Thieves? He could ascertain nothing that was stolen, though much was destroyed. A ransacking, not a plunder.
But where were his papers? They, whoever “they” were, had taken them from the leather document case he kept hidden behind the bricks of the jamb stove.
He was discovered as a spy. The London letters and his orders from Clarendon and Downing were in code, of course, but codes could be broken.
Drummond had an impulse to call Blandine back, but when he went out onto the street, she had already made the turn onto the canal and was gone.
A sickening thought stabbed him. His workshop.
He rushed through his rooms, out the back entrance and into the yard. Full dark had not yet fallen, so even before he reached it, he realized the plunder had been applied to the outbuilding, too. He extracted his Scottish pistol from his belt.
His heart falling, he entered the low, rectangular room. Formerly neat as a pin when he left it a month ago, it was now a shambles. As Drummond stepped forward, glass crunched underneath his feet. Stunned by mounting anger, tears in his eyes, he cataloged his losses. His perspective tube, smashed. His glass-making apparatus scattered to the floor, wrecked. Every instrument that could be bent, busted or mangled, was.
The workshop’s generous windows had been mostly broken, also. He looked through the frame of one of them to the top of his dwelling-house across the yard. At least they had not thought to dismantle the spyglass affixed to his roof. Its proud silhouette showed black against the fading sky.
As he stood there amid the wreckage of his life, Drummond heard shouts, voices. An alarm of some kind was being raised from the direction of the wharf. Still overcome with emotion, he crossed to his rooms, stepping over his scattered possessions to make his way to the open front door.
They met him there, at the bottom of his stoop, a dozen men, soldiers, burghers and the schout, De Klavier. Godbolt. Kees Bayard. Standing off to the side, the half-indian, Lightning.
“There he is!” Kees shouted, and the whole group rushed forward up the front steps. Drummond stumbled backward, aiming his pistol, at the last moment raising it upward and blasting the door lintel as the men filled the doorway.
Showered with dust and splinters of wood, his attackers retreated as quickly as they came, stumbling over one another in their haste to get out of the line of fire.
It would have been comical if Drummond had been in the mood. A mob of cowards. He reloaded his pistol, righted an overturned chair and sat down facing the open front door. He could hear them gabbing among themselves in the street.
“Drummond!” a voice called up. “We have you surrounded. Surrender yourself!”
De Klavier. Drummond had met him many times when the man shut the Red Lion at curfew. The more limited the authority, the greater the pomp.
“Don’t you have a taproom to close?” he shouted out. “Someone to levy a fine against who has spat upon the director general’s stoop?”
More voices in hurried conference. The square of his doorway glowed, they had ignited a torch. A musket discharged, a man screamed, the gab of voices rose to a pitch.
In his heart, Drummond knew there was nothing for it. What would he do, hold out against the whole town? Make his escape over the rooftops like a Paris musketeer pursued by a jealous husband?
He decided not. He placed his periwig atop his head. “I’m coming out,” he shouted.
The voices outside suddenly stilled. Whispers.
De Klavier. “Throw out your pistol, first.”
Drummond did so, then advanced on the door, stepped through and stood looking down from the top of his stoop.
Three militiamen trained their muskets at him. The muzzle ends looked huge to Drummond, bottomless, as if they were tunnels he could step inside.
“Put up your weaponry, gentlemen,” he said. “I will come peacefully, and you don’t want to hurt anyone else among you.” One of the guardsmen lay on the ground, nursing a bloody wound to his right foot, accidentally self-inflicted.
De Klavier rushed up the stoop, finding his courage against an unarmed prey.
“Edmund Drummond!” he shrieked.
“No,” said Drummond calmly. “You’ve got the wrong man.”
The schout halted, momentarily confused. “What?”
“My given name is Edward. If it’s Edmund Drummond you want, I advise you to look elsewhere.”
The militiamen were on him by then, and they bound his arms and hustled Drummond off the stoop down to the street. De Klavier rushed to catch up.
