The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  He stepped back from her. “Then I cannot help you,” he said. “The Lord have mercy on your soul.”

  Dominie Megapolensis walked from the pew where they sat together to the back of the church. He threw wide the doors of the sanctuary and, with a sweeping gesture of his arm, cast Blandine out.

  Ross Raeger heard the tumult in the streets and felt the more disgust for it. Deeper disgust, anyway, than that which was the habitual cast of his mind. There had been a lot of mob action this month, frightened chickens running in circles, baa-baaing sheep following one another so closely their noses became manured.

  The witika was bad for business.

  Raeger felt unsure of himself. He was an agent of the crown, yes, but at the same time he was what the Dutch called a weert, an innkeeper. Lately he detected the mundane concerns of the innkeeper taking him over. Riot might be good for an English agent, but it was bad for a weert.

  He retrieved his pistols and went to the front door of the Lion. Another day, another mob.

  This one, though, was different, and what Raeger saw alarmed him. Gaping, red-faced men shoved Blandine van Couvering down Pearl Street before them. The women in the crowd contented themselves with jeering, but the men wore more excited expressions on their faces. One of them, Aalbert Gravenraet, tore at the lace of Blandine’s open-necked gown, ripping it from her shoulders.

  She was trying to get to her home, Raeger realized. Why had she left the sanctuary? The frenzy over witchery, he was convinced, would soon die down. No one could take seriously this maiden being in league with the Devil, no matter what sort of witika nonsense they discovered in her dwelling-house.

  But the street mob seemed to take Witch Blandina very seriously. The rabble screamed the word at her repeatedly. The girl looked determined but frightened, pushing on for the haven of her own rooms.

  She wasn’t going to make it. A man—Raeger recognized him as a cobbler fellow who liked to go on drunken tears—pushed Blandine backward and tripped her at the same time. She fell.

  Raeger strode into the frenzy of mob members and fired one of his pistols over their heads. Nothing. No reaction. He couldn’t believe it. None of them seemed to respect his firearm. They were too far gone. The cobbler pulled Blandine to her feet and rubbed street muck into her face.

  Raeger fired again and managed to get to Blandine. He slammed the cobbler with the butt of one of his pistols, and the man staggered away, bleeding.

  Down the street, a drumbeat. The militia approached, with De Klavier at the fore.

  Raeger used the distraction to usher Blandine quickly to the Red Lion. He pushed her inside and slammed shut the heavy oak door.

  “Judas Priest, woman!” he shouted. “They aim to murther ye!”

  “Well, I shall not die with a dirty face,” Blandine said calmly. She crossed to the tin basin on the taproom counter and splashed water on herself.

  The men in the taproom, drinkers and drunks, Dutch citizens all, stared at the apparition who appeared before them. They knew Blandine by sight as a frequenter of the Lion. But here was another woman altogether. One not so demure. The witika witch, wild-haired and dirtied, her purple, lace-trimmed gown torn open so that her breasts half spilled out.

  “Whoever harms this woman answers to me!” Raeger shouted, hurriedly reloading his pair.

  The men in the taproom looked baffled. Where was their mild-mannered jokester weert?

  A furious pounding at the street door of the Lion.

  “Anyone don’t want to get caught in an insurrection,” Raeger said, “leave by the Mane.” He jerked his thumb toward the casino chamber at the back of the taproom. No one moved.

  More pounding. “What d’ye want!” Raeger shouted.

  “It’s the schout,” De Klavier called. “Open this door.”

  “In whose name?” Raeger said.

  “In the name of the director general,” De Klavier said. “Open up, Mister Raeger, or it will go badly for you!”

  “Have ye a warrant of search?” Raeger said. “I am by my rights to ask ye for a warrant.”

  “Open this door!” De Klavier roared.

  Raeger turned to his clientele, two dozen males, rough and ready but uncertain what their next move would be. Raeger knew they would not fight to protect a witch. But they would battle to the death to push back against the dictatorial, overweening ways of Petrus Stuyvesant.

