The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  She woke to pounding on the front entrance door. The room was dark. Drummond wasn’t there. The bearskin had been thrown over her, so their paltry few goods from the sloop had been delivered to his dwelling-house. How long had she slept?

  Out in the great room, voices. Blandine recognized De Klavier and the dominie, Megapolensis. Drummond’s voice, too, bringing her comfort.

  “It is better that this whole scandalous affair has ended,” De Klavier said.

  “Has it ended?” Drummond asked.

  “Obviously, Aet Visser preyed upon his charges,” Megapolensis said.

  “His death was his confession,” De Klavier said.

  Blandine rose and appeared, sleep-tousled and disheveled, in the doorway of the best chamber. “There’s nothing obvious about it,” she said.

  Drummond crossed to her.

  The dominie appeared upset, embarrassed. “Miss Blandina,” he said.

  “They have come to read us our indictments,” Drummond said.

  “We might have met you at your ship’s docking,” De Klavier said. “But this unfortunate incident with the orphanmaster disturbed our preparations. On Easter Sunday, too!”

  Megapolensis took a sterner tack. “I wonder that you are bold enough to show yourselves in sin together,” he said. “This is no way to present a defense in an ecclesiastical court, nor in any other, for that matter.”

  Edward put his arms around Blandine and kissed her tenderly. She was puffy-faced from sleep, her eyes red from crying, but he didn’t see it. Instead, he thought, is a woman ever more beautiful than when she just awakes?

  “You bring shame on you both, but especially upon you, Miss Blandina!” Megapolensis said. “I can no longer stay in this room.”

  “You must,” Drummond said. “You must stay in order to congratulate me and give Blandine your best wishes.”

  “What?”

  “The banns were read in the Dutch church at Esopus Sunday last,” Drummond said. “You shall no longer address her as ‘Miss.’”

  “You are married?” Megapolensis said, clearly stunned.

  “We will be, if you will do us the honor,” Drummond said.

  For once, Megapolensis was without words.

  De Klavier looked nonplussed. He had come to upbraid the accused spy, to inform him of his pending retrial for treason, and instead found himself pounding Drummond on the back and bussing his intended on her cheek. She really was quite the loveliest maiden in the colony. It would be a pity to burn her.

  Megapolensis found his tongue. “My hearty congratulations!” he said. “Of course I shall officiate the vows. I am happy, happy, happy for you!”

  “I’m afraid our joy is mixed with grief over Mister Visser’s death,” Blandine said.

  “No, no,” Megapolensis cried. “Don’t you see? The man was clearly plagued by guilt for his offenses. It is as the schout said: self-authorship of one’s death is the surest admission of culpability one could possibly provide. His confession removes all shadow from you, Blandine! Your trial now becomes purely pro forma. I have no doubt you will be cleared of any involvement in witchcraft or devilry.”

  “Aye, but you shall still have to stand trial,” said De Klavier. He attempted to reassert the severity of his office. He turned to Drummond. “As shall you.”

  Drawing a document from his waistcoat pocket, De Klavier assumed a stance of formal attention. “Edward Drummond, the ruling of the director general is, ye shall not depart the jurisdiction, ye must present thyself every day, once a day, to the schout—that’s me—if ye engage counsel, to inform the office of the director general. We shall expect you to make no discourse with the general public to inflame opinion, nor confer with criminal associates.”

  Drummond wondered if Raeger would fit into that last category.

  “How about a wedding ceremony?” he asked. “Might that be allowed?”

  When De Klavier and Megapolensis left, Drummond uncorked a bottle of brandy and poured a few fingers into a pewter tumbler. He and Blandine shared the drink.

  “Hungry?”

  She shook her head.

  “We could go to the Lion,” he said.

  “The Sabbath,” she said. “The taproom hearth is left cold. By order of the director general.”

  “Well, anyway, I have to speak with the weert there, an interesting man, a pirate, I think, in his former years.”

  Blandine’s laugh turned immediately to tears. “Why did he do it?” she cried.

  “Darling,” Drummond said, wrapping her in his arms again.

