The Orphanmaster (21 page)

Stuyvesant’s fearmongering address to the congregation at the Dutch Reformed Church helped fan the flames. As November bled into December, reports of murder jumped from house to house like a crown fire. The Jope Hawes killing up in Pine Plains four months before resurrected itself in people’s minds.

Rumor stalked the colony, seeking a victim.

The name of Blandine van Couvering kept cropping up. Wasn’t she inordinately interested in the witika business? The fever that infected the colony needed a target upon which to focus. An independent woman, unmarried, an orphan, probably wanton (and pretty, that was always a plus), one who consorted with Africans and indians, who spoke her mind, who had some sort of relationship with the drunkenly corrupt Aet Visser, the orphanmaster himself, not to speak of the suspect Englisher she went around with—Blandine fit the role of sacrificial lamb perfectly.

Kitane knew none of this as he entered the settlement by the East River land port and passed down Pearl to the heart of town. He stayed with a small community of Long Island indians, the Canarsie, who lived in a collection of lodges on the shores of northern Manhattan, near the swirling waters that the Dutch called
Hellegat
, Hell Gate. Blandine and her giant had situated Kitane there, wanting him to be closer to them, so they could monitor his return to health.

At first, his town visit went along fine. He entered a clothing shop. He purchased stockings as a gift for a Canarsie girl he liked.

He left the store and walked through the settlement. He was hungry for sweets. Though he did not readily admit it to himself, Kitane wanted to see Blandine. Her presence was like a cool cloth on his forehead during an illness. She had not come up the island to see him for many days now, sending Antony instead.

Sickness had humbled Kitane. As he passed among the colonists working on the wharf, he dreamed not of a war club materializing in his hands, nor of stoving in swannekin skulls. All that had been burned away during the time he imagined himself a witika.

He dreamed instead of a Dutch bakery he had visited once in the past, and of the pastries they offered for sale there. He headed toward
the shop. And suddenly a darkness rolled through the streets of New Amsterdam like a mist.

Did he imagine the colonists on the street staring at him, pointing their fingers? Kitane had been in New Amsterdam many times before. He could not remember ever being the object of any special attention. Yet there they were, that woman there, the man in the doorway, glaring strangely.

He did not know the townspeople had been infected by rumor.

Dissipating wisps of his former illness sometimes still blew through Kitane. During his witika sickness, fear of losing his mind caused him to lose his mind. Now a shadow of that fear crept back upon him. He felt unsure. Had he already killed? In his nightmares, surely he had. He saw children, too many to count, stretched out all around him. Were they really only dreams?

The swannekins all turned to look at him as he passed. Perhaps he had a smear of blood on his lips. He resisted the impulse to put his hand up to wipe it off. He knew it could not really be there.

The harbor gulls hung in the wind over his head, asking him what the master of the forest might be doing among the stone dwelling-houses of town. “Are you lost?” they shrieked.

Kitane told them to mind their own business, which was, as far as he could tell, rotted fish.

The bakery he remembered was no longer there. A tavern had taken its place. Kitane had noticed that was the main characteristic about New Amsterdam, that nothing was allowed to grow old there. Things changed with a baffling quickness. Shops, houses, people—they all shuffled and rearranged constantly.

A slight blade of panic worked its way behind Kitane’s eyes. He should go back to his Canarsie lodge, return at a run. He was not ready. His mind remained unhealed.

Disoriented, he turned a corner onto another street. Where was he? A spasm of waking dream gripped his mind. Not a war club in the dream this time, no, and no bashing of heads. Just him, Kitane, running down the street, tearing and ripping with his teeth at every settler he passed. Eating and eating and never finding his fill. A witika nightmare.

Like a miracle, another bakery shop appeared on the street into which he had stumbled. When he walked inside, the she-merchant owner uttered a little yelp of alarm, like the bark of a dog, and disappeared into the back of the store. Her man came out soon after.

“What do you want?” the baker said.

Kitane pointed to a frosted cake with raisins, not trusting himself to speak.

“Can you pay?”

He took a short string of seawan from his bag, held up three fingers and traded the shells for three of the cakes.

