The Orphanmaster (6 page)

Just in the last week, an issue came into the chamber when two human heads were discovered while gathering in the cattle of settlers who had disappeared “in the last disaster”—an indian incursion. Visser officially declared the two heads were indeed those of the vanished men, Cornelis Swits and Tobias Clausen, thereby rendering their children wards of the orphanmaster.

“Pursuant to the intentions of this court,” Visser ruled, “the cattle shall be put to use for the benefit of the orphans.”

The severed heads of the fathers, he suggested, should be remanded
to the dominie of the Dutch Reformed Church, for possible reunification with their bodies, should such bodies ever be located.

Another case, Dorothea Janz, father drowned off Hell Gate in 1661, mother dead through ingestion of arsenic. Visser divvied up the family belongings. A blanket to the child’s aunt, a string of seawan to the foster parents, a bedstead that materialized magically in the best chamber of the director general’s sister. A cache of twenty silver rider coins, where did those end up? A mystery, thankfully unexamined by prying eyes.

Through it all, Visser maintained a rumpled, shambling, habitually hungover mien that concealed a shrewdness around the heart.

“Money is the root of all,” he would proclaim.

When she first heard him say that, young Blandine archly suggested to the orphanmaster that he had left off the tag end of the biblical epigram. “Doesn’t it say, Mister Visser, ‘money is the root of all evil’?”

“Oh, right,” Visser responded, chuckling. “I always forget that last part.”

No matter what the monetary issue might be, he loved his orphans. He said it all the time, and people believed him.

A man of Visser’s long experience could not be put off by the surliness of Blandine van Couvering. Surely, it was not customary for one of his wards to live independently at such an early age. But Visser hewed to the philosophy of letting well enough alone. The maiden, as far as he could see, was making her way in the world. To drag her kicking and screaming into a foster family’s home would do neither of them any good.

He looked in on her often in her rented rooms, stopped her in the street to ask after her well-being, gave out small gifts of raisins and walnuts. Visser made the introductions to merchants who helped Blandine reach her current status as a trader-on-her-way-up. The orphan girl felt her heart melting, and iced it against the orphanmaster again and again. But eventually, he won her over.

Now, in the wake of Piddy’s disappearance, Blandine sought Visser out. She knew where he would be after
Margrave
docked. He would have a flock of orphans from the ship, and would bring them to the yard behind one of the grand houses of the settlement. There, they would be parceled out for work.

She made her way through the snow to the dwelling-house of the
Hendrickson family. This is what wealth bought in Manhattan. The mansion was easily the largest private home in the colony. Two stories plus attics, a full seven bays wide, with grounds that could have sited several of the neighboring residences. The acreage stretched from Market Street to the family’s own private waterway, which connected to the larger canal, the Heere Gracht.

The black prospect of the Hendrickson mansion, clapboarded in dark-stained wood, always struck Blandine. Built of milled lumber, the house didn’t simply occupy its lot in the style of the other residences in Market Street, many of which were grand enough. The Hendrickson house didn’t sit, it loomed. The prominent jetties on the second floor made the place appear as though it might topple down upon whoever might approach it.

The house had another odd quality, too. The windows were not the traditional casements, broken up into small individual lead-lights, but rather new-style sash affairs. The expanse of blank panes resembled nothing else in the glass-starved colony. The windows stared down at Blandine like blind eyes. She passed through the front gates, along the dwelling-house walk, beneath the overhanging second story to reach the stable yards in the grounds behind.

A solitary, pretty young female seldom approaches a group of adult men without at least a measure of trepidation. In the area to the rear of the house, many of New Amsterdam’s worthies gathered to examine the orphans newly arrived on
Margrave
. Aet Visser was there, conducting business at the far side of the yard. Blandine’s loyal suitor, Kees Bayard, stood with Martyn Hendrickson himself, the youngest of the three Hendrickson brothers, the wealthiest men of the colony.

And the orphans. A pathetic group of ten clustered together in the mud and snow of the yard, clothed in rags, still wobbly and filthy from their transocean voyage. Each face displayed the stunned, faraway “Where am I?” look of those new to the new world.

Ranged against the orphans, the gentlemen worthies, dressed impeccably in the style of the day, waistcoats, matched doublets and lace collars. They teetered on their scarlet heels,
les talons rouges
, a style imported from the French court of Louis XIV.