  “What do ye say, men?” Raeger said. “Mijn Heer General would like to stick his foot up our asses. How do we answer him?”

  “Which one?” the men chorused, surging toward the door just as the schout’s ax came through it, crashing it half down.

  Many of Raeger’s customers brandished pistols of their own. Others pulled down blades from the Red Lion’s fabled rafters, to be put to use at last.

  The Red Lion partisans were outnumbered, but De Klavier and his militiamen were attempting to squeeze through the narrow gap of the doorway. A militiaman stuck his musket through the splintered oak of the door, fired it, was fired back upon, and the taproom filled with billowing smoke.

  “Give me a pistol,” Blandine said, showing up at Raeger’s side.

  “Get yourself upstairs,” Raeger said, pulling up his gun to keep it away from her.

  De Klavier’s men smashed the street windows, looking for other ways to gain entry. The Lions tossed the taproom benches across the windowsills to blockade them.

  “Go!” shouted Raeger, pushing Blandine toward the stairs to the tavern’s second and third floors. “They see you in here, I canna hold them back!”

  Blandine still hesitated. “Do it, woman!” Raeger pleaded. It was impossible even to see the stairs with all the powder smoke. At the window, hand-to-hand combat.

  She went.

  Raeger pulled down the big-bladed silver partizan ax from its prized place in the rafters. As Blandine mounted the stairs, he furiously chopped at the newel post with the ax. She gained the landing on the second floor, and the stairway began to sway under Raeger’s furious assault.

  A few more full-swing chops with the partizan, and the whole flight of stairs tipped to the side, falling toward the center of the taproom with a splintering, ripping sound.

  “Look to yourselves!” Raeger yelled, and a few of the Lions had to jump away as the stairway crashed down.

  Blandine stood at the top of a flight of stairs that now dropped off into the smoke-filled air. Then the steps from the second to the third floor started to waver and swing, teetering wildly.

  “Head upstairs!” Raeger shouted to her. “All the way!”

  His men were busy hauling the shattered flight of stairs across the taproom to block the front entrance. Blandine disappeared around a bend in the stairwell, heading for the third floor, just as the second set of steps crashed downward, practically from under her feet.

  “Arrgh!” snarled Raeger. It turned out he was not an agent of the crown after all, nor a mild-mannered innkeeper. He was a pirate.

  When the musket ball caught Raeger in the side of the head, a wound that threw him wildly backward, he went down dreaming of mutiny.

  The Red Lion’s third story stood almost as high as the chestnut tree towering in the yard behind, so high no one could possibly reach Blandine.

  Raeger, his head wrapped in a theatrical bandage, his eyes blazing with the headache the gunshot wound had given him, had a rope threaded up to Blandine and tied a bucket to it. He sent her beer and vittles, as well as bulletins about the situation down below.

  Impasse [Raeger wrote]. Peg-leg’s troops not getting in, Lions not getting out. We are besieged. Enough provisions to last weeks. Many convinced the witch flew to the rooftop on her own.

  Blandine drank the beer, ate the cold chunks of sturgeon and the bread slathered with honey butter and sent back a note of her own.

  Drummond? Antony?

  Raeger’s reply: Not hung yet.

  Near dark-fall, the wind rose and a freezing sleet began to spatter from the skies. Outside the window
, the big chestnut tree’s branches thrashed in the black rain.

  The roof gables dropped steeply on both sides of her tiny garret room. A bed, a chamber pot, a single chair. Blandine could see out back, over the yards to the fort, but not toward her own dwelling-house across Pearl Street. Crowds huddled in the lee of the fort, gesturing up toward her aerie.

  She was safe, she was the lady in the tower. No one could get to her. She didn’t know what to do, so she cleaned the room. The evening waned, darkness closed on the settlement. The storm barreled in from the west.

  Stretched out on the woven-rope bed, wrapped in her blue woolen shawl (retrieved somehow from her rooms, and sent up via the bucket), Blandine made fierce plans in the dark. Suddenly she saw a dim shape float in the unglazed window, passing toward her through the rain-lashed shutters. She sat up, afraid.

