The Orphanmaster (18 page)

The
schout
knew well what it all meant. He must raise the hue and cry.

From the wilderness north, the witika had now slouched south to haunt New Amsterdam.

In London, Charles II chartered a new American colony, naming it Carolina after his murdered father. Spain found itself newly afflicted with its own monarch, also called Charles II, the product of a hundred years of Hapsburg inbreeding, a deformed and weak-witted descendant of Joanna the Mad. At Whitehall, Pepys overheard James, Duke of York, say that he would wear a wig, afterward gleaning from court gossip that the king avowed he would also wear one. A style was born.

Milton completed his epic
Paradise Lost
and sold the copyright to his publisher for ten pounds. The mathematician, philosopher and inventor of roulette, Blaise Pascal (“All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room”), died in a room in Paris.

Buxtehude took his seat at the great confectionary pipe organ of St. Mary’s, in Helsingor, Prince Hamlet’s home city. On the boards:
Theatrum Mundi
, “the world as stage.” Molière’s
Tartuffe
was produced for the first time.

The American missionary John Eliot, who oversaw the excommunication of Anne Hutchinson (he declared the number of deformities on the body of Hutchinson’s stillborn baby corresponded with the exact number of her heresies), translated the Bible into the Algonquin language of native Americans. The Harvard Puritan Michael Wigglesworth published his apocalyptic catechism,
The Day of Doom
. Eventually, one out of every twenty people in New England owned a copy.

The Maryland, Carolina and Virginia colonies promulgated laws
making it illegal to free enslaved Africans, contravening English law, which held they could be freed if they converted to Christianity.

In autumn 1663, the English emissary James Christe penetrated the western, Dutch-controlled end of Long Island, informing the settlers there that the territory was no longer under the jurisdiction of New Netherland, but that they should instead heretofore think of it as part of Connecticut.

For the first time, all over Europe but most especially in Italy, Holland and England, human beings placed their eyes to lozenges of shaped glass and peered into secrets of the universe. The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens debuted the magic lantern, an optical device that projected images upon surfaces. It was initially referred to as “the lantern of fright,” since in early applications it was used most often to display fear-inspiring images of the Devil.

Nowhere on earth were women more legally unencumbered than in the Netherlands and its colony of New Netherland. For their elementary education, girls received identical instruction to that of boys. Under a unique Dutch legal tradition, a woman could choose a form of marriage granting her legal standing equal to her husband’s, allowing her to represent herself in court, sign contracts and inherit property. Single women also enjoyed these rights, which would not be fully extended under British law for centuries.

Blandine van Couvering, aged twenty-two in 1663, took for granted her independent status before the law, though she herself could not feel free, oppressed as she was by her status as an orphan girl. In particular, she suffered nightmares of her sister’s death by drowning, and often waked with the agony of reaching out to six-year-old sister Sarah, only to have the seas sweep the child roughly away.

An able student, she lacked fluency in Latin but could converse readily in Dutch, English and French, plus the trade language that combined pidgin English, peddler’s French and Algonquin. As a child, working as a hawker of citrus, she lent her profits out to farmers at seven percent. She kept pigeons and refused to allow them to be sold for meat. A year later she had graduated to rabbits and was carrying on a brisk trade with New
Amsterdam meat-mongers. She explained the contradiction by saying, “Rabbits are much more stupid than pigeons.”

As she attained her majority she became avowedly parochial, preferring everything of the new world to anything of the old. For a time, her favorite reading was Anne Bradstreet’s
The Tenth Muse,
but she left this behind as her religious views shifted. She had seen war, massacre, pestilence, indigenes, lust, terror, loyalty, tobacco, hard cider, bobcats, intolerance, frugality, faithlessness.

She never wore a cap.

T
he director general hated the day. Every year, when the annual
kermis
rolled around, he felt his bowels tighten. During the harvest carnival, the populace threw themselves into drinking and brawling and fornication with unseemly abandon. An air of lawlessness descended upon the colony—his colony. Settlers poured into New Amsterdam from the outlying districts, so many that he could hardly recognize the faces on the streets. Because of knife fights, surgeons did their best business of the year.

