The Orphanmaster (50 page)

“Very,” Drummond said. He had not seen Ad close up, he realized, since his visit to the Hendrickson patent the previous fall. The man looked precisely the same. Thin, bony body types often appeared ageless.

“You get a breeze off the water here,” Ad said.

“Yes,” Drummond said. “May I offer you a plug?” He pushed a tray toward Hendrickson that had shreds of tobacco piled on it. A fine-flavored batch up from Virginia, very smooth.

“Don’t mind,” Ad said, took some, and lit up.

A long silence. What the devil? Drummond thought.

“You take these as your own chambers now,” Ad said, gesturing around the room.

“Oh, no,” Drummond said. “I merely meet my solicitor here once or twice a week, preparing my defense.”

“He is not here,” Ad said.

“No,” Drummond said. “Not today.” His solicitor was Kenneth Clarke, a strange, uncertain Englishman, recommended by Raeger. The opening of the proceeding was repeatedly delayed. The imposition of an English trial on the Dutch justice system complicated the process. Drummond had begun to think he would never get his chance to be hanged as a spy.

“Then you take these as your chambers now,” Ad said again.

Mentally, Drummond threw up his hands. “Yes, I guess you could say that.”

“And how is your defense developing?”

“We won’t know until we get in front of a jury,” Drummond said.

“A jury,” Ad said, a trace of a sneer in his voice. “I never saw the use of them myself. Wouldn’t a citizen court be open to suasion and bribery? What is wrong with a punishment tribunal?”

“Well, since the last punishment tribunal I came before sentenced me to hang by the neck until dead, I would have to disagree respectfully by preferring a jury trial this time around.”

He’d just about had enough of Ad Hendrickson. Drummond had papers to shuffle and pipes to smoke. Whatever it was the patroon was getting around to, he was taking too long to do it.

“Would ye like an acquittal?” Ad said.

“Ah, a tough question. Would I rather be acquitted than hung? Let me think on that. Uh, yes.”

“I mean, would ye like an acquittal?” Ad said.

The man was obtuse, or senile. Then the light suddenly dawned on Drummond.

“You mean…?”

“I could arrange for an acquittal,” Ad said.

Drummond had the sense of Hendrickson well enough not to ask him how he might manage such a thing. He had lived his whole life around people of power. They were magicians. They could accomplish feats that other mortals could not comprehend, and do it in ways that remained unknown, dissembled, mysterious.

In a barnyard in Cumbria as an ensign on a Scottish campaign, Drummond had an opportunity, during a stretch of idleness, to observe the behavior of the farm animals kept in captivity there.

The pigs were always the most intelligent, most industrious, most ambitious of the stock. They were always finding a way to escape their pens. They would dig under, dismantle, go over any fence presented to them. Ensign Drummond had to laugh at the passive, dim-witted sheep, who watched the pigs at their furious work. The sheep would stupidly stare, munching on their shoots of grass. Why, whatever could Master Hog be doing over there?

Later, when Drummond got to know the ways of powerful men, he thought of the pigs and sheep in the Cumbrian barnyard. Those in power, the pigs, performed spectacular machinations that the citizenry, the sheep, could only look upon and wonder.

“Do you wish payment for this service?” Drummond asked Hendrickson.

“Pish,” Ad said. “I have more money than you could ever dream on, Mister Drummond.”

“Then what could I possibly do for you?”

“Leave this colony entirely,” Ad said. “Take your wife and your brood, go home to England, go to Virginia or up to Canadee-i-o for all I care. I will sponsor your leave-taking if I must, but I wish you to quit this jurisdiction and never return.”

No vehemence informed Hendrickson’s tone. He was cold but not angry.

Drummond had a quick vision of Martyn Hendrickson, hounding him and Blandine on the ice-flat river, flung into the freezing waters and drowned.

“You blame me for your brother’s death,” Drummond said.

“I simply want you gone,” Ad said. He rose, tapped his pipe bowl into the tray and pushed the smoldering ashes flat. “I’ll give you a few days to think about it. Has the trial date been set?”

“Next week, now, the director general believes. Soon, anyway.”

“Out from the noose, into a new life elsewhere,” Ad said. “If you consider it well, Mister Drummond, I know you will take my offer. But don’t wait too long.”