  No one could get to her.

  But Kitane did.

  The Lenape slipped through the window to crouch on the floor in front of Blandine. She had last seen him weeks ago, snowshoeing off into the woods from the sleigh on the Fresh River.

  “Miss Blandina,” he said, his body wet and gleaming. “Anything new with you?”

  Blandine laughed with delight. “You go away from me and, as you see, I get myself in trouble.”

  “We will get you out,” Kitane said. He laid out on the floor a loaf of sweet cornbread, a wedge of black wax cheese and a knife. The blade he had taken from Canarsie friends in Hell Gate. The food he had purchased from his new favorite New Amsterdam bakery that afternoon.

  “I bring you greetings from Drummond and the big one,” Kitane said.

  “Drummond? How? They are in prison, no?”

  “Yes,” said Kitane, shrugging. “The two of them are held in the fort. But it is no big thing to get in and out of the swannekin’s castle.”

  The unimprisonable Kitane had indeed crept noiselessly into the keep in the early morning hours. He held a hurried conference with Drummond, who, as far as the Lenape trapper could tell, seemed unconcerned at the prospect of being executed. The Englisher asked most urgently about Blandine.

  During daylight, Kitane lay low on the quiet North River shore. He ventured out once, to the bakery. The possibility of becoming mesmerized with witika fever lessened, Kitane figured, the shorter time he spent on the streets, as did the likelihood of fingers pointing, accusations leveled, nooses tied. Still, there was always the whisper of fear that he must keep guard against, trailing him, circling his mind.

  Blandine knew that Kitane was better, stronger, healthier. She could tell that from his clear eyes and the way he sat, erect and calm. Almost his old self.

  “And the task I gave you, how did that go?”

  “The thought of you greased my footsteps through my journey.” Kitane smiled ruefully. “There were a few I could have eaten along the way. Some who deserved such a fate. Swannekins and my own people both.”

  Kitane was the avenger, still, but his revenge did not require the smashing of lives. When he began to talk, the cadences of his voice lulled Blandine back to the snowy reaches of the north.

  “You know that I visited my brothers the Esopus when I left you,” said Kitane. “After the war there are only a few of the tribe left, fewer than thirty, and most of these are women and children. The great war between the swannekins and the Sopus warriors ended the clan and sent refugees downriver to Pavonia. I spoke to some of the wives.”

  “You followed them?”

  “Down the Mohegantuck, yes.” The North River.

  “Did they know of the boy William Turner?” Blandine said.

  “During the war, they said, three families from farms along Esopus Creek were taken prisoner,” said Kitane. “Two of them had whole families of children, five or six. But one couple had a single son.”

  “What happens to prisoners of war?” asked Blandine, remembering her experience on the banks of the river with Mally and Lace.

  “Usually they are roasted. But the Esopus kept these people in their own lodges and made sure they were healthy, because they wanted to trade them back to the Dutch.”

  “And my people wanted the captives back,” Blandine said. Sitting on the bed, she took her hair down. It fell almost to her waist, giving off gleams of gold even though the night was pitch dark with the storm.

  Kitane had a prickly feeling in his mouth, almost like nausea, but equally resembling appetite. He pushed it back and took up his story. “The Dutch did not move fast enough to ransom the hostages. The pox came again through the village, and it moved faster.”

  “I remember refugees from the plagues and wars in the north,” Blandine said. “They streamed through the gates of the city. It was the first contagion of summer, but it lasted.”

  “Many didn’t make it to the town,” Kitane said. “They died where they walked.”

  “War and pestilence,” Blandine said. “‘Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’” There was nothing like a nonbeliever to quote the Bible. When Blandine was little, she enjoyed the drama of the language and the strangeness of the stories. But now the Word was just words.

  “The clan tried to isolate the ailing ones, Esopus and swannekins, in lodges away from the cook-fire,” Kitane said. “But their loved ones insisted on tending them, and then they would sicken themselves.”

  Blandine had known some of the Esopus people, close allies of the Lenape who came to trade in Beverwyck.

