The Orphanmaster (2 page)

“Il se cache parmi les papists,”
one of the men come to kill Crawley hissed. He hides among the Catholics.

The other assassin closed his hands around the regicide’s throat. The victim would have pled for a last moment of prayer, but found it impossible to speak. The attacker not busy strangling Crawley rifled quickly through the documents on his desk, stuffing them by hurried grabfuls into a greasy leather pouch.

Downstairs, Barbara squirmed in the grip of the third assassin.
“Chut,”
the man said,
“nous ne tuons pas les femmes.”
We don’t kill women. Meaning, unless they give us trouble.

In the garret, Crawley thrashed impotently, a minute, one minute more, the iron grip crushing his windpipe, a silent, terrible struggle. Then, blackness, blankness.

When the two killers were through, they dragged Crawley’s body downstairs, his head banging hollowly on each stone step. Barbara, seeing her brother dead, gasped out a low moan and broke free. As she rushed forward, one of the men delivered a blow that knocked her to the floor.

The corpse of William Crawley, regicide, soared from the second-floor terrace of the
pension
on Les Capucins. The body landed not quite on the hospital grounds, but close enough that the infirmary nuns took charge of it, burying the Protestant king-killer in unconsecrated ground the next afternoon.

*   *   *

Altogether elsewhere, in the new world, morning. The Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on the southern end of Manhattan Island. No indian summer there, but rather raw cold, with lowering clouds threatening an early first blizzard of the season.

A frail child, Piteous Charity Gullee, eight years old.

Piddy.

Alone in the forest near the Kollect Pond, north of the wall, yoked with two empty buckets, Piddy followed the beaten-earth path toward the water. Stood on end, the yoke she carried was taller than she was.

No one around. The dead of dawn.

Many times on her first trip to the Kollect in the morning—executed in total darkness during the winter—she kicked up whitetails, whistle pigs, squirrels, storms of screeching, warning birds.

This year the hunters had driven most of the animals farther up the island. The jays stayed around the swampy margins on the far side of the Kollect, mingling with herring gulls and common terns from the harbor.

Piddy humped the buckets over the last hillock. The pond’s watery mirror turned pink-yellow with the morning, flecked with the black outlines of ducks and geese. Reed beds stretched around the shoreline, their purple floating tufts glowing in the early light.

The Briel household Piddy served was a thirsty, dirty, profligate bunch. But they didn’t drink the water Piddy hauled, and they surely didn’t wash in it. Where did it all go, Piddy wondered, the dozen buckets she carried each day?

She slipped down her secret path through the reeds and out onto a finger of crusted mud that crooked into the shallows. As she crouched to fill her buckets, she startled at a figure watching from the jackpines near the shore.

A devil of some sort, half-man, half-beast. To her small eyes, the apparition towered as tall as a tree. The figure wore European dress, a low beaver hat and a wilted lace collar around his neck.

Above the collar, fixed in the place of a human face, a deerskin mask. Flat, made of peeled skin, with blank, staring eyes.

Fear rose in Piddy’s gorge. Still she thought that she could get away, that he would let her be.

The figure stepped into the water and splashed across the icy shallows between them. Just a few long-legged strides.

She turned her head so as not to see, but his breath came near and sour. From the mouth-hole of the mask, an odd sound,
“dik-duk
,
dik-duk”
—like the nursery rhyme the littlest Briel children recited.

“Oh, please God, no,” Piddy managed, tripping backward over her yoke.

She made her body still smaller than it was, merging with the chilly mud and turning her face down into its grit, with the wish that if she could not see, then the monster would not see her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a pair of red hooves, sunk into the mud of the pond.

For a long moment all she heard was the rattling breeze that pushed the tops of the reeds. Then,
“Dik-duk, dik-duk.”
He picked her up from the ground by the throat, shook her like a doll, and the air went out of her in little mewling cries,
uff, uff, uff
. Gripping her windpipe as though it were the handle to a satchel, the creature drew Piddy close.

