The Orphanmaster (33 page)

Enoch, not yet out of his twenties, appeared much older than his years. A wen disfigured his forehead. By the light of the hearth fire, his face became animated only when he talked of the murder. Enoch always referred to his discovery as “the body,” never naming Jope Hawes.

“The family paid quitrent to the Dutch patroons,” Jonathan said. “They was freeholders, but the patroons claimed the land to be part of New Netherland, though no one has ever surveyed the border, so we don’t know.”

“Hawes was a fool to pay rent,” interjected another neighbor, Jack Nelson, newly arrived. The arrival of strangers in the settlement excited universal interest, and the Pynchon cabin became increasingly crowded.

“I was told there were indian signs around the scene,” Drummond said.

“Aye, that there was,” Enoch said. “The totems and fetishes they use in their heathen worship. That doll they all keep in their lodges.”

“A willow circle, with a cross laid over it?” Blandine asked.

Enoch nodded vigorously. “Yeah, they had that, a number of ’em, tossed all around the body. But the chillingest thing were the face left stuck to a tree, looking down at ye like a spirit out to steal your soul.”

“The boy’s face?” shouted Jonathan. “They took off the boy’s face?”

His wife shushed him and took away his flagon of cider.

“Not the boy’s, not the boy’s, you muzzy fool,” Enoch said, equally inebriated.

“A mask,” Blandine said quietly.

“That’s it,” Enoch cried, stabbing his finger at her.

But it was Gar, the ten-year-old, who provided the real gem of the evening. After she had shooed all the guests home, Betty was up in the sleeping loft with Blandine, putting Gar and his two sisters to bed. After Bible verses, Gar reached out and took Blandine’s hand.

“He knew the Hawes boy,” Betty said.

“I met him every year at the harvest carnival up in Taconic,” Gar said. “I missed him a lot at this year’s fair. He were a crack shot, a real crack shot. His daddy were sick, so Jope fed the family. He got two little sisters, just like me.”

Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “The Hendricksons hated him.”

“Why do you say that?” Blandine asked.

“Because I know it,” Gar said. “They was always saying he was poaching, though how you can poach on your own rented land, I don’t know.”

“He got in a disagreement with the patroons?”

“Disagreements, hell, they was fights,” the boy said.

“Gar,” his mother warned.

“They was!”

“Watch thy tongue,” Betty said.

“The fights were about poaching?” Blandine said.

Gar shook his head. “About them being behind on rent. Hendrickson said, ‘I’ll toss your family off this land,’ and Jope says, ‘I’ll kill ye if ye do.’ He wasn’t a boy to back down.”

“I don’t like to speak ill of anyone,” Betty said. “But the Hendricksons are unpleasant people, what I’ve seen of them. They are frantic about English encroachment on their patent. They have been here to Canaan, one or the other of the brothers, many times to complain of it.”

“My daddy says, if they had their way about it, the Hendricksons would declare war on Massachusetts and Connecticut both,” Gar said.

Blandine wished the family a peaceful rest. She and Edward slept in two great chairs pulled up in front of the hearth.

“Good night, Drummond,” Blandine said.

“Good night, Van Couvering,” he said in return, listening to her breathing until he fell asleep himself.

Blandine and Drummond reached the Hawes place as the five o’clock sun disappeared. Beneath towering cedars, the forest seemed to hold more light than the sky. Throughout the long, frigid day, the trail offered rocks and slippery leaves beneath powdery snow that at times reached the bellies of their mounts. The horses made their way, plunging through the drifts, snorting by the end, in a lather, desperately needing a break.

But stopping was not an option. Shadows already dropped, spiderlike, from the cedars, elms and oaks. There was no horizon, no landmark to guide them. They must reach their destination by full dark or freeze.

Drummond grew up riding. Blandine demonstrated a competence, but found the journey something of a trial. She sat on the horse not
damensattel
, but in the French manner.

“You ride astride,” Drummond said, then immediately felt foolish for stating the obvious. “I could rig you a pommel if you wish.”

Blandine shook her head. “I’ve often thought that if things made any kind of sense, men would be the ones to ride sidesaddle.”

