The Orphanmaster (24 page)

Her dwelling-house. Her windows. Her rooms on Pearl Street.

Drummond had been spying on her.

Drummond hurried along the canal, crossed a bridge at Brouwer and headed down the street toward Blandine’s dwelling-house. He felt upset and worried about what he had just seen through the glass.

Actually, the sight had been so strange, so unexpected, that Drummond mistrusted his own eyes. Standing on his rooftop, playing his spyglass over the ships moored in the East River road, he had suddenly swung around, on impulse, and searched out the two-story clapboard house on Pearl Street where Blandine van Couvering rented rooms.

A whim, really, nothing more. He had been thinking of the woman, and the spyglass simply represented a playful way to render her closer.

Bending himself to the eyepiece, he adjusted the aim until he fixed on what he wanted. But as Blandine’s home swam into view, he found he had focused on something very different than a common unpainted Dutch dwelling-house. Standing in the backyard of the place, gloomed in by shadow, a figure stood motionless. Its tall, shapeless body was indistinct, but its face was clear enough, even to Drummond’s sight from a quarter mile away.

Not a face at all, but a mask with blank eyeholes and a cruel slash for a mouth.

Drummond had never seen one before, but he felt sure he was looking at the witika.

Tall, towering, beyond any human stature. The being seemed to float without walking, moving forward.

Taking the rungs of the ladder three at a time, Drummond rushed downstairs, through his ground-floor rooms and out into the late afternoon hubbub of the street.

Halfway down Pearl Street, he met Antony and the river indian Kitane, coming along the other way.

“Is she home?” he demanded of the giant, nearly frantic.

Antony shook his head. “I don’t know where she went,” he said slowly. Distress appeared on his face. He was uncomfortable not being sure, for once, just exactly where Blandine van Couvering was.

“She told me to take Kitane home,” Antony said, gesturing to the native.

“I saw something, I just saw something,” Drummond said. “At her house.”

“When?”

“Now!”

“You were there?” Antony asked.

“No,” Drummond said. “Or, yes. I was looking through the perspective tube.”

Antony pulled a long look at Drummond.

“It was the monster, the goblin thing,” Drummond said.

“You saw the witika?” Antony said.

Kitane let out a moan. As much as any man with Lenni Lenape blood can pale, he paled. Then he bent at the waist and vomited over Drummond’s shoes.

“By the bowels of Christ!” Drummond shouted.

“He’s sick,” Antony explained.

“No joking,” Drummond said.

“He thinks he’s being stalked by the goblin.”

Drummond stomped the cruller puke off his feet. No one paid the trio any mind. The colonists had seen many men empty their stomachs in the street before. It was a common-enough occurrence.

One person who happened to be passing by did notice him. “Mister Drummond?” said his old
Margrave
shipmate Gerrit Remunde.

“We have to—Let’s go!” Drummond said. He ran off toward Pearl Street, not waiting to see if Antony and the stricken Kitane would follow, leaving Remunde looking puzzled.

He found Blandine’s dwelling-house empty, its mistress not at home.
In the yard behind her rooms, nothing. The afternoon shadows had cast themselves farther across the garden, that was all.

“The beast has taken her,” Drummond said.

“No, no, she was just here with Kees,” Antony said.

“Kees Bayard?”

“We were together not fifteen minutes ago, and then she sent us out.”

Drummond and Antony searched the premises. The rooms, and then the garden. Kitane didn’t help. He stayed seated on the back steps that led from the yard to the door into Blandine’s
groot kamer
. He still looked queasy.

Antony and Drummond walked the yards, the paths behind the yards, the little narrow alley leading down toward the shore. Nothing. They returned to Blandine’s garden empty-handed.

Antony stared at Drummond strangely. He didn’t have to say what he was thinking.

“It was here, I tell you,” Drummond protested. “It was this house, this yard. Look!”

He pointed northeast across the settlement. He could pick out his own rooftop, where the brass perspective tube propped on its tripod reflected a glint of the setting sun.

“Tell me,” Drummond said. “Did Kees Bayard have time to dress himself up as the witika?”

“The witika is no man,” Antony said. “No natural man, anyway.”

Drummond paced the yard again, then bent down to examine the ground.

