The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  “Miss Blandina,” Antony called.

  Nothing.

  “We need to check through the whole house,” Drummond said, dread rising in him.

  “I’ll take this wing,” Antony said, turning back the way they had come.

  Throughout the chambers, utter and complete nastiness, dirt, chaos. An odd, sweet smell permeated the air. In a back chamber upstairs, Drummond encountered a family of feasting rats.

  But no Blandine, no Ad Hendrickson. He went back downstairs.

  In the second hearth-room, Drummond noticed blood pooling in a corner. He crossed to it, dipped his finger, found it fresh. How could it be there? He looked up, thinking it might be dripping from the floor above.

  No, it was coming, somehow, from behind the wall.

  He pushed on the wainscoting, heard a click and felt the hidden door swing outward.

  A small, sepulcher-sized room. Ad Hendrickson lay sprawled at the opposite end, bleeding from the chest.

  “Water,” he said.

  A faint light filtered in from a high, thin window set into the wall above. Smashed crockery littered the stone floor, which was wet.

  “Where is she?” Drummond said.

  “It was Lightning, always Lightning,” Ad said weakly. “I knew that damned buck was crazy when I first set eyes on him. I should have shot him right then, saved myself a boatload of trouble.”

  “Listen, old man,” Drummond said bending his face near to Ad. “I need to know where my wife is.”

  “He took her,” Ad said. “I tried to stop him.”

  “Who?” demanded Drummond. “Who took Blandine?”

  “My brother,” Ad said.

  “Your brother,” Drummond said, “is lying out there in the parlor room missing half his skull.”

  Ad winced, the blood visibly pulsing from his chest, flowing in waves to the floor. “I mean my little brother, my brother Martyn.”

  “Martyn is dead, too!” Drummond shouted. “Talk sense!”

  “You foolish man,” Ad said. “Everything you know is wrong. Don’t ye realize? My baby brother has shot and killed all of us. He’s gone mad. He’ll kill you, too.”

  “Martyn,” Drummond said.

  Ad Hendrickson began to blubber, tears falling to mix with his blood. “But it was always Lightning. He made Martyn what he was. He did it all. Don’t blame Martyn. Don’t blame the baby.”

  Weeping, he sagged backward. His face went slack.

  “Ad!” Drummond shouted. “Ad! Where is she?”

  But he was talking to a dead man.

  Antony showed at the door of the little low-ceilinged room. He could not fit his bulk inside. “Where’s Anna?” Drummond asked him.

  “At the old rooms across from the Lion,” Antony said. “Blandina told her to stay there with the children.”

  “We need to talk to Anna,” Drummond said. “I have to find out what’s going on.”

  But as they rushed from the front gate of the Hendrickson estate, they met Jan. The small boy rode atop an enormous black horse.

  It had been a day of wonders for Drummond, a day of surviving his own hanging, but perhaps this wonder topped them all, since he recognized the charger as Fantome, the amazing animal he had last seen plunging through the ice into the North River. If a beast could come back to life, anything was possible.

  Jan did not dismount. “I know where it is,” he said. “I know where the cave is.”

  The cave full of bones. Drummond knew with dead certainty that was where Martyn would take Blandine.

  “Where’d you get that animal?” he asked Jan.

  “I stole him!” Jan said. “From them”—gesturing with his chin at the Hendrickson house.

  Fantome suddenly bucked and whirled in a complete circle, whipping Jan’s head nearly off his body as he tried to hold on.

  Drummond leapt up behind him. “You stole him or he stole you?”

  Getting astride Fantome was like climbing onto some mythological creature, a griffin maybe, or Pegasus. The horse trembled as though he were about to explode straight up into the air.

  “Go!” Antony said. “I’ll follow.”

  He strode out onto Market Street, grabbed a good burgher from his saddle on a staid bright bay and put himself aboard instead. The burgher, seeing the size of his attacker and, especially, the enormity of the musket Antony carried, decided not to protest.

  They took off, pounding down Market onto the parade ground, scattering walkers on all sides as they raced up the Broad Way, blowing through the sentryless land port into the open country beyond.

