Fury answered fury, and now here were the vengeful Mahicans on the settlement’s doorstep.
Blandine huddled with Lace and Mally at the far edge of the group of colonists. Two of the raiders pulled Patricia Reydersen out of the group. She began to shriek. Blandine met the woman’s agonized gaze and covered the eyes of Lace and Mally so that they should not see.
Within view of the other settlers, the two raiders tore off Patricia Reydersen’s clothes. They alternately mounted her body to force her and, when she resisted, took up fist-sized stones to batter the woman’s face.
For Blandine, it was as though she saw her own mother attacked. Why hadn’t she moved to help her? Would she be next?
Several of the Mahicans gathered around the wounded Dutch soldier, Resoluet Waldron. Uttering short birdlike calls, they used the man roughly, pushing him back and forth, pummeling and kicking him. They stripped the soldier naked, too, laying him out prone, facedown. While two raiders extracted a souvenir fingernail from one of the bellowing man’s hands, another worked the blade of a battle-ax in a straight line down the skin of his spine.
When the cut was sufficiently deep, the raider, a tall Mahican with a blue-painted face, dug into the wound with both hands, grabbing the bloody stretch of skin and peeling it off the flesh. The whole flap came up easily, with the sound of a raw beaver tail being split open. The flayed man thrashed, but the natives stood on his neck and arms to hold him tightly in place.
None of the raiders seemed to be in any hurry. Several threw themselves on the ground in attitudes of aggressive repose, chatting, laughing, slapping one another’s chests. Those not directly involved in the attack on Waldron wandered easily in and out of the group of terrified colonists.
One of the warriors approached Blandine, fingering her yellow hair as she tried not to flinch. He yanked a trailing curl, hard, then strolled off, looking back once or twice, marking her. She had picked up a few words of the language while trading. She heard the man say “mine.”
Mally and Lace clung together, their faces wet with tears. They prayed in a desperate whisper. Hysteria and paralysis gripped all the colonists, women and children both. Blandine knew that she had to act, discover some way out, or she would follow Patricia Reydersen into death.
Blandine said under her breath, “We have to get away. Now. The three of us.”
Like everyone else in New Amsterdam, Blandine witnessed waves of blank-eyed Dutch refugees come south in flight from the Esopus war. Several told of being “freed” by their captors, experiencing an illusion of flight, only to be cruelly tracked down again. It was a common tactic of the native warriors.
Blandine sought to turn a false escape into a real one. She began to move, trying not to panic, leading Lace and Mally away.
Two raiders were close by, the one who had marked her before, painted with black-and-white zigzags, and another, a younger male whose whole body was stained yellow.
They bent over with laughter, as though women captives edging toward the forest made for a tremendously comical sight. They pointed and howled.
When Blandine, Mally and Lace were ten yards away from the mayhem, Zigzag and his yellow comrade broke off to follow.
“Where you go, huh?” the big indian called out in English, still laughing. “Where?”
“Keep on,” Blandine said. “Whatever happens, we stay together.”
Behind them, a raider in the larger group stood up from his task of wrestling down one of the colonial women and shouted in their direction.
“Bring them back,” Blandine understood the raider to say.
Zigzag turned and called in reply, “We have them.”
Suddenly Yellow Boy ran at Blandine in an abrupt, sudden charge, but fell to his knees and skidded to a stop a few feet away, laughing at her fright.
Zigzag dashed forward to slug Lace with a vicious punch, knocking her down. While Blandine pulled the woman back to her feet, the Mahican stood dancing in place, inches away, shouting threateningly into her face. But, abruptly, Zigzag turned his back on them and strode away.
The effect, Blandine knew, was designed for maximum fear.
In a staggering march, trailed by the two warriors, the three women left the scene of the berry-harvest attack behind. The shouts of the raiders and cries of settlers faded. Behind them, Zigzag and Yellow Boy continued their negligent pursuit. They would stop, plucking a leaf or berry, calling out to a hawk circling in the sky above them.
