Usually, normally, among the Lenape and their Algonquin cousins, the madness killed. From self-loathing, or from the effects of the poisonous diet. Yet the master thrived. Perhaps the Dutch were different. The Esopus had another name for them, in addition to swannekins. Moordenaars, meaning “murderers.”
Looking at his master now, chewing away, Lightning recognized the expression on the man’s face. Not disgust, not nausea.
Bliss.
27
Blandine and Antony turned out not to accompany Drummond on his post-Christmas jaunt to New Haven. It was probably better that way. Drummond had once seen, at a cattle-market fair in the Mitte quarter of Berlin, a juggler who kept four live cats and a screaming piglet up in the air at once. Marking king-killers for death with Blandine van Couvering on hand struck him as the more difficult task.
So, he would travel by coastal from New Amsterdam to New Haven, conduct the king’s business privately, then rendezvous with Blandine and her giant at Fort Huys de Goede Hoop, “Fort House of Good Hope,” the Dutch holdout trading post at Hartford, in the heart of Connecticut. Afterward, they’d proceed northward by sleigh to Jope Hawes territory.
New Haven, January, in the bold new annum of 1664. A low town of a few stone buildings, thatch-roofed wood-framed houses and many log huts. Chimneys were held together not with mortar but with clay. At least, Drummond thought, the residents were not living in earthen pits, as he had seen in Hartford and other hamlets in Connecticut.
The Puritan response to the new world consisted of prayer, sweet pudding and the stocks. The pudding was quite good, but the other two elements were strained from overuse. In place of the shining city on the hill, the New Haven Colony had thrown down a tight-as-a-pinprick theocratic harbor village.
Drummond had had his fill of Puritan religious fervor and spectacles of public punishment in the Civil War. The New Haven Colony did not agree with him.
Except, perhaps, the waterfront. The harbor was quite good. Coastal shipping generally made a stopover at New Haven on the transit between Boston and New Amsterdam. Although nary a taproom or sporting house marred the town’s sanctity even on the wharves, more secular travelers could find rooms and convivial atmospheres at several dwelling-houses in the harbor district.
At one of these, a wooden-framed structure with a generous public room, Drummond met with Tunny Beechman, Ross Raeger’s man in Connecticut.
“You are going to have to cut your hair,” Tunny said. “They’ll mark you right off as a royalist if you enter a meetinghouse with locks like that.”
“I’ll tuck them under my hat,” Drummond said.
“Which ye will remove at the meetinghouse door,” Tunny said.
Since the only communal gatherings in the town took place in one of four meetinghouses that were less like churches than public halls, Drummond had proposed to go around in disguise. He needed to gain entry to the community, and community in New Haven meant the ceaseless, droning prayer meetings.
A few times before, in England during the war, going incognito, he had worn the mockingbird clothes of the Puritans—black fustian tunics with plain white linen yoke collars. This would be trickier. The New Haven settlement was small, fewer than three hundred souls. Residents knew one another. They were suspicious of outsiders, even of their Puritan brethren from Plymouth and Boston. If he carried out his plan, discovery would be a very real threat.
“You could be hung,” Tunny said cheerfully. “At the very least, the stocks. They ain’t comfortable.” He rubbed his neck as if recalling a personal experience with the wooden traps of New Haven.
On his initial trip to the colony in October, Drummond had marked out the Puritan elders most likely to be harboring the trio of regicides lately sighted in the town. Now, on this second visit, came what Drummond referred to in his mind as “the Touch,” a delicate maneuver that was a central strategy of his particular brand of spycraft.
“How you going to get them to bite?” Tunny said. They were closed in his upstairs boarding room. Using a leather-stropped razor and a scrap of diaper to mop the blood, he shaved Drummond’s head.
“I’m going to say I’ve found the regicides,” Drummond said.
“But you ain’t found them,” Tunny said, plowing a furrow in Drummond’s skull.
“No, I ain’t found them,” Drummond said, wincing.
“So how can you say you have when you ain’t?”
“Well, Tunny, I guess I’m going to lie,” Drummond said.
