Free The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman

shower down on her like raindrops.
    He said he loved her, but she glimpsed him dallying with other girls, young things, at the market square on Saturdays. His idea of marrying Blandine always seemed hypothetical, held off to some golden, indeterminate future. “If we were to get engaged,” Kees said, rather than “when.” That was all right. She was too busy to marry now.
    In Holland, the standard of a woman’s honor hovered somewhere between the strict English version and the lax Parisian, and was perhaps a shade less rigid on the new world’s frontier than in Patria. Blandine did not hold herself above getting amorous now and then. She would have gone further with Kees, if she could have broken through his gentlemanly reserve.
    She held a terrible suspicion that she did not fully admit, even to herself, that their true love, each of them, was for profit. Kees liked to invoke one of his favorite sentences. “Out of every hundred guilders in Nieuw Amsterdam, I hold ten.”
    Blandine would complete the boast for him. “Soon to be fifteen,” she’d say.
    It was still early. Light came thinly through the orange shutters, falling on the clean-swept floor. Before dawn she awoke, and by the light of a candle had erupted in a frenzy of cleaning. The place was spotless, because Blandine kept it that way with soap and water every day. She cleaned that morning not to expunge dirt but because her Dutchwoman’s soul required the ritual.
    At first light, at her door, Antony, with the African elder Handy and Lace.
    “Piddy is found?” she asked.
    By their expressions, no.
    “You still mean to leave,” Lace said, unable to hide the disappointment in her tone.
    Blandine stepped out into the street in front of her stoop.
    “I leave, but I am with you.”
    Lace looked unconvinced. “You are with your trading,” she said, moving to turn away.
    Blandine said, “There is a thing I must look into in Beverwyck. Something that might bear upon Piddy’s disappearance.”
    Did she lie? She felt low, as though she were skulking away from friends in need.
    Antony had stayed with her, assuming his usual post outside the door. But Lace and Handy departed, still unsettled and, Blandine thought, angry with her.
    Now day had broken and the river sloop
Amsterdam Rose
would soon launch. She rummaged in her
kas
for an extra chemise, looking to take it along but also perhaps hoping to embarrass Kees Bayard a bit with the sight of it.
    “You are very pretty this morning,” he said, eyeing the frill of the undergarment.
    “The hunt suits me, Kees. Profit excites me. Advantage gives me pleasure.”
    She fluffed the chemise and stowed it in her overflowing trunk.
    “The tide turns,” she said. “I must go.”
    She shut the trunk and tied a gray cloak over her olive linen gown. “You know what is the softest fur?”
    “Beaver,” Kees said automatically.
    Blandine shook her head. “Mink. I’ll bring you back a pelt for a fur collar,” she said. “Or would you rather a bearskin muff?”
    They stepped outside. Antony waited on her, hefting her trunk effortlessly onto his shoulders. The snow in the middle of Pearl had already been tracked to mud, but lay bright white along the margins of the street.
    Kees displayed an attitude toward the giant that he had toward all servants, an oblivious disregard—until he required attendance. Then, finger-snapping hauteur.
    He held out his hand to Blandine, a gesture that was meant to be friendly but came across as somehow patronizing. She was leaving. He was staying. She felt an odd, heart-flutter rush of anticipation, the senseof slipping out from under the gaze of Kees, beyond the town, away from all constraint and expectation.
    Kees bowed, touched her cheek and set off down High Street toward the fort. He had apologized for not being able to see her off at the ship. “Business with Uncle,” he told her. Stuyvesant, the director general of the colony.
    Blandine didn’t care. As she watched