He shut his mouth for a while after that, having to think about it, forcing himself to believe that she had said what he thought she’d said. When they got on a wide trail leading west, Blandine pulled her bay alongside the roan. She looked over at Drummond.

“You’re grinning,” she said.

“Am I?” Drummond said. He performed an expansive gesture with his arm. “This wilderness. It answers.”

All Betty Pynchon in Canaan had said was “Ride west along the stream. Diverge at the laurel thickets. Continue through some miles of cedars, then tall oaks until you reach the spring. The house, if you can call it that, will lie half a mile from the spring, and you can follow the brook directly to it.”

Drummond’s surveying compass showed them the westerly direction of their route. Rasped cheese and leaden bread had been their sustenance on the trip, along with a flask of apple brandy Enoch Woods bestowed upon them as they left Canaan.

Following any directions at all was difficult in the snow-blanketed landscape, especially with the blue shadows coming on.

Riding side by side, they spoke little. Finally, Blandine broke the silence. “So, Drummond,” she said, “are you ever going to tell me what brings you to the new world?”

“Not wheat?” Drummond said.

“No, not wheat. I thought we had established that. You act a role.”

“And you wonder who is the puppeteer.”

“Oh, I think I know,” Blandine said. “The second Charles.”

“Yes, the second Charles,” Drummond said. “It is no great mystery.”

Feeling a relief no longer to withhold secrets from her, Drummond told of his work for the king, that he had been sent to New Amsterdam by
the Earl of Clarendon, with the twofold purpose of tracking the regicides in Connecticut and gathering intelligence about the town’s defenses.

“You misled me, then,” Blandine said. “You came here to do the colony wrong.”

“Forgive me,” Drummond said earnestly. “You well know the Dutch cannot maintain their hold.”

Whenever someone presented Blandine with a sin, a tragedy, an occurrence they would see pumped up into a catastrophe, whenever a trade went bad or she was swindled somehow, she always brought herself back to reality by thinking on her sister, Sarah. “A child did not die,” she would say to herself, and whatever seemed horrible before suddenly appeared less so.

“Are you going to kill these three judges of the king? The regicides?”

“No,” Drummond said. “But someone will.”

“How can you stand that?”

“I’ve been a soldier,” he said. “It’s like what they say about being a priest. Once a soldier, always a soldier. You obey orders.”

“And if the orders are bad?”

“I’ve been careful not to let that happen. I think I’ve been on the right side.”

“Everyone always thinks they are on the right side,” Blandine said.

They fell back into silence again, Blandine struggling with whether she could accept Drummond for what he was, learn to forgive.

Bitterroot Spring, when they finally arrived at it, proved an outcropping of sharp, erect gray boulders, where the body of young Jope Hawes had been discovered six months before. Blandine and Drummond now stood near their ultimate destination.

Blandine knew that too much time had passed for them to find signs of the murder at the spring, but she wanted to see the place anyway. The two dismounted and paced the site, Blandine lifting her heavy skirts above the snowpack. Her high elk-skin boots kept her dry at least to her knees.

“A bad place to die,” Blandine said.

Drummond was about to respond, “There is no good place,” but held back as a hawk passed over them, flying pell-mell through the woods,
effortlessly dodging the overhanging branches and screaming its cry of
“Kree! Kree!”

“Let’s go, Drummond,” Blandine said. It was only getting darker. “There’s nothing for us here.”

They pulled up to the Hawes homestead as the woods went inky black. From their point of view at the edge of the clearing, the cabin seemed abandoned. A small, half-collapsing barn looked as though it were fleeing from the house, heading back into the forest.

No one around. No fresh tracks in the snow.

They led their horses into the barn’s musty darkness, finding a listless little pony inside so emaciated she appeared more like an oversized goat. Feed looked to be scarce in the rick, and strewn on the dirt floor were layers of filthy straw. A kicked-over empty bucket showed next to one half filled with water. When Drummond extracted a bundle of carrots from the canvas pack on the spare bay, he made sure to give a few to the pony.

Standing before the door of the cabin, which was as small as the smallest dwelling in New Amsterdam and built of rough-hewn logs, Blandine realized that there was indeed human life inside. The faintest yellow light shone through the cracks in the shutters that covered the little window to her left.

