The Orphanmaster (49 page)

Blandine’s attire, the ladies agreed, was more than acceptable. The finest seamstress in town, Geertje Hapje, dove into her stock of fabrics to come up with the perfect cloth. Blandine’s gown did not come alive until she stepped outside into the sunlight, the fawn-colored silk glowing, shining, throwing off deep glints of green and blue. The folds of the dress draped almost to the ground in back, but were pulled up in scallops at the front, held in place by silver ribbons.

Underneath the gown, the blue damask petticoat and another of deep-pile rose satin. Her bare, powder-white shoulders were framed by a light silver lace scarf, matching Drummond’s, her legs set off by bright white stockings. She had on high-heeled shoes with blue and yellow embroidery and a florette of silver ribbon. Blandine wore no makeup, but bit her lips to give them color.

“Lovely,” murmured Margaret Tomiessen. Her judgment echoed through the tight grouping of New Amsterdam ladies like a wave through an inland sea. “Lovely,” repeated Lucy Hubbard to Femmie Gravenraet, who passed the word on to others as a sort of communal gift.

Antony, his wounds still swathed in bandages, stood beside the dominie, directly in front of Edward. In the wake of Lightning’s knife attack on him and his convalescence, Antony had taken up preaching. He asked Blandine if he could say a few words at the ceremony.

But first, and quite unexpectedly, Jan sang a solo air. His pure bell of a voice quieted the chatter of the crowd.

Stabat Mater. The mournful mother wept. A Catholic hymn! Drummond cast an eye over to Megapolensis, but the dominie seemed unconcerned. Either he did not recognize the words, or he didn’t care.

Then, Antony. His theme, from Corinthians: the redemptive power of love.

“Though I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love,” Antony said in his strong voice, “I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.”

The bride, calm and serene, nevertheless found her eyes again straying over the faces assembled together, watching her, crowding the garden, crammed at the casement windows of her rooms, standing on the rooftops across the yard.

What was she looking for?

A deerskin mask.

Blandine forced herself to stop, to attend to the words Megapolensis was saying over her. Vows chosen by the groom, from the English Book of Common Prayer.

“Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”

She remembered to say, “I will.”

D
uring the sweltering August of 1664, England and the Dutch Republic moved slowly toward war, lumbering along on a collision course like two ships of the line. Which trading empire would gain the upper hand would not be immediately decided, but eventually one stalled while the other covered the globe with its arrogant imperial glory.

The seeds of England’s victory were already sown. A little-known act of Parliament early in the century would prove the tipping point. The Statute of Monopolies, passed in 1623, came to be known as the Patent Law and would eventually lead to the spinning jenny, the rolling machine and Blake’s dark satanic mills. England would rise on cotton cloth and railroads, while the Dutch Republic remained fat, happy and static.

In the late summer heat, the Countess of Castlemaine, the English king’s bewitching mistress, withdrew from court to await the birth of a daughter, her fourth child with the second Charles. Christened Charlotte, the infant later became Lady Fitzroy and Countess of Litchfield. “We know but little of her except that she was beautiful,” wrote one nineteenth-century commentator, that she was a favorite of her uncle James, Duke of York, and that she was mother of eighteen children herself.

In New Netherland, in the new world, the balance between Dutch and English interests stood poised to tilt. In the
bouweries
and plantations, the fields of wheat and corn baked under a summer sun, growing toward an abundant harvest. But it was as if the countryside held its breath. The month seemed overhung with event. Dreams disturbed whatever sleep there was.

The Hendrickson mansion remained closed tight, even in the heat. Inside, two brothers continued to hide one of their own.

For a few days at August’s beginning, a
longueur
. The trial of Drummond, the English spy, would provide some entertainment in the capital. But the witika fever that had gripped the colony had finally broken. The
orphanmaster, author of the crimes, was dead, buried without rites, a suicide. The foul murders of settlement children, the good burghers of New Amsterdam believed, would add no new links to its long chain of horrors. As in other beliefs, they were wrong.