Wolfing down the sugary treats in the street, Kitane felt better. Sugar, he knew, came from far away, brought by the Dutch in their cloud-houses.
The Bar-bay-dos
. The Dutch owned many slaves there, Africans.

Kitane had never been so weak. He had always been the strongest among any group he found himself in, the quickest, the surest with a hatchet or trap. Now just the whisper of the witika had killed him. He was not himself. He should never have come to town.

A troop of urchins ran past him, coursing down the street like a flock of chirping birds. Were they repeating “witika, witika,” or was it only the voice of his mind?

He knew the settlement well. It was small. It was impossible to get lost. But Kitane wandered that noonday up and down streets he didn’t recognize. When he approached the palisade wall, a lanky boy threw stones at him, driving him away.

“Kitane!” a voice called to him. A familiar voice, but one he had a hard time placing. It sounded like the voice of Brother Bear. But what would a bear be doing in the streets of town?

The Dutch, Kitane thought, were capable of anything. He recalled a dancing bear he had seen once in the marketplace. “I am ashamed,” the bear told Kitane, when at the beck of its trainer it reared up on its back legs and shuffled slowly in a circle.

But the call came again. “Kitane!” Far off, like the wind.

Down the street, he saw Antony, big, lumbering, smiling Antony, gesturing to him. A friend among all the strangers. Relief poured into Kitane.

He was saved. He would not have to eat the swannekins after all.

T
he weather came in damp that day, but the caudle was warm and spicy, so all eight women drank copiously of the hot wine mixture from Margaret Tomiessen’s set of dainty silver cups. Despite the head colds that some of the participants brought with them to the gathering, they felt determined to finish Elsje Kip’s trousseau this Saturday morning. In a circle they sat, their lace lappets covering their ears, huddled over their work.

Elsje herself was absent. She lounged, the women who gathered imagined, in her father’s house, fancying her future life as a bride, in the new home her family planned to convey to her. It had already been purchased: a wooden house on the upper part of the Broad Way, with a bright red door and several windows glazed with real glass, imported from Amsterdam.

“I haven’t seen the inside,” said Gertrude Pont, taking a sip of caudle.

“Nor have I,” said Barb Stryker. Nor had any woman at the gathering. But they imagined it was the perfect spot for newlyweds, just so, with a scrubbed plank floor and smooth white plaster walls, the whole arrangement clean and fresh and decent.

Margaret Tomiessen’s house was also just so, and she easily fit eight chairs in her
groot kamer
to seat her guests that afternoon. The location of the dwelling couldn’t be more proper. The Tomiessens resided on Stone Street, steps away from the fort. A person could actually walk out her door without dragging one’s skirts in the mud, as Stone was the first street in all of New Amsterdam to be set with paving blocks.

Margaret maintained the home spotlessly, raking out yellow sand on the floor every morning, dusting the cabinet and the candlesticks atop it, gathering the cold ashes from the hearth and dropping them into the gutter outside.

The hostess sniffled as she refilled the caudle cups of her guests. Each hausfrau balanced a length of fabric upon her lap and sewed minute stitches to hem them all around. The fabric was white, as was the thread. The linens
had been bleached in Haarlem, and they were smooth and especially fine, an excellent gift for a newlywed, if you asked the women at this gathering.

When she stood on the new cobblestones outside her dwelling-house, Margaret could see all the way down to Pearl Street, where Blandine van Couvering kept her rooms.

“You know who’s in there now?” said Margaret, tasting her caudle without blowing upon it first, burning her mouth a bit.

“The big fellow, probably,” said Jacintha Jacobsen. “Angola.”

“Not this time,” said Margaret. “The big Lenape buck, Kitane. You’ve seen him?”

“He was at the bake shop this morning,” Elsbeth Trompetter said. “Scared me half to death.”

“They love their sweets,” Jacintha said. A moment of silence, as everyone’s thoughts went to the sweets tray on the cabinet, as yet untouched by the guests.

“And,
and
, do you want to know what else?” Margaret said. The others at the gathering leaned slightly forward, chickens cocking their beaks at a worm. “Sunday at dawn, Miss Blandina was seen coming in from the woods with her English fellow.”