A series of impressions marked the soil along the edge of the yard, pushed an inch deep into a soft loam of the garden.

“Well, it wasn’t the beast,” he said, loud enough for Kitane to hear. “Or if it was, the creature wears European shoes.”

F
our dark-haired, dark-eyed children sat on the backless bench, their feet swinging well above the floor. Aet Visser had a small chamber off the
groot kamer
of his house, a waiting room of sorts for his orphans and their minders—anyone who needed to transact business with him on a given day.

Blandine had seen these particular legs dangle here before. Visser told her that they were all members of one family, fathered by a white colonist and an indian woman, then abandoned when the couple moved far up the river, never to be seen again. Her brusque dismissal of Kees (Blandine was afflicted with cruel second thoughts) coupled with Edward Drummond’s baffling betrayal of her privacy had rendered her wholly out of sorts. Woebegone as she was, Blandine felt as though she should be sitting on the bench with the children. Bad little girl, bad!

The door to Visser’s
groot kamer
remained closed. She wanted badly to see him. As ridiculous as she knew him to be sometimes, with his slurring, stumblebum ways and his too-rosy complexion, she needed him. He was the one she turned to, as close to a parent as she possessed since her own had perished.

Visser had maps pinned up on the walls of the antechamber. She always liked to peruse them, although she had little idea where on the globe the lands depicted lay. The soft greens and pinks and blues of the maps inflamed her imagination. She had often thought of commandeering a ship, any ship in the harbor, embarking for whatever realm to which the journey would take her.

Do it. Do it now. Get far away from this little settlement, so close and suffocating.

“Do you like the pictures?” said the handsome little boy at the end of the bench. He was probably about eight or nine.

“I do like them,” she said. “Very much.”

Next to him sat three girls, in descending order of years, with the
smallest only about two or three. At this toddler’s age Blandine had been safe in the arms of her mama, singing and waddling around in her warm wool jumper and insisting that she be able to fry the doughnuts in the kitchen alongside her mother. She was a big girl!

Blandine extracted a wedge of marzipan from her pocket and broke bits of it off to give the children.

“What is your name, sweetcakes?” Blandine said to the smallest.

“Tha-bean,” the toddler said.

The biggest boy laughed. “She means ‘Sabine,’” he said. “She don’t talk too good yet.”

“That’s all right,” Blandine said. “We will just call her ‘the Bean.’”

“That’s what we do call her!” the boy said. He leaned across to nuzzle his sister. “Our little bean.”

“My name, Blandine,” Blandine said to Sabine, pointing to herself. “Your name, Sabine. Sabine, Blandine.”

The child gurgled happily.

Soon she had the girl on her lap. They sang a silly song together that Blandine knew from her own toddlerhood, about birds in the air and fish in the sea. Or rather, Blandine sang, and the little one mouthed an occasional word.

The blistering winter air had rendered the toddler’s cheeks chapped and pink. The Bean gazed up at Blandine with her finger in her mouth, mesmerized and content.

Then Visser came out of the inner room with Lightning at his side. The orphanmaster appeared startled to find her there, although it was a regular-enough occurrence.

Aet Visser often seemed surprised, as though reality sprang events on him from wholly unexpected directions. Lightning pushed past Blandine without a word. He chucked the baby, who recoiled from him, and vanished out the door.

Standing behind the orphanmaster in the inner chamber was his servant, Anna, like Lightning another half-caste native.

“This is Anna,” Visser said. “Anna is my helpmate, my house servant.”

Blandine looked at Visser strangely. She had certainly met Anna many times before. Didn’t Visser remember? Had his mind become totally addled by drink?

“I know Anna, Aet,” Blandine said.

Anna smiled and nodded and gathered up her brood of chicks from the backless bench in the antechamber.

“Kiss-kiss, fishy-fish, kiss-kiss!” yelled the oldest boy in a mock-aggressive tone.

“Paulson,” Visser said, calming the boy. Then, to Blandine’s astonishment, he swept the toddler girl up into his arms, bussed Sabine’s cheeks with kisses and deposited her in Anna’s arms. She had never known Visser to be so demonstrative with his charges. His usual posture was one of affable remoteness.

