The Orphanmaster (55 page)

“I want one squad south, watching the house, to make sure we are not surprised,” Peer commanded, sending out a trio of scouts.

“Disruption in the harbor,” Laila Philipe ran up and reported, breathless from having dashed all the way from the fort. “The English have come.”

Laila’s column of adolescent Amazons were capable of holding their own in any episode of fisticuffs. With their hair pulled back and their skirts hiked up, they were ready for this fight.

“Good,” Peer said. He turned to the boy beside him, the small, normally silent child who first proposed the Hendrickson raid.

“Once we go in, we can’t turn back,” Peer said, a last-minute fortitude check before committing to the mission.

The boy nodded. Jan Drummond, formerly William Turner, sometimes called William the Silent, known to the settlement as the Godbolt ward, was a child who at times even now forgot his words and reverted back to his old mute ways.

“Are you sure this is what you want?” Peer asked Jan.

“Yes,” Jan said.

The gangs moved forward on attack.

D
rummond followed Antony around the side of the fort, up through the market. The settlement flocked with people headed for the waterfront, but they parted readily for the two men rushing in the opposite direction. It helped that Antony brandished a weapon of comforting size, a man-mountain toting a musket almost as tall as he was.

The firearm that Antony held was an original creation of Blandine’s. When she was a teenager, her father threw open his gunsmithing workshop to her, tools and all. He challenged her to build him something. Starting with an ancient Dutch harquebus, Blandine tooled the muzzle to a precise thinness, enlarging the bore enormously.

To compensate for the weakness of the brittle old metal, she banded the barrel with iron straps that she smithed herself. For the firing mechanism, she cannibalized parts from other muskets and pistols lying around the workshop, a firing pan from this one, a hammer from that.

The breech wound up so gaping she had to create new shot, pouring the molten lead into moldings she fashioned via trial and error. Just for giggles, Blandine fitted a squirrel-gun barrel below the shotgun, lending the piece an over-and-under effect.

The result was a monstrosity. Willem van Couvering laughed uproariously when his daughter presented it to him. But he admired the workmanship. “This is just
tour de force
stuff,” her father said.

Pretty Polly, Blandine named the gun, in honor of its extreme ugliness. She and Willem took it out along the North River shore and tested it a few times, practicing cutting down trees with the thing. But for Blandine, the making of it was always more to the point than the shooting. She gave it to Antony, knowing that only one of his size could handle it.

Drummond knew instinctively where he and Antony were headed. He realized he had always known where it would really, truly end, after all the false finishes and deceptive cul de sacs into which the pursuit of the orphan-killers had led him.

The Hendrickson brothers.

Right turn onto Market Street, past Drummond’s own new dwelling, then ten rods east to the Hendrickson estate.

The gates hung open.

“Where is she?” Drummond asked.

Antony was breathing hard. He had run a long way, and the huge gun he carried was heavy.

“I never saw her. We have to find her. Anna told me she was here,” Antony said. He gestured toward the dark clapboarded structure, with its great sightless windows. Above the front door, a pane of green bull’s-eye glass.

Drummond stepped through the gate. He went to the front entrance, Antony beside him gripping the musket. The door, he realized as he approached it, was slightly ajar.

No sound from inside. Drummond pushed open the door. Where was a damned pistol of his own? Antony nodded to him wordlessly. They entered the big dwelling-house together.

The first thing Drummond saw was Ham Hendrickson sprawled out on the floor of the great room, the top of his head blown off and his blood spilled into an immense dark pool that spread across the floor to the hearth. A pistol lay beside him. Drummond picked it up, inspected it, saw that it was primed.

Kees Bayard, also dead, the blood flower on his white waistcoat showing a fatal wound to his chest, sat propped against the far wall. His stare was blank. Around him were several crushed poppy-tear tar-balls, their black substance smeared across the floor.

Antony and Drummond moved toward the second room, the parlor, the one built into the addition. All was silence, emptiness.

“Miss Blandina,” Antony called.

Nothing.

“We need to check through the whole house,” Drummond said, dread rising in him.

“I’ll take this wing,” Antony said, turning back the way they had come.

Throughout the chambers, utter and complete nastiness, dirt, chaos. An odd, sweet smell permeated the air. In a back chamber upstairs, Drummond encountered a family of feasting rats.

