The Orphanmaster (34 page)

“An orphan,” said Blandine, sotto to Drummond. He nodded.

Blandine had mouthed the word quietly, but feeble as she was, Kitty Hawes heard it anyway. “We never liked to see it that way, Jope an orphan,” she said. “He was as close to Matthew and me as any son could be. My girls loved him as a brother.”

Laura crept over to Drummond’s side, taking his hand in a filthy one of hers.

“Since he passed, and my husband passed, there is no one to till our acreage,” Kitty said. “Girls ain’t old enough. Strong enough.”

“I am too strong,” said Evie.

“Evie,” said her mother, “go put some of that samp on for supper.”

“I’m hungry,” Laura said.

“I know you are, honey,” said her mother. “Help Evie now. You can go outside and bring up a turnip from the root cellar.”

The two girls drifted off to their chores, Laura holding on to Drummond’s hand until the last moment.

“I didn’t want them to hear this,” said Kitty Hawes. “It concerns Jope.”

She sat up in bed and held the stained cloth to her mouth, controlling her coughing.

“There were things. Things around him.”

Blandine looked over at Evie by the fire.

“They brought the items back to us along with the body. But I burnt most of it. They weren’t fit to be near good people such as us.”

“What do you mean?” Drummond said.

“Things written on stones. Bones. And something I saved.” She stopped, reached down along the wall under the bed, and pulled out a totem figure.

“A sort of dolly,” she said. “But not the kind my girls would ever play with.”

Kitty Hawes handed the corn-husk doll over to Blandine.

“The heathens keep ’em in their lodges for protection, or maybe they worship them. Matthew told me it was to them the mother spirit. This one has that blackish paint on it. The work of Mahicans, maybe, or Quinnipiac. We see them sometimes, crossing our land.”

She fell back on the rags that served as her pillow. Evie came over from the hearth.

“She needs to rest,” said the girl. “Can I give you some corn mush?”

“We’re fine,” Blandine said. “We have food ourselves, and perhaps we can share some with you.”

Drummond and Blandine walked to the door. Coming in at the same
time was Laura, holding the small globe of a purple-topped turnip. “You won’t go,” she said stoutly.

The repast they all shared that night held little cheer and smaller savor. Blandine managed to find two pieces of hard candy secreted in her kit. She shared the treats with Laura and Evie. The girls received them as manna from heaven.

“Happy Christmas,” Blandine said.

“Happy Christmas,” the girls murmured in concert, sucking on the sugar.

Blandine masked her emotion by doing what she did whenever she didn’t know what to do. She cleaned. The cabin did not give up its dirt easily. Drummond read to the girls from the New Testament, the welcoming of Jesus by the children on Palm Sunday. The only book in the house.

At the end of the night, as Drummond prepared to go to bed in the barn, Laura refused to let him leave. She had been resting in his lap all evening.

Standing on her tiptoes, holding on to Drummond’s cloak, she put her tiny mouth to his ear. “Mister,” she said, “might you need a servant? I can cook, and clean, and I’m so good at taking care of Mama.”

Drummond kissed the top of her head and took himself out to the barn, which with four horses in it seemed to offer warmer possibilities than the dwelling.

The girls curled up together like puppies, lying amid the rag piles that seemed the family’s only asset, on the bricks in front of the dying embers of the fire.

Blandine slept in bed alongside the clammy, corpselike body of Kitty Hawes, turning her face away to avoid the woman’s cough. She woke in the night to find Kitty clinging to her. The corn-husk totem doll had somehow migrated from beneath the bed to lodge alongside Blandine’s ribs.

“W
e had visitors,” Ad Hendrickson said to his brother.

“Aye,” Ham said. “The Englisher.”

A long pause. The brothers were in the
groot kamer
of their northland plantation house. They had closed up the rest of their rambling manse, relegated the servants to the barn and retreated for the winter into the single large room.

“You see he don’t come here to visit us,” Ad said.

“No, he don’t dare.”

Pauses in conversation between Ad and Ham customarily grew to great dark gulfs, through which sea dragons swam. A report had come in from their indian friends (the Hendricksons still had a few, those they hadn’t exterminated) about trespassers on the eastern perimeter of their patent, along the contentious boundary with New England.

