The Orphanmaster Read Online Free PDF

the retaliatory massacres, the burning of cornfields and villages, happened far to the north of New Amsterdam, near the town of Wildwyck. So far, nothing of it had directly touched the settlement.
    Just to be safe, the
schout
ordained that no settler should venture out beyond the palisade wall without armed escort. But it was the high summer season, the raspberries on the hillsides only a short few leagues from town needed gathering and the colonists loved their summer fruit.
    A band of a dozen settlers, primarily women and children but with two Company militiamen along, headed out from town through the land gate. The militiamen carried firearms.
    Blandine joined them. She enjoyed raspberries as much as anyone, and liked the easy feeling of community among the pickers. It was a tradition. She had picked every year since as a child she went with her mother and father. Blandine always relished getting beyond the confines of the colony’s northern wall to the wilder lands beyond.
    The area where the tiny juicy drupelets grew seemed perfectly secure.
Bouweries
—the farms of the countryside—open meadows and dwelling-houses dotted the landscape, marked also by the major thoroughfare of the Post Road, the link between the southern tip of Manhattan and the territories to the north.
    As the group passed Little Angola, one of the women there, Mally, hailed Blandine.
    “You going berrying?” she asked, seeing the woven basket Blandine carried over her arm.
    Blandine knew Mally casually, having employed her and her half-sister, Lace, to do hemming on linens she imported from Patria. The finished product—pillowcases, bedsheets, handkerchiefs—commanded a higher price than raw cloth.
    Blandine saw Lace coming up behind Mally, carrying sacks for fruit. No one had any objections to the Africans joining the group, so Mally and Lace came with them.
    If Africans had any status in the colony at all, they were usually called by the last name of the region from which they came. So Mally and Lace and others, too, all were given the same last name, Angola. There was no thought behind it, and it was by no choice of the ones so named. The Dutch authorities simply needed a distinguishing label to put down on paper if the Africans were ever hauled into court.
    A hot July day. Insect noise swelled from the meadows, died andswelled again. Two sisters in the group, Tryntie and Aleida Bout, sang a hymn of thanks, “Nederlandtsche Gedenckclanck,” a new anthem celebrating the Protestant victory over the Spanish Catholics in Holland.
    We gather together
    To ask the Lord’s blessing
    God our defender and guide
    Through the past year.
    A few of the others picked up the song. Blandine noticed that the harsh rasping of the locusts, katydids and crickets easily drowned out the quavering human voices singing God’s praises.
    She trailed behind the group. With the journey out of town, her abiding sorrow lifted a little, the sadness she had suffered since she lost her family. Yet these were haunted precincts for Blandine. It had been a different, more carefree girl who traipsed through the sweet berry bushes when she was young.
    The road they followed up the island led them to a small rise with a view of the wide river to the west. The water’s surface reflected back the gunmetal blue of the sky. Blandine noticed a flattened thatch of grass. Probably nothing more than a night bed for deer.
    As they diverged from the road onto a path, Blandine saw that a collection of canoes had been pulled in amid a reed bed on the rocky Manhattan shore just below her. They stood empty, beached in a line.
    From the water, she thought, no one would see the skiffs among the reeds.
    The sky was patched with high white cumulus, the men had taken up the hymn along with the women and the group entered in among the scattered cane-fields of raspberries. The fruits dangled, crimson and abundant. Emperor and hairstreak butterflies sipped on the berry sugar. A cloud of them arose