The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

Following any directions at all was difficult in the snow-blanketed landscape, especially with the blue shadows coming on.

  Riding side by side, they spoke little. Finally, Blandine broke the silence. “So, Drummond,” she said, “are you ever going to tell me what brings you to the new world?”

  “Not wheat?” Drummond said.

  “No, not wheat. I thought we had established that. You act a role.”

  “And you wonder who is the puppeteer.”

  “Oh, I think I know,” Blandine said. “The second Charles.”

  “Yes, the second Charles,” Drummond said. “It is no great mystery.”

  Feeling a relief no longer to withhold secrets from her, Drummond told of his work for the king, that he had been sent to New Amsterdam by the Earl of Clarendon, with the twofold purpose of tracking the regicides in Connecticut and gathering intelligence about the town’s defenses.

  “You misled me, then,” Blandine said. “You came here to do the colony wrong.”

  “Forgive me,” Drummond said earnestly. “You well know the Dutch cannot maintain their hold.”

  Whenever someone presented Blandine with a sin, a tragedy, an occurrence they would see pumped up into a catastrophe, whenever a trade went bad or she was swindled somehow, she always brought herself back to reality by thinking on her sister, Sarah. “A child did not die,” she would say to herself, and whatever seemed horrible before suddenly appeared less so.

  “Are you going to kill these three judges of the king? The regicides?”

  “No,” Drummond said. “But someone will.”

  “How can you stand that?”

  “I’ve been a soldier,” he said. “It’s like what they say about being a priest. Once a soldier, always a soldier. You obey orders.”

  “And if the orders are bad?”

  “I’ve been careful not to let that happen. I think I’ve been on the right side.”

  “Everyone always thinks they are on the right side,” Blandine said.

  They fell back into silence again, Blandine struggling with whether she could accept Drummond for what he was, learn to forgive.

  Bitterroot Spring, when they finally arrived at it, proved an outcropping of sharp, erect gray boulders, where the body of young Jope Hawes had been discovered six months before. Blandine and Drummond now stood near their ultimate destination.

  Blandine knew that too much time had passed for them to find signs of the murder at the spring, but she wanted to see the place anyway. The two dismounted and paced the site, Blandine lifting her heavy skirts above the snowpack. Her high elk-skin boots kept her dry at least to her knees.

  “A bad place to die,” Blandine said.

  Drummond was about to respond, “There is no good place,” but held back as a hawk passed over them, flying pell-mell through the woods, effortlessly dodging the overhanging branches and screaming its cry of “Kree! Kree!”

  “Let’s go, Drummond,” Blandine said. It was only getting darker. “There’s nothing for us here.”

  They pulled up to the Hawes homestead as the woods went inky black. From their point of view at the edge of the clearing, the cabin seemed abandoned. A small, half-collapsing barn looked as though it were fleeing from the house, heading back into the forest.

  No one around. No fresh tracks in the snow.

  They led their horses into the barn’s musty darkness, finding a listless little pony inside so emaciated she appeared more like an oversized goat. Feed looked to be scarce in the rick, and strewn on the dirt floor were layers of filthy straw. A kicked-over empty bucket showed next to one half filled with water. When Drummond extracted a bundle of carrots from the canvas pack on the spare bay, he made sure to give a few to the pony.

  Standing before the door of the cabin, which was as small as the smallest dwelling in New Amsterdam and built of rough-hewn logs, Blandine realized that there was indeed human life inside. The faintest yellow light shone through the cracks in the shutters that covered the little window to her left.

  Drummond and Blandine looked at each other. Just as Blandine lifted her hand to knock on the door, it swung open. Backlit by the faint glow of the fireplace coals stood a child of perhaps five, with dark eyes and hair almost as fair as Blandine’s. A colorless blanket enveloped her body, and on her feet were creations that resembled not shoes nor stockings as much as bandages.

  “We don’t know you,” said the girl.

  “That’s right,” said Drummond. It was nearly as cold in the room as it was outside.

  “No, we don’t know you,” the girl repeated.

  “Might we come in, miss?” offered Blandine. “Just for a moment.”