  “I want to go to my dwelling-house,” Blandine said, speaking with her face buried in Drummond’s chest. “I want to go home, retrieve my things, and then come back here to stay with you the night.”

  “Then that is what we shall do,” Drummond said.

  * * *

  Tibb Dunbar sank his teeth into Peer Gravenraet’s left earlobe and wouldn’t let go, no matter how many times Peer punched and punched at Tibb’s face. Blood from the two boys mingled and flew. Tibb tried again to hook his leg around Peer’s and bring him down.

  The Coney Boys were challenging the High Street Gang, and each group had put forth their champion. Just off New Amsterdam’s wharf district, in the little one-block lane between High Street and Slyck, the gladiators met, Tibb and Peer, a bout, they both swore, to the death. The ring of combat involved two tight semicircles of spectators, the Coneys on the town side, the Highs on the wharf side.

  Peer Gravenraet’s standing among the Coneys had soared with his Christmas Eve discovery of the severed foot, to the degree he took his rightful place at the head of the gang. The Coneys recruited their membership from the well-dressed boys of the settlement, those who were all familied up, the ones who like as not had a few strings of seawan in their pockets.

  The High Streets were from a more ragged class. They took their name from the address of the work yard behind Missy Flamsteed’s tap house, where many of them spent long hours at cutting firewood, stall-mucking and vittle preparation.

  Requisite for membership in the Highs: orphanhood.

  A few of the High Streets were indentured to the families of the Coneys. When Saint Nicholas came at Christmastime, the High Street boys were the ones who did not find gold coins in the shoes they had laid out on the hearth the night before, nor candy nor wooden soldiers either. They woke the next morning to find just their same old shoes, cold and empty.

  Trouble brewed between the two bands all fall, with running battles continuing through the winter and into the spring. The Coneys delighted in taunting the Highs with their victimized status. They would scrawl the circle-and-cross witika sign on the facade of the Jug, the unofficial headquarters of the Highs. Being caught at such a prank meant a thorough pummeling by members of the orphan gang, but the dare was worth it.

  The Coney Boys scared themselves silly telling witika stories, but took great pleasure in the fact that it was always orphans that the indian demon targeted. They were safe, they were coddled in the stronghold of parents and relatives and friends, not like the dirty urchins who were consumed, one after another, by the voracious monster.

  “Witika take you!” was one of the jeers the Coneys leveled against the Highs.

  It had come to this, Peer “The Rat” Gravenraet versus Tibb “Gypsy Davey” Dunbar, man to man, hand to hand.

  There is no dirtier street fighter than a twelve-year-old. “No eye gouging,” the Coney Boy Denny Bayard had announced at the beginning of the battle, after which the contestants came together. Both immediately went for the eyes of the other.

  The left eye of Tibb Dunbar had, in fact, swollen shut, but he fought on just as well with one. He liked torso shots, and he was wearing his opponent down. Peer tended to go for the face.

  Two adults came down the lane from town, but the gangs were so avid that they ignored the intrusion until Blandine and Drummond were upon them. They waded into the melee, though, and dragged the boys apart.

  “Leave us b
e!” Peer shouted. The Coney Boys booed, but didn’t dare advance on the formidable Drummond. And they would never hit a woman.

  “Peer!” Blandine cried. “You’re bleeding!”

  “The schout!”

  De Klavier approached, advancing up the lane from the direction of the wharf, calling out, “Here now! Here now!”

  The two gangs scattered. De Klavier managed to snag one, a girl, Laila Philipe, age ten, but the rest artfully eluded him. “Little snip,” he snarled.

  Dragging her by the neck, the schout approached Blandine and Drummond on the former field of battle.

  “The imps,” he said. “You two are in the middle of this?”

  Drummond laughed and bowed. “Innocent bystanders,” he said. “Although I’d lay my wager on the orphans.”

  Blandine said, “Let her go, De Klavier. That’s Laila Philipe. She has a fine foster family and her guardians will be worried about her.”

  De Klavier let up on his grip, and Laila instantly vanished down the lane toward the wharf.

  Mortal enemies Tibb Dunbar and Peer Gravenraet happened to flee in the same direction, slipping into the yard of a chandler’s shop and hiding amid the cooperage there. Breathing hard, bleeding, they stared at each other in the darkness.

