The Orphanmaster (16 page)

In one of the last lodge houses, a small one along the far edge of the maple grove, she found strange totems strewn about the floor. A willow branch bent into a circle and lashed to a pair of cross-sticks. A mask.

In the dead embers of the lodge fire, some kind of half-crusted entrails, human or animal, she could not tell. Had someone been cooking there? The whole interior was cold and odorless.

One of the corn-husk fetish dolls the river indians kept in every lodge, this one stained black, sat upright beside the cold ashes. Fascinated, she picked it up. Discolored with what? Blood?

She lifted her lantern.

At the far back of the lodge, she saw Kitane.

Dead.

The Lenape trapper lay naked and motionless on a half-collapsed bed of willow sticks. By the dim light of her lantern, she recognized him by his bird tattoos. A fine gray ash covered the man’s skin from head to foot.

For a long moment Blandine halted, unwilling to venture farther into the darkened interior. Silence. Could he be alive? But no movement, no breath.

She moved forward and knelt next to the body of her friend. She touched his hand, which felt as cold as stone. Kitane had been the one who opened the wilderness to her. On their trip up the Mohawk River, he had shown Blandine not only how to survive in what the European might consider trackless wasteland, but how to embrace it, glory in it.

He was also a man. Kitane had the most striking physical presence of anyone Blandine ever encountered. Now here he was, wholly unclothed. She had never seen a grown man naked. Enthralled and horrified at once, she studied his ash-dusted body. The flesh showed no signs of decomposition.

Some of Kitane’s charisma had vanished with death. The bird tattoos across his chest, animated before, appeared lifeless. The ropes of muscle in his arms and shoulders, his flat belly, his strong thighs had subsided, the flesh sunk back like clay. His member rested inert alongside his leg, flaccid.

She bent her head down to his chest and listened. Nothing.

“Kitane Chansomps, prince of the locust clan,” she murmured. “What happened to you?”

She rose, turned her back on the corpse and crossed to the door of the lodge.

“Antony,” Blandine called out.

Behind her, Kitane reared up out of death.

The Lenape shouted a few unintelligible words of Algonquin, lunged forward and attacked Blandine, seizing her arm. He wore a deranged look and, strangest of all, snapped his jaws open and shut as if he would bite her.

Which he did.

Kitane sank his teeth into Blandine’s shoulder, tearing through the cambric of her dress. She cried out. The pain was intense.

The Lenape ripped his mouth away with a piece of her flesh. He looked ghastly. His muscles were slack and his skin had a green tinge. But in the small lodge Kitane appeared immense, filling the interior with his crazed, naked presence. Blandine knew her friend was out to kill her.

Jabbering loudly, Kitane tilted his head back and swallowed his bite of Blandine’s flesh, looking like a baby bird choking down some regurgitated morsel from its mother.

The lantern dropped from Blandine’s grasp. Pain shot through her arm and ran up her neck. She felt fear, but most of all astonishment. This was not Kitane. This was a rabid animal that had shape-shifted into the form of Kitane.

Bleeding all over herself, Blandine backed out of the lodge. Kitane came at her again. It would have gone beyond strange, had it not been so horrible, how he gnashed his teeth. She could hear them clack and snap as the Lenape bore down.

Antony appeared, slugged Kitane with a single roundhouse from one of his ham-sized fists, and the crazed indian slumped to the floor.

They stared at the collapsed figure. Blandine’s blood glistened on his lips. She clutched at her wounded shoulder, thoroughly shaken.

Antony bound Kitane by the legs, brought him away from the lodge and laid him lengthwise on the other side of their campfire. Later, the Lenape regained some measure of consciousness. But though his eyes opened, he remained catatonic.

Antony tended Blandine’s injury. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What are you sorry for? You didn’t attack me.”

“I should have been there.”

“I’m not sure what happened,” Blandine said. “He lay on his willow cot. I thought he was dead. Then he leapt up like an ambush. He would not have done it if he had known it was me.”

“It was chicken-hearted.”

“No, Antony, no,” Blandine said. “Look at him. The man is ill.”

Antony gazed across the fire at the comatose Lenape. Once more, Kitane seemed still to the point of death.

