The Orphanmaster (38 page)

“What would you have me do, dominie?” she asked. But she already knew the answer.

“Confess your love for Jesus, child,” Megapolensis said. “Attest to me that you accept Christ as your Lord and Savior. Fall upon your knees before God.”

Yes, yes. They all wanted her to do that, ever since she had been orphaned. Before that, it had not been an issue. She went to church with her parents and believed the fables and fantasies that had been presented there. She was a good girl.

What happened to her? How had she lost her faith? It wasn’t that question that tormented her, but others. Why had her parents sailed without her to Patria on their doomed, fateful voyage in
Blue Hen
, taking her little sister but not her? Why had she not insisted on going along?

Instead, she begged them rather to let her stay behind. She was fifteen, and old enough to be on her own, she argued. Her secret reason was that she was in love with Kees Bayard and wished to tease out his love for her. The voyage to Patria—for trade, and to have Sarah christened at her parents’ home church in Amsterdam, with their relatives around them for the ceremony—did not seem as vital to Blandine as a backward glance from a handsome boy.

So her parents died, and Sarah drowned alongside them. Innocent Sarah. It was impossible for Blandine to measure her love for her sister.

But love proved a weak thing. It failed to save Sarah. Blandine misjudged the cruelty of the world, a random, coldhearted realm that could snuff the life of such a one in the black seas off Goodwin Sands. She would give anything, a thousand glances from a thousand boys, she would stay forever chaste, simply to have her little sister back in her arms again.

No, no more God for her, thank you. The New Amsterdam dominie—a different one, not Megapolensis—had spoken with her at the time of her sister’s death, consoling Blandine in her grief, telling her the ways of God were not to be understood by mere humans. In her thoughts Blandine responded that on the contrary, clearly it was God who did not understand human ways. Why give her the capacity for love and then rip out her heart?

Back then she rooted through the scripture, trying to find solace, an explanation, anything, a shred of text that would give her a reason for Sarah’s fate. She found little that was of any use. Job helped.
While thine eyes are upon me, I shall be gone
. But nothing really answered.

“God needed her,” the old dominie told Blandine.

“I need her!” her heart cried out.

She did not decline the mystery of existence, the great day that dawns, the light that fills the world. But that mystery no longer wore a human face, a kindly grandfather who dwelt in the sky. It was, rather, a terrible severalty, an all-ness, equally joyous and crushing.

“You’ve been absent from our church,” Megapolensis said now. “Perhaps for this reason the people are suspicious of you, and label you a witch.”

“I did not keep those things that they said were in my dwelling-house,” Blandine said. “The garment and the witika totems. Whoever told you they were there lied, or someone put them there to slur me.”

Blandine had two visitors in the church that morning. A stammering, fearful Miep, who told her what she had learned from the Godbolt children and then said she could never see Blandine again, rushing out of the meeting-hall in great haste. And Aet Visser, acting very nervous and strange.

“The clothing,” he said. “The clothing they found in your rooms. I know whence it came.”

Blandine had trouble comprehending what he was saying. “You mean, you recognized it. It came from your orphans, the ones who have disappeared.”

She understood that much already. She learned it when they branded her a witch and an orphan-killer.

But how had Visser seen it? Was he present during the search of her rooms? The orphanmaster appeared entirely beside himself. He fussed, restless, picking at the skin of his hands and face. He rose from the church pew and sat back down. It was more than just worry about Blandine’s fate. She felt sure that something else was bothering Visser, some tremendous load bending him double.

“Oh, God, Blandine,” he kept repeating, over and over, near tears. “Oh, my dear Lord.”

The man, Blandine realized, was terrified.

“Is there something you have to tell me, Aet?” she asked.

But there wasn’t. Visser hustled from the church that morning, and Blandine was alone in the wood-vaulted meeting-hall until noon, when the dominie came to speak with her.

“One word from you,” Megapolensis repeated now, “and I will throw all my authority behind an effort to stanch these ugly accusations and rehabilitate you in the eyes of the church.”

Blandine nodded tiredly. Somewhere in the fort, not twenty rods from where she sat with Megapolensis, Drummond and Antony were being kept in a small cell. She knew what was coming, and she prayed—was
prayed
the right word?—that she had the courage to face it.

