The Orphanmaster (15 page)

D
rummond left Beverwyck and took Peterson’s ferry across the river, finding himself once again traveling across the sprawling patent of the Hendrickson brothers. But he felt eager now to initiate his New Haven mission against the regicides, and had no time to waste on Ad Hendrickson’s natterings about goblins.

Picking up the roan at the inn on the eastern shore where he had stabled it, he set out upon the Post Road toward New England. The land was wild. The road, really no more than a track carved out by indians, led through a succession of small but difficult fordings.

It did not help to ease Drummond’s mind that every other farmhouse had been burned out in the recent Esopus wars, leaving charred timber skeletons exposed to the elements.

He stayed over at an informal farmhouse hostelry, for once not having to share a bed.

That night a woman cried in the forest. Moaning, sobbing, inconsolable. Drummond rose, the night still pitch dark. He padded out to the porch of the farmhouse, peering into the inky black.

“What the devil?” he murmured to himself. The weeping crescendoed and fell, then mounted again. It sounded as though a woman were being murdered, or her child had been taken from her. Great, gasping yowls that went beyond pain to get at the horror of existence. Drummond felt lost and alone.

“Catamountain,” his host said, suddenly appearing, disheveled but wakeful, by his side. “They cry at night.”

The next day, the terrain turned mountainous, and the track climbed through hilly rumps of dense deciduous woods, alternating with deep gullies and swales, the Taconic Range. The forest floor lay thick with the golden litter of autumn leaves.

Taking up the Mohawk Trail, he drove himself onward even as a pelting rain began. The roan had difficulty keeping its footing, slipping often on the wet, slushy leaves.

The miles proved monotonous. To help himself along Drummond repeated, in a sort of singsong, the names of the three New Haven regicides. “Whalley and Dixwell and Goffe.” Over and over.

He switched to the names of the saints. “Francis and Stephen and Paul.” Then back to the regicides.

The crown had been trying for years to get at the regicides who had taken refuge in New England, living incognito in Cambridge. In 1661, the second Charles issued an order of arrest for the three. The document arrived in Boston on the heels of the fleeing outlaws.

They were old men now. Whalley, father-in-law to Goffe and son of the sheriff of Nottingham, signed his name next after Cromwell’s on the king’s death warrant.

As a young lieutenant, Drummond served with General Keith on the field at Worcester. He had met Whalley in battle, in front of Powick Bridge. Now he had the honor of helping to crucify him. He left unasked the question of whether the man was a traitor or a zealot. Whalley existed on the other side of the line of battle, and that was that.

Drummond had never actually sunk the blade into any of the regicides he tracked, leaving that to more sanguinary hands. His spymasters did not deign to ask someone of Drummond’s rank to get his soul dirty, any more than they would do the job themselves. His assignment was only to seek out the renegades and convey information about their whereabouts to the crown. Someone else killed them.

The French, if they knew about Drummond, would have labeled him “
le doigt-homme
.” The finger-man. But the French did not know about him.

After they fled Boston, Whalley, Dixwell and Goffe easily found allies to hide them. There were plenty in New England who hated the king, feared the papistry and adhered to the deceased Cromwell and the republican cause. Somewhere among them, in the Massachusetts Bay colony, or perhaps in Connecticut, the regicides had discovered what they considered a safe nest.

Drummond would flush them out.

The downpour turned vicious, the rain coming at him not from above but on a howling slant, a northeaster storm. He tightened the shaggy bearskin around him. It provided some comfort, even soaked as it was.

The massive pelt had been a gift from Blandine van Couvering when they parted after the trading days in Beverwyck. A begrudging gift, a strained mercy, granted, she said, in acknowledgment of Drummond’s intercession in the Embers de With trade.

After her mink-for-land triumph, Drummond had lost Blandine in the crowd of
handlaers
. They loved her, and loved most that she had managed to trade back for her original jug of molasses. She started with the jug, and ended with the jug plus an acre of prime Beverwyck land. Now that was a trader.

Drummond found Blandine again off the Fuyck, just as she was about to enter an inn. The crude, single-story log hostelry faced a burbling stream the Dutch called Tweedle Kill.

