The Orphanmaster (13 page)

Across the landscape, clots of laborers, dressed in tatters and wearing clogs, appeared as a forlorn army. No happy harvesters here, no milk or honey. Only recently, on a trip to Russia, Drummond had witnessed
serfdom in practice, and he was reminded of it now. Not much of a life for children.

Their lord and master, Adias Hendrickson, became animated only when he approached his stables. The patroon paddocked his complete herd, a dozen horses imported from Curaçao, he said.

Drummond liked a well-muscled roan, and he and Hendrickson concluded a deal. The man treated his horses with more respect than he did his farmworkers.

Drummond held off getting to the covert reason for his visit until after dinner, when his host offered buttered hard cider and tobacco. Only then did he ask about the strange Jopes Hawes killing, which Raeger told him about.

“Can you tell me, sir?”

Hendrickson worked his clay pipe with great sucking drafts. But still he stayed silent and frowning.

Drummond waited. Ham—Abraham, Adias’s brother—sat slouched in a chair at the back of the room. Ad looked over at Ham, both silent as monks.

Hiding something, thought Drummond again. He was about to entreat once more when Ad drank in a choking gulp of smoke, spewed it out (along with copious amounts of spittle) and spoke.

“Have you heard, sir, the name
witika
?”

Across the room, the heretofore motionless Ham Hendrickson stirred and coughed.

“The goblin of the river indians,” Drummond said.

“Very good, sir,” Ad Hendrickson said. “You’ve been schooled. You impress me.”

He sucked noisily on his pipe. “A demon, it is,” he said, “and a damnable one, too.”

“Superstition can have its uses,” Drummond said.

“What do you mean by that?” Ham demanded.

Ad said, “The witika stands three yards tall in its bare feet, and its feet are always bare, since it never wears shoes or clothes. This better shows the rotting flesh of its body, green and gray and speckled over with grave wax.”

“You paint a pretty picture,” Drummond said.

“In its chest lodges a beating heart made of ice,” Ad said. “Long, stringy hair, fouled with the dried blood of its victims. Great, red-rimmed eyes, but their centers are blank and black as a Bible.”

“Brother, for the Lord’s sake,” Ham said. “The man shouldn’t hear all this.”

Ad shook his head and continued. “For all its decrepitude, the witika is strong as a bear and fast as a lion. No man can outrun it. It can dash across the surface of water and leap in great bounds.”

“And who has seen this beast?” Drummond asked. “Have you?”

“Most who lay eyes upon the witika perish of fright,” Ad said. “Those who don’t, the beast murders. Those who survive go mad.”

“Then the question naturally occurs,” Drummond said, “as to how we know details of the creature’s appearance?”

“You are European, sir, an Englisher, you hail from the safe and sane precincts of the world. Here in this terrible new land, we are bereft of God. His glory has not yet penetrated the wilderness. The brutish old gods remain, the false idols and wild deities of the savages.”

“And the victim?” Drummond asked.

“The son of one of my tenants. Joseph Hawes, called Jope, twelve years of age. A smallish boy; we knew him. The family worked a farm plot on the eastern edge of our patent, past Pine Plains.”

Ham spoke up. “We told the Hawes people it was dangerous, living there. We thought the Sopus would rape the women to rags, skin the men alive, roast them all up and eat them.”

The obvious satisfaction with which Ham relayed his words made Drummond look over at him. But the man’s broad face remained inscrutable, either by expression or because it was lost in the gloom.

“But the indians didn’t get young Jope Hawes,” Drummond said. “Their demon did.”

“You are skeptical,” Ad said. “I understand that. I expect it. It was why I hesitated at first to traffic in such tales. You are a man of modern faith, sir?”

Modern faith. He meant nonconformist views. Drummond sidestepped. “And the circumstances of the killing,” he said. “What were they?”

“Jope has a living mother and two young sisters. They tell he left the homestead last July ides at dawn, with the view of a hunt in the
mountains to the east. Even at his young age, he was well-armed and experienced.”