But no Blandine, no Ad Hendrickson. He went back downstairs.

In the second hearth-room, Drummond noticed blood pooling in a corner. He crossed to it, dipped his finger, found it fresh. How could it be there? He looked up, thinking it might be dripping from the floor above.

No, it was coming, somehow, from behind the wall.

He pushed on the wainscoting, heard a click and felt the hidden door swing outward.

A small, sepulcher-sized room. Ad Hendrickson lay sprawled at the opposite end, bleeding from the chest.

“Water,” he said.

A faint light filtered in from a high, thin window set into the wall above. Smashed crockery littered the stone floor, which was wet.

“Where is she?” Drummond said.

“It was Lightning, always Lightning,” Ad said weakly. “I knew that damned buck was crazy when I first set eyes on him. I should have shot him right then, saved myself a boatload of trouble.”

“Listen, old man,” Drummond said bending his face near to Ad. “I need to know where my wife is.”

“He took her,” Ad said. “I tried to stop him.”

“Who?” demanded Drummond. “Who took Blandine?”

“My brother,” Ad said.

“Your brother,” Drummond said, “is lying out there in the parlor room missing half his skull.”

Ad winced, the blood visibly pulsing from his chest, flowing in waves to the floor. “I mean my little brother, my brother Martyn.”

“Martyn is dead, too!” Drummond shouted. “Talk sense!”

“You foolish man,” Ad said. “Everything you know is wrong. Don’t ye realize? My baby brother has shot and killed all of us. He’s gone mad. He’ll kill you, too.”

“Martyn,” Drummond said.

Ad Hendrickson began to blubber, tears falling to mix with his blood. “But it was always Lightning. He made Martyn what he was. He did it all. Don’t blame Martyn. Don’t blame the baby.”

Weeping, he sagged backward. His face went slack.

“Ad!” Drummond shouted. “Ad! Where is she?”

But he was talking to a dead man.

Antony showed at the door of the little low-ceilinged room. He could not fit his bulk inside. “Where’s Anna?” Drummond asked him.

“At the old rooms across from the Lion,” Antony said. “Blandina told her to stay there with the children.”

“We need to talk to Anna,” Drummond said. “I have to find out what’s going on.”

But as they rushed from the front gate of the Hendrickson estate, they met Jan. The small boy rode atop an enormous black horse.

It had been a day of wonders for Drummond, a day of surviving his own hanging, but perhaps this wonder topped them all, since he recognized the charger as Fantome, the amazing animal he had last seen plunging through the ice into the North River. If a beast could come back to life, anything was possible.

Jan did not dismount. “I know where it is,” he said. “I know where the cave is.”

The cave full of bones. Drummond knew with dead certainty that was where Martyn would take Blandine.

“Where’d you get that animal?” he asked Jan.

“I stole him!” Jan said. “From them”—gesturing with his chin at the Hendrickson house.

Fantome suddenly bucked and whirled in a complete circle, whipping Jan’s head nearly off his body as he tried to hold on.

Drummond leapt up behind him. “You stole him or he stole you?”

Getting astride Fantome was like climbing onto some mythological creature, a griffin maybe, or Pegasus. The horse trembled as though he were about to explode straight up into the air.

“Go!” Antony said. “I’ll follow.”

He strode out onto Market Street, grabbed a good burgher from his saddle on a staid bright bay and put himself aboard instead. The burgher, seeing the size of his attacker and, especially, the enormity of the musket Antony carried, decided not to protest.

They took off, pounding down Market onto the parade ground, scattering walkers on all sides as they raced up the Broad Way, blowing through the sentryless land port into the open country beyond.

“We did not go far enough before,” Jan shouted to Drummond, breathless. The two of them had searched and searched for the bone-filled cave where Lightning had taken Jan. They looked among the towering rock piles of the clearing, halfway up the island. They had found nothing. They could never locate the cave.

But the orphans knew. Geddy Jansen knew.

Jolting along at top speed on the back of Fantome, clutched securely by Drummond so he would not fall off, Jan said, “We need to go all the way to the top of Manhattan.”

Twelve miles. Drummond hoped there would be time.

