The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  Drummond could not decide which way to leave the world. He had declined a blindfold, but now he suddenly felt as though he could not bear to witness his own hanging. He shut his eyes. Shouts went up from the settlers near the gate.

  Who faces death without complaint?

  Sightless, eyes closed, Drummond thought of the Lenape warriors Kitane told him about, captured by Mahicans, impaled on a stick of finely shaped ash, just so, there is an art to it, the spear thrust up the fundament through the body to exit at the shoulder, but missing all the vital organs, in order that the victim doesn’t die right off. The speared man is tied at the hands and ankles, hefted horizontal, suspended over a fire to be slow-roasted.

  Sightless, eyes closed, Drummond asked Kitane, “So the man is alive? What is he doing while all this is being done to him?”

  Kitane: “Singing. Laughing. He calls out your name and remembers a game of stick-and-ball you had. As his skin pops and his fat runs into the fire. Smiling. Crowing.”

  Even at the bitterest of ends, the warrior maintained his dignity. No beseeching of the great god Manitou to save him. Beliefs don’t matter. Practice does.

  More shouts rose. Drummond waited for the kick at the trestle.

  “Blandine,” he whispered. He wondered if she had heard about the impromptu hanging, if she were even now rushing to get to him through the streets of the colony.

  Rising yells, a whole chorus of voices. The sound of running feet.

  Drummond opened his eyes.

  He had been deserted.

  Drummond stood alone balancing on the trestle, the noose around his neck. He saw the director general and his troop of militiamen hustling away toward the open gates of the fort.

  Had they forgotten to hang him? Was it some kind of cruel joke? Perhaps he was already dead, and this was the afterlife?

  The whole crowd streamed from the gates out onto the rocky beach that stretched along the Manhattan shoreline. They moved as one, as though they fled some terror or were drawn by some spectacle.

  Among the horde going the opposite way, only Gerrit Remunde walked toward him. “Mister Drummond,” he said. “May I help you down from there?”

  “I wish you would,” Drummond said.

  Gerrit mounted the trestle—it shook wildly, scaring Drummond witless for a quick second. His former shipmate gently removed the noose and unscrewed the shackles at Drummond’s back.

  “What has happened?” Drummond asked, leaping to the ground.

  “You’ll see,” Gerrit said.

  They walked together to the gates of the fort. The entire colony appeared to have crowded along the Strand, gaping and gawking out into the bay.

  Then two tall ships plunged by, English battle frigates, cannon ports open, marines posted on deck, an impossibly thrilling, throat-choking sight, putting up all sail and cutting through the roadstead waters at a fast clip, only twenty rods from shore.

  By a quick count Drummond made forty guns in the first frigate, and another twenty-six in the second. The ships were so close he could see lighted punks in the hands of the gunners.

  He looked back behind him at the ramparts of the fort. The director general stood beside a gun crew at one of the twenty cannons he could train upon the bay. Colonists crowded on the rocky beach, directly in the cross fire.

  Sixty-six guns of the crack English navy, against twenty in a crumbling citadel designed at best as a temporary refuge from indian attack. If Stuyvesant engaged, it would be a bloodbath, and one that the Dutch would surely lose.

  “Drummond,” a voice called to him.

  Antony.

  “It’s Miss Blandina,” Antony said. “Hurry.”

  45

  Martyn and Lightning created their alliance early on in their lives, when they were both nine, in the wild hills and endless forests of the Hendrickson patent. Stalking the woods, Martyn discovered Lightning (he was called Gerald then) and his sister, Anna, twins born of an unholy night of rape by a brandy-bitten German handlaer on a frightened Esopus woman, a child, really, only fifteen.

  The young Lightning and Martyn fell in love instantly, bonding over their shared sexual torment of Anna. They became inseparable. Lightning called himself Martyn’s slave.

  In their early teens, they began in the way a lot of killers start, with small animals. Martyn once found a litter of cats on the plantation, and he and Lightning buried the creatures up to their necks in a wheat field, then watched as reapers came through with long-curving scythes.

