The Orphanmaster (37 page)

They could see the palisade wall of New Amsterdam before them to the south as they trekked along the river.

“Piddy we know disappeared,” Blandine said, once again going through the sad litany of victims. “Ansel Imbrock, we know. The Gessie kids.”

“Dickie Dunn,” Drummond said. “The missing-foot boy.”

“Let’s concentrate on those,” Blandine said.

“They’ve disappeared, yes,” Drummond said. “But if they have indeed been killed, then where are the bodies?
Habeas corpus
, as the director general might say.”

The odd sense of a deserted community continued as they came to the boundary of New Amsterdam. Approaching the land port at the East River end of the palisade wall, they found it closed and fortified.

“Halloo! Halloo!” Drummond tried, but no one came. This was decidedly strange. Even in winter, the land ports normally bustled.

“What’s happened?” he said.

“The English invaded and rounded up the Dutch,” Blandine suggested. “Sent them all back to Patria.”

“Who will make the doughnuts now?” Drummond said. “Have you ever eaten English cooking?”

“Come on,” Blandine said. She led Drummond west along a narrow path running below the wall. Two hundred yards along this track, Blandine pushed in a pair of the palisade logs, which swung easily aside to admit them to the town.

“Very clever,” Drummond said. But he noted the position of the gap, in order to be prepared if his compatriots in the English army ever needed to breach the colony wall.

They found themselves in town, near Smit Street, which ran south and would lead them readily to Drummond’s quarters in Slyck Steegh.
A brittle winter sundown lengthened the shadows in the settlement. No one abroad. A plague? An indian attack? Drummond couldn’t fathom it.

A solitary soul did see them as they made the corner from Smit onto Slyck Steegh. A block away, coming up from the wharf district, a single figure, indistinct in the late afternoon darkness. The figure halted, shouted an unintelligible cry and ran away.

Blandine shook her head and laughed. “Welcome home,” she said to Drummond.

“Stop and sup with me,” Drummond said, when they reached his rooms.

“I think I would rather go straight on,” Blandine said.

“We shall say good-bye, then,” Drummond said.

“Good-bye, Drummond.”

“With affection,” he said, and bussed both her cheeks in the French style. Her skin felt soft and warm.

Drummond watched her go. He mounted his stoop and was about to unlock his front door when he found he could just push it open. Walking in, he realized instantly something was amiss.

His rooms had been tossed. Seriously. Every item of furniture overturned, every possession thrown to the floor. Drummond crossed to his best chamber and realized the intruders, whoever they were, had done the same there.

Thieves? He could ascertain nothing that was stolen, though much was destroyed. A ransacking, not a plunder.

But where were his papers? They, whoever “they” were, had taken them from the leather document case he kept hidden behind the bricks of the jamb stove.

He was discovered as a spy. The London letters and his orders from Clarendon and Downing were in code, of course, but codes could be broken.

Drummond had an impulse to call Blandine back, but when he went out onto the street, she had already made the turn onto the canal and was gone.

A sickening thought stabbed him. His workshop.

He rushed through his rooms, out the back entrance and into the yard. Full dark had not yet fallen, so even before he reached it, he realized the plunder had been applied to the outbuilding, too. He extracted his Scottish pistol from his belt.

His heart falling, he entered the low, rectangular room. Formerly neat as a pin when he left it a month ago, it was now a shambles. As Drummond stepped forward, glass crunched underneath his feet. Stunned by mounting anger, tears in his eyes, he cataloged his losses. His perspective tube, smashed. His glass-making apparatus scattered to the floor, wrecked. Every instrument that could be bent, busted or mangled, was.

The workshop’s generous windows had been mostly broken, also. He looked through the frame of one of them to the top of his dwelling-house across the yard. At least they had not thought to dismantle the spyglass affixed to his roof. Its proud silhouette showed black against the fading sky.

As he stood there amid the wreckage of his life, Drummond heard shouts, voices. An alarm of some kind was being raised from the direction of the wharf. Still overcome with emotion, he crossed to his rooms, stepping over his scattered possessions to make his way to the open front door.

They met him there, at the bottom of his stoop, a dozen men, soldiers, burghers and the
schout
, De Klavier. Godbolt. Kees Bayard. Standing off to the side, the half-indian, Lightning.

“There he is!” Kees shouted, and the whole group rushed forward up the front steps. Drummond stumbled backward, aiming his pistol, at the last moment raising it upward and blasting the door lintel as the men filled the doorway.

Showered with dust and splinters of wood, his attackers retreated as quickly as they came, stumbling over one another in their haste to get out of the line of fire.

It would have been comical if Drummond had been in the mood. A mob of cowards. He reloaded his pistol, righted an overturned chair and sat down facing the open front door. He could hear them gabbing among themselves in the street.

“Drummond!” a voice called up. “We have you surrounded. Surrender yourself!”

De Klavier. Drummond had met him many times when the man shut the Red Lion at curfew. The more limited the authority, the greater the pomp.

“Don’t you have a taproom to close?” he shouted out. “Someone to levy a fine against who has spat upon the director general’s stoop?”

More voices in hurried conference. The square of his doorway glowed,
they had ignited a torch. A musket discharged, a man screamed, the gab of voices rose to a pitch.

In his heart, Drummond knew there was nothing for it. What would he do, hold out against the whole town? Make his escape over the rooftops like a Paris musketeer pursued by a jealous husband?

He decided not. He placed his periwig atop his head. “I’m coming out,” he shouted.

The voices outside suddenly stilled. Whispers.

De Klavier. “Throw out your pistol, first.”

Drummond did so, then advanced on the door, stepped through and stood looking down from the top of his stoop.

Three militiamen trained their muskets at him. The muzzle ends looked huge to Drummond, bottomless, as if they were tunnels he could step inside.

