The Orphanmaster (25 page)

The centerpiece of the evening, without a doubt, was little Ansel Imbrock himself, the witika survivor, trotted out by his aunt Sacha like a prize pony. The adults chattered questions at him and hung on his tongue-tied, yes-and-no answers.

Had he been ill-used? Did the witika feed on him? Was the beast terrible? Did its eyes shoot fire? Did it display its brazen nakedness?

Yes, no, yes, yes, huh?

Visser had his own reason for attending the gathering. Through his
sources around the director general, the orphanmaster heard that Ansel had made an absurd charge against Visser. He was supposed to have led the orphan boy up the river to meet the witika. Since he, Visser, had a solid alibi for the time in question, Ansel’s claim had tarnished the veracity of the whole story.

“I still want to know why the boy might have cooked up such a charge,” Visser said to Blandine. But when they approached the crowd of partygoers around Ansel, the orphanmaster’s nerve failed. He hesitated.

“Another time,” he said, withdrawing back toward the
groot kamer
.

Blandine hung on Visser’s arm as they circumambulated the room, punch cups in hand. Blandine noticed most of the guests looked rather quickly away when they saw her. Sacha Imbrock had not readily welcomed them at the door as she did other guests. At last, Blandine and Visser fell silent in a corner. He drank and gorged on punch and ham. She watched the people who were covertly watching her.

“Don’t know if it’s frostier inside or out,” Visser said, taking a drink of his punch.

The matronly partygoers talked behind their hands about Blandine. Her rejection of a marriage proposal had instantly made the rounds. Who was she to throw over a man like Kees Bayard?

Martyn Hendrickson approached them, evidently the only guest with the confidence to do so.

“Miss Blandina,” Martyn said, bowing. “Visser.”

“Mister Hendrickson,” Blandine said.

“What a story the boy has,” Martyn said, nodding his head to where Ansel held court.

“Fantastic,” Visser said, his mouth full.

“Yes, we plan to speak to him very soon,” Blandine said. “To find out the particulars of his tale.”

“I would be quick about it, if I were you,” Martyn said. “He’s about to disappear upstairs to bed.”

“The poor boy must be completely worn out,” Blandine said. “I wonder at his aunt parading him about.”

A fiddler began to stomp out a rustic Scottish reel.

“Would you join me for a country dance?” Martyn asked.

The younger couples among the crowd eagerly took to the
groot kamer
’s cleared center space. The fiddler sang with a reedy voice:

As she and Martyn performed the steps, Blandine caught whiffs of her dance partner’s French perfume mixed with body odor and the smell of brandy. The dissipated life. In spite of her reflexive dislike for Hendrickson, she felt sorry for him. All that glorious possibility, wasted.

“Where is your man tonight?” Martyn asked.

“Perhaps with his uncle,” Blandine said. “They are very closely tied.”

“No, no, I mean your English man,” Martyn said.

Blandine colored. “I could ask you where your lady is, but I have the idea she may be down by the Strand,” she said.

He laughed. “Miss Suzy does get around.” And he spun Blandine in a circle that made her petticoats fly.

Aet Visser, too, had taken a partner, dancing with the hostess. But perhaps
dancing
was too fine a word for the man’s wild flailing. Other guests broke off to watch him, unable to choke back their laughter.

As she left Martyn and came off the floor, Blandine thought of Kees. She recalled with fondness his childlike enthusiasm for dancing, and hoped she would not see him at tonight’s wassail. Ordinarily she would attend a party like this with him. She imagined Kees coming into the Imbrock house, crossing the great room with Lilith Camber on his arm, or perhaps Maaje de Lang. Bitter, bitter, the betrayals of men.

Here came Maaje herself, pushed by others to be bold enough to approach her.

“Blandine,” she said, ignoring Visser. “You are without Kees tonight?”

“And he is without me,” Blandine murmured. Maaje, her courage all used up, simpered, turned and ran.

A smattering of applause broke out around the stairwell. They were
sending the boy Ansel upstairs to bed, baffled and sheepish from all the attention.