And then, suddenly, nothing. Blandine led Lace and Mally down a steep incline and turned them into a sheltered glade. They no longer could see their two pursuers. Silence. Even the faint whooping from the distant berry patch died out.
“Is it over?” Lace said, her voice half-strangled with fear.
“Keep going,” Blandine said. Her heart raced. She did not dare to think they had escaped so easily. But it seemed true.
A keening scream. Zigzag and Yellow Boy stood on the crest of the slope above them. In a combative display, the Mahicans battered each other, slapping and pummeling their chests like two boys in a school yard.
As the raiders advanced downward, their nonchalance vanished. Zigzag freed his stiffened member from behind its cloth, waving it at them arrogantly.
“Lord Jesus save me,” Lace whispered. Her hand gripped Blandine’s, nails abrading the skin.
“Now we run,” Blandine said.
The three women fled down the slope to the shore of the river. Blandine led them to the reed bed where the native dugouts were beached.
Mally leapt into the first canoe. Lace climbed into the unsteady craft with her.
“Come on!” Mally shouted to Blandine.
But, for a long breathless moment, Blandine stayed on shore, working to push the other canoes out of the shallows, casting them off into the river current. If their pursuers wanted them, they would have to swim.
Finally, she dove for the little boat.
Together the three women paddled the craft out into the current, working furiously. The raiders arrived at the shore and splashed into the water behind them. They lunged forward, swimming to within a few yards of the women in the dugout.
But they came up short. Blandine, Mally and Lace moved into deeper water, outdistancing the Mahicans.
When the three women arrived wet, bedraggled and still fear-stricken at the settlement, and once the Dutch director general sent a well-armed war party of his own to retaliate against the raiders, Blandine felt herself drawn into the lives of Mally and Lace and the community of Little Angola.
None of the others in the berrying party survived.
In the aftermath of the raid, Blandine noted with scorn some of her erstwhile suitors shying away from her as soiled goods. The men of the colony were never sure what exactly happened in the berry patch on the river.
Only the first love of her life, Kees Bayard, stayed true. “You are my brave girl,” Kees said to her, solicitous in the wake of the tragedy. He defended her stoutly. He volunteered for the company that pursued the fleeing raiders.
Deep inside, though, Blandine felt that no one understood the terror she experienced that day. Only Lace and Mally. It was as though, when your house burns down, you want to talk only to other people who have had their houses burn down. Her later friendship with Antony only cemented her connection with the Africans.
So it was natural, when one of their own disappeared that fall four years later, when a child who went out to fetch water did not come back, that Lace and Mally should turn to Blandine.
4
As soon as she heard of Piddy Gullee’s disappearance, Blandine sought out the orphanmaster.
Aet Visser was the man most important to her in all of New Amsterdam. Charged by the town government with looking after the interests of orphaned children, he had taken care of Blandine herself when she lost her parents at age fifteen.
Not that she wanted him to. Not at first anyway. Crushed by rage and grief at the news that her parents’ ship, Blue Hen, had
wrecked with the death of all aboard in the Channel off Kent, she walled herself away from human contact.
She was fine, Blandine told the orphanmaster when he came calling. I am old enough to take care of myself. A small stash of seawan made it possible to live as she pleased. When the disaster carried her parents to the bottom of the Channel, Blandine boldly marched into probate court, a girl of fifteen petitioning to sell her family’s home, a two-story redbrick residence on the canal with five apple trees in back.
Such a transaction was the proper province of the orphanmaster, and Visser appeared next to her in court, but she rudely refused his help. She stumbled through her dealings with the magistrate. Visser interrupted to suggest that Blandine retain the fruit of the orchard trees for ten years hence. The magistrate ruled five.
That was nice. But she told Visser he should keep out of her affairs anyway. She smiled ruefully at the memory of telling him off, a squeaky-voiced girl trying to act grown up.
