The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  A small crowd of handlaers gathered around her. She fended off furious offers and counteroffers. Antony glared at the traders whenever they got too close to her bale of pelts.

  Blandine felt splendid. She was at the top of her game. She had a brief, glancing wish that the English popinjay could see her now, but immediately banished the thought as unworthy of her.

  Embers de With emerged from the clutch of traders around Blandine and approached.

  “Fashion will change, that’s what it does,” he pronounced. His opening gambit. “Who knows how long mink will hold its present inflated value?”

  “And yet, the whole world tags along after Louis,” Blandine said. “Are we not sheep? What he wears, the courts of London, Portugal, the Empire, even Spain are sure to adopt.”

  “Not Spain, surely not Spain,” De With said.

  “They dye the fur black,” Blandine explained.

  De With countered, “And of course there is an ample supply of mink from Russia.”

  Suddenly Edward Drummond was there by her side. “You’ve not heard of the tsar’s edict of embargo?” he said to De With.

  De With flinched. “An embargo?”

  Drummond nodded. “Total and complete. To protect the Siberian mink population, which has much diminished in the wild.”

  Blandine almost laughed, but she also had the concomitant urge to smash Drummond in his supercilious, hair-draped face.

  “Please, sir,” she said, sotto. “I can well attend to my own affairs.”

  “An offer of pertinent intelligence, merely,” Drummond said loudly. “I have just recently come from the Grand Duchy of Muscovy.”

  Have you really? Have you just come from there, you precious English ass?

  Blandine focused on De With, who paced, hyperventilating, practically popping the buttons on his vest. He was less cool than in the morning, when he and Blandine had conducted their molasses-for-saltpeter barter.

  The pressures of trade affected different men in different ways. Some could not see their way clear to consider it as she did, as merely a great game.

  “You know, I’ve heard of a scheme to farm-raise the creatures,” Blandine mused. “Perhaps that would be a way to assure oneself of a steady supply of mink. But getting the husbandry of it might take a few seasons.”

  “By which time,” Drummond interjected, “the French king could have returned to ermine.”

  “Or sable,” Blandine said, smiling sweetly.

  Shadows lengthened around the Fuyck. Men had begun to stumble for the taverns, exhausted by the frenzy of bartering. The day of trade was nearly over.

  “All right!” De With said. “What will you take for the bale?”

  “My whole supply? Wouldn’t that be foolish of me?”

  “Just tell me,” the maddened trader said.

  “I really wouldn’t know. What can you offer?”

  “For the Lord’s sake, woman!”

  Blandine fingered the silky pelts in her suddenly golden cache. “You have a holding in Beverwyck town, on the heights off the river,” she said. “Almost an English acre, I think, from the looks of the plat map.”

  De With stared at her. Land, solid ground, earth-and-soil property, in exchange for the skins of dead animals. “That piece is just off the Post Road,” he said, a faint tone of accusation in his voice.

  “Just so,” Blandine said. She waited.

  “It is a full acre,” De With said.

  “Oh? I didn’t mark it exactly.”

  He paced, bulging in gut and eyeball, furious at the thought of being beaten by a girl.

  “I would need a signed and witnessed deed of transfer,” Blandine said.

  At this, De With erupted. “My word is good!” he shouted at her. “Ask anyone.”

  Blandine looked around. A crowd of traders attended the deal in amused anticipation. Drummond looked on attentively.

  She waited for De With some more. Come on, man, come to it.

  Finally, the exasperated merchant said, “The acre plot is yours,” and a laughing cheer went up from the assembled traders.

  Blandine looked over at Drummond. In spite of herself, she exchanged a small smile with the Englishman.

  “One thing,” Blandine said, turning back to De With. “Or two things, really.”

  “What are they?” De With said.

  Blandine yanked one of the mink pelts from the tightly wrapped bundle. “I keep one out,” she said. “A gift for a friend.”

  “For her lover,” the handlaer Warner Wessels shouted, and again the whole crowd laughed.

