The Orphanmaster

by Jean Zimmerman

  There were a few sparks. When Boer read Drummond’s casual remarks about the women of the settlement (“hardworking, well-educated, clever, an asset we would do well to co-opt”) the audience woke up. “Some of them are very pretty,” Drummond had added in a needless aside, and a titter ran through the chamber.

  But that was it. During Boer’s endless recitation, Drummond had a thought of giving up and pleading guilty. Anything to get out of this oven of a chamber.

  Kees pushed his way through the spectators to kneel at Blandine’s side. “Your man is a spy, a traitor and an assassin, isn’t he?”

  She looked down at him, trying to keep the pity out of her eyes. “I see him as a soldier, nothing more,” she said gently.

  “Is a soldier what you want? I am a captain of the militia!”

  It was pathetic. Once, she would have felt for him. Now, nothing.

  “Blandine,” he pleaded, putting his hand on her arm. “Don’t do this to yourself. Repudiate him.”

  “This isn’t worthy of you, Kees.”

  On the bench, the director general threw a glare their way, and several members of the gallery shushed them.

  “I did this, you know,” Kees whispered, showing both pride and pain. “I told Uncle to move against your man. I did this to you and to him.”

  “Even if it were true,” Blandine said, “I would forgive you.”

  Kees rose to his feet, turned his back on her and assumed his seat among the grandees in front of the meeting-hall.

  The fiscael read the documents for another half hour, sweat dripping from his forehead and plopping audibly down upon the pages. By the time he finally finished, the sun slanted into the hall from the west, and the eyes of many of the spectators drooped shut.

  Kees Bayard woke everyone up by rising grandly from his seat, saying loudly, “The case is proved,” and stalking out of the meeting-hall.

  Stuyvesant spoke. “The court stipulates that these documents were indeed the ones found in the chambers of the defendant on Slyck Steegh in the colony. Counsel?”

  “We accept the stipulation, Your Excellency,” Clarke said. He was about to sit down, but rose back up. “Although…”

  “Yes?” Stuyvesant said.

  “We wonder who is responsible for the decoding and translating of these missives,” Clarke said. “The answer impinges on the veracity of the version here read.”

  “The court had them rendered,” Stuyvesant said.

  “Yes, but who?” Clarke said. “A court can’t translate. There must be a person.”

  “Mijn Heer General did it himself,” De Klavier said.

  De Klavier was out of order, but Stuyvesant was pleased not to have to make the point himself, so he let it pass.

  “You did, Your Excellency?” Clarke said. “You yourself?”

  “Yes,” the director general said.

  “Very well, very good,” Clarke said. “We shall say no more about that.” And he sat down.

  But rose again. “Except…”

  “Yes?” Stuyvesant said. Drummond could tell by the fire in the man’s eyes that he was getting angered, not accustomed to having his pronouncements questioned.

  “It’s just that…” Clarke seemed to stammer and lose his way. “My apologies, Your Excellency, but I wonder, could you inform us of your training in Latin?”

  “What?”

  “The messages were originally written in Latin, I believe,” Clarke said. “Have you learning in that direction?”

  Watch now, watch now, Drummond thought, the director general will explode any second.

  De Klavier once again stood up and spoke out of order. “The director general is the finest Latin mind in the colony, perhaps the finest in the new world.”

  “Ipsi dixit,” Stuyvesant said, hauling out a Cicero quotation (“he said it himself”) from the bottomless depths of his knowledge.

  De Klavier said, “The director general attended school in Franeker, in Friesland, if you must know.”

  “Very well, yes, apologies, of course,” Clarke said. “I’m sure the translations are very, very good, very exact, not heir to the outrageous errors that often lurk in translated material, misconstruing and missing the original true meaning.”

  Drummond allowed himself an inner smile. The bumbler in the black barrister’s robe might be worth something after all.

  The afternoon waned, the court adjourned and the first English-style jury trial in the history of New Netherland completed its opening day. From the sleepy looks on the faces of the spectators, many would not be returning for day two.

