The Orphanmaster (51 page)

In the marketplace, Blandine sought out provisioners, deliverymen, anyone who might have been inside the Hendrickson house. She could not find many. A she-merchant baker, responsible for providing three loaves of white-flour bread to the Hendrickson back door every other morning, had not much to say.

“Ad pays me in coin, old-fashioned stuivers from Patria,” the baker told Blandine. “He don’t let me inside, but as far as I can see from the doorway, those brothers live in their own filth.”

On sleepy summer afternoons, while Edward was away in consultation with his solicitor, the Bean was down for her nap and Jan read quietly out of
The Day of Doom
, Blandine had taken to climbing the ladder to Drummond’s roof. She used the spyglass to surveil the comings and goings around the Hendrickson dwelling-house.

There weren’t many. This afternoon she saw Kees leave the place and head down Market toward the canal. She kept her eye on the spyglass but saw nothing, no movement in the house. The huge glass panes of the sash windows appeared opaque, like black, vacant eyes. The mud sharks in the sandbars off Turtle Bay had eyes like that.

One day, Blandine thought, after they moved to the new house, she would go and make a call on the Hendricksons. It was only the neighborly thing to do.

*   *   *

Kitane lodged not in New Amsterdam but with his Canarsie friends. The trapper had a superb spring and summer. He managed to retrieve Blandine’s product from Beverwyck, three stacks of beaver pelts that rose to his own eye-level, quality winter-fur skins, over a hundred of them, eminently merchantable.

He did not often visit New Amsterdam. Occasionally, his favorite bakery, for sweets.

Late one night he drank too much English milk from a cask the Canarsie had from a Dutch trader, reeled drunkenly into town and stole a coping saw from a blacksmith’s stable on Long Street. Kitane then crept into the dwelling-house of the director general near the pier, moving easily past the dozing sentries.

Stuyvesant slept alone. In his drunken state Kitane could not keep himself as quiet as he would have wished, but the director general did not stir. He snored evenly.

Kitane retrieved the peg leg from where it rested next to the curtains of the director general’s bedstead. Taking out the coping saw from within his robes, he cut an inch off Stuyvesant’s oak-and-silver fake leg. Afterward, Kitane returned the device to its place and let himself out.

T
he trial of an English spy in a Dutch colony, when the two fatherlands were already at each other’s throat. What were the odds that such a defendant could obtain justice?

Drummond knew he was in trouble as soon as the jury was empaneled. In the back row of the makeshift jury box, along with five other
middenstaaid
, middle-class, New Amsterdam citizens, sat his old shipmate Gerrit Remunde.

Drummond now dearly wished he had been more civil to the man, and not cut him so precipitously on the two occasions Remunde had hailed him in the street. What horrible luck! Remunde stared stonily straight ahead, not looking at the accused standing in the dock—Drummond, bareheaded, unwigged, wearing his blue wedding waistcoat.

He had come to have severe doubts about his counsel, too. Kenneth Clarke appeared constantly distracted by tangents, ignoring urgencies that Drummond thought needed attending to in quick order.

In darker moments, Drummond wondered if it were too late for prayer to save him. A consultation with Megapolensis, perhaps, an admission of faith, knees chafed and bruised in earnest supplication to an all-powerful god. Please, Lord, save me from idiots. The only worthy prayer there was.

The trial court convened on August 20, 1664, a special proceeding with New Amsterdam’s first jury.

The charge: spying for the English crown.

The meeting-hall council chamber cooked in the summer heat. Stuyvesant sat as judge,
in subsellio
, as he would say, on the bench. Ross Raeger told Drummond the director general might be losing his faculties, since he fell down twice walking the short distance across town from the Stadt Huys to the meeting-hall in the fort.

“Tumbled like a doddering old woman right there on Pearl Street,” Raeger said. “Tripped over his own foot. And don’t ask me which one.”

“The director general has his worries to distract him,” Drummond
said. “He feels us breathing down his neck.” “Us” meaning the English. Rumors of the crown’s move against New Netherland buzzed like wasps around the settlement. Every day, there were more incidents involving incursions into Dutch-held territory from Connecticut and Massachusetts.

