The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  He did not hesitate. “Yes,” he said.

  “What is the thrill made of? What does it mean?”

  Drummond thought back to his battles, the bitter defeat at Preston, the bloody Worcester, the engagements of the Russo-Polish War, the Anglo-Dutch campaigns (his people against hers), the Northern War.

  “‘Not me,’ that’s what killing means,” he said. It was his turn to poke the fire. “That’s it right there. If you are the killer, that automatically means you are not the killed. It feels like power. At least, I think that’s how the human mind works.”

  Blandine said, “So our killer, he wants it to be not him. Where does that lead us?”

  “He doesn’t want to be a dead orphan?”

  “Which might mean he’s an orphan, alive,” said Blandine. Herself an orphan.

  “Visser always calls himself an orphan,” Edward said.

  “That’s just more of his nonsense,” Blandine said. “Technically, I suppose it’s true, but he told me his parents lived to old age.”

  “Could you imagine him using his wards as catamites?”

  “Abuse them sexually? Certainly not.”

  “He keeps a secret family.”

  “Pish-posh,” Blandine said. “If Anna and her brood are a secret, it’s an open one.”

  Edward pulled a long look at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “You don’t want to believe it’s him,” Edward said. “You’re being blind.”

  “You forget that, unlike you, I actually know him.”

  “If you know him so well, tell me this,” Edward said. “How corrupt is he?”

  Blandine put her thumb and finger out, about an inch apart. “Not totally, but neither is he pure. Like he says, he lives in the real world.”

  Edward laughed. “I’m not sure I would describe New Amsterdam as the real world. It is more like a dog pit at the fair.”

  “Visser himself called New Netherland a narrenschiff, a ship of fools,” Blandine said. “But I know what you mean.”

  The orphanmaster possessed a few traits that argued for him as a murderer. First and foremost, to Drummond’s mind, was the man’s conversance with, and proximity to, the settlement’s orphan population. To be able to kidnap them, murder them, perform whatever ghoulish acts upon them that had been done, the guilty party must necessarily know which children of the colony were parentless and where they all were placed.

  How many orphans were there in New Amsterdam? What had Hendrickson said? Two hundred something. Every one had come through Visser’s hands in one way or another.

  There was also Visser’s general dissolution, his inebriated mental state, his habitual companionship with Lightning, surely the kind of man Drummond could readily believe was involved in the orphan-killings.

  “You must leave off your foolish sentiments about the orphanmaster,” he said. “If you allowed yourself to see things clearly, you’d conclude he is the one.”

  “I don’t want to live in a world where a man like Aet Visser kills children,” Blandine said.

  “Why, because he’s jolly? Because he tells a good joke?”

  “Because he’s all I have,” Blandine said softly.

  Edward was going to push it some more, but a look at Blandine’s face made him back away.

  The third:

  The third conversation you shall not be privy to.

  Their only visitor was Kitane. Riding an ancient-looking mule he garnered from the Canarsies, he’d come bringing foodstuffs and news of the colony. The Lenape seemed to pass through the woods effortlessly, even in the high snows of winter.

  The first time, they were surprised. In late afternoon, a rap at the window.

  Blandine nearly jumped out of her skin, which was, coincidentally, all she wore at that moment. She wrapped herself in Drummond’s cloak and the two of them met Kitane at the door. He stood before them, his moccasins saturated with snowmelt, the cat hide draped loosely about his torso.

  After greetings, they drew him into the warm cabin. “Have some for me?” he asked, indicating the plate, mounded with Drummond’s sugar, that lay carelessly on the hearth bricks.

  “Of course.” Blandine pushed the sugar toward him. “Now tell us everything. Do they still search for us?”

  “Not so much. The director general, he has other problems.”

  “How is Antony?”

  “Still hidden in Little Angola,” said Kitane.

  “So he remains at the capital,” Blandine said. “But how long can you hide a giant?”

  “He is all right for now,” said Kitane. “The African people shield their own.”

