The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  “So, I’ll have to go to Connecticut for the regicides,” Drummond said, resignation in his voice, weary from tracking the king-killers all over creation. “But first I must head north to Fort Orange and Beaver Town, to establish this ridiculous incognito I am hauling around.”

  “Last few years, the wheat business is booming,” Raeger said. “Maybe you could take a profit from it.”

  “To Fort Orange, then overland to, where, Hartford? Then finally New Haven and the regicides? What would that trip be like?”

  “A horror. The Boston Post Road. Easier to come back here, and sail up the coast by boat,” Raeger said. “Unless…”

  Drummond eyed him. “Unless what?”

  “Last July, the river indians made some kind of mess up north, and the Dutch are blaming the English. Anytime the Sopus act up, we catch the fault.”

  “And what could I do about it?”

  “I was instructed that at the present time we are to avoid another indian war,” Raeger said.

  “Now I’m a preventer of wars? Whenever someone wants me to perform a miracle, I tell them, no, thank you, sainthood is much too dangerous an occupation, I’ll stick to the safety of soldiering.”

  “Well, somebody should make a visit. I’d do it, but I have a public house to run.”

  “A visit. What are we talking about?”

  “There’s the Hendrickson plantation where the thing happened, on the east side of the river, opposite Wildwyck. Grisly sort of killing, we heard about it all the way down here, it’s got everyone spooked. There’ve been pamphlets distributed around the colony with the bloody details.”

  He took a folded sheet of foolscap from his vest and slid it across the table to Drummond. He came prepared, Drummond thought.

  “They’re talking devils in the woods,” Raeger said. “Ghosties and goblins.”

  Two texts, one English, one Dutch, written side by side. THE LATE MASSACRE AT PINE PLAINS, read the headline. “A faithful account of a bloody, treacherous and cruel plot by the English in America, purporting the total ruin and murder of all the Dutch colonists in New Netherland.”

  Drummond scanned the lurid prose. Blood spilled in the wilderness. Aboriginal demons, eaters of flesh. Esopus indians, English subterfuge to blame.

  And this: “To God alone has the fearful tragedy been revealed.”

  He put the pamphlet back on the table and lifted his tankard. He felt the need to wash out his mouth.

  “A ghost story,” he said.

  Raeger nodded. “The whole colony has an indian hobgoblin on the brain.”

  “I don’t understand,” Drummond said. “We English are said to enlist some sort of flesh-eater?”

  “People are too scared to think clearly,” Raeger said. “One of the Hendrickson brothers is downstairs right now. Do you want to talk to him?”

  Drummond demurred. “I need sleep. You’ve secured rooms for me? Not here, I hope.”

  Raeger said, “On Slyck Steegh, next to the canal.”

  “I’ve heard about your canal. That it stinks like pig anus.”

  “The better part of town.” Raeger laughed.

  “And the workshop I asked for?”

  “Abutting the back. Brick, with a glazed tile floor.” Raeger drank up his wine. “You can stand one night in a room upstairs, can’t you? Get settled tomorrow in the dwelling-house. Take your time. But you will go north to inquire about this awful business?” He flicked his finger at the pamphlet.

  “I suppose.” Drummond sighed.

  “I just thought that if you were up there, you could damp down the flames of anti-English sentiment a little.”

  “But I can’t go mucking about without drawing their suspicions,” Drummond said.

  Raeger nodded. “The Dutch,” he said, “are a most suspicious people.”

  “Only in this case, their suspicions are entirely correct.”

  Raeger laughed and slid open the little window, giving Drummond a view of the downstairs.

  The long-stemmed white clay pipes of the smokers bristled in the gloom. Voices rose from the taproom. Besides Dutch and English, Drummond counted snatches of French, Swedish and Polish, some Hochdeutsch, plus a few words of what he took to be Algonquin, the language of the river indians.

  The multilingual chatter impressed Drummond. By the bowels of Christ (Cromwell’s favorite oath), what a bestiary Raeger had himself here! As though someone had tilted up the globe and all the dregs flooded down into New Netherland.

  “Who’s that?” he asked Raeger.