Drummond and Blandine looked at each other. Just as Blandine lifted her hand to knock on the door, it swung open. Backlit by the faint glow of the fireplace coals stood a child of perhaps five, with dark eyes and hair almost as fair as Blandine’s. A colorless blanket enveloped her body, and on her feet were creations that resembled not shoes nor stockings as much as bandages.

“We don’t know you,” said the girl.

“That’s right,” said Drummond. It was nearly as cold in the room as it was outside.

“No, we don’t know you,” the girl repeated.

“Might we come in, miss?” offered Blandine. “Just for a moment.”

The child stepped toward them into the doorway.

“Mama is sick,” she said.

Blandine and Drummond peered into the room. Two stools stood in front of the hearth, one cockeyed with a broken leg. The floor, like
the stalls of the barn, had yellow straw cast across its length. A small table stood by the left wall. What the interior displayed most were rags, mounded in piles on the table, cast off along the wall and cascading dangerously toward the hearth.

The cabin walls had begun their existence as white plaster, but had been discolored by smoke from the fireplace, which apparently had a dysfunctional flue. Even standing at the open door, Blandine suppressed an urge to cough.

“Perhaps we could help your mama,” said Drummond.

The girl stepped slowly backward, toward the smoldering hearth, and admitted the two visitors.

“Who is it?” said a form on a bed to the right of the fireplace. It was impossible to see her features in the darkness. There appeared to be a pile of rags atop her not unlike the ones scattered around the room. An older girl sat at the edge of the bed.

Blandine removed her gloves. The tips of her fingers felt frozen.

“Who is it?” said the mother again.

“They didn’t say,” said the little girl.

Drummond and Blandine stepped toward the woman. “I am Edward Drummond, and this is Blandine van Couvering.”

“I don’t know you, do I?” whispered the woman. They were close enough now to see her features, which were pinched and gray and seemingly soiled with the same soot that hung in the air of the house.

“We haven’t met,” said Blandine. “We are here to talk with you about your son.”

“Mama is tired,” interjected the girl at the edge of the bed. She, too, wore a ripped, dirty blanket and bandagelike wrappings on her feet.

“I know, dear,” said Blandine. “But we need to speak for just a few minutes.”

“It’s all right,” said the woman. “I am Kitty Hawes. It’s not my son you are speaking of, it is my nephew, Joseph. We called him Jope, because when she was little that’s all my youngest could pronounce.”

A tiny light flickered in the eyes of Kitty Hawes as she looked at her daughter. She paused. “A wicked world it is.”

“We’re sorry for your loss,” Blandine said, crossing the small, cluttered
space to stand next to the bed. “We don’t wish to bring up painful memories, but we need to know how it happened.”

“You don’t bring painful memories, I live with them every day,” Kitty Hawes said. “I remember Jope leaving out that door carrying our musket as though it happened just before the moment you came in.”

Drummond let his gaze wander around the room, inventorying the fireplace crane and trammel, the several cook pots laid on the bricks, all as barren as the kicked-over bucket in the barn. Apart from a long rope of onions hanging off the summer beam, nothing of sustenance appeared anywhere in the cabin.

“What are you called?” he asked the youngest girl in a soft voice.

She looked at him suspiciously. “Laura.”

“A pretty name. What is your sister called?”

“Evie.” Laura stared at him some more, then suddenly broke out in a smile and jumped several times in place. A heartbreaker.

Drummond turned back to Blandine’s conversation with Kitty Hawes.

“Can you tell us anything about when he was found?” Blandine asked. “We have heard some of it from the Hendricksons, and from Enoch Wood. But it all sounds so wild.”

“By the time the landsman brought me Jope’s body,” Kitty said, “it was difficult to even look at him. He had these… pieces taken out of his flesh. But I washed Jope and wrapped him and my husband and I were about to lay him in a grave by the barn. Then the Hendricksons sent over a pine coffin, bless their souls.”

“I was interested to hear you say he was your nephew,” Drummond said. “We were under the impression he was your child.”

“Oh, he is not my son,” Kitty said. “Jope is my husband’s brother’s boy. He was living with us because both of his parents had gone to their graves. Vomiting blood. Same as Matthew, my husband, not three months ago.”

She coughed and held a discolored square of linen to her mouth.