The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman

Author:Jean Zimmerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Suspense, Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780670023646
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2012-06-18T18:30:00+00:00

27

Blandine and Antony turned out not to accompany Drummond on his post-Christmas jaunt to New Haven. It was probably better that way. Drummond had once seen, at a cattle-market fair in the Mitte quarter of Berlin, a juggler who kept four live cats and a screaming piglet up in the air at once. Marking king-killers for death with Blandine van Couvering on hand struck him as the more difficult task.

So, he would travel by coastal from New Amsterdam to New Haven, conduct the king’s business privately, then rendezvous with Blandine and her giant at Fort Huys de Goede Hoop, “Fort House of Good Hope,” the Dutch holdout trading post at Hartford, in the heart of Connecticut. Afterward, they’d proceed northward by sleigh to Jope Hawes territory.

New Haven, January, in the bold new annum of 1664. A low town of a few stone buildings, thatch-roofed wood-framed houses and many log huts. Chimneys were held together not with mortar but with clay. At least, Drummond thought, the residents were not living in earthen pits, as he had seen in Hartford and other hamlets in Connecticut.

The Puritan response to the new world consisted of prayer, sweet pudding and the stocks. The pudding was quite good, but the other two elements were strained from overuse. In place of the shining city on the hill, the New Haven Colony had thrown down a tight-as-a-pinprick theocratic harbor village.

Drummond had had his fill of Puritan religious fervor and spectacles of public punishment in the Civil War. The New Haven Colony did not agree with him.

Except, perhaps, the waterfront. The harbor was quite good. Coastal shipping generally made a stopover at New Haven on the transit between Boston and New Amsterdam. Although nary a taproom or sporting house marred the town’s sanctity even on the wharves, more secular travelers could find rooms and convivial atmospheres at several dwelling-houses in the harbor district.

At one of these, a wooden-framed structure with a generous public room, Drummond met with Tunny Beechman, Ross Raeger’s man in Connecticut.

“You are going to have to cut your hair,” Tunny said. “They’ll mark you right off as a royalist if you enter a meetinghouse with locks like that.”

“I’ll tuck them under my hat,” Drummond said.

“Which ye will remove at the meetinghouse door,” Tunny said.

Since the only communal gatherings in the town took place in one of four meetinghouses that were less like churches than public halls, Drummond had proposed to go around in disguise. He needed to gain entry to the community, and community in New Haven meant the ceaseless, droning prayer meetings.

A few times before, in England during the war, going incognito, he had worn the mockingbird clothes of the Puritans—black fustian tunics with plain white linen yoke collars. This would be trickier. The New Haven settlement was small, fewer than three hundred souls. Residents knew one another. They were suspicious of outsiders, even of their Puritan brethren from Plymouth and Boston. If he carried out his plan, discovery would be a very real threat.

“You could be hung,” Tunny said cheerfully.

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