The Orphanmaster (43 page)

He saw flesh poking from the ice for a moment before his mind allowed him to understand what it was. Greenish and blood-black, rising out of one of the small cracked floes. He stepped forward. Something—a gnawed arm?—thrust above the surface. This was what had drawn the coyote back again and again.

Unsteady, feeling as though an awful dawning were being prepared for him, Handy took a step forward and fell to his knees, slopping the icy water over himself.

He didn’t feel the cold.

The body was half-encased, imprisoned, caught where it lay, the glossy ice translucent. He could clearly see her face turned upward to the sky, wide-open eyes staring.

Piteous.

T
he adult colonists of New Amsterdam did not know the truth, and neither did their children, the ones in households with a mother and father and warm circles of relatives within which they comfortably lodged, safe and secure.

The governing officials of the colony did not know the truth, the director general and
schout
and
schepens
and
burgomeesters
and the Nine (with one exception: the orphanmaster knew).

The common men in the settlement were likewise all unknowing, the bricklayers, scavelmen, drunkards, apothecaries, cartwrights and saddlers. The women did not know, either, the she-merchants, godmothers, midwives, bakers, gossips, the sewing
klatsches
and guests at the caudle parties.

But the orphans knew. Tibb Dunbar knew it first. The indentured servants, the trash pickers, the gutter muckers, the street urchins, the children unloved and abandoned eventually came to understand. In their long days of labor, scrubbing floors and cleaning the jakes and throwing garbage to the swine, they would at times encounter one another. They exchanged hurried whispers. Intelligence, warnings.

Watch out for a man in scarlet heels. Beware the orphanmaster. Beware the half-breed indian with the stove-in hat. The Crease ain’t no joke.

Look to thyself. Step brightly, or ye will find thyself murthered and eaten.

“Be sober, be vigilant,” quoth the Bible-schooled among them. “Because your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

They didn’t know names. The orphans did not tell tales of witika. They did not fear imaginary goblins. Their experience had taught them that men were the real demons.

So Tibb Dunbar passed the word to Baertie van Vleeck, who told it to Laila Philipe. Laila whispered it to Waldo Arentsen. The Klos twins
got it from Waldo, and one of the twins—it was so difficult to tell the two apart—told the orphan who masqueraded as William Turner.

William, observant as he was silent, paid attention. On his way to school, to run errands for Rebecca Godbolt, or to serve his master Drummond—and thank God for Drummond, the only person in this town who had a pleasant word for him—he kept his eyes open.

It is surprising how much a person with open eyes can see that others don’t.

William lived through the horror of a frontier war, saw himself stolen by the river indians, then watched his parents die of the small pox as their hostages. He’d been traded for a nag to a cruel English couple and locked away in an attic for days at a time. Not to speak of being constantly pinched, poked and punched by the Godbolts’ natural children.

Through the fall and winter, he watched and waited. Everyone shrieked about the witika. Spring, he decided. Springtime was when he would make his move.

Time to be a hero, the boy said to himself, as the spring winds of April thawed the woods. Track the bad man, uncover the evidence, stop the murders. He was only a small child. But the adults seemed to be unable to do anything about orphans disappearing from the colony. He felt that it was left up to him.

William stashed provisions, clothes and an extra pair of shoes in a hidey-hole in the Godbolt attic.

“William,” Rebecca Godbolt commanded, “fetch a string of onions for dinner.” William would do as he was told.

On this day, the day they called Good Friday for reasons William could never understand (why was the day they murdered Our Dear Lord Jesus called “good”?), he pleaded a stomachache. Mixing dried bread with smashed-up maize, watering the recipe, he managed to concoct a passable batch of vomit to spill beside his bed.

“Ewwww!”
Mary cried when she stumbled through his alcove and almost stepped in the mess. “Mama, Billy made sick!”

Rebecca bustled in, felt his forehead for a scant two seconds and tut-tutted how much of a bother William was. She ordered her other children to stay away.

Rebecca Godbolt had been trying on her warm-weather costumes all morning to see if they still suited her figure. Easter approached, a day for finery to be displayed and admired. She didn’t have time to clean up an orphan’s vomit.

The family banged out the door for Good Friday services, lending William a full four-hour head start. He knew where to find his quarry, Lightning, the half-indian all the orphans called “the Crease,” for the ugly groove in his forehead.

William picked up the trail at the usual place, behind the Red Lion. He hid around the side, by the cistern, so he could see the comings and goings as freely as if it were a meeting-hall. The Crease wore ordinary European clothing, a shirt and waistcoat and pouchy breeches. When he left the Lion, exiting out of the Mane in back, William waited until he was a block gone, then followed.

The half-indian loped west on Pearl Street over to the fort. William crept along behind him, hunching behind stoops and pressing himself against doorways so as not to be seen. Together, they moved into the market square and north through the parade ground, past the fine houses of the Broad Way and Stone Street.

In the Company’s gardens, the mounded earth still slept at this, the very beginning of spring. The Crease never halted or even slowed down.

Private Christen Christoffelszen Cruytdop manned the Company’s west land port on the palisade wall. When the Crease reached the sentry, Cruytdop simply waved him through. He saw the half-indian nearly every day, since the man often ventured down to the taprooms around town, sometimes not returning north until after curfew.

He let Lightning through, but stopped the orphan boy.

“Halt, you,” barked Cruytdop, stepping from his post. The child came nearly up to the sentry’s chest, but not quite.

William took a piece of slate in a wooden frame from around his neck, where it hung with a length of twine. “
Godbolt
,” he wrote in chalk.

