The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  No one saw the good, they saw only the bad.

  “William Turner had expectations of good money from his family in England,” De Klavier said. “George Godbolt wished to be executor of that estate. When he lost William Turner, he faced losing control of thousands of English pounds. So he sought another supposititious child to take the young heir’s place.”

  “Fantastic,” Stuyvesant said. The evil of which his fellow humans were capable should have long ago ceased to amaze him, yet once again, he found himself amazed.

  “And this… relic,” he said, gesturing to the finger, which pointed back toward him accusingly.

  “We have not been able to retrace the path to where this boy Jan says he discovered it,” De Klavier said. They had searched the rocky outcroppings farther north on the island, but found nothing as bizarre as a cave full of bones.

  “Mijn Heer General, we wish to adopt the boy,” Blandine van Couvering said, speaking for the first time. “The lack of an orphanmaster in the colony has thrown issues of guardianship into confusion. So we came directly to your excellency to petition for relief. We know the boy. Mister Drummond, Edward, has had him in to work for him. We will take him under our care and give him our name.”

  Stuyvesant thought about the nasty business of the recent violence in Blandine van Couvering’s rooms. A man killed, another stabbed. Riot and anarchy. The lady seemed positively to attract disorder. The suicide of Aet Visser had mooted the witika witchcraft accusations against her, but the director general still believed that she was, as the book of Job said, born unto trouble, as sparks fly upward.

  “You are betrothed, I hear,” he said.

  “Yes, Your Excellency,” Blandine said.

  The union of a spy and a witch, Stuyvesant thought, appalled. O tempora, o mores! The manners and behaviors of his colonists made the director general shudder. If God did not call fire down upon the sinful inhabitants of New Amsterdam, then apologies were owed to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, since this settlement outdid them in wickedness.

  But after all that, one could not say otherwise but that Miss van Couvering graced the colony with her beauty. His nephew, Kees, had been a fool to lose her. The finest example of Dutch womanhood, yet she set herself against the director general and his kin. Why?

  Well, Stuyvesant needed a new orphanmaster, since his last one hung himself for reasons depraved and unaccountable. Van Couvering would now no doubt be exonerated at her ecclesiastical trial. Perhaps she could be fully rehabilitated. An orphanmistress? It had never been done before.

  “You realize that you might be marrying a condemned man,” the director general said. He could not get himself to say Drummond’s name. “This person’s trial has yet to be conducted.”

  De Klavier said, “The director general has graciously assented to empanel a special jury for Mister Drummond, in the English manner.”

  “I am optimistic, Mijn Heer General,” Blandine said.

  “And you, sir,” Stuyvesant said to Drummond, “you are a killer of king-killers? One of the Earl of Clarendon’s men?”

  “I’m an Englishman,” Drummond said.

  “Yes, you are,” Stuyvesant sneered, showing his disgust.

  He slapped both hands on the table in front of him. What did it matter? Jan Arendt or William Turner? What did he care? He had more pressing matters to which to attend. He had wasted too much time on this foolishness as it was.

  “You, boy,” he said to the orphan. “I guess we should call you not William but Jan. Do you wish to be taken in by this lady and this gentleman?”

  Jan nodded solemnly.

  Returning from his terrifying adventure at the bone-filled cave, after having been absent from the Godbolt household for two full days, including Easter itself, Jan had been Bible-beaten to within an inch of his life by Rebecca. He stood it as long as he could, and then he spoke up.

  “I know what happened to William,” he stammered out.

  Rebecca arrested herself mid-swing, the Good Book balanced above her head. She stared down at the child she had been abusing.

  “George?” she called out, her voice faltering. She had never heard the boy speak before. Was it a miracle? Or devilry?

  “I know that he is dead,” Jan said. “I know that I am not he. My name is Jan.”

  William the Silent no more.

  He spoke up in Stuyvesant’s audience chamber now, trembling ever so slightly in front of the intimidating man with the false leg.

  “I wish to go with Mister Drummond and Miss Blandina,” he said, loud enough for all to hear. “My name is Jan Drummond now.”

