The Orphanmaster Read online

  THE ORPHANMASTER

  Also by Jean Zimmerman

  Love, Fiercely

  The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant

  Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty

  Made from Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth

  Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem

  and Save Girls’ Lives (with Gil Reavill)

  Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook

  Jean Zimmerman

  THE

  Orphanmaster

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi–110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Jean Zimmerman, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Zimmerman, Jean.

  The orphanmaster / Jean Zimmerman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58365-4

  1. New York—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3626.I493O77 2012

  813’.6—dc23 2011038593

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Carre Noir Std Medium Designed by Francesca Belanger

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For the both of us

  Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to foreigners. We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.

  —Lamentations 5:2–3

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: Prince Maurice’s River

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Part Two: The Stadt Huys

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Part Three: The Place of Stones

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Part Four: The Crown Province of New York

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  October 8, 1663

  On the same day, two murders.

  In Delémont, in Switzerland’s Jura, the regicide William Crawley lived with his sister, hiding in plain sight in a pension on Faubourg des Capucins, near the hospital.

  As the bells of Saint-Marcel sounded vespers, Crawley’s sister Barbara watched the dark descend upon the town from the second-floor terrace off the kitchen. Although ever vigilant, she failed to notice three figures slip from the Rue des Elfes, come through the black backyards across the street and approach the ground-floor entry of the pension.

  A Saint Martin summer, unseasonably hot. Barbara went into the kitchen, stood at the sink, sopped her face with water from the basin. As she bent over, holding a cooling rag to her neck, they grabbed her from behind, muffling a shriek of alarm.

  Crawley, working at his desk upstairs in the cramped and stifling third-floor garret, heard the disturbance. A crash of crockery.

  “Barbara?” he called, rising to his feet. He went to the stairwell and saw them coming up toward him, taking the steps three or four at a time, a pair of blade-thin men in identical black waistcoats and small caps.

  “No!” Crawley shouted, lunging backward into his attic study, groping for his dog-lock pistolet, kept at hand on a shelf near his desk.

  They were too quick. They burst in on him, the first attacker wrenching the barrel of Crawley’s gun upward. The hammer dry-fired, the powder pan fizzled, then finally exploded. But the lead ball embedded itself impotently in the garret’s low ceiling, showering them all with plaster dust and bits of lath.

  Thus he was caught, fourteen years, eight months and eight days after he affixed his seal (“Ego, Hon Wm Crawley”) to a document that doomed Charles I, a sitting king sentenced to have his head separated from his body. Puritan zealots, appalled by the Catholicism infecting the monarchy, demanded royal blood. The death warrant Crawley signed gave it to them.

  On execution day, January 30, 1649, the condemned monarch wore two shirts, lest he shiver and seem to betray fear. The king of England, France and Ireland, the king of Scots, the Defender of the Faith, et cetera, asked the executioner, “Does my hair trouble you?” Charles I tucked the royal locks away from his neck beneath a cap, uttered a prayer, then splayed out his arms and received the blade.

  And, inevitably, the revenge. It took a while. Charles Stuart, the murdered monarch’s son, escaped (barely) the Puritan furies on his trail, slipped across the Channel to the Continent and entered into a decade of exile. Unimpressed by the young man’s chances to regain his kingship, European royals turned their backs on him. Impoverished and ignored, he wandered, mostly in France and the Low Countries, anguished by his father’s execution, feeling bruised by history.

  But the dynastic destiny of the Stuarts took a turn. On September 3, 1658, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, rebel ringleader and “brave bad man” (Clarendon’s phrase), died while attempting to pass a kidney stone. After two more years of succession chaos, the English Parliament invited Charles II to return home and assume the throne.

  As a gesture of royal largesse and reconciliation, the newly restored young monarch issued the Indemnity and Oblivion Act, pardoning all former rebels against the crown.

  All except the fifty-nine judge-commissioners who signed the death warr
ant of his father, Charles I.

  Some of those fifty-nine had already died. These had their bodies exhumed, propped up in their cerements before the bar at the Old Bailey, judged, condemned and, in the singular phrase of the day, “executed posthumously.” Cromwell’s corpse hung in chains from Tyburn gallows while his head rotted on a spike at Westminster.

  The living signatories, William Crawley among them, were hunted down like outlaws. Located by men of the king’s chancellor, George Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon, who had them assiduously tracked to the provinces, Scotland, the Continent, America, to wherever in the world they attempted to hide themselves. Puritan protectors of the regicides made the task difficult as well as dangerous.

  In this case, an agent of the crown named Edward Drummond beat the bushes of Europe to turn up the king-killer Crawley, following his spoor from Scotland to Paris, Münster and finally Switzerland. It was no simple task, finding a single needle in the haystack of the Continent, but Drummond made short work of it. The man, Clarendon believed, worked miracles. Without his efforts, the murderer Crawley would never feel the lash of the crown’s revenge.

  Clarendon could not ask a gentleman such as Drummond to perform the execution himself. He had other men for that, lean and hungry low-born men. After Drummond located the regicide, Clarendon sent out the assassins. Drummond was long gone by the time they arrived.

  “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.

  Part One

  Prince Maurice’s River

  1

  The 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 comm
erce. 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?”