The Orphanmaster (44 page)

Visser had been so convinced that Martyn’s death freed him from his bind. Convinced, too, that the orphan-killings would end, that the witika business was over.

But it was not to be. He had forgotten Lightning. Visser resumed his aimless wanderings on the backstreets of the settlement.

Ad and Ham Hendrickson tended to avoid appearing in public, but they made an exception for their brother’s funeral. Which was not a real funeral, since no corpus had been recovered. But one afternoon during his wanderings, Visser heard the funeral caller sound his mournful droning cry as the procession for Martyn Hendrickson wound through the streets.

“God, who works in mysterious ways, in his infinite wisdom has called home to glorious heaven, where he shall sit among the hosts, friend Martyn Hendrickson, a family man, grandee, commissioner of the Nine, captain of the colonial militia, patroon, citizen, paragon, whom all shall mourn. All mourn Martyn Hendrickson. Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names. All mourn Martyn Hendrickson.”

Visser watched the procession from a distance. At its head, Van Elsant, the caller—the
aansprecker
, the funeral inviter—was immediately preceded by a young, formally dressed boy hired for the occasion. As was the custom, black crepe streamers flowed back from both their cocked hats.

The boy was an orphan, Visser noted, but one whom he’d had no part in hiring out. The life of the colony had begun to pass the orphanmaster by. Step out of harness for a moment and they begin to forget you. The worse you feel, the worse treated you are.

Ad and Ham Hendrickson, Stuyvesant, Godbolt, Kees Bayard, all the leading lights of the colony took their place in Martyn’s funeral procession, wending across town toward the Doden Acker, the graveyard. Not to a freshly dug grave this time, just to a cenotaph. Such monuments usually marked sailors dead at sea, their bodies unrecovered.

Martyn’s death changed not a thing. All Lightning had to do was whisper a single word to remind Aet Visser he remained forever bound.

Anna
.

An orphan girl Visser was officially pledged to protect as orphanmaster, but who was now his clandestine common-law wife.

Visser’s relationship with Anna began in shame and darkness when the girl was thirteen. He was the lust-gripped client, she was the child whore, run by her brother.

There can exist a special innocence of the ruined. Anna Weiss grew up enduring furious assaults, physical, emotional and spiritual, first from her twin brother, Lightning (when he was still known as Gerald Weiss), then from Lightning’s friend Martyn Hendrickson. The two friends brutalized her, and when they’d had enough, sold her to be brutalized by others.

Visser stood at the end of a long line of customers. But a light broke. He saw within this ravaged, beautiful child a stubborn blamelessness. He fell in love with her.

Extracting Anna from her brother Lightning’s clutches required massive applications of money—the greater part of his illicit earnings as orphanmaster. For years, Martyn and his alter ego Lightning tormented Visser by threatening to expose the sordid details of Anna’s past.

Martyn demanded that Visser supply the Hendrickson family with cheap orphan labor. It had all come down to that terrible moment in the secret chamber of the Hendrickson mansion. Through Anna, Visser was still bound to Martyn. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t confess, could never tell what he had found stuffed into the corner of the Hendrickson
kas
.

Martyn’s sway continued from beyond the grave, in the malevolent form of his shadow, Lightning. As soon as Visser stepped forward to make a clean breast, it would be the end of him, and more important, the end of Anna. He would be disgraced. She would be driven from the colony, perhaps back into prostitution. Their children would be scattered, indentured, lost.

Once he gave in to blackmail, Visser could find no way to extricate himself. He twisted like a rat being shaken by a terrier. If Martyn had been guilty of terrible crimes, Visser was, too.

When he wandered the back alleys of the settlement, it was with a hellhound nipping at his heels. Every morning, Visser would decide once
again not to convene the Orphan Chamber that particular day. Instead, he burrowed down Tuyn Street, sticking to the margins, avoiding any direct intercourse with passersby.

He was headed nowhere, and he would soon reach his goal.

“We’ve had a lot of activity here lately,” said Lightning, sitting cross-legged on the ground before the fire ring. “As you can see.”