In the town behind them, a fusillade of cannon fire boomed.

“Dik-duk,”
said Martyn Hendrickson.

“Dik-duk,”
said Sabine, imitating him. That was a song she liked. The Bean sat on Blandine’s lap. Martyn sat atop a sawed-off stump across the fire ring, a couple yards away from them. Behind him loomed the dark and toothless maw of a cave.

Blandine had awakened, groggy, a fetid smell on her clothes, to find herself bound securely and Martyn gazing at her.

“How do you feel?” he asked. She didn’t answer. A vicious headache gripped her temples in a vise. But at least Sabine was with her and unharmed.

Martyn spoke again. “Did you enjoy the sweet oil of vitriol?
Oleum dulci vitrioli
, the director general would call the stuff. Effective, isn’t it? I discovered it in Germany and have been employing it quite often in my pastimes. The vapor gives one the sensation of death without its bothersome permanence. But the smell affronts the nose terribly.”

Like clouds passing from the sky, the effects of the ether lifted from Blandine’s mind. She still felt woozy.

“Don’t hurt her,” she said.

“Who, the little one? Or the mongrel?” He prodded an inert ball of fluff at his feet. Maddie. “Out cold. I might have overdone the dose.”

“Please, Martyn, do not harm Sabine. Take me instead.”

“Why not both?” Hendrickson said, smiling brightly. A pistol lay among the heap of clothes on the ground beside the dog. Children’s clothes, bloody rags from orphans, his trophies.

Lightning had liked bones. Martyn liked garments.

Blandine thought that Martyn had something amiss with his famous green eyes. The pupils glittered, enormous and jet black. He sucked on a short brass pipe.

The stench of Martyn’s tobacco sickened Blandine.

“You or the little one, what does it matter?” Martyn said. “I ask you that seriously. Doesn’t it seem to you that in this new world of ours, we have been entirely abandoned by God? Long ago I recognized you as a kindred spirit, one who believes as I do, in nothing.”

“Let her go,” Blandine said.

The Bean rocked in her lap. She clacked together the two human rib bones that Martyn had given her to play with.

The little girl remained in her red-stained dress, while Blandine still wore her torn, muddy gown. Martyn had left Blandine’s hands free, but bound her ankles and upper arms. She clutched onto Sabine.

“Put those down, honey,” Blandine said of the bones.

“No,” Sabine said stoutly.

Martyn laughed. “Oh, let her have them,” he said. “They are well boiled. They will do her no harm.”

“And you?” Blandine asked. “What harm will you do to her?”

“Let me ask you to imagine something, Blandine,” he said. “Journey up the North River to Fort Orange. Follow the Mohawk River to the west. You have done this, I know. Leave the river and go overland for a hundred leagues. You will find yourself in the middle of a trackless forest. Not even the
wilden
go there, their villages have been decimated by plague. It is an empty place, a wasteland.”

Martyn ran his fingers through his greasy locks. He took another deep suck on his pipe. Blandine finally recognized the smell from ships on which her goods traveled.

Poppy tears.

“Stand in the middle of such a place,” Martyn said, “and pronounce out loud the name Blandine van Couvering. Do you hear angels sing? No. Does God answer? No. Don’t you see? No one cares. No one is there.”

“So it doesn’t matter what we do,” Blandine said.

“It does not. Which means we can do anything.”

“Betray a friend.”

“What is that?” Martyn said. “That is nothing.”

“Murder.”

“Ah, yes. Your man is a soldier. He has killed many times, has he not? Yet you marry him and continue to cohabit with him. So murder shall give us no difficulty.”

“Terrorize a whole population,” Blandine said.

“As easily as one would drown a kitten,” Martyn said.

“Kill a child.”

“Yes! Yes!” Martyn cried, chortling. “Especially that.”

“Why ‘especially’?”

“Because that is the ultimate sin in the eyes of the world, Blandine,” Martyn said. “Once you can do that, you are free. Total, limitless freedom.”

“I could see how that would be attractive,” Blandine said.

“You say that just to humor me,” Martyn said, “but it really is true.”

He smiled.
“Dik-duk,”
he crooned to the Bean, and she, still occupied with the bones, said it back to him.

“She is no orphan,” Blandine said. “She has a mother.”