“Child?” Megapolensis said gently. “Do you accept Lord Jesus Christ as the light of the world and the only path to salvation, without whom wait the everlasting flames of damnation?”

Blandine remained stubbornly silent. Sarah’s round-cheeked little face floated in her mind.

“I beg of you, save yourself from hell,” the dominie said. “Glory is yours for a word.”

Blandine said, “I wonder if you could tell me, dominie, who organized the fright show in the meeting-hall on Christmas Eve?”

Megapolensis appeared disconcerted. “You ask that?” he said. “At this, the most crucial moment of your young life?”

He seized Blandine’s hand in his and looked directly into her eyes. “If I cannot entice you with an eternity in heaven, perhaps I can make you realize what this mortal life holds for you. Do you know what they do to witches, child?”

“What you will do, you mean,” Blandine said.

“They will strip your clothes and march you naked through the streets,” Megapolensis said. His eyes had a faraway look, as if he imagined the scene.

“The mob will fling mud and filth at you. You will be shorn of that lovely silken hair of which you are so vainly proud. They’ll bind you to the stake beside the gibbet near the fort. Then the
schout
reads out your charges and excommunication.”

“Who ignites the flame, dominie?” Blandine asked.

“You will hear the damning sentence,” Megapolensis continued, brushing her question aside. “Death at the stake.”

But she insisted. “Who strikes the first spark?”

“Child!”

“Who does it, dominie? Are you afraid to say?”

“I do!” Megapolensis shouted. Then, more quietly, “I light the fire.”

A silence. Blandine closed her eyes. A weariness took her, so deep that it was like sleep.

She heard the voice of the dominie. “I will start the flames at the outer edge of the pyre, so that the heat will come on you bit by bit, until it invades your whole body.”

Blandine heard Megapolensis get up and stride in the aisle of the church. “You will weep and howl and scream your repentance then, as your flesh burns, but it will be too late. Too late!”

Megapolensis let his voice go low. “And let me tell you this, Blandine”—he returned to her, and bent his face to hers once again, until she felt his breath—“those fires in which you will perish are but a feverish instant when compared to the eternal pits of hell.”

Blandine opened her eyes and turned to the dominie.

“Credere nequeo,”
she said. I cannot believe.

Megapolensis gazed at her for a long time. He felt sorrow, because he knew he had failed. He understood Blandine well enough not to bother asking if she were sure, if she had not better reconsider.

He stepped back from her. “Then I cannot help you,” he said. “The Lord have mercy on your soul.”

Dominie Megapolensis walked from the pew where they sat together to the back of the church. He threw wide the doors of the sanctuary and, with a sweeping gesture of his arm, cast Blandine out.

Ross Raeger heard the tumult in the streets and felt the more disgust for it. Deeper disgust, anyway, than that which was the habitual cast of his mind. There had been a lot of mob action this month, frightened chickens running in circles, baa-baaing sheep following one another so closely their noses became manured.

The witika was bad for business.

Raeger felt unsure of himself. He was an agent of the crown, yes, but at the same time he was what the Dutch called a
weert
, an innkeeper. Lately he detected the mundane concerns of the innkeeper taking him over. Riot might be good for an English agent, but it was bad for a
weert
.

He retrieved his pistols and went to the front door of the Lion. Another day, another mob.

This one, though, was different, and what Raeger saw alarmed him. Gaping, red-faced men shoved Blandine van Couvering down Pearl Street before them. The women in the crowd contented themselves with jeering, but the men wore more excited expressions on their faces. One of them, Aalbert Gravenraet, tore at the lace of Blandine’s open-necked gown, ripping it from her shoulders.

She was trying to get to her home, Raeger realized. Why had she left the sanctuary? The frenzy over witchery, he was convinced, would soon die down. No one could take seriously this maiden being in league with the Devil, no matter what sort of witika nonsense they discovered in her dwelling-house.

But the street mob seemed to take Witch Blandina very seriously. The rabble screamed the word at her repeatedly. The girl looked determined but frightened, pushing on for the haven of her own rooms.