The darkness had come on completely, but there was a little light escaping from the windows of the inn. Drummond caught sight of a head of white-blond hair and called out Blandine’s name.

She turned to him solemnly, unsurprised. As Drummond approached, the woman’s giant loomed out of the darkness, hefting the bearskin, folded into a mattress-sized bundle and tied with deer-sinew cords.

“I want to give you this,” she informed Drummond, “but not to encourage you to enter into my affairs again. I simply don’t wish to feel myself beholden to you.”

Antony laid the gift at Drummond’s feet.

“So we are even,” Blandine said. “You helped me with the trade, even though I did not ask it. This is a good skin of a nice-sized western bruin. We are quits.”

“We may be even,” he said. “But perhaps we are not quits.”

Blandine turned away. “Good night, Mister Drummond,” she said, and disappeared through the lantern-lit doorway.

Blandine was miles behind him now. Drummond had no idea where the woman was. Still in Beverwyck? On her way back to New Amsterdam? But if her mind ever played over him—would it? did it?—it made him curiously happy to think she might think that he was thinking of her. Out in the wilderness dark.

The bearskin was immense, wide as a tent, taken off some sort of
gargantuan she-bear. Inside it had been provided with arm slings and tanned to the softness of deer leather.

Getting her hands on such an impressive specimen no doubt represented a coup for Miss van Couvering. The young she-merchant had her contacts, though, among them the well-adorned Mohawk women with whom he’d seen Blandine in the Fuyck. And of course this man Kitane, the legendary Lenape trapper Drummond had heard so much about but never seen.

The roan’s head, streaming with icy water, hung in a most dispirited manner. The wind lashed, the blackness of night settled, the storm howled. Again and again, Drummond lost any sense of the trail, having to double back to locate it.

Footing turned from merely treacherous to downright lethal, with jumbled rocks and crisscrossing roots hidden under the layer of wet leaves. He considered that only Blandine’s bearskin, draped over him and falling across the withers of his mount, kept him from freezing to death.

He dismounted and led the roan, both of them exhausted, stumbling forward through the forest. If he didn’t find a haven soon, he would have to make a very ugly, very uncomfortable camp. He kept an eye for rock shelves beneath which to crawl.

Another thought brought him up short, one that indicated the gift of the bearskin might not be so straightforward as it seemed. Yes, the robe was big. Massive, in truth. Just the thing in nasty weather. But he had ignored one salient fact about it. The pelt’s bulk meant there were bears the size of horses abroad in the American woods.

To Drummond, lost and alone in the unfathomable wild, the mind played tricks. Rampaging she-bears hid behind every boulder. If one approached, he decided, he’d give it the roan.

He envisioned what would happen to him. The she-bear would insist on taking back her skin. His blue corpse would be found months later, the frozen flesh gnawed upon by the hungry witika. The soul-wrenching night-crying of the catamount still infected his mind.

Drummond knew his thoughts were rambling, but he couldn’t help himself. He hunched down into the pelt and wished the journey would end. He considered the person of Blandine van Couvering.

During his years of exile in the Netherlands, Drummond had encountered many other independent Dutch women, so different from the docile handmaidens he had left behind in England. Beguiled and bedeviled, attracted and affronted in equal measure, Drummond had never been able to grasp what it was these women wanted.

To be taken for a male? To destroy the space between man and woman? To possess the world on their own?

And now, this one. Pretty as a painting, but thorny as a rose.

Put her out of your mind, man.

But he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, and his fussing over the memory of Blandine almost made him lose the way.

When a low stone tavern revealed itself, he slogged right past it. No lights marked the place. Only his horse’s tug at the reins alerted him to halt.

To Blandine’s surprise, Antony had evidently developed Beverwyck connections of his own, since by the end of market, he was able to inform her where the Lenape trapper Kitane had last been seen.

They took the
Rose
again, sailing downriver, but stepped off the sloop when she put in at Wildwyck, the Dutch community at the head of Ronduit Kill. Blandine hired a skiff to ferry them across to the eastern shore of the river. From then forward, they proceeded on foot, penetrating the forest along an unnamed creek. This was where Antony had heard Kitane might be.

