The Orphanmaster (39 page)

“Head upstairs!” Raeger shouted to her. “All the way!”

His men were busy hauling the shattered flight of stairs across the taproom to block the front entrance. Blandine disappeared around a bend in the stairwell, heading for the third floor, just as the second set of steps crashed downward, practically from under her feet.

“Arrgh!” snarled Raeger. It turned out he was not an agent of the crown after all, nor a mild-mannered innkeeper. He was a pirate.

When the musket ball caught Raeger in the side of the head, a wound that threw him wildly backward, he went down dreaming of mutiny.

The Red Lion’s third story stood almost as high as the chestnut tree towering in the yard behind, so high no one could possibly reach Blandine.

Raeger, his head wrapped in a theatrical bandage, his eyes blazing with the headache the gunshot wound had given him, had a rope threaded up to Blandine and tied a bucket to it. He sent her beer and vittles, as well as bulletins about the situation down below.

Impasse
[Raeger wrote].
Peg-leg’s troops not getting in, Lions not getting out. We are besieged. Enough provisions to last weeks. Many convinced the witch flew to the rooftop on her own.

Blandine drank the beer, ate the cold chunks of sturgeon and the bread slathered with honey butter and sent back a note of her own.

Drummond? Antony?

Raeger’s reply:
Not hung yet.

Near dark-fall, the wind rose and a freezing sleet began to spatter from the skies. Outside the window, the big chestnut tree’s branches thrashed in the black rain.

The roof gables dropped steeply on both sides of her tiny garret room. A bed, a chamber pot, a single chair. Blandine could see out back, over the yards to the fort, but not toward her own dwelling-house across Pearl Street. Crowds huddled in the lee of the fort, gesturing up toward her aerie.

She was safe, she was the lady in the tower. No one could get to her. She didn’t know what to do, so she cleaned the room. The evening waned, darkness closed on the settlement. The storm barreled in from the west.

Stretched out on the woven-rope bed, wrapped in her blue woolen shawl (retrieved somehow from her rooms, and sent up via the bucket), Blandine made fierce plans in the dark. Suddenly she saw a dim shape float in the unglazed window, passing toward her through the rain-lashed shutters. She sat up, afraid.

No one could get to her.

But Kitane did.

The Lenape slipped through the window to crouch on the floor in front of Blandine. She had last seen him weeks ago, snowshoeing off into the woods from the sleigh on the Fresh River.

“Miss Blandina,” he said, his body wet and gleaming. “Anything new with you?”

Blandine laughed with delight. “You go away from me and, as you see, I get myself in trouble.”

“We will get you out,” Kitane said. He laid out on the floor a loaf of sweet cornbread, a wedge of black wax cheese and a knife. The blade he had taken from Canarsie friends in Hell Gate. The food he had purchased from his new favorite New Amsterdam bakery that afternoon.

“I bring you greetings from Drummond and the big one,” Kitane said.

“Drummond? How? They are in prison, no?”

“Yes,” said Kitane, shrugging. “The two of them are held in the fort. But it is no big thing to get in and out of the swannekin’s castle.”

The unimprisonable Kitane had indeed crept noiselessly into the keep in the early morning hours. He held a hurried conference with Drummond, who, as far as the Lenape trapper could tell, seemed unconcerned at the prospect of being executed. The Englisher asked most urgently about Blandine.

During daylight, Kitane lay low on the quiet North River shore. He ventured out once, to the bakery. The possibility of becoming mesmerized with witika fever lessened, Kitane figured, the shorter time he spent on the streets, as did the likelihood of fingers pointing, accusations leveled, nooses tied. Still, there was always the whisper of fear that he must keep guard against, trailing him, circling his mind.

Blandine knew that Kitane was better, stronger, healthier. She could tell that from his clear eyes and the way he sat, erect and calm. Almost his old self.

“And the task I gave you, how did that go?”

“The thought of you greased my footsteps through my journey.” Kitane smiled ruefully. “There were a few I could have eaten along the way. Some who deserved such a fate. Swannekins and my own people both.”

Kitane was the avenger, still, but his revenge did not require the
smashing of lives. When he began to talk, the cadences of his voice lulled Blandine back to the snowy reaches of the north.

