant said, a look of distaste passing over his face. He sat behind his official table in the audience room at the Stadt Huys, the morning after Christmas.

  “The foot may be his,” Visser repeated stupidly, looking a bit rumpled and carelessly shaven after the punch cups he had downed the day before. He felt intimidated in the presence of Mijn Heer General. As, he supposed, he was meant to feel. “At any rate, if it’s from one of my wards, I can’t imagine whose else it would be.”

  “An English child,” the director general said. “He was placed where?”

  “With Missy Flamsteed, at the Jug,” Visser said.

  “He lodged at a tap house?”

  “A mere stopgap, Mijn Heer General,” Visser said. “Missy Flamsteed often takes my wards on a temporary basis. She sleeps them in her back hearth.”

  “We cannot have loose body parts littering our streets, orphanmaster.”

  A sad child, Dickie Dunn. Visser saw him only briefly, when Sea Serpent docked. Sickly from the voyage, grief-stunned by his father’s death. He had relatives in Portsmouth, or Bournemouth, or somewhere, and no possessions or inheritance. Visser had planned to ship him back to England as soon as possible.

  “A quiet boy,” Missy Flamsteed said, when Visser questioned her in the wake of the shocking Christmas Day discovery. “Stayed near the chimney heat and crapped himself silly for the first few days he was here. Had to keep putting porridge into him.”

  If the youngster strayed at all, she said, he strayed to the wharf, looking out at the sea (actually, since this was the East River, staring across the anchorage to Breukelen), morose and pining. A shock to the system, this transition from old world to new. Some folks just could not accomplish it. It didn’t help that Dickie Dunn was all of five years old.

  Someone or something haunted the docks of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant was convinced. First the Imbrock boy, taken, the first time at least, from wharfside. And this latest, Dickie Dunn, who could not have ventured away from the Strand.

  “You are convinced it was Dunn?” the director general asked Visser.

  “With a high degree of certainty,” Visser said. “Always with the proviso that it will turn out, indeed, an orphan who was targeted. A terrible business.”

  “Naturally, suspicion falls upon you.”

  “What? Mijn Heer General!”

  “The Imbrock child told us you took him into the forest.”

  “He was confused,” Visser sputtered. “I was known to be with the dominie that day.”

  “You deal most prominently with the parentless and abandoned, after all.”

  “My wards are my special chicks,” Visser said, enormously flustered. His hands shook. “I would never do anything to harm them. On the contrary, I do everything I can to protect them, curry them, favor them.”

  “Yes,” said Stuyvesant, sounding not entirely convinced. “If we hear otherwise there will be grave consequences for you. I might wonder, also, what you and George Godbolt have got cooked up together with this orphan ward of his, William Turner. Is there anything I should know?”

  “I offer you my resignation, sire,” Visser said, hanging his head, abject and groveling. “Effective immediately.”

  The director general duly noted Visser’s disheveled hair atop his skull, and then waved him off. “No need for extremes. It’s just been some muttering on the part of half-wits in the community. Orphans disappear. And you are the orphanmaster. The people love to mutter.”

  “I assure you, I am guiltless.”

  “No man is guiltless, Aet,” Stuyvesant said. “You are stained with sin as are all men born of women. Vitiis nemo sine nascitur, Horace tells us, no man is without faults.”

  Visser would have continued to protest, but the director general held up his hand. “You are using the Englishman Edward Drummond as a liaison of some sort,” he said.

  “Drummond?” Visser was nonplussed.

  “Posthac, you are to discontinue any and all official relations with the man,” Stuyvesant said. “I don’t care if you are friendly with him in the course of your private life, although I will say there have been mutterings about him, too, and not by half-wits, either. As far as your official duties as orphanmaster are concerned, Mister Drummond is off-limits.”

  Visser left the presence of the director general
frightened and mystified. He felt, as he often did, as if he were in over his head. How much did Stuyvesant know?

  He could not glean, he could not scan, he could not plumb. Cogito ergo caput meum dolet, he said to himself, imitating the director general’s idiotic predilection for Latin phraseology. I think, therefore my head hurts.

  Visser badly needed a brandy. Perhaps some roast pork stuffed with prunes. He headed down Pearl Street for the Red Lion.

  He had not taken twenty steps before Martyn Hendrickson fell in beside him, wearing an extravagant cloak and his broad-brimmed cavalier hat.

