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years later, when a child who went out to fetch water did not come back, that Lace and Mally should turn to Blandine.

4
    A s soon as she heard of Piddy Gullee’s disappearance, Blandine sought out the orphanmaster.
    Aet Visser was the man most important to her in all of New Amsterdam. Charged by the town government with looking after the interests of orphaned children, he had taken care of Blandine herself when she lost her parents at age fifteen.
    Not that she wanted him to. Not at first anyway. Crushed by rage and grief at the news that her parents’ ship,
Blue Hen
, had wrecked with the death of all aboard in the Channel off Kent, she walled herself away from human contact.
    She was fine, Blandine told the orphanmaster when he came calling. I am old enough to take care of myself. A small stash of seawan made it possible to live as she pleased. When the disaster carried her parents to the bottom of the Channel, Blandine boldly marched into probate court, a girl of fifteen petitioning to sell her family’s home, a two-story redbrick residence on the canal with five apple trees in back.
    Such a transaction was the proper province of the orphanmaster, and Visser appeared next to her in court, but she rudely refused his help. She stumbled through her dealings with the magistrate. Visser interrupted to suggest that Blandine retain the fruit of the orchard trees for ten years hence. The magistrate ruled five.
    That was nice. But she told Visser he should keep out of her affairs anyway. She smiled ruefully at the memory of telling him off, a squeaky-voiced girl trying to act grown up.
    After that, Visser played patient. He had already reached middle age when they met, and had held the orphanmaster position forever, since the rough-and-tumble years of the 1650s, a time when colonists and natives seemed locked in irresolvable, deadly conflict. There were many new casualties of war.
    He oversaw the means and property of parentless minors. He was an angel of death, appearing whenever parents perished. Among shipwrecks,indian wars and rampaging contagions, the business of orphanmastering boomed.
    Visser came to the new world from Friesland, in the Dutch Republic, where the winds off the North Sea blew strong. He shared his background with many in the colony, including the director general, which allowed Visser to cultivate the relationships that helped him secure the position of orphanmaster.
    Did Visser cut corners? Was he ever accused of dipping his hand into the money pots of his wards? Inevitable, these accusations, when such dealings were transacted. But Aet Visser bumped along as the colony’s orphanmaster, not totally honest, perhaps, but for the purpose of the colony, honest enough. Which is all that can be realistically asked of any man.
    Rumor surrounded him. He had disobedient wards killed. He fathered a whole family of bastards with a beautiful half-indian woman north of the wall. He supplied young orphans to the Jews for their infernal blood rites.
    Visser shrugged off the tales. He modeled openness.
    “I myself am an orphan,” he always said, neglecting to add that his parents had both died at the comfortable old age of fifty-two.
    The orphanmaster held forth in the Orphan Chamber, a special court convened at the colony’s town hall, the Stadt Huys, an imposing five-story stone structure on the waterfront.
    In the Orphan Chamber, Visser arranged for apprenticeships and servitudes. He ensured that heirs inherited inheritances. He sent a few of his wards back across the sea to Holland, to be cared for in the homes of relatives.
    Just in the last week, an issue came into the chamber when two human heads were discovered while gathering in the cattle of settlers who had disappeared “in the last disaster”—an indian incursion. Visser officially declared the two heads were indeed those of the vanished men, Cornelis Swits and Tobias Clausen, thereby rendering their children wards of the orphanmaster.
    “Pursuant to