The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  In a barnyard in Cumbria as an ensign on a Scottish campaign, Drummond had an opportunity, during a stretch of idleness, to observe the behavior of the farm animals kept in captivity there.

  The pigs were always the most intelligent, most industrious, most ambitious of the stock. They were always finding a way to escape their pens. They would dig under, dismantle, go over any fence presented to them. Ensign Drummond had to laugh at the passive, dim-witted sheep, who watched the pigs at their furious work. The sheep would stupidly stare, munching on their shoots of grass. Why, whatever could Master Hog be doing over there?

  Later, when Drummond got to know the ways of powerful men, he thought of the pigs and sheep in the Cumbrian barnyard. Those in power, the pigs, performed spectacular machinations that the citizenry, the sheep, could only look upon and wonder.

  “Do you wish payment for this service?” Drummond asked Hendrickson.

  “Pish,” Ad said. “I have more money than you could ever dream on, Mister Drummond.”

  “Then what could I possibly do for you?”

  “Leave this colony entirely,” Ad said. “Take your wife and your brood, go home to England, go to Virginia or up to Canadee-i-o for all I care. I will sponsor your leave-taking if I must, but I wish you to quit this jurisdiction and never return.”

  No vehemence informed Hendrickson’s tone. He was cold but not angry.

  Drummond had a quick vision of Martyn Hendrickson, hounding him and Blandine on the ice-flat river, flung into the freezing waters and drowned.

  “You blame me for your brother’s death,” Drummond said.

  “I simply want you gone,” Ad said. He rose, tapped his pipe bowl into the tray and pushed the smoldering ashes flat. “I’ll give you a few days to think about it. Has the trial date been set?”

  “Next week, now, the director general believes. Soon, anyway.”

  “Out from the noose, into a new life elsewhere,” Ad said. “If you consider it well, Mister Drummond, I know you will take my offer. But don’t wait too long.”

  He knocked on the table sharply with his knuckles and went out. Drummond stared at the empty doorway as if it would reveal secrets. He was a sheep, wondering at the unfathomable activities of a pig. Ad Hendrickson had left behind a curious sense that Drummond could feel but not quite put his finger on. Then, suddenly, it came to him.

  Drummond did not much play chess. But what had just happened with Ad Hendrickson had the uncanny flavor, he thought, of an endgame.

  41

  Maddie the dog had disappeared. Sometimes the Bean thought she missed Maddie more than Pow. Other times she thought she missed Pow more than Maddie.

  She had dreams. Her saying to Pow, “You’ve come back, Pow!” Or her saying to Maddie, “Here you are, girl! Here you are!”

  It made her feel sad, since Maddie and Pow went away at the same time. Jan told the Bean that Mister Visser took Maddie to heaven with him, and the Bean wondered who Mister Visser was until Jan told her it was Pow. That was better. Pow and Maddie together somewhere nice.

  A big girl now, turning four in August. August sixteenth, though she had trouble saying it because of the lisp, and everyone laughed at her when she did. A little girl with a lisp should have an easier birthday, such as May fourth, something like that.

  When the Bean walked with Blandine around the settlement, at times she heard a dog barking and thought it was Maddie. Once, when she passed the big looming house on Market Street, just before she got to where the play-pit used to be but now where their new house was going up, up, up, the Bean heard Maddie bark and saw her, too. A flash of white fluff glimpsed through an iron fence all the way in the back garden. There and then gone.

  No one listened to her when she said Maddie was there. Jan told her that there were a lot of white dogs. Miss Blandina instructed Sabine to hurry and catch up because they had to go talk to Jacobson the carpenter.

  But the Bean felt sure. She knew her own dog, despite what everyone said. One day she would go back to the garden of the big house and find Maddie herself.

  “What do ye use the stuff for?” Kees Bayard asked Ad Hendrickson.

  He had personally delivered to the Hendrickson brothers a smelly round tar-ball wrapped in a crumbling palm leaf and secured with a length of straw twine. It had come via Amsterdam from far-off Batavia, on Kees’s flute ship, De Gulden Arent, the Golden Eagle, the only vessel he had left since his recent reversals.

