The Orphanmaster Read Online Free PDF Page B

as the Dutch, crying out like children, plunged into the bushes.
    In a first gluttonous spasm, the settlers didn’t bother with their baskets, they simply stuffed whole handfuls into their mouths.
    With Lace and Mally, Blandine wandered away from the others. The berry trail guided them in random directions. Each prickly, laden caneled to the next, as though there would be a secret revealed at the end of the path.
    Blandine left off picking. She sat on the ground amid the canes, her aproned skirts spread about her. She looked east toward the Post Road and a massive stand of jackpines that lined the way. Mentally, she calculated the worth of the trees. Masts for the navies of the world.
    Far off, on the roadway, a drover herded a pair of cattle, heading toward town. Then, between one tree and the next, he abruptly disappeared. She waited for the man to show himself again. His cattle wandered down the road without him. She could hear their bells tinkling.
    After a quarter hour, the clouds fully reefed the sky, hiding the sun, and a breath of cooler air rose from the river. The colonists quieted, intent on filling their baskets. Blandine struggled to maintain her lightness of heart. The cows still roamed alone. What happened to the drover?
    She quickly rose to her feet.
    “Mally,” she called. “Lace.” They were nearby.
    “We have to—” she said, but broke off. “We should join the others.” They threaded their way back through the berry canes to where the dozen pickers worked.
    Everything was all right. The clouds uncovered the sun, and the red-stained faces of her fellow townspeople reassured her. She was a ninny to be nervous. Odd how the wilderness struck her differently at different times. Glorious one moment, threatening the next.
    A hand fell on Blandine’s shoulder. She jumped, surprised.
    “Look within,” Patricia Reydersen said, displaying a basket nearly full with fruit. “What have ye been at? You’ve picked hardly nothing for yourself.”
    “I’ve got more than anybody!” crowed the nine-year-old Reydersen daughter, Ereen. Patricia Reydersen had been one of the matrons who was kind when Blandine was newly orphaned, having been close to her mother, Josette. Patricia’s hearth offered the hungry girl cider and cookies.
    Militiaman Jerominus Tyinck, his chin bloodred with berry juice, stood nearby. Blandine approached him. “Did you mark the canoes?”
    The man looked at her blankly.
    “Along the shore,” she said.
    “No doubt they’re over from Pavonia, lass,” Tyinck said, naming the colony across the river from Manhattan. Indians there were known to be harmless. “No need to fear.”
    Tyinck dismissed her, a young goose of a girl pulling at her curls and trying to keep her hands free of berry juice. The militiaman strode away toward an area of heavy cane. He propped his gun against a stump and worked his pipe.
    Silence. Out of that silence, a shout.
    Vocalizing loudly, an indian warrior appeared, running pell-mell from the concealing forest. He swung his war club and dropped Jerominus Tyinck with a tremendous blow to the head.
    Screams. As more natives showed around them, a wide-eyed panic gripped the colonists. They were outnumbered. The children clung to their mothers. The women moaned:
“Neen, neen, neen.”
No, no, no.
    Resoluet Waldron, the other militiaman, engaged his musket. The gunshot sounded enormous in the still glade. The bullet spun one of the attackers around in a bloody whirl. But that was all. Another raider grabbed the gun out of Waldron’s hands and smashed him with it. He, too, fell to the ground.
    The women and children were on their own.
    Blandine stood with Mally and Lace. More and more
wilden
appeared out of the woods. Not river indians, she saw. By their markings, Mahicans, from the north.
    The director general of the colony displayed a callous disregard for distinctions of tribe and clan among the natives. Armies of settlers during the Esopus wars attacked all