  “Yes?” De With said. “And the other thing?”

  She knew what she wanted. Her original trade, the one with which she had started out the day. “I am in need of a jug of good Barbados molasses,” Blandine said.

  Across the faces of the stones were written the name of the sun, the name of the wind, the name of the heart and the kidney and the liver. But what was written most and written largest was his name.

  Lightning.

  The sun blazed copper-bright. Behind the warrior swayed the deer he had netted and killed, still draining its fluids onto the gnarled roots below.

  The tree from which the carcass dangled stood at the mouth of the cave. His cave, Lightning’s own secret. The Place of Stones.

  The clearing at the top of Manhattan Island sang with the rushing river of stones, clacking together in the stream the Dutch called Spuyten Duyvil. The song made this the Place of Stones. The stones made this a castle for witika.

  As a child Lightning had visited, on the Manhattan shoreline below, the great Lenape village of Shorakapock. A place of summer feasting. Chepi lived there, Alawa, Nuttah and old mother Hausis. Now they were all dead.

  He could wade into the ancient shell middens of Shorakapock, dive so deeply into the pile of cast-off oyster shells that he was buried to his chest. He could thus swim through the past banquets of the village. The middens stretched around the end of the island. Endless shells, as many as there were stars in the sky.

  And he was well aware that there were shells in the pile that he himself had tossed away during the feasts of summer, sweet salty water pouring down his chin as he gobbled the succulent flesh of Brother Oyster.

  The blood of the deer still drained.

  Before dawn that morning, he had cut away a slice of its hide, ragged with reddish cold-weather fur. He laid out the skin as he prepared himself to do the work for his master. Lightning’s blade had shone scarlet with blood, like a sunrise sun.

  But he scraped the hide in the old way, not with a knife but with a sharpened clamshell. He flipped over the skin and touched the remnants of flesh. He crouched above the stone and punctured his palm, dripping his life blood to merge in a swirl with the deer’s innards. Rubbing a finger across the welts of blubber, he brought the blood to his lips. A milk of life, even in death.

  The hide called out to him from the hot stone on which he had laid it out. Where will be my eyes? the skin asked. What shape for my mouth?

  He had to lie down awhile to think. He flopped on the open grass, the skinned shank of a swannekin child a foot from his face.

  Brother Deer had his own memory, he thought. Brother Deer held within himself the crown of antlers and the troubles his people had suffered at the hands of the swannekins.

  I will help you in your fight for vengeance, said the deer.

  Lightning thought of how he might slice the raw leather, with a sure hand and a woman’s finesse. Over these last months, he had developed skills he never knew he had.

  The eyes, the mouth, he would carve them beautifully. As witika requested.

  All the while his languorous mind coursed slowly over the laying-outs that had taken place in the past and would occur in the future. Inside the cave opening behind him, trophies stacked themselves haphazardly.

  Heart, kidney, liver. Fingers, many fingers, and toes, collected from the laying-out places around the island. Each of them so small, as precious as the s
eashells from which seawan beads were carved. His master preferred to keep orphan garments, stained or clean, as mementos, but Lightning treasured the parts of the body.

  All that was missing was that which was given up to the feast.

  The dead called to him, too. Where are my eyes, where is my penis, where is my uterus?

  Ho, ho, he answered, they are here.

  He loved to witness rot.

  He had lain for hours, motionless as a stone, flat on his belly in the grass. A few feet away, his totems. Silently, patiently, he watched the progress of putrefaction, the leg shank crusting yellow, the blackened ooze from the organs, the way things transmogrified into other things.

  The process of decay held for him a majesty greater than any he had ever felt in the song circles of his people, the vision quests, the ceremonies that made him a man.

  The dangers were constant. All of nature seemed determined to raid his bounty. Heart, kidney, liver, I will be your protector.

  Buzzards flapped down, eager for a meal. Brothers, this is not your time. He crooked his arm and chucked at them lazily with rocks. Go! They rose away, lazily also, apologizing.