  “We did not go far enough before,” Jan shouted to Drummond, breathless. The two of them had searched and searched for the bone-filled cave where Lightning had taken Jan. They looked among the towering rock piles of the clearing, halfway up the island. They had found nothing. They could never locate the cave.

  But the orphans knew. Geddy Jansen knew.

  Jolting along at top speed on the back of Fantome, clutched securely by Drummond so he would not fall off, Jan said, “We need to go all the way to the top of Manhattan.”

  Twelve miles. Drummond hoped there would be time.

  In the town behind them, a fusillade of cannon fire boomed.

  “Dik-duk,” said Martyn Hendrickson.

  “Dik-duk,” said Sabine, imitating him. That was a song she liked. The Bean sat on Blandine’s lap. Martyn sat atop a sawed-off stump across the fire ring, a couple yards away from them. Behind him loomed the dark and toothless maw of a cave.

  Blandine had awakened, groggy, a fetid smell on her clothes, to find herself bound securely and Martyn gazing at her.

  “How do you feel?” he asked. She didn’t answer. A vicious headache gripped her temples in a vise. But at least Sabine was with her and unharmed.

  Martyn spoke again. “Did you enjoy the sweet oil of vitriol? Oleum dulci vitrioli, the director general would call the stuff. Effective, isn’t it? I discovered it in Germany and have been employing it quite often in my pastimes. The vapor gives one the sensation of death without its bothersome permanence. But the smell affronts the nose terribly.”

  Like clouds passing from the sky, the effects of the ether lifted from Blandine’s mind. She still felt woozy.

  “Don’t hurt her,” she said.

  “Who, the little one? Or the mongrel?” He prodded an inert ball of fluff at his feet. Maddie. “Out cold. I might have overdone the dose.”

  “Please, Martyn, do not harm Sabine. Take me instead.”

  “Why not both?” Hendrickson said, smiling brightly. A pistol lay among the heap of clothes on the ground beside the dog. Children’s clothes, bloody rags from orphans, his trophies.

  Lightning had liked bones. Martyn liked garments.

  Blandine thought that Martyn had something amiss with his famous green eyes. The pupils glittered, enormous and jet black. He sucked on a short brass pipe.

  The stench of Martyn’s tobacco sickened Blandine.

  “You or the little one, what does it matter?” Martyn said. “I ask you that seriously. Doesn’t it seem to you that in this new world of ours, we have been entirely abandoned by God? Long ago I recognized you as a kindred spirit, one who believes as I do, in nothing.”

  “Let her go,” Blandine said.

  The Bean rocked in her lap. She clacked together the two human rib bones that Martyn had given her to play with.

  The little girl remained in her red-stained dress, while Blandine still wore her torn, muddy gown. Martyn had left Blandine’s hands free, but bound her ankles and upper arms. She clutched onto Sabine.

  “Put those down, honey,” Blandine said of the bones.

  “No,” Sabine said stoutly.

  Martyn laughed. “Oh, let her have them,” he said. “They are well boiled. They will do her no harm.”

  “And you?” Blandine asked. “What harm will you do to her?”

  “Let me ask you to imagine something, Blandine,” he said. “Journey up the North River to For
t Orange. Follow the Mohawk River to the west. You have done this, I know. Leave the river and go overland for a hundred leagues. You will find yourself in the middle of a trackless forest. Not even the wilden go there, their villages have been decimated by plague. It is an empty place, a wasteland.”

  Martyn ran his fingers through his greasy locks. He took another deep suck on his pipe. Blandine finally recognized the smell from ships on which her goods traveled.

  Poppy tears.

  “Stand in the middle of such a place,” Martyn said, “and pronounce out loud the name Blandine van Couvering. Do you hear angels sing? No. Does God answer? No. Don’t you see? No one cares. No one is there.”

  “So it doesn’t matter what we do,” Blandine said.

  “It does not. Which means we can do anything.”

  “Betray a friend.”

  “What is that?” Martyn said. “That is nothing.”

  “Murder.”

  “Ah, yes. Your man is a soldier. He has killed many times, has he not? Yet you marry him and continue to cohabit with him. So murder shall give us no difficulty.”

  “Terrorize a whole population,” Blandine said.

  “As easily as one would drown a kitten,” Martyn said.

