The Orphanmaster (9 page)

“It is cold in here,” he said to the Swede as he inspected the shed. “Might you install a stove?”

Trount said he would be pleased to, and Drummond charged him with having his equipage fetched from the wharf warehouse. “Breakable furnishings,” he said. “Have your boys be extremely careful with it.”

“Certainly, sire,” the Swede said. He appeared continually offended by something, and Drummond wondered if the cause was not him. No matter. Landlords, in his experience, lived to fuss.

Later in the day, he uncrated his treasures. The snow of the early blizzard melted from the roof of the shed, but there would be another freeze that night. Drummond worked as dusk fell, not bothering with assistants, loving to do the tender labor himself.

He opened Spinoza’s lenses, carried in slots of red velvet within an oaken case. He remembered Bento, his kindness, his diamond intelligence, his monk’s existence.

The lens grinder tended toward the philosophical, too, and along with his optics Drummond had taken away a hand-copied manuscript of Spinoza’s work,
Korte Verhandeling van God,
which full title in English would be
A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being
. Drummond had gained fluency in Dutch during his ten years of exile with Charles II.

The writing had impressed Drummond on his tedious voyage across the sea to America. It had, in fact, become his nightly companion, his candle burner. But Drummond did not wonder that the author of such a work had been driven out of his community. The thought behind the book was incendiary, a challenge to Christian and Jewish orthodoxy both.

In his workshed now, Drummond moved on to his prize, the perspective tube he had recently purchased in London. Safe in its nest of wood shavings and hay, the two-yard-long instrument made Drummond shiver with anticipation.

Becalmed on the ocean one moonless night, Drummond had set up the tube and aimed it at the caudal light that streaked across the southwestern quadrant of the sky. He allowed Captain John Grudge, the other officers and a few of his shipmates to peer at the comet through the glass.

“It resembles a grain of rice,” was Gerrit Remunde’s comment.

A ship at sea offered no suitable base upon which to steady a perspective tube such as Drummond’s. He would take it to the highest hill in the colony, he would ask Raeger where was best, he would erect it on the darkest night, and wrapped in a warm blanket with a flask of brandy he would look into the heavens to his heart’s content, all night if he could manage it.

The comet, the planet Venus, the stars of Orion, the oceans of the moon.

And he would pour molten glass in his little shed and grind lenses. Spinoza had demonstrated that lens-grinding could be a suitable enterprise for a gentleman. The great Galileo occupied himself with grinding and optics. Drummond meant to do the same.

If all the king’s urgencies would let him.

“Halloo!” a voice called. The Dutchman from the Red Lion, the one who wanted to talk wheat and corn, showed himself in the yard. “Edward Drummond?”

No peace. Get rid of the man, remove himself to his rooms, some mulled claret, an early night.

“Mister Drummond.”

“Yes?”

“Aet Visser. We met last night at the Lion.”

“Yes, I’m sorry, Visser, I am just in the midst of getting settled.”

“A man of the new learning, I see,” Visser said, poking his head into the doorway of the workshop.

“May we speak in the future?” Drummond shut the shed door in the man’s face and moved off toward his dwelling-house. A little rudeness often did the trick of discouraging unwanted acquaintance.

“I don’t mean to disturb you,” Visser said. “I know you must still be getting your land legs under you. Have you help? I can send you over one of my orphans, very good, very reliable.”

“No, thank you,” Drummond said, sidling across the yard.

“No bother at all.”

“I bid you good evening,” Drummond said.

“One moment, if I might trouble you, I have a small request to make upon your time.”

“I’m sorry, Mister Visser.”

“Please, it won’t take a moment. It has to do with my work as the orphanmaster here, about the welfare of children, sir, always a worthy occupation of any gentleman.”

Drummond had his hand on the knob that opened the door into his rented chambers. Inside were unpacked boxes and bags. An unsuitable environment for guests.

But something made him hold his hand from turning the knob. An expression on the man’s face, an invitation to openness and congeniality.