  Sister Coyote whined, snuffling under the rock ledge, pleading for some meat. Brother, please, please, she said, I beg of you.

  His heart was as of stone.

  He held himself warily against them. He must guard even against the resolute armies of ants.

  But some he favored.

  Come, Brother Fly, friend moth, beetle chieftain with your legion of followers. He watched them carry their morsels away. One after another, numberless. Still he lay quietly, until the maggots burst out of their eggs and began to eat. He could hear the tiny tusks munching.

  I am ready, brother, a soft voice whispered.

  It was the mask, calling him. Its outline revealed itself, perfect in shape and dimensions.

  He got to his feet and crossed the Place of Stones to approach the sacred skin. He petted the scabby, mottled surface, uneven with fat globules and veins.

  Witika’s next mask.

  He lifted the blade and began to cut.

  Part Two

  The Stadt Huys

  14

  Drummond left Beverwyck and took Peterson’s ferry across the river, finding himself once again traveling across the sprawling patent of the Hendrickson brothers. But he felt eager now to initiate his New Haven mission against the regicides, and had no time to waste on Ad Hendrickson’s natterings about goblins.

  Picking up the roan at the inn on the eastern shore where he had stabled it, he set out upon the Post Road toward New England. The land was wild. The road, really no more than a track carved out by indians, led through a succession of small but difficult fordings.

  It did not help to ease Drummond’s mind that every other farmhouse had been burned out in the recent Esopus wars, leaving charred timber skeletons exposed to the elements.

  He stayed over at an informal farmhouse hostelry, for once not having to share a bed.

  That night a woman cried in the forest. Moaning, sobbing, inconsolable. Drummond rose, the night still pitch dark. He padded out to the porch of the farmhouse, peering into the inky black.

  “What the devil?” he murmured to himself. The weeping crescendoed and fell, then mounted again. It sounded as though a woman were being murdered, or her child had been taken from her. Great, gasping yowls that went beyond pain to get at the horror of existence. Drummond felt lost and alone.

  “Catamountain,” his host said, suddenly appearing, disheveled but wakeful, by his side. “They cry at night.”

  The next day, the terrain turned mountainous, and the track climbed through hilly rumps of dense deciduous woods, alternating with deep gullies and swales, the Taconic Range. The forest floor lay thick with the golden litter of autumn leaves.

  Taking up the Mohawk Trail, he drove himself onward even as a pelting rain began. The roan had difficulty keeping its footing, slipping often on the wet, slushy leaves.

  The miles proved monotonous. To help himself along Drummond repeated, in a sort of singsong, the names of the three New Haven regicides. “Whalley and Dixwell and Goffe.” Over and over.

  He switched to the names of the saints. “Francis and Stephen and Paul.” Then back to the regicides.

  The crown had been trying for years to get at the regicides who had taken refuge in New England, living incognito in Cambridge. In 1661, the second Charles issued an order of arrest for the three. The document arrived in Boston on the heels of the fleeing outlaws.

  They were old men now. Whalley, father-in-law to Goffe and son of the sheriff of Nottingham, signed his name next after Cromwell’s on the king’s death warrant.

  As a young lieutenant, Drummond served with General Keith on the field at Worcester. He had met Whalley in battle, in front of Powick Bridge. Now he had the honor of helping to crucify him. He left unasked the question of whether the man was a traitor or a zealot. Whalley existed on the other side of the line of battle, and that was that.

  Drummond had never actually sunk the blade into any of the regicides he tracked, leaving that to more sanguinary hands. His spymasters did not deign to ask someone of Drummond’s rank to get his soul dirty, any more than they would do the job themselves. His assignment was only to seek out the renegades and convey information about their whereabouts to the crown. Someone else killed them.

  The French, if they knew about Drummond, would have labeled him “le doigt-homme.” The finger-man. But the French did not know about him.

