The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  Drummond knew his thoughts were rambling, but he couldn’t help himself. He hunched down into the pelt and wished the journey would end. He considered the person of Blandine van Couvering.

  During his years of exile in the Netherlands, Drummond had encountered many other independent Dutch women, so different from the docile handmaidens he had left behind in England. Beguiled and bedeviled, attracted and affronted in equal measure, Drummond had never been able to grasp what it was these women wanted.

  To be taken for a male? To destroy the space between man and woman? To possess the world on their own?

  And now, this one. Pretty as a painting, but thorny as a rose.

  Put her out of your mind, man.

  But he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, and his fussing over the memory of Blandine almost made him lose the way.

  When a low stone tavern revealed itself, he slogged right past it. No lights marked the place. Only his horse’s tug at the reins alerted him to halt.

  To Blandine’s surprise, Antony had evidently developed Beverwyck connections of his own, since by the end of market, he was able to inform her where the Lenape trapper Kitane had last been seen.

  They took the Rose again, sailing downriver, but stepped off the sloop when she put in at Wildwyck, the Dutch community at the head of Ronduit Kill. Blandine hired a skiff to ferry them across to the eastern shore of the river. From then forward, they proceeded on foot, penetrating the forest along an unnamed creek. This was where Antony had heard Kitane might be.

  She had a sense of urgency, wondering what was happening in New Amsterdam, spurred by the idea that the Lenape might help her understand the abduction of an orphan child. The disappearance of Piddy Gullee connected in her mind with the ritualized killing of Jope Hawes, and Blandine felt certain that Kitane could give her insight into the mystery of the witika.

  The storm winds of the previous night had stripped most of the remaining autumn leaves from the trees. What few remained were a golden shade of copper, on the oaks, which were always the last trees to lose their foliage. The night’s rains freshened the forest air, the walking proved cool but not uncomfortable and Blandine followed Antony easily along the barely there track through the woods.

  The stream they followed pooled into a swamp, which in turn led to a lake. At dusk Blandine and Antony entered the ghostly precincts of an abandoned native village on the shore of the lake. Lodges—the river indians called the larger ones their “castles,” adopting the word readily from Europeans—dotted the forest floor beneath an expansive stand of sugar maples.

  Lenapes loved the “sweet water” sap from maples, and considered the tree itself inhabited by beneficial spirits. Maples, Kitane informed Blandine once, were great tellers of jokes.

  But there were no jokes to be told here. The lodges were empty, decrepit, their tree-bark wall panels curled up and admitting rain to the interiors. Maple boughs had fallen to collapse the roofs of a few of the castles. In the flats around the lake, fields once cultivated with corn lay overgrown with quick-growing sumac and bracken.

  This was once the great village of Upukuipising, haunt of the Wappinger federation, tribal brothers of the Lenape.

  “Here?” Blandine asked Antony, looking around at the devastated village.

  “She told me, look in Upukuipising,” Antony said, mangling the Algonquin word.

  “She, who?”

  “I said already. The Mohawk woman.”

  “What would she know of the Wappinger?”

  Antony shrugged. “This is that village?”

  “Yes, but there is no one here,” Blandine said.

  “We can at least camp the night,” Antony said. “I’ll build a fire.”

  The place gave Blandine a disconsolate feeling. She would have rather not stayed. Sickness and death marked every lodge. Even the breeze, passing through the plague-decimated village, shushed itself forlornly. But the evening came on, and there was nothing for it. They had to halt for the night.

  As Antony gathered wood, she laid out their dinner, dried pippins, salted venison ham, chunks of sweetened bread buttered with beef tallow. When she went to fetch water, she discovered the stream had a pleasant taste. Upukuipising, she knew, meant something like “lodge among the reeds by the little stream.” She had visited here as a girl years ago, in the village’s heyday, with her father.

  “All dead,” she murmured to Antony, as they ate together by the fire.

  “Or gone across the river,” Antony said. “To get away from us.”

  She would go back to New Amsterdam, she thought, marry Kees Bayard, have a family, construct a trading empire, leave the past behind. Edward Drummond would no more figure in her life except as a fleeting memory.

  Full dark, no moon. Bats rose into the night sky, darting black dots against the blue stars.

  Later, Blandine felt compelled to visit each of the old lodges in turn, not the ones far afield, scattered in the woods, but at least the dozen or so that were bunched together on the slope above the lake. Taking an oil lantern, she wandered through the deserted village.

  At times such as these, evenings in the forest, loneliness seized her like a black dog. She kept telling herself it was pure weakness, that she had to be strong to stay alive in this world. Her orphanhood hung about her like a cloak. You shall not feel sorry for yourself, she commanded, and then disobeyed.

  Wilderness was where she lost God. She had not known her sister, Sarah, for that long, only a few years. But some children charm you, bewitch you, warm you with their glow. Sarah had a way with her… but what was the use? How to describe to anyone what Blandine had lost?

  She realized what she was looking for as she traipsed from one empty lodge to another. Her family. She imagined herself going about the whole world, street after street, knocking on doors. Finally, behind one of them, she would discover her mother, Josette, at the hearth.

  Blandine’s secret: beneath the surface veneer of stubborn independence, she needed desperately to belong to somebody.

  She could see the fire that Antony had built, beneath the trees down the slope toward the lake. She felt as though she were orbiting the thin, wavering light in vain, circling, never to come home.

  In one of the last lodge houses, a small one along the far edge of the maple grove, she found strange totems strewn about the floor. A willow branch bent into a circle and lashed to a pair of cross-sticks. A mask.

  In the dead embers of the lodge fire, some kind of half-crusted entrails, human or animal, she could not tell. Had someone been cooking there? The whole interior was cold and odorless.

  One of the corn-husk fetish dolls the river indians kept in every lodge, this one stained black, sat upright beside the cold ashes. Fascinated, she picked it up. Discolored with what? Blood?

  She lifted her lantern.

  At the far back of the lodge, she saw Kitane.

  Dead.

  The Lenape trapper lay naked and motionless on a half-collapsed bed of willow sticks. By the dim light of her lantern, she recognized him by his bird tattoos. A fine gray ash covered the man’s skin from head to foot.

  For a long moment Blandine halted, unwilling to venture farther into the darkened interior. Silence. Could he be alive? But no movement, no breath.

  She moved forward and knelt next to the body of her friend. She touched his hand, which felt as cold as stone. Kitane had been the one who opened the wilderness to her. On their trip up the Mohawk River, he had shown Blandine not only how to survive in what the European might consider trackless wasteland, but how to embrace it, glory in it.

  He was also a man. Kitane had the most striking physical presence of anyone Blandine ever encountered. Now here he was, wholly unclothed. She had never seen a grown man naked. Enthralled and horrified at once, she studied his ash-dusted body. The flesh showed no signs of decomposition.

  Some of Kitane’s charisma had vanished with death. The bird tattoos across his chest, animated before, appeared lifeless. The ropes of muscle
in his arms and shoulders, his flat belly, his strong thighs had subsided, the flesh sunk back like clay. His member rested inert alongside his leg, flaccid.

  She bent her head down to his chest and listened. Nothing.

  “Kitane Chansomps, prince of the locust clan,” she murmured. “What happened to you?”

  She rose, turned her back on the corpse and crossed to the door of the lodge.

  “Antony,” Blandine called out.

  Behind her, Kitane reared up out of death.

  The Lenape shouted a few unintelligible words of Algonquin, lunged forward and attacked Blandine, seizing her arm. He wore a deranged look and, strangest of all, snapped his jaws open and shut as if he would bite her.

  Which he did.

  Kitane sank his teeth into Blandine’s shoulder, tearing through the cambric of her dress. She cried out. The pain was intense.

  The Lenape ripped his mouth away with a piece of her flesh. He looked ghastly. His muscles were slack and his skin had a green tinge. But in the small lodge Kitane appeared immense, filling the interior with his crazed, naked presence. Blandine knew her friend was out to kill her.

  Jabbering loudly, Kitane tilted his head back and swallowed his bite of Blandine’s flesh, looking like a baby bird choking down some regurgitated morsel from its mother.

  The lantern dropped from Blandine’s grasp. Pain shot through her arm and ran up her neck. She felt fear, but most of all astonishment. This was not Kitane. This was a rabid animal that had shape-shifted into the form of Kitane.

  Bleeding all over herself, Blandine backed out of the lodge. Kitane came at her again. It would have gone beyond strange, had it not been so horrible, how he gnashed his teeth. She could hear them clack and snap as the Lenape bore down.

  Antony appeared, slugged Kitane with a single roundhouse from one of his ham-sized fists, and the crazed indian slumped to the floor.

  They stared at the collapsed figure. Blandine’s blood glistened on his lips. She clutched at her wounded shoulder, thoroughly shaken.

  Antony bound Kitane by the legs, brought him away from the lodge and laid him lengthwise on the other side of their campfire. Later, the Lenape regained some measure of consciousness. But though his eyes opened, he remained catatonic.

  Antony tended Blandine’s injury. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What are you sorry for? You didn’t attack me.”

  “I should have been there.”

  “I’m not sure what happened,” Blandine said. “He lay on his willow cot. I thought he was dead. Then he leapt up like an ambush. He would not have done it if he had known it was me.”

  “It was chicken-hearted.”

  “No, Antony, no,” Blandine said. “Look at him. The man is ill.”

  Antony gazed across the fire at the comatose Lenape. Once more, Kitane seemed still to the point of death.

  “A madness comes upon them, a witika madness,” Antony said. “He thinks he has become possessed by witika. He needs to eat human flesh.”

  A sick feeling stole over Blandine. She admired Kitane greatly. But she knew him to be near the settlement when Piddy disappeared. He had also been up north when the Jope Hawes murder occurred. Here in his lodge were the totems, a fetish doll such as Hannie de Laet found in the forest.

  Blandine felt she didn’t know enough about witika madness to judge whether this was a case or not. Was it even real? Could it be contagious?

  She lay down close to the fire. Her shoulder throbbed. Antony stayed with his back propped against the trunk of a maple. Sleep didn’t come to either of them.

  Midnight winds rose in the night sky, blowing loose the stars into darkness. Antony laid more wood on the fire. Blandine reached a tentative decision. She would nurse Kitane back to health. But she would do it warily.

  After a long time, Antony said, “You saw that he didn’t attack me.”

  “Yes,” Blandine said.

  “You know why?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Too big to eat.”

  15

  Two weeks later, moonlight made the night into day. Blandine decided to return directly to New Amsterdam that evening, instead of staying over at the director general’s bouwerie as she planned.

  She had been gone from home for almost a month now. First the Beverwyck market, then the aftermath of Kitane’s attack. She needed to get back. Aet Visser’s claim of a pattern of child disappearances weighed heavily on her mind. She and Antony made their way along the shoreline of Manhattan, following a trail she could see clearly, though a scattering of clouds at times obscured the radiance of the sky.

  They had left the convalescing Kitane in the care of a village of Canarsies near Hell Gate. Over the past two weeks Blandine had nursed the trapper. After his attack on her, the Lenape fell into a fever, but she stayed at his bedside. She sweated him with steam infused with herbs. Antony brought in a native healer.

  Kitane slowly recovered his wits, but remained in a weakened state. The prospect of him relapsing into witika madness receded somewhat. He became aware of what he had done to Blandine, and writhed in shame.

  Blandine’s shoulder healed. It was good to be going home, back to New Amsterdam. Her trading days at Beverwyck had been a fantastic success, so much so that she almost felt guilty. She knew she would soon see Lace and Mally. It was early November. As Blandine and Antony walked south toward the settlement, an unease rose in her, a sense of coming back to responsibilities too long left untended.

  Still, what could be more beautiful than the white light of a full moon on the breast of the new world? The birch groves they passed shone incandescent. Night birds hooted as though they were calling to Blandine directly. The smell of autumn, delicious and bitter, hung over the forest.

  The trail led them along the western flank of Mount Petrus, a low knob whose promontory indicated that they were only a half-league from the palisades wall.

  “Up there,” Antony said.

  “What?” Blandine asked, searching where he pointed. She could see nothing.

  “A man,” Antony said.

  A voice hailed them, a voice she could not believe, one that she had last heard in Beverwyck three weeks before. He came hurtling down the side of the hill, his boots sending up clouds of crackling leaves.

  “Come,” Edward Drummond said, taking Blandine’s hand. “You must see this.”

  She thought of extracting her hand from his but found she could not make herself do so. His sudden appearance was so surprising, his tone seemed so urgent—not panicked, but excited, happy.

  “You, too,” Drummond called back to Antony, as he led Blandine up the slope.

  “Mister Drummond,” she said. But it was as if she were caught up in a whirlwind.

  He brought her, breathless, to the bald crown of Mount Petrus. A child stood there, mute and motionless. A cloud suddenly dropped away from the moon and light flooded over them, making the child appear unearthly, like a ghost or a fairy.

  William, the Godbolts’ ward.

  “Here, take a look,” Drummond said.

  Beside the boy stood some sort of a weapon, a brass cannon the likes of which Blandine had never seen. Stood on end, it was taller than she was. The device rested on a metal tripod, aimed at the sky.

  Drummond, Blandine noticed, was wrapped in the bearskin robe she had given him.

  Antony reached the top of the slope after her.

  “Please, you must,” Drummond said.

  The boy stepped forward, like a little page at a royal court, and indicated a small cylinder fixed to the lower end of the cannon. He bent down and placed his eye to the cylinder. The pantomime was perfect. “Like this,” William seemed to say, entirely without speaking.

  “Go ahead,” Drummond said. “You won’t be sorry, I promise.”

  Blandine looked over at Antony. He stared, not at her but at the cannon, lost in admiration for the apparatus, its long brass lines gleaming in the light of the moon.

  “What is it?”
Blandine asked, hesitating. Drummond merely gestured her forward.

  Blandine bent as the boy had done and placed her eye at the end of the brass tube. Nothing. A blank. This must be the Englishman’s idea of a prank.

  “Close your other eye,” Drummond said, leaning uncomfortably close to her.

  She did so, and suddenly gave a startled cry. “Oh!”

  Through the brass tube shone the moon, the moon as Blandine had never seen it, close enough to touch. Its mountains and oceans could be read clearly. An immense beauty filled her eye and gripped her heart. She dared not breathe. Here was another new world, not America but a celestial one, presented to her as a gift, full of mystery, drenched in light.

  Wholly involuntarily, she trilled out a laugh. She could not help herself. It was that wonderful.

  Blandine had trouble keeping the moon in view. She did not understand how she was seeing it. It danced and moved, she lost it, found it again, laughed again.

  That is a sound, Drummond thought, that the world needs to hear more of.

  They were all aware of it, boy and giant and English spy, how lovely was the delight of this woman, bending slightly at her waist, her white-yellow hair the color of moonlight.

  Blandine straightened up. “Oh, Mister Drummond,” she said. As if compelled, she immediately returned her eye to the tube.

  “I can’t get it,” she said. “Yes, I can.”

  “Antony,” Drummond said, and Blandine straightened again.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. She guided her man’s eye to the tube. His size made it more convenient for him not to bend down but to go to his knees. He at first also had difficulty registering the view.

  “Lord God,” he said after a moment. “My dear Lord God.”

  He, too, laughed, throwing his head back with a bursting guffaw, then immediately returning for another look. He stopped, gazed up at Drummond with an immense smile, as though he had received a Christmas present.

  “What is it?” Blandine asked Drummond.

  “It is called a perspective tube,” Drummond said. “It works by bending rays of light.”