  The innkeeper peered around out the little window to see where Drummond was looking. “Aet Visser,” he said.

  Drummond shook his head and gave Ross Raeger a thin smile. Always joking.

  “Visser’s a minor Dutch official,” Raeger said. “A sort of guardian they call the orphanmaster.”

  “Please,” Drummond said.

  “Oh, you mean the lady,” Raeger said, putting on an innocent face.

  “I saw her when Margrave came in,” Drummond said.

  “Blandine van Couvering. Styles herself a she-merchant. Grain, foodstuff, some small furs, working her way up to beaver. Striking, isn’t she?”

  “Very. She deals in grain? So do I.”

  “She’s not for you, my man,” Raeger said. He quoted Wyatt’s poem about Anne Boleyn: “‘Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’” Touch me not, the Latin meant.

  “Caesar,” Drummond said.

  “Stuyvesant has Lady Blandina marked for his nephew,” Raeger said.

  “Stuyvesant,” Drummond said.

  “The director general.”

  “I know who Stuyvesant is,” Drummond said. “Does he arrange marriages now?”

  “The person our director general reminds me of the most is Cromwell himself,” Raeger said. “Stuyvesant tells people to call him ‘Mijn Heer General.’”

  “I heard he’s not half the man that Cromwell was,” Drummond said.

  Raeger laughed. “Yes, yes, and Mijn Heer General has not a leg to stand on. We know the jokes. But it’s serious. Like the wolf, the longer Stuyvesant lives, the worse he bites.”

  “And like Cromwell, he’s a great builder of gallows.”

  “You saw that, did you, coming in? Stuyvesant had it erected down there on the point for a purpose, so it’s the first thing newcomers see of the new world.”

  “I don’t know,” Drummond mused. “Perhaps it is a necessary measure, in the wild. I have only just arrived, and already I get a sense of lawlessness, beyond the wall, waiting to burst in.”

  “Extraterritoriality,” Raeger said. “We have slipped the leash of civilization out here.”

  “And God, is he present and accounted for?”

  “Oh, Mijn Heer General keeps God in his vest pocket,” Raeger said. “You can ask him for a peep if you wish.”

  “And the nephew, the girl’s beau? What’s his story?”

  “Cornelus Bayard, called Kees, ‘like the call of the hawk,’ he says, but ‘Kees’ actually means ‘cheese.’ The eldest son of the director’s sister. A shipbuilder-merchant. Something of a prig, and tied to the director general’s purse strings, but he’s on his way to becoming a very rich man.”

  Drummond gazed down through the window. “She can do better than that,” he said.

  The high-booted English peacock came down the stairs from the second floor, strode directly across the taproom and stood before Blandine and Visser.

  He performed a courtly bow. “Edward Drummond,” he said. “I’m told you deal in grain.”

  Blandine felt her face grow hot, and hated herself for it.

  Visser saved her. “Why, yes,” he said in his thickly accented English. “I trade in a little wheat, flax and barley. A Briton, are you not?”

  “English,” Drummond said, not taking his eyes from Blandine’s downcast face.

  “A grain merchant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aet Visser,” the
orphanmaster said, and held out his hand to Drummond.

  Several loud bangs sounded against the street wall of the tavern.

  “The schout,” someone called.

  “Time, gentlemen,” a voice said from the outside.

  Raeger emerged from upstairs and hurried across to the taproom entrance. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, disappearing into the street to consult with the sheriff.

  The clientele drained down their last dregs and began filing out. From the backroom casino, the Mane, curses from the gamblers.

  When Drummond turned back to the chimney-corner table, he saw that the woman Blandine had slipped around him and joined the crowd in leaving.

  Drummond was about to follow, but Visser grabbed his arm.

  “We should talk, sir,” the orphanmaster said. “You and I should talk wheat and corn.”

  7

  The next morning, Tuesday, a half foot of wet snow covered the ground. Kees Bayard visited Blandine before her departure for the trading market upriver at Beverwyck. He was preoccupied.

  “Will you go around the island by Hell Gate or up the North River?”

