The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  “God sleeps,” Lightning answered. Then he said, “How much does a good wig cost?”

  Martyn gave up. From now on, he knew, wigs were all he would hear about from the damned half-indian. The man was manic. Martyn would have to get him a wig somehow. Perhaps Drummond’s. He wouldn’t be long needing his.

  Martyn headed into the audience chamber, and Lightning made to go with him, but was stopped by the militiaman guarding the door.

  “Are you a witness?” the militiaman asked Lightning.

  “He’s with me,” Martyn said.

  “Europeans only allowed, unless they are witnesses.”

  Lightning’s face darkened, but Martyn only shrugged. He passed from the anteroom into the audience chamber, leaving his protégé behind.

  In the chamber, they were hearing the Africans, Lace and Mally and Handy, talk about their latest missing child. Tara Oyo, the girl’s name was, they said, six years old. She had been found, stripped naked, facedown in a rotting litter of leaves, missing a haunch and the fingers of her left hand.

  The director general gave the Africans a scolding. “Why let this child wander alone?” Stuyvesant asked.

  “She wasn’t wandering, she had to work, and she was going—” the man Handy said, but Stuyvesant cut him off.

  “It seems your community is lax about attending to its children. You must pray over it, and search your hearts to find if you are not as much to blame as the demon that took her. Quae nocent, saepe docent.” What hurts, instructs.

  “Sire—” the woman Lace said, but again, the director general interrupted.

  “We have heard enough about this instance,” he said, dismissing the Africans. They stood, not knowing what to do, but finally turned and passed Martyn on their way out of the audience room.

  The director general and his citizen-advisors, the Nine, had convened to sort out the witika madness that gripped the colony. The Nine were what passed for representative democracy in New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant would just as soon keep his own counsel, but unrest in the streets was such that he had to admit some burghers and leading citizens into the governing process.

  Convening the Nine, Martyn knew, was a sop. In his experience, advising the director general was like trying to get a stone to absorb water. The words ran off and soaked into the earth.

  But the exercise was often entertaining. George Godbolt was there, Kees Bayard, the schout, De Klavier, Aet Visser, Chas Pembeck, the Company tax official, the schoolmaster, Adolphus Roeletsen, the powerful patroon from across the river in Pavonia, Michiel Pauw, the burgomeester, Rem Fuchs. And finally, Martyn’s own brother Adias Hendrickson, making a rare appearance in the capital.

  A collection of enfeebled idiots, as far as Martyn was concerned, even though on occasion he had himself numbered among the Nine. Nine ninnies, his brother not excepted. Friend Visser, he noticed, looked ill, slack-faced. The orphanmaster avoided Martyn’s gaze.

  “I now convene this body as a correctional tribunal,” Stuyvesant announced. “We shall take up the business of the imprisoned spy Edward Drummond.”

  “Hang him,” Kees Bayard said, immediately. For weeks, he had been pressing his uncle with the case against Drummond.

  “And the African, too,” George Godbolt said.

  “No, no, not the African,” Kees said.

  The director general rapped his knuckles on the grand polished-mahogany table behind which he sat. “Gentlemen,” he said, “let us consider the evidence. First the evidence, then the hanging.”

  He shuffled some papers on the desk. “Thanks to the diligence of our schout”—nodding to De Klavier—“a great deal of material was recovered from the spy Drummond’s chambers. Included were coded messages in Latin.”

  A look of immense satisfaction passed over the director general’s face. Petrus Stuyvesant loved Latin as a harsh mistress. He gloried in always being the smartest gentleman in the room, the smartest in the colony and among the smartest (he qualified carefully) in the world.

  “I have personally broken the code on these messages,” he said. He waited for the proper level of awe to settle upon his tribunal.

  The effort had taken Stuyvesant many hours, laboring alone in the night, picking away at the scribbles taken from a leather box found in Edward Drummond’s best chamber. Letter by letter, word by word, a frustrating work requiring ferocious concentration. The director general loved every second of it.