Stuyvesant would have outlawed the whole festival if he could. Herded them all into church, given them a good tongue-thrashing sermon to mull over. The fair’s promiscuity troubled him deeply. Africans and river indians and good Company men, thrown in together without thought of proper social forms.

The whole task of the new world, the director general considered, was to bring its morals in line with the old. Already the stays had been loosened. Between men and women, intimacies occurred openly on a daily basis that would be unheard of in Patria. Kisses, fondlings, passionate exchanges between unmarrieds, random adulteries on the part of those who were linked to others before God.

He recalled interrogating his nephew Kees about his dealings with the Van Couvering girl.

“Hast thou kissed?”

Yes.

“Touched?”

Yes.

“Does she remain intact?”

“Uncle!”

Among all the peoples of Europe, behind only the French, the Dutch were notoriously randy. The women, if not promiscuous, were open to suggestion. In fact, they were the ones who sometimes offered up the
suggestion first. It did not necessarily matter that a woman possessed her virginity on her wedding day.

“It is a legitimate concern. Answer my question. Is she intact?”

Yes.

Or so the young suitor averred. From what Stuyvesant knew of his nephew, Kees would be no threat to any girl’s honor. What he did with the prostitutes down along the Strand was his own business. With a proper lady, Kees would pull up short before things went too far. But not every man in the settlement would be so circumspect.

He, Petrus Stuyvesant, acted as the dykemaster, holding back the flood. The carnival challenged all that he tried to do. These things went on in his jurisdiction, he knew. But at
kermis
, they burst out into the open. They were goading him, his colonists, challenging his authority.

“Do you know,” the director general said, “that this market carnival business was originally a religious affair?
Ker-mis
—it means ‘church mass.’ Now look at them!”

George Godbolt nodded in agreement, attempting to put the correct expression of distaste on his face. Godbolt was the sole petitioner in the director general’s audience chamber at the Stadt Huys that day. Stuyvesant granted him a private audience as a show of favor to one of his loyal English residents. He had an idea that he might need Godbolt’s support in the future.

Crowds flocked past the Stadt Huys along the wharf, gabbing and laughing and calling to one another, streaming toward the market square next to the fort. They reminded the director general of a gaggle of geese.

“Labor omnia vincit,”
murmured the director general.

“I’m afraid M’lord General’s learning is superior to mine,” Godbolt said.

“Virgil,” the director general said. He was Latin-proud in the extreme. “Work conquers all.”

“A great truth, M’lord General.”

“But no work gets done during
kermis
,” Stuyvesant said.

Godbolt startled as the director general turned abruptly from the window, pivoting on his wooden peg so fast that he instantly came around.
The apparatus, Godbolt noticed with fascination, boasted strengthening seams of inlaid silver running along its length of oak.

“You know we have these indian murders to deal with,” the director general said.

He did not divulge to Godbolt that there had been a new incident, with the orphan Ansel Imbrock’s fantastic testimony.

“I understand, of course,” Godbolt said. “I appreciate your seeing me during a time of trouble. This petition of mine is a very small matter.”

“Aet Visser believes he can dodge authority,” Stuyvesant growled.

“It’s not Aet Visser,” Godbolt said quickly. “Not him so much as this other one, the grain merchant, Drummond. I would be thankful if you could back him off.”

“I’ve had some report of him,” the director general lied. In truth, the man Drummond’s name had not entered the lists, as far as he knew. An unlicensed presence in the colony always caused Stuyvesant anxiety. He wondered at Godbolt, an Englishman, complaining about this newcomer, his countryman.

Someone shouted drunkenly amid the circus outside his window. “A profane time,” the director general said.

“Amen,” said Godbolt. He felt relieved that the director general seemed to look with favor on his petition.

“These murders, too, must be signs of the Lord’s displeasure. The De Laet child was quite hysterical about what she saw out there in the woods. Her father wouldn’t let me alone.”