  “He is well cared for?”

  “He asks about you,” Kitane said.

  “This is the longest we’ve been apart since first we met,” Blandine said.

  Kitane ate well when the food was served, from the provisions he brought—venison strips and farmer cheese, crackers and greasy pemmican, loaves of bread, only slightly stale. Blandine and Edward contributed the last of their sweet butter, which they kept fresh in a crock of snow outside the cabin’s front door.

  “There is this, too,” Kitane said. He presented them with a schoolroom lesson board, a piece of slate in a wooden frame. “It comes from the boy, William Turner.”

  Edward peered over her shoulder.

  “Drumin? Ubi es?”

  Drummond had been a schoolboy once. “‘Drumin,’ that’s Drummond. Ubi es? Where are you?”

  Blandine turned to Kitane. “Where is the boy? With the Godbolts?”

  Kitane nodded. “They don’t let him out of their sight.”

  Blandine rubbed out the message on the slate, but there was no chalk to send a response. Drummond pulled an ashy stick from the fire and presented it to her.

  Soon, was the first word she thought to write. Then courage.

  Kitane finished scooping sugar into his mouth. His moccasins dried by the fire, his pack empty of the supplies he brought to Blandine and Edward, he tucked the message slate into his kit and set off.

  The Angolan known in the colony as Handy had hunted prey both in Africa, far back across the green sea of time, and here on Manhattan Island, in what everyone called the new world.

  He himself, Handy thought, was in no way new, an old man who did not know his years. Forty? Fifty? Sixty? The young ones of Little Angola called him Grandfather, though fortune cursed him with childlessness.

  Boys and girls who were not his own came to his garden on Company land along the North River, visiting him while he was on his knees, tending his potato plants.

  Can I help you, Grandfather? Can I, Grandfather? the children chattered. What they meant was that they were hungry. Handy allowed them to reach deep into the hills of peaty dirt and pull out the firm, round, spud-golden treasures beneath.

  Were the children aware of how their presence mocked him?

  I am nobody’s grandfather, child. I am Handy Kimbarata, born a prince, whose line will end with my own death in a strange land.

  The air still held some winter on an early April morning when Handy set forth with his scattergun across the island toward the Kollect Pond, glad for having thought to wear the single pair of woolen socks he owned. After stopping a moment to chew on a hunk of molasses bread, his breakfast, he swung through a ravine that cut between two rocky hilltops.

  Directly ahead, the Kollect’s surface gleamed through the trees. Frost on the rotting leaves of the ravine showed him the trail of a coyote.

  He had followed the animal’s footprints before, tracking them to the north bank of the Kollect, where birch trees sprang out of a carpet of moss on the shore of the pond. This day, the track again led into the reeds and vanished. No sign. Handy swore under his breath, invoking an old Bakonga imprecation, untranslatable, about monkey entrails.

  Handy once watched, arrested in place, as a coyote ripped through a pen of baby lambs. The animal fled before he could take a single forward step. They were quicker than wind.

&nb
sp; This is your day to die, coyote.

  Handy crossed over to stalk the watery southern edge of the Kollect, which was fringed with reeds. The pocked crust of half-frozen mud first crunched, then sucked at his feet as though it would pull him down.

  Easy, fool, Handy said to himself, fall in the pond and you’ve got a cold walk home. He followed a narrow winding path that curved into the frigid water. The inlets of the Kollect here were topped with thin, fragile panes of silver ice.

  He spotted the coyote. Not twenty yards away. Leaning down to the water and lapping. He could see the animal’s delicate pink tongue. Handy moved carefully to raise his firearm.

  A flash of brown-gray fur. The coyote disappeared so quickly Handy almost felt he hadn’t seen it at all. So he ran, cracking the ice and sloshing through the shallows, to get to where the animal last was. Let off a shot through the trees, the slope rising just there.

