The Orphanmaster (53 page)

The militiamen hefted Drummond, still bound, onto the trestle. One of them, a corporal, leapt up beside him to adjust the noose around his neck.

De Klavier was there, standing below, looking up. “Does the condemned wish to be hooded, or to be given a bowl of tobacco?”

“No to the blindfold,” Drummond said. “Yes to the tobacco.”

“Get on with it!” Stuyvesant barked. But De Klavier merely carefully lighted a pipe and handed it up to the corporal, who placed it to Drummond’s lips.

What could be more delicious than a last lungful of Virginia
brightleaf? The August sun shone down. He heard shouts, cries, the echoing music of human voices. Through the open gates of the fort, Drummond could see the blue waters of the bay sparkle and heave.

The corporal jumped down from the trestle.

Edward again had thoughts of Blandine.

T
he letter left to Blandine by Visser was marked, on the outside envelope, with the words
URGENT, FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY
.

The request evidently went unheeded by Eberhard Luybeck. Its author had been dead now for more than four months.

Blandine repaired to Drummond’s rooms on Slyck Steegh to open it.

April 14, 1664

My dearest Blandine,

By the time you read this I will have taken myself far, far away. That does not mean I am excused from all of my wrongdoing. My heart hangs heavy for the role I have played in the harmful and sinful doings in our community. There are dark secrets in my family that I cannot bear to face. I am the man you know, the man who has tried to care for you and watch out for you lo these many years. But I am something else, too.

I am an auxiliary to evil.

Blandine placed the letter carefully upon a desk table in the great room, walked over to the window and opened it wide. She was not sure she could stand to read on. Visser! She had long had suspicions that all was not right with the man, but looked away out of loyalty. Now she took a deep breath of fresh air, steadied herself and returned to the table.

Instead of going immediately back to the letter, she gazed at an hourglass Drummond had just purchased, part of his melancholy campaign to replace all that he had lost in the disruptive search of his chambers. The glass was a particularly large model, imported from London, about the height of a forearm, with turned oak braces. It contained a mixture of pinkish pulverized marble and eggshell. More to avoid the letter than anything else, she turned the apparatus over.

All those ground-up moments cascading through the glass, set against the crushed humanity of Aet Visser.

I am sure you know that Anna is much more to me than a helper in my home. She is my helpmeet because she is my wife—though in none but the common-law sense—and Paulson and Abigel and Maria and Sabine are the beautiful children she bore for me.

Anna came into my life as a young girl, an adolescent, when I was dealing with the deaths of her father and mother. The story I told you about my own children, that they were orphaned by dissolute parents, is actually true of Anna and Gerald, Anna’s twin brother. The two were left abandoned by their parents’ abrupt demise when they were nine, left to wander the wilderness.

As orphans, they both fell under my purlieu. With young Gerald, I failed. He turned wild. He disappeared for weeks at a time. He returned from his wanderings bearing scars, carrying a knife collection that no young man could honorably possess. He took to calling himself Lightning.

With Anna, I did better. I was able to rescue her from the sordid life Gerald had her leading. Eventually our friendship blossomed into love. At thirteen, I knew that she was too young to couple with an aging blusterer like me, but I could not help myself, she was too beautiful.

Blandine felt a hard, burning rock in her chest. The hourglass had descended about a quarter of the way down. Once again, she steadied herself by going to the window, taking a moment before returning to the letter.

Martyn Hendrickson and Lightning became friends at a young age. I thought little of it. Martyn was an upstanding young man from a well-to-do family. He had an easy way about him, a smile for everyone. I thought he might help Lightning.

I was wrong.

Martyn became Lucifer to Lightning’s Mephistophilis. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Each was enslaved to the other.

I don’t know precisely what ghastly ungodliness the two have been party to over the years. But I did see with my own eyes the brutal evidence of their engagement in… I can hardly bring myself to say it… every orphan-killing that has taken place in this colony since last summer.

The evidence? Bloody rags, red-stained clothing, held within the Hendrickson house here in town. And I recognized the garments, they belonged to children who I had responsibility for, who I should have protected.