Lightning worked his flint and had a blaze going more quickly than any man William had ever seen. In a cold hearth, it usually took William himself a full ten minutes of striking and striking, metal to flint, in order to start a fire for the Godbolts.

Beyond the flames of the fire, William could see the black opening of a cave. The walk up the island had taken half the day. The afternoon shadows lengthened. They were somewhere high on a hill, surrounded by rocky promontories. Far below, the mumbling of a creek.

William sat on a fallen log. This was a bad place, he knew. The air smelled of rotten meat. The first flies of spring made a sound like an angry thought inside his head.

He is the one
, William thought, looking at Lightning. He saw him clearly, a man in halves, European and indian, the two halves fighting. Him wanting you to believe he was a swannekin, when really anyone could see what he was.

The Crease. That’s what Tibb Dunbar called him.

Why am I still alive? William felt cold fear as well as another thing, a boldness that lay atop his panic. Damn him, he thought. Damn his ugly creased skull straight to hell.

He recalled the word written on the slate Kitane had carried back to him from Drummond and Blandine.
Courage
.

Lightning had made William quick-step all the way up the island, at first at the point of his pistol. But soon enough, the half-indian shoved the weapon into his belt, and the two continued walking together as though they were a father and son out for an Easter holiday hike.

Somewhere up the island, they scaled a steep rocky cliffside and came to a clearing where the ground was covered with dark, oval stones. Upon their arrival at the place, the Crease showed William around, gesturing
proudly to the cave a number of times, bending forward at the waist like an usher in a church. He babbled.

“The parts of the whole need a place to go,” the half-indian said. “The master will come to see what is choice and what is not. It is his decision, not my own.”

William nodded as though he understood, when he did not.

“My master knows many things about the night, and about children,” said the Crease. “You should meet him. He is the true orphanmaster.”

He pronounced the name.

If William had not been certain before, he now knew beyond doubt the Crease was crazy. The man he named as master, Martyn Hendrickson, was dead. Everyone knew that. Yet Lightning spoke of him as if he were present, perhaps asleep next door, in the cave.

William noticed some small objects arrayed on the ground around where the Crease squatted, items that he kept touching and manipulating and piling one on top of the other.

“The relics here are utmost holy,” said the half-indian. He abruptly fell to laughing as though he were watching a clown at
kermis
. “Yes, we have witika fever here. This is where to catch it. We all have witika fever!”

A wave of nausea crashed over William, and he folded his arms and stared down at the ground. Saliva flooded his mouth. He didn’t really want to know what the half-indian held in his hands.

“I like your silence,” said the half-indian, approaching the voiceless boy on his hands and knees. The man was deranged. “I like you. I might like you too much, but that choice is my master’s. He’s the one who decides the deed. I merely advise and collect the afterbirth. Relics, icons, the essential leave-takings. That’s me.”

The Crease reached out with a gentle hand and patted William on the knee. The boy stared at the stars painted along his jawline.

William tried not to show he was cringing. He thought of how he would find out what he needed to know.

He took out his chalk. “
William Turner?
” he wrote. “
Orphan
.”

“Can I hold that?” said the Crease.

Lightning gently removed the slate from around William’s neck. “You really don’t speak?” he asked.

He leaned forward and pinched a portion of William’s flesh, just above his left elbow, twisting it so viciously that the skin abraded and bled. Tears came to the boy’s eyes, but he did not cry out.

Lightning nodded, as if satisfied. “Now, William Orphan Turner,” he said. “That is a story.” He narrowed his eyes as though they could burn through the mute child.

“After the one up north, the Hawes boy, the master’s brothers got a little peevish with us. Sent us down here. But you know when you get a taste of something, and want a little something more? Like… ice cream. Have you ever had ice cream?”

William shook his head.

“Well, no matter. A thing you like, you want some more, right? That’s natural. So we found a little African orphan girl. The master did it.”

He waited for some sign of understanding from William, but the boy kept an expression of confusion on his face. “You are asking where William Orphan Turner comes into it, aren’t you? Very simple. He saw it. At the Kollect. He was going for water. He saw the master, and I saw him see. Now, do you see?”