  That evening, Blandine asked Drummond, “Would you mind very much, Edward, if I didn’t come to see the second day of your trial?”

  Drummond smiled and shook his head. “I would be absent myself, if it were my choice.”

  “Nothing will happen at the tribunal tomorrow, will it?” Blandine said.

  “My counsel says no,” Drummond said. “Only procedural actions.”

  “It’s just I should see Luybeck,” Blandine said.

  “Go, go ahead, I will return to you well baked after my afternoon in the oven.”

  Eberhard Luybeck, the probate judge, had been attempting for the last four months to untangle the mess of Aet Visser’s estate. He was the same man Drummond had questioned about George Godbolt’s financial condition, back at the beginning of his time in the colony.

  Blandine moved about the rooms as Drummond sat brooding. She readied them for the move to the new house on Market Street, and worked to pack their possessions.

  Drummond took Blandine’s hand as she passed by him. “You can’t stop us, you know,” he said. “Us” meaning the English.

  Blandine walked around casually in her camisole and the emerald petticoat. “I trust you,” she said.

  The New Netherland Colony displayed the kind of atmosphere that Drummond imagined it shared with the last days of Pompeii. Mount Vesuvius had been smoking for months now, and the explosion was due. Down from New England, up from Virginia, from across the seas, somehow, some way, the English were coming.

  Silence between them. Then Blandine said, “Do you want to know why I trust the English? Because I want Beverwyck.”

  At first, Drummond didn’t understand. She “wanted” Beverwyck? What did that mean?

  She came and sat in his lap and laid it out for him. The lands of the north, including the vital trading outpost of Beverwyck, had already been claimed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Stuyvesant and the Dutch were too weak to resist the claim.

  The English, though, when they came in, would maintain proper borders. The colony—her colony, whatever it came to be named under the English, but Blandine’s familiar turf nonetheless—would be able to retain its gateway to the fur trade.

  It was a question, Drummond realized, of who Blandine trusted more, the incoming English or the rival Massachusetts Bay Colony.

  “Both are English, no?” Drummond asked her. “The crown that comes and the New England colony that is.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “But our treatment at the hands of one will be very different.”

  Both were antithetical to Dutch interests, in other words, but one more than the other. In this case, the devil Blandine didn’t know, the crown, she preferred to the devil she did know, Massachusetts. A nuanced view of real-world statecraft.

  Blandine began to talk about the members of the jury in Drummond’s trial. “Three tradefolk, a handlaer and an agriculturist,” she said.

  “And Gerrit Remunde,” Drummond said.

  “Another trader. Every one of those people know where their coin is coming from. Beaver pelts. Communicate to them this one single point and you will have them well in hand: Petrus Stuyvesant will lose Beverwyck for them.”

  43

  Another stifling day in the council chamber of the meeting-hall in the fort. The spectators were fewer today, and some new ones had replaced the old. The director general, Drummond noticed, did not sweat.

  A
s the accused, Drummond stood again in the dock, shifting his feet from one to the other, attempting not to yawn. He distracted himself by examining the six men of the jury. They appeared restless. After the reading of Drummond’s decoded messages, the fiscael ended his presentation of the case for the prosecution. Clarke rose for Drummond’s defense, embarking upon a complex argument involving the supposed nature of his client’s crime.

  “This charge of treason,” Clarke said, addressing the jury directly, “we must ask, against whom? Against what entity? The Dutch West India Company? Can one be disloyal to a commercial entity the way one can to a nation?”

  Drummond thought, I will hang for sure if this is the best he can do. The eyes of the jurymen began to wander.

  “Tell me, who has this man betrayed?” Clarke said, gesturing to Drummond. “No country. The supposed secret messages upon which the prosecution bases its case represent not treason but a simple business strategy. The day when a corporation is accorded the same standing as a country, with all the rights attending to that status, will be a sad day indeed.”

  “Barrister Clarke?” the director general interrupted from the bench.