“Oyez, oyez, oyez,”
pronounced the town crier in the court. “All persons having business before the Honorable, the special court of the jurisdiction of New Amsterdam, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the court is now sitting. God save the officers of justice, the settlement of New Amsterdam, the colony of New Netherland. God save Patria, and may the truth be told in this Honorable court.”

Drummond wondered about that last part.
“Dire la vérité et de sentir la lame,”
isn’t that what the French said? Tell the truth and feel the blade.

De Klavier directed Drummond forward to the dock. Stuyvesant read out the formal charge: collecting intelligence for the English against the interests of the New Netherland Colony.

“You, sir, are to be proved a spy,” Stuyvesant said from the bench.

Teunis Dircksen Boer, the finest legal mind the Company had to offer, acted as
fiscael
, prosecutor.

“Mister Drummond, are you a member of the clandestine society called the Sealed Knot?”

“It is a patriotic fellowship in support of Charles II,” Drummond said.

“I didn’t ask what it was, I asked if you were one,” Boer said. “But it doesn’t matter. These documents will prove clearly your activities on the part of this nefarious organization.”

Boer began to read, out loud for the benefit of the court, the decoded messages found in Drummond’s rooms. Settling in for a long afternoon in the stifling council chamber, the
fiscael
read document after document, droning on like a schoolteacher.

Blandine sat in the front row of the gallery, a few yards from Drummond, who stood before a section of railing that acted as the dock. Spectators crowded into the council chamber. The opportunity to experience the novelty of an English-style trial proved enticing to the entertainment-starved settlement. As befitted their standing, the
schout
, the
schepens
, the
burgomeesters
of the colony took the special chairs of the council members.

The gallery looked bored. This was all? A pumped-up Company
fiscael
reading, coughing, clearing his throat, reading some more? A pall settled on the jury members. Most important, to Drummond’s eyes, was the fact that Gerrit Remunde still refused to meet his gaze.

There were a few sparks. When Boer read Drummond’s casual remarks about the women of the settlement (“hardworking, well-educated, clever, an asset we would do well to co-opt”) the audience woke up. “Some of them are very pretty,” Drummond had added in a needless aside, and a titter ran through the chamber.

But that was it. During Boer’s endless recitation, Drummond had a thought of giving up and pleading guilty. Anything to get out of this oven of a chamber.

Kees pushed his way through the spectators to kneel at Blandine’s side. “Your man is a spy, a traitor and an assassin, isn’t he?”

She looked down at him, trying to keep the pity out of her eyes. “I see him as a soldier, nothing more,” she said gently.

“Is a soldier what you want? I am a captain of the militia!”

It was pathetic. Once, she would have felt for him. Now, nothing.

“Blandine,” he pleaded, putting his hand on her arm. “Don’t do this to yourself. Repudiate him.”

“This isn’t worthy of you, Kees.”

On the bench, the director general threw a glare their way, and several members of the gallery shushed them.

“I did this, you know,” Kees whispered, showing both pride and pain. “I told Uncle to move against your man. I did this to you and to him.”

“Even if it were true,” Blandine said, “I would forgive you.”

Kees rose to his feet, turned his back on her and assumed his seat among the grandees in front of the meeting-hall.

The
fiscael
read the documents for another half hour, sweat dripping from his forehead and plopping audibly down upon the pages. By the time he finally finished, the sun slanted into the hall from the west, and the eyes of many of the spectators drooped shut.

Kees Bayard woke everyone up by rising grandly from his seat, saying loudly, “The case is proved,” and stalking out of the meeting-hall.

Stuyvesant spoke. “The court stipulates that these documents were
indeed the ones found in the chambers of the defendant on Slyck Steegh in the colony. Counsel?”

“We accept the stipulation, Your Excellency,” Clarke said. He was about to sit down, but rose back up. “Although…”

“Yes?” Stuyvesant said.

“We wonder who is responsible for the decoding and translating of these missives,” Clarke said. “The answer impinges on the veracity of the version here read.”

“The court had them rendered,” Stuyvesant said.

