The Orphanmaster (46 page)

Abide with me, Lord, as the sunlight shines no more, abide with me, Lord, when soon the evening falls…

It seemed everything pointed him one way. Martyn holding the Bean in his lap. The fear in Gypsy Davey’s eyes. Even the bay’s blue-lit waves trended in a single direction only.

Visser found that he had indeed mounted the thirteen steps, that he had indeed slipped the rope around his neck. Though he had never tightened the noose around his neck before, he often wondered how that would feel.

He snugged the rope, took a last look over the bay and reached out to pull the hangman’s handle.

“I
t couldn’t be him,” Blandine said. “Tell me it isn’t Aet Visser.”

“Why would they hang him?” Drummond asked. “And on Easter Sunday? It doesn’t make sense.”

“They must have done it on Good Friday,” Blandine said bitterly. “The director general likes to leave his bodies to rot a little, send a message.”

They arrived at the wharf ahead of the news. After Stroose docked
The Republic
at a finger pier on the East River, Blandine and Edward disembarked and hurried down the rough-plank causeway to wharfside.

At the moment they took their first steps on New Amsterdam soil in two months, the town crier’s call rose from the opposite side of town. His echoing voice floated on the still Easter air like a curse.

“
Oyez, oyez
, the orphanmaster is dead. The orphanmaster is dead. Discovered hung by the neck at the town gallows.”

It was all so confusing. Obviously, it had indeed been Visser dangling dead at the gibbet. Just as obviously, the hanging had not been carried out by the town authorities. And if the director general had not ordained the hanging as punishment for some heinous crime, who had?

The realization dawned only slowly. Drummond walked with Blandine up the canal to his rooms on Slyck Steegh. They proceeded in silence. She did not weep, but her face wore a suffering, shocked expression.

On the streets, along the waterfront, on New Bridge over the canal, the residents of the settlement paraded in their Easter holiday finery, gossiping volubly. The women wore their best gowns, looped up high to display the riotous colors of their petticoats. In Blandine’s unsettled mood, the effect seemed that of a circus in a cemetery.

No one paid the least attention to the two returned exiles. Edward and Blandine passed through the crowds as ghosts. The words
Aet Visser
and
suicide
flew from the lips of the colonists. Someone said, “One is risen, and one is fallen,” and someone else laughed at the Easter witticism.

Blandine felt dislocated. Coming back to New Amsterdam represented a treacherous-enough transition for her, without adding to it the distress of Visser’s death. Old feelings of loss and abandonment welled up in her. She had lost her first father, and now she had lost her second.

They turned off the canal to the quieter side street. Drummond mounted the stoop to the front door of his rooms. Nine weeks previous, he had been hauled down those same steps as a traitor and a spy. It seemed another age. The buttonwood tree on the street in front of his dwelling-house, bare then, now showed tiny green buds.

Raeger had Drummond’s front door repaired, the bullet hole in the lintel fixed, the disorder of the rooms righted, the mounds of broken glass swept up from the floor of the workshop. Raeger saw to it that the Swedish landlord had been paid his monthly twelve-guilder rent.

But as Drummond and Blandine entered, the hearth was cold, and the rooms displayed a suspended, out-of-time feel. As they wandered through the place, Blandine finally wept disconsolate tears over Aet Visser. She sat down, rose up abruptly, ventured out into the yard, came back inside again, Drummond always at her side.

Blandine found herself unable to make her brain work, not willing to understand what she was doing there. Why? She asked herself over again. Suddenly more tired than she had ever known herself to be, she sank down upon Drummond’s big bed in his best chamber and, after crying for a restless half hour, dropped into sleep, watched over by her lover.

Dreams of falling, drowning, losing control. The witika swooped over the thatched rooftops of New Amsterdam like a leather-winged bat.

She woke to pounding on the front entrance door. The room was dark. Drummond wasn’t there. The bearskin had been thrown over her, so their paltry few goods from the sloop had been delivered to his dwelling-house. How long had she slept?

Out in the great room, voices. Blandine recognized De Klavier and the dominie, Megapolensis. Drummond’s voice, too, bringing her comfort.

“It is better that this whole scandalous affair has ended,” De Klavier said.

