The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  Antony led the sleigh horses, Kitane stayed stubbornly atop the cargo box, and the roan ranged freely to the lip of the surrounding forest. It bucked and danced, friskily kicking at the snow, apparently deciding the trip might not be so bad after all.

  Blandine and Drummond walked together in the track of the sleigh. “Do we make a mistake?” Drummond asked her. “I don’t have any understanding of what we’ll find at the other end, neither Canaan nor the Hawes place.”

  “Oh, no,” Blandine said. “This is right, this is where to start, at the border of New Netherland and New England.”

  “Your people and mine,” he said.

  “New England is so well settled and prosperous,” she said. “Antony remarked upon it on our trip from New Amsterdam to Hartford. So many farms, so much ambition, so much enterprise. I have heard Boston now numbers five thousand souls. I fear you will snow us under.”

  “The Dutch are no strangers to ambition and enterprise.”

  “I wonder, though,” Blandine said. “Will I be allowed to conduct my trade under the rule of the Stuart king? I’ve heard that in English law, a woman cannot sign her name to contracts or represent herself in court. Is that true? She becomes a vassal of her husband? And if she has no husband, she has the same legal status as an infant child?”

  “I suppose it is true,” Drummond said. “I never thought about it.”

  “Because you are a man,” she said. “You are not an indian, so you care not what happens to Kitane, nor an African, so Antony gets none of your concern.”

  Good Lord, thought Drummond, is this the way it’s going to be? “Van Couvering, if you are going to take our time together as an opportunity to strip the hide from my back, I think it will be very trying for me.”

  “I only point out that an English takeover of New Netherland would ill benefit me as a woman. We ourselves, I mean the Dutch, have two kinds of status in marriage, called manus and usus. Manus is more like your English common law, no rights for the wife, she is chattel of her spouse. With usus, the wife retains her independent status, she legally is her own person, not subsumed under her husband. If I ever marry, it will only be usus.”

  “How could you ever find a man bold enough to accept such terms?” Drummond said lightly.

  Blandine looked sideways at him. “I shall use a pistol.”

  Drummond laughed. They mounted a rise and saw Antony and Kitane ahead of them with the sleigh, waiting on the blue sheet of river ice above the Windsor rapids.

  28

  Stuyvesant sat in his Stadt Huys audience room surveying his New Haven visitors. Misters Allerton and Remmick were worthies of the Connecticut Colony, no doubt, but men toward which the director general of New Netherland had every reason to harbor suspicion. Here were the Englishers among those who were massing upon New Netherland’s borders, intent to steal his American empire away.

  Mid-January, 1664. The men had made a long, snow-blanketed trip south to visit the director general, which only increased their sour mood.

  “I shall come straight to the point,” said Remmick, the one with close-cropped gray hair. “Is New Amsterdam in the practice of harboring assassins within its jurisdiction?”

  The director general’s schout, a Belgian Walloon by the name of Bernard de Klavier, stirred at the thought of lawbreakers in his bailiwick. Stuyvesant made a barely perceptible movement with his hand to still his lieutenant.

  “We are a settlement of peaceful, law-abiding citizens,” the director general said. “And we repulse any criminal incursions from outside our lawful borders.”

  A dig at English pressure on New Netherland. Remmick ignored Stuyvesant’s sally. “A man recently appeared in our colony, representing himself as a goodman believer from the Maine district,” he said.

  “Which he was most assuredly not,” said the other New Haven man, Allerton.

  “An Englishman?” Stuyvesant asked.

  “A gentleman imposter, going about illegally under disguise,” Remmick said. “He slipped away before we could properly question him. The dockside caitiff who aided the man decamped from town, too. But our investigations traced back the assassin’s trail. He began here, in New Amsterdam.”

  “An assassin, you say. Did he attempt murder? We are always willing to help a neighbor keep the peace, provided said neighbor respects our sovereignty.”

  Again, another dig. New Englanders, some from Connecticut as well as others from Massachusetts Bay, of late habitually made forays into Dutch territory, claiming huge swaths of Long Island, Westchester and the northland for their own.