The heavy snow of the New Year lay on the town like a curfew. The holiday spirit did not seem much abroad. The only real life came from the wafting scent of yeast out of the bakeries.
When the drumbeat sounded that sunup, Tunny and Drummond presented themselves at the meetinghouse for morning prayer. As opposed to midday prayer, evening prayer or midnight prayer. The New Haven colonists were a very prayerful people. All the getting done of God’s work made Drummond wonder if there was any time left over for the works of man. When did the religious caterpillars get the opportunity to build houses, harvest crops, make pudding?
“Goodman Allerton,” Tunny said to a hawk-faced elder at the door of the meetinghouse, “may I present to you Harry Fossick.”
“Of Maine,” Drummond said, greeting the man in the Puritan style, with an open hand rather than a bow.
Allerton gave him a wordless, parsimonious nod and entered into the hall. Drummond endured an interminable service, during which blood from Tunny’s scalping trickled down the back of his neck. The sermon’s theme: accept Christ as thy savior now, in this world, or meet him in the next world as thy judge.
Evidently personal talk was for after the service, not before. Goodman Allerton sought Drummond and Tunny out as the presbyters flocked out of the meetinghouse into the chill morning air.
“Mister Fossick of the district of Maine,” Allerton said to another elder Drummond had seen leading the services. “Goodman Remmick.”
“I give ye best wishes for the New Year,” Drummond said, again restraining his all-too-royalist bow. “I am down from the Sagadahoc Colony.”
“For what purpose?” Remmick said. He had more meat on his bones than his fellow elder, but Drummond still felt himself confronted by two hunch-shouldered crows.
“Worship, and a little trade,” he said. “We have so few manufactories in the north, and the settlers of your colony are known for their industry.”
“The Maine district is much afflicted by French papists, I believe,” Allerton said to Remmick, as if eager to curry favor with a superior.
“Please see that you enter the lists with our sheriff,” Remmick said.
“I will,” Drummond said. “Oh, and I wish to see the two judges of the English king who are in town, the colonels, Goffe and Whalley. And perhaps a third judge, the man Dickwell, Dickson, something like that?”
The Touch.
Drummond might as well have slapped Remmick and Allerton across their faces. Remmick recovered first. “You are mistaken,” he said.
“We harbor none of the judges here,” Allerton said.
“But I’ve been told where to find them,” Drummond said.
Remmick glared furiously at Tunny. “It was not me, sire,” Tunny said, practically groveling in front of the eminence.
“Who informed you of this, Goodman Foster?” Remmick demanded.
“Fossick,” Drummond corrected him. “One of your local mockingbirds perched on my window sash and chittered in my ear.”
Remmick appraised him coolly. “Do animals speak to you often, Mister Fossick? I believe the last case we had of that here, we hung as a witch.”
“Her corpse spoke after death,” Allerton said. “Confessing her sins.”
“Have I offended?” Drummond said. “I am heartily sorry. I merely seek to keep good company with the men who removed the vile Roman, the first Charles, from besmirching our land with his papistry.”
Settle down, he told himself. Don’t overdo it.
“England’s corruption is beyond the death of one man to remedy,” Allerton intoned, but Remmick placed his hand on his cohort’s arm.
“Good day, Mister Fossick,” he said icily. The two Puritans hurried off.
Drummond watched them go. “How did I do?” he asked Tunny.
“I believe I’ll have to go to Boston for a few weeks,” Tunny said mournfully. “Did you call him ‘sire’?”
“I did not,” Drummond said.
“I think you called him ‘sire,’ sire. Or acted as though you might. That gave you dead away. You make a very poor Puritan.”
“Thank you,” Drummond said. He gazed at the square patch of black that was the back of Goodman Remmick, receding down the street. “That man’s stare could stop the hands of a clock.”
“Boston,” Tunny said. “Maybe for a few months.”
We will make them flee to their stoat hole, Drummond told Tunny. He had boys on alert to follow Remmick and Allerton. According to their later report, Remmick went directly to his dwelling-house, but Allerton made a stop before going to his. He spoke to a laborer, a pitman at a woodlot named John Meigs, who immediately mounted a horse and made for the western district of New Haven. Meigs proceeded to the home of a Puritan minister, John Davenport.