“He will not sleep tonight,” Visser prophesized. “I know him. He’s something of a mooncalf.”

Blandine’s visions of Kees had unsettled her.

“I must go,” she said.

“D’ye mind if I stay?” Visser said, his mouth crammed full of cake.

“You’re ridiculous,” Blandine said. “But you’re good.” She kissed him on his reddened, grizzled cheek.

Outside full dark had fallen, a pre-solstice winter dark, cloudy on this night and unilluminated by stars. Blandine proceeded along Pearl. She had never seen the town so emptied. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock, but it felt like midnight.

Again the feeling crept across her that she had had in Beverwyck, of someone watching. She tried to shake it off but it only came on stronger. Every shadow in every doorway gave birth to a man.

In the harbor off the wharf, the carcass of an enormous porpoise floated, bumping up against the pilings of the pier. Waterfront rats jumped on and off the fleshy corpse, grabbing a morsel, leaping away, guzzling it down, going back for more. Much like the Imbrock sideboard.

Nary a soul around. She couldn’t understand it. The Advent season normally featured much visiting and crowded streets, even late into the evening.

Blandine felt a hand on her arm. She startled and drew back. “Miss Blandina,” a voice from the shadows murmured.

Martyn Hendrickson, her dance partner from the wassail.

“A dreary affair,” he said. He wouldn’t let go of her arm. “I had to leave. And you, I think, they drove away.”

“I hate them sometimes,” Blandine said.

“I hate them all the time,” Martyn said. His sour breath washed over her.

“Heading for the Strand?” she asked.

“This way,” he said, retaining his grip on her arm. He pushed her into a tiny alleyway that the settlers called the Box.

I can surely handle Martyn Hendrickson, Blandine thought to herself. If he doesn’t break my arm.

“Demons abroad,” Martyn hissed. “I would not want you harmed by them.”

A tower of cooperage and wooden crates blocked their way. “I can take care of myself,” Blandine said.

“Ah, yes, you are your own woman, aren’t you?” Martyn said. “Nevertheless, the problem with looking for demons is that you very well might find them. Hmn, Blandina? Always looking into this witika business?”

She thought of Pim, warning her off the Africans. Kees, telling her to leave her concerns about missing orphans alone. Visser saying that her fears would be assuaged. And now Martyn.

She wrenched free, stepping backward to the street.

Martyn leaned toward her, and she flinched, but it was only to buss her cheek.

“Come by the house on Market,” he said pleasantly. “I’ll have the servants make sure you get a bundle of tea.”

Martyn slipped past the heaped-up barrels and disappeared down the dead end of the Box. Blandine thought she knew every nook and cranny of the island, but evidently, Martyn Hendrickson knew a way out that she didn’t.

A shaken Blandine hurried on her way, looking behind her repeatedly as she went. But Pearl Street remained deserted.

She approached her dwelling-house.

There, in the dim corner beside her stoop, a figure slouched, huge, taller than any man. As Blandine stepped back, it lunged forward. She choked off a shriek.

Antony. “I’m back,” he said. “I saw Kitane safely home.”

“You startled me,” Blandine said. She realized the encounter with Martyn had thoroughly jangled her nerves.

“You have a visitor,” Antony said.

Kees, Blandine thought. Come to renew his plea.

E
dward Drummond waited for Blandine in the
groot kamer
. He jumped to his feet when she came in. He had been sitting in front of the fire, which he had let die to embers.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “Antony allowed me to come in.”

Blandine crossed to her
kas
and put up her shawl. She didn’t know how it would sound if she tried to speak, so she remained silent. Her heart and mind each pulled in several different directions of their own.

“I had to speak with you,” he said.

“Drummond,” she began. Not “Mister,” not anymore.

“Please,” he said. “Hear me out.”

She hesitated, and then sat beside him by the hearth.

“I understand that you think me a superficial sort of man,” he said. “That maybe I have tried too quickly to express my feelings for you, and you resented that.”

“It would help if you did not try to tell me what I think or feel.”