  He did not divulge all of what he found in the coded messages. The English were moving against him, that was certain. He already knew that, but he had not grasped how far their plans had developed. They had spies everywhere, in the capital, at Fort Orange, in Wildwyck, on Long Island. Drummond’s papers drew a noose around the director general’s neck.

  Among the documents there were sketches of every major building and thoroughfare in New Amsterdam. A diagram of the fort. Lists of English settlers. Also uncovered were plans against the New Haven regicides.

  “These papers reveal Edward Drummond to be a paid assassin of his High Mightiness, the king of England, and an agent of his papist schemes,” Stuyvesant said. That much he was willing to make public. “He has come to our jurisdiction to wreak havoc, on the trail of the judge-commissioners who lately condemned to death the former king, Charles I. He journeyed recently to New Haven Colony for the purpose of tracking the regicides who find safe harbor there, exposing them to the sitting king’s murderous fury.”

  The director general rose to his feet, or, as the wags would have said in the Red Lion, his foot. “Edward Drummond is a murderer,” he announced sententiously. “These documents represent his confession. He is condemned to hang.”

  He looked around the chamber. The Nine tripped over themselves to agree. “Aye,” said Kees Bayard.

  “Aye,” De Klavier said.

  “Aye,” Godbolt said.

  Ayes from Pembeck, Roeletsen, Pauw, Fuchs.

  Visser, silent, abstaining. The worst circles of hell, Martyn thought acidly, were reserved for those who do not decide which side they are on.

  His brother spoke up. “I don’t scruple at hanging the man,” Ad Hendrickson said. “But I wonder what connection he has with this witch business.”

  “The witch and the spy are in league,” Martyn said, drawing a stare from Stuyvesant. When one of his brothers was present, Martyn was allowed in chamber only as a silent observer.

  “That is a lie,” Kees Bayard said, gamely defending his old love. “Blandine van Couvering is the target of a campaign to make her appear guilty.”

  Martyn decided he would have to deal with Kees Bayard directly, sooner or later. The man had labeled him a liar in public discourse. Dueling was disallowed in the colony, but Martyn had picked up a taste for it during his sojourn in Paris. And there were other ways.

  “Drummond and Van Couvering were clearly seen entering the settlement at dawn after the Ansel Imbrock kidnapping,” De Klavier said.

  “Perhaps she has bewitched him,” Godbolt said.

  “She is innocent!” Kees burst out.

  Stuyvesant sat heavily back down in his chair, rapping for order. He addressed his nephew directly. “Personal connections have no place in this chamber,” he told Kees. “You must sacrifice your own petty concerns for the good of the public. I myself have sacrificed much”—here he stamped his wooden leg on the floor, as he often did for effect. “You need to show you are ready to keep a clear head or recuse yourself from this deliberation.”

  “Yes, Uncle,” Kees said, cowed.

  “Yes, Mijn Heer General,” Stuyvesant corrected.

  “Yes, Mijn Heer General,” Kees said.

  “We could call for testimony from the militia sentry at the land port,” De Klavier suggested.

  “Which one?” the director general asked. A barely suppressed titter passed through the assembly. Stuyvesant had pronounced the punch line to his own joke. Human beings can be so cruel, thought the director general. He felt fury rise in him.

  “The disposit
ion of the case of Blandine van Couvering is a religious matter,” Stuyvesant said coldly. “It was resolved not by this body but by myself in concert with Dominie Megapolensis.”

  He paused, and once again stood. “Just before this meeting, the dominie and I made a finding of actus reus, wrongful acts. Blandine van Couvering will be burned at the stake for perverse and sundry high crimes, murder, kidnapping, the eating of human flesh, depravity and consorting with the Devil. May the Lord have mercy on her soul.”

  Kees groaned audibly, but the rest of the Nine fell silent. Aet Visser put his head in his hands. Only Ad Hendrickson spoke up.

  “All right, all right,” he said, impatient. “What I want to know, is she convicted of this witika mess? Will there be no more disappearing orphans? Has the lawful pursuit of this matter closed?”

  He seemed to be addressing the assembly, but he was staring openly and sternly at his brother.

  “So we shall have a hanging and a burning,” Martyn said lightly. “Perhaps they can be arranged on the same day.”

