The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  “Don’t know,” said Georgie. At six, he was the youngest. His teeth had gotten stuck in a toffee bit and he drooled a fat teardrop of brown-colored spittle as he tried to work the piece loose.

  “William,” said Mary, her mouth full, too. “Don’t even think about him. He wouldn’t want any candy anyway.”

  “Ask William, ‘Do you want some candy?’” said Ann. “You know what he’d say? Nothing.”

  The Godbolt children all laughed.

  “He don’t say nothing!” Georgie crowed. Miep stepped forward and stuck a peppermint stick directly into his open mouth.

  “He’s a mute,” said Mary.

  “He’s dumb,” said Ann.

  “You know, I had a funny feeling when I saw him this year at school,” Miep said. “He looked different to me.”

  The Godbolt children turned sullen, silent. They glanced sideways at one another. All their licking, sucking, chewing and chomping slowed.

  “William is a very nice boy,” said Ann. “As nice as can be.”

  Mary glared at the other children. “William has become a part of our family,” she volunteered.

  Charles said, “I like him. I really do.”

  Georgie said, “Me, too. Especially the new William.” He held out his peppermint stick, admiring the way he had sucked it into a point at the end.

  Miep said, “Especially what? The new William?”

  Ann said, “Go get washed up, Georgie, your face is a mess.”

  Mary said, “Yeah, Georgie, go away, you’re annoying.”

  “But I’d just like a little more candy wandy,” said Georgie, sensing Miep’s interest in his remark. Georgie liked attention, and didn’t usually get it in the hurly-burly atmosphere of the Godbolt household.

  Miep steeled herself. She took a caramel out of her bag and waved it in front of Georgie. “Tell me about the new William.”

  “He’s a bad boy I like who’s nice to me,” Georgie said, taking the caramel. Ann, sitting beside her little brother, kicked at his shin with her pointed silk slipper. Georgie just giggled.

  Miep found herself stumped. What would Blandine have her do? Her mind felt thwarted, dim.

  “Is it a secret?” she suddenly said. “I love secrets. I can keep a secret.”

  “Mama told us never to tell,” Ann said.

  “I promise,” Miep said.

  “Mary,” Ann said. She pulled her sister and Miep into the empty hallway, away from the boys.

  “Wandy, wandy!” Georgie called after them.

  “All right,” Ann whispered. “Do you pinkie-swear not to tell?”

  Miep held out the little finger of her right hand. Ann and Mary held out theirs. The three girls linked pinkies and pulled. The pact was sealed.

  “The orphan boy William came to us a lot of months ago,” Ann said.

  “In the spring,” Mary said.

  “Then he went away,” Ann said.

  “He went away?” Miep said.

  “We lost him,” Ann said. “No one knew where he went. Our parents were frantic.”

  “They loved William,” Mary said. “And he was going to give us a lot of money.”

  “Real money, gold money,” Ann said, relishing the tale. “He had a ’heritance.”

  The three girls had their heads together, their mouths a few inches from one another in the dark hallway.

  “So what happened?” Miep asked.

  “We got a new William,” Ann said. “A different William.”

  “He came from the Sopus indians!” Mary said, glorying in the outlandish detail, raising her voice. Ann shushed her.

  “See, if we’re all quiet about it, we’ll get the ’heritance anyway,” Ann said. “No one is to know. Not Petrus Stuyvesant, not the schoolmaster, not the orphanmaster, nobody.”

  “We’ll be rich!” Mary said, again too loudly.

  “We’re already rich, booby,” Ann said. “We’ll be richer. When we go to Paris, France, Miep, I shall bring you back a ribbon.”

  “Thank you,” Miep said, smiling.

  “Have you any more caramels?” Mary said.

  Just then Miep saw Rebecca Godbolt come to the bottom of the staircase below them. She held a slab of bacon in one hand and a cast-iron skillet in the other.

  Miep motioned to the girls, and they stepped back out of sight toward the best chamber.

  “Pinkie-swear,” whispered Mary, kissing Miep on the cheek. Miep nodded, crossing her fingers behind her back.