  “Yes, Mijn Heer General?”

  “The Dutch West India Company enjoys the status of an overlord in this case,” Stuyvesant said. “The Company thus has standing to serve as a jurisdiction. All this was argued and answered in pretrial.”

  “Yes, Mijn Heer General,” Clarke said, clearly dismayed.

  All right, Drummond thought, what else do you have?

  Clarke again addressed the jury directly. “As members of the jury, you have the right to direct a summary judgment at any time,” he said. “If you believe the prosecution has advanced its argument convincingly, you may do so. Likewise, if you believe the prosecution has not made its case, you may ask that this trial end in a finding of ‘not guilty.’”

  Something was wrong, Drummond thought. The proceedings seemed to be rattling along somehow much faster than he anticipated. He didn’t understand what was happening. A summary judgment? Clarke droned on, but Drummond felt the need to interrupt him.

  “Mijn Heer General?” he called out, turning to Stuyvesant. “May the accused speak?”

  “Stand mute in the dock, if you please,” the director general said.

  Peter Cuyck, the farmer on the jury, spoke up. “Please, sir, we would like to hear Mister Drummond speak.”

  “The defendant has the right to make a statement to the court,” Clarke said.

  Stuyvesant repressed his natural rage at being openly contradicted, and curtly nodded his assent. But inwardly he steamed. The defendant has the right? Who has rights? Rights were only what he, the director general, allowed. Nothing more. He could give them and take them away.

  Drummond faced the jury. “John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony has claimed all land north of the forty-second parallel latitude. That cuts our line just to the north of Wildwyck, gentlemen, and that means the Massachusetts Bay Colony will take Fort Orange and Beverwyck.”

  Stuyvesant stamped his peg leg on the hollow floor of the council chambers. He could not abide this. Drummond saying “our line,” as if he were at one with the Dutch jurymen! “The accused will stick to the facts of the present case,” the director general said.

  But Drummond continued on in the same vein.

  “Wildwyck, Fort Orange and Beverwyck. We need them. John Winthrop and Massachusetts shall not have them. Fort Orange and Beverwyck may be called by different names under the English king, but we will keep those entities within this jurisdiction. You may trade up the river as before.”

  “Mister Drummond!” Stuyvesant shouted, rising up from his chair.

  “If you want to keep Beverwyck, come with us, come with England,” Drummond said. “If you want to lose it to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, go with this man.” He pointed at Stuyvesant, who had gone apoplectic.

  “Stand mute! Stand mute!” the director general yelled at Drummond.

  “Your Excellency?” Clarke shouted.

  Speaking directly to the jury, Drummond said, “The new colony will be called the Crown Province of New York, and you have the promise of King Charles II that its governors will take Dutch law and customs seriously, including all border disputes.”

  Drummond looked at Gerritt Remunde and the others. Blandine had given him the key. Internecine rivalries trumped global ones every time. It is a human characteristic to fear a local bully more than a remote god. The traders in the settlement cared little who ruled them, Dutch or English. But they desperately did not want to be cheated via a land grab by one of their neighboring colonial rivals.

  Gerrit Remunde stood up in the jury box, begging for Stuyvesant’s attention. “Sir? Sir?”

  “Sit down!” the director general said.

  “Your Excellency,” Remunde said, persisting. “We gentlemen of the jury wish to direct the court to do what the barrister suggested”—he gestured at Clarke—“what he called it, a summary judgment, that this man be found not guilty of the charge and freed.”

  The gallery erupted in chatter. “Not guilty” sounded from several lips.

  “Out of order, out of order!” the director general said. Stuyvesant stamped his foot repeatedly, attempting to quiet a council chamber that verged on riot.

  After a long few minutes, he finally quelled the disturbance. He stood silent for a beat, glowering.

  “Spying is by definition a military matter, and I am the duly authorized general of the colonial militia,” Stuyvesant began.

  He was shouted down by the members of the gallery, who realized what the director general was about to do. “No, no, no!” they called out.