  He saw flesh poking from the ice for a moment before his mind allowed him to understand what it was. Greenish and blood-black, rising out of one of the small cracked floes. He stepped forward. Something—a gnawed arm?—thrust above the surface. This was what had drawn the coyote back again and again.

  Unsteady, feeling as though an awful dawning were being prepared for him, Handy took a step forward and fell to his knees, slopping the icy water over himself.

  He didn’t feel the cold.

  The body was half-encased, imprisoned, caught where it lay, the glossy ice translucent. He could clearly see her face turned upward to the sky, wide-open eyes staring.

  Piteous.

  Part Four

  The Crown Province of New York

  36

  The adult colonists of New Amsterdam did not know the truth, and neither did their children, the ones in households with a mother and father and warm circles of relatives within which they comfortably lodged, safe and secure.

  The governing officials of the colony did not know the truth, the director general and schout and schepens and burgomeesters and the Nine (with one exception: the orphanmaster knew).

  The common men in the settlement were likewise all unknowing, the bricklayers, scavelmen, drunkards, apothecaries, cartwrights and saddlers. The women did not know, either, the she-merchants, godmothers, midwives, bakers, gossips, the sewing klatsches and guests at the caudle parties.

  But the orphans knew. Tibb Dunbar knew it first. The indentured servants, the trash pickers, the gutter muckers, the street urchins, the children unloved and abandoned eventually came to understand. In their long days of labor, scrubbing floors and cleaning the jakes and throwing garbage to the swine, they would at times encounter one another. They exchanged hurried whispers. Intelligence, warnings.

  Watch out for a man in scarlet heels. Beware the orphanmaster. Beware the half-breed indian with the stove-in hat. The Crease ain’t no joke.

  Look to thyself. Step brightly, or ye will find thyself murthered and eaten.

  “Be sober, be vigilant,” quoth the Bible-schooled among them. “Because your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

  They didn’t know names. The orphans did not tell tales of witika. They did not fear imaginary goblins. Their experience had taught them that men were the real demons.

  So Tibb Dunbar passed the word to Baertie van Vleeck, who told it to Laila Philipe. Laila whispered it to Waldo Arentsen. The Klos twins got it from Waldo, and one of the twins—it was so difficult to tell the two apart—told the orphan who masqueraded as William Turner.

  William, observant as he was silent, paid attention. On his way to school, to run errands for Rebecca Godbolt, or to serve his master Drummond—and thank God for Drummond, the only person in this town who had a pleasant word for him—he kept his eyes open.

  It is surprising how much a person with open eyes can see that others don’t.

  William lived through the horror of a frontier war, saw himself stolen by the river indians, then watched his parents die of the small pox as their hostages. He’d been traded for a nag to a cruel English couple and locked away in an attic for days at a time. Not to speak of being constantly pinched, poked and punched by the Godbolts’ natural children.

  Through the fall and winter, he watched and waited. Everyone shrieked about the witika. Spring, he decided. Springtime was when he would make his move.

  Time to be a hero, the boy said to himself, as the spring winds of April thawed the woods. Track the bad man, uncover the evidence, stop the murders. He was only a small child. But the adults seemed to be unable to do anything about orphans disappearing from the colony. He felt that it was left up to him.

  William stashed provisions, clothes and an extra pair of shoes in a hidey-hole in the Godbolt attic.

  “William,” Rebecca Godbolt commanded, “fetch a string of onions for dinner.” William would do as he was told.

  On this day, the day they called Good Friday for reasons William could never understand (why was the day they murdered Our Dear Lord Jesus called “good”?), he pleaded a stomachache. Mixing dried bread with smashed-up maize, watering the recipe, he managed to concoct a passable batch of vomit to spill beside his bed.

  “Ewwww!” Mary cried when she stumbled through his alcove and almost stepped in the mess. “Mama, Billy made sick!”

  Rebecca bustled in, felt his forehead for a scant two seconds and tut-tutted how much of a bother William was. She ordered her other children to stay away.