  They teased each other, goading themselves on to greater indignities. In the second Esopus war, Martyn took a captaincy and Lightning became his aide de corps, officially a scout and unofficially the chief torturer.

  Lightning helped Martyn drive his abiding sadness deep inside, so deep it nearly disappeared beneath layers of anger and recklessness. A single old memory remained, the only one he had of his mother, cooing a nursery rhyme over him. Words about chicks and fishes.

  In the summer of 1663, Martyn came to Lightning with a proposition. His brothers, Ad and Ham, Martyn said, were upset with the encroachment on their land by Englishers from the east.

  Trespassers, outlaws, they deserved to die, Ham said.

  What would be good, Ad said, is if we could throw a real scare into the whole of New England.

  That was when Martyn first heard the word witika.

  Have a witika scream down on them, Ham said, they would think twice about coming onto our land.

  Martyn didn’t know what a witika was, but Lightning did. He described the demon in detail. During his recital of the creature’s appearance, appetites and practices, Martyn found himself strangely aroused.

  Later, in the wake of the uproar following the killing and the partial consumption of Jope Hawes, Ad and Ham confronted their baby brother. They insisted they had never been serious. It was all just talk, they said. They looked at Martyn strangely, as if he had somehow transgressed, when all he had done was put into practice what they themselves had proposed!

  As the witika furor grew in the northland, Ad and Ham feared that Martyn would be unmasked. They exiled him to Manhattan. Out of harm’s way. Lightning went with him.

  But a taste, once developed, is not so easily given up. So, Piteous Gullee. And William Turner, the orphan boy who had the bad luck to blunder into some of their doings with Piddy. And Small Bill Gessie, and his sister, Jenny, and on and on to all the others, Ansel Imbrock, Richard Dunn, Tara Oyo, Tibb Dunbar. There were others, too, that didn’t come to be known by name.

  How they worked: Lightning was the rapist, boys and girls both, it didn’t matter. Martyn was always the smasher, the basher, the ripper, the killer, the eater. While he performed, Lightning watched, and vice versa.

  Martyn and Lightning were having the time of their lives. And it all got blamed on the witika demon. They had good, hearty laughs about that.

  Twenty feet beneath the grounds of the Hendricksons’ New Amsterdam dwelling-house, Martyn trudged a dank passageway lined with stone. He had Blandine slung over one of his shoulders and led the Bean by the other hand.

  “Come along,” Martyn said to the little girl. “Keep up.”

  Sabine didn’t know if she was in the middle of an adventure or a nightmare. She tried to be a good girl and do what dik-duk Martyn told her. She snuffled a little. Barefoot on the cool paving squares, she carried the limp form of Maddie.

  “Puppy’s just sleeping,” Martyn told her. “Like Miss Blandina.”

  He carried a torch in his off hand, illuminating the corridor. A cart sat covered in grime. Its wheels were attached to some sort of line apparatus—the rope led forward, disappearing in the murk of the tunnel.

  Martyn dumped Blandine into the cart. “Ooof,” he commented to Sabine. “The woman should lay off the desserts a little.”

  Turning a wheel on the wall, Martyn caused the cart to move magically forward. “Would you like to ride?” he asked Sabine.

  She said she would. The passageway ahead swa
llowed the thin flame of the torch, and the darkness scared the Bean, but the cart proved irresistible. Martyn swept up her and the dog and deposited them next to the sleeping Blandine.

  Sabine had never seen a wagon move by itself. It was fun. Martyn walked behind, holding the light. Then he fell back a little.

  “Mister?”

  Everything faded to black. She twisted around to see the torch getting smaller and smaller. The cart creaked forward.

  “Dik-duk,” she called, a sob choking her voice. No answer.

  “Dik-duk,” she said again, despairing.

  It was chilly in the passageway. She snugged herself closer to her sleeping friend, burying her head in Blandine’s chest.

  Martyn let the cart disappear ahead of him. He thought how the Romans described the descent to Hades. A gentle slope down. Facilis descenscus Averno. There was a line of Virgil for the director general to mull over. The descent to Hell is easy.

