The Orphanmaster (42 page)

Drummond had succeeded in secreting among his things a surprise delicacy almost unknown in New Amsterdam: a cone of white sugar. They took slices of dried pear, moistened them with brandy and dipped them in the sweet, crumbled granules, lounging on the bearskin before the hearth.

No more Van Couvering and Drummond. He addressed her as Blandine, as he always had in his mind, or sometimes “Ina,” while she, relishing his given name, called him Edward. In his more idiotic moods he cooed at her as
“la petite souris,”
the little mouse.

He had removed his waistcoat for good, it seemed, as she had tossed away her gown. She went about the place dressed in his white linen blouse, unbuttoned and untucked—there was nothing in which to tuck it—barefoot.

The weeks tripped by. They had only three conversations of any note.

*   *   *

The first:

“After the attack, I changed my thinking,” Blandine said during one noontime meal before the fire.

“The Mahican attack, you mean,” Drummond said. “Berry-picking.” She had told him some about it, but not all.

“I realized that I had never really thought about things before. I just accepted what people told me.”

“They always want you to take what they say on faith,” Drummond said. “The spiritual is the most important area of life, and they don’t want you to think too hard about it.”

“I felt during those days as though I were spinning out of control,” Blandine said. “I would walk along the Strand, look out at the bay and realize how much I loved the beauty of the world. It nearly choked me sometimes with emotion. The world is beautiful even for a coyote.”

“Even for a mole,” Drummond said.

“For a worm.”

“A gnat.”

“For a rock!” said Blandine. “Even for that stone in the hearth! Yes! But then I would look at the explanation I was being given for all this gloriousness, and I just refused.”

“Credere nequeo,”
Drummond said.

“That’s right,” Blandine said. “What I told the dominie.”

He picked up her mass of hair as it fell over her shoulders and held it to his face. He wished he could protect Blandine from everything the world was going to hand her, but knew that was impossible, that ultimately she would have to protect herself.

“There is a man,” Edward said. “His name is Benedict Spinoza. He’s a lens grinder in Holland.”

“He is who you read?” she said.
A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being
.

“He puts into words what you are talking about. He knows the glory of the world cannot be contained. It must be infinite. It can’t have a human face.”

“I know!” said Blandine. “It must be everything, all things. I thought
that myself, and then I thought how dangerous that kind of thinking was, and I tried to stop.”

“Bento Spinoza’s thought is so dangerous that they tossed him right out of his community.”

“Like us.”

“Like us,” Edward said.

Blandine’s eyes shone, staring into Edward’s face. “I really felt alone,” she said. “I never considered that anyone believed as I did.”

“Once you do begin to think about it, though, it becomes obvious,” Drummond said.

Blandine nodded. “Difficult, but obvious,” she said. “You’re right.”

“After Worcester, I, too, lost my faith. My boots had waded in blood up to the ankles. The god held up to me to believe in seemed so…”

“Petty and small,” Blandine said.

“Yes. When you see men being smashed by cannon fire, you can’t believe again. A god who gives a damn in any way whatsoever about human pain and hopes and predicaments just begins to appear ridiculous.”

“What I found myself thinking was, no god at all,” Blandine said. “Or a different kind of one. I didn’t know if it could even go by the name of God.”

Edward said, “The god my soul needs is huge and unbreakable. Spinoza’s god. That’s what I see out here in the new world. And their old-world god just turned out to be small and soft.”

Blandine snuggled her body up against his. “Like you,” she said. “Small and soft.”

He laughed. “Like your breasts.”

“My breasts aren’t small!”

Edward said, “Nor am I, if you’d just do your job.”

She did.

The second:

“The question to ask about crime is always,
qui bono?
” said Edward. “That’s how the constable is trained.” They had walked outside to take some air that afternoon, looking over the vast iced-in river below,
congratulating themselves, with the impossible satisfaction of lovers, on their good luck and good taste in each other.

After their walk, they returned to a still warm cabin and a hearth with dying coals.

“Qui bono?”
Blandine said, poking the embers with a heavy stick from the woods outside. “My Latin…
Qui
, I know. That means ‘who.’ But
bono
? Good? ‘Who is good?’”

