The Orphanmaster (45 page)

He had a brandy bottle hidden in a cubby in the vestibule, and he fortified himself with that before he went inside. As he passed into the great room, he stopped cold.

The
schout
did not lie in wait. Nor Petrus Stuyvesant.

Sitting in Visser’s parlor chair was the dead man.

Martyn Hendrickson.

Resurrected. He looked paler than normal, blue-lipped, as though the cold of the North River still hung on him.

“Ah, Visser, you’ve come at last,” Hendrickson said, his wet boots steaming from the heat of the hearth.

“You are dead,” Visser stammered.

“It’s Eastertime!” Martyn declared, laughing. “He is risen!”

Opposite to Martyn, in the matching hearthside chair, sat Lightning. Held tightly in the half-indian’s lap was Visser’s little fur ball of a dog, Maddie.

Lightning wore not his customary ancient hat of collapsed black felt, normally forever affixed to his head, tied in place by a scarf in winter and a piece of rope in summer. It was indeed strange to see him out of it, so identified had he become with its display.

Instead, the half-breed wore the most outlandish periwig Visser had ever seen, a curly monstrosity that would have been right at home in Fontainebleau.

But Visser had no thought of Lightning. Not right at that moment.

Sitting on Martyn’s lap, fussing contentedly with a lace ribbon, was the Bean.

“
Guten abend
, Pow-Pow,” Sabine said.
“Wie gehts?”
She barely looked at him, so caught up she was in her ruffle.

Martyn, on the other hand, stared at him fixedly.

“Well?” Martyn said. “You’ve been asking around about us, haven’t you? Poking your fat red nose into our business. And here we are.”

With a kind of marveling pride, Martyn revealed the story of his resurrection. How Fantome had struggled to gain purchase on the edge of the crumbling ice, which kept breaking away under the horse’s hooves. How the heroic charger finally managed to haul itself up on the firm, frozen surface.

And how Martyn himself, submerged for a good ten minutes beneath
the water of the North River, had been dragged out by the stallion only because his body was tangled in the traces. He lay more dead than alive when Lightning, rushing up the river on a run, discovered him.

But the icy water shut down Martyn’s body. His blood retreated to his brain, keeping it nourished. And by a miracle Lightning was able to revive him in front of a fire at the Place of Stones, a half hour after Martyn died in the river. The half-indian conducted the corpselike body home to the big house on Market Street, where Martyn’s brothers, Ad and Ham, further thawed him out and kept him away from the eyes of the world.

“Jesus did not do better with Lazarus,” Martyn said, reaching across to slap Lightning on the knee. “And look! In return the good Lord granted our handsome friend a full wealth of hair.”

“Sabine,” Visser said. “Come to Pow.”

The child, still fixated on her bit of lace, obediently began to squirm off Martyn’s lap. He held her back.

“I think not,” Martyn said, smooching at the Bean’s neck. “She is a cherry so delicate it must be plucked only with the lips.”

“I warn you, Martyn—” Visser began, but Lightning rose abruptly to his feet. Maddie fell to the floor with a yelp.

“I need to know one thing,” Martyn said. “And you will tell it to me straight off.”

He stared, his eyes boring into those of the orphanmaster. Visser dropped his gaze. “I want to know where that fucker Edward Drummond is, and his whore Blandine van Couvering.”

Blandine and Edward rode south on the Post Road toward New Amsterdam.

The morning sun woke flights of bluebirds, fat buds at the ends of tree branches and the gentle exhalations of spring. The vast highland valley of the North River lay before them, most of its trees still denuded by winter. But if you looked at the hillsides slantwise, Blandine noticed, you could catch the first hint of yellow-green. The sloppy trail spattered her gown and Drummond’s doublet with mud.

“Do we know what day this is?”

“No,” Drummond said.

“It may be Easter Sunday,” Blandine said.

“Aye,” Drummond said.

They were riding into a trap. Either that, or the messages that reached them through Kitane were true.

In New Amsterdam, and in New Netherland as a whole, the political winds had shifted. The estrangement of the Dutch citizenry from their director general, thrown into high relief by the Battle of the Red Lion (Raeger capitalized it thus), had recently become complete. An increasingly marginalized and desperate Stuyvesant turned to the English residents of the colony for support.

