The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  They were visible to the settlement but for a moment, though it turned out to be enough. Their pursuers were onto them at once, three sleighs of militia, assorted private cutters, streaking out from the settlement like hounds to the hunt.

  “Drummond!” Blandine said, looking back over her shoulder.

  “I know,” Drummond said. “I see them.”

  He sped down the lanes of the bouweries north of the palisade wall. A hayrick lay athwart their path and he veered away. The shoreline of the river showed ahead of them, dropping off sharply to the ice. But the horses took the jump easily, and the sleigh soared for ten feet before crashing crazily onto the hard blue surface of the frozen river.

  “Judas Priest!” Blandine swore, bouncing off the bench with the jolt. She had taken up Raeger’s signature curse during the battle of the Red Lion.

  Three hundred yards behind them, on the ice, a squad of sleighs swung onto their trail. But Drummond was right. Their pursuers harnessed only two animals in tandem per sledge. The new innovation of the troika, so impressive to Drummond during his recent sojourn in Russia (tracking a regicide who had hidden there), provided their sleigh with an extra advantage.

  The far-off bang of a musket, and a puff of white smoke appeared above one of the sledges to their rear, but the distance was much too great.

  The surface of the river proved perfect, made for velocity. The sleet of the storm the night before had frozen flat as a pancake. They raced, drawing slowly away from the sleighs behind them. Four hundred yards, five hundred, a half mile. The sledges on their trail dropped out singly or by twos and threes, stopping and turning around.

  All except one. Every time he looked behind to check the pursuit, Drummond noticed the small cutter hitched with a single horse. Far from falling back, the cutter was gaining on them, not quickly, but bit by bit.

  They thundered on, the horses frothing, tiny speeding figures dwarfed under the blue, larkless vault of heaven. At the top of Manhattan Island, Drummond swung wide to avoid the open water at Spuyten Duyvil. The cutter followed.

  Much more of this, Drummond knew, and the horses would be blown.

  “He is only one, Drummond,” Blandine shouted at him over the crash of the runners on the ice.

  Drummond had an idea who whipped that cutter forward, and he was unsure what kind of firepower the man carried. He did not want to risk himself or Blandine in a direct face-off. They would try to outrun their lone hound.

  He took a route that led him nearer to the shore, around a patch of open water. Another mistake. The cutter chose a different route, swinging around toward the middle of the river. That turned out to be the quicker path. When Drummond and Blandine finally got past the water and back onto glaze ice, the cutter had pulled close.

  Martyn Hendrickson held the reins of the sled in his teeth, aiming a pistol that exploded with a sharp, echoing report. The ball flew closely by them, making a noise between a whistle and a hiss. The cutter hurtled onward, the black charger at full gallop.

  “It’s Fantome,” Blandine shouted. “Kees’s horse. The best in the colony.” In one of Raeger’s chatty notes to her while she was barricaded in the tower, the Red Lion’s proprietor informed Blandine that Kees had, a week before, forfeited his prized horse to Martyn Hendrickson at a game of dice in the Mane.

  Lost his girl, lost his horse, Raeger scribbled. Upset at both.

  The enormous, night-black stallion blew out flecks of white foam from his nostrils but still strained at the harness. Magnificent, Drummond thought. Just our luck.

  “Shoot him,” he told Blandine.

  “No!” she shouted.

  “Shoot the damned animal, Van Couvering!”

  She drew the little palm-pistol Drummond gave her from her muff. Blandine banged off a shot, not at the horse, but at the sleigh driver. She missed.

  Martyn was upon them, seemingly unable to reload in mid-ride, but wielding an evil-looking bullwhip. He lashed out with the whip, and it snaked above Drummond’s head, stinging his cheek with a deep cut. Drummond steered the sleigh away from shore toward the center of the river. But the cutter swung to the other side. Martyn readied the whip once again, this time aiming for Blandine.

  “Where are your pistols?” Blandine shouted to Drummond.

