The Orphanmaster (35 page)

“Hello, Sabine,” said Martyn. “Hello, little girl.”

Sabine smiled and put her mud-caked finger to her mouth. Visser batted it gently away.

“I have cookies!” the Bean said. She pronounced it, with her usual lisp, as “tookies.”

“I wish I had a little baker like you,” Hendrickson said, smiling.

To distract the man from his interest in the child, Visser fished out the bottle. “Can I tempt you with a pull of cognac?”

“For now, no. I am off for parts north.
Hunter
awaits me at the pier.” The Hendrickson family’s river sloop.

“Another day, then,” Visser said.

“You have your hands full, Visser, do you not?” Hendrickson said. “All the poor orphan boys and girls, and just one of you.”

“God’s work,” said Visser.

“Ah, God,” Hendrickson said. “He’s gone and died and made us all into his orphans, hasn’t he?”

Visser blinked up at the man.

“Difficult to keep them all alive and prospering, I guess,” said Hendrickson, allowing his vague smile to remain in place.

Visser could not respond to that. He pulled the Bean close.

“I did have another shipment,” Visser said.

“Ah, yes,
Eenhoorn
, the
Unicorn
,” Martyn said. “I wondered that you didn’t come to me when it docked. I thought maybe you were angry with me.”

“Oh, no,” Visser said.

“Good specimens?”

“One or two you might be interested in,” Visser said.

“Keep us in mind for them, will you? My brothers always need willing hands for the estate, and I myself—well, you know my needs.”

“I will wait on your return,” Visser said to Martyn. “When will we have that good fortune?”

“Oh, you’ll know it when you see me,” said Hendrickson.

Per usual
, thought Visser. But Hendrickson’s departure gave him an idea.

Martyn started to go. He stopped and turned briefly back around.

“She really is adorable,” he said, smiling down at the Bean. “Grow her some, and then bring her to me.”

Stone Street remained the prime address for the burghers of New Amsterdam, but the Hendrickson place gave Market Street a particular
cachet all its own. The colony’s joiners, turners and housewrights had been kept busy on it. Riven shingles covered most of the upper story, but a new addition featured the settlement’s first slate roof, as well as decorative cornices and a series of window-sash embrasures that were at least four feet broad.

The wonder of it was that the dwelling-house stood empty much of the time. Ad and Ham seldom came to town, and Martyn, well, Martyn was a flibbertigibbet, a cuckoo flitting from nest to nest, gone even when he was present. He would as well pass out over dice in the Mane as sleep in his own bed.

And the three brothers were all there was, the father crushed by a falling tree on the estate up north, and soon after the mother dead when Martyn was three. The boy entered a rheumatoid fever delirium and woke up a week later to find his dear mama gone and buried. The tragedy marked him. His brothers always said Martyn became a different child after that, weepy, angry, unpredictable.

For years, he ran from his sorrow. Even as a child, he slept away often. Ad and Ham never knew where he was or what he was up to. When Martyn turned twenty, they sent him on a tour of Europe. He returned with new costumery and revised manners, but never said a word about his experiences to his brothers. To them, Martyn remained remote, unpindownable.

So the Hendrickson town house stood grand and lonely, its hearth fires attended by servants, its floors swept and its linens changed, usually for no one.

Visser liked to visit. He would ascertain that the hosts would not be present, then rap upon the garden door to gain entry. Several of his orphan charges found service work at the house over the years, and he conducted his forays under the pretense of checking up on them.

It did not hurt that the empty house kept an excellent larder. All servants and no masters lent the premises an air of holiday, and his orphans fed and beveraged Visser well. He liked being served. He habitually avoided any brush with the cookstove himself. Anna cooked for him, or he took his meals at the Red Lion.

This day he saw Hendrickson ride away from the pit toward the
canal and the river docks. He hustled the Bean and Maddie back to the care of Anna and left quickly, trailing apologies, fare-thee-wells and half-explanations. Then he returned to Market Street, passed by the pit and continued down the street to the hulking wooden monster that was the Hendrickson dwelling-house.

“Halloo!” he cried, coming into the little vestibule that gave onto the town house’s great room.