  “Been to see the one-legged wonder?” Martyn asked.

  “Yes, I was summoned,” Visser stammered. He felt unaccountably as if he had been found out in some transgression.

  “Had a good little talk, did you?” Martyn asked.

  Visser left off answering as they crossed the canal. “Did you?” Martyn demanded.

  “We did, a very brief one.”

  “About what?”

  “What?”

  Martyn stopped Visser abruptly and guided him, a little roughly, off the street into a stable yard. “I asked what the goddamned substance of your conversation was.”

  “Nothing of import,” Visser said. He hesitated. “Well, Mijn Heer General did appear distressed about body parts showing up discarded on the streets of the settlement.”

  “A messy business, that,” Martyn said. “Put the fear of witika into every household in town, didn’t it?”

  “You contracted to hire out the youth in question, I believe,” Visser said. “Richard Dunn, called Dickie.”

  “Did I?” Martyn said. “There are so many we employ, I lose track. Did you happen to mention my contracting the Dunn boy to Monsieur Stuyvesant?”

  “No, no,” Visser said hurriedly. “I would never… A private business, surely, a contractual agreement, confidential to the parties involved. A man’s servants are his own affair.”

  Martyn nodded. “That has always been my opinion. I wonder if you yourself might need a little more household help.”

  “Me?”

  “Your growing family,” Martyn said. “Perhaps I could send brother Lightning over to help out.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Are you sure? It would be no problem for me to do so. Your pretty little half-breed wifey has her hands full.”

  Martyn swept his cloak aside and casually rested his hand on the hilt of his parrying dagger, carried in a leather sheath on his belt.

  A weak feeling ran through Visser’s gut. His senses became acute. He smelled the manure of the yard as though it were smeared in his nostrils.

  “Really, Martyn, please.”

  “No?” Martyn said. “No need for Lightning to strike, so to speak?”

  “No, no.”

  Martyn stared at Visser for a long beat. The horses in the nearby stalls snorted and wheezed. “I’ll bid you good-bye, then,” he said. Martyn stepped backward onto Pearl Street and strode off.

  Perhaps, Visser thought, no pork dinner at the Lion. He had lost his appetite.

  There will be a fire. Gaze into a campfire, and you share a view common to all humans of all ages who ever looked into one. The Maid of Orléans stared into a fire. Caesar. Moses. Embers are eidetic. Flames are the original shape-shifters.

  So, a fire. In a lodge, in a cave, in the open air. Around it, the gathered clan. Close to the warmth, seated in a position of respect, the sachem, the singer, the vision woman, the one we’ve all come to hear.

  At this fire, for this song, the singer changes. At times it seems to be one of the chiefs, Quesqakwons, perhaps, or Mattahorn, maybe the great Tamanend. At one moment you clearly see it is Hawsis, the old woman. But then the shape shifts and you are not sure who or what you are looking at. A mountain lion. A coyote.

  Suddenly it is Kitane seated at the fire, the others waiting on his words. He looks to the sky, stares into the flames and begins to sing.

  The twin sisters, Nanabush and Bachtama, hated each other from the start and fought even in the womb. Their battles were such that their mother, Arwen, died in giving birth. Their father, the wind god, enraged with grief, attacked his newborn daughters, who had no choice but to defend themselves. They killed their father in the fight, thus rendering themselves orphans from birth.

  Struck by loneliness, Nanabush wandered across the sky-bridge from her home in heaven to stalk the forests of earth. She incarnated herself as the dog, the coyote. Her sister, Bachtama, when she came hunting after Nanabush, incarnated herself as the lion, the catamount.

  Nanabush and Bachtama found the woods, meadows and rivers of this world splendid and incredibly bountiful, but wholly devoid of gods. Bachtama was forced to create a suitable husband out of the mud of the river bottom. She bore a devil, who instantly mated with its mother to create a race of humans. Nanabush, looking on with jealousy, created a mate of her own out of the ice of a glacier, coupled with it and gave birth to a demon. It forced itself upon its own mother and Nanabush gave birth to a rival race of humans.

