The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

“Blandine van Couvering, Mister Pembeck,” Blandine said. As you well know. She thrust out her hand. A challenge to genteel tradition, which held that ladies never shook, but a business practice Blandine had lately adopted.

  Pembeck took her hand unwillingly, limply releasing it. He ignored young Miep, who curtsied.

  Blandine presented her bill of lading. Peering through his newfangled lenses, Pembeck soberly inspected the document, comparing its list of goods with the jumble spread around Blandine.

  Company agents had marked off the counting-room floor in squares with quicklime. Blandine’s bundles, firkins and barrels filled her square, spilling over the line. Pembeck nudged a stray cask back inside the border with his foot.

  “This barrel?” he said. “Let’s start there.”

  “Duffel cloth,” she said. “From Antwerp.”

  “Better not to shut the tuns before inspection,” Pembeck said.

  Blandine pried open the top and displayed the contents, thick wool cloth, folded to better fit the container. “I have a smaller cask of duffel there,” she said.

  The inspector nodded and went on, ticking off the items one by one. “Two pony barrels of molasses. Brass thimbles, one score. A dozen long knives, a dozen jackknives.”

  “Sheffield Barlows, sire,” Blandine said.

  “Good,” Pembeck said, popping open one of the English-made blades. “The river indians like these.”

  But there it had been again. That “sire” of the girl’s had been pronounced with a faint air of condescension, of parody. Little Miss Snippy. He would level her an extra guilder in excise for that.

  Pembeck clambered over the goods to reach the back of Blandine’s marked-off square, tap, tap, tapping with his excise rod. “Six barrels Barbados rum. Five staves lead. Twenty pounds powder. A hundred ells cloth, red and plaid.”

  “I’ve got osnabrig, serge, diaper, Hamburg linen. Lawn and silk.”

  “And the duffel.”

  “Yes.”

  Pembeck made a note. “Hand tools, nails, saws and hammers.” Rummaging, peering, checking against her bill of lading. She had a wide variety of goods, he saw, but no great quantity.

  “Twelve iron pots, ten iron frying pans. The wilden prefer copper better, they like to shape it for arrowheads.”

  Wilden, what the Dutch called the natives. Savages.

  “Forty white clay pipes—wherever did you get so many? Lace festoons. A wealth of those.”

  “For the women,” Blandine said.

  “Yes,” said the inspector.

  Every autumn fur traders—handlaers, they called themselves—paid hunters in advance with such trade goods, expecting in return fur pelts and animal skins. The river indians spent all winter trapping. Handlaer and native would then meet in the spring to complete their transactions.

  The upcoming market weeks were crucial for Blandine’s campaign to rise from her limited trade in minor peltry—soft-tanned deer skins, elk, mink, muskrat, otter and bobcat hides—to enter the elite world of the strange, mystical animal that had rendered life in the New Netherland colony viable.

  Beaver.

  Europe was avid for American fur, and valued beaver above all.

  Blandine eyed Pembeck. “If I have the goods, I can make the trades, can I not?”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  “There is no law or regulation stopping me?”

  “You must pay the Company its tax is all.”

  Pembeck arrived at the black heart of Blandine’s trading cache, her three long-barreled muskets. Providing weapons to the river indians had customarily been subject to Company regulation. She would brazen it out.

  “Ah, these are fine,” Pembeck said, his eyes lit with a familiar mercantile gleam.

  Her father, Willem, had begun his life as a gunsmith, so Blandine could easily recite the characteristics of the weapons.

  “Round, seven-five caliber, baluster-turned, pin-fastened, smoothbore, iron barrels with wedding-band transitions, rounded banana contours and matching gooseneck hammers.”

  Pembeck blinked at her. “You’re a sly one, ain’t ye, lass? I had no idea.”

  No idea that the muskets were baluster-turned and pin-fastened? Or no idea that a green frill such as Blandine could know so much about gunsmithing?

  Pembeck hefted one of the heavyweight muskets. He frowned. “Only…”

  “Yes?” Blandine asked.

  “We are not selling the indigenes flintlocks just now. The wilden are frisky enough as it is.”