“Who benefits? Who gains from the crime?” Edward said. He pushed a fresh log into the fire, and rubbed his hands together.

“Ah. Well, the killer benefits. Or killers,” said Blandine.

“Yes, but how?” Edward said. “These are strange, chained-together murders. I have never heard of killings that go forward serially. What links them? How could anyone gain by slaying orphans?”

Blandine thought she knew. “There is a thrill from killing, isn’t there? Isn’t that enough? You’ve killed, haven’t you? Is there a thrill to it?”

He did not hesitate. “Yes,” he said.

“What is the thrill made of? What does it mean?”

Drummond thought back to his battles, the bitter defeat at Preston, the bloody Worcester, the engagements of the Russo-Polish War, the Anglo-Dutch campaigns (his people against hers), the Northern War.

“‘Not me,’ that’s what killing means,” he said. It was his turn to poke the fire. “That’s it right there. If you are the killer, that automatically means you are not the killed. It feels like power. At least, I think that’s how the human mind works.”

Blandine said, “So our killer, he wants it to be not him. Where does that lead us?”

“He doesn’t want to be a dead orphan?”

“Which might mean he’s an orphan, alive,” said Blandine. Herself an orphan.

“Visser always calls himself an orphan,” Edward said.

“That’s just more of his nonsense,” Blandine said. “Technically, I suppose it’s true, but he told me his parents lived to old age.”

“Could you imagine him using his wards as catamites?”

“Abuse them sexually? Certainly not.”

“He keeps a secret family.”

“Pish-posh,” Blandine said. “If Anna and her brood are a secret, it’s an open one.”

Edward pulled a long look at her.

“What?” she said.

“You don’t want to believe it’s him,” Edward said. “You’re being blind.”

“You forget that, unlike you, I actually know him.”

“If you know him so well, tell me this,” Edward said. “How corrupt is he?”

Blandine put her thumb and finger out, about an inch apart. “Not totally, but neither is he pure. Like he says, he lives in the real world.”

Edward laughed. “I’m not sure I would describe New Amsterdam as the real world. It is more like a dog pit at the fair.”

“Visser himself called New Netherland a
narrenschiff
, a ship of fools,” Blandine said. “But I know what you mean.”

The orphanmaster possessed a few traits that argued for him as a murderer. First and foremost, to Drummond’s mind, was the man’s conversance with, and proximity to, the settlement’s orphan population. To be able to kidnap them, murder them, perform whatever ghoulish acts upon them that had been done, the guilty party must necessarily know which children of the colony were parentless and where they all were placed.

How many orphans were there in New Amsterdam? What had Hendrickson said? Two hundred something. Every one had come through Visser’s hands in one way or another.

There was also Visser’s general dissolution, his inebriated mental state, his habitual companionship with Lightning, surely the kind of man Drummond could readily believe was involved in the orphan-killings.

“You must leave off your foolish sentiments about the orphanmaster,” he said. “If you allowed yourself to see things clearly, you’d conclude he is the one.”

“I don’t want to live in a world where a man like Aet Visser kills children,” Blandine said.

“Why, because he’s jolly? Because he tells a good joke?”

“Because he’s all I have,” Blandine said softly.

Edward was going to push it some more, but a look at Blandine’s face made him back away.

The third:

The third conversation you shall not be privy to.

Their only visitor was Kitane. Riding an ancient-looking mule he garnered from the Canarsies, he’d come bringing foodstuffs and news of the colony. The Lenape seemed to pass through the woods effortlessly, even in the high snows of winter.

The first time, they were surprised. In late afternoon, a rap at the window.

Blandine nearly jumped out of her skin, which was, coincidentally, all she wore at that moment. She wrapped herself in Drummond’s cloak and the two of them met Kitane at the door. He stood before them, his moccasins saturated with snowmelt, the cat hide draped loosely about his torso.

After greetings, they drew him into the warm cabin. “Have some for me?” he asked, indicating the plate, mounded with Drummond’s sugar, that lay carelessly on the hearth bricks.