A chronic labor shortage afflicted the colony, and Visser’s orphans-for-hire got snapped up soon after they stepped off the boat. The gentlemen checked the offerings, poking and prodding as though they were hell’s ferrymen, examining lost souls.

Blandine recoiled at the scene. She knew what it reminded her of: the slave market at the foot of Wall Street on the East River.

“Blandina,” Kees Bayard called, seeing her. The men all turned and straightened up, a pretty girl in their midst.

“We have another orphan up for grabs,” Martyn Hendrickson called out. “What do we bid on her, gentlemen?”

Kees glared at him and took Blandine’s hand. She withdrew it.

“If I had the means,” she said, “I would gladly sponsor all of the boys here.”

“Did you hear that, Visser?” Martyn called over to the orphanmaster. “We have a new proffer, you will have to top Miss Blandina’s price.”

Aet Visser, haggling with one of the gentleman worthies over a hollow-eyed scarecrow of barely ten years, looked over at Blandine and waved genially.

“I’ll have half of these myself,” Martyn said briskly. “Send them upriver to my brothers, work on the estate. Good healthy toil in the fields.”

“Plus they don’t eat much,” Blandine said.

Martyn ignored the hint of bitterness in her tone and laughed. “Exactly,” he said. “And if one of my brothers gets hungry, he can always cook himself up a couple of them.”

“I beg of you, sir,” Kees Bayard said, “not to be coarse in front of the lady.”

“Miss Blandina knows well I am only jesting,” Martyn said.

“Dear Martyn,” Blandine said. “The way one knows one is joking? Is if the other person is laughing.”

The two men stood on either side of Blandine as though vying for her favor. But Martyn Hendrickson could never be anyone’s suitor. A notorious gambler, drinker, whoremonger, he preferred dissipation to romance. Tempting as he was, the young women of the settlement despaired of Martyn Hendrickson. Killingly handsome, green-eyed, rich as a god, he appeared too wild to tame.

Blandine always thought she detected a loneliness behind Martyn’s unfocused eyes and brandy-slurred speech. Although the two of them could not possibly be more different in circumstance and outlook, they each had lost both parents. Martyn would never think of displaying vulnerability, but Blandine perceived it in him nonetheless. She recalled when she and Martyn were young, rattling about the settlement, lost and but shallowly rooted. Or perhaps she was just reading her hurt into his.

“I have just seen Lace and Mally,” Blandine said.

“Ah, the Africans again,” Kees said. He disapproved of Blandine’s friendship with the two women. It brought up troubling memories of the Mahican raid.

“I come with bad news,” Blandine said. “A little girl in the African community has gone missing.”

“And what is your bad news?” Martyn asked.

“For pity’s sake, Hendrickson,” Kees said. But he laughed in spite of himself.

“You are unfunny, sir,” Blandine said to Martyn, and crossed the yard to Aet Visser. She stopped beside him, waiting for him to finish his business.

With Visser was the orphanmaster’s frequent shadow, Lightning, a half-caste Esopus indian who prided himself on his European father. Lightning dressed as a Dutchman, spoke as a Dutchman and wished desperately to be a Dutchman. Blandine found him repulsive. As if sensitive to her feelings, Lightning faded away when she approached, crossing over to join Martyn Hendrickson.

Visser stood resting a hand on the shoulder of one of his wretched orphans. These boys were healthy enough, he thought, feeling the bones beneath the boy’s threadbare shirt. They’d serve anyone well as field hands.

The orphanmaster turned to his former ward.

“Miss Blandina,” he said. “This is not a place for you.”

“How much for that one over there?” Blandine cocked her chin at a young orphan boy.

“Please, it’s not that way,” Visser said. “I merely guide my wards toward gainful employment.”

Blandine poked Visser in his belly, where the heavy clink of money bags sounded.

The orphanmaster nodded, acknowledging her point. “We must live in the real world,” he said, sighing.

“The real world,” Blandine repeated. The orphans looked like a collection of stick figures, leaning against one another for support. From the streets and workhouses of Patria to a hard-labor existence in New Netherland. She loved a part of Aet Visser. But not this part.