  “These are simple pattern locks. You see?” She cocked the firing mechanism and displayed its brass powder pan to the inspector.

  Pembeck performed a genial half-bow. “Permissible,” he said.

  He propped one of the muskets with its stock resting on the wide wooden floorboards of the counting room. “These will be pelt guns, and you will have the trappers bring back beaver skins to the same height as the length of the musket barrel.”

  The inspector held his hand, palm level, at the barrel’s end. In exchange for the gun, an indian would be obliged to trade a fifty-nine-inch stack of “merchantable” beaver pelts.

  Yes, yes, no need to tell me, Blandine said to herself. What does a man love more than to lecture a woman?

  Inwardly, though, she reeled with contained excitement. After never having traded a single beaver skin, here were three five-foot stacks of them coming her way, each stack made up of, what? Thirty or thirty-five pelts?

  Earlier in the day, she had quizzed Miep on the potential profit. “A thick winter beaver pelt is far more valuable than a skin having a thinner summer pelt,” she said.

  “Yessum,” Miep said. At times she looked up at Blandine as the earthworm must look at the acrobat, in wonder that such things were done.

  Blandine went on. “A hundred beavers, say, rounding out, at eight guilders, if the market holds.”

  “Eight hundred guilders,” Miep said, adopting a pious tone whenever money was mentioned.

  “Take away the cost of the pelt guns,” Blandine said, “and the expenses of the trip, totaling perhaps two hundred seventy, being generous. Yielding what?”

  She had watched the cogs of the young girl’s mind turn. “Six hundred thirty,” Miep said.

  Ah, well, a gear must have slipped in there somewhere. “Five hundred thirty, isn’t it?” Blandine said, gently.

  Miep blushed, but Blandine could think only of the fatness of the number. In the spring of next year, she would be more than five hundred guilders clear.

  On the musket guns alone.

  A risk existed, to be sure. The hunter with whom she bartered might simply disappear into the fathomless wilderness with her weapon, giving no peltry in return the following spring. He could himself perish over the long winter with all its sundry dangers. He could fall to other wilden, be torn apart by beasts, lose his way to madness.

  Without risk, no profit. Her father taught her that at his knee. More risk, more profit. From a young age Blandine saw buying and selling as a delightful game. Trade was all she ever wanted to do.

  This year was her year. The portents others saw as grave she interpreted as omens of her coming success. A great burning comet flew nightly across the heavens. On the first of the last month of summer, a double rainbow aimed northward, pointing to the path of the North River. A woman at Corlaers Hook reported visions of pikemen in the sky. In Harlem, a cow gave birth to a two-headed calf.

  Odd weather continued to descend upon the colony, like the early blizzard swirling outside the greased parchment windows of the counting rooms, snow mixing with flurries of multicolored autumn leaves.

  “You embark on Amsterdam Rose?” Pembeck asked her.

  “Tomorrow,” Blandine said. “With the early tide.”

  “You bring the maiden with you?” Deigning to notice Miep, who curtsied again confusedly.

  “No, she has not the experience.”

  “But with your giant?”

  There it was at last. Pembeck’s gr
udging acknowledgment that yes, indeed, he was well aware who Blandine van Couvering was.

  “Always,” she said. Blandine’s most marked characteristic, to outside eyes, was that she went accompanied abroad by the tallest man in the colony, her familiar, her shadow, Antony Angola.

  “Nasty weather,” the inspector said. In quick order he affixed the Company seal to her bill of lading, calculated her excise at fourteen guilders and accepted payment.

  Clink, clink, clink. The silver coins sounded their melody, falling from her hand to his.

  Actual specie was rare in the settlement. Most of the trade went to barter or seawan, the wampum employed as currency. The carefully hoarded lion dollars Blandine had just given Pembeck represented the majority portion of her bank. She watched them disappear into the inspector’s purse.

  Nevertheless, exhilaration stole over her. It was done. She was on her way.

  Naturally enough, because every good thing invites the bad, a cloud suddenly appeared in her blue sky. Her man Antony stood beckoning her, a hulking figure filling the doorway of the counting room.