“Yes, but who?” Clarke said. “A court can’t translate. There must be a person.”

“
Mijn Heer
General did it himself,” De Klavier said.

De Klavier was out of order, but Stuyvesant was pleased not to have to make the point himself, so he let it pass.

“You did, Your Excellency?” Clarke said. “You yourself?”

“Yes,” the director general said.

“Very well, very good,” Clarke said. “We shall say no more about that.” And he sat down.

But rose again. “Except…”

“Yes?” Stuyvesant said. Drummond could tell by the fire in the man’s eyes that he was getting angered, not accustomed to having his pronouncements questioned.

“It’s just that…” Clarke seemed to stammer and lose his way. “My apologies, Your Excellency, but I wonder, could you inform us of your training in Latin?”

“What?”

“The messages were originally written in Latin, I believe,” Clarke said. “Have you learning in that direction?”

Watch now, watch now, Drummond thought, the director general will explode any second.

De Klavier once again stood up and spoke out of order. “The director general is the finest Latin mind in the colony, perhaps the finest in the new world.”

“Ipsi dixit,”
Stuyvesant said, hauling out a Cicero quotation (“he said it himself”) from the bottomless depths of his knowledge.

De Klavier said, “The director general attended school in Franeker, in Friesland, if you must know.”

“Very well, yes, apologies, of course,” Clarke said. “I’m sure the translations are very, very good, very exact, not heir to the outrageous errors that often lurk in translated material, misconstruing and missing the original true meaning.”

Drummond allowed himself an inner smile. The bumbler in the black barrister’s robe might be worth something after all.

The afternoon waned, the court adjourned and the first English-style jury trial in the history of New Netherland completed its opening day. From the sleepy looks on the faces of the spectators, many would not be returning for day two.

That evening, Blandine asked Drummond, “Would you mind very much, Edward, if I didn’t come to see the second day of your trial?”

Drummond smiled and shook his head. “I would be absent myself, if it were my choice.”

“Nothing will happen at the tribunal tomorrow, will it?” Blandine said.

“My counsel says no,” Drummond said. “Only procedural actions.”

“It’s just I should see Luybeck,” Blandine said.

“Go, go ahead, I will return to you well baked after my afternoon in the oven.”

Eberhard Luybeck, the probate judge, had been attempting for the last four months to untangle the mess of Aet Visser’s estate. He was the same man Drummond had questioned about George Godbolt’s financial condition, back at the beginning of his time in the colony.

Blandine moved about the rooms as Drummond sat brooding. She readied them for the move to the new house on Market Street, and worked to pack their possessions.

Drummond took Blandine’s hand as she passed by him. “You can’t stop us, you know,” he said. “Us” meaning the English.

Blandine walked around casually in her camisole and the emerald petticoat. “I trust you,” she said.

The New Netherland Colony displayed the kind of atmosphere that Drummond imagined it shared with the last days of Pompeii. Mount
Vesuvius had been smoking for months now, and the explosion was due. Down from New England, up from Virginia, from across the seas, somehow, some way, the English were coming.

Silence between them. Then Blandine said, “Do you want to know why I trust the English? Because I want Beverwyck.”

At first, Drummond didn’t understand. She “wanted” Beverwyck? What did that mean?

She came and sat in his lap and laid it out for him. The lands of the north, including the vital trading outpost of Beverwyck, had already been claimed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Stuyvesant and the Dutch were too weak to resist the claim.

The English, though, when they came in, would maintain proper borders. The colony—her colony, whatever it came to be named under the English, but Blandine’s familiar turf nonetheless—would be able to retain its gateway to the fur trade.

It was a question, Drummond realized, of who Blandine trusted more, the incoming English or the rival Massachusetts Bay Colony.

“Both are English, no?” Drummond asked her. “The crown that comes and the New England colony that is.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “But our treatment at the hands of one will be very different.”

Both were antithetical to Dutch interests, in other words, but one more than the other. In this case, the devil Blandine didn’t know, the crown, she preferred to the devil she did know, Massachusetts. A nuanced view of real-world statecraft.