  “Children,” called Rebecca, “do I have to do everything myself?”

  * * *

  Lightning enjoyed entering homes whose occupants were not present almost as much as he did when they were home and asleep. He liked the sense of intimacy, of prying out people’s secrets, of touching private objects.

  His master had instructed Lightning to salt the home of the pretty Dutch she-merchant with witika items. The willow-stick totems, a lodge doll and one of the deerskin masks. Lightning chose a mask he had crafted and rejected as unworthy for ritualized use. He carried them all in his kit bag when he slipped over the woman’s garden wall, through her yard and past her back door into her chambers.

  Also in his bag, a bit of mischief that would help doom Blandine van Couvering to be burned at the stake as a witika witch.

  His master liked to keep garments from their kills. It was a stupid quirk of his, Lightning realized. But Lightning had quirks of his own, and he felt indulgent toward those of his friend.

  They had to force the she-merchant and the Englisher off the trail somehow. And the best defense was to attack. This the master taught Lightning.

  Pawing through the she-merchant’s kas, Lightning found lace frillies, rigid underclothes that kept milady’s figure from spilling out, numerous handkerchiefs. He took a couple of the latter. More than anything, Lightning liked to present himself as a European, a swannekin gentleman of the most impeccable costume. The nose-cloths might help that effect.

  Lightning’s secret dream was to join the promenade at kermis. Dressed as a dandy, the linen square stiff in his breast pocket, he would mince, he would quick-step, he would parade. In his vision, the woman beside him showed up indistinct. Perhaps Lightning could be allowed to promenade on his own, to the wonder of all onlookers.

  Yes, Lightning was half Sopus indian. But he was half German, too. Wasn’t Germany a well-recognized part of the continent of Europe? Yes, he was a vile bit of rape spawn. But couldn’t a fellow rise above his beginnings?

  From within Blandine’s kas he extracted a linen gown of light apricot, slipping it on loosely over his shoulders. Swannekins sometimes wore women’s clothes at kermis, didn’t they? Everything was upside down. Lightning brushed his fingers against the fabric and brought them to his nostrils, inhaling the Van Couvering girl’s scent.

  Lightning looked around the room he had broken into. He would have all of this someday. The dwelling-house. The garden. The comfortable bed with its goose-feather mattress. Perhaps Lightning could even possess the she-merchant’s rooms themselves, with all their furnishings, after he watched her sizzle in the flames at the stake.

  “Witch!” he would shout out, adding his voice to the others.

  What a surprise the meddling girl would have, when she returned to New Amsterdam to find all fingers pointed at her. Witch!

  The master would take care of bringing the witch-hunters down upon Blandine. The Van Couvering woman was the one, the master would say, she made the witika appear. She murdered the children herself. Look in her rooms. You will find the evidence there.

  The Walloon schout, De Klavier, would search Van Couvering’s rented dwelling-house on Pearl Street. Lightning thought he might take a table across the way, at the Red Lion, to watch the fun.

  Thoughts of the Red Lion made Lightning hungry, and he took an onion from a wreath above the hearth. He sat down at the table, dreaming over how it would be—the search, the discovery of incriminating evidence, the hated she-merchant branded as a witch, the insti
gator of all the orphan-killings in the colony burned at the stake.

  Contemplating these thoughts, Lightning bit into the onion and ate it like an apple.

  The nights were the worst for Aet Visser.

  After Anna and the children left for their lodgings up at Corlaers Hook, he found himself alone in his hodgepodge of a dwelling-house. He couldn’t stand it. Insomnia plagued him. He would oftentimes bolt out of the house and wander the dark precincts of the settlement. He would have climbed out of his own skin if it were possible.

  On many of these black wanderings, Visser wound up in front of the pit-house on Market Street, the place where Sabine loved to play.

  Beside the pit-house, on the eastern edge of the lot, lay piled an old mound of dirt, an excavation from the original pit. Weeds had grown over it with the years, a frowzy green beard of dock, chickweed and henbit. In the winter the mound became a ten-foot-high hump of frozen snow. An unremarkable feature of the settlement, except for one attribute that drew Visser to it.

