The Orphanmaster (52 page)

Blandine began to talk about the members of the jury in Drummond’s trial. “Three tradefolk, a
handlaer
and an agriculturist,” she said.

“And Gerrit Remunde,” Drummond said.

“Another trader. Every one of those people know where their coin is coming from. Beaver pelts. Communicate to them this one single point and you will have them well in hand: Petrus Stuyvesant will lose Beverwyck for them.”

A
nother stifling day in the council chamber of the meeting-hall in the fort. The spectators were fewer today, and some new ones had replaced the old. The director general, Drummond noticed, did not sweat.

As the accused, Drummond stood again in the dock, shifting his feet from one to the other, attempting not to yawn. He distracted himself by examining the six men of the jury. They appeared restless. After the reading of Drummond’s decoded messages, the
fiscael
ended his presentation of the case for the prosecution. Clarke rose for Drummond’s defense, embarking upon a complex argument involving the supposed nature of his client’s crime.

“This charge of treason,” Clarke said, addressing the jury directly, “we must ask, against whom? Against what entity? The Dutch West India Company? Can one be disloyal to a commercial entity the way one can to a nation?”

Drummond thought, I will hang for sure if this is the best he can do. The eyes of the jurymen began to wander.

“Tell me, who has this man betrayed?” Clarke said, gesturing to Drummond. “No country. The supposed secret messages upon which the prosecution bases its case represent not treason but a simple business strategy. The day when a corporation is accorded the same standing as a country, with all the rights attending to that status, will be a sad day indeed.”

“Barrister Clarke?” the director general interrupted from the bench.

“Yes,
Mijn Heer
General?”

“The Dutch West India Company enjoys the status of an overlord in this case,” Stuyvesant said. “The Company thus has standing to serve as a jurisdiction. All this was argued and answered in pretrial.”

“Yes,
Mijn Heer
General,” Clarke said, clearly dismayed.

All right, Drummond thought, what else do you have?

Clarke again addressed the jury directly. “As members of the jury,
you have the right to direct a summary judgment at any time,” he said. “If you believe the prosecution has advanced its argument convincingly, you may do so. Likewise, if you believe the prosecution has not made its case, you may ask that this trial end in a finding of ‘not guilty.’”

Something was wrong, Drummond thought. The proceedings seemed to be rattling along somehow much faster than he anticipated. He didn’t understand what was happening. A summary judgment? Clarke droned on, but Drummond felt the need to interrupt him.

“
Mijn Heer
General?” he called out, turning to Stuyvesant. “May the accused speak?”

“Stand mute in the dock, if you please,” the director general said.

Peter Cuyck, the farmer on the jury, spoke up. “Please, sir, we would like to hear Mister Drummond speak.”

“The defendant has the right to make a statement to the court,” Clarke said.

Stuyvesant repressed his natural rage at being openly contradicted, and curtly nodded his assent. But inwardly he steamed.
The defendant has the right?
Who has rights? Rights were only what he, the director general, allowed. Nothing more. He could give them and take them away.

Drummond faced the jury. “John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony has claimed all land north of the forty-second parallel latitude. That cuts our line just to the north of Wildwyck, gentlemen, and that means the Massachusetts Bay Colony will take Fort Orange and Beverwyck.”

Stuyvesant stamped his peg leg on the hollow floor of the council chambers. He could not abide this. Drummond saying “our line,” as if he were at one with the Dutch jurymen! “The accused will stick to the facts of the present case,” the director general said.

But Drummond continued on in the same vein.

“Wildwyck, Fort Orange and Beverwyck. We need them. John Winthrop and Massachusetts shall not have them. Fort Orange and Beverwyck may be called by different names under the English king, but we will keep those entities within this jurisdiction. You may trade up the river as before.”

“Mister Drummond!” Stuyvesant shouted, rising up from his chair.

“If you want to keep Beverwyck, come with us, come with England,” Drummond said. “If you want to lose it to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, go with this man.” He pointed at Stuyvesant, who had gone apoplectic.

“Stand mute! Stand mute!” the director general yelled at Drummond.