“You know that I visited my brothers the Esopus when I left you,” said Kitane. “After the war there are only a few of the tribe left, fewer than thirty, and most of these are women and children. The great war between the swannekins and the Sopus warriors ended the clan and sent refugees downriver to Pavonia. I spoke to some of the wives.”

“You followed them?”

“Down the Mohegantuck, yes.” The North River.

“Did they know of the boy William Turner?” Blandine said.

“During the war, they said, three families from farms along Esopus Creek were taken prisoner,” said Kitane. “Two of them had whole families of children, five or six. But one couple had a single son.”

“What happens to prisoners of war?” asked Blandine, remembering her experience on the banks of the river with Mally and Lace.

“Usually they are roasted. But the Esopus kept these people in their own lodges and made sure they were healthy, because they wanted to trade them back to the Dutch.”

“And my people wanted the captives back,” Blandine said. Sitting on the bed, she took her hair down. It fell almost to her waist, giving off gleams of gold even though the night was pitch dark with the storm.

Kitane had a prickly feeling in his mouth, almost like nausea, but equally resembling appetite. He pushed it back and took up his story. “The Dutch did not move fast enough to ransom the hostages. The pox came again through the village, and it moved faster.”

“I remember refugees from the plagues and wars in the north,” Blandine said. “They streamed through the gates of the city. It was the first contagion of summer, but it lasted.”

“Many didn’t make it to the town,” Kitane said. “They died where they walked.”

“War and pestilence,” Blandine said. “‘Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’” There was nothing like a nonbeliever to quote the Bible. When Blandine was little, she enjoyed the drama of the language and the strangeness of the stories. But now the Word was just words.

“The clan tried to isolate the ailing ones, Esopus and swannekins, in lodges away from the cook-fire,” Kitane said. “But their loved ones insisted on tending them, and then they would sicken themselves.”

Blandine had known some of the Esopus people, close allies of the Lenape who came to trade in Beverwyck.

Kitane gazed out her window. A peal of thunder, then a streak of silver cut across the night sky. This swannekin sky-castle struck him as rickety, ready to fall. Voices from the taproom down below. More flashes, more thunder.

Lightning
, Blandine thought, so odd in winter. Comets, plagues, portents. The dominie was going to have a lot to chew on in his sermons. That thought naturally led her to the man called Lightning, with his dead eyes and creased scalp. Was he out there hunting for her along with the rest of the colonists?

“When the pox scourge ended, and the war was over,” Kitane said, “only one of the swannekin hostages was left.”

“A boy,” breathed Blandine.

“He was young and small, but healthy. The clan expected that he would stay on with them.”

“As sometimes happens,” Blandine said.

“As sometimes happens,” Kitane agreed.

“This was the beginning of autumn,” said Blandine.

“Then a strange thing occurred,” Kitane said. “A man and a woman came on horseback to the Esopus. They led a third horse, a sagging, elderly nag. To this horse they had strapped two pony kegs and a string of hams and sausages.”

“Traders,” Blandine said.

“The sausage man and woman went into the lodge of Memewu, the clan’s last surviving leader. They stayed only a short time. The women of the lodge prepared meals, and brought in to them a roast fish and some ash corn.”

Another crash of thunder. “What do you think happened?” Kitane said, looking at Blandine.

“The man and woman rode away from the camp with the boy.”

“And the horse, the hams and the kegs stayed behind,” Kitane said. “I guess Memewu judged the boy not worth much.”

“If the animal was so broken down, why would anyone want it?”

“Meat.”

“And the barrels held rum?”

“One did,” Kitane said. “The other, seawan, blue glass, from Holland. Still good for trade.”

“When did this exchange happen?”

“The month of the goose moon,” Kitane said.

October. The pieces fit with what Miep told her in the church that morning. William Turner gone, disappeared. The new boy, the Esopus plague survivor, claimed by the Godbolts, the pork dealers.

The question remained, what happened to the real William Turner?