Myrthe and Nicole, a matched pair of German cousins, fifteen years of age, their mothers, sisters, both dead in an indian massacre, interrupted their prattle to greet him.

“Sire,” both girls exclaimed at once. Visser habitually forgot their last name. Mueller, that was it.

He strode into the center of the room to admire its spaciousness. Oh, the habits of the rich! He liked how the gold wood of the pine floorboards gleamed beneath several coats of naval varnish. He liked how the mantel was not of rude fieldstone but boxed in by a green-painted wooden frame braced with stout pillars. He liked the cushioned chairs, made easy by stuffing the upholstery with overgenerous amounts of horsehair.

Everything spick and span. His charges evidently did their jobs well. They now brought him coffee. Coffee!

Someone was cracking the whip, Visser had no idea whom. Not Martyn. The man could not run a household if his life depended upon it. He needed taking care of, and could take care of nothing himself.

“
Mit schlag
, sire?” Myrthe said to him, offering the cream she had just whipped that morning.

“Certainly,” Visser cried, extending his cup. “Do they treat you well here?”

“Oh, yes, sire,” Myrthe said, dishing up a fat, oily dollop of
schlag
into the orphanmaster’s coffee and then curtsying. “Very well.”

“I’m glad of it. No one getting too familiar with ye?”

Myrthe blushed. “No, never, sire.”

Servant rape was a problem in the colony. Visser had encountered cases before, and wouldn’t countenance the practice, sending for the
schout
whenever circumstances warranted. Martyn, drunken, decadent Martyn, might be a prime suspect for it, if his brandy habit would ever allow him concupiscence.

“The new best chamber is finished,” Nicole said. “Would you like to see it?”

“After my coffee,” Visser said. “Go ahead about your duties, child. I would not draw you away from them. I will show myself the new room on my own. It is just through there?”

“Yes, sire,” Nicole said. The two cousins drew self-consciously away from Visser to the opposite end of the room, where they made elaborate motions of polishing plate.

Invigorated by the coffee and settled by a stomach full of pastry delicacies, Visser strolled through the echoing chambers of the Hendrickson house, examining the cloth, thumping the plasterwork. He entered the new room, part of yet another addition.

A new chimney, a new hearth! Manganese tiles from Delft framed the fireplace, each maroon-and-white square depicting a scene of
wilden
in the new world. Visser bent his head to examine the images. Someone’s idea of the American indigenes, to be sure, but nothing close to reality. Nobody ever got the natives right. From Visser’s experience, they were not to be got. Except for his Anna.

“Put your hand on the wall just there and push,” Nicole said. She had entered the room stealthily behind him and startled Visser.

“What?”

“That panel, there,” the girl said. “Push it.”

Visser did so, and the wall yielded with a click and then swung outward.

“A secret chamber,” Nicole said. “The housewright said we are to go inside there in case of indian attack.”

“It is the only room we don’t clean,” Myrthe said, coming in behind Nicole, “because we dasn’t enter.”

“I’ll go in,” Visser said.

“Oh, no, sir,” Myrthe said. “No one is allowed.”

“Go to your silver cleaning,” Visser said, employing his voice of command. The two girls hesitated, then left.

He opened the door wide and stepped inside the secret room.

A sharp metallic smell hit his senses. The place was small, five feet by ten, extending back along the side of the chimney stack. The
only light came from a narrow horizontal window at the top of the far wall.

Wishing for the full effect, Visser swung shut the door panel, closing himself in. Crocks of water lined one side. A wooden
kas
, or wardrobe cabinet, stood crammed at the far end, its double doors fastened with a bent and varnished stick.

Visser never knew what made him slip the stick aside and open the doors of the cabinet. He was naturally curious, especially in other people’s houses, where he spent a good deal of his time. But this went beyond idle curiosity. Some sense of the place gave him a feeling of urgency.

Inside the wardrobe were linens, lengths of cloth. But stuffed into a bottom back corner was a disheveled heap of garments for children, shirts and pants and jackets. They were wrinkled and stained, and gave off the dead smell Visser encountered when he first gained access to the secret chamber.

He reached out to touch the fabric of one coat, and found it stiff with dried blood. Black confetti flecks came off on his hand.

That was not the horror of it, though. The horror of it was Visser recognized many of the clothes.