  How true it was. Looking back over his life, it all seemed a serene glide to where he was now, with a woman, a child and a dog in a Stygian tunnel, water dripping from the timbers overhead. The three of them could be a family about to receive the judgment of Charon. Mother, father, baby, together and unbreakable, even in the underworld.

  Ahead of him, in the gloom, the woman in the cart groggily lifted up her head. Martyn couldn’t believe it. She had only been out an hour, and he had given her enough of the sweet vapor to drop a horse. The child began to wail.

  Martyn swore. He slipped his dagger from its sheath. The old fury rose in him. He rushed forward, squeezed around the cart and kicked open the door at the end of the tunnel.

  Daylight flooded in. They lay concealed deep in the gutter of the canal. A skiff waited for them, tied to an iron ring set into the bulwark, bobbing on the inflowing tide. Martyn transferred Blandine from cart to boat, covering her unconscious form with a bit of tarpaulin. He turned to the tear-stained face of the child.

  “Now would you like to take a ride in this little ship?” He didn’t wait for Sabine to answer, but lifted her and Maddie into the craft.

  Martyn poled them down the Begin Gracht and into the larger Heere Gracht. The green water of the canal slid by effortlessly. No other boats or barges were abroad. To prying eyes, Martyn appeared like any other burgher, heading through town with a load of merchandise to trade. Potatoes, perhaps, or firewood.

  He could hear the indistinct sound of men’s voices above him. The upper stories of buildings in the settlement would appear and then drop behind, cut off by the green-stained walls of the waterway. Martyn had the marvelous sense of passing through the town in a ghost boat, furtive, untouched, invisible. The canal bridges slipped by, one, two, three.

  Sabine crawled under the tarp next to Blandine and, snuffling, fell asleep.

  Once he emerged from the canal out onto the East River, Martyn set sail and turned the skiff north.

  The extensive grounds of the Hendrickson estate in New Amsterdam stretched north from Market Street across the Begin Gracht to Heere Dwars Street. With orchards, gardens and outbuildings, the property amounted to a small bouwerie or plantation within the bounds of the settlement.

  Sebastian Klos and his twin brother, Quinn, knew the grounds well. They lodged with a foster family on the canal (one of the good deeds of Aet Visser had been to keep the twins together), only a few rods away from the Hendrickson property. The Klos boys—and practically every other scamp, vagabond and light-finger in the settlement—loved to sneak into the estate and steal peaches.

  So the Klos boys understood that the stands of fruit trees were well concealed from thieving outside eyes behind fences and a dense, European-style hedgerow. They knew that at the heart of the orchard lay a paddock, a well-fenced half-hectare enclosure that adjoined the stables and corrals in the back of the big house.

  And they knew one final thing, that in the Hendrickson paddock occasionally appeared a magnificent black stallion.

  Together, the Coney Boys and the High Street Gang knew everything there was to know about the island of Manhattan. In the blazing summer of 1664, they put their joint efforts into ending, once and for all, the witika plague that had late afflicted the settlement.

  “I know where is a cave,” said one of them, the orphan Geddy Jansen, whose fishmongering foster uncle had brought her along on his tramps to the northern tip of the island in search of eels.

  The Coneys and the Highs knew that William Turner—or Jan Drummond or whatever he was calling himself these days, one of the High Street Gang, anyway—was desperately searching for the location of a cave in the upper reaches of Manhattan, so they communicated Geddy’s knowledge.

  And when Jan Drummond, in receipt of that knowledge, said he needed a steed to travel to said cave, the Klos twins thought of the stallion in the paddock in the middle of the orchard.

  Thus when the allied forces of the Coney Boys and the High Street Gang crept into the Hendrickson estate that hot August day, they weren’t after peaches. They infiltrated through hedgerow gaps so narrow that no one but a child would ever realize they were there. Taking as their bywords silence, stealth and cunning, the band of irregulars moved at the behest of their captain, Peer Gravenraet.

  Peer would rather have been the brave Achilles, and confront the enemy outright, instead of the wily Odysseus, sneaking and faking and dodging. But a raid was a raid, and the time to strike was now, when the colony was distracted by the prospect of English ships off the shore of Manhattan.

