The Orphanmaster (56 page)

“Unfortunate,” Martyn said. “I shall have to break my rule.”

“I am one,” Blandine said. “I am an orphan.”

“Yes, I know.”

“We orphans are special, are we not? So alone, so vulnerable,” Blandine said. “I wonder if you cried yourself to sleep as a child.”

“Shut your mouth,” Martyn said.

“Yes, we are alike,” Blandine said, her hands gripping Sabine tightly, her eyes blazing. “Both parentless, both without God. But there you are, and here I am. We are free to make choices, and we have both made them, haven’t we?”

“I have tasted white, black and red flesh,” Martyn said. “Lightning even found me some yellow flesh once, from a cook’s boy on a merchant ship just in from Asia. But do you know what I have never done?”

He waited, clearly expecting Blandine to hold up her end of an insane conversation. She worked silently to loose the bonds that wrapped around her arms, but they only tightened more.

“What I haven’t done is… eat live flesh,” Martyn said.

“Take me instead,” Blandine said, begging him.

“A trader to the last!” Martyn said, laughing and shaking his head. “Oh, you know, adult humans are rotten with the sins of the world. Their meat is rancid, most unpalatable. I much prefer the fresh.”

“Would it matter if it were the meat of a pregnant woman?” Blandine asked.

“Ah, really? My hearty congratulations. I wondered at your heaviness when I hefted you. And that is an interesting offer. But I can always tear the thing out of your body.”

He took up a brand from the smoldering fire and put it to his pipe. “I’ve witnessed it done in the war,” he said, exuding smoke from his mouth, like the Devil. “By both sides.”

Blandine could see a change come over Martyn. She had never seen an opium taker before, but she felt him slipping away from her, going unfocused and remote.

Martyn stretched out his hand. “Come here, pretty Sabine,” he said languidly. “Sit on my lap.”

“Don’t,” Blandine said.

Martyn rose to his feet. Suddenly energized, he declaimed as if onstage, “Madame, I have seen with my own eyes Lightning pull a man’s entrails out of his gut, unravel them and then force-feed them back into that same man’s own mouth, making him to chew! And you say to me ‘Don’t’? Don’t? Can’t you do any better?”

He pulled down the deerskin mask across his face, and mounted a strange pair of wooden stilts that made him tower over the clearing.

The Bean looked up at him and began to cry.

A
fter Peer set Jan aboard the big stallion, the Coney Boys and the High Street Gang began phase two of their operation. They attacked the Hendrickson house with a barrage of stone-throwing.

Children hated the place. The orphans knew without knowing that it had some connection with the disappearances of their own. An ominous air of dread emanated from the mansion. The peculiar brothers who lived there became evil figures in the mythology of the orphans, wealthy but malevolent monsters. The decrepit, shuttered residence took on the nature of a spook house. And a spook house just naturally attracts rocks.

Revolution hung in the air. The Dutch had been swept out, but the English had not yet asserted control. Anarchy quickly slipped its leash and loosed itself upon the settlement.

“Now we have a hope to pepper these devilish Dutch traders,” swore a drunken German shiv-man at the Jug. “They have salted us too long. We know where their booty is stored.”

Added a menacing Polish sailor beside him, “And we know where the young girls live who wear gold chains.”

Peer Gravenraet embraced the innate anarchy of the twelve-year-old, and he loved the tinkling sound of smashed glass. He didn’t often get a chance to hear it.

“Let’s go!” he said, ordering his troops forward.

“Fetch the pickles!” shouted the orphans, their rallying cry. “For Tibb!”

“For the ones we’ve lost!” Peer called out sententiously.

It was Sebastian Klos—or his brother, Quinn, it was difficult to tell them apart—who cast the first stone. Soon a dark shower of rocks rained down upon the Hendrickson manse, lofted by the Coney Boys and the High Street Gang.

How did the fire happen? How did stone-throwing turn to arson? No one knows. Perhaps a projectile from the hand of Quinn Klos, smashing
through one of the big sash windows, ricocheted into the
groot kamer
where Ham Hendrickson lay dead, felled by his own brother’s hand.

The thrown rock tipped over an oil lamp. The lamp spilled its fuel. The wick ignited a flame.