“He served as ensign for a scout at Fort Orange,” Ham said.

“His parents found him dead?” Drummond asked.

“Here is where it gets interesting,” Ad said. “The mother, Christina, Kitty, avers she had a terrible dream that night, one of blood and fire, wherein her son stepped out of a hole in the ground and ascended skyward trailing flames.”

“A portent,” Drummond said.

“Exactly so. The goblin appeared to her also, a long-armed wracky creature with fangs.”

The Hendrickson brothers spoke Dutch with each other. Drummond’s fluency had been honed in his years in the Low Countries with the exiled second Charles. The brothers, he noted, used a northern dialect. Ham told Ad to be careful with his words and Ad told Ham to shut his mouth.

To Drummond, Ad continued. “The son Jope did not return when the family expected. A day later, now some ten weeks ago, poor young Jope’s body turned up in the woods, ravaged beyond belief. He lay beside a well-known spring, as if the killer wanted the body to be found.”

Ham spoke from the darkness. “Do you wish to hear the details, Mister Drummond? Listeners always want to hear the bloody details, don’t they, brother?”

“Who discovered the body?” Drummond asked.

“A freeholder from Canaan,” Ad said.

“From Connecticut?” Drummond asked. Now they were getting to it. “An Englishman?”

“You may well ask what he was doing abroad in our woods,” Ham said. “But your countrymen here make themselves very free with other men’s property.”

“Brother, you are rude to our guest,” Ad said mildly.

“That’s quite all right,” Drummond said. “I understand the borders remain unsurveyed.”

“They are clear, sir!” Ad said shrilly. “The borders are very clear!”

The next words out of his mouth, Drummond thought, would be “damned English.” But Ad settled back on his chair, and sucked his pipe.

“His rump was eaten,” Ham said. “That’s what you want to hear, don’t you?”

It’s evidently what you wish to tell me
.

“The witika is a great consumer of human flesh,” Ad said. “He himself is born of starvation. The more the witika eats, the more he hungers.”

“It gorges, yet still finds itself ravenous,” Ham said.

“I know how it feels,” Drummond said. “I’ve had such meals myself.”

The elder brother gaped at him, and then burst out laughing. “My word, sir, you are a pippin.” Turning to Ham, he said, “He’s had meals like that!”

“Could not the depredation of the body be from animals?” Drummond asked. “On my journey up here, I saw many beasts, including some sort of wolf-dog and the one you call a bobcat.”

“Humanlike teeth marks,” Ham said, practically crowing now. “Witika teeth marks on dear dead Jope’s rump, his shoulder, his cheeks. The monster ate out the young boy’s eyes. And it proved a great relisher of the male genitals.”

“Do the natives here customarily indulge in cannibalism?” Drummond said.

“There were other indications of the river indians,” Ad said. “Certain totems left around the body in the ritualistic way.”

“Sopus totems?” Drummond asked.

“Yah,” Ad said. “They make a sign, a circle with a cross, like this.”

He drew in the ashes spilled from the hearth.

The sign seemed to agitate Ham. “What does it matter!” he shouted. He raised himself out of his chair and stormed over to the fire, stamping his foot on the hearth bricks to erase the sign his brother had drawn. Ham stood over Drummond and brandished his flagon like a war club.

“Zelf kalm, broer,”
Ad said in Dutch. Calm thyself, brother.

“If one would seek to sow dissension between the peoples of New
England and those here in New Netherland,” Drummond said, “he need only spark another Esopus war such as the one near past. Is that not so?”

“It is the damned English who stir up the Sopus against us,” Ham said, vehement.

Finally, thought Drummond, the English had been damned, as he knew they would be.

“I don’t mean to upset you,” he said. “And I sorrow over any trespass committed by my countrymen. I only mean to get at the truth of the matter.”

“Are you a representative of the crown?” Ad said.

“As I told you, I am only a grain merchant, en route to Fort Orange on a mission of trade in wheat. One of my confederates asked me to shake out the details of this matter. I do so in a purely unofficial way.”