  “Your so-called sovereignty is not the question here,” Remmick said. “The question is rather will you give help yielding up a homicide!”

  “Do not come into my chambers and raise your voice,” Stuyvesant said. “Have you a name for the miscreant?”

  “He said his name was Harry Fossick, which is another indication of his subterfuge,” Allerton said.

  “I don’t understand,” the director general said.

  “‘Fossick’ means ‘to seek out’ in our English language,” Remmick said. “An alias, for certain.”

  “Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit,” quoth Stuyvesant. His guests put on that pained expression of the unlearned in which the director general so delighted. “He has left, absconded, escaped and disappeared?”

  “Yes,” Remmick said.

  “Tell me,” Stuyvesant said. “Is this man tall, shapely, with a good leg and a mop of curly dark hair?”

  When his New Haven visitors departed, the director general left his chair and turned to the schout.

  “Edward Drummond has rooms in the town?” he asked.

  De Klavier nodded sharply. “In Slyck Steegh, on this side of the canal.”

  “I think he is due for a visit.”

  “Yes, Mijn Heer General.” The sheriff turned to go.

  “De Klavier?”

  “Yes?”

  “If the man were not to be at home, all the better. Conduct a search, and don’t be pretty about it, either.”

  Kitane perched on the back of the sleigh. Snatches of conversation blew in the wind from Drummond and Blandine, sitting a few feet in front of him on either side of the bench. What he heard distressed him. They appeared to be telling him to cannibalize the orphanmaster.

  “Eat Visser,” he heard, over and over, the words snatched out of the air and inserted like a pair of iron nails into Kitane’s ears.

  “Eat Visser,” they said. Was it meant for him? A command? Or were they worried that this was what Kitane might do? The man Visser was fat enough, it was true. The corpulent orphanmaster would provide anyone interested with several meals. But the Lenape didn’t believe that Blandine, at least, would intend the man, or Kitane himself for that matter, such monstrous harm.

  The old witika madness still dogged him, kept at bay only by the constant lash of his will.

  Blandine and Drummond were indeed having a conversation about the orphanmaster, his trustworthiness, his secrets. Yet what the Lenape at their back heard as an insidious suggestion was merely the two of them pronouncing the man’s name, Aet, in the English manner, to rhyme with beat. They didn’t realize that each time they said it represented a small trigger for Kitane.

  Toward the end of the day, as the sleigh approached the territory of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, without a word Kitane slipped off the cargo box. Antony pulled in the reins to halt the progress of the horses, thinking to pick him back up. But the Lenape simply bent down, tied the small, circular snowshoes onto his feet and set off at a quick march into the forest.

  “What is he up to?” Drummond said.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Blandine said. “He goes to do a bit of business for us.”

  “William Turner?” Drummond said.

  “Or the boy Rebecca Godbolt swears is William Turner,” Blandine said. “Kitane will ask among the natives about the trade of a boy last spring. If we can unlock that mystery, perhaps the fate of Piteous Gullee
and the others will open to us, also.”

  “So what will he ask?” Drummond said.

  “If any of his tribal cousins can tell him about European captives, taken and then swapped as hostages,” Blandine said. “The Godbolts obtained the boy they switched for William Turner somewhere.”

  “Very good,” Drummond said. “Very, very good. Van Couvering, you are a wonder.”

  The man had already disappeared into the woods. His tracks led forward and then disappeared, swallowed by a boundless wilderness.

  The remaining three sojourners overnighted at an inn in Springfield, where Blandine did a rollicking trade in blanketry. In the morning they pushed west along a tributary of the Fresh. The sleigh proved more and more troublesome. Trees blocked their passage up the increasingly narrow river.

  After a particularly harrowing time dragging the sleigh up the river’s bank, around an obstacle and then back down onto the ice, only to be faced with another downed tree around the next bend, Blandine and Drummond conferred.

  “Antony,” Blandine said, “we want you to take the sleigh back to Springfield and proceed from there to Hartford. I’ll give you money for passage back to New Amsterdam.”

