Free The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman Page A

Kees’s rigid, squared-off form disappearing down the street, she felt lighthearted and free. She locked her front door and turned the other way, toward the docks.
    “You know the indian? Lightning?” Antony said, walking along beside her. “He’s one of Aet Visser’s men.”
    “Yes?” Blandine said, diverted by her eagerness to board ship.
    “He watches you,” Antony said. “He’s been around. Last night. And he was here this morning.”
    Lightning. The skeletal half-indian habitually wore a stove-in black felt hat, covering a scar that people gossiped came from a Mahican scalping with a sharpened clamshell. He had tattoos of stars along his jawline.
    “If he’s watching me,” Blandine said, “he won’t have much to see for the next few weeks.”
    They turned along the wharf and found the sloop that would carry her and Antony north into the wilderness. She could see her goods being loaded onto the
Rose
. Joy coursed through her.
    It was all she could do not to break into a run as she reached the pier.

8
    D rummond lodged the night in the Lion, sleeping alongside a loutish sail captain. Emperor Nasty-Pants erupted with vile-smelling vapors the whole time, waking bright-eyed, jubilant with the triumph of a new day, just as Drummond fell back into an uneasy doze.
    He dreamed of the colony’s lone pet peacock, seeking for advantage among the seagulls and pigeons of the town. He killed the bird and fed its heart to a street mongrel.
    When Drummond woke, a smear of blood showed on the snow as he went to empty his bladder behind the Lion. But it was only the telltale aftermath of the tavern’s cook slaughtering a chicken. It turned out the colony owned no peacock.
    He took breakfast with Raeger, who afterward sent a boy with Drummond to find his rented rooms in Slyck Steegh. His landlord was a Swede with an unpronounceable name. Trount, or something like that.
    The rooms were acceptable. Drummond asked to see the outbuilding. A rectangular space, well windowed, the tile floor finely grouted, the whole place as licked-clean as the king’s boots.
    “I informed Mister Raeger the shed would be three guilders a month extra,” the Swede said. “I’ll take it in seawan if you don’t have coin.”
    The business of wampum mystified Drummond. Raeger possessed barrels of the stuff stored in a keep at the back of the Lion. The Dutch, Drummond knew, established seawan factories on Long Island, protected by armed guards. Inside, they churned out whole wreaths by drilling holes in clamshells and stringing the bits together. The purple being more valuable than the white.
    Which seawan the river indians and everyone else in the colony cheerfully accepted as legal tender for all debts public or private. So the Dutch literally were able to mint money. Incredible. Drummond couldn’t fathom how it worked. Designs for shell-drilling instruments and more efficient seawan-stringing machines naturally occurred to his mind.
    “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