The Orphanmaster (29 page)

Now, in another place, another monstrous image. A man, a Dutch
man in a waistcoat and breeches, materialized, and crouched on his back, feasting upon the man’s brains with long, venomous fangs, a teeth-gnashing demon.

More moans, a scraping of the three-legged stools upon which the burghers sat with their wives, children whimpering helplessly.

“Jesus save us!” came the cry.

“He stalks among you!” shouted Megapolensis.

In the darkness, a few skeptics. Martyn Hendrickson and Kees Bayard exchanged knowing smiles, their teeth gleaming.

On and on it went as panic rose in the hall, one fiendish image after another. At each display, wails rose and fell like sirens. One of the brave bachelors present bent over and vomited. Audience members stumbled over one another in the dark, trying to find the exit.

Gradually, the images changed. The skin color of the demon went from red to green. The monster got gaunter, hungrier. Taller, with longer hair.

It was Hannie who blurted out the name first. “The witika,” she shouted, and soon the whole crowd took up the cry. Wives fainted, plummeting to the broad floorboards without their husbands being able to help. The whelps, Tommy van Elsant, Peer Gravenraet and their friends, turned into sobbing babies. They blundered for escape.

“Hold!” said the dominie. “Courage! Courage! For the Prince of Peace doth come.”

But it was too late. Shrieking, weeping, rushing out alone or dragging their loved ones with them, the residents of New Amsterdam performed a wholesale retreat from the Stadt Huys fright show.

The dominie was there to announce the last of the images, the last of the glass-slide paintings by Emily Stavings, projected upon the wall by the new invention of the magic lantern.

The magic lantern. Just a lens with a light behind it, but if you have never encountered it before, wondrous, frightening.

Jesus finally appeared, yes, the Son of God displayed on the white plaster wall. With a familiar face. But the glass upon which the image was painted quickly cracked.

“Light! Light!” called Megapolensis.

He, too, rushed out of the room, a shepherd pursuing his flock.

Claus van Elsant lit the wicks of the oil lamps. Their faint glow reillumined the hall.

Only five people were left in the room. The funeral caller, laboriously completing his job of relighting the lamps. Martyn Hendrickson and Kees Bayard, observing the room-clearing enterprise with evident satisfaction. Tipped stools and knocked-over chairs everywhere.

Near the door, observing the other two observers, Blandine van Couvering and Edward Drummond. When Kees saw Blandine with the other man, his face went pale and his thin smile vanished.

Blandine nodded to Kees and led Drummond out of the hall.

Outside, in the street, Peer Gravenraet held tightly to his parents. He wished he could have climbed into his mama’s arms.

The settlers hurried to their homes, still struck by fear over what they had seen. The panic affected them differently. Some wept. Others chattered or giggled self-consciously. But they were all eager to dive into warm beds and duck their heads under their feather coverlets, anxious to drown themselves in the black sea of sleep.

Beaver Street lay deep in shadow, so when Peer’s foot kicked the foot that lay in his path, he did not at first think what it was. But Aalbert erupted with a “God’s faith,” and a neighbor couple, the Nattersons, pulled Peer away from the grisly find.

A child’s foot, chewed ragged at the ankle.

“Witika,” Femmie said, stepping back from it.

“Call for the
schout
,” Michael Natterson said.

Peer buried his face in the folds of his mother’s gown.

“H
ow many of them have died?”

Blandine and Edward stood on the New Bridge over the canal, a common meeting place for wealthy burghers, but deserted this Christmas morning after the fright-show hangover from the night before.

Antony sat a few feet away, squatting at the bridge steps and tossing stones into the canal. Across the river the hills of Breukelen rose, iced by snow sugar.

“How many? Would you like an inventory, Drummond?” Blandine asked.

“It might help, Van Couvering,” Drummond said.

“Died or just missing?”

“Both.”

“All right,” Blandine said, beginning to count on her fingers. “Piteous Gullee.”

“No, first the Hawes boy, up north.”

Drummond tamped tobacco into a Belgian-style pipe and lit it. At Raeger’s behest, he had taken up smoking. The aroma floated over to Blandine, triggering an intense desire to indulge, which she fought back. Below them in the canal, the tidewaters flowed in, creeping up the ice-crusted ditch a little at a time.