“Of course.” Blandine pushed the sugar toward him. “Now tell us everything. Do they still search for us?”

“Not so much. The director general, he has other problems.”

“How is Antony?”

“Still hidden in Little Angola,” said Kitane.

“So he remains at the capital,” Blandine said. “But how long can you hide a giant?”

“He is all right for now,” said Kitane. “The African people shield their own.”

“He is well cared for?”

“He asks about you,” Kitane said.

“This is the longest we’ve been apart since first we met,” Blandine said.

Kitane ate well when the food was served, from the provisions he brought—venison strips and farmer cheese, crackers and greasy pemmican, loaves of bread, only slightly stale. Blandine and Edward contributed
the last of their sweet butter, which they kept fresh in a crock of snow outside the cabin’s front door.

“There is this, too,” Kitane said. He presented them with a schoolroom lesson board, a piece of slate in a wooden frame. “It comes from the boy, William Turner.”

Edward peered over her shoulder.

“Drumin? Ubi es?”

Drummond had been a schoolboy once. “‘
Drumin
,’ that’s Drummond.
Ubi es?
Where are you?”

Blandine turned to Kitane. “Where is the boy? With the Godbolts?”

Kitane nodded. “They don’t let him out of their sight.”

Blandine rubbed out the message on the slate, but there was no chalk to send a response. Drummond pulled an ashy stick from the fire and presented it to her.

Soon
, was the first word she thought to write. Then
courage
.

Kitane finished scooping sugar into his mouth. His moccasins dried by the fire, his pack empty of the supplies he brought to Blandine and Edward, he tucked the message slate into his kit and set off.

The Angolan known in the colony as Handy had hunted prey both in Africa, far back across the green sea of time, and here on Manhattan Island, in what everyone called the new world.

He himself, Handy thought, was in no way new, an old man who did not know his years. Forty? Fifty? Sixty? The young ones of Little Angola called him Grandfather, though fortune cursed him with childlessness.

Boys and girls who were not his own came to his garden on Company land along the North River, visiting him while he was on his knees, tending his potato plants.

Can I help you, Grandfather? Can I, Grandfather?
the children chattered. What they meant was that they were hungry. Handy allowed them to reach deep into the hills of peaty dirt and pull out the firm, round, spud-golden treasures beneath.

Were the children aware of how their presence mocked him?

I am nobody’s grandfather, child. I am Handy Kimbarata, born a prince, whose line will end with my own death in a strange land.

The air still held some winter on an early April morning when Handy set forth with his scattergun across the island toward the Kollect Pond, glad for having thought to wear the single pair of woolen socks he owned. After stopping a moment to chew on a hunk of molasses bread, his breakfast, he swung through a ravine that cut between two rocky hilltops.

Directly ahead, the Kollect’s surface gleamed through the trees. Frost on the rotting leaves of the ravine showed him the trail of a coyote.

He had followed the animal’s footprints before, tracking them to the north bank of the Kollect, where birch trees sprang out of a carpet of moss on the shore of the pond. This day, the track again led into the reeds and vanished. No sign. Handy swore under his breath, invoking an old Bakonga imprecation, untranslatable, about monkey entrails.

Handy once watched, arrested in place, as a coyote ripped through a pen of baby lambs. The animal fled before he could take a single forward step. They were quicker than wind.

This is your day to die, coyote.

Handy crossed over to stalk the watery southern edge of the Kollect, which was fringed with reeds. The pocked crust of half-frozen mud first crunched, then sucked at his feet as though it would pull him down.

Easy, fool, Handy said to himself, fall in the pond and you’ve got a cold walk home. He followed a narrow winding path that curved into the frigid water. The inlets of the Kollect here were topped with thin, fragile panes of silver ice.

He spotted the coyote. Not twenty yards away. Leaning down to the water and lapping. He could see the animal’s delicate pink tongue. Handy moved carefully to raise his firearm.

A flash of brown-gray fur. The coyote disappeared so quickly Handy almost felt he hadn’t seen it at all. So he ran, cracking the ice and sloshing through the shallows, to get to where the animal last was. Let off a shot through the trees, the slope rising just there.