To curry favor with them, the director general promised Drummond a new trial. A proper English jury trial, it was said, independent from government influence, six men brave and true.

As for Miss Blandina [Raeger wrote], she is guaranteed a full ecclesiastical hearing. The witika fever in the settlement has cooled somewhat, though an Africanus orphan disappeared this spring. Some say this is proof positive of Miss Blandina’s innocence, that the witika struck again when she was gone. Come home, you two, and we’ll kick over the tables and haul down the staircases once again. This place makes no sense without you.

They debated.

“We can’t stay in this fairy castle forever,” Blandine said.

“We can’t?” Edward said.

They took the Post Road south at the first melt. The chorale of spring peepers sounded in the low wet marshes at the side of the trail, the insistent song of the immature little frogs swelling to such a volume that it became almost alarming.

Blandine, at least, did not look overly happy about heading home. Drummond thought it was more than her worry over an uncertain reception at the other end of their journey.

“You are ill at ease,” he said. “I used to see you this way often, but…”

“Not lately,” Blandine said.

“No, not lately,” Edward said. “Lately you’ve seemed content.”

He wondered if he should hazard a guess. “You are upset with the two of us,” he said. “You think that by our time away from New Amsterdam we have shirked our commitment to ferreting out the truth of these murders.”

“For our own pleasure,” Blandine said.

“And putting aside the fact that if we had stayed in the capital, we would have both been executed.”

“Hmmn,” Blandine murmured, as if it were a small thing.

Drummond said, “It is not like we haven’t been thinking about the killings.”

“Like worrying a bad tooth,” Blandine said.

“And what are your thoughts? If not Aet Visser, who? Who would you propose?” They had been over and over this, increasingly so in the past few days, since their decision to return to the capital.

“In my dark moments, I think it is all of them.”

“All?”

“A whole cabal,” Blandine said. “The director general and his nephew. George Godbolt and Aet Visser and Martyn Hendrickson and every damn well-fed burgher in the settlement. I see them get together for a kind of horrible children-killing sport.”

Edward looked at Blandine oddly. “I hope your dark moments are few,” he said.

A face peered out from the recesses of Blandine’s mind, its outline becoming clearer and clearer. A handsome face. She wasn’t sure, and would not want to say the name before she was certain.

Raeger survived the Battle of the Red Lion and emerged a hero to the rebellious Dutch populace. He sent a sloop to meet Drummond and Blandine at the Tappan Zee, where the river ice had broken up enough to allow travel by water. The ship couldn’t take the horses, so they hobbled them and would send a groom up for them later.

“Aye, Easter it is,” said their captain, Jeremy Stroose, when they asked after the day as they boarded
The Republic
on the morning of their rendezvous.

“Good of you to come on a holiday Sabbath,” Drummond said.

“Oh, this river’s my church,” Stroose said. He swung the sloop out among the ice floes of the middle channel.

Soon, visible along the North River shore of Manhattan Island, came the familiar
bouweries
and Company farms, the reed beds where the Mahican canoes had long ago been beached, a fleeting glimpse of Little Angola. Blandine felt herself gripped with a sharp pang of missing Antony.

They passed the boundary of New Amsterdam, marked by the palisade wall, after which there appeared in quick succession the Company gardens, the fort, the gallows.

“I guess the director general has been busy,” Drummond said grimly.

A body hung in the gibbet.

High tide. Stroose had an offshore wind and brought them in close to the settlement, cutting alongside the shoreline, the sloop throwing off white froth from the prow, dashing at the waves as though its inanimate timbers could feel joy.

“Oh, my God,” Blandine said, staring at the hanged man, swinging at the end of the rope just a dozen rods away from them.

Blandine recognized the body. She moaned and dropped to her knees.

As the town drums beat the glad tidings of Easter, Aet Visser wandered far from the church meeting-hall, along the wall at the northern limit of the settlement. He traversed the street below the palisade several times without noticing just where he was.