“A madness comes upon them, a witika madness,” Antony said. “He thinks he has become possessed by witika. He needs to eat human flesh.”

A sick feeling stole over Blandine. She admired Kitane greatly. But she knew him to be near the settlement when Piddy disappeared. He had also been up north when the Jope Hawes murder occurred. Here in his lodge were the totems, a fetish doll such as Hannie de Laet found in the forest.

Blandine felt she didn’t know enough about witika madness to judge whether this was a case or not. Was it even real? Could it be contagious?

She lay down close to the fire. Her shoulder throbbed. Antony stayed with his back propped against the trunk of a maple. Sleep didn’t come to either of them.

Midnight winds rose in the night sky, blowing loose the stars into darkness. Antony laid more wood on the fire. Blandine reached a tentative decision. She would nurse Kitane back to health. But she would do it warily.

After a long time, Antony said, “You saw that he didn’t attack me.”

“Yes,” Blandine said.

“You know why?”

“No,” she said.

“Too big to eat.”

T
wo weeks later, moonlight made the night into day. Blandine decided to return directly to New Amsterdam that evening, instead of staying over at the director general’s
bouwerie
as she planned.

She had been gone from home for almost a month now. First the Beverwyck market, then the aftermath of Kitane’s attack. She needed to get back. Aet Visser’s claim of a pattern of child disappearances weighed heavily on her mind. She and Antony made their way along the shoreline of Manhattan, following a trail she could see clearly, though a scattering of clouds at times obscured the radiance of the sky.

They had left the convalescing Kitane in the care of a village of Canarsies near Hell Gate. Over the past two weeks Blandine had nursed the trapper. After his attack on her, the Lenape fell into a fever, but she stayed at his bedside. She sweated him with steam infused with herbs. Antony brought in a native healer.

Kitane slowly recovered his wits, but remained in a weakened state. The prospect of him relapsing into witika madness receded somewhat. He became aware of what he had done to Blandine, and writhed in shame.

Blandine’s shoulder healed. It was good to be going home, back to New Amsterdam. Her trading days at Beverwyck had been a fantastic success, so much so that she almost felt guilty. She knew she would soon see Lace and Mally. It was early November. As Blandine and Antony walked south toward the settlement, an unease rose in her, a sense of coming back to responsibilities too long left untended.

Still, what could be more beautiful than the white light of a full moon on the breast of the new world? The birch groves they passed shone incandescent. Night birds hooted as though they were calling to Blandine directly. The smell of autumn, delicious and bitter, hung over the forest.

The trail led them along the western flank of Mount Petrus, a low knob whose promontory indicated that they were only a half-league from the palisades wall.

“Up there,” Antony said.

“What?” Blandine asked, searching where he pointed. She could see nothing.

“A man,” Antony said.

A voice hailed them, a voice she could not believe, one that she had last heard in Beverwyck three weeks before. He came hurtling down the side of the hill, his boots sending up clouds of crackling leaves.

“Come,” Edward Drummond said, taking Blandine’s hand. “You must see this.”

She thought of extracting her hand from his but found she could not make herself do so. His sudden appearance was so surprising, his tone seemed so urgent—not panicked, but excited, happy.

“You, too,” Drummond called back to Antony, as he led Blandine up the slope.

“Mister Drummond,” she said. But it was as if she were caught up in a whirlwind.

He brought her, breathless, to the bald crown of Mount Petrus. A child stood there, mute and motionless. A cloud suddenly dropped away from the moon and light flooded over them, making the child appear unearthly, like a ghost or a fairy.

William, the Godbolts’ ward.

“Here, take a look,” Drummond said.

Beside the boy stood some sort of a weapon, a brass cannon the likes of which Blandine had never seen. Stood on end, it was taller than she was. The device rested on a metal tripod, aimed at the sky.

Drummond, Blandine noticed, was wrapped in the bearskin robe she had given him.

Antony reached the top of the slope after her.

“Please, you must,” Drummond said.

The boy stepped forward, like a little page at a royal court, and indicated a small cylinder fixed to the lower end of the cannon. He bent down and placed his eye to the cylinder. The pantomime was perfect. “Like this,” William seemed to say, entirely without speaking.