  “Happy Easter, rabbit,” Tibb said. The Highs always called the Coney Boys the Rabbits. Likewise, the Coneys customarily referred to the Highs as the Lows.

  “Glad tidings, low boy,” Peer responded.

  Fast friendships have been formed before in the euphoria that follows a good fight. An ear-tattered Peer extended his hand to a punch-stunned Tibb. Tibb took it. Both boys started laughing at once, and they shared a good one together, wheezing, coughing and spitting chips of teeth and gobs of blood.

  Thus began the alliance of the Coney Boys and the High Street Gang.

  Blandine’s rooms had the same lost-in-time air that Drummond’s displayed. Lace and Mally were in to restore order after the searches of the witchcraft tribunal, and during the mistress’s exile up north they continued to come, at Antony’s insistence, to keep the place tidy.

  Miss Blandina would return, Antony always thought. Things would go back to the way they were before.

  When Blandine did come back, she knew nothing would reverse time. “I don’t want to stay here,” she murmured, as she and Edward passed through her cold, empty chamber. Dusk had fallen. They lit candles, but the light only weakly pushed back the dark.

  “We said we would stay the night at mine,” Drummond said.

  “I want to go everywhere with you,” she said. They embraced. “London, Batavia, the Barbados.”

  “Cain-tuck-kee,” Drummond said.

  Blandine laughed and nodded. “Yes! Cain-tuck-kee. We’ll open the first entrepôt west of the mountains.”

  “I’m told you hold a plot of land up in Beverwyck,” he said.

  “I do!” she said, smiling.

  “First things first,” Drummond said. “Get your things together and we’ll go home.”

  “It won’t take long,” Blandine said.

  “Let me go across and see if Raeger is at the Lion,” Drummond said. He left her alone.

  In her groot kamer, Blandine fingered the things she left behind. The scattered items seemed alien to her, as though they belonged to another woman altogether. The gowns, scarves, linens, combs, pins, slippers, tabards looked helpless, forlorn, disowned. She decided she didn’t need any of it. How we weigh ourselves down!

  But a small curio that Aet Visser had given her, a scrimshaw figurine he got off a ship captain, that she would keep. Blandine wondered it was not confiscated as evidence when the witch-hunters searched through her rooms.

  If she had but gazed outside the casement window of her kamer, Blandine would have seen a figure standing, staring in. She busied herself packing. The masked shadow floated closer. Towering, spectral. If there hadn’t been a wall and a window separating them, she would have smelled the Devil.

  And indeed, she sensed the beast before she saw it. A prickly sensation at the back of her neck forced her to turn and look.

  The witika.

  “Edward?” Blandine whispered. But Drummond was gone.

  The figure outside moved. With an eye still on the window, Blandine looked hurriedly around the great room. Her muff pistol, she thought. Where was her fox-fur muff? Back at Drummond’s.

  The cloaked shape mounted the steps from the yard, swung open the door and stepped into the room facing Blandine. She could not grasp how enormous the witika was. It stood filling the room, the top of its vacant-eyed deerskin mask practically grazing the ceiling. No man was that tall. No man was eight or nine feet, not even Antony.

  Blandine made a move to flee, heading for the doorway that led out onto Pearl Street, but at the same moment Lightning crashed into the room from that direction.

  As he reeled past Blandine, the half-indian grabbed her hair. She shouted with the pain of it. The two of them staggered across the floor and slammed into the opposite wall. The witika loomed beside them.

  Lightning held a blade to Blandine’s throat.

  Drummond rushed in after Lightning with two cocked pistols, one in each hand. He fired at the witika, the boom sounding enormous in the closed room, the muzzle flash brilliant. White, sulfurous smoke filled the air.

  “Drop your pistol!” Lightning shouted. He drew the dull spine of his knife across Blandine’s neck as a threat, then reasserted the sharpened blade so hard that the pressure drew drops of blood. His lavish wig trailed down to swing over Blandine’s face.

  Drummond could not get a clear shot. In view of the knife at Blandine’s neck, he let his unfired weapon fall to the floor.