Tibb Dunbar would never have been taken had he not tied on a woesome drunk the night before. He and ten-year-old Juno Brecht procured a three-quarters-full brandy bottle, filching it from the pantry cupboard of a
groot kamer
whose location shall not be identified. The two boys took the liquor to their stomping grounds at the great oak north of the town, and settled in to drink.

Summer on Manhattan. Tibb time, his favorite season, lazy and at the same time brimming with possibility. When the gardens were full, when the stoops yielded prizes left for him by his kind women protectors, when brandy bottles fell out of the sky.

Halfway through the evening, Juno felt the need to splash water on his face, staggered to the East River, fell in and passed out on the shore. He woke with a pleasant headache the next morning, none the worse for wear, and headed to Missy Flamsteed’s for a little hair of the dog.

Tibb Dunbar slept off his drunk, dead to the world, the red kerchief draped over his face like a shroud. As demons often did, the witika came to him in his dreams. His legs wouldn’t work, he couldn’t get away. When Tibb woke, the morning sun blazing down, the day already hot, he thought he still lay in a dream. Something was indeed wrong with his legs. He reached his hand down to feel them and it came away sticky with blood.

“Christ in the foothills,” he swore, his favorite oath. He tried to rise and made it up only with extreme difficulty. His left leg proved completely useless. It could not support his weight. The short sailor pants he wore were matted down with half-congealed blood.

“Halloo, Juno!” he called. But his drinking buddy was long gone.

Gingerly, Tibb examined his leg. A deep cut showed behind his knee, severing the cordlike tendons. The lower part of the leg flopped around like a baby’s rattle. He could only hobble painfully.

“No mercy,” he cursed to himself. “Fetch the pickles.” Then he stopped cold, sagging back against the trunk of the great oak.

Ten yards away, down an alleyway of pines, he saw an apparition that proved he still remained in the grip of his nightmare. The witika stood there, motionless, staring.

Tibb was brave, but he was not a fool. He would have run if he could.

“Yaaah!” he screamed, hoping either to wake himself up or frighten the demon away. He bent down painfully, seized a large rock and hurled it toward the witika. From long practice, Tibb’s aim was true. The rock smashed into the leering deerskin mask of the demon.

A strange thing happened. The monster instantly collapsed, as if the rock had punctured a bladder-balloon that inhabited its costume.

Tibb could not believe his own eyes. He surely dreamed all this. It could not be real. He hobbled up to the heap of clothes that had just appeared to him as the witika.

A bundle of sticks, propped up to mimic a demon form. A crude mask. A lace collar like a burgher wore. But inside it, nothing, just empty air.

“Huh, just some gummy outfit,” Tibb said to himself. “I never did think it real.” He laughed with relief.

From out among the alley of pines stepped a second witika demon—a real, full-bodied one this time. It loomed over the boy as though it were tall enough to block the sun.

“Judas Priest,” Tibb swore.

The monster held a dagger in its left hand, the blade already bloodied, which it drove into Tibb’s neck.

The boy screamed and staggered away.

Bleeding, half-lame, Tibb Dunbar nevertheless made a game attempt at flight. It would turn out later that the orphan boy was a royal prince after all, the child of an English lady and her lord, kidnapped as an infant by pirates, discarded for his colicky bawling on the shores of Prince Maurice’s River. Or perhaps that story was only a figment of Tibb’s dying dreams.

The witika caught him not too far off. The orphan swayed in place, unable to go another step. Blood pulsed from his wound. He felt the close panting breath of his attacker.

“Dik-duk,”
the witika said, raising the red-stained dagger.

“Nice costume,” Tibb said, his last words, his last sneer at the world.

He died unmourned. No one missed him. Or at least, no one of any worth. A troop of urchin street children, what were they?

Drummond holed up in the council chambers of the meeting-hall inside Fort Amsterdam. The summer was proving mercilessly, scorchingly hot, and the room’s windows opened to admit a little air off the bay. He sometimes took refuge there, officially to help prepare the defense for his upcoming trial on spy charges, but really (occasionally) to allow himself a short respite from home.