He knocked on the table sharply with his knuckles and went out. Drummond stared at the empty doorway as if it would reveal secrets. He was a sheep, wondering at the unfathomable activities of a pig. Ad Hendrickson had left behind a curious sense that Drummond could feel but not quite put his finger on. Then, suddenly, it came to him.

Drummond did not much play chess. But what had just happened with Ad Hendrickson had the uncanny flavor, he thought, of an endgame.

M
addie the dog had disappeared. Sometimes the Bean thought she missed Maddie more than Pow. Other times she thought she missed Pow more than Maddie.

She had dreams. Her saying to Pow, “You’ve come back, Pow!” Or her saying to Maddie, “Here you are, girl! Here you are!”

It made her feel sad, since Maddie and Pow went away at the same time. Jan told the Bean that Mister Visser took Maddie to heaven with him, and the Bean wondered who Mister Visser was until Jan told her it was Pow. That was better. Pow and Maddie together somewhere nice.

A big girl now, turning four in August. August sixteenth, though she had trouble saying it because of the lisp, and everyone laughed at her when she did. A little girl with a lisp should have an easier birthday, such as May fourth, something like that.

When the Bean walked with Blandine around the settlement, at times she heard a dog barking and thought it was Maddie. Once, when she passed the big looming house on Market Street, just before she got to where the play-pit used to be but now where their new house was going up, up, up, the Bean heard Maddie bark and saw her, too. A flash of white fluff glimpsed through an iron fence all the way in the back garden. There and then gone.

No one listened to her when she said Maddie was there. Jan told her that there were a lot of white dogs. Miss Blandina instructed Sabine to hurry and catch up because they had to go talk to Jacobson the carpenter.

But the Bean felt sure. She knew her own dog, despite what everyone said. One day she would go back to the garden of the big house and find Maddie herself.

“What do ye use the stuff for?” Kees Bayard asked Ad Hendrickson.

He had personally delivered to the Hendrickson brothers a smelly round tar-ball wrapped in a crumbling palm leaf and secured with a length of straw twine. It had come via Amsterdam from far-off Batavia,
on Kees’s flute ship,
De Gulden Arent
, the Golden Eagle, the only vessel he had left since his recent reversals.

“Rheumatism,” Ham Hendrickson said.

“You look fine to me,” Kees said.

“Bent double with it half the time,” Ham said, sitting perfectly upright.

Kees suspected that the “poppy tears” opium tar he delivered to the Hendricksons was being put to use not as an analgesic but for decadent purposes. The whole Hendrickson dwelling-house smelled of it, a pungent incense that reminded Kees of the spice islands of East Asia.

On those islands, most especially in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch colony of Java, the practice of blending poppy tears into tobacco and smoking the resulting admixture had produced legions of hollow-eyed stumblers. They ranged through the streets of Batavia like ghosts. The smokers indulged to excess. They appeared to Kees to have no sense of restraint.

From his trips to East Asia, Kees knew what an opium user looked like, and neither Ad nor Ham qualified. Yet the chambers of the enormous house on Market Street reeked of the stuff. No one else lived there. Ad and Ham shut themselves off from the world. Kees could not figure it out.

He did not enjoy his visits to the Hendrickson mansion. The brothers lived in squalor. They appeared servantless. Objects, clothing and possessions lay in vast, scattered piles in every chamber. Stale, dried-out dog feces trailed through the halls, though no animal was apparent.

In the
groot kamer
where Kees normally met with Ad, silver plates stacked up, crusted with the remains of food. When the brothers grew sick of dirty crockery they merely tossed it out the window into the yard. The only element that kept the Hendrickson place from smelling like a garbage dump was the floating aroma of opium.

It was not his place to wonder why. The previous February, a timely infusion of funds from Ad Hendrickson had saved Kees Bayard’s trading empire from ruin. In return for his investment, as well as a killing level of interest, Ad demanded Kees deliver him occasional packets of opium. Kees felt he had no choice but to oblige his creditor.

Adverse luck dogged Kees. Not one but two of his flute ships went down in wrecks, both fully loaded with merchandise. He lost his prized
charger, Fantome, in a gambling reversal. Married life did not agree with him. Mrs. Maaje Bayard, as far as he could tell, was simply a hole down which to pitch money.

