The Orphanmaster (5 page)

She quickly rose to her feet.

“Mally,” she called. “Lace.” They were nearby.

“We have to—” she said, but broke off. “We should join the others.” They threaded their way back through the berry canes to where the dozen pickers worked.

Everything was all right. The clouds uncovered the sun, and the red-stained faces of her fellow townspeople reassured her. She was a ninny to be nervous. Odd how the wilderness struck her differently at different times. Glorious one moment, threatening the next.

A hand fell on Blandine’s shoulder. She jumped, surprised.

“Look within,” Patricia Reydersen said, displaying a basket nearly full with fruit. “What have ye been at? You’ve picked hardly nothing for yourself.”

“I’ve got more than anybody!” crowed the nine-year-old Reydersen daughter, Ereen. Patricia Reydersen had been one of the matrons who was kind when Blandine was newly orphaned, having been close to her mother, Josette. Patricia’s hearth offered the hungry girl cider and cookies.

Militiaman Jerominus Tyinck, his chin bloodred with berry juice, stood nearby. Blandine approached him. “Did you mark the canoes?”

The man looked at her blankly.

“Along the shore,” she said.

“No doubt they’re over from Pavonia, lass,” Tyinck said, naming the colony across the river from Manhattan. Indians there were known to be harmless. “No need to fear.”

Tyinck dismissed her, a young goose of a girl pulling at her curls and trying to keep her hands free of berry juice. The militiaman strode away toward an area of heavy cane. He propped his gun against a stump and worked his pipe.

Silence. Out of that silence, a shout.

Vocalizing loudly, an indian warrior appeared, running pell-mell from the concealing forest. He swung his war club and dropped Jerominus Tyinck with a tremendous blow to the head.

Screams. As more natives showed around them, a wide-eyed panic gripped the colonists. They were outnumbered. The children clung to their mothers. The women moaned:
“Neen, neen, neen.”
No, no, no.

Resoluet Waldron, the other militiaman, engaged his musket. The gunshot sounded enormous in the still glade. The bullet spun one of the attackers around in a bloody whirl. But that was all. Another raider grabbed the gun out of Waldron’s hands and smashed him with it. He, too, fell to the ground.

The women and children were on their own.

Blandine stood with Mally and Lace. More and more
wilden
appeared out of the woods. Not river indians, she saw. By their markings, Mahicans, from the north.

The director general of the colony displayed a callous disregard for distinctions of tribe and clan among the natives. Armies of settlers during the Esopus wars attacked all indians indiscriminately, and in one recent engagement, decimated a Mahican village.

The action against the Mahicans, Blandine had heard, was particularly vicious. Soldiers set lodges afire with families still inside and shot the inhabitants as they fled. One army trio happened upon a young, pregnant Mahican, sewed her orifice shut with deer sinew, then induced labor by beating the girl with their musket butts. She died in her birth pangs.

Fury answered fury, and now here were the vengeful Mahicans on the settlement’s doorstep.

Blandine huddled with Lace and Mally at the far edge of the group of
colonists. Two of the raiders pulled Patricia Reydersen out of the group. She began to shriek. Blandine met the woman’s agonized gaze and covered the eyes of Lace and Mally so that they should not see.

Within view of the other settlers, the two raiders tore off Patricia Reydersen’s clothes. They alternately mounted her body to force her and, when she resisted, took up fist-sized stones to batter the woman’s face.

For Blandine, it was as though she saw her own mother attacked. Why hadn’t she moved to help her? Would she be next?

Several of the Mahicans gathered around the wounded Dutch soldier, Resoluet Waldron. Uttering short birdlike calls, they used the man roughly, pushing him back and forth, pummeling and kicking him. They stripped the soldier naked, too, laying him out prone, facedown. While two raiders extracted a souvenir fingernail from one of the bellowing man’s hands, another worked the blade of a battle-ax in a straight line down the skin of his spine.

When the cut was sufficiently deep, the raider, a tall Mahican with a blue-painted face, dug into the wound with both hands, grabbing the bloody stretch of skin and peeling it off the flesh. The whole flap came up easily, with the sound of a raw beaver tail being split open. The flayed man thrashed, but the natives stood on his neck and arms to hold him tightly in place.