  The child stepped toward them into the doorway.

  “Mama is sick,” she said.

  Blandine and Drummond peered into the room. Two stools stood in front of the hearth, one cockeyed with a broken leg. The floor, like the stalls of the barn, had yellow straw cast across its length. A small table stood by the left wall. What the interior displayed most were rags, mounded in piles on the table, cast off along the wall and cascading dangerously toward the hearth.

  The cabin walls had begun their existence as white plaster, but had been discolored by smoke from the fireplace, which apparently had a dysfunctional flue. Even standing at the open door, Blandine suppressed an urge to cough.

  “Perhaps we could help your mama,” said Drummond.

  The girl stepped slowly backward, toward the smoldering hearth, and admitted the two visitors.

  “Who is it?” said a form on a bed to the right of the fireplace. It was impossible to see her features in the darkness. There appeared to be a pile of rags atop her not unlike the ones scattered around the room. An older girl sat at the edge of the bed.

  Blandine removed her gloves. The tips of her fingers felt frozen.

  “Who is it?” said the mother again.

  “They didn’t say,” said the little girl.

  Drummond and Blandine stepped toward the woman. “I am Edward Drummond, and this is Blandine van Couvering.”

  “I don’t know you, do I?” whispered the woman. They were close enough now to see her features, which were pinched and gray and seemingly soiled with the same soot that hung in the air of the house.

  “We haven’t met,” said Blandine. “We are here to talk with you about your son.”

  “Mama is tired,” interjected the girl at the edge of the bed. She, too, wore a ripped, dirty blanket and bandagelike wrappings on her feet.

  “I know, dear,” said Blandine. “But we need to speak for just a few minutes.”

  “It’s all right,” said the woman. “I am Kitty Hawes. It’s not my son you are speaking of, it is my nephew, Joseph. We called him Jope, because when she was little that’s all my youngest could pronounce.”

  A tiny light flickered in the eyes of Kitty Hawes as she looked at her daughter. She paused. “A wicked world it is.”

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” Blandine said, crossing the small, cluttered space to stand next to the bed. “We don’t wish to bring up painful memories, but we need to know how it happened.”

  “You don’t bring painful memories, I live with them every day,” Kitty Hawes said. “I remember Jope leaving out that door carrying our musket as though it happened just before the moment you came in.”

  Drummond let his gaze wander around the room, inventorying the fireplace crane and trammel, the several cook pots laid on the bricks, all as barren as the kicked-over bucket in the barn. Apart from a long rope of onions hanging off the summer beam, nothing of sustenance appeared anywhere in the cabin.

  “What are you called?” he asked the youngest girl in a soft voice.

  She looked at him suspiciously. “Laura.”

  “A pretty name. What is your sister called?”

  “Evie.” Laura stared at him some more, then suddenly broke out in a smile and jumped several times in place. A heartbreaker.

  Drummond turned back to Blandine’s conversation with K
itty Hawes.

  “Can you tell us anything about when he was found?” Blandine asked. “We have heard some of it from the Hendricksons, and from Enoch Wood. But it all sounds so wild.”

  “By the time the landsman brought me Jope’s body,” Kitty said, “it was difficult to even look at him. He had these… pieces taken out of his flesh. But I washed Jope and wrapped him and my husband and I were about to lay him in a grave by the barn. Then the Hendricksons sent over a pine coffin, bless their souls.”

  “I was interested to hear you say he was your nephew,” Drummond said. “We were under the impression he was your child.”

  “Oh, he is not my son,” Kitty said. “Jope is my husband’s brother’s boy. He was living with us because both of his parents had gone to their graves. Vomiting blood. Same as Matthew, my husband, not three months ago.”

  She coughed and held a discolored square of linen to her mouth.

  “An orphan,” said Blandine, sotto to Drummond. He nodded.

  Blandine had mouthed the word quietly, but feeble as she was, Kitty Hawes heard it anyway. “We never liked to see it that way, Jope an orphan,” she said. “He was as close to Matthew and me as any son could be. My girls loved him as a brother.”

