The Orphanmaster (27 page)

“She is indisposed,” Meike said. Blandine tried to imagine how a little snip of a girl like Miep Fredericz might qualify for the regal term
indisposed
. She noticed the mother could not meet her eye.

“Is she ill?” Blandine asked gently.

Carsten thrust himself into the room. “You’d best leave now,” he said. Meike placed her hand on his arm, restraining him.

“It’s just that I have a present for her. May I leave it?”

“No gifts from the likes of you!” Carsten said, almost shouting.

“Please, Carsten,” his wife murmured. “Be civil.”

Blandine tightened her blue shawl around her shoulders. As Aet Visser observed, a cold wind blew through the New Amsterdam colony, both outside and inside the dwelling-houses. She turned to go.

“I also have her wages,” she said.

Carsten struggled with himself, cupidity and the question of appearances battling it out. “Wait,” he said. “Perhaps…”

“I would wish to count her out the money myself, in person,” Blandine said, and she stepped out through the front door, closing it behind her.

The Fredericz family lived on Tuyn Street, so Blandine turned alongside the canal to head toward her own home. High tide filled the ditch with seawater from the East River, and down below her a few merchants pulled their boats into the narrow canal, one maneuvering a barge piled high with hay. Blandine proceeded quickly, walking into the sharp wind off the harbor.

“Miss! Miss!” a small voice called from behind her.

Miep. Blandine allowed herself an inner smile. Cupidity had won out after all.

Blandine and Miep took mulled autumn cider together at the hearth in Blandine’s rooms, the girl stammering and hesitant. “They told me to come right back,” Miep said.

“After you collect your wages,” Blandine said.

“Yes,” Miep said. She savored the cider, though, so warming after the chilly walk through the settlement.

“Do you know the Godbolt children, Miep? George and Charles, Mary and Ann?”

“Georgie. They call him Georgie.”

“All right,” Blandine said. “You went to school with them?”

“The boys are nice enough,” Miep said. “But the little girls are rude.”

“It’s usually the other way around,” Blandine said. “And William, the orphan they keep as a ward, do you know him?”

“No.”

“No?”

“He is impossible to know,” Miep said. “He doesn’t speak.”

Blandine leaned over to the hearth and poured Miep another helping of cider.

“I should go,” Miep said. “They said…”

“If I told you of a way to help William, would you do it?”

The girl looked at her doubtfully. “I don’t believe what Mama says.”

“What does Mama say?” Blandine asked.

“She says you truck with the Devil.”

“You and I both understand that can’t be true,” Blandine said. “You know me well enough, don’t you, Miep?”

“You treat me better than they do,” Miep said petulantly. “At least you believe I can do things.”

She seemed on the verge of tears. Blandine took Miep’s head and laid it on her shoulder, petting the girl’s hair.

“Tell me, Miep,” Blandine said. “Will you help William Turner find out about his real parents?”

*   *   *

When the
schout
read the prisoner lists, he cited Corporal Jeffrey Shire as convicted of public drunkenness, sentenced to “ride the wooden horse” for an afternoon, two o’clock to close of parade, in the concourse to the north of the fort. The horse in question wasn’t an animal at all, but a wooden rail made to wedge uncomfortably up the guilty man’s crotch and carried by six husky soldiers.

Stay astride the “timber mare” long enough, and you would feel yourself half split in two. The tailbone would sometimes shatter, and at any rate, sitting down with any comfort would prove impossible for weeks. Shire had a heavy musket tied to each leg for extra weight, a fitting touch, since he had discharged his own firearm several times in the course of a drunken night of revelry, thus disturbing the public peace.

Director General Stuyvesant, his nephew Kees Bayard and Kees’s friend the resplendently wealthy Martyn Hendrickson gathered together with other colony worthies to witness the commencement of Corporal Shire’s punishment. Not for any enjoyment they might get from the spectacle—Stuyvesant, at least, never seemed to derive joy from any experience whatsoever—but merely to add to the sense of public humiliation.

The punishment took place in a location worthy of spectacle, directly below the towering earthen ramparts of the fort, in front of the elegant housefronts of Stone Street and Market Street.