  The lion-devil-mud children of the orphan sister Bachtama and the dog-demon-ice children of the orphan sister Nanabush battled for supremacy back and forth across the earth. One of Nanabush’s sons, the arrogant Witika, proposed a strategy to vanquish the rival clan forever. He directed his sisters and brothers to open wide their mouths and eat everything in sight, consuming all the game, all the maize, all the squash and cranberries and ramps, everything edible that ever existed.

  Witika’s strategy worked. A new god, starvation, ruled the world. Bachtama’s children became bereft and solitary, which is the reason the catamount cries at night. But after everything edible was consumed by Nanabush’s children, they had nothing left to eat themselves, and they, too, fell under the dominion of the new god, starvation.

  At this, the great god Manitou, looking down upon earth from heaven, had pity. He stomped on the bellies of Nanabush’s children, and they disgorged all the beasts of the forests, the fish of the waters and the fruits of the earth. And Manitou cursed Witika with eternal exile, sending him off to wander alone, afflicting him with an appetite that could never be sated.

  But Witika is a coyote’s child, so he turned Manitou’s curse back upon itself. When he eats, he eats only the flesh of humans, and he shares his affliction, this hunger for human flesh, with all who encounter him.

  Master and slave lounged in the Place of Stones. A wet, spattering snow blew in from the river, so they sat just inside the mouth of the cave. Lightning built a fire on the lip outside, and the fat flakes dropped into it, hissing. Behind them, the bones, showing white as the cave-throat dark swallowed them.

  “He was easily taken?” the master said.

  Lightning grunted. “They are all easily taken,” he said. “Didn’t I creep into the very house of one, while you yourself feasted below?”

  The master disliked Lightning’s boastfulness, but the trait seemed to run in his Esopus blood. At least, the man was half Dutch, or half German, or half whatever it was that randied the Sopus woman who birthed him.

  Lightning took off his hat and vigorously scratched his head. He had seated himself below his master, leaning back against a cairn of stones and bones, so he gave a rare good view of his scarred scalp.

  The master looked on with fascination. The scalping scar, he noticed, seemed to have faded somewhat, yet remained heavily mottled with purple and red. The skin still layered the indian’s skull with extra tissue, waxy and uneven, as though the flesh had bubbled and then solidified. The crease looked like it could channel rainwater.

  Perhaps a wig, the master thought. Weren’t wigs supposed to be au fait?

  Out loud, he said, “I appreciate the getting of a white child.”

  “I serve my master,” Lightning said.

  “I had forgotten, really, what white flesh tastes like, and I’ve often wondered if I could discern the difference, set side by side.”

  Lightning bent forwar
d to the fire. He snapped open his Barlow—a prized possession—and sliced from a buttock that hung on a crane hook above the flames a small crescent of human flesh. Then he reached over and did the same from a calf section that lay athwart the stones of the fire ring.

  “No, no,” the master said. “They are of not the same vintage, and I will be able to tell which is which from the taste.”

  “This one, the black, has been frozen in snow, just thawed this morning,” Lightning said. “Do you want me to blindfold you?”

  The master laughed. “I don’t ever feel at home,” he said, “unless it is here in the Place of Stones with you.”

  Lightning fashioned his staple-wool scarf—another prized possession, and one he customarily used to affix his crumpled felt hat firmly to his head—into a covering for his master’s eyes. Lovingly, he tied it around the man’s skull.

  He was helpless now, thought Lightning.

  “All right,” the master said. “First one, then the other. After, I will tell you which is which, and you tell me whether I am right.”

  A collop of flesh from the ham. The master chewed thoughtfully. Then one from the calf.

  “They taste the same,” the master said. “Like the smoke of the fire.”

  “You must guess.”

  The master tasted again, one after another. “This is the white child,” he said, holding out a scrap of flesh.

  He was wrong, Lightning noticed, fielding the scrap. The one the master had extended to him was from the little African girl.

  “You are right!” he cried, and the master stripped the scarf from his eyes and laughed. The two pieces could be identified from small flaps of skin still attached to them, one darker, one lighter, but Lightning easily switched them so that the master was fooled into thinking he had guessed rightly.

  “I knew it,” the master said giddily. “The one has a flavor more of… well, I can’t explain it, I just knew.”

  Lightning pushed what remained of the two slices into the master’s mouth. He never partook, himself, but the master consumed human flesh with an enthusiasm bordering on gluttony. Lightning had never before seen the witika madness settle on anyone so completely.