  “Rheumatism,” Ham Hendrickson said.

  “You look fine to me,” Kees said.

  “Bent double with it half the time,” Ham said, sitting perfectly upright.

  Kees suspected that the “poppy tears” opium tar he delivered to the Hendricksons was being put to use not as an analgesic but for decadent purposes. The whole Hendrickson dwelling-house smelled of it, a pungent incense that reminded Kees of the spice islands of East Asia.

  On those islands, most especially in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch colony of Java, the practice of blending poppy tears into tobacco and smoking the resulting admixture had produced legions of hollow-eyed stumblers. They ranged through the streets of Batavia like ghosts. The smokers indulged to excess. They appeared to Kees to have no sense of restraint.

  From his trips to East Asia, Kees knew what an opium user looked like, and neither Ad nor Ham qualified. Yet the chambers of the enormous house on Market Street reeked of the stuff. No one else lived there. Ad and Ham shut themselves off from the world. Kees could not figure it out.

  He did not enjoy his visits to the Hendrickson mansion. The brothers lived in squalor. They appeared servantless. Objects, clothing and possessions lay in vast, scattered piles in every chamber. Stale, dried-out dog feces trailed through the halls, though no animal was apparent.

  In the groot kamer where Kees normally met with Ad, silver plates stacked up, crusted with the remains of food. When the brothers grew sick of dirty crockery they merely tossed it out the window into the yard. The only element that kept the Hendrickson place from smelling like a garbage dump was the floating aroma of opium.

  It was not his place to wonder why. The previous February, a timely infusion of funds from Ad Hendrickson had saved Kees Bayard’s trading empire from ruin. In return for his investment, as well as a killing level of interest, Ad demanded Kees deliver him occasional packets of opium. Kees felt he had no choice but to oblige his creditor.

  Adverse luck dogged Kees. Not one but two of his flute ships went down in wrecks, both fully loaded with merchandise. He lost his prized charger, Fantome, in a gambling reversal. Married life did not agree with him. Mrs. Maaje Bayard, as far as he could tell, was simply a hole down which to pitch money.

  The woman was a fool. Kees Bayard had married a fool. He could not believe it of himself, but there it was. He sorely missed Blandine, and fantasized about what a life with her would have been like.

  And yet Kees believed Blandine herself was the author of his sour fortune. As his ships sank and his trading failed and he found hair coming off his head in great clumps, he harbored a secret conviction. He didn’t tell anyone, not even his new spouse. But what they had said about Blandine van Couvering really was true. She was a witch, and she had cursed Kees Bayard out of spite over their failed romance.

  Kees rose to his feet to signal that his business with Ad was done.

  “When you send The Golden Eagle over, we’ll take another one of these,” Ad said, pushing at the wrapped ball of opium with his finger.

  Kees left, and Ad took out a pouch of Virginia tobacco. He opened the packet of poppy tears by slicing the palm-leaf wrapping with a penknife. With the knife’s small blade he cut off a dozen small slivers of the opium tar. Then, on the oak tabletop, he carefully mixed the tar with the tobacco.

  “You baby him,” Ham said, watching the whole process with open disgust. “Waste of good leaf as far as I am concerned.”

  “It’s the only way to keep him in our pocket,” Ad said. “Would ye rather have him running around Ju
das knows where doing Judas knows what?”

  In the curtained and muffled best chamber at the back of the house’s second floor, Ad entered to deliver Martyn his dose. Brother Martyn slept much of the day. He reclined on a plump but filthy mattress, the hanging drapes around the bed in disarray. A half-full chamber pot balanced precariously among the bedclothes.

  Some sort of fly-specked offal rotted on a plate, a child’s red kerchief folded neatly on top of it.

  Martyn coughed, nodding, to acknowledge Ad’s approach. He clutched the apparatus of his opium smoking, which he took not in the Dutch style, with a long-stemmed clay pipe, but in a bell-shaped brass bowl imported from Batavia.

  Last Easter night Martyn had stumbled home to his siblings, displaying a gunshot wound to his side, bleeding and near death. Ad and Ham nursed their baby brother, keeping him out of sight, exiling servants and shunning outsiders. After all, in the eyes of the community, Martyn was already dead.