Drummond at bottom always liked the Dutch. He joked about them and often found them risible, but every people (apart from the Italians) had their saving graces. An essential goodness underpinned what some saw as the Dutchman’s natural greed. Goodness and sturdiness were, for Drummond, an unbeatable combination.

He’d fought alongside Russians, Frenchmen, Poles. After his own countrymen, he would choose the Dutch to have beside him if he were ever caught in dire straits, in a castle, say, long besieged. They would eat well to the end, starve together gaily, and he could count on them to stick when the situation turned ugly.

“I have mulled wine in the kettle, but no crockery out yet,” he said to Visser. “We’ll have to drink directly from the ladle.”

Visser bowed. “An option to which I have often resorted in the past, I am unashamed to say.” He passed from the yard into the dwelling-house in front of Drummond.

Boots propped on the andirons, slouched side by side in a pair of heavy chairs, Drummond and Visser drank in the light of a single candle as the dark welled up outside.

Drummond appreciated his guest’s initial silence, his respect for the ancient, sacred act of imbibing. Drink first, talk later. Even if the wine did dribble down one’s chin because you were using a bent kitchen spoon to drink it. Never mind, the act was still sacred.

Visser displayed the scarlet heels favored by the colony grandees, a style that no doubt would soon be outmoded. Fashion was a thing so
ridiculous, Drummond thought, that it had usually to be abandoned immediately upon being adopted.

“I am here in connection with my role as the colony’s orphanmaster,” Visser began, after a pause to let the glow of the wine take hold. “Are you familiar with the office? Have you orphanmasters in England?”

“Not as such, no,” Drummond said. “But I have spent a great deal of time in Flanders, and in Holland, so I believe I’ve encountered the practice before.”

“The parents perish, and the surviving children are vulnerable to exploitation,” the orphanmaster said. “I prevent that. It is merely a recognition by the state of the obligations of Christian charity.”

“You are very good,” Drummond said.

“You were afraid I came here to talk wheat and corn,” Visser said.

Drummond laughed. “Well, last evening…”

“I attempted to deflect your attentions from the lady. She is the trader between the two of us. She does a good deal of grain bartering. I merely dabble.”

“You sought to place yourself between us as a shield for her virtue,” Drummond said. “I am not so predatory as that.”

“She is a former ward of mine. Grown up now, and I really have no standing to direct her actions one way or another. But she is very dear to me.”

“I am an honorable man.”

“I’ve spoken to some of your shipmates on
Margrave
, and this looks to be the case. But I had no way of knowing that when you presented yourself to us in the Red Lion. Acquaintances begun in taprooms often come to smash.”

Drummond began to feel impatient, and wondered what the meddler might be getting at. Checking with Drummond’s fellow passengers on his bona fides! It wasn’t as though he had asked for the young maiden’s hand, for pity’s sake.

“No doubt you question my motives, sir,” Visser said. “You speculate that I am here to talk about Blandine van Couvering. My motives are pure, and I propose to close that subject and move on to the real matter of our interview.”

“Of course,” Drummond said.

“May I?” Visser asked. He gestured toward the kettle of blood-dark wine, helping himself, then refilling the ladle for Drummond. He blew his red nose with a well-used bit of lace, then leaned toward Drummond in his hard-backed chair as though the two had long been confidants.

Drummond thought Visser appeared plump that evening, but surmised it was the dog he kept with him, stuffed into his waistcoat. He was not wrong. The animal’s small head popped from its place in Visser’s vestments. The orphanmaster extracted a piece of cheese rind from behind his left ear and fed bits of it to the pup.

He picked up his story. One of his charges, he said, was a six-year-old orphan, William Turner, a child of some little inheritance, whom he had placed in the care of an English family, George and Rebecca Godbolt. William saw his mother and father die within a week of each other from the small pox.

“I placed William with the Godbolts in the spring. A loving household, with a number of other children. When I asked how many, the father, George, joked that they ran around so much he had been unable to make a count. But I think there are five, all unfledged.”

“Mister Visser—”

“Call me Aet, sir. I have the intention that you and I shall become friends. And the best way to make a man a friend, I believe, is to bind him to you with the asking of a favor.”