She wasn’t going to make it. A man—Raeger recognized him as a cobbler fellow who liked to go on drunken tears—pushed Blandine backward and tripped her at the same time. She fell.

Raeger strode into the frenzy of mob members and fired one of his pistols over their heads. Nothing. No reaction. He couldn’t believe it. None of them seemed to respect his firearm. They were too far gone. The cobbler pulled Blandine to her feet and rubbed street muck into her face.

Raeger fired again and managed to get to Blandine. He slammed the cobbler with the butt of one of his pistols, and the man staggered away, bleeding.

Down the street, a drumbeat. The militia approached, with De Klavier at the fore.

Raeger used the distraction to usher Blandine quickly to the Red Lion. He pushed her inside and slammed shut the heavy oak door.

“Judas Priest, woman!” he shouted. “They aim to murther ye!”

“Well, I shall not die with a dirty face,” Blandine said calmly. She crossed to the tin basin on the taproom counter and splashed water on herself.

The men in the taproom, drinkers and drunks, Dutch citizens all, stared at the apparition who appeared before them. They knew Blandine by sight as a frequenter of the Lion. But here was another woman altogether. One not so demure. The witika witch, wild-haired and dirtied, her purple, lace-trimmed gown torn open so that her breasts half spilled out.

“Whoever harms this woman answers to me!” Raeger shouted, hurriedly reloading his pair.

The men in the taproom looked baffled. Where was their mild-mannered jokester
weert
?

A furious pounding at the street door of the Lion.

“Anyone don’t want to get caught in an insurrection,” Raeger said, “leave by the Mane.” He jerked his thumb toward the casino chamber at the back of the taproom. No one moved.

More pounding. “What d’ye want!” Raeger shouted.

“It’s the
schout
,” De Klavier called. “Open this door.”

“In whose name?” Raeger said.

“In the name of the director general,” De Klavier said. “Open up, Mister Raeger, or it will go badly for you!”

“Have ye a warrant of search?” Raeger said. “I am by my rights to ask ye for a warrant.”

“Open this door!” De Klavier roared.

Raeger turned to his clientele, two dozen males, rough and ready but uncertain what their next move would be. Raeger knew they would not fight to protect a witch. But they would battle to the death to push back against the dictatorial, overweening ways of Petrus Stuyvesant.

“What do ye say, men?” Raeger said. “
Mijn Heer
General would like to stick his foot up our asses. How do we answer him?”

“Which one?” the men chorused, surging toward the door just as the
schout
’s ax came through it, crashing it half down.

Many of Raeger’s customers brandished pistols of their own. Others pulled down blades from the Red Lion’s fabled rafters, to be put to use at last.

The Red Lion partisans were outnumbered, but De Klavier and his militiamen were attempting to squeeze through the narrow gap of the doorway. A militiaman stuck his musket through the splintered oak of the door, fired it, was fired back upon, and the taproom filled with billowing smoke.

“Give me a pistol,” Blandine said, showing up at Raeger’s side.

“Get yourself upstairs,” Raeger said, pulling up his gun to keep it away from her.

De Klavier’s men smashed the street windows, looking for other ways to gain entry. The Lions tossed the taproom benches across the windowsills to blockade them.

“Go!” shouted Raeger, pushing Blandine toward the stairs to the tavern’s second and third floors. “They see you in here, I canna hold them back!”

Blandine still hesitated. “Do it, woman!” Raeger pleaded. It was impossible even to see the stairs with all the powder smoke. At the window, hand-to-hand combat.

She went.

Raeger pulled down the big-bladed silver partizan ax from its prized place in the rafters. As Blandine mounted the stairs, he furiously chopped at the newel post with the ax. She gained the landing on the second floor, and the stairway began to sway under Raeger’s furious assault.

A few more full-swing chops with the partizan, and the whole flight of stairs tipped to the side, falling toward the center of the taproom with a splintering, ripping sound.

“Look to yourselves!” Raeger yelled, and a few of the Lions had to jump away as the stairway crashed down.

Blandine stood at the top of a flight of stairs that now dropped off into the smoke-filled air. Then the steps from the second to the third floor started to waver and swing, teetering wildly.