  The stars of the dogwood flowers along the canal burst out. The cherry and apple trees in New Amsterdam gardens bloomed with a pink-white tinge. Blandine van Couvering and Edward Drummond pledged their marriage vows on a springtime day made glorious by love, bright skies and the bubbling aroma of fresh-fried doughnuts.

  The first of May, warm and clear. Colony matrons, having gone about well-laced and bundled up for the long cold months of winter, felt moved to strip off their stockings, hike up their skirts and let the soft breeze play against their skin. They leaned back on their stoeps, twiddling their toes and enjoying the sunshine. Their men, locked in the unending battle of existence, eyed the bare legs of their goodly wives and had thoughts of matters other than profit and loss.

  The feast laid out in the backyard of Blandine’s dwelling-house displayed all the bounty the colony had to offer. Doughnuts, yes, steaming hot and plunged in Barbados sugar. And also meats, confections, beverages and desserts.

  The multiple black clouds that hung over these particular nuptials seemed to vanish with the morning, as though the ceremony had been given a special one-day dispensation by the weather gods. Aet Visser’s death, the groom’s impending treason trial and his possible execution by hanging, the late unpleasantness with mob violence, murder most foul and sundry hauntings by demons—well, just a puff of wind from the cheeks of heaven had blown the skies clear of it all.

  Antony recovered gradually from his wounds. The schout oversaw the disposal of the dead body of the renegade half-indian Lightning, his burial unheralded by the funeral caller, his grave unmarked. Blandine scrubbed and scrubbed to clean the bloodstains from the wide plank flooring of her rooms.

  The charges against the bride, of consorting with the Devil, had, at last, been laid to rest. Blandine’s ecclesiastical trial, officiated by Dominie Megapolensis and featuring an august panel of three local pastors, was a two-hour affair concluded a week before the wedding. The finding? The charges were groundless, baseless, a rude contumely created for reasons unknown by the real guilty party, Aet Visser.

  “I always believed in her,” said the reigning matron of the settlement, Margaret Tomiessen. “Didn’t I tell you that she was as guiltless as a newborn child?”

  The other women in her circle, matrons and maidens both, looked to Margaret for direction as to whether a proper lady might attend the wedding celebration. Every person among them, from the acid-tongued Jacintha Jacobsen to a newly enceinte Elsje Kip and a fresh-faced Maaje de Lang (what was she so happy about?), wanted desperately to go.

  The combination of splendid food and inestimable grist for gossip was just too difficult to resist. Nothing like the spice of scandal to attract the polite and decorous. Luckily, following Margaret’s lead, the ladies did not have to defy the temptation.

  Margaret said, “I testified at her trial, did I tell you that?” (She had told them that.) “I said I had seen men enter her domicile when she was not at home. Were they Aet Visser and his henchmen? I don’t know for sure, so I couldn’t say. But there was an opportunity to break into that poor girl’s dwelling-house to spread around those horrid demon-indian articles they found there. That’s all I had to tell their excellencies.”

  Conspiracy! Dark doings under the cover of night. A virtuous maiden’s honor besmirched. What could be better?

  So, with Margaret Tomiessen’s blessing, the proper lad
ies would come to the nuptials, and that meant the men would be allowed to come, and that meant that the whole of New Amsterdam—all those who could fit, anyway—would be arriving at Blandine van Couvering’s Pearl Street dwelling-house on this splendiferous springtime day. Across the street at the Red Lion, Ross Raeger threw open his doors for any overflow crowd that might happen by, putting up a groaning board of his own.

  As the preparations were being laid for the ceremonies, the prospective bride and groom strolled together through the Clover Waytie, the freshest meadow on the island, where the verdant smells of springtime were strongest.

  Together, they inspected a gold ring.

  “It’s dulled by time and far too big for your finger,” Edward said. The white-gold metal of the band, he thought, matched the color of her hair.

  “I love it,” Blandine said.