“I arrest you in the name of the Dutch West India Company for treasonous acts against the jurisdiction of New Netherland,” De Klavier announced, finding his footing at last. “You will be conducted to Fort Amsterdam and thereby be imprisoned.”
“In Latin, man, in Latin,” Drummond murmured, and the schout again looked confused.
Kees Bayard leaned in close. “You will hang,” he said.
“And she will still not love you,” Drummond said. Kees smacked him across the face.
The crowd surrounding Drummond grew rapidly. There was something about torchlight that emboldened the citizenry. “Traitor!” they shouted at the prisoner as he was borne away, following after him to yell “Spy!” “Intriguer!” and “Murderer!” also.
Well, spy, yes, Drummond thought. Intriguer, maybe, whatever it meant. But where had that “murderer” come from? Was he to stand accused of every crime in the colony?
He worried about Blandine.
Down Slyck Steegh to the canal, alongside the canal to Pearl, down Pearl toward the fort. The members of the mob wore heavy doublets. He had neglected his in the ruckus at home and was left in his white linen blouse, open at the throat.
The cold air stung him into that state of alertness he had experienced before only in battle. Some part of him knew the fiercely aware condition represented the only time he was truly alive.
If Drummond were more daring, he would have launched into an English marching song, perhaps “When the King Enjoys His Own Again.” But he feared his voice would crack if he tried. He satisfied himself with a crooked smile.
The crowd swelled to dozens strong. Drummond felt as though he were at sea, propelled along by an enormous wave. Past Blandine’s dwelling-house and the Red Lion opposite. He stared desperately at both, attempting to discern if Van Couvering, and perhaps Raeger, had been taken also.
But in the foul cell into which they tossed him, a log storeroom in the keep of the fort, Drummond found that the only other inmate was Antony Angola.
“Hello, Drummond,” Antony said.
“Blandine?” Drummond asked.
“Fled away,” Antony said. “The last I heard, she headed for sanctuary in the Reformed Church, across the yard from us.”
“She is here?”
“Not within shouting distance, if that’s what you mean. Under the protection of the dominie, for now. They don’t want her, Drummond. At least, not yet. You and me, we are to be hanged as traitors.”
“You?”
“For my association with you,” Antony said. “And for my skin color,” he added.
During Drummond’s absence in the northland, witika panic had gripped New Amsterdam ever more tightly. The town crier told of another orphan disappearance.
“One of ours again,” Antony said. “A little African girl. Not that anyone cares too much.”
If one included the mystery of William Turner, the killings or disappearances now numbered eight.
“While you were gone, the colony went up in arms with witika fear,” Antony said. “The land ports closed and the militia summoned.”
The director general declared another day of prayer and penitence. The settlement’s Jews were in hiding, Antony told him, in fear of the ancient specter of blood libel, the idea that Jewish rituals involved the sacrifice of abducted Christian children.
Also, this: a pattern of frost appeared on one of the windows of the Stadt Huys. The frost picture had been constr
ued as a representation of the witika demon, a warning to New Amsterdam to repent of its manifold sins.
Some of the boys of the town had been caught chalking the witika sign up on the facades of public buildings, houses, even across the paving blocks of Stone Street.
“The parents are going crazy,” Drummond said, “and the children see it all in terms of a prank.”
Later, after they had talked half the night, the giant attempted some genial consolation.
“Worry not, my friend,” Antony said to Drummond, rubbing the rope-burn scars around his massive, treelike neck. “I’ve been hung before, and it don’t hurt much.”
32
In the deserted meeting-hall of the Reformed Church built within the confines of Fort Amsterdam, Blandine sat with Johannes Megapolensis, the dominie of the colony and thus the chief religious authority of New Netherland.
“I shall not give you to him, child,” Megapolensis said. “Him” being the director general. The dominie and Petrus Stuyvesant had been at loggerheads from the first day of Megapolensis’s installment, and the witchcraft charges leveled at Blandine represented another battle in their long war.