  “I want one squad south, watching the house, to make sure we are not surprised,” Peer commanded, sending out a trio of scouts.

  “Disruption in the harbor,” Laila Philipe ran up and reported, breathless from having dashed all the way from the fort. “The English have come.”

  Laila’s column of adolescent Amazons were capable of holding their own in any episode of fisticuffs. With their hair pulled back and their skirts hiked up, they were ready for this fight.

  “Good,” Peer said. He turned to the boy beside him, the small, normally silent child who first proposed the Hendrickson raid.

  “Once we go in, we can’t turn back,” Peer said, a last-minute fortitude check before committing to the mission.

  The boy nodded. Jan Drummond, formerly William Turner, sometimes called William the Silent, known to the settlement as the Godbolt ward, was a child who at times even now forgot his words and reverted back to his old mute ways.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” Peer asked Jan.

  “Yes,” Jan said.

  The gangs moved forward on attack.

  46

  Drummond followed Antony around the side of the fort, up through the market. The settlement flocked with people headed for the waterfront, but they parted readily for the two men rushing in the opposite direction. It helped that Antony brandished a weapon of comforting size, a man-mountain toting a musket almost as tall as he was.

  The firearm that Antony held was an original creation of Blandine’s. When she was a teenager, her father threw open his gunsmithing workshop to her, tools and all. He challenged her to build him something. Starting with an ancient Dutch harquebus, Blandine tooled the muzzle to a precise thinness, enlarging the bore enormously.

  To compensate for the weakness of the brittle old metal, she banded the barrel with iron straps that she smithed herself. For the firing mechanism, she cannibalized parts from other muskets and pistols lying around the workshop, a firing pan from this one, a hammer from that.

  The breech wound up so gaping she had to create new shot, pouring the molten lead into moldings she fashioned via trial and error. Just for giggles, Blandine fitted a squirrel-gun barrel below the shotgun, lending the piece an over-and-under effect.

  The result was a monstrosity. Willem van Couvering laughed uproariously when his daughter presented it to him. But he admired the workmanship. “This is just tour de force stuff,” her father said.

  Pretty Polly, Blandine named the gun, in honor of its extrem
e ugliness. She and Willem took it out along the North River shore and tested it a few times, practicing cutting down trees with the thing. But for Blandine, the making of it was always more to the point than the shooting. She gave it to Antony, knowing that only one of his size could handle it.

  Drummond knew instinctively where he and Antony were headed. He realized he had always known where it would really, truly end, after all the false finishes and deceptive cul de sacs into which the pursuit of the orphan-killers had led him.

  The Hendrickson brothers.

  Right turn onto Market Street, past Drummond’s own new dwelling, then ten rods east to the Hendrickson estate.

  The gates hung open.

  “Where is she?” Drummond asked.

  Antony was breathing hard. He had run a long way, and the huge gun he carried was heavy.

  “I never saw her. We have to find her. Anna told me she was here,” Antony said. He gestured toward the dark clapboarded structure, with its great sightless windows. Above the front door, a pane of green bull’s-eye glass.

  Drummond stepped through the gate. He went to the front entrance, Antony beside him gripping the musket. The door, he realized as he approached it, was slightly ajar.

  No sound from inside. Drummond pushed open the door. Where was a damned pistol of his own? Antony nodded to him wordlessly. They entered the big dwelling-house together.

  The first thing Drummond saw was Ham Hendrickson sprawled out on the floor of the great room, the top of his head blown off and his blood spilled into an immense dark pool that spread across the floor to the hearth. A pistol lay beside him. Drummond picked it up, inspected it, saw that it was primed.

  Kees Bayard, also dead, the blood flower on his white waistcoat showing a fatal wound to his chest, sat propped against the far wall. His stare was blank. Around him were several crushed poppy-tear tar-balls, their black substance smeared across the floor.

  Antony and Drummond moved toward the second room, the parlor, the one built into the addition. All was silence, emptiness.