The Orphanmaster (47 page)

Thus began the alliance of the Coney Boys and the High Street Gang.

Blandine’s rooms had the same lost-in-time air that Drummond’s displayed. Lace and Mally were in to restore order after the searches of the witchcraft tribunal, and during the mistress’s exile up north they continued to come, at Antony’s insistence, to keep the place tidy.

Miss Blandina would return, Antony always thought. Things would go back to the way they were before.

When Blandine did come back, she knew nothing would reverse time. “I don’t want to stay here,” she murmured, as she and Edward passed through her cold, empty chamber. Dusk had fallen. They lit candles, but the light only weakly pushed back the dark.

“We said we would stay the night at mine,” Drummond said.

“I want to go everywhere with you,” she said. They embraced. “London, Batavia, the Barbados.”

“
Cain-tuck-kee
,” Drummond said.

Blandine laughed and nodded. “Yes!
Cain-tuck-kee.
We’ll open the first entrepôt west of the mountains.”

“I’m told you hold a plot of land up in Beverwyck,” he said.

“I do!” she said, smiling.

“First things first,” Drummond said. “Get your things together and we’ll go home.”

“It won’t take long,” Blandine said.

“Let me go across and see if Raeger is at the Lion,” Drummond said. He left her alone.

In her
groot kamer
, Blandine fingered the things she left behind. The scattered items seemed alien to her, as though they belonged to another woman altogether. The gowns, scarves, linens, combs, pins, slippers, tabards looked helpless, forlorn, disowned. She decided she didn’t need any of it. How we weigh ourselves down!

But a small curio that Aet Visser had given her, a scrimshaw figurine he got off a ship captain, that she would keep. Blandine wondered it was not confiscated as evidence when the witch-hunters searched through her rooms.

If she had but gazed outside the casement window of her
kamer
, Blandine would have seen a figure standing, staring in. She busied herself packing. The masked shadow floated closer. Towering, spectral. If there hadn’t been a wall and a window separating them, she would have smelled the Devil.

And indeed, she sensed the beast before she saw it. A prickly sensation at the back of her neck forced her to turn and look.

The witika.

“Edward?” Blandine whispered. But Drummond was gone.

The figure outside moved. With an eye still on the window, Blandine looked hurriedly around the great room. Her muff pistol, she thought. Where was her fox-fur muff? Back at Drummond’s.

The cloaked shape mounted the steps from the yard, swung open the door and stepped into the room facing Blandine. She could not grasp how enormous the witika was. It stood filling the room, the top of its vacant-eyed deerskin mask practically grazing the ceiling. No man was that tall. No man was eight or nine feet, not even Antony.

Blandine made a move to flee, heading for the doorway that led out onto Pearl Street, but at the same moment Lightning crashed into the room from that direction.

As he reeled past Blandine, the half-indian grabbed her hair. She shouted with the pain of it. The two of them staggered across the floor and slammed into the opposite wall. The witika loomed beside them.

Lightning held a blade to Blandine’s throat.

Drummond rushed in after Lightning with two cocked pistols, one in each hand. He fired at the witika, the boom sounding enormous in the closed room, the muzzle flash brilliant. White, sulfurous smoke filled the air.

“Drop your pistol!” Lightning shouted. He drew the dull spine of his knife across Blandine’s neck as a threat, then reasserted the sharpened blade so hard that the pressure drew drops of blood. His lavish wig trailed down to swing over Blandine’s face.

Drummond could not get a clear shot. In view of the knife at Blandine’s neck, he let his unfired weapon fall to the floor.

The witika had unaccountably vanished in the smoke. Dead? Fallen? Disappeared?

“Now you—” Lightning began, but Antony hurtled into the room, bellowing past the disarmed Drummond to tackle the half-indian. Thrown back, Lightning released Blandine, but turned his knife on the giant, stabbing Antony deeply in the chest, pounding away with his blade. Antony’s huge body bent at the waist and collapsed.

Blandine picked up Drummond’s pistol and shot Lightning in the head, sending him instantly to the floor. His wig lay in bloody disarray, with his scalping scar once again visible. A great gout of blood fountained out from the middle of the crease, where the ball Blandine fired had bored a smoking hole.

G
overning such a contentious jurisdiction as New Netherland put the director general in mind of Julius Caesar, felled like a dog by multiple stab wounds on the floor of the Roman Senate. Stuyvesant likewise felt himself under assault on all sides. His foes were always evident, and every friend eventually revealed himself only as the wearer of an affable mask, hiding an enemy within.

This morning, the news from Long Island, bad. The Dutch towns of the west end were forcibly taken by Connecticut. The news from the northland, bad. The Massachusetts Bay Colony asserted its claim to all country north of the forty-second parallel of latitude. Fort Orange and Beverwyck fell into that territory, as well as a huge portion of the Hendrickson patent.

And now, this. His
schout
had arranged the audience.

Appearing before the director general in his chamber at the Stadt Huys, the accused witch Van Couvering, the English spy Drummond and a young male-child with a fantastic story to tell. Or not to tell, since every indication had it that the boy was mute.

His name was Jan Arendt, but he had been masquerading as a servant-ward of the Godbolts named William Turner.

“
Mijn Heer
General, the case is complicated by the fact that the Godbolts seem to have disappeared,” De Klavier said.

“What do you mean?” Stuyvesant demanded.

“Their dwelling-house is empty, they themselves, the father, George, and the mother, Rebecca, all their children, are not to be found.”

“Don’t be obtuse,
schout
,” Stuyvesant said. “Find them.”

“I have searched, and I regret to say that I have not been successful,” De Klavier said. “There are some indications they decamped during the night, abandoning many of their possessions.”

“Where did they go?”

“Rhode Island, my sources tell me,” De Klavier said. “Providence.”

Of course, the director general thought. They’d take anyone up there
in that open sewer of a colony, thieves, misfits, traitors. Providence was a sink into which all the dregs of the new world ran.

Godbolt. The director general had begun to count on the man. He appeared to be God-fearing and trustworthy. Stuyvesant had made him a friend, an ally.

“Et tu?”
he murmured to himself. The only thing Godbolt left behind, evidently, was the knife in the director general’s back.

And the child. “Who is this boy?”

“A Godbolt ward,” De Klavier said. “An orphan.”

Stuyvesant felt like seizing his head and pulling out a few strands of his rapidly graying hair. Orphans! He was beset by them, bedeviled, hounded! What had he done against them? How could they, the lowest of the low, bring down the director general of a great colony? He felt like the man who stuck his head in a
bijenkorf
, a beehive, stung all around.

De Klavier pushed Jan Arendt forward and the orphan boy laid his grisly little find in front of Stuyvesant. Bleached-out human finger bones, adorned, if that was the word, by a signet ring.

“It seems—this is difficult,
Mijn Heer
General,” De Klavier stammered. “Godbolt seems to have committed a fraud. He replaced a ward of his, William Turner, with this one here, whose real name is Jan Arendt.”

Stuyvesant sighed. “George Godbolt did this. Who I recently elevated to the post of
burgomeester
. One of the Nine.”

“Yes,
Mijn Heer
General.”

“Why?”

“The original orphan boy William Turner was victim of the witika, or rather, of Aet Visser—” De Klavier began. He faltered.

Edward Drummond spoke up. “There was an inheritance involved,” he said.

The director general turned a cold eye on the man, wondering that he had the temerity to show up in his audience chamber. In the messages confiscated from Drummond’s rooms, Stuyvesant had decoded the Englisher’s opinions of him. Vile, hurtful sentiments, cynical in the extreme.

No one saw the good, they saw only the bad.

“William Turner had expectations of good money from his family in England,” De Klavier said. “George Godbolt wished to be executor
of that estate. When he lost William Turner, he faced losing control of thousands of English pounds. So he sought another supposititious child to take the young heir’s place.”

“Fantastic,” Stuyvesant said. The evil of which his fellow humans were capable should have long ago ceased to amaze him, yet once again, he found himself amazed.

“And this… relic,” he said, gesturing to the finger, which pointed back toward him accusingly.

“We have not been able to retrace the path to where this boy Jan says he discovered it,” De Klavier said. They had searched the rocky outcroppings farther north on the island, but found nothing as bizarre as a cave full of bones.