The woman was a fool. Kees Bayard had married a fool. He could not believe it of himself, but there it was. He sorely missed Blandine, and fantasized about what a life with her would have been like.

And yet Kees believed Blandine herself was the author of his sour fortune. As his ships sank and his trading failed and he found hair coming off his head in great clumps, he harbored a secret conviction. He didn’t tell anyone, not even his new spouse. But what they had said about Blandine van Couvering really was true. She was a witch, and she had cursed Kees Bayard out of spite over their failed romance.

Kees rose to his feet to signal that his business with Ad was done.

“When you send
The Golden Eagle
over, we’ll take another one of these,” Ad said, pushing at the wrapped ball of opium with his finger.

Kees left, and Ad took out a pouch of Virginia tobacco. He opened the packet of poppy tears by slicing the palm-leaf wrapping with a penknife. With the knife’s small blade he cut off a dozen small slivers of the opium tar. Then, on the oak tabletop, he carefully mixed the tar with the tobacco.

“You baby him,” Ham said, watching the whole process with open disgust. “Waste of good leaf as far as I am concerned.”

“It’s the only way to keep him in our pocket,” Ad said. “Would ye rather have him running around Judas knows where doing Judas knows what?”

In the curtained and muffled best chamber at the back of the house’s second floor, Ad entered to deliver Martyn his dose. Brother Martyn slept much of the day. He reclined on a plump but filthy mattress, the hanging drapes around the bed in disarray. A half-full chamber pot balanced precariously among the bedclothes.

Some sort of fly-specked offal rotted on a plate, a child’s red kerchief folded neatly on top of it.

Martyn coughed, nodding, to acknowledge Ad’s approach. He clutched the apparatus of his opium smoking, which he took not in the
Dutch style, with a long-stemmed clay pipe, but in a bell-shaped brass bowl imported from Batavia.

Last Easter night Martyn had stumbled home to his siblings, displaying a gunshot wound to his side, bleeding and near death. Ad and Ham nursed their baby brother, keeping him out of sight, exiling servants and shunning outsiders. After all, in the eyes of the community, Martyn was already dead.

“You can’t kill a dead man,” Ham told Ad, somewhat nonsensically, Ad thought.

Martyn’s wound had healed by now. The danger of infection passed. But the tonic he started during his convalescence wholly took him over. The little white dog Martyn always kept with him lay on the bed, its fur matted and dirty. The room smelled of opium and dog piss.

“I’ll get up,” Martyn said. But he rarely did.

When he wasn’t sleeping, Martyn was subject to fits of volcanic anger. If Ad failed to provide opium or suggested he go easy on the drug, Martyn went berserk. He cursed his brothers, they that only loved him. Ad and Ham were deeply hurt by the language of these outbursts.

“I hate the two of you!” was the mildest of Martyn’s imprecations. “I’ll see you both dead!”

Hard as the elder Hendricksons worked to keep Martyn corralled, hidden and off the streets, he occasionally succeeded in slipping out. Always at night, always alone. His brothers never knew where he went. They were equally convinced that they did not want to know.

Whenever she could, Blandine avoided encountering Kees Bayard on the streets of the settlement. She did this not out of spite, but because her presence seemed to excite the man, sending him rambling into self-conscious, tic-ridden conversation about how well his trades were going.

Blandine knew the truth. Her old friend faced disaster. But their friendship came out of another time. Kees wasn’t real to her anymore. She wondered what she had ever seen in him.

She dodged Kees in public, but she was very interested in the goings-on of the Hendrickson mansion. The face of Martyn Hendrickson
still floated in her mind’s eye every once in a while. Before he died, Blandine felt sure that she was getting closer to the truth about the man. The idea haunted her even now. The dead patroon ventured into her dreams at night.

An ominous feeling passed over Blandine whenever she walked by the brothers’ house. Ad and Ham, her soon-to-be near-neighbors, never displayed themselves in the sprawling yards and orchards on their grounds. The plantings grew up thick with weeds. It looked as though wilderness had reasserted its sway in the gardens, entering into the vacuum that came of disuse.

Blandine was not alone. The Hendrickson place was slowly gaining the reputation of something of a spook house among the children and the gossips of the settlement. The orphan boys of the High Street Gang ventured onto the property only on a dare.