Kitane stood by the window, next to the curtain of freezing rain falling outside. In a moment he would part that curtain and climb into the dark. Blandine had the same feeling again, a certainty she and Kitane came from different worlds. At that moment, the Lenape was probably listening to the whispers of the mice that lived in the walls of the Red Lion garret. Whispers that Blandine could not hear.

She rose to her feet and crossed to him. Blandine would have liked to do something, make some gesture, throw her arms around him, comfort him somehow, extend a warm hand from her world to his.

She would have, if she were not sure he would instantly flap away into the night in response, soaring through the storm like some kind of immense moon moth.

T
he next morning, in the anteroom outside the audience chamber of the Stadt Huys, Lightning huddled with Martyn Hendrickson.

“I was there when they grabbed Drummond from his rooms,” Lightning said. “I wanted to convince them to hang him right then, but they took him to prison in the fort instead.”

“Did he weep?” Martyn asked.

“He grinned,” Lightning said, his face darkening. “Something very strange happened. When Drummond first appeared in his doorway with his cocked pistol, he was shaved nearly bald. The next time we saw him, only moments later, he had grown long, curly hair. The man must be a devil of some sort.”

“A wig, Lightning. He put on a wig.”

“You have told me about these things, but I never have seen one,” Lightning said. “It looked like his real hair.”

“Was he wounded? Did he fall when the mob mistreated him?”

“Do you think I myself could obtain a wig?” Lightning asked.

Martyn rolled his eyes. The man could not be dealt with logically. He was too much concerned with the hideous mottled scar atop his head. To distract Lightning from his new obsession, Martyn directed him through the infernal catechism.

“Who sits on a throne in heaven?” he asked.

“Lucifer,” Lightning said. The questions always soothed him.

“Who sits in hell?”

“Father Jesus Christ the Lord Our Savior,” Lightning said.

That “father” was extraneous, but the answer was close enough, Martyn decided. “What does God do?”

“God sleeps,” Lightning answered. Then he said, “How much does a good wig cost?”

Martyn gave up. From now on, he knew, wigs were all he would hear about from the damned half-indian. The man was manic. Martyn would
have to get him a wig somehow. Perhaps Drummond’s. He wouldn’t be long needing his.

Martyn headed into the audience chamber, and Lightning made to go with him, but was stopped by the militiaman guarding the door.

“Are you a witness?” the militiaman asked Lightning.

“He’s with me,” Martyn said.

“Europeans only allowed, unless they are witnesses.”

Lightning’s face darkened, but Martyn only shrugged. He passed from the anteroom into the audience chamber, leaving his protégé behind.

In the chamber, they were hearing the Africans, Lace and Mally and Handy, talk about their latest missing child. Tara Oyo, the girl’s name was, they said, six years old. She had been found, stripped naked, facedown in a rotting litter of leaves, missing a haunch and the fingers of her left hand.

The director general gave the Africans a scolding. “Why let this child wander alone?” Stuyvesant asked.

“She wasn’t wandering, she had to work, and she was going—” the man Handy said, but Stuyvesant cut him off.

“It seems your community is lax about attending to its children. You must pray over it, and search your hearts to find if you are not as much to blame as the demon that took her.
Quae nocent, saepe docent
.” What hurts, instructs.

“Sire—” the woman Lace said, but again, the director general interrupted.

“We have heard enough about this instance,” he said, dismissing the Africans. They stood, not knowing what to do, but finally turned and passed Martyn on their way out of the audience room.

The director general and his citizen-advisors, the Nine, had convened to sort out the witika madness that gripped the colony. The Nine were what passed for representative democracy in New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant would just as soon keep his own counsel, but unrest in the streets was such that he had to admit some burghers and leading citizens into the governing process.

Convening the Nine, Martyn knew, was a sop. In his experience,
advising the director general was like trying to get a stone to absorb water. The words ran off and soaked into the earth.

But the exercise was often entertaining. George Godbolt was there, Kees Bayard, the
schout
, De Klavier, Aet Visser, Chas Pembeck, the Company tax official, the schoolmaster, Adolphus Roeletsen, the powerful patroon from across the river in Pavonia, Michiel Pauw, the
burgomeester
, Rem Fuchs. And finally, Martyn’s own brother Adias Hendrickson, making a rare appearance in the capital.