At one corner, he encountered Tibb Dunbar. The ragamuffin froze upon seeing Visser. A quick moment passed between them. The boy he knew as Gypsy Davey recognized who the orphanmaster was. And Visser saw a look of naked fear cross the orphan’s face.

“No, Davey, no,” Visser murmured, reaching out. But the boy ran, vanishing into a walk between two dwelling-houses along the wall. Visser leaned up against an orchard fence and wept.

His own chicks feared him. He had let them down. In his soul, it was as if he carried with him an immense stone, a weight so heavy it threatened to force him to the ground, drag his body into the earth, send him straight down into a fire-and-brimstone netherworld.

He had kept his mouth shut about his own complicity in horrendous crimes. A voice inside him would shout,
But you didn’t realize! Your complicity was mitigated by your ignorance!

Visser provided Martyn with the orphans of New Amsterdam. He received money for the service. But he had done so with the best of intentions, thinking to place his wards as servants in the many Hendrickson holdings. He had no way of knowing what their fate would be.

He had beaten back his suspicions and entered into a foolish delusion, accepting the strange nightmare of indian demons and supernatural murder as an explanation for the events that had late afflicted the colony.

Why? He was a coward. Since childhood he had been yellow, a character flaw that he had tried and failed to correct. Trembling before authority, being swayed by convenience, physically unable to face fear, going along to get along. Ugh! How life had dirtied him!

But that wasn’t it, was it?

The reason for his silence did not come truly home to him until he saw his three-year-old darling sitting in the lap of the monster, Martyn Hendrickson. He would do anything to save the Bean from ruin. Anything at all, even pretend ignorance toward evil.

His crimes had to be laid against that tally: the Bean, kept safe and happy, maintaining her existence of innocent joy. Visser was her bulwark. If the world ever knew of his involvement in the witika business, Sabine would be tarred with his brush. He would take on the sins of the world in order that she remain unsullied.

Contemplating these dark, desperate thoughts, Visser wandered through the colony, unaware of his surroundings, down across the parade ground, around the fort, past the
moolens
, to arrive inexplicably at the foot of the town gallows.

It had often happened like that. Visser would trudge all day long, avoiding all eyes, unmoored, wandering like Odysseus, only to find himself drawn again and again to the gibbet.

It had become an object of fascination for him. The wind from the bay blew strong here at the edge of the shore, bringing the smell of the sea, somehow fresh and decayed all at once.

At his back, the
moolens
spun ceaselessly, creaking out the message that, so said Dutch tradition, the noise of their turning made:
work harder, work harder
. In counterpoint to the stern Calvinist squeak of the windmills, the seals populating the rocks off the island’s point barked joyfully.

The gallows structure itself had been constructed for hard service, built to last out of island oak harvested from the great stands that greeted the colonists when they first arrived. The wrights framed in massive eight-by-eight beams, crossed with nailed-down two-inch-thick milled planks, creating something like a civic monument. Looming above the structure, blocking any view of the settlement to the east, the ramparts of the fort.

The mechanism of the trapdoor in particular intrigued Visser. He took repeated tours underneath the apparatus, marking the hinges and the throw-chock, which connected upward to the hangman’s handle.

The thirteen steps (Visser had counted them many times), likewise sturdy, rose from a stone landing laid at the platform’s south side. Thirteen being the traditional number, as were the nine loops of the knot that tied the noose. The business end of the hangman’s handle, visible on the platform beside the square outline of the trapdoor, was worn from use to a fine, smooth finish.

The director general liked to leave the rope in place as a symbolic caution to sinners. Occasionally, during his darker moods, Visser slipped the noose around his neck. Just to try it out. Just to see how it felt. He imagined that the rough hemp coils smelled of the condemned.

A long parade of prisoners had marched here. Mount platform stairs, step, step, step (thirteen times), cross planks, bow head to accept noose, last words, hood slipped down, darkness, drop, sudden wrenching snap, silence.

On this morning, the bright joyous day of Easter renewal just beginning, Visser could hear the barely audible strains of the congregation, singing hymns in the meeting-hall of the Reformed Church inside the fort. A solo air. A psalmody. Then Visser recognized the ancient Dutch hymn: