The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  The Maryland, Carolina and Virginia colonies promulgated laws making it illegal to free enslaved Africans, contravening English law, which held they could be freed if they converted to Christianity.

  In autumn 1663, the English emissary James Christe penetrated the western, Dutch-controlled end of Long Island, informing the settlers there that the territory was no longer under the jurisdiction of New Netherland, but that they should instead heretofore think of it as part of Connecticut.

  For the first time, all over Europe but most especially in Italy, Holland and England, human beings placed their eyes to lozenges of shaped glass and peered into secrets of the universe. The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens debuted the magic lantern, an optical device that projected images upon surfaces. It was initially referred to as “the lantern of fright,” since in early applications it was used most often to display fear-inspiring images of the Devil.

  Nowhere on earth were women more legally unencumbered than in the Netherlands and its colony of New Netherland. For their elementary education, girls received identical instruction to that of boys. Under a unique Dutch legal tradition, a woman could choose a form of marriage granting her legal standing equal to her husband’s, allowing her to represent herself in court, sign contracts and inherit property. Single women also enjoyed these rights, which would not be fully extended under British law for centuries.

  Blandine van Couvering, aged twenty-two in 1663, took for granted her independent status before the law, though she herself could not feel free, oppressed as she was by her status as an orphan girl. In particular, she suffered nightmares of her sister’s death by drowning, and often waked with the agony of reaching out to six-year-old sister Sarah, only to have the seas sweep the child roughly away.

  An able student, she lacked fluency in Latin but could converse readily in Dutch, English and French, plus the trade language that combined pidgin English, peddler’s French and Algonquin. As a child, working as a hawker of citrus, she lent her profits out to farmers at seven percent. She kept pigeons and refused to allow them to be sold for meat. A year later she had graduated to rabbits and was carrying on a brisk trade with New Amsterdam meat-mongers. She explained the contradiction by saying, “Rabbits are much more stupid than pigeons.”

  As she attained her majority she became avowedly parochial, preferring everything of the new world to anything of the old. For a time, her favorite reading was Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse, but she left this behind as her religious views shifted. She had seen war, massacre, pestilence, indigenes, lust, terror, loyalty, tobacco, hard cider, bobcats, intolerance, frugality, faithlessness.

  She never wore a cap.

  17

  The director general hated the day. Every year, when the annual kermis rolled around, he felt his bowels tighten. During the harvest carnival, the populace threw themselves into drinking and brawling and fornication with unseemly abandon. An air of lawlessness descended upon the colony—his colony. Settlers poured into New Amsterdam from the outlying districts, so many that he could hardly recognize the faces on the streets. Because of knife fights, surgeons did their best business of the year.

  Stuyvesant would have outlawed the whole festival if he could. Herded them all into church, given them a good tongue-thrashing sermon to mull over. The fair’s promiscuity troubled him deeply. Africans and river indians and good Company men, thrown in together without thought of proper social forms.

  The whole task of the new world, the director general considered, was to bring its morals in line with the old. Already the stays had been loosened. Between men and women, intimacies occurred openly on a daily basis that would be unheard of in Patria. Kisses, fondlings, passionate exchanges between unmarrieds, random adulteries on the part of those who were linked to others before God.

  He recalled interrogating his nephew Kees about his dealings with the Van Couvering girl.

  “Hast thou kissed?”

  Yes.

  “Touched?”

  Yes.

  “Does she remain intact?”

  “Uncle!”

  Among all the peoples of Europe, behind only the French, the Dutch were notoriously randy. The women, if not promiscuous, were open to suggestion. In fact, they were the ones who sometimes offered up the suggestion first. It did not necessarily matter that a woman possessed her virginity on her wedding day.

  “It is a legitimate concern. Answer my question. Is she intact?”

  Yes.

  Or so the young suitor averred. From what Stuyvesant knew of his nephew, Kees would be no threat to any girl’s honor. What he did with the prostitutes down along the Strand was his own business. With a proper lady, Kees would pull up short before things went too far. But not every man in the settlement would be so circumspect.

  He, Petrus Stuyvesant, acted as the dykemaster, holding back the flood. The carnival challenged all that he tried to do. These things went on in his jurisdiction, he knew. But at kermis, they burst out into the open. They were goading him, his colonists, challenging his authority.

  “Do you know,” the director general said, “that this market carnival business was originally a religious affair? Ker-mis—it means ‘church mass.’ Now look at them!”

  George Godbolt nodded in agreement, attempting to put the correct expression of distaste on his face. Godbolt was the sole petitioner in the director general’s audience chamber at the Stadt Huys that day. Stuyvesant granted him a private audience as a show of favor to one of his loyal English residents. He had an idea that he might need Godbolt’s support in the future.

  Crowds flocked past the Stadt Huys along the wharf, gabbing and laughing and calling to one another, streaming toward the market square next to the fort. They reminded the director general of a gaggle of geese.

  “Labor omnia vincit,” murmured the director general.

  “I’m afraid M’lord General’s learning is superior to mine,” Godbolt said.

  “Virgil,” the director general said. He was Latin-proud in the extreme. “Work conquers all.”

  “A great truth, M’lord General.”

  “But no work gets done during kermis,” Stuyvesant said.

  Godbolt startled as the director general turned abruptly from the window, pivoting on his wooden peg so fast that he instantly came around. The apparatus, Godbolt noticed with fascination, boasted strengthening seams of inlaid silver running along its length of oak.

  “You know we have these indian murders to deal with,” the director general said.

  He did not divulge to Godbolt that there had been a new incident, with the orphan Ansel Imbrock’s fantastic testimony.

  “I understand, of course,” Godbolt said. “I appreciate your seeing me during a time of trouble. This petition of mine is a very small matter.”

  “Aet Visser believes he can dodge authority,” Stuyvesant growled.

  “It’s not Aet Visser,” Godbolt said quickly. “Not him so much as this other one, the grain merchant, Drummond. I would be thankful if you could back him off.”

  “I’ve had some report of him,” the director general lied. In truth, the man Drummond’s name had not entered the lists, as far as he knew. An unlicensed presence in the colony always caused Stuyvesant anxiety. He wondered at Godbolt, an Englishman, complaining about this newcomer, his countryman.

  Someone shouted drunkenly amid the circus outside his window. “A profane time,” the director general said.

  “Amen,” said Godbolt. He felt relieved that the director general seemed to look with favor on his petition.

  “These murders, too, must be signs of the Lord’s displeasure. The De Laet child was quite hysterical about what she saw out there in the woods. Her father wouldn’t let me alone.”

  Godbolt had served this function before, as soundboard for the director general’s musings. Truth was, he wished to present his petition and—he felt himself a hypocrite—slip off to kermis to join his family in the revels.

  “We thoroughly searched the
area where Hannie de Laet said she saw the monstrosity,” Godbolt told the director. “We could find nothing.”

  Godbolt was part of a crew platooned by the Company to investigate the fire ring in the forest. The merchant Jean de Laet had been so hounded by his fear-maddened daughter that his wife, Clara, had forced the man to ask the director general for redress. Something must be done, De Laet had said, to set my darling daughter’s fright to rest.

  The party, a dozen colonists strong, was organized by Kees Bayard, who, as far as the others could see, did none of the searching himself, but stood around smoking and directing others.

  What were they looking for? A charred patch in the wilderness. A scrap of leather hung from a tree. The fingers of a child.

  They found nothing. A young girl’s flight of fancy, grumbled members of the search party. But Godbolt had a secret worry. Any inquiry into the loss of settlement children hove dangerously close to home.

  Which is why he appeared before the director general on the first morning of kermis, asking that scrutiny of his mute adopted child cease immediately. On the part of Visser or the new English busybody aristocrat, Edward Drummond.

  “The colony is inflamed with visions of the indian devil,” the director general said.

  Rumors were already abroad. This morning, the director general had reports of a witika effigy paraded in the marketplace during the fair. The Africans were making noises about disappearances of their own.

  The director general would not be able to keep a lid upon Ansel Imbrock’s new report of witika mischief for very long. He would have to organize another search party to get lost in the woods again, searching for a shadow of a mirage of a chimera.

  He considered telling all to Godbolt, and thought the better of it. The man was a booby. He appeared eager to depart from the director general’s presence. Probably to get himself off to the festival drinking booths.

  But Petrus Stuyvesant knew a thing or two about ruling a colony of men. He understood the manifold uses of fear. He thought of a way to spring Ansel Imbrock’s terrible story upon the populace, and curtail the excesses of kermis at the same time.

  “I shall declare a day of prayer and repentance,” the director general said. “To bring our jurisdiction more in line with the Lord’s wishes.”

  “Very wise, very necessary, M’lord General,” Godbolt said. “Shall you also look into this man Edward Drummond’s activities in the colony?”

  “I have the sense,” Drummond said to Raeger, “that a single frigate with a brace of twenty-four-pounders could blow this whole business down.”

  They had strolled through every precinct of New Amsterdam that morning, pretending to be friends out for a constitutional, but in truth performing a careful inspection of the settlement’s defenses, its palisade walls, its sea roads, its anchorage in the East River. You could walk the whole colony in two or three hours.

  And now, the stronghold. Fort Amsterdam. A four-square citadel on the southwest edge of the island. At one time, it might have furnished a suitable defense against attack. And it still would serve as a refuge from marauding river indians. But for any real bulwark against a modern cannonade, the place was useless.

  Crumbling curtain walls, rotted battlements, collapsed roofs. Inside—the gates were left open to all comers—one corner of the bailey played host to a great pile of manure, which seeped out into the enclosure and fouled the unused, leaf-covered cistern. Neglect spoke from every corner of the fortress. The roof of the keep, such as it was, served merely as a perch for doves.

  “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble,” Raeger said. He meant that England would have no difficulty with the planned move by the crown to take New Netherland.

  “By ‘we’ you might as well say you and I,” Drummond said. “I think the two of us could take it on our own.”

  Raeger laughed. “Deliver it up to King Charles with our compliments.”

  He sucked on his clay pipe. Raeger had picked up some of the local habits during his time in the colony. Pipe-smoking, he informed Drummond, was useful. The wreath of smoke could be employed as camouflage, he said, to hide one’s expression during a conversation, say, or a negotiation.

  “This settlement is waiting to be plucked,” Drummond said. “The Dutch are like sleepwalkers. They pile up the gold, but forget to lock the door of the counting house.”

  Some sort of carnival or market day held sway on the lee side of the fort. Raeger had assured Drummond that no more favorable time could be had for a guided reconnaissance of the town. “The beast fair,” Raeger called kermis, an autumn festival and trading opportunity. A time when colonists bartered cattle, and became beasts themselves.

  “The folk go a little unbuckled during the fair,” Raeger told him. “They indulge themselves in holiday play after the labor of the harvest and commit all kinds of drunken silliness. If you would ever want to steal a kiss from a pretty miss—say, for example, Blandine van Couvering over there—the beast fair would be the time to do it.”

  They had rounded the corner of the fort and were thrust into the noise and raucous anarchy of the harvest market.

  Blandine was indeed there, in the midst of the crowd, but Drummond could hardly recognize her.

  They had not seen each other since two mornings past, when the four moongazers had wandered into the deserted town at dawn, tired but merry after their rapturous night.

  Drummond and Blandine and Antony and William felt as though they had just emerged from under a spell cast by the heavens. The full moon, setting in the west, still hung before them, a mystery realm, a few of whose secrets they had unlocked that night.