A silence fell over the group. One of the guests present actually was English. Lucy Hubbard’s husband managed a taproom, and she had become acquainted with some of the finest ladies in town.

“That day,” Lucy said, eager to demonstrate where her allegiances lay, “was the day the Imbrock orphan turned up at the director general’s farm, scared imbecilic.”

“That day,” contributed Veltje van Borsum, her small wet tongue licking her thread to put it through the needle, “there was no church for Blandine van Couvering.”

“Not unusual,” Margaret said, hovering over her guests with the caudle ladle.

“Not at all,” Jacintha said. “She avoids church like the pox.”

Margaret said brightly, to keep up the conversation, “Ever since she was ravished by the indians.”

Lucy Hubbard was a skeptic. “We don’t know about that,” she offered. “She said she was not. She escaped.”

The other ladies blanched at a word spoken, however mildly, in Blandine’s defense.

Margaret was quick to tamp down the incipient rebellion. “Escaped along with her African friends,” she sneered.

Everyone else was confident. Blandine had been raped. Years ago. When her parents were still alive.

Margaret finally picked up the tray of izer cookies and offered them around. The women fell upon them with gusto.

“Is that why she has never married? She is the same age as Elsje, and look at us here, now, finishing up a beautiful trousseau for a proper young woman’s
kas
.” Jacintha munched on a cookie, spilling buttery crumbs all over a pillowcase in the process.

“Who would she marry?” said Maaje de Lang.

“Martyn Hendrickson,” pronounced Veltje van Borsum, and all the women laughed.

“It would take a plumper hen than Miss Blandina to bring that rooster down,” Jacintha said.

“No,” Margaret said emphatically. “It’s Kees Bayard.”

Said Femmie Gravenraet, “He won’t marry her.” Margaret wondered if her cookies were not just too crisp, as all her guests seemed to wind up with crumbs in their laps.

“Not now. Would you?” said Jacintha. The topic excited her. “A little pretty thing she is, but headstrong. Like a man, almost. Then what would that make Kees? Her bride?”

The women laughed easily.

“A fine young gentleman,” said Femmie. “I’d take him.”

“Hoo-hoo!” said Maaje.

Jacintha was more stern, as was her way. “He is the nephew,” she reminded them.

“So Miss Blandina, she brushes away Kees Bayard,” said Femmie. “Pretty as you please.”

“With those fine, fine shoulders of his,” erupted Maaje. She was the greenest of them, and had known Kees in her school classes. Had a sweetness for him, in fact.

The chickens cackled. They well knew young Maaje’s infatuation.

Femmie said, “She takes up with an African, an English monarchist, probably a Catholic—”

“He is!” Margaret interjected.

“—And now an indian,” finished Femmie, pulling a nose-cloth out of her bosom and sneezing into it. “She’s an orphan, with no parents to keep her straight.”

“That African is always around,” Jacintha said.

“You needn’t worry about him,” Femmie said. She lowered her voice to a whisper, gesturing toward her lap. “Castrated in the Barbados before they shipped him here.”

Another long silence fell, as the women contemplated the possibility.

Margaret struck up the assault again. “She rejects her church,” she reiterated.

“She has gotten herself caught up in this witika mess,” said Jacintha. “What good woman does that?”

Margaret shook her head. “You have to wonder. What is her story anyway? Does anyone really know her?”

Every guest took a bite of her crumbling cookie and a draft of her caudle. Margaret crushed the drink and made her pronouncement.

It was the first time that the word
witch
was spoken in connection with Blandine van Couvering.

Drummond had not been able to get a peep out of William. Not speech, anyway. They were together in the workshed in the yard behind Drummond’s rented rooms. He heard the boy humming to himself as he cleaned the slick tile floor. William came to his rooms every day but Sunday, cleaning the workshop top to bottom, polishing Drummond’s brass scientific instruments.

Drummond made inquiries about the Godbolts. Through Raeger, he found a probate judge, Eberhard Luybeck, who knew something about the family’s finances. Luybeck wore an ornate, steel-gray wig that framed a doglike countenance.

“I am considering a business arrangement with George Godbolt,” Drummond told the man. “I am wondering how solid his credit might be.”

“He don’t do much in grain,” Luybeck said. “Meat’s his custom.”