  The big man let a sullen look cross his face, as he always did when Blandine suggested they part company.

  “We’ll take two of the bays and the roan,” she said. “Can you make do with one?”

  He didn’t answer, but began to unhitch the harness from one of the two outside sleigh horses.

  “That’s the one I’d take, too,” Drummond said. “She’s got the best head on her.”

  Antony didn’t respond. “We shall reunite at the Red Lion,” Drummond said, “as if there we had hidden our gold.”

  The giant stayed silent, so Drummond tried again. “In mid-month there will be a full moon, and we will take the perspective tube out on Mount Petrus.”

  “I know when I am being talked down to, Edward,” Antony said. But he appeared to cheer at the prospect of another bout with the mountains of the moon. “Diana,” he called the world he saw through Drummond’s apparatus, and told Blandine it was a land of freedom that he often visited in his dreams.

  They parted. Drummond bear-hugged Antony, and was bear-hugged in return, an experience that resembled being closed into a tomb and lifted by a tornado.

  Drummond rode the roan and Blandine took the bay gelding, with the other bay, a mare, relegated to pack duty. They reached Canaan at dusk and lodged in one of three farmhouses clustered in a small grouping next to a millrace and an ice-choked waterfall.

  The man of the house, Jonathan Pynchon, appeared stunned into speechlessness by the appearance of two strangers out of the snowy wilderness. But his wife, Betty, was chatty and welcoming. Blandine warmed to her immediately.

  “Oh, you’ve come about the Hawes boy,” Betty said, as soon as Blandine broached the subject. “A terrible business, that.”

  She turned to her husband. “Jonny, send Gar over to fetch Enoch Woods.”

  “Now?” Jonathan said.

  “Give the boy a lantern,” Betty said, pushing her ten-year-old son, Gar, toward the door of the cabin. “If he gets lost, it’ll be only one less mouth to feed this winter.”

  She laughed gaily and turned back to Blandine. “Enoch’s the one who found the body at Bitterroot Spring. He’s the one you’ll want to speak with.”

  The dinner the Pynchons were able to lay out was humble but bountiful: trout, chestnuts, a ham, elderberry jelly and the oddly named wentelteefje, a kind of egg-soaked Dutch toast that translated as “turnover bitches.” A feast in the midst of the wilderness.

  Both the taciturn Jonathan and the equally mute Enoch Woods became considerably more animated with the administration of generous drafts of the house’s excellent hard cider. As did Blandine and Drummond.

  “The body lay in a very violent posture,” Enoch said, detailing his discovery of the Jope Hawes murder.

  “Bitterroot Spring, a dependable fresh watering hole, now ruined,” Jonathan interjected. “Five miles west of here, across the supposed border of New Netherland.”

  Enoch verbally elbowed his host aside. “The body was split open like a citrus orange. Its entrails trailed out and were festooned on the branches of the trees overhanging the spring. It lay faceup, but its bottom was twisted around so that its buttocks showed. Half-moon bite marks all up and down the flank.”

  Enoch, not yet out of his twenties, appeared much older than his years. A wen disfigured his forehead. By the light of the hearth fire, his face became animated only when he talked of the murder. Enoch always referred to his discovery as “the body,” never naming Jope Hawes.

  “The family paid quitrent to the Dutch patroons,” Jonathan said. “They was freeholders, but the patroons claimed the land to be part of New Netherland, though no one has ever surveyed the border, so we don’t know.”

  “Hawes was a fool to pay rent,” interjected another neighbor, Jack Nelson, newly arrived. The arrival of strangers in the settlement excited universal interest, and the Pynchon cabin became increasingly crowded.

  “I was told there were indian signs around the scene,” Drummond said.

  “Aye, that there was,” Enoch said. “The totems and fetishes they use in their heathen worship. That doll they all keep in their lodges.”

  “A willow circle, with a cross laid over it?” Blandine asked.