  “Kill a child.”

  “Yes! Yes!” Martyn cried, chortling. “Especially that.”

  “Why ‘especially’?”

  “Because that is the ultimate sin in the eyes of the world, Blandine,” Martyn said. “Once you can do that, you are free. Total, limitless freedom.”

  “I could see how that would be attractive,” Blandine said.

  “You say that just to humor me,” Martyn said, “but it really is true.”

  He smiled. “Dik-duk,” he crooned to the Bean, and she, still occupied with the bones, said it back to him.

  “She is no orphan,” Blandine said. “She has a mother.”

  “Unfortunate,” Martyn said. “I shall have to break my rule.”

  “I am one,” Blandine said. “I am an orphan.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “We orphans are special, are we not? So alone, so vulnerable,” Blandine said. “I wonder if you cried yourself to sleep as a child.”

  “Shut your mouth,” Martyn said.

  “Yes, we are alike,” Blandine said, her hands gripping Sabine tightly, her eyes blazing. “Both parentless, both without God. But there you are, and here I am. We are free to make choices, and we have both made them, haven’t we?”

  “I have tasted white, black and red flesh,” Martyn said. “Lightning even found me some yellow flesh once, from a cook’s boy on a merchant ship just in from Asia. But do you know what I have never done?”

  He waited, clearly expecting Blandine to hold up her end of an insane conversation. She worked silently to loose the bonds that wrapped around her arms, but they only tightened more.

  “What I haven’t done is… eat live flesh,” Martyn said.

  “Take me instead,” Blandine said, begging him.

  “A trader to the last!” Martyn said, laughing and shaking his head. “Oh, you know, adult humans are rotten with the sins of the world. Their meat is rancid, most unpalatable. I much prefer the fresh.”

  “Would it matter if it were the meat of a pregnant woman?” Blandine asked.

  “Ah, really? My hearty congratulations. I wondered at your heaviness when I hefted you. And that is an interesting offer. But I can always tear the thing out of your body.”

  He took up a brand from the smoldering fire and put it to his pipe. “I’ve witnessed it done in the war,” he said, exuding smoke from his mouth, like the Devil. “By both sides.”

  Blandine could see a change come over Martyn. She had never seen an opium taker before, but she felt him slipping away from her, going unfocused and remote.

  Martyn stretched out his hand. “Come here, pretty Sabine,” he said languidly. “Sit on my lap.”

  “Don’t,” Blandine said.

  Martyn rose to his feet. Suddenly energized, he declaimed as if onstage, “Madame, I have seen with my own eyes Lightning pull a man’s entrails out of his gut, unravel them and then force-feed them back into that same man’s own mouth, making him to chew! And you say to me ‘Don’t’? Don’t? Can’t you do any better?”

  He pulled down the deerskin mask across his face, and mounted a strange pair of wooden stilts that made him tower over the clearing.

  The Bean looked up at him and began to cry.

  47

  After Peer set Jan aboard the big stallion, the Coney Boys and the High Street Gang began phase two of their operation. They attacked the Hendrickson house with a barrage of stone-throwing.

  Children hated the place. The orphans knew without knowing that it had some connection with the disappearances of their own. An ominous air of dread emanated from the mansion. The peculiar brothers who lived there became evil figures in the mythology of the orphans, wealthy but malevolent monsters. The decrepit, shuttered residence took on the nature of a spook house. And a spook house just naturally attracts rocks.

  Revolution hung in the air. The Dutch had been swept out, but the English had not yet asserted control. Anarchy quickly slipped its leash and loosed itself upon the settlement.

  “Now we have a hope to pepper these devilish Dutch traders,” swore a drunken German shiv-man at the Jug. “They have salted us too long. We know where their booty is stored.”

  Added a menacing Polish sailor beside him, “And we know where the young girls live who wear gold chains.”

  Peer Gravenraet embraced the innate anarchy of the twelve-year-old, and he loved the tinkling sound of smashed glass. He didn’t often get a chance to hear it.

  “Let’s go!” he said, ordering his troops forward.

  “Fetch the pickles!” shouted the orphans, their rallying cry. “For Tibb!”

  “For the ones we’ve lost!” Peer called out sententiously.