“Your Excellency?” Clarke shouted.

Speaking directly to the jury, Drummond said, “The new colony will be called the Crown Province of New York, and you have the promise of King Charles II that its governors will take Dutch law and customs seriously, including all border disputes.”

Drummond looked at Gerritt Remunde and the others. Blandine had given him the key. Internecine rivalries trumped global ones every time. It is a human characteristic to fear a local bully more than a remote god. The traders in the settlement cared little who ruled them, Dutch or English. But they desperately did not want to be cheated via a land grab by one of their neighboring colonial rivals.

Gerrit Remunde stood up in the jury box, begging for Stuyvesant’s attention. “Sir? Sir?”

“Sit down!” the director general said.

“Your Excellency,” Remunde said, persisting. “We gentlemen of the jury wish to direct the court to do what the barrister suggested”—he gestured at Clarke—“what he called it, a summary judgment, that this man be found not guilty of the charge and freed.”

The gallery erupted in chatter. “Not guilty” sounded from several lips.

“Out of order, out of order!” the director general said. Stuyvesant stamped his foot repeatedly, attempting to quiet a council chamber that verged on riot.

After a long few minutes, he finally quelled the disturbance. He stood silent for a beat, glowering.

“Spying is by definition a military matter, and I am the duly authorized general of the colonial militia,” Stuyvesant began.

He was shouted down by the members of the gallery, who realized what the director general was about to do. “No, no, no!” they called out.

“Captain of the guard!” he shouted. “Captain of the guard!”

Muskets in hand, four of the director general’s paid militiamen marched into the chambers from their post just outside the door.

“Director general, I object to this—” Clarke said, but he was jostled aside by the soldiers.

“This court is dissolved!” Stuyvesant shouted, greeted by more calls of “No! No!” But even the staunchest republicans were not about to risk death by bayonet just to save the hide of an English spy. The spectators moved sullenly out as the militiamen cleared the chamber.

“The jury is dismissed,” the director general said, speaking over the tumult. “I hereby adjourn, suspend and disperse this court.”

More protests were called out, but sounded weaker. In the chaos, Drummond motioned Raeger over from the gallery.

“Get word to Blandine,” he said. “She’s at Luybeck’s.” The
weert
rushed out.

Drummond found himself in the dock, facing the director general as if the two of them were alone. Just Petrus Stuyvesant and his musket men.

One look at the director general’s face and Drummond knew he was doomed. Challenge a tyrant at your own risk, and the smaller the stakes, the greater the tyranny. The proceedings lost all semblance of a trial. Stuyvesant meant to kill him.

What had Drummond ever done to the man to invite such enmity? He had just been acquitted as a spy. But still Stuyvesant bore down. This was personal.

Drummond couldn’t fathom it. Apart from his trenchant asides in confidential diplomatic messages, he’d had few dealings with the director general. Some of the language he had used might have been a little salty, but was it enough for Stuyvesant to want to string him up? Or perhaps Drummond was being blamed for the Godbolt affair?

Kees Bayard could be behind it. Jealousy being the great motivator in human affairs more often than was recognized.

Stuyvesant rose to his feet. “Having heard the evidence, I am within my authority as director general of the colony and military governor to pronounce the accused guilty and sentence him to hang.”

His face twisted into something resembling a smile.
Where is your arrogance now, Englisher?

“This isn’t justice,” Drummond said evenly. “It’s murder.”

“Corporal? Take this man into custody.”

As the militiamen moved on Drummond, Stuyvesant called out, “Under shackles!”

The day may have started as a jury trial, but in the end, the director general could do whatever he wanted. Might made right.

Desperation, Drummond thought, assessing the situation that would lead, in perhaps minutes, to his death. The director general had merely underlined the dictatorial nature of his governorship. He had already lost the Dutch residents of the colony. By this action, he would lose those few English residents who remained his allies.

Instead, the impulsive Stuyvesant placed all his hopes in the militia. A hundred men with pikes and flintlock muskets. Twenty cannon on the ramparts of the fort. That was all that was left to him.