  From the small height of the dirt mound, it was possible to keep an eye on both the front entrance and the back garden door of the Hendrickson mansion, just down Market Street. From atop the dirt and slush of the mound, Visser could surveil the house where Martyn Hendrickson (occasionally) spent his nights.

  What was Visser doing? Why did he watch? He tormented himself with random imaginings. He explained the clothes he found in the secret room at the Hendricksons’ in various ways. Adias and Abraham were the real witika killers. Or perhaps Martyn had been secretly deputized by the schout to look into the orphan-killings and was keeping the clothes as evidence. Any innocent explanation would do.

  Otherwise—if there were no innocent explanation for the clothes in the kas—then the only alternative explanation was that he himself, Aet Visser, the orphanmaster, charged with guarding the interests of the colony’s parentless children, had instead fed them into a monstrous, murderous, unthinkable plot.

  So he watched. Some days and most nights, he would find himself standing partially concealed by the small knob of dirt near the pit-house. He did not feel the cold. Or rather, he understood that the cold represented a measure of his penitence.

  What was he looking for? Certainty. He groped toward an awful truth that he both needed to know and was desperately afraid to discover. Hoping, and hoping against hope. He and Martyn Hendrickson were thick as thieves. If Martyn was guilty of monstrosities, well, then, so was Aet Visser.

  He watched Martyn come in from his evenings in the Red Lion, his nights at the sporting houses of the Strand.

  This particular night, Martyn entered the hulking mansion, closed the door and lit no lamps inside. Visser peered at the house as though his gaze would penetrate the wooden ramparts of Fortress Hendrickson. He always experienced a sense of relief when Martyn was safely at home. Visser could see both doorways. Martyn could not leave without the shadowy midnight watcher spying him.

  So Visser was stunned out of his wits that evening when, after seeing Martyn enter his home and stay there, where he could do no one harm, suddenly the man’s voice sounded behind him.

  “It’s Mister Visser,” Martyn said. “Out for a breath of night air, orphanmaster?”

  Beside Martyn, smirking knowingly, stood Lightning.

  “Martyn,” Visser said. “How did you…?” He must be seeing things. He had witnessed the man just now go into his house, had not seen him come out, yet here he was. A man could not be in two places at once. Unless he were a wizard or devil of some sort.

  “Come along with us, brother,” Lightning said.

  “Yes, do,” Martyn said. “We’re off to the hunt.”

  A hunt? At night? Perhaps, Visser thought, they were headed to the whorehouses of the Strand. “I have an appointment,” he said, stammering out the words.

  “Break it,” Martyn said.

  “No, no, no, no,” Visser said.

  “No, no, no, no,” Lightning mocked him.

  “Well, go along, then,” Martyn said. “Go to your odd late-night assignation, at a time when no one has meetings. As long as your rendezvous is not with the schout. It’s not with the schout, is it, Visser?”

  “No,” Visser said, his mouth quite dry.

  “Because if you talk to the schout, we might have something to say to him, too.”

  “About you and my beautiful sister,” Lightning said.

  “Please, Martyn, no—I am silent as the grave,” Visser said, groveling. “Anna is my…”

  “Your what?” Martyn demanded. “We let you have her, Visser, but we can take her away, too.”

  Visser stood shamefaced, his neck bent like a whipped dog.

  “Are you our man?” Martyn asked.

  “I’m your man,” Visser said, his voice a whisper.

  “Good,” Martyn said. “Au revoir, then.”

  The two men strode off together, not toward the Strand but to the north, toward the palisade wall. To the hunt, whatever they might mean by that.

  31

  Weary and travel-battered, Blandine and Drummond returned to New Amsterdam in the dead cold of early February. The East River roadstead proved clogged with jumbled floes of ice. They disembarked their sloop at Hell Gate and proceeded toward town along a well-trampled footpath through the snow.

  They spoke about what new evidence they had gleaned on the winter trip to the north. “He targets orphans exclusively,” Blandine said.

  “He? Do we know he’s a he?” Drummond said.