  The woman who Drummond saw at the fair seemed a different creature altogether. Blandine looked a wonder, dressed to be seen in layers of scarlet, purple and green, with a black steepled hat that made Drummond think of the piled-high hairstyles of the French court.

  But it wasn’t just her costume. She struck a formal pose, mincing forward step by step, her hand outstretched and placed archly in the grasp of her companion, an equally up-rigged colonial gentleman.

  The two of them were characters in a dumb show. Goggle-eyed crowds of wrights, rude boys and rustics surged around them. A few other high-caste couples, similarly accoutred and stylized, passed through the fair, swans gliding over a lake crowded with wood ducks and widgeons.

  Blandine and her partner stepped delicately aside to allow for passage of a yoke of oxen, hawked for sale by its drover.

  Drummond almost laughed out loud. It was as though Blandine were playing at an appearance for the royal court at Whitehall. But she should be careful not to step with her pretty little beribboned shoes into the pile of ox dung just dumped in her path.

  Drums beat to announce the opening of kermis. Already boys in yellow stockings and monkey jackets roamed the market, eager to spend the few stuivers given to them by their parents at just the right food stall or the most enticing of the spectacle booths.

  Touts, mongers and hawkers lured customers to the booths with flatulent blasts of brass trumpets. Ribbons, bunting and flowers garlanded every surface. The fair lacked a maypole, but that was another festival, another season. The atmosphere of frolic was the same.

  Drinking and food counters lined the fairway, offering wine stiffened with sugar, ham pasties and sweet pies, cakes with chips of candied citrus peel.

  “Here it is, here it is,” the waffle man called. He had no need of a brass trumpet. The wafting aroma of his hot fried cakes drizzled with honey ensured that he and his missus had all the customers they could handle.

  Most of the smells of the fair were not nearly so fragrant, and the stench of the assembled pigs, sheep, goats, oxen, cattle and milk cows mingled with the yeasty odor of spilled beer.

  Spectator booths lodged against the fort wall, away from the public promenade. A fire-eater, a dwarf. One booth displayed the invitation “See the Jew!” charging a stuiver for country gawkers to stick their heads through a curtain and gaze upon a memb
er of the tribe, complete with a fur hat and trailing side curls. The money, it must be said, went toward the establishment of a temple.

  Blandine and Kees Bayard conducted their promenade north through the market to the parade ground, turned and made another promenade south, stilt-stepping all the while.

  Blandine encountered the rare exhibition of a miniature human, not more than a foot tall. Dressed in a tunic and cap, the homunculus danced and hissed atop a cabinet, a thin collar and metal chain around his neck.

  “Hello, little one,” cooed Blandine. The creature had tufts of cream-colored fur around its grimacing, disapproving visage, and tore apart an apple with childlike fingers.

  “Just a monkey,” said Kees. Since he had traveled to Suriname on one of his ships, Blandine noticed that he affected not to find anything wondrous anymore.

  “He’s a little man, isn’t he?” Blandine said. She reached out to touch the paw of the beast, but Kees pulled her back.

  “It’s dirty,” he said.

  * * *

  In the Doden Acker, the town cemetery off the Broad Way north of the parade ground, a dozen children went unsupervised that afternoon, their nearby parents letting them run free. The kids played Deadman’s Bluff among the graves.

  “Deadman, Deadman, come alive,” their singsong child voices called. “Come alive when we count to five. One, two, three, four, five.”

  The blindfolded “Deadman,” Bo Dorset, stretched his six-year-old arms in front of him, grabbing at the air as the other girls and boys weaved and dodged away from him.

  Suddenly young Bo blundered into a pair of tree trunks. There were the solid adult legs of Mister Martyn Hendrickson, planted right in the middle of the game. He towered above the boy, charming, smiling and totally smashed. His drinking pals Ludwig Smits and Pim Jensen stood next to him, holding him up and being held up in turn.