An English gentleman and a wench, on horseback.

Drummond.

Other reports had come to the Hendricksons throughout the fall into Christmas, troubling accounts of the witika business afflicting the capital to the south. Ad, especially, didn’t like it. He had dispatched brother Martyn to New Amsterdam to keep him out of trouble, not to send him into the midst of more.

Ad had no use for the city. He construed the Hendrickson patent on the North River, its plantation and woodlands, its livestock and tenants, as a self-contained realm. Petrus Stuyvesant might make noise about being governor of all of New Netherland, but his authority meant little here. The estate comprised the Hendrickson duchy, an independent principality, and it weren’t no republic, neither. Besides, the peg-leg had his hands full with all the wickedness of New Amsterdam.

Ad stirred the fire in the hearth. Ham liked to keep the
groot kamer
cold, freezing, in order to save on firewood. He assumed his usual seat in an upholstered, thronelike chair along the wall, as far from the chimney
as he could get. But Ad, at forty years old, felt the first touch of the bony fingers of age. A hardwood fire felt good on a dark winter day.

Ham rose and crossed to the chamber-stool lodged near the outside door. He unbelted himself, squatted and evacuated noisily with several sharp cracking blasts. The chimney draft drew the stench into the room, but Ad paid it no mind. His brother’s smell was as familiar as his own.

The Hendrickson clan started out in the new world four decades before as a single-room family, and here they were back to it again. From a miserable cabin (Ad kept it maintained, two leagues to the west, nearer to the river, as a memorial) they rose to the largest house in the North River highlands. Losing their mother and father at the start of the struggle and forging ahead in spite of it. Tearing their patent out of the unbreached wilderness by sheer force of will.

It was Ad and Ham that did it, really. Little Martyn was useless, a weepy child, always burbling about missing his mama.

“I knew Mister Drummond was a problem when he first came to us on his way to Beverwyck, jawing on about the Hawes boy killing,” Ham said.

“Now this business to the south,” Ad said.

“We should have shut him up in the smokehouse when he turned thirteen,” Ham said. He didn’t need to name Martyn.

Ad said, “Fed him through the smoke hole.”

“He gets antsy, we close the hole,” Ham said.

The brothers laughed together silently. Ad again stirred the fire.

“I sure get tired cleaning up after him,” Ham said. “I used to wipe his little infant ass, but I thought that would be over when he growed. Is he any good for anything besides spending our money and causing commotion?”

“Nay, for nothing but that,” Ad said.

A long pause. Flames flared in the hearth and showed Ad’s face. Across the room, Ham remained in shadow. The brothers both knew they loved their baby brother with a depth of emotion that veered toward mania, but neither of them would have confessed it upon pain of death.

“When are we thinking of going down there?” Ham said.

“This week,” Ad said.

He retrieved a cleaver from a pin on the chimney and crossed to the
pantry closet to cut slices of beef for their noon meal. Ham went outside to get the beer, kept frosty cold in a bank of snow.

“I want, I want, I want, I want, I want!”

It was the kind of January day when the frozen ground temporarily thawed, men unbuttoned their waistcoats and the round sky above brimmed with deep azure. Hausfraus bared their necks and shoulders to the hot sun as they vigorously swept their stoops, stopping occasionally to chat with their equally energetic neighbors. Oxen pulling carts full of wood or stone to building sites seemed to haul their loads lightly in the mildness of the day, flanks steaming beneath their yokes.

“I want…” The little girl stopped and put her finger in her mouth.

“Yes, Sabine, what is it you want?” Aet Visser had promised Anna, Sabine’s mother, to take the child with him for the morning.

“The play place!”

Anna, the woman Visser introduced to everyone as his servant, had work to do. As always. When she wasn’t cleaning Visser’s home, she had the job of stringing seawan for Frederick Philipse, the well-fed merchant who had barrels of shells and beads stashed in his cellar on Stone Street.

The Dutch, from a waterlogged country, did not much favor cellars. But such understories proved viable in New Amsterdam, and several of the finer residences possessed them. Anna would sweep and polish the Philipse storeroom, cleaning its smooth floor of paving stones and bright whitewashed walls until not a speck of dirt survived.