Behind the scabby mask, red eyes. Her own gushed tears. He cracked her heavily across the mouth, loosening her teeth. Again. He drove his knee to force apart Piddy’s spindly legs. She wanted to collapse, but he had her dangling by the throat.

It went on.

“Dik-duk.”
She found herself on her back. Piddy’s blank brown eyes reflected the cloud-spotted sky above. Unconsciousness found her, but still her body wept and groaned as the creature worked on her.

When it was over, the killer dragged Piddy by her bare feet to the spongy edge of the pond. The corpus refused to sink. He leaned into the pond, weighting the small form with a stone folded into the thin linen of her dress.

Piddy did not hear the creature softly mouth two words, nor would she have understood them if she had.

“Deus dormit.”
God sleeps.

It began to snow.

T
he counting rooms of the Dutch West India Company took the whole of the first floor of a redbrick warehouse, built along the East River on the southernmost flank of Manhattan Island.

The eighth day of October, 1663. Outside, a premature snowfall. In the crowded, noisy, tobacco-fogged counting-room quarters, merchants inspected the goods, the shipping barrels and one another. Beneath the din of voices, a musical ringing of coins and hollow clink of wampum, pleasing to all ears.

Everywhere were stacked colanders and kettles, pins and vinegar, blankets and Bibles and toys. The warehouse, like the colony itself, skewed heavily male, a realm of pipe-sucking traders, profane sail captains and percentage-minded excise officials.

But among the Dutch, profit was a promiscuous god, welcoming all supplicants, and in the counting rooms that fall day worked a scattering of she-merchants. One among them, a woman of twenty-two years, directed a young female assistant in the procedures of trade.

“When you fold, straightened edges go together,” Blandine van Couvering said, watching her apprentice struggle with a length of duffel. The girl, fifteen years old, called Miep, was the youngest daughter of the Fredericz family.

Carsten Fredericz van Jeveren wanted Miep to learn commerce. To become a she-merchant like Blandine van Couvering. Blandine herself had no need of a protégée, but she did have use for Carsten Fredericz’s patronage, so she took the slow learner on.

Miep displayed the refolded duffel to her mentor. “Good,” Blandine said. “Now place it in the stack of others, and put the stack in—well, we have all sorts of cooperage, don’t we? Which would you choose?”

The girl took the pile of duffel lengths and stuffed them roughly into a small cask. Fine. Not the barrel Blandine would have selected, and a bit messy, but let it go. She couldn’t continue correcting Miep the whole day.

“You’re next, madam,” a phlegmy male voice said behind her.

Blandine turned to face the West India Company’s ancient tax inspector, Chas Pembeck. The man wore a pair of the new Italian eye spectacles. He possessed himself of all the latest luxuries, a benefit of being the gatekeeper for the colony’s imported goods.

“You are?” he said.

Blandine hid a pained smile. Pembeck’s question stung. She thought of herself as a rising young trader of the colony. But the old fish pretended not to remember her. She stared at the ocular device affixed to the man’s face.

Charming, the blush in her cheeks
, the inspector thought. But was that insolence in her expression? He tried again. “Your name?”

“Blandine van Couvering, Mister Pembeck,” Blandine said. As you well know. She thrust out her hand. A challenge to genteel tradition, which held that ladies never shook, but a business practice Blandine had lately adopted.

Pembeck took her hand unwillingly, limply releasing it. He ignored young Miep, who curtsied.

Blandine presented her bill of lading. Peering through his newfangled lenses, Pembeck soberly inspected the document, comparing its list of goods with the jumble spread around Blandine.

Company agents had marked off the counting-room floor in squares with quicklime. Blandine’s bundles, firkins and barrels filled her square, spilling over the line. Pembeck nudged a stray cask back inside the border with his foot.

“This barrel?” he said. “Let’s start there.”