The regicide colonels, Goffe and Whalley, left Davenport’s house “in blistering haste,” according to the report of one of the boys. The colonels stopped at the home of a Mister Jones, took mounts and met another man, whom Drummond considered to be Dixwell, the third regicide. The three spurred their horses into the wilderness, to the West Rock Ridge a mile from the town. There they repaired to a cave.
“A cave?” Drummond asked.
“Yes, sir,” said the little harbor ruffian whom Tunny had employed as a tail. “Quite a nice cave it is, too,” the boy added. “Furnished with several cots and a chest of drawers. I could be at home there.”
The child looked as though he only occasionally saw a roof over his head. Parentless, no doubt.
“You didn’t give yourself away, did you?”
“No, sir,” the orphan boy said, a wry miniature adult. “I pretended to be a mere passing urchin. Which wasn’t difficult, since that’s what I were. They didn’t want me near the cave, see, but I went. Then they cast some stones to shoo me away, so I peels down my pants and showed them my backside.”
Drummond laughed. “Admirable discretion,” he said. He pushed a coin into the ruffian’s dirty palm, and immediately had three other wharf rats, none of them over the age of ten, clamoring for remuneration of their own.
Should he trust the word of urchins? In the past, he had found them surprisingly reliable, but Drummond thought in this case he should see for himself. He rode out to West Rock Ridge and peered through his spyglass at the three regicides. They paced and argued in front of a smoky fire at the mouth of their cave. Not a cave at all, really, but an immense riven rock.
Through the glass, he saw the face of Whalley, the Puritan general. Drummond recognized him from the field at Worcester. Older now, but then, who wasn’t?
Satisfied, he left New Haven Colony, mentally composing his message to Clarendon. Inveni eos. I have found them. Rendered in cipher, thus:
Bgoxgb xhz
Afterward, in a few months, say, given the vagaries of cross-ocean travel, the lord chancellor’s stranglers would come.
On the clear green ice of the Fresh River at Hartford, a cutter sleigh waited, triplet-hitched, with a cargo box behind. A collection of desultory flakes hung in the air, not falling but floating. Back in New Amsterdam Drummond had heard Raeger call it “dandruff snow.” Hoarfrost lent a white, shimmering patina to every surface.
As well as the three horses he had harnessed, in the Russian style, to the sleigh’s shaft bow, Drummond attached his old friend the roan by a hemp-rope line to the back of the sleigh. He had picked up the horse from where he boarded it on his last trip to the New Haven Colony.
Having spent the intervening weeks in lazy, stabled contentment, munching on oats and dried apples, the beast now stared dolefully at him, recalling the sluicing rain of the Mohawk Trail, as if to say, “What new hell have you invented for me this time?”
Drummond stamped his feet on the snow-covered planks of the river pier. He was there, but where was Blandine? He left word with the Dutch traders at Fort House of Good Hope that she and Antony should meet him at the Fresh River docks.
He wore a wig that resembled his old hair, so that Blandine would not be taken too much by surprise by his appearance. He fretted. There was a point in most enterprises, he knew from experience, where aims appeared ludicrous and the prospects of success dim.
She came down from Hartford town, dressed in a riding habit she had ordered direct from London: a red wool gown and jacket with buttons of brass and a brocade waistcoat. Over it she wore a mink cape. In a mink-trimmed riding hat, her face pinked by the cold, stamping the planks of the pier herself with elk-skin boots, Blandine van Couvering looked ready for adventure.
“Lord,” Drummond said to himself, “never did someone who wanted to be a man so much embody a woman.”
Antony trailed behind her, obscured by the stack of woolen blankets he carried that was almost as tall as he himself, and burdened with a canvas voyageur pack as well.
And Kitane. The Lenape wrapped his upper torso in the pelt of one of the forest lions of the new world, of the kind Drummond had glimpsed watering itself on the North River’s shore during his first trip into the American interior. He wore heavy leather leggings, a red-felt cummerbund and the same kind of elk-skin boots that Blandine had on. He, too, had a pack slung over his back, off which a couple of bear-claw snowshoes dangled.