She had a sense of urgency, wondering what was happening in New Amsterdam, spurred by the idea that the Lenape might help her understand the abduction of an orphan child. The disappearance of Piddy Gullee connected in her mind with the ritualized killing of Jope Hawes, and Blandine felt certain that Kitane could give her insight into the mystery of the witika.

The storm winds of the previous night had stripped most of the remaining autumn leaves from the trees. What few remained were a golden shade of copper, on the oaks, which were always the last trees to lose their foliage. The night’s rains freshened the forest air, the walking proved cool but not uncomfortable and Blandine followed Antony easily along the barely there track through the woods.

The stream they followed pooled into a swamp, which in turn led to a lake. At dusk Blandine and Antony entered the ghostly precincts of an abandoned native village on the shore of the lake. Lodges—the river indians called the larger ones their “castles,” adopting the word readily from Europeans—dotted the forest floor beneath an expansive stand of sugar maples.

Lenapes loved the “sweet water” sap from maples, and considered the tree itself inhabited by beneficial spirits. Maples, Kitane informed Blandine once, were great tellers of jokes.

But there were no jokes to be told here. The lodges were empty, decrepit, their tree-bark wall panels curled up and admitting rain to the interiors. Maple boughs had fallen to collapse the roofs of a few of the castles. In the flats around the lake, fields once cultivated with corn lay overgrown with quick-growing sumac and bracken.

This was once the great village of Upukuipising, haunt of the Wappinger federation, tribal brothers of the Lenape.

“Here?” Blandine asked Antony, looking around at the devastated village.

“She told me, look in Upukuipising,” Antony said, mangling the Algonquin word.

“She, who?”

“I said already. The Mohawk woman.”

“What would she know of the Wappinger?”

Antony shrugged. “This is that village?”

“Yes, but there is no one here,” Blandine said.

“We can at least camp the night,” Antony said. “I’ll build a fire.”

The place gave Blandine a disconsolate feeling. She would have rather not stayed. Sickness and death marked every lodge. Even the breeze, passing through the plague-decimated village, shushed itself forlornly. But the evening came on, and there was nothing for it. They had to halt for the night.

As Antony gathered wood, she laid out their dinner, dried pippins, salted venison ham, chunks of sweetened bread buttered with beef tallow. When she went to fetch water, she discovered the stream had a pleasant taste. Upukuipising, she knew, meant something like “lodge among the
reeds by the little stream.” She had visited here as a girl years ago, in the village’s heyday, with her father.

“All dead,” she murmured to Antony, as they ate together by the fire.

“Or gone across the river,” Antony said. “To get away from us.”

She would go back to New Amsterdam, she thought, marry Kees Bayard, have a family, construct a trading empire, leave the past behind. Edward Drummond would no more figure in her life except as a fleeting memory.

Full dark, no moon. Bats rose into the night sky, darting black dots against the blue stars.

Later, Blandine felt compelled to visit each of the old lodges in turn, not the ones far afield, scattered in the woods, but at least the dozen or so that were bunched together on the slope above the lake. Taking an oil lantern, she wandered through the deserted village.

At times such as these, evenings in the forest, loneliness seized her like a black dog. She kept telling herself it was pure weakness, that she had to be strong to stay alive in this world. Her orphanhood hung about her like a cloak. You shall not feel sorry for yourself, she commanded, and then disobeyed.

Wilderness was where she lost God. She had not known her sister, Sarah, for that long, only a few years. But some children charm you, bewitch you, warm you with their glow. Sarah had a way with her… but what was the use? How to describe to anyone what Blandine had lost?

She realized what she was looking for as she traipsed from one empty lodge to another. Her family. She imagined herself going about the whole world, street after street, knocking on doors. Finally, behind one of them, she would discover her mother, Josette, at the hearth.

Blandine’s secret: beneath the surface veneer of stubborn independence, she needed desperately to belong to somebody.

She could see the fire that Antony had built, beneath the trees down the slope toward the lake. She felt as though she were orbiting the thin, wavering light in vain, circling, never to come home.