“Has it ended?” Drummond asked.

“Obviously, Aet Visser preyed upon his charges,” Megapolensis said.

“His death was his confession,” De Klavier said.

Blandine rose and appeared, sleep-tousled and disheveled, in the doorway of the best chamber. “There’s nothing obvious about it,” she said.

Drummond crossed to her.

The dominie appeared upset, embarrassed. “Miss Blandina,” he said.

“They have come to read us our indictments,” Drummond said.

“We might have met you at your ship’s docking,” De Klavier said. “But this unfortunate incident with the orphanmaster disturbed our preparations. On Easter Sunday, too!”

Megapolensis took a sterner tack. “I wonder that you are bold enough to show yourselves in sin together,” he said. “This is no way to present a defense in an ecclesiastical court, nor in any other, for that matter.”

Edward put his arms around Blandine and kissed her tenderly. She was puffy-faced from sleep, her eyes red from crying, but he didn’t see it. Instead, he thought, is a woman ever more beautiful than when she just awakes?

“You bring shame on you both, but especially upon you, Miss Blandina!” Megapolensis said. “I can no longer stay in this room.”

“You must,” Drummond said. “You must stay in order to congratulate me and give Blandine your best wishes.”

“What?”

“The banns were read in the Dutch church at Esopus Sunday last,” Drummond said. “You shall no longer address her as ‘Miss.’”

“You are married?” Megapolensis said, clearly stunned.

“We will be, if you will do us the honor,” Drummond said.

For once, Megapolensis was without words.

De Klavier looked nonplussed. He had come to upbraid the accused spy, to inform him of his pending retrial for treason, and instead found himself pounding Drummond on the back and bussing his intended on her cheek. She really was quite the loveliest maiden in the colony. It would be a pity to burn her.

Megapolensis found his tongue. “My hearty congratulations!” he said. “Of course I shall officiate the vows. I am happy, happy, happy for you!”

“I’m afraid our joy is mixed with grief over Mister Visser’s death,” Blandine said.

“No, no,” Megapolensis cried. “Don’t you see? The man was clearly plagued by guilt for his offenses. It is as the
schout
said: self-authorship of one’s death is the surest admission of culpability one could possibly provide. His confession removes all shadow from you, Blandine! Your trial now becomes purely
pro forma
. I have no doubt you will be cleared of any involvement in witchcraft or devilry.”

“Aye, but you shall still have to stand trial,” said De Klavier. He attempted to reassert the severity of his office. He turned to Drummond. “As shall you.”

Drawing a document from his waistcoat pocket, De Klavier assumed a stance of formal attention. “Edward Drummond, the ruling of the director general is, ye shall not depart the jurisdiction, ye must present thyself every day, once a day, to the
schout
—that’s me—if ye engage counsel, to inform the office of the director general. We shall expect you to make no discourse with the general public to inflame opinion, nor confer with criminal associates.”

Drummond wondered if Raeger would fit into that last category.

“How about a wedding ceremony?” he asked. “Might that be allowed?”

When De Klavier and Megapolensis left, Drummond uncorked a bottle of brandy and poured a few fingers into a pewter tumbler. He and Blandine shared the drink.

“Hungry?”

She shook her head.

“We could go to the Lion,” he said.

“The Sabbath,” she said. “The taproom hearth is left cold. By order of the director general.”

“Well, anyway, I have to speak with the
weert
there, an interesting man, a pirate, I think, in his former years.”

Blandine’s laugh turned immediately to tears. “Why did he do it?” she cried.

“Darling,” Drummond said, wrapping her in his arms again.

“I want to go to my dwelling-house,” Blandine said, speaking with her face buried in Drummond’s chest. “I want to go home, retrieve my things, and then come back here to stay with you the night.”

“Then that is what we shall do,” Drummond said.

*   *   *

Tibb Dunbar sank his teeth into Peer Gravenraet’s left earlobe and wouldn’t let go, no matter how many times Peer punched and punched at Tibb’s face. Blood from the two boys mingled and flew. Tibb tried again to hook his leg around Peer’s and bring him down.