I can never forgive myself for this. I did not know about the particulars when it was going on, but I knew enough. I hid from my duty. I should have seen Lightning and Martyn for what they were—predators. And I will suffer in hell for my inaction.

Martyn Hendrickson is not dead. He is in hiding, awaiting the chance to perform his next infernal deed. I am convinced he will kill and kill, assisted by Lightning. His appetite for death will never be sated.

Find him. Stop him. Enlist Drummond. Save our children, before he takes them all.

God bless you, and reserve some small portion of your love for this broken old man, who remains, as ever, your friend and servant,

Aet Visser

Then, scrawled at the bottom in a hurried hand, a chilling sentence that looked as though it were added later.

I fear for the Bean.

The hourglass had dropped half its contents into its lower bulb. Thirty minutes had passed. Blandine imagined her mind gripped by a pair of terrible claws. She tossed the letter aside.

Martyn Hendrickson alive. And the Bean in some sort of danger.

Blandine knew exactly where Sabine should be at that moment. Not at home, as she wished the little girl was, especially after reading Visser’s tag-end warning. But every morning, Anna took the children to examine the work on the new house.

Blandine passed out of the chamber by the door into the backyard and went to the ladder Drummond had propped against the wall of the house. She scaled it, holding her petticoat aside in one clenched hand, a desperate urgency informing her movements.

From the roof, Blandine could scan the whole town, all the sturdy dwelling-houses, she thought bitterly, sheltering the safe little families. She could see the fort, erected to protect the populace, the church, protector of its souls, the roadstead, where ships arrived with bounty from Europe, and the streets, peopled with the ignorant and unconcerned.

There was Drummond’s spyglass, trained as Blandine had left it, upon the environs of Market Street. She peered through the eyepiece and found her focus, first locating the new house, where workmen were framing the walls with pine timbers. Here she and Edward would live with Sabine and Jan.

Sabine!
I fear for the Bean
. What had Visser meant?

And just then, as though both God and the Devil were reading her thoughts, Blandine saw the Bean come dawdling down Market Street, trailing her mother, her brother and her two sisters. As they did every day, Anna and the children visited the new house. They were now leaving to return to their Pearl Street rooms.

In a pink, frilly petticoat and a white summer blouse, Sabine played at scotch-hoppers, tossing a pebble in front of her and getting to it however she might, balancing on one foot.

Blandine sighed with relief. Anna was there. All was well.

But in horror Blandine watched as Sabine stopped by the side of the street to look through a gate into a yard. Blandine shifted the spyglass slightly and realized the child was looking at the massive Hendrickson dwelling-house.

She shifted the glass again, and saw that Anna and the children had turned off Market Street into the parade ground next to the fort. The
Bean stood momentarily alone in front of the Hendrickson gate. Why did she stop? What did she stare at so intently?

In a second, Blandine saw for herself. Something white, bounding behind the fence of the big house in the long shaggy grass.

Maddie. The Bean ran through the open iron gate and down the walk toward the Hendrickson backyard.

“Sabine!” Blandine shouted at the child, who could not possibly hear.

Panicked, her breath coming in frantic sobs, Blandine tumbled down the ladder so quickly she ripped her skirt. She had never moved so fast. She dashed inside the chambers, but only to grab the muff pistol Drummond gave her, kept primed and ready on the desk table near the door.

Blandine rushed outside and over to the canal. The big ditch blocked her path. She could head downtown to take Brewer’s Bridge or uptown to take the Little Bridge. Both courses would bring her a hundred yards out of her way. The dark mouth of Market Street lay directly across the canal, only three rods distant.

An incoming tide, but the seawater had not yet flowed up the canal to where she stood. A bottom layer of muck remained exposed. On each side of the deep ditch, wooden buttresses, green with slime and built of raw pitch-treated pine, angled slightly outward at the top. But the walls had gaps between the planks, and support timbers that a desperate person could climb to get to the other side.