But the director general possessed an immediate present advantage. For this particular time and this place, he held the guns, and there was nothing Drummond could do to stop him.

He thought of Blandine.
Nothing will happen at the tribunal, will it?

“Devilish tricky business,” Eberhard Luybeck said to Blandine, tying up a sheaf of documents with a length of twine. The two sat in Luybeck’s law chamber near the Stadt Huys.

“I mean, Aet Visser was a wonder, had his finger in all sorts of pies, everywhere in the colony,” Luybeck said. “Multiple and sundry partnerships, debts owed, debts outstanding owed to him, some sort of royalty relationship with the director general, a share in a Pavonia acreage with the Hendrickson family, payments to them, funds received from them. He was in court more often than he was out of it, and not just the Orphan Chamber either.”

Eberhard Luybeck knew that crucial to survival in the profession of law were estates, and the payments attendant upon death. The best things in life were fees.
Probate!
The word was sweeter to him than any other. It was the teat he suckled for all his sustenance, and therefore he loved it with the pure innocence of an infant.

“I merely need to know if he has taken care of Anna and his family,” Blandine said.

“Yes, well, he has, very handsomely,” Luybeck said. “There can be no formal recognition of his paternity, of course, nor of the marriage. The woman is half a Haverstraw indian, I believe?”

“Sopus,” Blandine said.

“A rare survivor,” Luybeck said. “I hear that through the actions of our courageous militia the Esopus clan has for all intents and purposes been extinguished. Anna had a twin brother, did she not? This man recently deceased, Gerald, who went by the name of Lightning?”

What?

Blandine felt too unsettled by the revelation to attend much to what Luybeck was saying to her.

Lightning. Anna. Which meant Lightning was uncle to the Bean and all the others. And that his relationship with Visser was much tighter than Blandine had previously imagined.

“Oh, and there’s this that Mister Visser left you,” Luybeck said. He slid a sealed envelope across his desk table to Blandine.

A jurisdiction cannot have too many gallows. In addition to the public one, on the shoreline outside the fort, the one Aet Visser co-opted for his own last Easter, Stuyvesant also had at his disposal a smaller military gibbet, erected within the fort and used for cases of desertion, insubordination, dereliction of duty. He had hung a sleeping sentry there in just the last week.

It was to this platformless hanging ground that his militia guards conducted Drummond. The smaller gibbet lacked the spectacle value of the public gallows, but in this case was more convenient. The bailey yard of Fort Amsterdam had not been entirely cleared of the citizenry, and many of the spectators who had been pushed from the court chamber assembled near the open gates of the fortress. They had not yet coalesced into a mob.

Drummond saw Gerrit Remunde among them. The man hailed him across the twenty yards separating them as though they were friends at a party. “Drummond!” he called. Drummond wondered if he was again going to extend an invitation to dine.

The militiamen, their numbers now swelled to more than two dozen
strong, did not fear interference. The director general stumped alongside them, pointing the way, commanding and instructing.

“Hurry along, now,” he said.

The arrangement at this particular gibbet was simple. The condemned would be made to climb upon a trestle, the noose placed around his neck, the trestle removed.

“Position it so I may kick it out from under him with my own foot,” instructed the director general.

Drummond bit his tongue. He did not want “which one?” to be the last thing he said on this earth.

As the militiamen moved the wooden frame in place beneath the noose, Stuyvesant came close to the shackled Drummond.

“Am I a one-legged strutting fool?” he hissed. “Am I a changeable and overweening dictator? Is my Latin a joke? Do I set myself up as a lord?”

Drummond at first did not grasp what the man was saying, but then realized Stuyvesant was quoting Drummond’s own words back to him, judgments contained in the coded messages transmitted to London. Cited by the director general word for word, from memory. A deep wound, obviously, now freshly reopened.

There it was. Why Drummond had to die. Because he had insulted his High Mightiness, Petrus Stuyvesant. On purely practical grounds, Drummond wished he had been kinder. The language of secret diplomatic correspondence was not meant for prying outside eyes.

The director general stepped back and made a quick gesture. “Proceed,” he said.