  The witika had unaccountably vanished in the smoke. Dead? Fallen? Disappeared?

  “Now you—” Lightning began, but Antony hurtled into the room, bellowing past the disarmed Drummond to tackle the half-indian. Thrown back, Lightning released Blandine, but turned his knife on the giant, stabbing Antony deeply in the chest, pounding away with his blade. Antony’s huge body bent at the waist and collapsed.

  Blandine picked up Drummond’s pistol and shot Lightning in the head, sending him instantly to the floor. His wig lay in bloody disarray, with his scalping scar once again visible. A great gout of blood fountained out from the middle of the crease, where the ball Blandine fired had bored a smoking hole.

  39

  Governing such a contentious jurisdiction as New Netherland put the director general in mind of Julius Caesar, felled like a dog by multiple stab wounds on the floor of the Roman Senate. Stuyvesant likewise felt himself under assault on all sides. His foes were always evident, and every friend eventually revealed himself only as the wearer of an affable mask, hiding an enemy within.

  This morning, the news from Long Island, bad. The Dutch towns of the west end were forcibly taken by Connecticut. The news from the northland, bad. The Massachusetts Bay Colony asserted its claim to all country north of the forty-second parallel of latitude. Fort Orange and Beverwyck fell into that territory, as well as a huge portion of the Hendrickson patent.

  And now, this. His schout had arranged the audience.

  Appearing before the director general in his chamber at the Stadt Huys, the accused witch Van Couvering, the English spy Drummond and a young male-child with a fantastic story to tell. Or not to tell, since every indication had it that the boy was mute.

  His name was Jan Arendt, but he had been masquerading as a servant-ward of the Godbolts named William Turner.

  “Mijn Heer General, the case is complicated by the fact that the Godbolts seem to have disappeared,” De Klavier said.

  “What do you mean?” Stuyvesant demanded.

  “Their dwelling-house is empty, they themselves, the father, George, and the mother, Rebecca, all their children, are not to be found.”

  “Don’t be obtuse, schout,” Stuyvesant said. “Find them.”

  “I have searched, and I regret to say that I have not been succe
ssful,” De Klavier said. “There are some indications they decamped during the night, abandoning many of their possessions.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Rhode Island, my sources tell me,” De Klavier said. “Providence.”

  Of course, the director general thought. They’d take anyone up there in that open sewer of a colony, thieves, misfits, traitors. Providence was a sink into which all the dregs of the new world ran.

  Godbolt. The director general had begun to count on the man. He appeared to be God-fearing and trustworthy. Stuyvesant had made him a friend, an ally.

  “Et tu?” he murmured to himself. The only thing Godbolt left behind, evidently, was the knife in the director general’s back.

  And the child. “Who is this boy?”

  “A Godbolt ward,” De Klavier said. “An orphan.”

  Stuyvesant felt like seizing his head and pulling out a few strands of his rapidly graying hair. Orphans! He was beset by them, bedeviled, hounded! What had he done against them? How could they, the lowest of the low, bring down the director general of a great colony? He felt like the man who stuck his head in a bijenkorf, a beehive, stung all around.

  De Klavier pushed Jan Arendt forward and the orphan boy laid his grisly little find in front of Stuyvesant. Bleached-out human finger bones, adorned, if that was the word, by a signet ring.

  “It seems—this is difficult, Mijn Heer General,” De Klavier stammered. “Godbolt seems to have committed a fraud. He replaced a ward of his, William Turner, with this one here, whose real name is Jan Arendt.”

  Stuyvesant sighed. “George Godbolt did this. Who I recently elevated to the post of burgomeester. One of the Nine.”

  “Yes, Mijn Heer General.”

  “Why?”

  “The original orphan boy William Turner was victim of the witika, or rather, of Aet Visser—” De Klavier began. He faltered.

  Edward Drummond spoke up. “There was an inheritance involved,” he said.

  The director general turned a cold eye on the man, wondering that he had the temerity to show up in his audience chamber. In the messages confiscated from Drummond’s rooms, Stuyvesant had decoded the Englisher’s opinions of him. Vile, hurtful sentiments, cynical in the extreme.