“The Africans report a child of theirs lost or disappeared,” Blandine said. “Lace and Mally have gone frantic.”

“I know,” he said.

“You know? What do you mean? I just heard of this.”

“The boy has been gone a good week now,” Visser said.

“The boy? What boy?” Blandine said. “This is a little girl.”

Visser took Blandine’s arm and moved her to the far edge of the yard. “We must speak of this, but not now,” he said. “We’ll meet at our usual venue, after sundown, and have our sup.”

There was nothing Blandine could do. She left, her heart rending. If her life had played out differently, she could have been among the orphans lined up for work, getting pawed over like cattle.

The Hendrickson house beetled above her as she stepped out into the snowy muck of Market Street.

E
dward Drummond stayed with
Margrave
well into nightfall, supervising the unloading of his instrument case, his lenses and lens-grinding tools, purchased in the shops of London’s Long Acre and Chancery Lane, crated and couched in beds of wood shavings and straw.

“That one, there,” Drummond said of the coffin-sized wooden crate containing his prized brass perspective tubes. “Have a care.”

The porter bumped the crate down the wharf.

Drummond said to the man, “Is there a glassworks?”

“A glassworks?” Drummond might as well have asked,
Is there an elephant
?

On his way from Switzerland to meet
Margrave
in Rotterdam, he had time for a detour to Rijnsburg, to the laboratory of Benedict Spinoza, the lens grinder. He picked out a set of plano-concaves, a pair of lovely biconvexes, a concavo-convex, extremely fine work, the man was a magician, plus a disassembled treadle apparatus, in order that Drummond might better learn to grind his own.

At the dockside warehouse, he questioned the factor. “You keep a watch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All night?”

“My man lives atop the stairs,” the factor said.

Drummond stuck an English guinea into the man’s hand. “I’ll send word where to deliver my crates. Keep them safe.”

Hat, doffed. Forelock, tugged. Plus a stiff-cocked bow. Perhaps the guinea had been too much.

He saw his impedimenta safely warehoused and then, at nine o’clock, left the docks and proceeded down Pearl Street into the heart of town.

One reason to tarry about
Margrave
was to divest himself of shipmate Remunde, who possessed an inquiring sensibility, and thus might well
disrupt Drummond’s purpose in New Amsterdam. Send Gerrit home to his Gerta, and leave the questions behind.

Drummond must appear a simple grain merchant, newly arrived, in search of his lodgings. He possessed letters of trade that would present him as such.

One thing he enjoyed about the Dutch, perhaps their best characteristic, was that they were always too busy with their single-minded scurrying after profit to pay anyone else much mind.

The contemporary wisdom: “The Dutchman is a lusty, fat, two-legged cheese worm, a creature so addicted to eating butter, drinking fat drink and skating on ice that all the world knows him for a slippery fellow.”

Well, yes. But they were not all that way. Bento Spinoza, for example. A superior man in every aspect.

On his walk into the town Drummond saw himself clearly transported to the land of the cheese worms. A brawling, ruddy, crapulous bunch, snuffling along like pigs after truffles. The streets of the colony were alive even well after dark.

The new world, as far as Drummond could see upon first blush, was much like the old. Only dirtier.

If he squinted he could have been on any minor main street in a Kenmerland countryside village, in the muddy outer precincts of Assen, say, or Hunz.

Not the Flanders of the Van Eyck brothers, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt van Rijn or even the Brueghels. New Amsterdam felt more like the pig-gravy-and-sausage hamlets in the backwaters of the Zuider Zee, where the peasant boys stared at you gape-jawed, never having seen a human being they didn’t know from the cradle.

But no one stared at him here. Drummond, in his experiences in service to the crown, had attempted to perfect a posture of transparency. After periods of trial and error, in Amsterdam, the Hague, Paris and London itself, he found it a not difficult skill to possess.

Pull down your hat brim. Meet not the eyes of any passerby. Appear unlost, resolute in direction, with no hesitancy. Wear a dark cloak that swathes any identifying clothing. Keep to the marge.

Drummond once walked past a night watch in Bruges, passing within
three feet of his lantern. Then a cohort, George Post, trailing behind Edward, waylaid the man and asked if he had seen anyone abroad in the street just now. The night watch had sworn not.