After that, Visser played patient. He had already reached middle age when they met, and had held the orphanmaster position forever, since the rough-and-tumble years of the 1650s, a time when colonists and natives seemed locked in irresolvable, deadly conflict. There were many new casualties of war.
He oversaw the means and property of parentless minors. He was an angel of death, appearing whenever parents perished. Among shipwrecks, indian wars and rampaging contagions, the business of orphanmastering boomed.
Visser came to the new world from Friesland, in the Dutch Republic, where the winds off the North Sea blew strong. He shared his background with many in the colony, including the director general, which allowed Visser to cultivate the relationships that helped him secure the position of orphanmaster.
Did Visser cut corners? Was he ever accused of dipping his hand into the money pots of his wards? Inevitable, these accusations, when such dealings were transacted. But Aet Visser bumped along as the colony’s orphanmaster, not totally honest, perhaps, but for the purpose of the colony, honest enough. Which is all that can be realistically asked of any man.
Rumor surrounded him. He had disobedient wards killed. He fathered a whole family of bastards with a beautiful half-indian woman north of the wall. He supplied young orphans to the Jews for their infernal blood rites.
Visser shrugged off the tales. He modeled openness.
“I myself am an orphan,” he always said, neglecting to add that his parents had both died at the comfortable old age of fifty-two.
The orphanmaster held forth in the Orphan Chamber, a special court convened at the colony’s town hall, the Stadt Huys, an imposing five-story stone structure on the waterfront.
In the Orphan Chamber, Visser arranged for apprenticeships and servitudes. He ensured that heirs inherited inheritances. He sent a few of his wards back across the sea to Holland, to be cared for in the homes of relatives.
Just in the last week, an issue came into the chamber when two human heads were discovered while gathering in the cattle of settlers who had disappeared “in the last disaster”—an indian incursion. Visser officially declared the two heads were indeed those of the vanished men, Cornelis Swits and Tobias Clausen, thereby rendering their children wards of the orphanmaster.
“Pursuant to the intentions of this court,” Visser ruled, “the cattle shall be put to use for the benefit of the orphans.”
The severed heads of the fathers, he suggested, should be remanded to the dominie of the Dutch Reformed Church, for possible reunification with their bodies, should such bodies ever be located.
Another case, Dorothea Janz, father drowned off Hell Gate in 1661, mother dead through ingestion of arsenic. Visser divvied up the family belongings. A blanket to the child’s aunt, a string of seawan to the foster parents, a bedstead that materialized magically in the best chamber of the director general’s sister. A cache of twenty silver rider coins, where did those end up? A mystery, thankfully unexamined by prying eyes.
Through it all, Visser maintained a rumpled, shambling, habitually hungover mien that concealed a shrewdness around the heart.
“Money is the root of all,” he would proclaim.
When she first heard him say that, young Blandine archly suggested to the orphanmaster that he had left off the tag end of the biblical epigram. “Doesn’t it say, Mister Visser, ‘money is the root of all evil’?”
“Oh, right,” Visser responded, chuckling. “I always forget that last part.”
No matter what the monetary issue might be, he loved his orphans. He said it all the time, and people believed him.
A man of Visser’s long experience could not be put off by the surliness of Blandine van Couvering. Surely, it was not customary for one of his wards to live independently at such an early age. But Visser hewed to the philosophy of letting well enough alone. The maiden, as far as he could see, was making her way in the world. To drag her kicking and screaming into a foster family’s home would do neither of them any good.
He looked in on her often in her rented rooms, stopped her in the street to ask after her well-being, gave out small gifts of raisins and walnuts. Visser made the introductions to merchants who helped Blandine reach her current status as a trader-on-her-way-up. The orphan girl felt her heart melting, and iced it against the orphanmaster again and again. But eventually, he won her over.
Now, in the wake of Piddy’s disappearance, Blandine sought Visser out. She knew where he would be after Margrave docked. He would have a flock of orphans from the ship, and would bring them to the yard behind one of the grand houses of the settlement. There, they would be parceled out for work.