A wood-framed, clapboard dwelling-house is an invitation to the gods of fire, a match waiting to be struck. It took only a moment before the flames rose and the house was beyond saving. An orange-black divinity leapt fully born from the roof, roaring, fattening, ascending.

The Coney Boys and the High Street Gang stood stupefied as angry spouts of smoke and fire billowed from the windows they had just finished breaking.

It was by far the most wonderful sight any of them had ever seen.

A half-etherized Blandine crawled on her hands and knees across the uneven surface of the Place of Stones. Her head throbbed so badly it felt split open. A harsh chemical stench filled her nostrils. She threw up a little, but still struggled forward.

Flat stones littered the dirt of the clearing. Sheep-gray rock formations towered like madness overhead. Just beyond her showed the blank eye of the cave.

She had fought against it, but Martyn had doped her again, covering her face with the foul-smelling handkerchief. Then he untied her bonds and laughed while she staggered drunkenly around the clearing, flailing at him. Another dose from the handkerchief. As Blandine lost consciousness, she witnessed him disappear into the cave, hauling Sabine under one arm.

The fire ring displayed the familiar wooden stakes pounded into a circle, ready to be garlanded by a string of guts. In the still-warm ashes, a set of tiny fingers, laid ritualistically in the shape of a fan.

Blandine clutched at wakefulness, lost it, grabbed at it again. The veins in her temples pealed like church bells. She tried to concentrate, to block out the rush of her own poisoned blood.

She heard gurgling water in the stone-choked creek bed down below. And then, from within the cave, the sound of a woman’s voice, soothing a child.

“Hush, little one.” Strange female tones, fussing, cooing, tut-tutting. “Now, now, it’s all right.”

Blandine’s mind would not order itself. A woman? A matron? Was it her own mother, Josette’s voice? She was hearing things.

“Little Martyn will be all better now,” the mother promised.

The woman’s high-pitched voice was cut by another, a child’s snuffling, hiccupping cry. The Bean.

Blandine rose to her feet and stumbled to the cave entrance.

Strewn on the ground in front were dead ashes and chunks of blackened wood. They crunched under Blandine’s bare feet as she crossed the threshold into the stone chamber.

A single step led her out of the sunlight and into a dim subterranean coolness, sharply felt after the heat of the day.

A smell of decomposition. Cluttered on the floor of the cave were bones, hundreds, piled and stacked, sorted into a mad kind of order. Blandine recognized deer bones, those of cattle, other animals. Hooves, antlers, everything in between.

The human bones assembled themselves to one side, arranged into a sort of shrine. Candle wax had dripped onto the dirt below, cooling into dirty lumps. A small-statured skeleton, dressed in children’s clothes, posed as if to beckon Blandine forward. A necklace fashioned from human nipples hung around its spine.

She shuddered. Where was the Bean? An unreal silence. The stone walls closed in on her. Blandine forced herself to keep going toward the shadows at the back of the cave. She felt as though she were being swallowed.

From the deep recesses, whispery voices echoed. “Time for a bath,” the mother said, her words sleepy and soft. “Shall we take off your clothes?”

“No, no, don’t want to,” said the muffled, teary voice of the child.

“Dik-duk, dik-duk,”
the mother’s voice sang. “Ain’t that how my little chick clucks?”

Then, an answering childlike voice:
“Moeder, moeder, moeder.”
Mother, mother, mother. Or, perhaps, she wasn’t hearing right, murder, murder, murder. The voice wasn’t Sabine’s. How many lost souls were in there?

The dirt floor of the cave sloped downward toward a narrow cleft.

Blandine pressed herself against the wall. Her thoughts were clearing
by the minute. The cleft led into another chamber. She had to bend over and crawl on her hands and knees again in order to slip through the cramped passage.

A large space. In the weak yellow glow of a single flickering taper, Blandine saw Sabine, totally naked, crouched upon a large flat rock. A carpet of dark-green moss lay atop the stone. The child had the witika sign drawn in ash across her chest. In the muted light, Blandine caught a heartrending, hope-abandoned look on the Bean’s face.

Blandine rose from the passageway and moved forward, touching the rough rocks, approaching the girl. “Hush, little one,” she said, unconsciously mimicking the woman’s voice she had just heard. “It’s all right.”

She reached the Bean and gathered her into her arms.

A movement behind her.

The witika demon, its shadow huge on the cave wall.