  It was Edward’s own ring, worn by his officer father before him, nicked and knocked about a bit over the years (a Swede’s blade bounced off it during the Battle of Warsaw, saving Drummond’s finger), but meaningful to him. The ring represented his connection with a family and a past that he had left behind in his teens, as a young ensign entering the crown’s army.

  Blandine decided she would wear the band not on her finger, but hung around her neck on the fine gold chain that usually displayed the enameled rose her parents had given her when she turned thirteen. The rose she would put away, far back in her kas, folded in a scrap of linen. That was then, this is now. She would move on.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “We will have it worked on by a goldsmith, to size it so that it may fit your finger,” Edward said. “Is there a goldsmith in this damned settlement?”

  “No, no, not the ring,” Blandine said. “I mean, are you sure of us?”

  Edward looked at her and was about to laugh. A little late for her to ask that, wasn’t it? But something in her expression made him hold off.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” he said. “Very sure. Sure beyond certainty.”

  “And the other thing, is it over?”

  He knew what she meant. The witika, the orphan-kidnappings, their alliance of two to stop the killings and find justice for the dead.

  She wanted desperately for him to say yes. On this day of all days, the ugliness of the world must be beaten back. She could not prevent an image from assailing her at unguarded moments, the towering figure of the deerskin-masked witika, filling her great room, then vanishing abruptly.

  What did the apparition imply? Could it be she just imagined it? Aet Visser was dead and gone. If he had formerly been the one masquerading as the demon, then who was this terrifying specter? Visser risen from the dead? An ally of Lightning’s?

  The violent Easter evening confrontation had been so sudden, so chaotic. It happened in seconds. As time went on, the memory became more faded and jumbled, and she became unsure of what she had seen and what she hadn’t.

  Blandine told herself that on her wedding day she would banish all such thoughts from her mind. She would be married in the garden where the creature last appeared, a clear rejection of its power and reach. But she needed to turn to Drummond for support. Was it over?

  “Yes, it’s over,” Drummond said.

  He put the ring into her palm and closed her hand over it. “Give that to Megapolensis, and let’s do this.”

  The couple persuaded the dominie to perform the ceremony at the home of the bride rather than at the church. An unusual request, one Megapolensis would not generally allow. He had argued against it, telling Blandine that to conduct the ceremony in the Dutch Reformed House of God would dispel any suspicions that might linger about her as a woman once accused of witchcraft.

  But he did not argue too long or too hard. The fact was that, as dominie, he himself might well come under criticism for conducting the wedding at his church.

  Blandine left Drummond, crossed town and met Megapolensis.

  “Here it is,” she said, giving him the ring Drummond had given her.

  “Good,” the dominie said. “Then we are ready.”

  Megapolensis had come to accept that some of the circumstances of this union departed from the conventional. Blandine’s religious conviction wavered. She had no dowry. She had no parents. She would continue to work independently as a she-merchant, trading up and down the river, and as much as she valued a spotless groot kamer, being a hausfrau would never be her sole identity.

  In Holland, generous fathers-in-law presented their prospective daughters-in-law with a chatelaine, a waist-hung filigree from which suspended objects a wife would need—her household keys, most important, and a scent ball, a pincushion, a needle case and perhaps a small mirror.

  There would be no chatelaine for Blandine. Drummond’s father, Captain Llewellyn Drummond, had died seventeen years before, in a meaningless skirmish in the English Civil War.

  Nor would his mother take part in their nuptials. Judith Drummond lived with Edward’s two widowed sisters in a dwelling she had inhabited her whole adult life. Through wars and civil disruptions, changes in governments and social upheavals, Judith remained at Ditchley Gates, the family country house near Durham, waiting for the unscheduled and sporadic visits from her military husband and son. The woman would not even hear of Edward’s wedding until a message crossed the sea to reach her, weeks after the ceremony took place.

  She herself had no family, Blandine thought, heading back to her rooms from meeting the dominie, and Edward had none present in the settlement. With Aet Visser gone, she had no one to give her away. She had brought herself around to thinking it was better that way. She and Edward were as two innocent children, a pair of solitary human beings, clear of any attachments, no holds on either of them, standing alone together and becoming as one.