  It was Sebastian Klos—or his brother, Quinn, it was difficult to tell them apart—who cast the first stone. Soon a dark shower of rocks rained down upon the Hendrickson manse, lofted by the Coney Boys and the High Street Gang.

  How did the fire happen? How did stone-throwing turn to arson? No one knows. Perhaps a projectile from the hand of Quinn Klos, smashing through one of the big sash windows, ricocheted into the groot kamer where Ham Hendrickson lay dead, felled by his own brother’s hand.

  The thrown rock tipped over an oil lamp. The lamp spilled its fuel. The wick ignited a flame.

  A wood-framed, clapboard dwelling-house is an invitation to the gods of fire, a match waiting to be struck. It took only a moment before the flames rose and the house was beyond saving. An orange-black divinity leapt fully born from the roof, roaring, fattening, ascending.

  The Coney Boys and the High Street Gang stood stupefied as angry spouts of smoke and fire billowed from the windows they had just finished breaking.

  It was by far the most wonderful sight any of them had ever seen.

  A half-etherized Blandine crawled on her hands and knees across the uneven surface of the Place of Stones. Her head throbbed so badly it felt split open. A harsh chemical stench filled her nostrils. She threw up a little, but still struggled forward.

  Flat stones littered the dirt of the clearing. Sheep-gray rock formations towered like madness overhead. Just beyond her showed the blank eye of the cave.

  She had fought against it, but Martyn had doped her again, covering her face with the foul-smelling handkerchief. Then he untied her bonds and laughed while she staggered drunkenly around the clearing, flailing at him. Another dose from the handkerchief. As Blandine lost consciousness, she witnessed him disappear into the cave, hauling Sabine under one arm.

  The fire ring displayed the familiar wooden stakes pounded into a circle, ready to be garlanded by a string of guts. In the still-warm ashes, a set of tiny fingers, laid ritualistically in the shape of a fan.

  Blandine clutched at wakefulness, lost it, grabbed at it again. The veins in h
er temples pealed like church bells. She tried to concentrate, to block out the rush of her own poisoned blood.

  She heard gurgling water in the stone-choked creek bed down below. And then, from within the cave, the sound of a woman’s voice, soothing a child.

  “Hush, little one.” Strange female tones, fussing, cooing, tut-tutting. “Now, now, it’s all right.”

  Blandine’s mind would not order itself. A woman? A matron? Was it her own mother, Josette’s voice? She was hearing things.

  “Little Martyn will be all better now,” the mother promised.

  The woman’s high-pitched voice was cut by another, a child’s snuffling, hiccupping cry. The Bean.

  Blandine rose to her feet and stumbled to the cave entrance.

  Strewn on the ground in front were dead ashes and chunks of blackened wood. They crunched under Blandine’s bare feet as she crossed the threshold into the stone chamber.

  A single step led her out of the sunlight and into a dim subterranean coolness, sharply felt after the heat of the day.

  A smell of decomposition. Cluttered on the floor of the cave were bones, hundreds, piled and stacked, sorted into a mad kind of order. Blandine recognized deer bones, those of cattle, other animals. Hooves, antlers, everything in between.

  The human bones assembled themselves to one side, arranged into a sort of shrine. Candle wax had dripped onto the dirt below, cooling into dirty lumps. A small-statured skeleton, dressed in children’s clothes, posed as if to beckon Blandine forward. A necklace fashioned from human nipples hung around its spine.

  She shuddered. Where was the Bean? An unreal silence. The stone walls closed in on her. Blandine forced herself to keep going toward the shadows at the back of the cave. She felt as though she were being swallowed.

  From the deep recesses, whispery voices echoed. “Time for a bath,” the mother said, her words sleepy and soft. “Shall we take off your clothes?”

  “No, no, don’t want to,” said the muffled, teary voice of the child.

  “Dik-duk, dik-duk,” the mother’s voice sang. “Ain’t that how my little chick clucks?”

  Then, an answering childlike voice: “Moeder, moeder, moeder.” Mother, mother, mother. Or, perhaps, she wasn’t hearing right, murder, murder, murder. The voice wasn’t Sabine’s. How many lost souls were in there?