She made her way through the snow to the dwelling-house of the Hendrickson family. This is what wealth bought in Manhattan. The mansion was easily the largest private home in the colony. Two stories plus attics, a full seven bays wide, with grounds that could have sited several of the neighboring residences. The acreage stretched from Market Street to the family’s own private waterway, which connected to the larger canal, the Heere Gracht.
The black prospect of the Hendrickson mansion, clapboarded in dark-stained wood, always struck Blandine. Built of milled lumber, the house didn’t simply occupy its lot in the style of the other residences in Market Street, many of which were grand enough. The Hendrickson house didn’t sit, it loomed. The prominent jetties on the second floor made the place appear as though it might topple down upon whoever might approach it.
The house had another odd quality, too. The windows were not the traditional casements, broken up into small individual lead-lights, but rather new-style sash affairs. The expanse of blank panes resembled nothing else in the glass-starved colony. The windows stared down at Blandine like blind eyes. She passed through the front gates, along the dwelling-house walk, beneath the overhanging second story to reach the stable yards in the grounds behind.
A solitary, pretty young female seldom approaches a group of adult men without at least a measure of trepidation. In the area to the rear of the house, many of New Amsterdam’s worthies gathered to examine the orphans newly arrived on Margrave. Aet Visser was there, conducting business at the far side of the yard. Blandine’s loyal suitor, Kees Bayard, stood with Martyn Hendrickson himself, the youngest of the three Hendrickson brothers, the wealthiest men of the colony.
And the orphans. A pathetic group of ten clustered together in the mud and snow of the yard, clothed in rags, still wobbly and filthy from their transocean voyage. Each face displayed the stunned, faraway “Where am I?” look of those new to the new world.
Ranged against the orphans, the gentlemen worthies, dressed impeccably in the style of the day, waistcoats, matched doublets and lace collars. They teetered on their scarlet heels, les talons rouges, a style imported from the French court of Louis XIV.
A chronic labor shortage afflicted the colony, and Visser’s orphans-for-hire got snapped up soon after they stepped off the boat. The gentlemen checked the offerings, poking and prodding as though they were hell’s ferrymen, exam
ining lost souls.
Blandine recoiled at the scene. She knew what it reminded her of: the slave market at the foot of Wall Street on the East River.
“Blandina,” Kees Bayard called, seeing her. The men all turned and straightened up, a pretty girl in their midst.
“We have another orphan up for grabs,” Martyn Hendrickson called out. “What do we bid on her, gentlemen?”
Kees glared at him and took Blandine’s hand. She withdrew it.
“If I had the means,” she said, “I would gladly sponsor all of the boys here.”
“Did you hear that, Visser?” Martyn called over to the orphanmaster. “We have a new proffer, you will have to top Miss Blandina’s price.”
Aet Visser, haggling with one of the gentleman worthies over a hollow-eyed scarecrow of barely ten years, looked over at Blandine and waved genially.
“I’ll have half of these myself,” Martyn said briskly. “Send them upriver to my brothers, work on the estate. Good healthy toil in the fields.”
“Plus they don’t eat much,” Blandine said.
Martyn ignored the hint of bitterness in her tone and laughed. “Exactly,” he said. “And if one of my brothers gets hungry, he can always cook himself up a couple of them.”
“I beg of you, sir,” Kees Bayard said, “not to be coarse in front of the lady.”
“Miss Blandina knows well I am only jesting,” Martyn said.
“Dear Martyn,” Blandine said. “The way one knows one is joking? Is if the other person is laughing.”
The two men stood on either side of Blandine as though vying for her favor. But Martyn Hendrickson could never be anyone’s suitor. A notorious gambler, drinker, whoremonger, he preferred dissipation to romance. Tempting as he was, the young women of the settlement despaired of Martyn Hendrickson. Killingly handsome, green-eyed, rich as a god, he appeared too wild to tame.
The Orphanmaster Page 4