“Duffel cloth,” she said. “From Antwerp.”

“Better not to shut the tuns before inspection,” Pembeck said.

Blandine pried open the top and displayed the contents, thick wool cloth, folded to better fit the container. “I have a smaller cask of duffel there,” she said.

The inspector nodded and went on, ticking off the items one by one. “Two pony barrels of molasses. Brass thimbles, one score. A dozen long knives, a dozen jackknives.”

“Sheffield Barlows, sire,” Blandine said.

“Good,” Pembeck said, popping open one of the English-made blades. “The river indians like these.”

But there it had been again. That “sire” of the girl’s had been pronounced with a faint air of condescension, of parody. Little Miss Snippy. He would level her an extra guilder in excise for that.

Pembeck clambered over the goods to reach the back of Blandine’s marked-off square, tap, tap, tapping with his excise rod. “Six barrels Barbados rum. Five staves lead. Twenty pounds powder. A hundred ells cloth, red and plaid.”

“I’ve got osnabrig, serge, diaper, Hamburg linen. Lawn and silk.”

“And the duffel.”

“Yes.”

Pembeck made a note. “Hand tools, nails, saws and hammers.” Rummaging, peering, checking against her bill of lading. She had a wide variety of goods, he saw, but no great quantity.

“Twelve iron pots, ten iron frying pans. The
wilden
prefer copper better, they like to shape it for arrowheads.”

Wilden
, what the Dutch called the natives. Savages.

“Forty white clay pipes—wherever did you get so many? Lace festoons. A wealth of those.”

“For the women,” Blandine said.

“Yes,” said the inspector.

Every autumn fur traders—
handlaers
, they called themselves—paid hunters in advance with such trade goods, expecting in return fur pelts and animal skins. The river indians spent all winter trapping.
Handlaer
and native would then meet in the spring to complete their transactions.

The upcoming market weeks were crucial for Blandine’s campaign to rise from her limited trade in minor peltry—soft-tanned deer skins, elk, mink, muskrat, otter and bobcat hides—to enter the elite world of the strange, mystical animal that had rendered life in the New Netherland colony viable.

Beaver.

Europe was avid for American fur, and valued beaver above all.

Blandine eyed Pembeck. “If I have the goods, I can make the trades, can I not?”

“Certainly,” he said.

“There is no law or regulation stopping me?”

“You must pay the Company its tax is all.”

Pembeck arrived at the black heart of Blandine’s trading cache, her three long-barreled muskets. Providing weapons to the river indians had customarily been subject to Company regulation. She would brazen it out.

“Ah, these are fine,” Pembeck said, his eyes lit with a familiar mercantile gleam.

Her father, Willem, had begun his life as a gunsmith, so Blandine could easily recite the characteristics of the weapons.

“Round, seven-five caliber, baluster-turned, pin-fastened, smoothbore, iron barrels with wedding-band transitions, rounded banana contours and matching gooseneck hammers.”

Pembeck blinked at her. “You’re a sly one, ain’t ye, lass? I had no idea.”

No idea that the muskets were baluster-turned and pin-fastened? Or no idea that a green frill such as Blandine could know so much about gunsmithing?

Pembeck hefted one of the heavyweight muskets. He frowned. “Only…”

“Yes?” Blandine asked.

“We are not selling the indigenes flintlocks just now. The
wilden
are frisky enough as it is.”

“These are simple pattern locks. You see?” She cocked the firing mechanism and displayed its brass powder pan to the inspector.

Pembeck performed a genial half-bow. “Permissible,” he said.

He propped one of the muskets with its stock resting on the wide wooden floorboards of the counting room. “These will be pelt guns, and you will have the trappers bring back beaver skins to the same height as the length of the musket barrel.”

The inspector held his hand, palm level, at the barrel’s end. In exchange for the gun, an indian would be obliged to trade a fifty-nine-inch stack of “merchantable” beaver pelts.