  “The North” is what Blandine should have said. But seeing Kees pace, glancing out the window of her rooms to the early morning foot traffic on Pearl Street, she felt an urge to tease him.

  “We sail east across the wine-dark sea, the better to stop over at Holland.”

  “Yes, that’s the proper way,” he murmured, still distracted. Kees was anxious to get on with his business. He was always anxious to get on with his business.

  They were in the ground-floor groot kamer, the great room of her dwelling-house, directly opposite the Red Lion. The taproom across the street presented a blank, shuttered face to the morning, the death-sleep of the drunkard.

  “Your kit is stowed?” Kees asked, evidently not noticing her trunk, still half spilling out its contents.

  Cornelus Bayard. “Kees.” Ever since Blandine had been a little girl, Kees shone like a star in the tiny firmament of the colony. She loved him before she even knew what romantic love was, when she still wore her leading strings, under the close watch of her mother. All the maidens in the colony, and some married women, too, set their caps for Kees Bayard. And now here he was with her, in her rooms, wishing her a safe journey.

  “Sea dragons will gobble up the Rose to the last timber,” she said.

  Kees stared out her window. “Devilish weather,” he said. Then he turned to her. “I’m sorry, what?”

  She laughed and patted him lightly on the cheek. It didn’t bother her that his mind was often elsewhere. That “elsewhere” included his three flute ships plying the waters between the new world and the old, bringing timber and furs to the Netherlands, returning to the colony with lengths of linen, panes of window glass and kegs of gunpowder.

  One thing she loved about Kees was that though others might question her passion for trading, he understood and encouraged her. They were going to be rich together. He had a fourth merchant ship already in negotiations for purchase. The day Blandine married Kees, guilders would shower down on her like raindrops.

  He said he loved her, but she glimpsed him dallying with other girls, young things, at the market square on Saturdays. His idea of marrying Blandine always seemed hypothetical, held off to some golden, indeterminate future. “If we were to get engaged,” Kees said, rather than “when.” That was all right. She was too busy to marry now.

  In Holland, the standard of a woman’s honor hovered somewhere between the strict English version and the lax Parisian, and was perhaps a shade less rigid on the new world’s frontier than in Patria. Blandine did not hold herself above getting amorous now and then. She would have gone further with Kees, if she could have broken through his gentlemanly reserve.

  She held a terrible suspicion that she did not fully admit, even to herself, that their true love, each of them, was for profit. Kees liked to invoke one of his favorite sentences. “Out of every hundred guilders in Nieuw Amsterdam, I hold ten.”

  Blandine would complete the boast for him. “Soon to be fifteen,” she’d say.

  It was still early. Light came thinly through the orange shutters, falling on the clean-swept floor. Before dawn she awoke, and by the light of a candle had erupted in a frenzy of cleaning. The place was spotless, because Blandine kept it that way with soap and water every day. She cleaned that morning not to expunge dirt but because her Dutchwoman’s soul required the ritual.

  At first light, at her door, Antony, with the African elder Handy and Lace.

  “Piddy is found?” she asked.

  By their expressions, no.

  “You still mean to leave,” Lace said, unable to hide the disappointment in her tone.

  Blandine stepped out into the street in front of her stoop.

  “I leave, but I am with you.”

  Lace looked unconvinced. “You are with your trading,” she said, moving to turn away.

  Blandine said, “There is a thing I must look into in Beverwyck. Something that might bear upon Piddy’s disappearance.”

  Did she lie? She felt low, as though she were skulking away from friends in need.

  Antony had stayed with her, assuming his usual post outside the door. But Lace and Handy departed, still unsettled and, Blandine thought, angry with her.

  Now day had broken and the river sloop Amsterdam Rose would soon launch. She rummaged in her kas for an extra chemise, looking to take it along but also perhaps hoping to embarrass Kees Bayard a bit with the sight of it.

  “You are very pretty this morning,” he said, eyeing the frill of the undergarment.

  “The hunt suits me, Kees. Profit excites me. Advantage gives me pleasure.”

  She fluffed the chemise and stowed it in her overflowing trunk.