  Kitane gazed out her window. A peal of thunder, then a streak of silver cut across the night sky. This swannekin sky-castle struck him as rickety, ready to fall. Voices from the taproom down below. More flashes, more thunder.

  Lightning, Blandine thought, so odd in winter. Comets, plagues, portents. The dominie was going to have a lot to chew on in his sermons. That thought naturally led her to the man called Lightning, with his dead eyes and creased scalp. Was he out there hunting for her along with the rest of the colonists?

  “When the pox scourge ended, and the war was over,” Kitane said, “only one of the swannekin hostages was left.”

  “A boy,” breathed Blandine.

  “He was young and small, but healthy. The clan expected that he would stay on with them.”

  “As sometimes happens,” Blandine said.

  “As sometimes happens,” Kitane agreed.

  “This was the beginning of autumn,” said Blandine.

  “Then a strange thing occurred,” Kitane said. “A man and a woman came on horseback to the Esopus. They led a third horse, a sagging, elderly nag. To this horse they had strapped two pony kegs and a string of hams and sausages.”

  “Traders,” Blandine said.

  “The sausage man and woman went into the lodge of Memewu, the clan’s last surviving leader. They stayed only a short time. The women of the lodge prepared meals, and brought in to them a roast fish and some ash corn.”

  Another crash of thunder. “What do you think happened?” Kitane said, looking at Blandine.

  “The man and woman rode away from the camp with the boy.”

  “And the horse, the hams and the kegs stayed behind,” Kitane said. “I guess Memewu judged the boy not worth much.”

  “If the animal was so broken down, why would anyone want it?”

  “Meat.”

  “And the barrels held rum?”

  “One did,” Kitane said. “The other, seawan, blue glass, from Holland. Still good for trade.”

  “When did this exchange happen?”

  “The month of the goose moon,” Kitane said.

  October. The pieces fit with what Miep told her in the church that morning. William Turner gone, disappeared. The new boy, the Esopus plague survivor, claimed by the Godbolts, the pork dealers.

  The question remained, what happened to the real William Turner?

  Kitane stood by the window, next to the curtain of freezing rain falling outside. In a moment he would part that curtain and climb into the dark. Blandine had the same feel
ing again, a certainty she and Kitane came from different worlds. At that moment, the Lenape was probably listening to the whispers of the mice that lived in the walls of the Red Lion garret. Whispers that Blandine could not hear.

  She rose to her feet and crossed to him. Blandine would have liked to do something, make some gesture, throw her arms around him, comfort him somehow, extend a warm hand from her world to his.

  She would have, if she were not sure he would instantly flap away into the night in response, soaring through the storm like some kind of immense moon moth.

  33

  The next morning, in the anteroom outside the audience chamber of the Stadt Huys, Lightning huddled with Martyn Hendrickson.

  “I was there when they grabbed Drummond from his rooms,” Lightning said. “I wanted to convince them to hang him right then, but they took him to prison in the fort instead.”

  “Did he weep?” Martyn asked.

  “He grinned,” Lightning said, his face darkening. “Something very strange happened. When Drummond first appeared in his doorway with his cocked pistol, he was shaved nearly bald. The next time we saw him, only moments later, he had grown long, curly hair. The man must be a devil of some sort.”

  “A wig, Lightning. He put on a wig.”

  “You have told me about these things, but I never have seen one,” Lightning said. “It looked like his real hair.”

  “Was he wounded? Did he fall when the mob mistreated him?”

  “Do you think I myself could obtain a wig?” Lightning asked.

  Martyn rolled his eyes. The man could not be dealt with logically. He was too much concerned with the hideous mottled scar atop his head. To distract Lightning from his new obsession, Martyn directed him through the infernal catechism.

  “Who sits on a throne in heaven?” he asked.

  “Lucifer,” Lightning said. The questions always soothed him.

  “Who sits in hell?”

  “Father Jesus Christ the Lord Our Savior,” Lightning said.

  That “father” was extraneous, but the answer was close enough, Martyn decided. “What does God do?”