“Then there’s the scene described by Hannie de Laet and Hans Bontemantel,” Blandine said.

“The young lovers. Let’s just say, in that instance, victim undetermined.”

“I guess that could be the place where Piddy was killed,” Blandine said.

“Or some other child, unknown.”

“There’s Bill Gessie and his sister, Jenny, who never came back. And Ansel Imbrock, taken but not killed, then retaken. Then this new one.”

“The random stray foot,” Drummond said.

“Definitely a child’s.”

“And fresh.”

“Ugh,” Blandine said.

“I mean only that he or she had been recently killed. Who is missing in the past few days that we can match with a stray foot?”

“I haven’t yet confirmed with Aet. But that’s five, or six, depending.”

“You forget one,” Drummond said.

“Who?”

“I don’t know for sure. But there is the situation of William Turner. The Godbolts’ ward.”

“That’s just a question of identity, isn’t it?” Blandine said. “Not murder.”

“But say Aet Visser is right. Say William Turner is not William Turner. Doesn’t that leave us with another missing child? If the real William does not live with the Godbolts, then where is he?”

“So we have…”

“Jope Hawes, a Dutch son with two parents living,” Drummond said.

“I heard tell that the father died. But after the son’s murder,” Blandine said.

“Two orphans taken, both Dutch. Perhaps a third.”

“Three African children,” Blandine said.

“Were any of them orphans?”

“Yes, all of them.”

“And all under the age of ten,” Drummond said.

“Well, the Hawes boy was twelve,” said Blandine. “And finally William Turner. That makes seven.”

“Orphans and Africans,” Drummond said. “Can you think of what they might have in common?”

“I can,” Blandine said. “I have thought about this. They are both highly vulnerable in the colony.”

“But perhaps it’s just a crime of opportunity,” Drummond said.

“Isn’t that the same thing? Do you mean that Africans and orphans both get around more than other children?”

“Out and abroad? Working? Less supervision? Lax guardianship?”

“One might think so,” said Blandine archly, “unless one knew how closely held children are within the African community.”

“I apologize, Van Couvering.”

“Don’t mention it, Drummond.”

She had to admit that he looked gorgeous this morning, leaning on the balustrade of the canal bridge, in a cobalt cloak and casually unbuckled boots. The man was annoying, but she could yet feel herself coming around.

“It’s troubling,” he said.

“I don’t think that quite says it, Drummond.”

“No, I mean that these five, or six, or seven or however many, are only the ones we have any idea of. What we don’t know is what’s truly terrifying.”

They both fell silent.

“Do you have children, Drummond?”

“No,” he said. “I had a wife and an infant, too, both dead in childbirth. I yearned for that baby.”

“I’m sorry, Drummond,” she said.

“And you, Van Couvering?”

Blandine shook her head, gazing out on the East River. “I’m an orphan.”

“Last I knew, orphans might bear children,” Drummond said.

“I mean that this is what I have in common, sir, with some of the victims.”

“I take your meaning to be that if I don’t myself have offspring, why should I care that someone is murdering those of this colony? Do you seriously ask that?”

“Children die in New Netherland all the time,” said Blandine. “Murder rarely comes into it. I merely consider your incentive here.”

“You play
advocatus diaboli
,” Drummond said. Devil’s advocate—an apt formulation, given the imagery of the fright show the night before.

“I am being accused as a witch, Drummond, because I am paying too much mind to this matter. You would do well to look to yourself.”

Drummond extracted a small metallic item from his doublet and passed it to Blandine. A miniature pistol.

“Tap action,” Blandine said briskly. “I’d say forty caliber. Is it French?”

Drummond looked at her strangely. “Good Lord, Van Couvering, is there anything you do not know?”

“Papa was a gunsmith,” Blandine said, smiling. “It’s a pretty piece.”

It was indeed French. Filigreed silver, with its thumb-style applewood stock checkered with inlaid silver wire. The pistol had, she noted, a sliding safety. It fit neatly into the palm.

“You have a pocket in your muff?” Drummond asked.

The muff Blandine carried was gigantic, still not as big as Drummond’s, but made of beautiful silver fox fur.

“Put it in there,” Drummond said.