“He should be shorn, he should be shorn!” called out Stuyvesant, seeing Shire’s straggly hair spill down over his shoulders. The
schout
had one of his boys scramble up the horse, a good twelve feet high, and scrape the man’s head with a dull razor.

“Taking it well,” Martyn said, smoothing his doublet. He wore his own hair long and wavy, but due to his family’s standing in the colony, no one dared criticize him. “At least he’s not whimpering.”

Stuyvesant paced, his false leg sounding an uneven rhythm on the packed dirt of the parade ground, leaving an odd track in its dirty covering of snow. “He’s a soldier,” he said. “Pain for a soldier should be mother’s milk.”

The director general knew the intimate contours of pain, thoroughly and indelibly. In an engagement with the Spanish on the Caribbean island
of Curaçao, almost a decade ago now, a papist cannonball screamed through the air to tear off his right leg. He leaned on his sword, staring downward. Nothing remained but tatters and bloody shreds, no foot, no shin, just a tangle of dangling, threadlike nerves, veins and arteries.

He sank his stump into the sand of Blauwbay Beach and woke up a few hours later on a surgeon’s table aboard his flagship. What followed were agonizing months—years, really—of recovery, learning to walk again with the ridiculous peg they fashioned for him, every step pure torture.

So don’t talk to him about pain.

Newly shorn and properly righted, Corporal Shire felt his timber mare hoisted by six strong men, quick-marching around and around the parade ground. By the tenth round, he began to let out short, propulsive moans on the downstroke of each stride. Blood showed on his trousers.

“He bleeds like a woman,” Martyn noted.

“Uncle,” Kees said, “there may be more barbering to be done in your jurisdiction.”

“Yes?” Stuyvesant said. He made ready to leave the parade ground, where dozens of spectators had now gathered to jeer at the corporal. Shire knew many of them. He didn’t blame them. He would have jeered, too, were he in their place. But Stuyvesant certainly didn’t have time to see the man endure the whole four hours of his punishment.

“A long-haired Englisher,” Kees said, “by the name of Drummond. Needs to be cut down.”

“Drummond?” the director general said. “Why do I keep hearing that name?”

He looked around. “Godbolt!” he shouted, summoning the man from where he stood with a group of scarlet-heeled grandees. George Godbolt hustled over.

“Weren’t you talking about one of your countrymen by the name of Drummond?” the director general said.

“Yes, M’Lord General,” Godbolt said, bowing his head to show his deference.

“A papist, I think,” Kees said. “Or at least, definitely of the English
royalist faction. Wears his hair like a lion’s mane, imitating his High Mightiness.”

“Ex more,”
Stuyvesant said. “No crime in that.”

“Against none but fashion,” said Kees, and Godbolt laughed.

Stuyvesant did not join in. “I’ve made inquiries,” he said, “and Drummond seems to be a simple grain merchant. Enterprise is to be encouraged in the colony, by landsmen and foreigners alike.”

“A grain merchant who has never made a trade,” Kees said.

“He does nothing but sit and toy with his glass lenses and perspective tubes,” said Godbolt. “He has a spyglass mounted upon the roof of his dwelling-house.”

“Has he?” the director general said.

“For what the purpose? We have to ask ourselves,” Godbolt said.

Interesting, Martyn Hendrickson thought. He himself had often wished for the ability to focus on people’s activities without their knowledge.

“As you, Godbolt, can attest, we have many English friends,” Stuyvesant said. “At times I feel my own countrymen turn against me, claiming no responsibility for the settlement’s defense beyond that of their own single homes. But the English residents in my jurisdiction I can always count upon. In the late Esopus war, I asked for volunteers and got four Dutchmen and forty Englishers.”

Godbolt stared at his feet. He had not been among the forty.

“There are Englishers, and there are Englishers,” Kees said. “All I suggest is that Drummond’s activities warrant looking into.”

“This is perhaps a private affair between you,” Stuyvesant said. Kees’s mother, the director general’s sister, had complained of Kees being thrown over by the Van Couvering girl for this Drummond fellow.

“He is in constant communication with factions in New England,” Kees said.

“Is this true?” Stuyvesant asked, his interest pricked at last.

