Read Online The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman - Free Book Online Page A

“I need sleep. You’ve secured rooms for me? Not here, I hope.”
    Raeger said, “On Slyck Steegh, next to the canal.”
    “I’ve heard about your canal. That it stinks like pig anus.”
    “The better part of town.” Raeger laughed.
    “And the workshop I asked for?”
    “Abutting the back. Brick, with a glazed tile floor.” Raeger drank up his wine. “You can stand one night in a room upstairs, can’t you? Get settled tomorrow in the dwelling-house. Take your time. But you will go north to inquire about this awful business?” He flicked his finger at the pamphlet.
    “I suppose.” Drummond sighed.
    “I just thought that if you were up there, you could damp down the flames of anti-English sentiment a little.”
    “But I can’t go mucking about without drawing their suspicions,” Drummond said.
    Raeger nodded. “The Dutch,” he said, “are a most suspicious people.”
    “Only in this case, their suspicions are entirely correct.”
    Raeger laughed and slid open the little window, giving Drummond a view of the downstairs.
    The long-stemmed white clay pipes of the smokers bristled in the gloom. Voices rose from the taproom. Besides Dutch and English, Drummond counted snatches of French, Swedish and Polish, some Hochdeutsch, plus a few words of what he took to be Algonquin, the language of the river indians.
    The multilingual chatter impressed Drummond. By the bowels of Christ (Cromwell’s favorite oath), what a bestiary Raeger had himself here! As though someone had tilted up the globe and all the dregs flooded down into New Netherland.
    “Who’s that?” he asked Raeger.
    The innkeeper peered around out the little window to see where Drummond was looking. “Aet Visser,” he said.
    Drummond shook his head and gave Ross Raeger a thin smile. Always joking.
    “Visser’s a minor Dutch official,” Raeger said. “A sort of guardian they call the orphanmaster.”
    “Please,” Drummond said.
    “Oh, you mean the lady,” Raeger said, putting on an innocent face.
    “I saw her when
Margrave
came in,” Drummond said.
    “Blandine van Couvering. Styles herself a she-merchant. Grain, foodstuff, some small furs, working her way up to beaver. Striking, isn’t she?”
    “Very. She deals in grain? So do I.”
    “She’s not for you, my man,” Raeger said. He quoted Wyatt’s poem about Anne Boleyn: “‘
Noli me tangere
, for Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’” Touch me not, the Latin meant.
    “Caesar,” Drummond said.
    “Stuyvesant has Lady Blandina marked for his nephew,” Raeger said.
    “Stuyvesant,” Drummond said.
    “The director general.”
    “I know who Stuyvesant is,” Drummond said. “Does he arrange marriages now?”
    “The person our director general reminds me of the most is Cromwell himself,” Raeger said. “Stuyvesant tells people to call him ‘
Mijn Heer
General.’”
    “I heard he’s not half the man that Cromwell was,” Drummond said.
    Raeger laughed. “Yes, yes, and
Mijn Heer
General has not a leg to stand on. We know the jokes. But it’s serious. Like the wolf, the longer Stuyvesant lives, the worse he bites.”
    “And like Cromwell, he’s a great builder of gallows.”
    “You saw that, did you, coming in? Stuyvesant had it erected down there on the point for a purpose, so it’s the first thing newcomers see of the new world.”
    “I don’t know,” Drummond mused. “Perhaps it is a necessary measure, in the wild. I have only just arrived, and already I get a sense of lawlessness, beyond the wall, waiting to burst in.”
    “Extraterritoriality,” Raeger said. “We have slipped the leash of civilization out here.”
    “And God, is he present and accounted for?”
    “Oh,
Mijn Heer
General keeps God in his vest pocket,” Raeger said. “You can ask him for a peep if you wish.”
    “And the nephew, the girl’s beau? What’s his story?”
    “Cornelus Bayard, called Kees, ‘like the call of the hawk,’ he says, but ‘Kees’