  The whip came down, but its snapping tip missed Blandine and wrapped around the rail of the sleigh. The leather lash ran itself taut, tangled at the other end in Fantome’s harness. The tension yanked the cutter off center. The little sleigh tilted over on an angle, riding a single runner, and ran wildly off course.

  The whip broke, and at the same moment the cutter overturned, with Hendrickson clinging to it. It spun crazily across the river surface toward a soft spot on the ice. The frozen surface buckled, giving way, plunging the cutter, its driver and the stallion into the black water below.

  As Blandine watched, the little sledge sank out of sight, and Fantome surfaced, screaming, scrabbling madly at the edges of the hole into which he had fallen.

  There was no sign of Martyn Hendrickson.

  Blandine grabbed the reins from the bleeding Drummond. She drove the sleigh onward, up the frozen river, out of reach of the settlement and all pursuit, beneath the blue, enclosing sky.

  35

  They left the river in late afternoon at a frozen, mazelike marsh, its reeds dry and yellow-brown and covered in mounds of snow. Unhitching the sleigh and stripping the harnesses from the horses, they each rode a mount and used the spare third horse for the pack.

  Blandine, at least, had a sense of safe haven, of leaving their pursuers far behind. No one knew where they were. Drummond was not so sure. A spy left unhanged tends to look back over his shoulder.

  They climbed the hardwood hills on the river shore to where, in a grown-over meadow with a faint track leading to it, stood a cabin constructed of peeled cedar timbers. Built by Blandine’s parents, rented out to tenants, the structure had been abandoned in the first Esopus war.

  This was thirty miles from New Amsterdam, on land purchased out of the family’s earnings from a shipload of musket parts from Patria. Willem van Couvering had the idea that the cabin would serve as a base for fur-trading, not willing to believe that beaver, once so plentiful, had already been trapped out along the river, all the way up to Beverwyck.

  Big plans. The Van Couvering family would have a dwelling-house in New Amsterdam, a bouwerie a short league beyond the wall and a fur-trading cabin thirty miles farther upriver in the northland. But before they could enjoy all that, the parents would just make a quick dash across the sea to get their youngest daughter christened.

  The cabin stood empty for years. Blandine had no idea what kind of shape it was in. She knew her father had constructed it to last. She had helped him build the place, in fact, to the extent of her ten-year-old abilities, toting nails to her father when he called for them.

  Now, as Blandine and Drummond approached, the buckskin geldings they rode foundered in the high-drifted snow, so they dismounted and led them. Blandine climbed the icy stone stairs to the front porch, trying the door. It wouldn’t budge. Drummond came beside her and they both put their shoulders into it and pushed. It swung open.

  Inside, a single great room, with every surface shimmering in the last afternoon light, dusted with delicate rime frost. Spidery ice crystals covered over the casement windows. Abandoned as it was, fallen down and long unused, the place yet resembled a fairyland. The interior glowed white.

  Blandine and Edward walked through the room with hesitant steps, as though they did not want to break its spell. Wherever they stepped, they left prints in the powdery layer of snow on the floor, drifted in from one of the cracked windowpanes. A circular staircase in the Dutch style wound up to a second-story loft.

  A winter stillness, glistening, unbroken. Everything was ice.

  “It’s like…” Drummond said, and instantly regretted speaking as Blandine reached out and put a finger to his lips.

  “Shhh,” she said.


  Holding hands like children, they walked through the place.

  “I’ll make a fire,” Drummond whispered, thinking it was something he could do. Both of them were frozen to the bone.

  Blandine merely nodded, passing through the house and into memory. She should have been exhausted from their journey up the river but felt not at all tired. She climbed the staircase. It had been designed, she knew, to bring mother and father and little Blandine and baby Sarah up to two small bed chambers. Back then, the house had been full of chairs and tables, rugs and beds and pictures.

  As the evening came on, the snow shimmer inside the cabin faded to silver. The domicile never had much light inside, despite its glass windows, and now the blanket of winter outside rendered its rooms grayer and more hushed, like the inside of a satin cave.