  “No woman, whether she be wilden, Dutch or English, could do what has been done to those children.”

  “Perhaps, but I was thinking more ‘they’ than ‘he.’”

  “Granted,” Blandine said. “It might be more than one.”

  Not a soul appeared to them on the path. The surrounding bouweries looked deserted also, the smoke from a few lone chimneys providing the only sign of life. “What about the witika?” Drummond said.

  “What about it?” Blandine said.

  “Do we think it could be an indian demon doing all this?”

  “You mean Kitane, while he’s possessed.”

  “No, I mean a creature nine feet tall that can walk on water,” Drummond said. “The monster we saw in the fright show on Christmas Eve.”

  Blandine said, “I don’t believe in haints, sprites, ghosts, devils, sea monsters nor anything else used to scare children or childlike adults.”

  “Nor witches,” Drummond said.

  “Not witches either,” Blandine said, smiling painfully.

  “Nor any god,” Drummond said.

  Blandine was silent. Even though she didn’t believe in ghosts, she could still scare herself by imagining bumps in the night.

  Drummond said, “What man knows orphans? To kill or kidnap orphans, one has to know which child is one, and which is not.”

  “I know you mean Aet Visser,” Blandine said. “But he put you on to the Godbolts, trying to ascertain if they had switched out William Turner. Would the real killer have done that?”

  “We don’t know what happened to William Turner, or if anything did,” Drummond said.

  “Kitane is in the northland, trying to turn up the facts of that,” Blandine said. “He could be waiting for us in the settlement.”

  “Aye,” Drummond said.

  They could see the palisade wall of New Amsterdam before them to the south as they trekked along the river.

  “Piddy we know disappeared,” Blandine said, once again going through the sad litany of victims. “Ansel Imbrock, we know. The Gessie kids.”

  “Dickie Dunn,” Drummond said. “The missing-foot boy.”

  “Let’s concentrate on those,” Blandine said.

  “They’ve disappeared, yes,” Drummond said. “But if they have indeed been killed, then where are the bodies? Habeas corpus, as the director general might say.”

  The odd sense of a deserted community continued as they came to the boundary of New Amsterdam. Approaching the land port at the Eas
t River end of the palisade wall, they found it closed and fortified.

  “Halloo! Halloo!” Drummond tried, but no one came. This was decidedly strange. Even in winter, the land ports normally bustled.

  “What’s happened?” he said.

  “The English invaded and rounded up the Dutch,” Blandine suggested. “Sent them all back to Patria.”

  “Who will make the doughnuts now?” Drummond said. “Have you ever eaten English cooking?”

  “Come on,” Blandine said. She led Drummond west along a narrow path running below the wall. Two hundred yards along this track, Blandine pushed in a pair of the palisade logs, which swung easily aside to admit them to the town.

  “Very clever,” Drummond said. But he noted the position of the gap, in order to be prepared if his compatriots in the English army ever needed to breach the colony wall.

  They found themselves in town, near Smit Street, which ran south and would lead them readily to Drummond’s quarters in Slyck Steegh. A brittle winter sundown lengthened the shadows in the settlement. No one abroad. A plague? An indian attack? Drummond couldn’t fathom it.

  A solitary soul did see them as they made the corner from Smit onto Slyck Steegh. A block away, coming up from the wharf district, a single figure, indistinct in the late afternoon darkness. The figure halted, shouted an unintelligible cry and ran away.

  Blandine shook her head and laughed. “Welcome home,” she said to Drummond.

  “Stop and sup with me,” Drummond said, when they reached his rooms.

  “I think I would rather go straight on,” Blandine said.

  “We shall say good-bye, then,” Drummond said.

  “Good-bye, Drummond.”

  “With affection,” he said, and bussed both her cheeks in the French style. Her skin felt soft and warm.

  Drummond watched her go. He mounted his stoop and was about to unlock his front door when he found he could just push it open. Walking in, he realized instantly something was amiss.

  His rooms had been tossed. Seriously. Every item of furniture overturned, every possession thrown to the floor. Drummond crossed to his best chamber and realized the intruders, whoever they were, had done the same there.