“Anna takes them home for me, poor things,” Visser said, a little embarrassed himself by his display. “Corlaers Hook. We heard the parents died from the hot sickness. No other family. Terrible times.”

Blandine well knew Anna’s story. An orphan herself, Anna had come under Visser’s care very early in life. She now lived north of the town on the East River shore, from where she traveled each day. When she was not cleaning Visser’s rooms, she took care of the four orphans Blandine had been regaling with nursery rhymes. They traveled to Corlaers Hook and back with Anna.

“Good-bye now,” Visser called as Anna and the children left. “You will come tomorrow to clean house?”

Anna looked back over her shoulder, giving him an odd look, as did Blandine. Visser acted very strangely today. Perhaps it was not a good idea for her to come.

“I’m so glad to see you,” Visser said. “I was just heading out the door to the Imbrock woman’s wassail. Would you like to accompany me?”

“I don’t know that I am in the mood for crowds,” Blandine said.

“Nonsense,” Visser said, bustling around for his muff and cloak. “You will know everyone there.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Blandine said. “All the familiar faces, with familiar tongues wagging in their mouths.”

“Never mind, never mind,” Visser said, ushering her out the door and closing up his dwelling-house behind them. “Saint Paul puts it this way, ‘gossips and busybodies, saying things they ought not to.’”

Visser lived in the far corner of the colony. His makeshift dwelling-house, a crumbling heap of logs and clapboards, appeared ready to tumble into the East River. It had been in that state as long as Blandine could recall. Visser had lived in the place for twenty years, and rarely lifted a finger for its upkeep.

“You’ve had a bad day, dear,” Visser said as they set off along the Strand. “I can tell.”

As they passed through the town, Blandine declined the necessity of stopping at her home to change into party costume. “I will not stay,” she said.

“The Imbrock boy will be there,” Visser said. “Her orphaned nephew, one of my wards, actually, and the one who… you know.”

“Was taken,” Blandine said.

“Yes,” Visser said. “Our only witness and, I’m afraid to say, never the most intelligent boy in the settlement.” He lowered his voice. “I believe his wits are addled.”

Sacha Imbrock kept her residence on the opposite end of Pearl Street from Blandine, just around the corner from Stuyvesant’s Great House. She liked to think of her home as the pale reflection of the governor’s great glory. The irregular bricks that clad its exterior walls showed almost black-red, demonstrating that they had come from the first brickyards in New Netherland, thus establishing the Imbrock clan’s primacy in the pecking order of the colony.

December robbed the front garden of its color, but the canes still displayed plenty of thorns. Acclaimed within the community, assailed by a Puritan few as a frivolous gratuity, Sacha Imbrock’s famous garden plot grew only roses, red, pink, white, yellow and flame orange. One or another of the blooms showed all summer long.

Visser mounted the shallow stoop with Blandine and lifted the heavy knocker, shaped like the head of a horse. The door swung open. For the
first celebration of the Advent season, Sacha had decorated the front of the house with cedar boughs. Rushing Christmas, she knew, but she couldn’t resist their soft needles or their fragrance.

The initial assault upon a guest’s nostrils came from a huge ham that had been smoked, covered with dried fruits and baked all afternoon in the oven by the side of the hearth fire. Now it was given pride of place on the groaning board that greeted Blandine and Visser as soon as they walked in. Pink, fat-beaded slices taken by the other guests had reduced the joint by half. Daffodil-yellow butter lay mounded on the long oak table next to the ham, with crusty, slash-topped bread ready for the eating.

On the sideboard, smoked oysters and trout and hard crackers and onions and pickled pullet eggs.

Aet Visser lit up like a child in a candy shop. He hustled forward, not to the food but to the punch bowl. First things first.

The Imbrock main hearth-room opened onto a stairwell and another chamber, its curtained bed pushed to the wall to enlarge the space. The result was an irregular rectangle of perhaps forty English feet, peopled now with two dozen couples, assorted children and several specially hired servants.

Word was the director general might come, if only were it not that he suffered a slight stomach bloat.

Seated ladies balanced small china plates atop their jewel-toned petticoats, delicately biting on cubes of Holland gouda with white, mouselike teeth. Women as well as men brought long-stemmed pipes languidly to their mouths, an activity that showed off the polished gems with which they adorned their fingers.