  “It may be a sad thing to have no relatives here,” Drummond said. “On the other hand, we never had them to spoil our courting.” Blandine’s thought of her parents made her smile, the idea of them dictating how long a queester, a gentleman caller, might stay into the evening.

  Blandine clung to her fond feelings for Aet Visser. The orphanmaster, she thought, was always one for a punch bowl. His shadow would fall over the ceremony, adding a tincture of melancholy to the otherwise joyous occasion. But she had come to accept this, too. Blandine remained the man’s steadfast advocate. She and Edward planned to have an empty place setting at their feast table, a symbol of an absent friend.

  She returned home from the church and mounted her stoop. Ross Raeger called to her from in front of the Lion. “A great day,” he said.

  “Aye,” Blandine said.

  “It’s not too late to change your mind and marry me instead,” he said.

  Blandine laughed. “I would always smell of onions and beer,” she said. “The life of an innkeeper’s wife is not for me.”

  She stepped inside her dwelling-house and closed the door behind her. A jolly fire blazed despite the fine May Day weather, and a fatted side of beef roasted slowly over the flames.

  To help her prepare her premises for the party Blandine appointed a spellmeisje, a playgirl, Miep Fredericz van Jeveren, who under her expert command had applied soap and water to clean her already spotless groot kamer. Miep arranged the bride’s basket with green garlands, and would hold her fan and perfumed gloves and veil when Blandine wasn’t using them. Mally and Lace were in, too, to spread the cloths on the tables and fold napkins into fanciful shapes, houses and turtles and stars.

  Via her trading contacts throughout New Netherland, Blandine carefully provisioned the party, arranging with the cooks of the town to turn out their finest cuisine. There would be local delicacies, of course. Slabs of sirloin, breasts of veal, crisp-skinned turkey and gamey venison in white pastry, all displayed on a plank table beside a whole roast spring lamb and pound upon pound of fricadelle, mince meat.

  Then there were foodstuffs Blandine obtained from the stores of her ship-trader cohorts, specialties imported from Amsterdam, flavors of Patria. A barrel
of pickled herring, whose briny flavor would bring tears to the eyes of colonists who missed their homeland. And of course, the Dutch cheeses. Cumin-seed-studded cheese. Red-wax-covered hard cheese. A green cheese tinted by the dung of sheep.

  Drummond insisted on no less than a dozen hogsheads of French and Rhenish wine. Raeger promised to roll twenty half-casks of ale across the street. Delftware platters would constantly circulate, offering shreds of golden tobacco. Finally, for dessert, rosewater-scented marzipan, whimsically sculpted to resemble spring lambs and baby chicks.

  She had left nothing to chance. Blandine wanted the stays of her women guests and the belts of the men to be thoroughly loosened by the end of the day.

  For all that, she had a persistent worry that no one would come.

  Shooing Blandine away from her obsessive checking on the banquet, Mally and Lace fussed over the bride’s hair, which she had fixed in sausage curls and pinned to her head so that it half cascaded down the back of her neck. Slipping out of her street dress, stepping out of her everyday underclothes, the bride put on a fawn-colored silk gown over a blue damask petticoat.

  She was ready. She felt lighthearted and a little light-headed. Any anxiety she experienced that morning had fled, with joy and exhilaration flooding in to take its place. Blandine rose from the chair where Mally and Lace had sentenced her to sit, erect and unmoving so as not to muss her costume. She crossed the groot kamer and stepped out into the garden.

  My, what a lot of people had come after all! They crowded into the yard all the way to the garden wall. She heard them shuffle into the great room behind her, too, as she left it. A few scamps had climbed the roof of the sailcloth-maker’s shop on the Strand, their view directly down into Blandine’s yard. Led by Tibb Dunbar, they stamped and whistled as they saw her come out.

  And Edward. Hatless, wigless, standing alongside Megapolensis in a newly tailored blue waistcoat of wool crepe, wearing a cream-colored blouse and a silver lace neck scarf. His brown hair had grown in shaggy, an inch long. He had on brick-red breeches and his usual polished black boots.