“
Mijn Heer
General, we wish to adopt the boy,” Blandine van Couvering said, speaking for the first time. “The lack of an orphanmaster in the colony has thrown issues of guardianship into confusion. So we came directly to your excellency to petition for relief. We know the boy. Mister Drummond, Edward, has had him in to work for him. We will take him under our care and give him our name.”

Stuyvesant thought about the nasty business of the recent violence in Blandine van Couvering’s rooms. A man killed, another stabbed. Riot and anarchy. The lady seemed positively to attract disorder. The suicide of Aet Visser had mooted the witika witchcraft accusations against her, but the director general still believed that she was, as the book of Job said, born unto trouble, as sparks fly upward.

“You are betrothed, I hear,” he said.

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Blandine said.

The union of a spy and a witch, Stuyvesant thought, appalled.
O tempora, o mores!
The manners and behaviors of his colonists made the director general shudder. If God did not call fire down upon the sinful inhabitants of New Amsterdam, then apologies were owed to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, since this settlement outdid them in wickedness.

But after all that, one could not say otherwise but that Miss van Couvering graced the colony with her beauty. His nephew, Kees, had been a fool to lose her. The finest example of Dutch womanhood, yet she set herself against the director general and his kin. Why?

Well, Stuyvesant needed a new orphanmaster, since his last one hung himself for reasons depraved and unaccountable. Van Couvering would now no doubt be exonerated at her ecclesiastical trial. Perhaps she could be fully rehabilitated. An orphanmistress? It had never been done before.

“You realize that you might be marrying a condemned man,” the director general said. He could not get himself to say Drummond’s name. “This person’s trial has yet to be conducted.”

De Klavier said, “The director general has graciously assented to empanel a special jury for Mister Drummond, in the English manner.”

“I am optimistic,
Mijn Heer
General,” Blandine said.

“And you, sir,” Stuyvesant said to Drummond, “you are a killer of king-killers? One of the Earl of Clarendon’s men?”

“I’m an Englishman,” Drummond said.

“Yes, you are,” Stuyvesant sneered, showing his disgust.

He slapped both hands on the table in front of him. What did it matter? Jan Arendt or William Turner? What did he care? He had more pressing matters to which to attend. He had wasted too much time on this foolishness as it was.

“You, boy,” he said to the orphan. “I guess we should call you not William but Jan. Do you wish to be taken in by this lady and this gentleman?”

Jan nodded solemnly.

Returning from his terrifying adventure at the bone-filled cave, after having been absent from the Godbolt household for two full days, including Easter itself, Jan had been Bible-beaten to within an inch of his life by Rebecca. He stood it as long as he could, and then he spoke up.

“I know what happened to William,” he stammered out.

Rebecca arrested herself mid-swing, the Good Book balanced above her head. She stared down at the child she had been abusing.

“George?” she called out, her voice faltering. She had never heard the boy speak before. Was it a miracle? Or devilry?

“I know that he is dead,” Jan said. “I know that I am not he. My name is Jan.”

William the Silent no more.

He spoke up in Stuyvesant’s audience chamber now, trembling ever so slightly in front of the intimidating man with the false leg.

“I wish to go with Mister Drummond and Miss Blandina,” he said, loud enough for all to hear. “My name is Jan Drummond now.”

The stars of the dogwood flowers along the canal burst out. The cherry and apple trees in New Amsterdam gardens bloomed with a pink-white tinge. Blandine van Couvering and Edward Drummond pledged their marriage vows on a springtime day made glorious by love, bright skies and the bubbling aroma of fresh-fried doughnuts.

The first of May, warm and clear. Colony matrons, having gone about well-laced and bundled up for the long cold months of winter, felt moved to strip off their stockings, hike up their skirts and let the soft breeze play against their skin. They leaned back on their
stoeps
, twiddling their toes and enjoying the sunshine. Their men, locked in the unending battle of existence, eyed the bare legs of their goodly wives and had thoughts of matters other than profit and loss.

The feast laid out in the backyard of Blandine’s dwelling-house displayed all the bounty the colony had to offer. Doughnuts, yes, steaming hot and plunged in Barbados sugar. And also meats, confections, beverages and desserts.