Cruytdop would not have been able to pass any rigorous literacy test, but he was aware of the Godbolt family, primarily because his young wife, Wanda, favored their sausage shop. Cruytdop looked annoyed by the chalkboard. Couldn’t the child speak?

“Your business?” Cruytdop said.

William again bent over the board. “
Cloth
,” he wrote. Another word Private Cruytdop could read. He knew that residents of Little Angola, just north of the wall, frequently were paid to finish sheets and towels for the denizens in the settlement.

He was afraid the boy would begin to write again, something to stump him this time. So he finally waved him by.

William could no longer see the half-indian he trailed. Lightning had gotten too much of a lead in the time William was stuck with the sentry. The Broad Way turned rustic once past the palisade wall. Here were fruit orchards, small
bouweries
and the strip of properties that made up Little Angola.

Running along, William caught sight of the Crease. The half-indian was hustling now. Tall, ancient pine trees towered over the lane. William hid behind one, then darted forward to the next one.

When the road turned into a trail, slippery with April mud and strewn with gray rocks, William got a second wind. The trail twisted, climbed up and down hills, crossed rock formations.

Would they be reaching some destination soon? William wondered. The youngster had trod too many miles already. He walked on.

“Do you have a gun?”

William was startled nearly out of his shoes. Somehow, the Crease had materialized, squatting on a big boulder just beside the trail. William had been following him, and now suddenly the half-indian was there in front of him. He stared down at William, negligently holding a flintlock pistol in his right hand.

“Do you have a gun?” Lightning asked again. “Because I have one. Do you see it?”

William nodded. He would have been struck dumb even if he weren’t already mute.

“Good,” the Crease said. “You are so eager to follow me. My pistol will show you the way. Come along.”

After the shock of his covert visit to the hidden room in the Hendrickson manse, Aet Visser lost his direction. He no longer understood what he
was supposed to do in life. His orphanmaster duties seemed meaningless or, worse, downright evil. He spent his days wandering the settlement, avoiding those citizens he knew, which turned out to be, just his luck, an overwhelming percentage of the colony’s population.

During that dark time it seemed to Visser that New Amsterdam had the atmosphere of a coffin, sealed in, confining and brutally contained. There was no way out. The settlement’s triangular boundaries had two sides cut off by water and a third closed in by a palisade wall.

Still, there were places where a not-too-particular man might lose himself. Visser shunned the Red Lion in favor of the Jug, Missy Flamsteed’s tap house on the Strand. There he could drink in obscurity, content to languish in the shadows, unbothered by the other waterfront drunks.

Visser did not call the Orphan Chamber to sit during all of January, nor in February, nor, so far, for the first weeks of spring. He officially postponed the proceedings once, then again, then did not even bother to post a notice. The orphanmaster simply failed to show up for his own court.

The director general, who normally kept a tight grip on every administrative matter in the colony, found himself too distracted by his main worry—the insolent incursions against New Netherland by the English settlers of Connecticut and the Massachusetts Bay Colony—to notice Visser’s dereliction.

Visser did not walk the streets, he skulked them. He crossed the settlement not via Pearl or Stone but through the
quartier perdu
of Tuyn Street. He habituated alleys and lanes. He slipped through the palisade wall and wandered north.

Where was he going, exactly? Everywhere he went, he discovered himself there, and that ruined everything. The only real relief would have been to take on a new self and crawl out of his old one.

He kept coming back to Martyn, dissolute, unhinged, brilliant, wealthy, self-obsessed Martyn. The man’s watery death upon the ice of the North River had not removed Martyn from Visser’s thoughts.

Domineering guilt wore on the orphanmaster. Among the bloody garments secreted in the cabinet, Visser recognized a shirt of Ansel Imbrock,
a torn doublet of Dickie Dunn. The thought of so many orphans dead or disappeared, and his own part in it remaining hidden from public view, tormented him. When he made his discovery in the
kas
, he should have run outside screaming.

Alarm! Alarm! The witika killer is found!

Why had he not?

Because Martyn and Lightning held a terrible secret over Visser’s head.

Visser had thought that Martyn Hendrickson’s death might give him a measure of relief, and for a brief moment, it did. The night after the settlement rocked with the news of the favored Hendrickson son’s drowning, Visser slept soundly for the first time in months. He woke up late and resolved to convene the Orphan Chamber that very day. He even shaved.

Humming to himself, he set off to greet the morning, what there was left of it. He met the
schout
heading down Long Street toward the Stadt Huys.

“De Klavier!” he cried.

“Well, Visser,” the
schout
said. “We have not seen much of you these past weeks. Have you been ill?”

“A Lenten penitence,” Visser said airily.

“Yes, I thought you looked off your feed,” De Klavier said. “How are your bowels treating you?”

“A disciplined fast is just the thing,” Visser said.

At that moment, Visser caught sight of Lightning, slouching against the sun-warmed stone of the Stadt Huys. His carefree mood evaporated. The half-indian might appear a casual lounger to the passing colonists, but his gaze bore into Visser like hot iron.

He read the message clearly in Lightning’s eyes.
Martyn is dead, but you are not released.

Visser stepped back from De Klavier. “I have business,” he said, and abruptly hustled off. Not in the direction he had been going, De Klavier noticed, and not the way he had come, either. He fled up Smit Street and disappeared into the anonymous neighborhoods of the settlement.

What was that all about? De Klavier had not a clue. He thought the orphanmaster’s cheese might be slipping off his cracker. The witika had everyone rattled, and of course, it would be natural that Visser would
be most concerned of all, his wards disappearing into thin air as they had been doing.