  “Captain of the guard!” he shouted. “Captain of the guard!”

  Muskets in hand, four of the director general’s paid militiamen marched into the chambers from their post just outside the door.

  “Director general, I object to this—” Clarke said, but he was jostled aside by the soldiers.

  “This court is dissolved!” Stuyvesant shouted, greeted by more calls of “No! No!” But even the staunchest republicans were not about to risk death by bayonet just to save the hide of an English spy. The spectators moved sullenly out as the militiamen cleared the chamber.

  “The jury is dismissed,” the director general said, speaking over the tumult. “I hereby adjourn, suspend and disperse this court.”

  More protests were called out, but sounded weaker. In the chaos, Drummond motioned Raeger over from the gallery.

  “Get word to Blandine,” he said. “She’s at Luybeck’s.” The weert rushed out.

  Drummond found himself in the dock, facing the director general as if the two of them were alone. Just Petrus Stuyvesant and his musket men.

  One look at the director general’s face and Drummond knew he was doomed. Challenge a tyrant at your own risk, and the smaller the stakes, the greater the tyranny. The proceedings lost all semblance of a trial. Stuyvesant meant to kill him.

  What had Drummond ever done to the man to invite such enmity? He had just been acquitted as a spy. But still Stuyvesant bore down. This was personal.

  Drummond couldn’t fathom it. Apart from his trenchant asides in confidential diplomatic messages, he’d had few dealings with the director general. Some of the language he had used might have been a little salty, but was it enough for Stuyvesant to want to string him up? Or perhaps Drummond was being blamed for the Godbolt affair?

  Kees Bayard could be behind it. Jealousy being the great motivator in human affairs more often than was recognized.

  Stuyvesant rose to his feet. “Having heard the evidence, I am within my authority as director general of the colony and military governor to pronounce the accused guilty and sentence him to hang.”

  His face twisted into something resembling a smile. Where is your arrogance now, Englisher?

  “This isn’t justice,” Drummond said evenly. “It’s murder.”

  “Corporal? Take this man into c
ustody.”

  As the militiamen moved on Drummond, Stuyvesant called out, “Under shackles!”

  The day may have started as a jury trial, but in the end, the director general could do whatever he wanted. Might made right.

  Desperation, Drummond thought, assessing the situation that would lead, in perhaps minutes, to his death. The director general had merely underlined the dictatorial nature of his governorship. He had already lost the Dutch residents of the colony. By this action, he would lose those few English residents who remained his allies.

  Instead, the impulsive Stuyvesant placed all his hopes in the militia. A hundred men with pikes and flintlock muskets. Twenty cannon on the ramparts of the fort. That was all that was left to him.

  But the director general possessed an immediate present advantage. For this particular time and this place, he held the guns, and there was nothing Drummond could do to stop him.

  He thought of Blandine. Nothing will happen at the tribunal, will it?

  “Devilish tricky business,” Eberhard Luybeck said to Blandine, tying up a sheaf of documents with a length of twine. The two sat in Luybeck’s law chamber near the Stadt Huys.

  “I mean, Aet Visser was a wonder, had his finger in all sorts of pies, everywhere in the colony,” Luybeck said. “Multiple and sundry partnerships, debts owed, debts outstanding owed to him, some sort of royalty relationship with the director general, a share in a Pavonia acreage with the Hendrickson family, payments to them, funds received from them. He was in court more often than he was out of it, and not just the Orphan Chamber either.”

  Eberhard Luybeck knew that crucial to survival in the profession of law were estates, and the payments attendant upon death. The best things in life were fees. Probate! The word was sweeter to him than any other. It was the teat he suckled for all his sustenance, and therefore he loved it with the pure innocence of an infant.

  “I merely need to know if he has taken care of Anna and his family,” Blandine said.

  “Yes, well, he has, very handsomely,” Luybeck said. “There can be no formal recognition of his paternity, of course, nor of the marriage. The woman is half a Haverstraw indian, I believe?”