  “Ipso lex,” said Stuyvesant. By the power of law, he meant, but the schoolmaster, Roeletsen, spoke up.

  “If I may, Mijn Heer General, you mean ipso iure, since that is the ablative—”

  “Good God, man!” Stuyvesant cut him off.

  “How about the witch’s African?” Ad said. “As I understand it, you hung him once already, and yet he still lives.”

  “A stouter rope,” Martyn suggested.

  In the street outside the Stadt Huys, shouts, cries, raised voices. Martyn at first thought the public had somehow become aware of the sentences against Drummond and the witch, just passed down by Stuyvesant and the Nine, and the shouting expressed their approval.

  The call of the town crier floated up to the third-floor audience room. “Oyez, oyez, the prisoners have escaped! They have escaped!”

  34

  In the event, departure from Dutch captivity proved relatively simple to pull off, which Drummond should have known, judging by the state of the rotting wicker gabions stacked along the fort’s parapet. The citadel had been allowed to fall into a general state of disrepair.

  While their jailer slept that early morning, Antony managed to pry loose a log at the back of the cell. They both squeezed through the space, Antony having a much harder time of it than Drummond. The wall gave out to an adjacent passageway which had, at the end of it, a barred window that was easily forced. They climbed the earthen ramparts and then faced a thirty-foot jump to the parade ground below.

  “I’m not doing it,” Drummond said. “We’ll break our necks.”

  “Snowbanks,” Antony said, and he leaped off. Plummeting downward in the dawn dark, the giant plunged into a massive snow pile and disappeared completely. Drummond peered down. A white snowman struggled out of the hole made from the fall and waved up at him.

  “Well, all right,” Drummond said, and jumped himself.

  Blandine, too, found her extraction from the siege at the Red Lion a fairly straightforward matter. Taking her shawl and all the extra clothes she could gather, she rode the rope down while standing in the bucket, twirling queasily for the whole thirty-foot drop. Raeger greeted her in his first-floor taproom headquarters.

  “It’s time for ye to leave, wench,” he said, lapsing into pirate talk. “They are stacking the faggots and pounding in the stake. If ye stay on, ye’ll see yourself roasted to a smoking char by nightfall.”

  “I shall leave then,” Blandine said. “Though I will dearly miss your company.”

  “I remain here to fight the good fight for the people’s rights,” Raeger said. “Due process, protection against unlawful seizure, enforcement of the writ.”

  “Aye, and iced beer,” Blandine said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “You were liking that style, were ye, up in your attic aerie? We kept it in the snow, back of the Mane.”

  “I was getting used to it, although tepid is fine, too.”

  The Lions, Raeger’s valiant customers and loyal troops, slept every which way in the taproom and the casino chamber. If the director general’s militiamen thought to rush the place at that moment, Blandine thought, they would have an easy time of it.

  Raeger bundled her out of the Lion through the Mane, and handed her off to Kitane, who led her through backyards for the whole of the block to emerge into the deserted market square.

  Neither of them spoke. The early morning streets were empty. A rattle watch came by, crossing Brugh Street. The man didn’t see their two shadows, passing quickly to the north, edging along the fort toward the parade ground.

  There another pair of figures awaited, one overlarge, one regular.

  “Hello, Drummond,” Blandine said.

  “Miss Blandina,” Antony said. Kitane stood beside Blandine.

  “Once more, the four of us,” Drummond said.

  The light had broken fully with the sunrise. In order to avoid the land port, they sought to pass around the palisade wall along the rough shore of the North River.

  There were numerous hitches. They had to conceal themselves for an hour in a shed in the Company gardens on the settlement side of the wall. The Broad Way became more peopled during that time. They knew how easily recognized Antony’s profile was.

  Finally they made the circuit around the wall. They crept through the fields north to Little Angola and Mally’s cabin. Lace was there, also.

  “They were going to burn you, girl,” the normally stern Mally said. “I saw the blood in their eyes.”

  According to plan, a sleigh waited at Mally’s. But another snag: no horses. “They coming,” Mally said.