Again, William shook his head. He reached for the slate but Lightning held it away.

“He witnessed the master doing the black girl, don’t you understand? So little Billy Turner had to get done, too. And afterward, when we learned he was an orphan, too, well, we took that as a sign. We didn’t think it was a coincidence. Not one orphan, but two!”

An object hung from a nearby tree branch, swaying slightly. It resembled one of the hams in the Godbolt attic. Lightning pointed to the haunch of meat.

“Do you see the tasty?”

William nodded, barely.

“The master calls it the ‘divine carcass.’ The cadaver of God. He can be clever with words, though he is sometimes very stupid with other things.”

Lightning rose smoothly to his feet, unfolding his legs as though they were made of spring steel.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait, wait. I kept a souvenir of William Turner.”

He turned and strode into the cave. William heard him rooting around in there as though it were a wardrobe closet.

“Aha,” he called out, and returned to William at the fire. Holding out a two-inch bone to him, Lightning smiled broadly and gestured for the boy to take it.

Clean and dry, boiled white, the finger was jointed into three interlocking bones. A signet ring rode on the knuckle like a quoit.

“Have it, it’s yours,” the Crease said. “And now, my master has requested my presence. I promised him I would be back by nightfall.”

In other words, the Crease was telling William that he had an appointment with a dead man.

He crossed to a leather box that lay on the ground next to the cave mouth. He bustled busily with his back to William. Then he turned, tugging a hairpiece into place on the crown of his naked head. The periwig, light brown and curly, reached just below his shoulders.

“Well?” he asked, flipping the luxuriant hair with the back of one of his hands. “Not at all like a Sopus, is it? More like a European.”

William nodded slowly. The man looked as though a shaggy billy goat had crawled atop his skull.

Lightning leaned toward him conspiratorially. “I know you won’t say a word about all this, because you ain’t the talking type.” He had a good laugh over that.

Then, quite unexpectedly, he was off like a panther down the rocky cliffside, wig hair flapping like a pennant, disappearing into the late afternoon woods. He left William alone, unshackled, alive. The boy couldn’t understand it. But then, nothing Lightning did made any sense.

When William was sure the Crease was gone, he opened his left hand, the one that clutched the finger. Around the slim bone rattled the heavy gold signet ring, a large “WT” initialed on its bezel.

“William Turner,” the boy said out loud.

A
fter another exhausting day of wandering alone, Visser approached, with a measure of relief, his own home, in a private lane off Long Street near the East River land port. Anna would have dinner for him. Loud and rambunctious as they were, the children would manage to soothe his jangled nerves. He would nuzzle the Bean and be renewed.

Lately, his family had been staying more and more with him in his ramshackle dwelling-house. He no longer saw the need for the propriety of sending them up to Corlaers Hook each evening. Propriety, for him, had vanished behind that secret door in the sprawling dwelling-house of his patron.

Good Friday. Or perhaps it might already be Holy Saturday. The days merged together for Visser. The drumbeat sounded so often, calling the colonists to worship in this sacred season, that he was unsure what day it actually was.

In High Street he passed the ragged artist Emily Stavings. He had always meant to ask her who had organized the appalling fright-lantern show of Christmas Eve. The paintings projected were clearly hers. No one else in the colony was capable of executing anything nearly so handsome.

But Visser passed Stavings by without stopping. In all his recent wanderings he determinedly avoided speaking to people, if at all possible. He had cut many good citizens that way, people he once accorded his friends.

He trudged up the short rise in the lane that led to his door. His domicile, a fantastic warren of additions, chambers and sagging hallways, shone with a welcoming glow in the springtime dark.

“Anna!” he called upon entering. “Children!”

No one at home.

Flee
, Visser thought.
All is discovered
. The
schout
and the director general would be in his chambers, asking, “When did you first discover the bloody clothes of the murdered orphans?” “What was your involvement?” And, “Why did you say nothing about it?”