None of the raiders seemed to be in any hurry. Several threw themselves on the ground in attitudes of aggressive repose, chatting, laughing, slapping one another’s chests. Those not directly involved in the attack on Waldron wandered easily in and out of the group of terrified colonists.

One of the warriors approached Blandine, fingering her yellow hair as she tried not to flinch. He yanked a trailing curl, hard, then strolled off, looking back once or twice, marking her. She had picked up a few words of the language while trading. She heard the man say “mine.”

Mally and Lace clung together, their faces wet with tears. They prayed in a desperate whisper. Hysteria and paralysis gripped all the colonists, women and children both. Blandine knew that she had to act, discover some way out, or she would follow Patricia Reydersen into death.

Blandine said under her breath, “We have to get away. Now. The three of us.”

Like everyone else in New Amsterdam, Blandine witnessed waves of blank-eyed Dutch refugees come south in flight from the Esopus war. Several told of being “freed” by their captors, experiencing an illusion of flight, only to be cruelly tracked down again. It was a common tactic of the native warriors.

Blandine sought to turn a false escape into a real one. She began to move, trying not to panic, leading Lace and Mally away.

Two raiders were close by, the one who had marked her before, painted with black-and-white zigzags, and another, a younger male whose whole body was stained yellow.

They bent over with laughter, as though women captives edging toward the forest made for a tremendously comical sight. They pointed and howled.

When Blandine, Mally and Lace were ten yards away from the mayhem, Zigzag and his yellow comrade broke off to follow.

“Where you go, huh?” the big indian called out in English, still laughing. “Where?”

“Keep on,” Blandine said. “Whatever happens, we stay together.”

Behind them, a raider in the larger group stood up from his task of wrestling down one of the colonial women and shouted in their direction.

“Bring them back,” Blandine understood the raider to say.

Zigzag turned and called in reply, “We have them.”

Suddenly Yellow Boy ran at Blandine in an abrupt, sudden charge, but fell to his knees and skidded to a stop a few feet away, laughing at her fright.

Zigzag dashed forward to slug Lace with a vicious punch, knocking her down. While Blandine pulled the woman back to her feet, the Mahican stood dancing in place, inches away, shouting threateningly into her face. But, abruptly, Zigzag turned his back on them and strode away.

The effect, Blandine knew, was designed for maximum fear.

In a staggering march, trailed by the two warriors, the three women left the scene of the berry-harvest attack behind. The shouts of the raiders and cries of settlers faded. Behind them, Zigzag and Yellow Boy continued their negligent pursuit. They would stop, plucking a leaf or berry, calling out to a hawk circling in the sky above them.

And then, suddenly, nothing. Blandine led Lace and Mally down a steep incline and turned them into a sheltered glade. They no longer could see their two pursuers. Silence. Even the faint whooping from the distant berry patch died out.

“Is it over?” Lace said, her voice half-strangled with fear.

“Keep going,” Blandine said. Her heart raced. She did not dare to think they had escaped so easily. But it seemed true.

A keening scream. Zigzag and Yellow Boy stood on the crest of the slope above them. In a combative display, the Mahicans battered each other, slapping and pummeling their chests like two boys in a school yard.

As the raiders advanced downward, their nonchalance vanished. Zigzag freed his stiffened member from behind its cloth, waving it at them arrogantly.

“Lord Jesus save me,” Lace whispered. Her hand gripped Blandine’s, nails abrading the skin.

“Now we run,” Blandine said.

The three women fled down the slope to the shore of the river. Blandine led them to the reed bed where the native dugouts were beached.

Mally leapt into the first canoe. Lace climbed into the unsteady craft with her.

“Come on!” Mally shouted to Blandine.

But, for a long breathless moment, Blandine stayed on shore, working to push the other canoes out of the shallows, casting them off into the river current. If their pursuers wanted them, they would have to swim.

Finally, she dove for the little boat.

Together the three women paddled the craft out into the current, working furiously. The raiders arrived at the shore and splashed into the water behind them. They lunged forward, swimming to within a few yards of the women in the dugout.