  “You can’t kill a dead man,” Ham told Ad, somewhat nonsensically, Ad thought.

  Martyn’s wound had healed by now. The danger of infection passed. But the tonic he started during his convalescence wholly took him over. The little white dog Martyn always kept with him lay on the bed, its fur matted and dirty. The room smelled of opium and dog piss.

  “I’ll get up,” Martyn said. But he rarely did.

  When he wasn’t sleeping, Martyn was subject to fits of volcanic anger. If Ad failed to provide opium or suggested he go easy on the drug, Martyn went berserk. He cursed his brothers, they that only loved him. Ad and Ham were deeply hurt by the language of these outbursts.

  “I hate the two of you!” was the mildest of Martyn’s imprecations. “I’ll see you both dead!”

  Hard as the elder Hendricksons worked to keep Martyn corralled, hidden and off the streets, he occasionally succeeded in slipping out. Always at night, always alone. His brothers never knew where he went. They were equally convinced that they did not want to know.

  Whenever she could, Blandine avoided encountering Kees Bayard on the streets of the settlement. She did this not out of spite, but because her presence seemed to excite the man, sending him rambling into self-conscious, tic-ridden conversation about how well his trades were going.

  Blandine knew the truth. Her old friend faced disaster. But their friendship came out of another time. Kees wasn’t real to her anymore. She wondered what she had ever seen in him.

  She dodged Kees in public, but she was very interested in the goings-on of the Hendrickson mansion. The face of Martyn Hendrickson still floated in her mind’s eye every once in a while. Before he died, Blandine felt sure that she was getting closer to the truth about the man. The idea haunted her even now. The dead patroon ventured into her dreams at night.

  An ominous feeling passed over Blandine whenever she walked by the brothers’ house. Ad and Ham, her soon-to-be near-neighbors, never displayed themselves in the sprawling yards and orchards on their grounds. The plantings grew up thick with weeds. It looked as though wilderness had reasserted its sway in the gardens, entering into the vacuum that came of disuse.

  Blandine was not alone. The Hendrickson place was slowly gaining the reputation of something of a spook house among the children and the gossips of the settlement. The orphan boys of the High Street Gang ventured onto the property only on a dare.

  In the marketplace, Blandine sought out provisioners, deliverymen, anyone who might have been inside the Hendrickson house. She could not find many. A she-merchant baker, responsible for providing three loaves of white-flour bread to the Hendrickson back door every other morning, had not much to say.

  “Ad pays me in coin, old-fashioned stuivers from Patria,” the baker told Blandine. “He don’t let me inside, but as far as I can see from the doorway, those brothers live in their own filth.”

  On sleepy summer afternoons, while Edward was away in consultation with his solicitor, the Bean was down for her nap and Jan read quietly out of The Day of Doom, Blandine had taken to climbing the ladder to Drummond’s roof. She used the spyglass to surveil the comings and goings around the Hendrickson dwelling-house.

  There weren’t many. This afternoon she saw Kees leave the place and head down Market toward the canal. She kept her eye on the spyglass but saw nothing, no movement in the house. The huge glass panes of the sash windows appeared opaque, like black, vacant eyes. The mud sharks in the sandbars off Turtle Bay had eyes like that.

  One day, Blandine thought, after they moved to the new house, she would go and make a call on the Hendricksons. It was only the neighborly thing to do.

  * * *

  Kitane lodged not in New Amsterdam but with his Canarsie friends. The trapper had a superb spring and summer. He managed to retrieve Blandine’s product from Beverwyck, three stacks of beaver pelts that rose to his own eye-level, quality winter-fur skins, over a hundred of them, eminently merchantable.

  He did not often visit New Amsterdam. Occasionally, his favorite bakery, for sweets.

  Late one night he drank too much English milk from a cask the Canarsie had from a Dutch trader, reeled drunkenly into town and stole a coping saw from a blacksmith’s stable on Long Street. Kitane then crept into the dwelling-house of the director general near the pier, moving easily past the dozing sentries.

  Stuyvesant slept alone. In his drunken state Kitane could not keep himself as quiet as he would have wished, but the director general did not stir. He snored evenly.