“I grant you full sanctuary,” Megapolensis continued. “But you must do me one thing.”
In the chaos of the previous evening, Blandine fled to the church not knowing where else to go. She and Drummond both had been blindsided on their return to New Amsterdam from the northland. He, evidently, had been taken as a spy. She stood accused as a witch.
Hysteria screamed through the colony like a fireball rocket. Rumors exploded. Amid the insults hurled at her by angry crowds, Blandine heard a jumble of strange reports and half-facts. Much had been made of her coming back into the capital at dawn the day after the orphan Ansel Imbrock had been taken the first time.
In the panicked town, enough suspicion fell on Blandine that her dwelling-house had been searched. Witika totems turned up in her rooms, an indian lodge doll, the circle-and-cross willow fetishes, a deerskin mask.
And—the kicker, the killer, the discovery that damned Blandine as a witch—the bloody jacket of an orphan child.
Could that be possible? The evening before was a nightmare. As soon as she left Drummond’s and proceeded toward her dwelling-house, she had been attacked. She was besieged by a mob, many members of which seemed ready to burn her right then and there. She escaped only by taking out the muff pistol Drummond had given her and firing it in the air.
“What would you have me do, dominie?” she asked. But she already knew the answer.
“Confess your love for Jesus, child,” Megapolensis said. “Attest to me that you accept Christ as your Lord and Savior. Fall upon your knees before God.”
Yes, yes. They all wanted her to do that, ever since she had been orphaned. Before that, it had not been an issue. She went to church with her parents and believed the fables and fantasies that had been presented there. She was a good girl.
What happened to her? How had she lost her faith? It wasn’t that question that tormented her, but others. Why had her parents sailed without her to Patria on their doomed, fateful voyage in Blue Hen, taking her little sister but not her? Why had she not insisted on going along?
Instead, she begged them rather to let her stay behind. She was fifteen, and old enough to be on her own, she argued. Her secret reason was that she was in love with Kees Bayard and wished to tease out his love for her. The voyage to Patria—for trade, and to have Sarah christened at her parents’ home church in Amsterdam, with their relatives around them for the ceremony—did not seem as vital to Blandine as a backward glance from a handsome boy.
So her parents died, and Sarah drowned alongside them. Innocent Sarah. It was impossible for Blandine to measure her love for her sister.
But love proved a weak thing. It failed to save Sarah. Blandine misjudged the cruelty of the world, a random, coldhearted realm that could snuff the life of such a one in the black seas off Goodwin Sands. She would give anything, a thousand glances from a thousand boys, she would stay forever chaste, simply to have her little sister back in her arms again.
No, no more God for her, thank you. The New Amsterdam dominie—a different one, not Megapolensis—had spoken with her at the time of her sister’s death, consoling Blandine in her grief, telling her the ways of God were not to be understood by mere humans. In her thoughts Blandine responded that on the contrary, clearly it was God who did not understand human ways. Why give her the capacity for love and then rip out her heart?
Back then she rooted through the scripture, trying to find solace, an explanation, anything, a shred of text that would give her a reason for Sarah’s fate. She found little that was of any use. Job helped. While thine eyes are upon me, I shall be gone. But nothing really answered.
“God needed her,” the old dominie told Blandine.
“I need her!” her heart cried out.
She did not decline the mystery of existence, the great day that dawns, the light that fills the world. But that mystery no longer wore a human face, a kindly grandfather who dwelt in the sky. It was, rather, a terrible severalty, an all-ness, equally joyous and crushing.
“You’ve been absent from our church,” Megapolensis said now. “Perhaps for this reason the people are suspicious of you, and label you a witch.”
“I did not keep those things that they said were in my dwelling-house,” Blandine said. “The garment and the witika totems. Whoever told you they were there lied, or someone put them there to slur me.”