Godbolt had served this function before, as soundboard for the director general’s musings. Truth was, he wished to present his petition and—he felt himself a hypocrite—slip off to
kermis
to join his family in the revels.

“We thoroughly searched the area where Hannie de Laet said she saw the monstrosity,” Godbolt told the director. “We could find nothing.”

Godbolt was part of a crew platooned by the Company to investigate the fire ring in the forest. The merchant Jean de Laet had been so hounded by his fear-maddened daughter that his wife, Clara, had forced the man to ask the director general for redress. Something must be done, De Laet had said, to set my darling daughter’s fright to rest.

The party, a dozen colonists strong, was organized by Kees Bayard,
who, as far as the others could see, did none of the searching himself, but stood around smoking and directing others.

What were they looking for? A charred patch in the wilderness. A scrap of leather hung from a tree. The fingers of a child.

They found nothing. A young girl’s flight of fancy, grumbled members of the search party. But Godbolt had a secret worry. Any inquiry into the loss of settlement children hove dangerously close to home.

Which is why he appeared before the director general on the first morning of
kermis
, asking that scrutiny of his mute adopted child cease immediately. On the part of Visser or the new English busybody aristocrat, Edward Drummond.

“The colony is inflamed with visions of the indian devil,” the director general said.

Rumors were already abroad. This morning, the director general had reports of a witika effigy paraded in the marketplace during the fair. The Africans were making noises about disappearances of their own.

The director general would not be able to keep a lid upon Ansel Imbrock’s new report of witika mischief for very long. He would have to organize another search party to get lost in the woods again, searching for a shadow of a mirage of a chimera.

He considered telling all to Godbolt, and thought the better of it. The man was a booby. He appeared eager to depart from the director general’s presence. Probably to get himself off to the festival drinking booths.

But Petrus Stuyvesant knew a thing or two about ruling a colony of men. He understood the manifold uses of fear. He thought of a way to spring Ansel Imbrock’s terrible story upon the populace, and curtail the excesses of
kermis
at the same time.

“I shall declare a day of prayer and repentance,” the director general said. “To bring our jurisdiction more in line with the Lord’s wishes.”

“Very wise, very necessary, M’lord General,” Godbolt said. “Shall you also look into this man Edward Drummond’s activities in the colony?”

“I have the sense,” Drummond said to Raeger, “that a single frigate with a brace of twenty-four-pounders could blow this whole business down.”

They had strolled through every precinct of New Amsterdam that
morning, pretending to be friends out for a constitutional, but in truth performing a careful inspection of the settlement’s defenses, its palisade walls, its sea roads, its anchorage in the East River. You could walk the whole colony in two or three hours.

And now, the stronghold. Fort Amsterdam. A four-square citadel on the southwest edge of the island. At one time, it might have furnished a suitable defense against attack. And it still would serve as a refuge from marauding river indians. But for any real bulwark against a modern cannonade, the place was useless.

Crumbling curtain walls, rotted battlements, collapsed roofs. Inside—the gates were left open to all comers—one corner of the bailey played host to a great pile of manure, which seeped out into the enclosure and fouled the unused, leaf-covered cistern. Neglect spoke from every corner of the fortress. The roof of the keep, such as it was, served merely as a perch for doves.

“I don’t think we’ll have any trouble,” Raeger said. He meant that England would have no difficulty with the planned move by the crown to take New Netherland.

“By ‘we’ you might as well say you and I,” Drummond said. “I think the two of us could take it on our own.”

Raeger laughed. “Deliver it up to King Charles with our compliments.”

He sucked on his clay pipe. Raeger had picked up some of the local habits during his time in the colony. Pipe-smoking, he informed Drummond, was useful. The wreath of smoke could be employed as camouflage, he said, to hide one’s expression during a conversation, say, or a negotiation.

“This settlement is waiting to be plucked,” Drummond said. “The Dutch are like sleepwalkers. They pile up the gold, but forget to lock the door of the counting house.”