“I could shed some light on this.” Martyn smiled. “Soon after he arrived in the colony, Mister Drummond made a journey up the North River and stopped for a visit to our patent. He spent a night with my
brothers on the estate, went to Beverwyck and then continued on east, to New England.”

“Why wasn’t I told about this?” Stuyvesant said.

“It didn’t seem important at the time,” Martyn said. He examined his fingernails. “Drummond said he needed merely to purchase some horseflesh, and our plantation proved the most likely place to do that.”

“And he went on to Massachusetts?”

“New Haven Colony, I think,” Martyn said.

“Tell me why a grain merchant would visit New Haven,” Kees said, “where they grow no wheat, and import none to make beer.”

“I want to add in one other thing, if I may, M’Lord General,” Godbolt said. “Full moon last, November third, on the night of the day that Ansel Imbrock was first taken, this Drummond was seen coming in through the land port at dawn. At dawn, M’Lord General. He came from parts north. He carried with him some equipment, or perhaps weapons, in concealing boxes.”

Corporal Shire shrieked in pain as one team of carriers dropped the wooden horse to the ground, with another team immediately taking it up again.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Stuyvesant said. “I must take this all under advisement.”

I will put a runner on him
, the director general thought. One of the Pavonia indians, perhaps. This man Drummond needs looking after. Stuyvesant turned his back to leave the parade ground just as the screaming corporal rode by.

The gentleman in the scarlet heels proceeded through the settlement to the wharf district, where he entered into the mazelike, chockablock neighborhood of huts and cabins bordering on the pier warehouses.

He passed along the back of a teetering clapboard dwelling-house that was originally two floors but which was now collapsing into one. Lashed to the leeward side of this structure, scaling up a moldy, weathered wall of rotting wood, a stairway led to what was left of the upper story. The winds off the river smelled strongly of decay, and the whole effect was one of enduring poverty and neglect.

The gentleman knocked at a board-and-batten door at the top of the stairs and entered without waiting. Inside all was gloom and damp. A woman sat bent over a rickety table at a window. Another form, older, more decrepit, could barely be discerned beneath the covers of a moth-bitten bed in the opposite corner.

“Do you have them?” the gentleman asked.

“They are finished,” said the woman at the window. She was young, although you could barely see it, bundled as she was against the winter cold. Beneath a knitwork cap her eyes shone clearly, gray and alert. Only a few sticks of firewood lay beside the smoky fire in the hearth.

With fingerless leather gloves she lifted a small box from her table. His eyes fell on the gobs and dabs of color on a palette that lay before her, next to the handful of brushes that seemed to be all she had to conduct her business. Spread around the room, laid out on every surface, drawings on planks of wood.

These painted portraits, likenesses of the good citizens of New Amsterdam, served as the only amelioration of the depressing atmosphere. The gentleman recognized a few of his acquaintances, figured among the art. They had been commissioned for a few stuivers each from the petite, ragged woman standing before him, the colony’s lone portraitist, Emily Stavings.

In any other part of the world, it would be considered outlandish for a female to render pictures of people, landscapes, anything. Women simply did not enter the trade. But here on Manhattan the Dutch gave women freedom to become artists alongside men, just as they were encouraged to act as merchants or ship factors. For Emily, portrait-painting was not a vocation so much as a calling.

The gentleman opened the box Emily gave him. Inside, fitted into an ingenious series of slots, pieces of glass gleamed in the dim light. The gentleman eagerly attempted to extract one and pricked his finger in the process. He swore an oath.

“Yes,” Emily said. “I have cut myself, too. You have to hold them like this, do you see?”

She held one of the glass lozenges by its edges. The gentleman had himself provided the small transparent rectangles to her, each one inch
by three, not lenses but window glass. She would never have had been able to afford the precious material herself.

The gentleman took the shard from her, crossed to the window—parchment, he noticed, not glass—and held it up to the fading afternoon light.

An image of a demon stared out at him.

“Very fine,” he said. “You have the detail exactly.” Some blood from his pricked finger smeared on the miniature.

“I had difficulty getting the paint to stick to the glass,” Emily said. “I finally discovered if I mixed the pigment with glue, that would do.”

With increasing excitement he went through the slides one after another. “Some would say you have this business almost too well. As though you have met up with Old Scratch himself, perhaps bargaining for your soul.”