“We don’t believe you,” Ham said.

“We’ll say no more, say no more,” Ad said quickly. “Lest we wind up poisoning our acquaintance with barbs and accusations.”

That was all right. Drummond judged himself ready to quit anyway. The Hendricksons’ excellent, butter-heavy cider foxed his brain, and he didn’t want his probing to further alert the patroons about English interest in the area. They were clearly touchy about the subject.

He managed a cordial good-night to Ad. Taper in hand, Brother Ham conducted him to a bed in a rickety lean-to, where a servant man already snored loudly.

As Ham was leaving, Drummond said, “There is a third Hendrickson brother? Martyn?”

Ham turned to stare at him.

“I saw him briefly in New Amsterdam at the Red Lion,” Drummond said. “He’s an important man in the capital, is he not?”

Ham snorted derisively. “You don’t know nothing,” he said.

Drummond caught a look at his face, lit from below by the candle. An expression crossed Ham’s features, violently seizing the man, then just as abruptly vanished. Drummond couldn’t call it by any other name than fury.

“Don’t go on about Martyn,” Ham said, “or I’ll whip ye good.” He blew out his candle, plunging Drummond into blackness.

B
landine came to the big Saturday market with a jug of good Barbados molasses, planning on letting the Lenape and Mohawk children get a taste, and draw in their elders that way.

But she was glad she had it along, since a Beverwyck landowner named Embers de With immediately sought it in trade for a small wooden keg of saltpeter.

“I don’t need the stone salt myself,” he explained. “But the molasses I can use.”

The natives flooded Beverwyck’s central square, coming in from the lodges the local merchants made available to them for sleeping during market time. The taverns, at ten o’clock in the morning, already had eager customers.

Beverwyck. In English, “Beaver Town.”

The open square at the intersection of Handlaer and Yonkheer streets, the site of heaviest trading, went by the name of “the Fuyck,” a Dutch transliteration of a native word. Understandably, the usage gave rise to much bawdy punning on the part of the English traders allowed to do business there.

The snows of the past days had vanished. The sun beat down on the scene, offering one of the few hot days left to the season, before cold and winter dark descended on this part of the world.

Blandine luxuriated in the warmth of sunshine on her neck, and loosened the lace scarf that propriety demanded she wear, a demand she honored more in the breach than in the observance.

She could not afford a huge wardrobe, but the clothes she did possess tended to the bright and feminine, and today she wore a cornflower blue dress with a tight bodice, blousy sleeves and a yellow petticoat underneath. She considered caps foolish.

Sunning herself in the Fuyck, seated atop her barrel of saltpeter, knocking her heels against its staves, Blandine saw Edward Drummond before the man saw her.

Drummond, the grain merchant from the Red Lion.

The Englishman, dressed simply in a flowing white blouse, leather breeches and knee-high jackboots, strode up the hill from the fort, toward the sprawling market where all the day’s trading would take place.

She watched Drummond talk volubly in the middle of a small clutch of grain merchants and fur
handlaers
. This was a man, it struck Blandine, who was acting a role, and who certainly thought it a great lark to be Mister Edward Drummond.

Well, Mister Drummond
, she lied to herself,
I had forgotten all about you
. She was surprised to see him in the north. Could it have been Drummond who these past few days she felt watching her?

The men and women surrounding the Englishman attended to him slavishly, hanging on his every word. Blandine felt disgusted by the fawning sycophancy that colonists directed toward aristocratic Europeans.

As one born and bred in America, Blandine van Couvering had the opposite feeling. She knew that people in New Netherland were somehow stronger, more resilient and braver than their transatlantic cousins. At least she felt herself to be.

Drummond saw Blandine across the crowded market. Smiling broadly, he gave her a full Court of St. James bow.

Ugh. The pompous English fop.

She jumped down from her perch, turned away from him, kicked the cask of stone salt in front of her and attempted to disappear among the numberless traders that had flocked to the big market day.