  Laura crept over to Drummond’s side, taking his hand in a filthy one of hers.

  “Since he passed, and my husband passed, there is no one to till our acreage,” Kitty said. “Girls ain’t old enough. Strong enough.”

  “I am too strong,” said Evie.

  “Evie,” said her mother, “go put some of that samp on for supper.”

  “I’m hungry,” Laura said.

  “I know you are, honey,” said her mother. “Help Evie now. You can go outside and bring up a turnip from the root cellar.”

  The two girls drifted off to their chores, Laura holding on to Drummond’s hand until the last moment.

  “I didn’t want them to hear this,” said Kitty Hawes. “It concerns Jope.”

  She sat up in bed and held the stained cloth to her mouth, controlling her coughing.

  “There were things. Things around him.”

  Blandine looked over at Evie by the fire.

  “They brought the items back to us along with the body. But I burnt most of it. They weren’t fit to be near good people such as us.”

  “What do you mean?” Drummond said.

  “Things written on stones. Bones. And something I saved.” She stopped, reached down along the wall under the bed, and pulled out a totem figure.

  “A sort of dolly,” she said. “But not the kind my girls would ever play with.”

  Kitty Hawes handed the corn-husk doll over to Blandine.

  “The heathens keep ’em in their lodges for protection, or maybe they worship them. Matthew told me it was to them the mother spirit. This one has that blackish paint on it. The work of Mahicans, maybe, or Quinnipiac. We see them sometimes, crossing our land.”

  She fell back on the rags that served as her pillow. Evie came over from the hearth.

  “She needs to rest,” said the girl. “Can I give you some corn mush?”

  “We’re fine,” Blandine said. “We have food ourselves, and perhaps we can share some with you.”

  Drummond and Blandine walked to the door. Coming in at the same time was Laura, holding the small globe of a purple-topped turnip. “You won’t go,” she said stoutly.

  The repast they all shared that night held little cheer and smaller savor. Blandine managed to find two pieces of hard candy secreted in her kit. She shared the treats with Laura and Evie. The girls received them as manna from heaven.

  “Happy Christmas,” Blandine said.

  “Happy Christmas,” the girls murmured in concert, sucking on the sugar.

  Blandine masked her emotion by doing what she did whenever she didn’t know what to do. She cleaned. The cabin did not give up its dirt easily. Drummond read to the girls from the New Testament, the welcoming of Jesus by the children on Palm Sunday. The only book in the house.

  At the end of the night, as Drummond prepared to go to bed in the barn, Laura refused to let him leave. She had been resting in his lap all evening.

  Standing on her tiptoes, holding on to Drummond’s cloak, she put her tiny mouth to his ear. “Mister,” she said, “might you need a servant? I can cook, and clean, and I’m so good at taking care of Mama.”

  Drummond kissed the top of her head and took himself out to the barn, which with four horses in it seemed to offer warmer possibilities than the dwelling.

  The girls curled up together like puppies, lying amid the rag piles that seemed the family’s only asset, on the bricks in front of the dying embers of the fire.

  Blandine slept in bed alongside the clammy, corpselike body of Kitty Hawes, turning her face away to avoid the woman’s cough. She woke in the night to find Kitty clinging to her. The corn-husk totem doll had somehow migrated from beneath the bed to lodge alongside Blandine’s ribs.

  29

  “We had visitors,” Ad Hendrickson said to his brother.

  “Aye,” Ham said. “The Englisher.”

  A long pause. The brothers were in the groot kamer of their northland plantation house. They had closed up the rest of their rambling manse, relegated the servants to the barn and retreated for the winter into the single large room.

  “You see he don’t come here to visit us,” Ad said.

  “No, he don’t dare.”

  Pauses in conversation between Ad and Ham customarily grew to great dark gulfs, through which sea dragons swam. A report had come in from their indian friends (the Hendricksons still had a few, those they hadn’t exterminated) about trespassers on the eastern perimeter of their patent, along the contentious boundary with New England.

  An English gentleman and a wench, on horseback.

  Drummond.