  Trouble. With the look on Antony’s face, Blandine immediately took up her blue shawl. As soon as she did so, Antony turned and disappeared down the street, his outsized gait giving him a head start.

  “Go home,” she said quickly to Miep.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Your lesson’s over.”

  Blandine van Couvering pushed through the counting-room traders to head into the snow, cinching the sash around her waist as though girding for battle.

  2

  The big-bellied flute ship Margrave, six weeks out of Rotterdam, three hundred twenty Holland tons burden, slid into the harbor waters of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. An ominous fall blizzard, a small wind, a swollen, inflowing tide.

  Gerrit Remunde found the English gentleman at the portside rail, and they stood together staring into the snow and mist.

  “Thick soup,” Gerrit said.

  “Aye,” Edward Drummond said. “But we are close.”

  How could he tell?

  “Because our soup has pigeon in it,” Drummond said, as though reading Gerrit’s thoughts. He gestured upward.

  A pair of soft gray rock doves fluttered among the rigging, harassed by the gulls.

  Clever Englishman. Gerrit had watched him covertly for the whole crossing, during which the man showed himself to be a calm, remote, unruffled presence. Much as he stood at the rail now. Dark, curly locks spilled past his shoulders, in the style of the English king.

  He had boarded Margrave not in Texel, where her journey began, but at a stopover in Rotterdam, coming, he said when Gerrit questioned him, from the Jura.

  Gerrit, a humble agent in cross-ocean trade, would be sad to see less of Edward Drummond. They both would disappear into the demands of their individual businesses. Though the compass of the Dutch colonial capital was small, they might never encounter each other again.

  In the course of the passage the man proved devilishly difficult to pin down in conversation. But at random moments he surprised his listeners by offering titbits of adventure, intrigue, bloody engagements on horseback and at sea, diplomacy, feckless ministers, King Charles II, called the “Black Boy” for his olive skin and glossy hair, duels, smuggling, a lady’s leg glimpsed behind the arras, an anecdote that demonstrated bitter familiarity with the pain of exile.

  Vastly entertaining.

  “You are a born raconteur, sir,” Gerrit told him.

  “Raconteur,” Drummond said. “That is the French word for ‘bore.’” And everyone laughed.

  His clothes were especially fine. Gerrit delighted in them. The man portrayed himself as a grain merchant but did not, Gerrit noted with secret glee, know the tare on a barrel of wheat.

  A grain merchant! And him with velour on his back. But his incognito lodged safe with Gerrit. Mum was the word.

  In the sheltered bowl of the bay, the snow thickened, the wind died entirely, the sails luffed, and Margrave was becalmed. One of the low skiffs of the river indians loomed out of the weather, bobbed in the ship’s wake, became fog-swallowed.

  For an interminable half hour they drifted with the tide, the only sound being the muffled mutterings of the seamen.

  No one else appeared concerned, but a familiar tension gripped Gerrit. He felt it during every arrival, sure that they would wreck themselves upon the rocks of the river. He would drown within view of his family on the shore.

  Damned fog. Damned obscurity. An early October blizzard? They were lost for sure.

  Far off, a quiet lap of the surf and, yes, the yelping bark of harbor seals. Suddenly it was there, a fat green band of coastline appearing out of the blizzard like a blessing. Gerrit recognized the lower tip of the isle of Manhattan.

  Towering above a thin strip of rocky beach stood the town gallows, poking proudly from the mist.

  “Ah,” Drummond said. “Civilization.”

  They hove aback off the island, heading toward the East River roadstead, the brick dwelling-houses and low taprooms of the Strand increasingly visible. Inhabitants poured into the streets, shouting and calling. Behind the gibbet, the fort and the windmills.

  Ten, twenty, then several whooping dozens ran along the shore, children and adults, pacing the new arrival’s progress toward the wharf on the island’s eastern side.

  A cannonade of welcome boomed, answered by the lone twelve-pounder at Margrave’s stern.

  Gerrit glanced over at Drummond and saw him tracking something with his eyes. As the crowd flowed east, following the ship, a single figure, trailed by another, pushed west, against the tide of townsfolk.