  After they fled Boston, Whalley, Dixwell and Goffe easily found allies to hide them. There were plenty in New England who hated the king, feared the papistry and adhered to the deceased Cromwell and the republican cause. Somewhere among them, in the Massachusetts Bay colony, or perhaps in Connecticut, the regicides had discovered what they considered a safe nest.

  Drummond would flush them out.

  The downpour turned vicious, the rain coming at him not from above but on a howling slant, a northeaster storm. He tightened the shaggy bearskin around him. It provided some comfort, even soaked as it was.

  The massive pelt had been a gift from Blandine van Couvering when they parted after the trading days in Beverwyck. A begrudging gift, a strained mercy, granted, she said, in acknowledgment of Drummond’s intercession in the Embers de With trade.

  After her mink-for-land triumph, Drummond had lost Blandine in the crowd of handlaers. They loved her, and loved most that she had managed to trade back for her original jug of molasses. She started with the jug, and ended with the jug plus an acre of prime Beverwyck land. Now that was a trader.

  Drummond found Blandine again off the Fuyck, just as she was about to enter an inn. The crude, single-story log hostelry faced a burbling stream the Dutch called Tweedle Kill.

  The darkness had come on completely, but there was a little light escaping from the windows of the inn. Drummond caught sight of a head of white-blond hair and called out Blandine’s name.

  She turned to him solemnly, unsurprised. As Drummond approached, the woman’s giant loomed out of the darkness, hefting the bearskin, folded into a mattress-sized bundle and tied with deer-sinew cords.

  “I want to give you this,” she informed Drummond, “but not to encourage you to enter into my affairs again. I simply don’t wish to feel myself beholden to you.”

  Antony laid the gift at Drummond’s feet.

  “So we are even,” Blandine said. “You helped me with the trade, even though I did not ask it. This is a good skin of a nice-sized western bruin. We are quits.”

  “We may be even,” he said. “But perhaps we are not quits.”

  Blandine turned away. “Good night, Mister Drummond,” she said, and disappeared through the lantern-lit doorway.

  Blandine was miles behind him now. Drummond had no idea where the woman was. Still in Beverwyck? On her way back to New Amsterdam? But if her mind ever played over him—would it? did it?—it made him curiously happy to think she might t
hink that he was thinking of her. Out in the wilderness dark.

  The bearskin was immense, wide as a tent, taken off some sort of gargantuan she-bear. Inside it had been provided with arm slings and tanned to the softness of deer leather.

  Getting her hands on such an impressive specimen no doubt represented a coup for Miss van Couvering. The young she-merchant had her contacts, though, among them the well-adorned Mohawk women with whom he’d seen Blandine in the Fuyck. And of course this man Kitane, the legendary Lenape trapper Drummond had heard so much about but never seen.

  The roan’s head, streaming with icy water, hung in a most dispirited manner. The wind lashed, the blackness of night settled, the storm howled. Again and again, Drummond lost any sense of the trail, having to double back to locate it.

  Footing turned from merely treacherous to downright lethal, with jumbled rocks and crisscrossing roots hidden under the layer of wet leaves. He considered that only Blandine’s bearskin, draped over him and falling across the withers of his mount, kept him from freezing to death.

  He dismounted and led the roan, both of them exhausted, stumbling forward through the forest. If he didn’t find a haven soon, he would have to make a very ugly, very uncomfortable camp. He kept an eye for rock shelves beneath which to crawl.

  Another thought brought him up short, one that indicated the gift of the bearskin might not be so straightforward as it seemed. Yes, the robe was big. Massive, in truth. Just the thing in nasty weather. But he had ignored one salient fact about it. The pelt’s bulk meant there were bears the size of horses abroad in the American woods.

  To Drummond, lost and alone in the unfathomable wild, the mind played tricks. Rampaging she-bears hid behind every boulder. If one approached, he decided, he’d give it the roan.

  He envisioned what would happen to him. The she-bear would insist on taking back her skin. His blue corpse would be found months later, the frozen flesh gnawed upon by the hungry witika. The soul-wrenching night-crying of the catamount still infected his mind.