In the three months since his wedding, Drummond found himself a bit marriage-stunned. Nothing serious, and he cherished his new wife beyond anyone in the universe, but there was only so much a man could take. He not only had to become accustomed to living with a woman, but since he had inherited (willingly, joyfully) a collection of foster children, wards and sundry outcasts, he was now the proud father of a new extended family.

On the whole, Drummond loved it. Jan, Sabine, the other children in Anna’s household, all provided him with laughter, surprises and a depth of caring that he had not heretofore imagined possible. The relationship that flowered between the Bean and Jan, for example, was a wonder to witness.

It was just a bit sudden, that’s all. One minute Drummond was a cavalier on an important mission for a crowned head of state, the next he was gently moving aside hanging pairs of women’s stockings to get to the jakes. Blandine would never detect in him a hint of distress over his new circumstances, he made himself careful about that. But once in a while, an afternoon or two a week, he escaped to smoke his pipe in the empty and silent chambers of the Fort Amsterdam meeting-hall.

While the newlyweds lived at Drummond’s, Blandine had installed Anna’s family in her old rooms across the street from the Red Lion. As a surprise wedding gift, Drummond presented his wife with a new dwelling-house. Well, it was a house in the process of being built, anyway, the housewrights and joiners were still swarming over it, but it would be finished, everyone said, very soon. They had been saying that for a while now.

The structure arose on the site of a former pit-house on Market Street,
quite the best address in town if you didn’t count nearby Stone Street, and a place, Sabine told him solemnly, where she and Pow used to play.

The ghost of Aet Visser still hovered around Drummond and Blandine’s instantly created family. The orphanmaster’s financial affairs proved an impossible tangle. The degree of his involvement in the witika business remained shrouded in mystery. The townspeople still referred to him as a murderer. But Blandine, at least, stayed faithful to his memory. She would not hear a word said against him.

She and Drummond liked to climb the ladder to the roof of their rooms on Slyck Steegh and look through his spyglass, the only perspective tube that had survived the violent search of his premises by the town’s civil authorities. On full-moon nights, Antony would come over, Jan would come up and they would attempt to re-create the magic of that night on Mount Petrus the previous November.

But many times, during the day, Edward and Blandine enjoyed training the spyglass on the building of their new dwelling-house on Market Street, across town. Looking through the lens and seeing the carpenters at work provided a nice sense of microcosm, as though Edward and Blandine were children again, playing with a dollhouse.

Yes, their new life together was altogether delightful, altogether lovely. Couldn’t be better. But Drummond was not such an unfeeling brute that he could ignore the shadow that sometimes passed behind Blandine’s eyes. He noticed that, like himself, she occasionally needed time alone. She seemed attracted to the homes of their neighbors on Market Street, and would walk out of a summer evening, traversing the few blocks to the canal and back, thoughtful and unreachable.

With all she’d been through, Drummond thought, Blandine had a right to feel an occasional inward turning. He resolved to be more tender, more attentive. Things would be better, he believed, once they moved into the new place, and left behind for good his old rooms and hers, with their unpleasant memories and associations.

When Ad Hendrickson found him in the meeting-hall council chamber that afternoon, Drummond naturally thought the man had come to discuss some issue surrounding the new house. They were to be neighbors. The Hendrickson town house was just down Market Street from
them. Perhaps the construction mess had somehow disturbed the Hendrickson peace, and he had come to complain.

Since their brother Martyn’s death, Ad and Ham Hendrickson had done something wholly unexpected. After long being country patroons almost exclusively, they moved into town, taking up residence in their gargantuan clapboard mansion. They still remained somewhat remote, and rarely took part in the communal activities of the settlement. Most surprisingly, they discharged all their servants and lived a monastic life. No one ever saw them.

“Hot,” Ad Hendrickson said to Drummond, sitting down after greeting him.