  Enoch nodded vigorously. “Yeah, they had that, a number of ’em, tossed all around the body. But the chillingest thing were the face left stuck to a tree, looking down at ye like a spirit out to steal your soul.”

  “The boy’s face?” shouted Jonathan. “They took off the boy’s face?”

  His wife shushed him and took away his flagon of cider.

  “Not the boy’s, not the boy’s, you muzzy fool,” Enoch said, equally inebriated.

  “A mask,” Blandine said quietly.

  “That’s it,” Enoch cried, stabbing his finger at her.

  But it was Gar, the ten-year-old, who provided the real gem of the evening. After she had shooed all the guests home, Betty was up in the sleeping loft with Blandine, putting Gar and his two sisters to bed. After Bible verses, Gar reached out and took Blandine’s hand.

  “He knew the Hawes boy,” Betty said.

  “I met him every year at the harvest carnival up in Taconic,” Gar said. “I missed him a lot at this year’s fair. He were a crack shot, a real crack shot. His daddy were sick, so Jope fed the family. He got two little sisters, just like me.”

  Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “The Hendricksons hated him.”

  “Why do you say that?” Blandine asked.

  “Because I know it,” Gar said. “They was always saying he was poaching, though how you can poach on your own rented land, I don’t know.”

  “He got in a disagreement with the patroons?”

  “Disagreements, hell, they was fights,” the boy said.

  “Gar,” his mother warned.

  “They was!”

  “Watch thy tongue,” Betty said.

  “The fights were about poaching?” Blandine said.

  Gar shook his head. “About them being behind on rent. Hendrickson said, ‘I’ll toss your family off this land,’ and Jope says, ‘I’ll kill ye if ye do.’ He wasn’t a boy to back down.”

  “I don’t like to speak ill of anyone,” Betty said. “But the Hendricksons are unpleasant people, what I’ve seen of them. They are frantic about English encroachment on their patent. They have been here to Canaan, one or the other of the brothers, many times to complain of it.”

  “My daddy says, if they had their way about it, the Hendricksons would declare war on Massachusetts and Connecticut both,” Gar said.

  Blandine wished the family a peaceful rest. She and Edward slept in two great chairs pulled up in front of the hearth.

  “Good night, Drummond,” Blandine said.

  “Good night, Van Couvering,” he said in return, listening to her brea
thing until he fell asleep himself.

  Blandine and Drummond reached the Hawes place as the five o’clock sun disappeared. Beneath towering cedars, the forest seemed to hold more light than the sky. Throughout the long, frigid day, the trail offered rocks and slippery leaves beneath powdery snow that at times reached the bellies of their mounts. The horses made their way, plunging through the drifts, snorting by the end, in a lather, desperately needing a break.

  But stopping was not an option. Shadows already dropped, spiderlike, from the cedars, elms and oaks. There was no horizon, no landmark to guide them. They must reach their destination by full dark or freeze.

  Drummond grew up riding. Blandine demonstrated a competence, but found the journey something of a trial. She sat on the horse not damensattel, but in the French manner.

  “You ride astride,” Drummond said, then immediately felt foolish for stating the obvious. “I could rig you a pommel if you wish.”

  Blandine shook her head. “I’ve often thought that if things made any kind of sense, men would be the ones to ride sidesaddle.”

  He shut his mouth for a while after that, having to think about it, forcing himself to believe that she had said what he thought she’d said. When they got on a wide trail leading west, Blandine pulled her bay alongside the roan. She looked over at Drummond.

  “You’re grinning,” she said.

  “Am I?” Drummond said. He performed an expansive gesture with his arm. “This wilderness. It answers.”

  All Betty Pynchon in Canaan had said was “Ride west along the stream. Diverge at the laurel thickets. Continue through some miles of cedars, then tall oaks until you reach the spring. The house, if you can call it that, will lie half a mile from the spring, and you can follow the brook directly to it.”

  Drummond’s surveying compass showed them the westerly direction of their route. Rasped cheese and leaden bread had been their sustenance on the trip, along with a flask of apple brandy Enoch Woods bestowed upon them as they left Canaan.