  Kitane retrieved the peg leg from where it rested next to the curtains of the director general’s bedstead. Taking out the coping saw from within his robes, he cut an inch off Stuyvesant’s oak-and-silver fake leg. Afterward, Kitane returned the device to its place and let himself out.

  42

  The trial of an English spy in a Dutch colony, when the two fatherlands were already at each other’s throat. What were the odds that such a defendant could obtain justice?

  Drummond knew he was in trouble as soon as the jury was empaneled. In the back row of the makeshift jury box, along with five other middenstaaid, middle-class, New Amsterdam citizens, sat his old shipmate Gerrit Remunde.

  Drummond now dearly wished he had been more civil to the man, and not cut him so precipitously on the two occasions Remunde had hailed him in the street. What horrible luck! Remunde stared stonily straight ahead, not looking at the accused standing in the dock—Drummond, bareheaded, unwigged, wearing his blue wedding waistcoat.

  He had come to have severe doubts about his counsel, too. Kenneth Clarke appeared constantly distracted by tangents, ignoring urgencies that Drummond thought needed attending to in quick order.

  In darker moments, Drummond wondered if it were too late for prayer to save him. A consultation with Megapolensis, perhaps, an admission of faith, knees chafed and bruised in earnest supplication to an all-powerful god. Please, Lord, save me from idiots. The only worthy prayer there was.

  The trial court convened on August 20, 1664, a special proceeding with New Amsterdam’s first jury.

  The charge: spying for the English crown.

  The meeting-hall council chamber cooked in the summer heat. Stuyvesant sat as judge, in subsellio, as he would say, on the bench. Ross Raeger told Drummond the director general might be losing his faculties, since he fell down twice walking the short distance across town from the Stadt Huys to the meeting-hall in the fort.

  “Tumbled like a doddering old woman right there on Pearl Street,” Raeger said. “Tripped over his own foot. And don’t ask me which one.”

  “The director general has his worries to distract him,” Drummond said. “He feels us breathing down his neck.” “Us” meaning the English. Rumors of the crown’s move against New Netherland buzzed like wasps around the settlement. Every day, there were more incidents involving incursions into Dutch-held territory from Connecticut and Massachusetts.

  “Oyez, oyez, oyez,” pronounced the town crier in the court. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the special court of
the jurisdiction of New Amsterdam, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the court is now sitting. God save the officers of justice, the settlement of New Amsterdam, the colony of New Netherland. God save Patria, and may the truth be told in this Honorable court.”

  Drummond wondered about that last part. “Dire la vérité et de sentir la lame,” isn’t that what the French said? Tell the truth and feel the blade.

  De Klavier directed Drummond forward to the dock. Stuyvesant read out the formal charge: collecting intelligence for the English against the interests of the New Netherland Colony.

  “You, sir, are to be proved a spy,” Stuyvesant said from the bench.

  Teunis Dircksen Boer, the finest legal mind the Company had to offer, acted as fiscael, prosecutor.

  “Mister Drummond, are you a member of the clandestine society called the Sealed Knot?”

  “It is a patriotic fellowship in support of Charles II,” Drummond said.

  “I didn’t ask what it was, I asked if you were one,” Boer said. “But it doesn’t matter. These documents will prove clearly your activities on the part of this nefarious organization.”

  Boer began to read, out loud for the benefit of the court, the decoded messages found in Drummond’s rooms. Settling in for a long afternoon in the stifling council chamber, the fiscael read document after document, droning on like a schoolteacher.

  Blandine sat in the front row of the gallery, a few yards from Drummond, who stood before a section of railing that acted as the dock. Spectators crowded into the council chamber. The opportunity to experience the novelty of an English-style trial proved enticing to the entertainment-starved settlement. As befitted their standing, the schout, the schepens, the burgomeesters of the colony took the special chairs of the council members.

  The gallery looked bored. This was all? A pumped-up Company fiscael reading, coughing, clearing his throat, reading some more? A pall settled on the jury members. Most important, to Drummond’s eyes, was the fact that Gerrit Remunde still refused to meet his gaze.