“Put up your weaponry, gentlemen,” he said. “I will come peacefully, and you don’t want to hurt anyone else among you.” One of the guardsmen lay on the ground, nursing a bloody wound to his right foot, accidentally self-inflicted.

De Klavier rushed up the stoop, finding his courage against an unarmed prey.

“Edmund Drummond!” he shrieked.

“No,” said Drummond calmly. “You’ve got the wrong man.”

The
schout
halted, momentarily confused. “What?”

“My given name is Edward. If it’s
Edmund
Drummond you want, I advise you to look elsewhere.”

The militiamen were on him by then, and they bound his arms and hustled Drummond off the stoop down to the street. De Klavier rushed to catch up.

“I arrest you in the name of the Dutch West India Company for treasonous acts against the jurisdiction of New Netherland,” De Klavier announced, finding his footing at last. “You will be conducted to Fort Amsterdam and thereby be imprisoned.”

“In Latin, man, in Latin,” Drummond murmured, and the
schout
again looked confused.

Kees Bayard leaned in close. “You will hang,” he said.

“And she will still not love you,” Drummond said. Kees smacked him across the face.

The crowd surrounding Drummond grew rapidly. There was something about torchlight that emboldened the citizenry. “Traitor!” they shouted at the prisoner as he was borne away, following after him to yell “Spy!” “Intriguer!” and “Murderer!” also.

Well, spy, yes, Drummond thought. Intriguer, maybe, whatever it meant. But where had that “murderer” come from? Was he to stand accused of every crime in the colony?

He worried about Blandine.

Down Slyck Steegh to the canal, alongside the canal to Pearl, down Pearl toward the fort. The members of the mob wore heavy doublets. He had neglected his in the ruckus at home and was left in his white linen blouse, open at the throat.

The cold air stung him into that state of alertness he had experienced before only in battle. Some part of him knew the fiercely aware condition represented the only time he was truly alive.

If Drummond were more daring, he would have launched into an English marching song, perhaps “When the King Enjoys His Own Again.” But he feared his voice would crack if he tried. He satisfied himself with a crooked smile.

The crowd swelled to dozens strong. Drummond felt as though he were at sea, propelled along by an enormous wave. Past Blandine’s dwelling-house and the Red Lion opposite. He stared desperately at both, attempting to discern if Van Couvering, and perhaps Raeger, had been taken also.

But in the foul cell into which they tossed him, a log storeroom in the keep of the fort, Drummond found that the only other inmate was Antony Angola.

“Hello, Drummond,” Antony said.

“Blandine?” Drummond asked.

“Fled away,” Antony said. “The last I heard, she headed for sanctuary in the Reformed Church, across the yard from us.”

“She is here?”

“Not within shouting distance, if that’s what you mean. Under the protection of the dominie, for now. They don’t want her, Drummond. At least, not yet. You and me, we are to be hanged as traitors.”

“You?”

“For my association with you,” Antony said. “And for my skin color,” he added.

During Drummond’s absence in the northland, witika panic had gripped New Amsterdam ever more tightly. The town crier told of another orphan disappearance.

“One of ours again,” Antony said. “A little African girl. Not that anyone cares too much.”

If one included the mystery of William Turner, the killings or disappearances now numbered eight.

“While you were gone, the colony went up in arms with witika fear,” Antony said. “The land ports closed and the militia summoned.”

The director general declared another day of prayer and penitence. The settlement’s Jews were in hiding, Antony told him, in fear of the ancient specter of blood libel, the idea that Jewish rituals involved the sacrifice of abducted Christian children.

Also, this: a pattern of frost appeared on one of the windows of the Stadt Huys. The frost picture had been construed as a representation of the witika demon, a warning to New Amsterdam to repent of its manifold sins.

Some of the boys of the town had been caught chalking the witika sign up on the facades of public buildings, houses, even across the paving blocks of Stone Street.

“The parents are going crazy,” Drummond said, “and the children see it all in terms of a prank.”

Later, after they had talked half the night, the giant attempted some genial consolation.

“Worry not, my friend,” Antony said to Drummond, rubbing the rope-burn scars around his massive, treelike neck. “I’ve been hung before, and it don’t hurt much.”

I
n the deserted meeting-hall of the Reformed Church built within the confines of Fort Amsterdam, Blandine sat with Johannes Megapolensis, the dominie of the colony and thus the chief religious authority of New Netherland.

“I shall not give you to him, child,” Megapolensis said. “Him” being the director general. The dominie and Petrus Stuyvesant had been at loggerheads from the first day of Megapolensis’s installment, and the witchcraft charges leveled at Blandine represented another battle in their long war.

“I grant you full sanctuary,” Megapolensis continued. “But you must do me one thing.”

In the chaos of the previous evening, Blandine fled to the church not knowing where else to go. She and Drummond both had been blindsided on their return to New Amsterdam from the northland. He, evidently, had been taken as a spy. She stood accused as a witch.

Hysteria screamed through the colony like a fireball rocket. Rumors exploded. Amid the insults hurled at her by angry crowds, Blandine heard a jumble of strange reports and half-facts. Much had been made of her coming back into the capital at dawn the day after the orphan Ansel Imbrock had been taken the first time.

In the panicked town, enough suspicion fell on Blandine that her dwelling-house had been searched. Witika totems turned up in her rooms, an indian lodge doll, the circle-and-cross willow fetishes, a deerskin mask.

And—the kicker, the killer, the discovery that damned Blandine as a witch—the bloody jacket of an orphan child.

Could that be possible? The evening before was a nightmare. As soon as she left Drummond’s and proceeded toward her dwelling-house, she had been attacked. She was besieged by a mob, many members of which seemed ready to burn her right then and there. She escaped only by taking out the muff pistol Drummond had given her and firing it in the air.