  Rebecca Godbolt had been trying on her warm-weather costumes all morning to see if they still suited her figure. Easter approached, a day for finery to be displayed and admired. She didn’t have time to clean up an orphan’s vomit.

  The family banged out the door for Good Friday services, lending William a full four-hour head start. He knew where to find his quarry, Lightning, the half-indian all the orphans called “the Crease,” for the ugly groove in his forehead.

  William picked up the trail at the usual place, behind the Red Lion. He hid around the side, by the cistern, so he could see the comings and goings as freely as if it were a meeting-hall. The Crease wore ordinary European clothing, a shirt and waistcoat and pouchy breeches. When he left the Lion, exiting out of the Mane in back, William waited until he was a block gone, then followed.

  The half-indian loped west on Pearl Street over to the fort. William crept along behind him, hunching behind stoops and pressing himself against doorways so as not to be seen. Together, they moved into the market square and north through the parade ground, past the fine houses of the Broad Way and Stone Street.

  In the Company’s gardens, the mounded earth still slept at this, the very beginning of spring. The Crease never halted or even slowed down.

  Private Christen Christoffelszen Cruytdop manned the Company’s west land port on the palisade wall. When the Crease reached the sentry, Cruytdop simply waved him through. He saw the half-indian nearly every day, since the man often ventured down to the taprooms around town, sometimes not returning north until after curfew.

  He let Lightning through, but stopped the orphan boy.

  “Halt, you,” barked Cruytdop, stepping from his post. The child came nearly up to the sentry’s chest, but not quite.

  William took a piece of slate in a wooden frame from around his neck, where it hung with a length of twine. “Godbolt,” he wrote in chalk.

  Cruytdop would not have been able to pass any rigorous literacy test, but he was aware of the Godbolt family, primarily because his young wife, Wanda, favored their sausage shop. Cruytdop looked annoyed by the chalkboard. Couldn’t the child speak?

  “Your business?” Cruytdop said.

  William again bent over the board. “Cloth,” he wrote. Another word Private Cruytdop could read. He knew that residents of Little Angola, just north of the wall, frequently were paid to finish sheets and towels for the denizens in the settlement.

  He was afraid the boy would begin to write again, something to stump him this time. So he finally waved him by.
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  William could no longer see the half-indian he trailed. Lightning had gotten too much of a lead in the time William was stuck with the sentry. The Broad Way turned rustic once past the palisade wall. Here were fruit orchards, small bouweries and the strip of properties that made up Little Angola.

  Running along, William caught sight of the Crease. The half-indian was hustling now. Tall, ancient pine trees towered over the lane. William hid behind one, then darted forward to the next one.

  When the road turned into a trail, slippery with April mud and strewn with gray rocks, William got a second wind. The trail twisted, climbed up and down hills, crossed rock formations.

  Would they be reaching some destination soon? William wondered. The youngster had trod too many miles already. He walked on.

  “Do you have a gun?”

  William was startled nearly out of his shoes. Somehow, the Crease had materialized, squatting on a big boulder just beside the trail. William had been following him, and now suddenly the half-indian was there in front of him. He stared down at William, negligently holding a flintlock pistol in his right hand.

  “Do you have a gun?” Lightning asked again. “Because I have one. Do you see it?”

  William nodded. He would have been struck dumb even if he weren’t already mute.

  “Good,” the Crease said. “You are so eager to follow me. My pistol will show you the way. Come along.”

  After the shock of his covert visit to the hidden room in the Hendrickson manse, Aet Visser lost his direction. He no longer understood what he was supposed to do in life. His orphanmaster duties seemed meaningless or, worse, downright evil. He spent his days wandering the settlement, avoiding those citizens he knew, which turned out to be, just his luck, an overwhelming percentage of the colony’s population.

  During that dark time it seemed to Visser that New Amsterdam had the atmosphere of a coffin, sealed in, confining and brutally contained. There was no way out. The settlement’s triangular boundaries had two sides cut off by water and a third closed in by a palisade wall.