The casement windows, installed up high to let in light from the street, she washed to a transparent sparkle. You barely needed a candle to work in the space, it was so little like a basement.

Here were dozens of wooden casks of seawan. Anna’s job was to count out and then string the beads, purple with purple and white with white, on durable twine imported from Amsterdam. Her elder children helped her, separating the finer shells from the not so fine. But Sabine, at three, was only a nuisance.

Visser picked up the little girl at Philipse’s Stone Street mansion at nine o’clock that morning. The other children, Paulson and Abigel and Maria, plunged their hands again and again into an open seawan
barrel, dribbling the beads out of their fingers to hear the sound they made.

Visser pretended to let Sabine carry the leash of the little dog Maddie, and they walked out about the town.

“Pow,” Sabine said, using the nickname that had evolved when the children were forbidden to call Visser Papa. “Can we go? I want to!” She jumped up and down, holding his large hand in her own two and pulling him in the direction she wanted to head.

Pow and the Bean.

Visser patted the brandy flask in his waistcoat. He had worries about being seen drinking on the street, and also about being seen with Sabine. It was natural enough for an orphanmaster to accompany an orphan. But Visser was convinced that a person of only mild aptitude would be able to glean, at a glance, his paternal relationship with Sabine.

People would surely know a father and daughter when they saw them. Then a can of worms would be opened in Visser’s private life that could not easily be closed back up. What kind of orphanmaster would he be, with a family of four bastards and a common-law wife?

On Market Street, just around the corner from Philipse’s dwelling-house, lay a property that had once been used by a family of colonists who had no funds to build a real house. Instead, they dug a hole in the ground and lived under a roof of bark and thatch for the five years they tried to make a go of life in New Amsterdam.

Since the family returned, disconsolate, to Patria, ownership of the property had been under dispute. As a result, no dwelling-house had been erected there, even though Market was now a street of fine homes. The roof of the pit-house had long since decayed and fallen in. Between two handsome residences sat this eyesore, a round-shouldered depression in the stony ground.

The pit made for the perfect play place, as far as Sabine was concerned. But Pow was the only one to allow her there. She jumped, one step at a time, two feet on each step, down the flight of slate stairs that led to the pit’s hard-packed floor.

Once there, the Bean busily began to take handfuls of wet earth from the sides of her “house.” Roots, pebbles and the random grub filled
the muck, just the right consistency for making into pies. Visser sat at the bottom of the steps, only a slight headache marring the pleasure of watching the Bean assemble her feast.

He wondered at how a man of his advanced age—he was nearing fifty—came to be caring for a toddler. “By the usual method,” he muttered to himself.

“Koeckjes,”
the Bean said, presenting a mud confection to Maddie, then pushing a handful of patty-cake soil toward Visser’s mouth.

“Come here,” said Visser. “I’ll give you a cookie, all right.” He grabbed her and tickled her until her bonnet fell off. Then he gave her what they, in the Bean’s family, called “whisker love,” rubbing his rough beard across her soft cheeks.

“Pow!” she protested, laughing helplessly. “Pow, no!” She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on, Maddie yapping all the while. When the Bean escaped to scamper back across the dirt floor of the pit, Visser removed the brandy from his pocket and raised it to his lips.

“Ho, down there,” came a voice from the street.

Visser quickly replaced the stopper on the brandy bottle and laid the vessel on the ground beneath the folds of his cloak.

“Visser!” came the voice of Martyn Hendrickson from above. Sabine sat on the ground, still shaping her feast of mud, her skirts a filthy puff in a circle all around her.

“Hendrickson,” said Visser. “What brings you out?”

“Exceptional day, is it not?” said Martyn. “That sky is a robin’s egg.”

“Have you been spending much time away from town?” Visser said. He remembered Martyn’s menacing, hand-on-dagger conversation in the stable yard. They had not seen each other since.

“Lying low,” said Martyn. “Pretty thing she’s turning into.”

Visser winced. “The dog?”

“The child. Which one’s this?”

“Sabine,” said Visser. Thinking he was calling her, the Bean toddled over into Visser’s arms and turned her rosy face up to the man towering above.