  She returned to the first floor. Drummond had a fire in the hearth. He had laid out the bearskin.

  Blandine approached Drummond as he fed in more wood, the yellow flames crackling, hissing, heating the air. He looked back at her over his shoulder. She smiled awkwardly and commenced the complicated procedures that a fully clothed woman of the day required in order to strip naked.

  She removed her silk stockings, reaching deep under her costume and pulling them off singly, her legs smooth and bare. The string laces of her maize-colored bodice came next, loosened at the back with her arms reached behind her waist, and then drawn through their eyelets. As the piece’s tight fit went slack, Blandine took it off. She stood in her gown of ivory linen.

  She did not speak during this. In her thoughts, she begged Drummond not to be awkward, not to overplay it, and especially not to vaunt his experience over her lack of it. She was a moral woman, he was a gentleman. Nothing in that precluded what they would do this night.

  Again Blandine reached around behind herself, undoing the three cloth-covered buttons that held her gown in place. She shimmied her waist to release it. She did not like him to see her hands trembling, so she held them close as she opened her lace-collared chemise.

  Underneath, the underbodice, her stays, which she unhooked, uncovering herself to the waist. Slipping her palms alongside her hips, she allowed the last layer, her petticoat, to drop to the floor in a cloud of emerald. She took a final ribbon from her hair, letting the heap of blond tresses fall down her back, and finally stood unclothed before him, pale, shivering in the still cool air, the firelight playing on her skin.

  By the end of the first week, Blandine found herself able to talk in an ordinary, less love-struck fashion. Not about anything important, but more along the lines of “Pass me the salt, darling,” and “Has the bucket of snow melted yet for water?” Whether it was she who spoke or he, Blandine often could not tell, their two voices seemed melded into one.

  Many of their days involved the green petticoat. Edward knew that the best emeralds are those that display an elusive hint of blue within them, and he thought the petticoat brought out the color of her eyes, blue within the swirl of green. So he requested it often.

  She watched the whip wound on his cheek slowly heal. “Dashing,” she murmured. “Ladies love a scar.”

  “I do not care for the plural,” Drummond said. “I care only for one.”

  No one beyond Antony and Kitane knew where they were. Their pursuers might be searching for them, but here they were removed from fear. Somewhere, deep in their thoughts, they knew they would eventually have to face whatever was brewing downriver.

  Not now. Not here.

  Mainly Blandine drowsed in Edward’s arms as the fire roared, and touched his face and his chest as though she had never touched a man before.

  Which she had not.

  Outside the casement windows on the cabin’s first floor (they didn’t bother with the second), the two of them could see the horses they had taken up the slope from the river, tied beneath a narrow shelter beside the tumbledown barn. There was still hay in the barn from the old days. That and the withered apples they gathered, ferreting them out from under the drifts around old trees in the orchard, kept the horses in fairly good spirits.

  For five weeks, Blandine and Drummond stayed inside, tended the fire and made love often, every day, and during stretches of blizzard several times a day. Blandine unearthed her father’s ragged copy of the tragedies, and they read to each other from Lear, Othello and the Scottish play. Mally had packed them provisions, and they cooked simple meals, hutspot with potatoes, carrots and onion, toasted cheese, slices of Lenape-style dried venison, smoked herring, a cracked-wheat bread, risen over the coals.

  Drummond had succeeded in secreting among his things a surprise delicacy almost unknown in New Amsterdam: a cone of white sugar. They took slices of dried pear, moistened them with brandy and dipped them in the sweet, crumbled granules, lounging on the bearskin before the hearth.

  No more Van Couvering and Drummond. He addressed her as Blandine, as he always had in his mind, or sometimes “Ina,” while she, relishing his given name, called him Edward. In his more idiotic moods he cooed at her as “la petite souris,” the little mouse.

  He had removed his waistcoat for good, it seemed, as she had tossed away her gown. She went about the place dressed in his white linen blouse, unbuttoned and untucked—there was nothing in which to tuck it—barefoot.

  The weeks tripped by. They had only three conversations of any note.