  Every moment, Blandine knew, meant they were closer to being recaptured. Antony and Drummond had concealed their leaving by heaping bedclothes in their cell to resemble sleeping forms, but soon enough that ruse would be uncovered.

  “I should go,” Drummond said.

  “Horses coming, I told you,” Mally said. “Have faith.”

  “Well, no, I was thinking, if we are marooned here, I could just dash back into town for a bit.”

  “What?” Antony said.

  “Drummond!” Blandine said.

  “I need to retrieve something,” Drummond said. “A thing I forgot.”

  “What is it?” Mally said.

  “You are not going back there,” Blandine said. “We just escaped!”

  But Drummond was not to be deterred. “Really, it will only take a moment. I’ll be back by the time you have the horses hitched.”

  “For pity’s sake, Edward,” Blandine said, forgetting their agreement about using last names only.

  “It will be fine,” Drummond said. To Antony: “Remember, hitch the horses three abreast, the two outside—”

  “—with breast collars, I know,” Antony said.

  “Then we’ll be able to outrun anything,” Drummond said. He left by the side door and slipped off to the south, toward the palisade wall of the settlement.

  “That man,” said Mally, “is either plumb raving crazy or just downright insane. That’s the only two choices he’s offering to us.”

  Blandine fretted out an hour. The horses came and were hitched to the sleigh in the same style of triplets that had served them so well on the trip up the Fresh River. Antony packed the few belongings Blandine had taken from her time in the Red Lion tower. Lace and Mally loaded foodstuffs and other supplies.

  “I’ll go find him,” Kitane offered.

  “No, no, he’ll come,” Blandine said. “He said he would, and he will.”

  “Unless he’s captured,” Antony said, tightening the traces on the sleigh horses. The beasts shifted their weight back and forth, breaths wreathing in the frosty morning air, eager to get going, two buckskins and a spotted perlino. Kitane had thieved or bartered them from where he did not say.

  As Antony finished, Drummond approached, coming not from the south, the direction they expected him, but from the north.

  “We should go,” he said. “As I
was leaving I heard the town crier call my name. I am absconded, he was shouting.”

  He had been detoured, in town, by an unfortunate encounter with his old Margrave shipmate Gerrit Remunde, who came out of nowhere as Drummond slinked down the backstreets of the settlement, trying to avoid notice.

  “Mister Drummond!” Remunde called. “We want to have you for dinner!”

  Drummond took off. He had to run the long way around to lose the man.

  Still a little winded, Drummond tossed onto the bench of the sleigh the crucial item he had returned to town in order to fetch: the bearskin Blandine had gifted him with, many long weeks ago in Beverwyck.

  Blandine tried to look stern. “That was foolhardy,” she said.

  “The pelt is devilishly warm, and we have a cold journey ahead,” Drummond said. He turned to the giant. “Antony, my friend, let’s away.”

  But Antony remained standing apart. “I don’t go with you,” he said.

  “What?” Drummond asked.

  “I am too easily seen,” Antony said. “If I pass by, everyone remembers. You will do better without me.”

  “Nonsense,” Drummond said. “We need you. Hop on.”

  “No,” Antony said. “I’ll be fine here in Angola. Lace and Mally will hide me.”

  Blandine put her hand on Drummond’s arm, and he realized the arrangement was something she and Antony had worked out while he was in town.

  Kitane, too, would stay behind. No grand good-byes from him, simply a quick fade into the back alleyways of Little Angola.

  “Safe journey, Blandina,” Antony said, tears streaming down his face. “You take care of her, Edward.”

  Drummond shifted over to the center of the sleigh bench and took up the reins.

  “Better days,” he said.

  “Better days,” Antony said.

  “God watch over you,” Mally said. Lace just waved, overcome by emotion.

  “We shall meet again in the taproom of the Red Lion,” Drummond said.

  “As if there we had hidden our gold,” Blandine finished the phrase for him, and they set off.

  Immediately, they made a mistake and ran into trouble. Drummond intersected the Broad Way to head for the ice of the North River, but that brief crossing displayed their sleigh to the land port two hundred yards to the south.