Only three passengers could fit comfortably on the upholstered bench seat of the sleigh. What would the Lenape do, trot alongside? Drummond did not put it past him. Kitane looked incredibly hale. Gone was the hangdog pallor of their previous meeting. The expression of the proud trapper had returned to his face. Beneath the catamountain hide, his naked chest displayed its fierce bird tattoos.
“We are four?” Drummond asked, as the trio trooped down the pier toward him. “Is there room?”
In answer, Kitane leaped from the pier onto the ice, sliding smoothly across it like a skater. He spun around and hopped atop the buckboard cargo box at the back of the sleigh. The Lenape stroked the nose of the tied-on roan, and the horse nickered.
“Greetings, Drummond,” Blandine said.
“Van Couvering,” he said. “You come with a suite of courtiers.”
“Ah, yes,” she said, coming to him hand outstretched. “My retinue. I try to discourage them, but they insist on following me around.”
They shook hands. “I have the bearskin,” Drummond said. “Why ever did you bring so many blankets?”
“For trade, Drummond, for trade,” Blandine said.
Drummond drew her aside. “The last time I saw Kitane, I had to clean the man’s puke off my shoes. Is he all right?”
“He is much stronger,” Blandine said. “His witika fear has mostly left him.”
They both looked over at the Lenape, sitting serenely on the cargo box.
Antony approached Drummond. “You’ve yoked three together,” he said, gesturing at the trio of horses, stamping the ice in front of the sleigh. “How does that work?”
“The two side ones we harness in breast collars,” Drummond said, helping the man by sloughing off a few layers from his tower of blankets. “The middle animal trots and the outer ones canter. I saw it done in Muscovy, it works quite well.”
What the arrangement gave them, most of all, was speed. Antony settled his pack and took up the reins in the center position of the postilion. Blandine and Drummond sat on either side of him. The silent Kitane hung on behind.
They set off at a clip that Drummond did not think possible to maintain. The sleigh runners sliced the windswept river ice with a thin, hissing cut. He reached back and untied the roan to let it trot along at its own pace. The h
orse swung abreast to match its gait with the three white-stockinged bays they had in harness.
As they flew up the river, the ice changed from green to blue, to a milky white, then to a cloud color that resembled the eyeballs of the horses. Antony artfully steered them clear of any open or soft spots in the river ice. The sleigh blasted through patches of snow, which blew upward and swirled madly in their wake.
The bearskin Blandine had given Drummond, draped over the two of them but folded behind the back of Antony, lent the journey an intimate feel. Blandine did not talk. Drummond sat starboard in one corner of the seat, the continent-sized expanse of Antony’s back took up the middle, and she sat to port. The sun broke out even as the snowflakes still levitated magically, motelike, in midair.
“Festive,” Blandine said, laughing at the small, multicolored snowbows that sparkled above the frozen river. But that was all she said until, an hour later, this: “Drummond, I think your hair is bleeding.”
A cut Tunny had inflicted on Drummond’s scalp had reopened under the drubbing it was taking on the journey. He doffed his hat and took off his wig.
“Drummond!” Blandine said.
Antony looked around and almost crashed the sleigh. Kitane, too, was interested, leaning over the back of the sleigh to take the wig from Drummond’s hands, examining it carefully.
“Hast that always been your hair?” Blandine said, slipping into an extra-formal kind of speech.
“I had myself shorn in New Haven,” Drummond said.
“Lice,” said Antony.
“A business decision, purely.”
Blandine looked closely at Drummond, as though trying to glean the truth behind his words. “You resemble a convict,” she said.
“Escaped from New Haven jail,” he said, smiling.
“And what was your crime?” Blandine asked.
“Oh, impure thoughts,” he said. “I’m afraid I failed miserably as a Puritan.”
They made the cascade rocks that blocked the river at Windsor, its splashing waters arrested into icy shapes, huge mid-current boulders glistening as though they were sheathed in glass. There, a broad track diverged around the rapids.
The Orphanmaster Page 24