But they came up short. Blandine, Mally and Lace moved into deeper water, outdistancing the Mahicans.

When the three women arrived wet, bedraggled and still fear-stricken at the settlement, and once the Dutch director general sent a well-armed
war party of his own to retaliate against the raiders, Blandine felt herself drawn into the lives of Mally and Lace and the community of Little Angola.

None of the others in the berrying party survived.

In the aftermath of the raid, Blandine noted with scorn some of her erstwhile suitors shying away from her as soiled goods. The men of the colony were never sure what exactly happened in the berry patch on the river.

Only the first love of her life, Kees Bayard, stayed true. “You are my brave girl,” Kees said to her, solicitous in the wake of the tragedy. He defended her stoutly. He volunteered for the company that pursued the fleeing raiders.

Deep inside, though, Blandine felt that no one understood the terror she experienced that day. Only Lace and Mally. It was as though, when your house burns down, you want to talk only to other people who have had their houses burn down. Her later friendship with Antony only cemented her connection with the Africans.

So it was natural, when one of their own disappeared that fall four years later, when a child who went out to fetch water did not come back, that Lace and Mally should turn to Blandine.

A
s soon as she heard of Piddy Gullee’s disappearance, Blandine sought out the orphanmaster.

Aet Visser was the man most important to her in all of New Amsterdam. Charged by the town government with looking after the interests of orphaned children, he had taken care of Blandine herself when she lost her parents at age fifteen.

Not that she wanted him to. Not at first anyway. Crushed by rage and grief at the news that her parents’ ship,
Blue Hen
, had wrecked with the death of all aboard in the Channel off Kent, she walled herself away from human contact.

She was fine, Blandine told the orphanmaster when he came calling. I am old enough to take care of myself. A small stash of seawan made it possible to live as she pleased. When the disaster carried her parents to the bottom of the Channel, Blandine boldly marched into probate court, a girl of fifteen petitioning to sell her family’s home, a two-story redbrick residence on the canal with five apple trees in back.

Such a transaction was the proper province of the orphanmaster, and Visser appeared next to her in court, but she rudely refused his help. She stumbled through her dealings with the magistrate. Visser interrupted to suggest that Blandine retain the fruit of the orchard trees for ten years hence. The magistrate ruled five.

That was nice. But she told Visser he should keep out of her affairs anyway. She smiled ruefully at the memory of telling him off, a squeaky-voiced girl trying to act grown up.

After that, Visser played patient. He had already reached middle age when they met, and had held the orphanmaster position forever, since the rough-and-tumble years of the 1650s, a time when colonists and natives seemed locked in irresolvable, deadly conflict. There were many new casualties of war.

He oversaw the means and property of parentless minors. He was an angel of death, appearing whenever parents perished. Among shipwrecks,
indian wars and rampaging contagions, the business of orphanmastering boomed.

Visser came to the new world from Friesland, in the Dutch Republic, where the winds off the North Sea blew strong. He shared his background with many in the colony, including the director general, which allowed Visser to cultivate the relationships that helped him secure the position of orphanmaster.

Did Visser cut corners? Was he ever accused of dipping his hand into the money pots of his wards? Inevitable, these accusations, when such dealings were transacted. But Aet Visser bumped along as the colony’s orphanmaster, not totally honest, perhaps, but for the purpose of the colony, honest enough. Which is all that can be realistically asked of any man.

Rumor surrounded him. He had disobedient wards killed. He fathered a whole family of bastards with a beautiful half-indian woman north of the wall. He supplied young orphans to the Jews for their infernal blood rites.

Visser shrugged off the tales. He modeled openness.

“I myself am an orphan,” he always said, neglecting to add that his parents had both died at the comfortable old age of fifty-two.

The orphanmaster held forth in the Orphan Chamber, a special court convened at the colony’s town hall, the Stadt Huys, an imposing five-story stone structure on the waterfront.

In the Orphan Chamber, Visser arranged for apprenticeships and servitudes. He ensured that heirs inherited inheritances. He sent a few of his wards back across the sea to Holland, to be cared for in the homes of relatives.