The Coney Boys were challenging the High Street Gang, and each group had put forth their champion. Just off New Amsterdam’s wharf district, in the little one-block lane between High Street and Slyck, the gladiators met, Tibb and Peer, a bout, they both swore, to the death. The ring of combat involved two tight semicircles of spectators, the Coneys on the town side, the Highs on the wharf side.

Peer Gravenraet’s standing among the Coneys had soared with his Christmas Eve discovery of the severed foot, to the degree he took his rightful place at the head of the gang. The Coneys recruited their membership from the well-dressed boys of the settlement, those who were all familied up, the ones who like as not had a few strings of seawan in their pockets.

The High Streets were from a more ragged class. They took their name from the address of the work yard behind Missy Flamsteed’s tap house, where many of them spent long hours at cutting firewood, stall-mucking and vittle preparation.

Requisite for membership in the Highs: orphanhood.

A few of the High Streets were indentured to the families of the Coneys. When Saint Nicholas came at Christmastime, the High Street boys were the ones who did not find gold coins in the shoes they had laid out on the hearth the night before, nor candy nor wooden soldiers either. They woke the next morning to find just their same old shoes, cold and empty.

Trouble brewed between the two bands all fall, with running battles continuing through the winter and into the spring. The Coneys delighted in taunting the Highs with their victimized status. They would scrawl the circle-and-cross witika sign on the facade of the Jug, the unofficial headquarters of the Highs. Being caught at such a prank meant a thorough pummeling by members of the orphan gang, but the dare was worth it.

The Coney Boys scared themselves silly telling witika stories, but took great pleasure in the fact that it was always orphans that the indian demon targeted. They were safe, they were coddled in the stronghold of
parents and relatives and friends, not like the dirty urchins who were consumed, one after another, by the voracious monster.

“Witika take you!” was one of the jeers the Coneys leveled against the Highs.

It had come to this, Peer “The Rat” Gravenraet versus Tibb “Gypsy Davey” Dunbar, man to man, hand to hand.

There is no dirtier street fighter than a twelve-year-old. “No eye gouging,” the Coney Boy Denny Bayard had announced at the beginning of the battle, after which the contestants came together. Both immediately went for the eyes of the other.

The left eye of Tibb Dunbar had, in fact, swollen shut, but he fought on just as well with one. He liked torso shots, and he was wearing his opponent down. Peer tended to go for the face.

Two adults came down the lane from town, but the gangs were so avid that they ignored the intrusion until Blandine and Drummond were upon them. They waded into the melee, though, and dragged the boys apart.

“Leave us be!” Peer shouted. The Coney Boys booed, but didn’t dare advance on the formidable Drummond. And they would never hit a woman.

“Peer!” Blandine cried. “You’re bleeding!”

“The
schout
!”

De Klavier approached, advancing up the lane from the direction of the wharf, calling out, “Here now! Here now!”

The two gangs scattered. De Klavier managed to snag one, a girl, Laila Philipe, age ten, but the rest artfully eluded him. “Little snip,” he snarled.

Dragging her by the neck, the
schout
approached Blandine and Drummond on the former field of battle.

“The imps,” he said. “You two are in the middle of this?”

Drummond laughed and bowed. “Innocent bystanders,” he said. “Although I’d lay my wager on the orphans.”

Blandine said, “Let her go, De Klavier. That’s Laila Philipe. She has a fine foster family and her guardians will be worried about her.”

De Klavier let up on his grip, and Laila instantly vanished down the lane toward the wharf.

Mortal enemies Tibb Dunbar and Peer Gravenraet happened to flee in the same direction, slipping into the yard of a chandler’s shop and hiding amid the cooperage there. Breathing hard, bleeding, they stared at each other in the darkness.

“Happy Easter, rabbit,” Tibb said. The Highs always called the Coney Boys the Rabbits. Likewise, the Coneys customarily referred to the Highs as the Lows.

“Glad tidings, low boy,” Peer responded.

Fast friendships have been formed before in the euphoria that follows a good fight. An ear-tattered Peer extended his hand to a punch-stunned Tibb. Tibb took it. Both boys started laughing at once, and they shared a good one together, wheezing, coughing and spitting chips of teeth and gobs of blood.