  Gerrit recognized her. A young she-merchant of the town, wrapped in a shawl of Virgin Mary blue. It seemed the only color to enliven the whole scene. Behind her, the big brute, her giant.

  Gerrit smiled. Well, the woman was appealing enough to attract a man’s gaze, to be sure, her head boldly uncovered, her hair white-blond and arresting. Not to Gerrit’s own taste, too thorny, too independent, but Drummond seemed momentarily taken by the vision of her.

  “Civilization,” he murmured again, watching the pretty miss with her trailing bodyguard.

  Milady and milady’s giant proceeded west along the Strand as Margrave continued east around the tip of the island.

  Soon, home. In bed tonight Gerrit would tell Gerta all about his shipmates, and about the Englishman. “Very much a superior class of person,” he would say.

  Blandine threaded her way through the crowd of townsfolk rushing to the ship newly arrived from Patria. Normally, she would have been among them.

  Speed, Blandine felt, was of the utmost urgency. Along Pearl Street to the market square, past the fort, past the vegetable gardens of the West India Company, leaving behind the hurrying crowds hallooing the ship heading toward the East River slip.

  Off the shore, ghostly in the fog and falling snow, the Dutch vessel, catching small wind to lumber in the harbor swell. Blandine loved how the river indians called the sailing ships from Europe “cloud-houses.” The flute ship—possibly Sea Serpent, since it hoisted a Frisian flag—indeed resembled a floating cottage with sail-clouds billowing above it.

  She knew Antony would have liked to greet the ship. He enjoyed excitement. But he was her faithful shadow, even though she felt no need of one. Blandine had long ago stopped pleading for him not to follow her around. His devotion meant more to her than she cared to admit.

  Three years ago, when Antony Angola had recently arrived in the colony as a West India Company slave, the town’s schout, or sheriff, implicated him and a group of others in the killing of a fellow African.

  Unable to determine individual guilt, Petrus Stuyvesant, the director general of the colony, had each member of the group draw straws.

  Antony the tall drew the short straw, and the director general sentenced him to hang. The first time Blandine ever laid eyes on the giant, he stood on the gallows scaffold.

  He made for a pa
thetic picture. Seven feet in height, twenty-three stone in weight, forty years old, he nevertheless cowered under the jeers of the crowd. The condemned man stared at the Bible they presented him to kiss as if he had never seen a book before.

  The onlookers roared as the trap fell, but entered into a stunned silence when the double halters around Antony’s neck (the hangman used two, in accord with the condemned man’s size) both broke like puppet strings.

  The giant fell heavily to the ground. He sat up, stunned and blinking, the tattered noose ropes hanging limp. He looked fearfully at the gape-mouthed colonists surrounding him, expecting to be set upon.

  At that moment, the sun broke through the clouds, sending a bar of light over the Upper Bay. The crowd remained struck mute and frozen in place.

  Except for Blandine van Couvering. She moved forward and knelt beside the dead man who had not died.

  The crowd raised a huzzah then, proclaimed a miracle, cried out for mercy and insisted the giant be pardoned. The director general complied. At the crowd’s urging, he granted Antony the “half-freedom” that was the colony’s odd custom, manumitting him from Company enslavement. The double welts around his neck became emblems of his rebirth.

  Blandine’s compassion was flavored with pain. She had lost her own family to shipwreck four years before, so her heart went out to Antony, whom she saw as a solitary soul like herself. She drew the man out of the mob and took him under her own broken wing for protection and nurturing.

  Antony had not left Blandine’s side for any serious stretch of days since. He graduated from involuntary servitude with the Company to voluntary servitude with his “Blandina.” She fed and clothed him and tried to shelter him, but he slept out of doors even in the foulest weather, using an open shed behind her dwelling-house.

  He found ingenious ways to bring in money to the household. In the coves and shoals along the island’s shore, he dove and swam as no giant could ever be expected to swim, scrabbling along the rocky bottom for lobsters. He would bring back a burlap sack full of the creatures and barter them in the market by the fort. Blandine knew he had gone lobster fishing only when a leg of pork or bundles of carrots suddenly materialized in her larder.