M
iep Fredericz and young Ann Godbolt were not the best of friends. Though they sat in the same classroom, two years separated them. But when Miep hooked her arm through Ann’s outside the schoolhouse and whispered in her ear, Ann began to consider her quite nice.

“I think the schoolmaster is sweet on you,” said Miep. “After lunch I saw him staring.”

Adolphus Roeletsen, a gangly Flemish import of twenty-six who had been known to go head to head with the director general on Latin phraseology, possessed two qualities that were a boon to misbehaving students: bad eyesight and a distracted sensibility. He barely saw his students when they sat before him, let alone favor one of the girls in particular.

But Ann Godbolt, rather full of herself at the advanced age of thirteen, believed every word Miep said. In fact, she wished to hear more on the same theme.

So Ann invited Miep to visit her home when the school day ended. The Godbolt family lived on the corner of Beaver Street and the Broad Way, and their crisp clapboard town house abutted a small shop whose door stayed open most of the day, the better to entice potential shoppers with the fragrance of the smoked pork within.

A favorite game of the two Godbolt girls, Ann and Mary, was to peek out the glossy black shutters of the upstairs windows and, when passersby ignored their family shop, to drip soapy water onto their heads.

“Miep!” Mary whispered, holding the water jar. “Come!”

Miep Fredericz looked around the corner parlor on the second floor while the girls engaged in their pranks. There was a baby’s cradle on rockers, and a bed with dark blue curtains all around it.

She felt like a spy, and relished the feeling. Her assignment from Miss Blandina—to find all she could of what the Godbolt children knew about their foster brother, William Turner—at first troubled her, then tantalized her.

Blandine’s standing in the community had plummeted since Miep had worked for her in the fall. “You are to have no more business with her,” Carsten Fredericz van Jeveren told Miep just after Christmas.

“Why, Father?” Miep asked.

“Do what I tell you, d’ye hear?” Carsten barked, saying no more.

But the school-yard children knew. Blandine van Couvering, they gossiped to one another, stood accused of witika witchcraft. The particulars were vague, but the children embroidered their own fanciful details. Blandine ate orphans. She liked their stewed eyeballs, Paula Kertemann suggested, most of all.

Miep remained aloof. Loyalty was her lodestar. She alone knew Miss Blandina. She alone would help her, save her from the gossip and scandal, pull her out of the burning flames at the stake. If her mentor found it necessary to know more about the Godbolt ward, William Turner, Miep would oblige.

It was time to put Miss Blandina’s plan into effect. Miep pulled from her pocket a netted bag Blandine had given her, stuffed with honey balls, peppermint sticks and chewy golden toffee.

“Ann, Mary,” Miep called. “Would you like a candy?”

Ann and Mary left off their soap-water game as if jerked by a chain. They were usually forbidden anything sugary.

Miep’s bag proved bottomless. After Ann and Mary crammed their cheeks full, Georgie and Charles tumbled into the room. The boys didn’t have to demand their share. Miep gave it freely.

The Godbolt children sat sucking and munching, their backs along the wall, while Miep stayed in the center of the room, like the conductor of an orchestra.

“Where’s the other kid?” Miep said. She found herself smiling foolishly in her nervousness, but the thought of Miss Blandina made her soldier on. “Is he still at school?”

“Don’t know,” said Georgie. At six, he was the youngest. His teeth had gotten stuck in a toffee bit and he drooled a fat teardrop of brown-colored spittle as he tried to work the piece loose.

“William,” said Mary, her mouth full, too. “Don’t even think about him. He wouldn’t want any candy anyway.”

“Ask William, ‘Do you want some candy?’” said Ann. “You know what he’d say? Nothing.”

The Godbolt children all laughed.

“He don’t say nothing!” Georgie crowed. Miep stepped forward and stuck a peppermint stick directly into his open mouth.

“He’s a mute,” said Mary.

“He’s dumb,” said Ann.

“You know, I had a funny feeling when I saw him this year at school,” Miep said. “He looked different to me.”

The Godbolt children turned sullen, silent. They glanced sideways at one another. All their licking, sucking, chewing and chomping slowed.

“William is a very nice boy,” said Ann. “As nice as can be.”