Blandine had two visitors in the church that morning. A stammering, fearful Miep, who told her what she had learned from the Godbolt children and then said she could never see Blandine again, rushing out of the meeting-hall in great haste. And Aet Visser, acting very nervous and strange.
“The clothing,” he said. “The clothing they found in your rooms. I know whence it came.”
Blandine had trouble comprehending what he was saying. “You mean, you recognized it. It came from your orphans, the ones who have disappeared.”
She understood that much already. She learned it when they branded her a witch and an orphan-killer.
But how had Visser seen it? Was he present during the search of her rooms? The orphanmaster appeared entirely beside himself. He fussed, restless, picking at the skin of his hands and face. He rose from the church pew and sat back down. It was more than just worry about Blandine’s fate. She felt sure that something else was bothering Visser, some tremendous load bending him double.
“Oh, God, Blandine,” he kept repeating, over and over, near tears. “Oh, my dear Lord.”
The man, Blandine realized, was terrified.
“Is there something you have to tell me, Aet?” she asked.
But there wasn’t. Visser hustled from the church that morning, and Blandine was alone in the wood-vaulted meeting-hall until noon, when the dominie came to speak with her.
“One word from you,” Megapolensis repeated now, “and I will throw all my authority behind an effort to stanch these ugly accusations and rehabilitate you in the eyes of the church.”
Blandine nodded tiredly. Somewhere in the fort, not twenty rods from where she sat with Megapolensis, Drummond and Antony were being kept in a small cell. She knew what was coming, and she prayed—was prayed the right word?—that she had the courage to face it.
“Child?” Megapolensis said gently. “Do you accept Lord Jesus Christ as the light of the world and the only path to salvation, without whom wait the everlasting flames of damnation?”
Blandine remained stubbornly silent. Sarah’s round-cheeked little face floated in her mind.
“I beg of you, save yourself from hell,” the dominie said. “Glory is yours for a word.”
Blandine said, “I wonder if you could tell me, dominie, who organized the fright show in the meeting-hall on Christmas Eve?”
Megapolensis appeared disconcerted. “You ask that?” he said. “At this, the most crucial moment of your young life?”
He seized Blandine’s hand in his and looked directly into her eyes. “If I cannot entice you with an eternity in heaven, perhaps I can make you realize what this mortal life holds for you. Do you know what they do to witches, child?”
“What you will do, you mean,” Blandine said.
“They will strip your clothes and march you naked through the streets,” Megapolensis said. His eyes had a faraway look, as if he imagined the scene.
“The mob will fling mud and filth at you. You will be shorn of that lovely silken hair of which you are so vainly proud. They’ll bind you to the stake beside the gibbet near the fort. Then the schout reads out your charges and excommunication.”
“Who ignites the flame, dominie?” Blandine asked.
“You will hear the damning sentence,” Megapolensis continued, brushing her question aside. “Death at the stake.”
But she insisted. “Who strikes the first spark?”
“Child!”
“Who does it, dominie? Are you afraid to say?”
“I do!” Megapolensis shouted. Then, more quietly, “I light the fire.”
A silence. Blandine closed her eyes. A weariness took her, so deep that it was like sleep.
She heard the voice of the dominie. “I will start the flames at the outer edge of the pyre, so that the heat will come on you bit by bit, until it invades your whole body.”
Blandine heard Megapolensis get up and stride in the aisle of the church. “You will weep and howl and scream your repentance then, as your flesh burns, but it will be too late. Too late!”
Megapolensis let his voice go low. “And let me tell you this, Blandine”—he returned to her, and bent his face to hers once again, until she felt his breath—“those fires in which you will perish are but a feverish instant when compared to the eternal pits of hell.”
Blandine opened her eyes and turned to the dominie.
“Credere nequeo,” she said. I cannot believe.
Megapolensis gazed at her for a long time. He felt sorrow, because he knew he had failed. He understood Blandine well enough not to bother asking if she were sure, if she had not better reconsider.
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