“Go ahead,” Drummond said. “You won’t be sorry, I promise.”

Blandine looked over at Antony. He stared, not at her but at the
cannon, lost in admiration for the apparatus, its long brass lines gleaming in the light of the moon.

“What is it?” Blandine asked, hesitating. Drummond merely gestured her forward.

Blandine bent as the boy had done and placed her eye at the end of the brass tube. Nothing. A blank. This must be the Englishman’s idea of a prank.

“Close your other eye,” Drummond said, leaning uncomfortably close to her.

She did so, and suddenly gave a startled cry. “Oh!”

Through the brass tube shone the moon, the moon as Blandine had never seen it, close enough to touch. Its mountains and oceans could be read clearly. An immense beauty filled her eye and gripped her heart. She dared not breathe. Here was another new world, not America but a celestial one, presented to her as a gift, full of mystery, drenched in light.

Wholly involuntarily, she trilled out a laugh. She could not help herself. It was that wonderful.

Blandine had trouble keeping the moon in view. She did not understand how she was seeing it. It danced and moved, she lost it, found it again, laughed again.

That is a sound, Drummond thought, that the world needs to hear more of.

They were all aware of it, boy and giant and English spy, how lovely was the delight of this woman, bending slightly at her waist, her white-yellow hair the color of moonlight.

Blandine straightened up. “Oh, Mister Drummond,” she said. As if compelled, she immediately returned her eye to the tube.

“I can’t get it,” she said. “Yes, I can.”

“Antony,” Drummond said, and Blandine straightened again.

“Oh, yes,” she said. She guided her man’s eye to the tube. His size made it more convenient for him not to bend down but to go to his knees. He at first also had difficulty registering the view.

“Lord God,” he said after a moment. “My dear Lord God.”

He, too, laughed, throwing his head back with a bursting guffaw, then immediately returning for another look. He stopped, gazed up at
Drummond with an immense smile, as though he had received a Christmas present.

“What is it?” Blandine asked Drummond.

“It is called a perspective tube,” Drummond said. “It works by bending rays of light.”

“That is the moon? That is the real moon?”

The expression on Blandine van Couvering’s face would have been impossible for Drummond to describe or render. Her lips, parted in excitement, the blush of her cheeks, the radiant pale blue of her eyes, framed by dark, ash-colored lashes. He himself was the moon, poor and lifeless, with no light of his own, merely reflecting her sun.

The four of them returned again and again to the tube, boy and giant and man and woman, a small colony of the entranced. Drummond taught Blandine to adjust the device so that it tracked the moon’s transit of the sky.

The night passed. It was cold, but none of them felt it. Drummond had shucked off his bearskin, offering it to Blandine, but she declined. The boy William crawled under it instead, comically moving about, a midget caught beneath a bed-mattress.

Down the slope, placed well away from the perspective tube in order that its light would not dilute the radiance of the moon, a small fire burned. Every so often, William moved down to tend it.

It had been difficult to persuade the Godbolts to let the boy out for a whole night, but again, some small flatteries convinced them. Rebecca, at least, became more comfortable with hiring out her ward. William proved extremely helpful to Drummond, silence being an attractive virtue in a servant.

From time to time Drummond would pose a question to him, trying to unlock the orphan boy’s secrets. William stared at him but never spoke, mute as a millstone.

Allowing Antony to take over the tube, Blandine and Drummond followed William down to the fire. The boy stirred it into flame and squatted nearby. Drummond threw the bearskin down, and they sat.

“You have been ill,” Drummond said. Her face, drawn and pale.

“Yes,” Blandine said.

“And your arm. Is it stiff?”

“A wound,” she said. “It’s all right now.”

“But since Beverwyck, you have been tending to your commerce?”

“I have been nursing a friend,” Blandine said.

“An angel of mercy,” Drummond said.

She shook her head, as if the comment had broken the mood. “I am no angel,” she said.

“You look it, though.”

Again, she drew back, refusing the trend of the conversation. “We are not at the king’s court, Mister Drummond.”

“Oh, they would love to see you at Whitehall,” he said, laughing.