  “The tide turns,” she said. “I must go.”

  She shut the trunk and tied a gray cloak over her olive linen gown. “You know what is the softest fur?”

  “Beaver,” Kees said automatically.

  Blandine shook her head. “Mink. I’ll bring you back a pelt for a fur collar,” she said. “Or would you rather a bearskin muff?”

  They stepped outside. Antony waited on her, hefting her trunk effortlessly onto his shoulders. The snow in the middle of Pearl had already been tracked to mud, but lay bright white along the margins of the street.

  Kees displayed an attitude toward the giant that he had toward all servants, an oblivious disregard—until he required attendance. Then, finger-snapping hauteur.

  He held out his hand to Blandine, a gesture that was meant to be friendly but came across as somehow patronizing. She was leaving. He was staying. She felt an odd, heart-flutter rush of anticipation, the sense of slipping out from under the gaze of Kees, beyond the town, away from all constraint and expectation.

  Kees bowed, touched her cheek and set off down High Street toward the fort. He had apologized for not being able to see her off at the ship. “Business with Uncle,” he told her. Stuyvesant, the director general of the colony.

  Blandine didn’t care. As she watched Kees’s rigid, squared-off form disappearing down the street, she felt lighthearted and free. She locked her front door and turned the other way, toward the docks.

  “You know the indian? Lightning?” Antony said, walking along beside her. “He’s one of Aet Visser’s men.”

  “Yes?” Blandine said, diverted by her eagerness to board ship.

  “He watches you,” Antony said. “He’s been around. Last night. And he was here this morning.”

  Lightning. The skeletal half-indian habitually wore a stove-in black felt hat, covering a scar that people gossiped came from a Mahican scalping with a sharpened clamshell. He had tattoos of stars along his jawline.

  “If he’s watching me,” Blandine said, “he won’t have much to see for the next few weeks.”

  They turned along the wharf and found the sloop that would carry her and Antony north into the wilderness. She could see her goods being loaded onto th
e Rose. Joy coursed through her.

  It was all she could do not to break into a run as she reached the pier.

  8

  Drummond lodged the night in the Lion, sleeping alongside a loutish sail captain. Emperor Nasty-Pants erupted with vile-smelling vapors the whole time, waking bright-eyed, jubilant with the triumph of a new day, just as Drummond fell back into an uneasy doze.

  He dreamed of the colony’s lone pet peacock, seeking for advantage among the seagulls and pigeons of the town. He killed the bird and fed its heart to a street mongrel.

  When Drummond woke, a smear of blood showed on the snow as he went to empty his bladder behind the Lion. But it was only the telltale aftermath of the tavern’s cook slaughtering a chicken. It turned out the colony owned no peacock.

  He took breakfast with Raeger, who afterward sent a boy with Drummond to find his rented rooms in Slyck Steegh. His landlord was a Swede with an unpronounceable name. Trount, or something like that.

  The rooms were acceptable. Drummond asked to see the outbuilding. A rectangular space, well windowed, the tile floor finely grouted, the whole place as licked-clean as the king’s boots.

  “I informed Mister Raeger the shed would be three guilders a month extra,” the Swede said. “I’ll take it in seawan if you don’t have coin.”

  The business of wampum mystified Drummond. Raeger possessed barrels of the stuff stored in a keep at the back of the Lion. The Dutch, Drummond knew, established seawan factories on Long Island, protected by armed guards. Inside, they churned out whole wreaths by drilling holes in clamshells and stringing the bits together. The purple being more valuable than the white.

  Which seawan the river indians and everyone else in the colony cheerfully accepted as legal tender for all debts public or private. So the Dutch literally were able to mint money. Incredible. Drummond couldn’t fathom how it worked. Designs for shell-drilling instruments and more efficient seawan-stringing machines naturally occurred to his mind.

  “It is cold in here,” he said to the Swede as he inspected the shed. “Might you install a stove?”

  Trount said he would be pleased to, and Drummond charged him with having his equipage fetched from the wharf warehouse. “Breakable furnishings,” he said. “Have your boys be extremely careful with it.”