The deerskin face glared down at her, the blood scabs shining in the candlelight.

From behind the deerskin mask came the cloying woman’s voice. “Good boy. Good little Martyn.”

The monster loomed tall, spreading out its arms, reaching for Blandine and the Bean.

In one hand it held a pistol.

As though events were happening with agonizing slowness, Blandine saw the thumb pulling back the hammer, heard the click as the pin cocked, witnessed the finger tighten on the trigger.

“Martyn!” Blandine shouted, lashing out with her feet at the candle on the crude stone altar.

Lights out.

Sabine tight in her arms, she rolled sideways. The gun exploded, echoing in the closed rock chamber of the cave.

The muzzle flash strobed the darkness, illuminating the witika apparition as in a dream. Afterward, the cave chamber returned to sudden pitch-black darkness, hung with a gunpowder stink.

Sabine clung to her. Deafened, blinded, Blandine scrabbled forward, seeking the way out, the low passageway cleaved into the rock. Nothing. A dirty stone wall.

Behind them, the demon came on. Blandine could smell him, foul and close. He was right behind her.

Her hand groped forward and found the cleft. She pushed Sabine into it. “Run, now,” she said. “Run and don’t stop.”

Little Sabine wouldn’t leave.

“Go, go,” Blandine said, and pushed the child away from her again.

A hand seized Blandine’s ankle, pulling her backward across the rough floor, into the yawning gulf of the inner chamber.

Drummond, Antony and Jan arrived among the rocky promontories near the Place of Stones, having blown out their horses on the frantic trip up the island. They found themselves at the northernmost tip of Manhattan.

Kitane was with them. They had picked him up in Little Angola, the Lenape trapper leaping easily up behind Antony on the borrowed bay mare.

“It’s up there,” Jan told Drummond, recognizing the gray rock faces where Lightning had led him before.

The four of them hitched the mounts and climbed to a slot in the crags where they could see the flat, stone-littered clearing and the cave opening beyond it.

“Where are they?” Antony said.

A terrifying vision suddenly presented itself: Sabine, naked, running as fast as her small legs could pump, tearing out from inside the cave and crossing the Place of Stones in a fear-blinded dash.

Drummond moved forward and swept the girl up in his arms. The Bean struggled against him, terror not allowing the child to realize who it was that had her. But she saw Jan and her hysteria receded.

“Jannie,” she sobbed.

“Where is Blandina?” Drummond asked. “Where is your Ina, Sabine?”

The child gestured to the cave.

Drummond let Jan have the Bean and turned to confer with Antony and Kitane.

“We come in on three sides,” he said. “Give me five minutes to move around to the cliffside there.” He gestured to the rock face towering over the cave.

“We should go in now, all together,” Antony said. “Every minute could matter.”

“I need to know that there’s not another way out,” Drummond said, and he moved off before any more discussion could delay him.

The witika demon brought Blandine to the mouth of the cave, a dagger pressed at her throat.

“Sabine is gone,” Blandine said through gritted teeth. “You’ll never get her.”

The beast lowered the blade to her abdomen. With a slashing movement, the knife sliced open Blandine’s already torn and muddy dress.

She felt the blade, cold against her flesh. The Devil was after her unborn. She pushed away hard, putting all the leverage she had into her elbow.

Martyn Hendrickson tottered and swayed backward on the strange wooden buskins he wore to elevate himself to nine feet.

At that moment Edward Drummond dropped from the gray stone crags above the cave, tackling Martyn.

In her exhausted and half-drugged state, Blandine at first thought the whole cliffside had fallen, a rock slide, an avalanche. But it was Drummond.

The two men collapsed in a heap. As he fell, the blade of Martyn’s dagger twisted upward and ended up embedded deeply in his own shoulder. He had inadvertently stabbed himself when Drummond struck him from above.

Blandine had never seen Drummond this way. Fury rode him. He tore off the man’s witika mask and flung it away.

Martyn fell back, his face twisted into a sick, red-faced snarl. He panted like a cornered animal. But his eyes looked strangely blank, mesmerized with opium.

Drummond began pummeling him. As his fists smashed into the handsome face, over and over, Martyn reached up with one arm as though to ward off the blows.

Blandine saw the dagger. Martyn groped for the handle of the knife.