Blandine plunged in. She half fell, half climbed down the twelve-foot wall on the near side. The stinking mud grabbed her feet as she crossed, and she almost tumbled more than once. Shells and dying fish lay in her path. A nest of eels writhed.

Going up the other side was more difficult. She grabbed at whatever crevices she could find, picking up splinters in her palms. Thoroughly muddied, Blandine made the top and staggered forward into the eastern end of Market Street.

She immediately encountered Anna, wild-eyed, searching. “Sabine!” she called, and the other children called the name, too.

“Anna!” Blandine called.

“Where is she?” Anna said. “Do you have her?”

Blandine took the woman by the shoulders. “You must take the children and go home,” she said.

“No, no, I have to—” Anna cried, but Blandine shook her roughly.

“You must do what I say. Take them home. Keep them safe. I will bring Sabine back to you unharmed.”

Anna searched her face, distracted.

“I have a gun,” Blandine said, showing her palm pistol. “All will be well, I promise you.”

Anna turned and herded the other children away.

Blandine moved down the street to the Hendrickson mansion. She stepped through the iron gate warily. No sound, no little barking dog, no Bean. Was she sure of what she had seen?

“Sabine!” she called.

No response. Blandine walked around the house, wading through the unkempt grass, seeing broken crockery strewn about the yard. When she got to the rear of the house, she tried the garden entrance, the one that led into the new addition the Hendrickson brothers had built onto the original structure.

She pushed, and the door creaked open.

Leaning in, Blandine saw a sheen of glossy droplets splashed near the wall, pooling on the parquet floor.

Blood. He has already killed her, she thought.

One step, then another. She was inside.

The red pool on the floor was fresh. The chambers bore the silence of the tomb. A strange mix of smells: rot, gunpowder, wine, a sharp stench like a tannery, an odd sweet perfume laying over all. A summer cook-fire glowed faintly in the hearth.

Deep within the house, upstairs, a sudden patter of footsteps. They abruptly ceased. To Blandine’s left, a steep, curving servant’s stairway climbed out of sight. Keeping her palm pistol in front of her, she took the winding stair.

Blandine strained her hearing. She reached the top of the steps. The second floor showed itself even darker and gloomier than the first. The walls were of a fashionable tint, tomato red. Stifling heat rendered the interior tight and claustrophobic.

A hallway, running the length of one wing, led off from the stairs to the left and right. Blandine chose left. Belongings cluttered the way, and she had to step over dirty laundry, spine-broken books, a crushed wooden box. She placed her hand on the wall for balance. The plaster felt hot to the touch. The heat closed around her, slowing her thoughts to a crawl.

Proceeding along the hallway, Blandine finally understood the reason for the inhuman blankness of the mansion’s big windows. They appeared as voids when seen from the street because the Hendricksons had covered the glass on the inside with tarlike black paint. Thin, weak beams of daylight seeped through cracks and window-frame seams, but otherwise all was sightless dark.

A rustling noise distracted her. A rat, scurrying away from her, hid itself underneath a spill of papers.

Nothing. More silence. A dog yapped, its bark deadened.

Suddenly, from the other end of the hallway came a child’s laughter. Blandine turned to see the Bean, barefoot, stripped to her chemise, running from one chamber to another.

“Sabine!”

She rushed to the other end of the hall, but found herself confronted by a maze of doorways. She called out again. More footsteps, starting and halting.

Something was wrong. She heard a thin, quavering, womanish voice, then another voice, Sabine’s, joining it.

Blandine could not understand from where the sound came. She felt disoriented. The voices appeared to emanate from inside the walls.

A giggle, broken off. Perspiration ran from Blandine’s forehead, stinging her eyes. Where could the Bean be?

“Ina? Ina?” called a tiny, muffled voice.

Blandine halted dead in her tracks. “Ina” was the name her little sister, Sarah, used to call her.

She rushed through an open door to find a cluttered, filthy chamber, with an upended
kas
beside a disheveled bed. On a table stood a globe and a bulbous brass pipe. The sickly sweet perfume smell managed to overpower the stench of body sweat and garbage.