  Other reports had come to the Hendricksons throughout the fall into Christmas, troubling accounts of the witika business afflicting the capital to the south. Ad, especially, didn’t like it. He had dispatched brother Martyn to New Amsterdam to keep him out of trouble, not to send him into the midst of more.

  Ad had no use for the city. He construed the Hendrickson patent on the North River, its plantation and woodlands, its livestock and tenants, as a self-contained realm. Petrus Stuyvesant might make noise about being governor of all of New Netherland, but his authority meant little here. The estate comprised the Hendrickson duchy, an independent principality, and it weren’t no republic, neither. Besides, the peg-leg had his hands full with all the wickedness of New Amsterdam.

  Ad stirred the fire in the hearth. Ham liked to keep the groot kamer cold, freezing, in order to save on firewood. He assumed his usual seat in an upholstered, thronelike chair along the wall, as far from the chimney as he could get. But Ad, at forty years old, felt the first touch of the bony fingers of age. A hardwood fire felt good on a dark winter day.

  Ham rose and crossed to the chamber-stool lodged near the outside door. He unbelted himself, squatted and evacuated noisily with several sharp cracking blasts. The chimney draft drew the stench into the room, but Ad paid it no mind. His brother’s smell was as familiar as his own.

  The Hendrickson clan started out in the new world four decades before as a single-room family, and here they were back to it again. From a miserable cabin (Ad kept it maintained, two leagues to the west, nearer to the river, as a memorial) they rose to the largest house in the North River highlands. Losing their mother and father at the start of the struggle and forging ahead in spite of it. Tearing their patent out of the unbreached wilderness by sheer force of will.

  It was Ad and Ham that did it, really. Little Martyn was useless, a weepy child, always burbling about missing his mama.

  “I knew Mister Drummond was a problem when he first came to us on his way to Beverwyck, jawing on about the Hawes boy killing,” Ham said.

  “Now this business to the south,” Ad said.

  “We should have shut him up in the smokehouse when h
e turned thirteen,” Ham said. He didn’t need to name Martyn.

  Ad said, “Fed him through the smoke hole.”

  “He gets antsy, we close the hole,” Ham said.

  The brothers laughed together silently. Ad again stirred the fire.

  “I sure get tired cleaning up after him,” Ham said. “I used to wipe his little infant ass, but I thought that would be over when he growed. Is he any good for anything besides spending our money and causing commotion?”

  “Nay, for nothing but that,” Ad said.

  A long pause. Flames flared in the hearth and showed Ad’s face. Across the room, Ham remained in shadow. The brothers both knew they loved their baby brother with a depth of emotion that veered toward mania, but neither of them would have confessed it upon pain of death.

  “When are we thinking of going down there?” Ham said.

  “This week,” Ad said.

  He retrieved a cleaver from a pin on the chimney and crossed to the pantry closet to cut slices of beef for their noon meal. Ham went outside to get the beer, kept frosty cold in a bank of snow.

  “I want, I want, I want, I want, I want!”

  It was the kind of January day when the frozen ground temporarily thawed, men unbuttoned their waistcoats and the round sky above brimmed with deep azure. Hausfraus bared their necks and shoulders to the hot sun as they vigorously swept their stoops, stopping occasionally to chat with their equally energetic neighbors. Oxen pulling carts full of wood or stone to building sites seemed to haul their loads lightly in the mildness of the day, flanks steaming beneath their yokes.

  “I want…” The little girl stopped and put her finger in her mouth.

  “Yes, Sabine, what is it you want?” Aet Visser had promised Anna, Sabine’s mother, to take the child with him for the morning.

  “The play place!”

  Anna, the woman Visser introduced to everyone as his servant, had work to do. As always. When she wasn’t cleaning Visser’s home, she had the job of stringing seawan for Frederick Philipse, the well-fed merchant who had barrels of shells and beads stashed in his cellar on Stone Street.

  The Dutch, from a waterlogged country, did not much favor cellars. But such understories proved viable in New Amsterdam, and several of the finer residences possessed them. Anna would sweep and polish the Philipse storeroom, cleaning its smooth floor of paving stones and bright whitewashed walls until not a speck of dirt survived.