“What I want to say, if we could set all that aside, the misunderstandings that can develop between a man and a woman, what possibilities I might feel and you reject—”

“Drummond!”

“—If we could set all that aside,” he said again, “there is a thing going on here, in this town, in this colony, and it’s something important that needs to be dealt with.”

Blandine’s heart fell and rose at the same moment. Here she thought for a fleeting moment that perhaps she was going to get her second marriage proposal of the day, and instead the man was proposing only that they “set all that aside.” All what?

But there were indeed strange happenings in New Amsterdam, events distressing and confusing, and her heart rose at the thought of someone else, some paladin arriving to help her deal with it.

“I saw something this afternoon that made me think you might be in danger,” Drummond said.

“What was that?”

“A figure in your garden, in disguise, some sort of man or monster, very strange.”

“You were here in my garden this afternoon?” Blandine asked, already knowing the answer.

“No,” he said.

“Then how…?”

“I happened to be looking through my spyglass,” Drummond said.

“Your spyglass,” Blandine said. “You happened…?”

“I have one mounted on the roof of my house,” he said. “To see the ships of the harbor, that sort of thing.”

“Or to see through the windows of the women in the town. Were you spying on me, Drummond?”

“No! I mean, that’s not what’s important.”

“That’s the kind of thing we shall set aside, is that it?”

“Don’t you see? Someone or something was in your garden! Today, this afternoon. And it looked like…”

“The witika,” Blandine said.

“Or someone who meant you to think he was the witika,” Drummond said.

Blandine leaned over and, elbows on her knees, stirred the embers in the hearth. The flames rose and illuminated her face. Her postures, thought Drummond, can be so like those of a rough-and-ready man, but her features… It was an intriguing mix.

“There are a lot of things going on right now, things you might not know about,” she said. “Did you hear the African community is missing three children? They have disappeared. No one knows where they’ve gone. No one seems to care.”

Drummond matched her with revelations of his own. He said, “Do you know Aet Visser believes one of his orphan children has been switched for another? And that the scene that the Imbrock orphan described seeing in the woods, the picture your director general painted so graphically from the pulpit on his day of penitence and fasting, is very close to the scene of a killing that happened in the north?”

“The Jope Hawes murder,” Blandine said.

“Exactly,” Drummond said. “There are a lot of pieces of a puzzle lying around and we seem to be the only ones interested in picking them up. How many children have died now? Three? Four?”

“I know of four gone for sure, either dead or disappeared,” Blandine said.

“Maybe there’s more.”

“Maybe more.”

They were silent for a long moment, both staring at the embers. There were cities revealed there among the coals, fiery foreign hells, countries of the damned.

“I propose we act together,” Drummond said. “Let us make an alliance of two. I know what you must think of me. But stopping these killings is far more important than our opinions of each other.”

Blandine could only feel that Drummond did not know the first thing about what she thought of him. And she realized her upset of earlier in the day over his intrusion on her privacy was hypocritical. How had she found him out? By trespassing on the privacy of his rooms.

“Blandine?” he said.

“I’m sorry, what is your first name?” she said. Another lie. She knew it well. Why was she acting this way? The man had come to her in good faith.

“Edward,” he said.

“I think I am not yet worthy of your first name,” Blandine said.

He seemed taken aback. “What do you propose?”

“I shall be Van Couvering to you, no ‘Miss’ necessary, and you shall be simply Drummond to me,” she said. “I also propose that I make the alliance of two some hot cider.”

“And we leave all that other business aside, Van Couvering?” Drummond said.

She looked him in the eye. Was there a hint of smile there? “We leave it aside,” she said. She extended her hand.

They shook on it.

Ansel snuggled in bed with a pressed rose against his face. The dried flower was spindly, fragile, like a spider’s web. It still smelled faintly of summer.

His auntie had given him many things. A home not the least. A toy boat. A picture book. But he remained an orphan. She had not been able to give him love, and for that he had to cast his mind back to the few years he spent with his mother. The memory of her faded like a pressed rose. He was left with a dim, half-remembered shape entering a room. But the soul of her, the feeling of her, stayed with him.