“A loan,” Blandine said.

“A gift,” Drummond said.

“I’m not sure I can be taking gifts from you, Drummond. That might put us on a whole other level, could it not? Next thing, you’ll step up to a ring.”

“All right, woman, a loan,” Drummond said, exasperated. “You know who gave me that? Look at the engraving.”

Blandine examined the barrel jacket of the tiny pistol. “
Charles Rex
,” she read.

“The king,” Drummond said.

“I know that,” Blandine said.

“In recognition of my service to the crown.”

“Oh, I am a republican,” Blandine said, making to return the pistol. “I cannot possibly take such a priceless royalist piece.”

“Shush,” Drummond said, pushing the gun back at her. “The king directed me to give it to a woman someday, and now I have.”

“Well, in that case,” Blandine said, and she slipped the pistol into her fox fur muff. If nothing else, she could trade it for at least a half dozen beaver pelts.

“Now that that’s settled,” Drummond said.

“Yes,” Blandine said, “now that it’s settled, what next?”

“I knew a man in Holland, a lens grinder, a very fine man,” Drummond said. “He told me something that stuck in my mind. He said that everything a human being does is necessarily entirely insignificant. But it is very important that he do it anyway.”

“All right, we’re important,” Blandine said. “Where do we start?”

“I should think we should start at the beginning, don’t you?”

“Jope Hawes,” Blandine said.

Drummond proposed a trip to the north, to the Hendrickson patent, but this time approaching from the direction of Connecticut. “I would like to speak with the Canaan landsman who discovered the Hawes boy dead.”

“Then go on to talk with the mother,” Blandine said.

Visions of an intimate sleigh ride up the frozen Fresh River naturally occurred in Drummond’s mind. He and Blandine, under the single bearskin.

“If we go,” Antony interjected, “I can drive the sleigh.”

Drummond’s vision abruptly vanished. A merry company. Just the three of them.

Perhaps, he thought, they might stop off at New Haven first.

“I have accounted for all of my charges but one,” Aet Visser reported to the director general. “His name is Richard Dunn, and he came in on
Sea Serpent
, his father dying on the crossing. His mother dead in Plymouth, before they ever departed for the new world.”

“The foot may be his?” Stuyvesant said, a look of distaste passing over his face. He sat behind his official table in the audience room at the Stadt Huys, the morning after Christmas.

“The foot may be his,” Visser repeated stupidly, looking a bit rumpled and carelessly shaven after the punch cups he had downed the day before. He felt intimidated in the presence of
Mijn Heer
General. As, he supposed, he was meant to feel. “At any rate, if it’s from one of my wards, I can’t imagine whose else it would be.”

“An English child,” the director general said. “He was placed where?”

“With Missy Flamsteed, at the Jug,” Visser said.

“He lodged at a tap house?”

“A mere stopgap,
Mijn Heer
General,” Visser said. “Missy Flamsteed often takes my wards on a temporary basis. She sleeps them in her back hearth.”

“We cannot have loose body parts littering our streets, orphanmaster.”

A sad child, Dickie Dunn. Visser saw him only briefly, when
Sea Serpent
docked. Sickly from the voyage, grief-stunned by his father’s death. He had relatives in Portsmouth, or Bournemouth, or somewhere, and
no possessions or inheritance. Visser had planned to ship him back to England as soon as possible.

“A quiet boy,” Missy Flamsteed said, when Visser questioned her in the wake of the shocking Christmas Day discovery. “Stayed near the chimney heat and crapped himself silly for the first few days he was here. Had to keep putting porridge into him.”

If the youngster strayed at all, she said, he strayed to the wharf, looking out at the sea (actually, since this was the East River, staring across the anchorage to Breukelen), morose and pining. A shock to the system, this transition from old world to new. Some folks just could not accomplish it. It didn’t help that Dickie Dunn was all of five years old.

Someone or something haunted the docks of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant was convinced. First the Imbrock boy, taken, the first time at least, from wharfside. And this latest, Dickie Dunn, who could not have ventured away from the Strand.

“You are convinced it was Dunn?” the director general asked Visser.

“With a high degree of certainty,” Visser said. “Always with the proviso that it will turn out, indeed, an orphan who was targeted. A terrible business.”