  * * *

  The first:

  “After the attack, I changed my thinking,” Blandine said during one noontime meal before the fire.

  “The Mahican attack, you mean,” Drummond said. “Berry-picking.” She had told him some about it, but not all.

  “I realized that I had never really thought about things before. I just accepted what people told me.”

  “They always want you to take what they say on faith,” Drummond said. “The spiritual is the most important area of life, and they don’t want you to think too hard about it.”

  “I felt during those days as though I were spinning out of control,” Blandine said. “I would walk along the Strand, look out at the bay and realize how much I loved the beauty of the world. It nearly choked me sometimes with emotion. The world is beautiful even for a coyote.”

  “Even for a mole,” Drummond said.

  “For a worm.”

  “A gnat.”

  “For a rock!” said Blandine. “Even for that stone in the hearth! Yes! But then I would look at the explanation I was being given for all this gloriousness, and I just refused.”

  “Credere nequeo,” Drummond said.

  “That’s right,” Blandine said. “What I told the dominie.”

  He picked up her mass of hair as it fell over her shoulders and held it to his face. He wished he could protect Blandine from everything the world was going to hand her, but knew that was impossible, that ultimately she would have to protect herself.

  “There is a man,” Edward said. “His name is Benedict Spinoza. He’s a lens grinder in Holland.”

  “He is who you read?” she said. A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being.

  “He puts into words what you are talking about. He knows the glory of the world cannot be contained. It must be infinite. It can’t have a human face.”

  “I know!” said Blandine. “It must be everything, all things. I thought that myself, and then I thought how dangerous that kind of thinking was, and I tried to stop.”

  “Bento Spinoza’s thought is so dangerous that they tossed him right out of his community.”

  “Like us.”

  “Like us,” Edward said.

  Blandine’s eyes shone, staring into Edward’s face. “I really felt alone,” she said. “I never considered that anyone believed as I did.”

  “Once you do begin to think about it, though, it becomes obvious,” Drummond said.

  Blandine nodded. “Difficult, but obvious,” she said. “You’re right.”

  “After Worcester, I, too, lost my faith. My boots had waded in blood up to the ankles. The
god held up to me to believe in seemed so…”

  “Petty and small,” Blandine said.

  “Yes. When you see men being smashed by cannon fire, you can’t believe again. A god who gives a damn in any way whatsoever about human pain and hopes and predicaments just begins to appear ridiculous.”

  “What I found myself thinking was, no god at all,” Blandine said. “Or a different kind of one. I didn’t know if it could even go by the name of God.”

  Edward said, “The god my soul needs is huge and unbreakable. Spinoza’s god. That’s what I see out here in the new world. And their old-world god just turned out to be small and soft.”

  Blandine snuggled her body up against his. “Like you,” she said. “Small and soft.”

  He laughed. “Like your breasts.”

  “My breasts aren’t small!”

  Edward said, “Nor am I, if you’d just do your job.”

  She did.

  The second:

  “The question to ask about crime is always, qui bono?” said Edward. “That’s how the constable is trained.” They had walked outside to take some air that afternoon, looking over the vast iced-in river below, congratulating themselves, with the impossible satisfaction of lovers, on their good luck and good taste in each other.

  After their walk, they returned to a still warm cabin and a hearth with dying coals.

  “Qui bono?” Blandine said, poking the embers with a heavy stick from the woods outside. “My Latin… Qui, I know. That means ‘who.’ But bono? Good? ‘Who is good?’”

  “Who benefits? Who gains from the crime?” Edward said. He pushed a fresh log into the fire, and rubbed his hands together.

  “Ah. Well, the killer benefits. Or killers,” said Blandine.

  “Yes, but how?” Edward said. “These are strange, chained-together murders. I have never heard of killings that go forward serially. What links them? How could anyone gain by slaying orphans?”

  Blandine thought she knew. “There is a thrill from killing, isn’t there? Isn’t that enough? You’ve killed, haven’t you? Is there a thrill to it?”