Drummond was not so sure of the truth of that proposition, quite the contrary, from his experience. But he let it pass.

“My quandary is this,” Visser said. “I visit my charges often, at least monthly, to see how they are getting on, to perform my role as guardian. For reasons I lay entirely at my own feet, I let a few months pass in between visits to William.”

“He was securely placed, was he not?” Drummond asked. “No blame accrues if he was well taken care of.”

“When I came again, I had a strange experience. They brought the boy William in to me, and an odd whim gripped me that it was not the same child.”

“He looked not the same? I mean, children change rapidly as they grow, that is axiomatic.”

“The same color of hair,” Visser said. “The same age and general stature, similar features, but an uncanny sense of difference.”

“But the Godbolts—is that the name?”

“The Godbolts put him forth as William Turner, the one I had placed in their care those fifteen weeks before.”

“What did you say to them?” Drummond asked.

“What could I say? I thought perhaps it was my own mind that was playing tricks, a possibility I considered much more likely than some mischief originating with the Godbolts.”

“You said nothing?”

“I blurted out, quite stupidly, ‘This is the same Billy?’ George and Rebecca chuckled as though I were an aged relative wondering at the growth of a grandchild.”

Drummond felt certain some deeper story lay behind Visser’s actions. Why had the orphanmaster sought him out? A newcomer to the colony? It didn’t make sense. He had the vague feeling of being a mark, dealt a hand of cards by a sharper.

“You’re wondering how this concerns you,” Visser said. “On that first visit, I left the house with my thoughts unsettled, doubting my impression. But after passing a night of disquiet, I returned immediately the next day. And now, for the first time, I attempted to communicate my doubts to the Godbolts.”

“A delicate task,” Drummond said.

“Indeed, sir. I had no wish to alienate a family of competent guardians by making wild accusations. Well, they denied the idea.”

“They disavowed the possibility,” Drummond said.

“With more bafflement than vehemence,” Visser said. “Their reaction appeared very natural. I was a crazy man, proposing an insane charge against them. They asked me what I thought. Did I contend that they had spirited the other child away? Murdered him? That they were some sort of witches?”

“Let me ask you this,” Drummond said, his curiosity aroused in spite
of himself. “Did the child you placed have birthmarks or identifying characteristics? A prominent tooth, for example, or some deformity?”

“You are quite right, quite perspicacious. And I have in the past noted the birthmarks of my orphans. But I did not do so in the case of William Turner. I wracked my memory trying to recall a mole, a wine spot, something, anything.”

“Well, Mister Visser—” Drummond began, but the orphanmaster held up his hand.

“We are almost there. As I left, purporting to be satisfied with their denials, I said I would come again. When I did, the next day, a strange thing happened. The Godbolts, man and wife, professed to have difficulty understanding me.”

“Why you could make such a charge against them.”

“No, not that. They played themselves confused, again and again, over the accents of my speech. They asked me to repeat my sentences. They would look bewildered, one to the other. They even asked me to ‘Please, sir, speak the king’s English,’ which of course I was already doing. I don’t know if it was the king’s, but it was certainly the common tongue.”

“What was the difficulty?”

“The Godbolts both claimed to find my speech more or less unintelligible.”

“And this was not the case when you had met with them before.”

“Never,” Visser said.

“Your English is as fine as any native speaker,” Drummond said. “Finer than mine, in fact. You used the word
perspicacious
before. That’s not the sign of an uncertain man.”

“Thank you,” Visser said. “I have spoken it from childhood. I am aware my accent is rough, but I have never had a problem with making myself understood.”

Impatience stirred in Drummond. Whatever could the man want?

Visser drank again. “There is something about an orphan, sir,” he said. “They attain an almost mystical status within a community. They live beyond the pale. No parents, and thus, no stops against a child’s natural urges.”

“You have more experience with orphans, of course,” Drummond said.

“Mister Drummond,” Visser said, again tipping himself conspiratorially toward Drummond, “I would like to enlist you, as an Englishman, and as a native speaker of the English tongue, to visit the Godbolt household, and try to make some progress in this affair.”