“You’re not here for tea, or to look at the school,” said Anna.
“Whiskey, then, perhaps?” said Miss Ashcroft setting her hat on the baize-covered table. “I’m told New Yorkers like to conduct all their business over strong drink, and I expect you kept a bottle, for her.”
“I did keep one, in the kitchen,” admitted Anna. “But I poured it out when I learned she was dead.” She’d poured it, to be specific, in a wide circle over the ground in the garden, a libation of sorts. It had been a sentimental gesture, an offering in honor of a woman who disdained sentiment. Anna had never learned the trick of it, how to detach herself from people and things. Sometimes at night she still closed her eyes and ached to be back in her family’s cottage with the smoky jambless chimney and warm sleeping loft.
“Then I suppose there’s nothing for it—tea, it is,” said her mysterious visitor. She took the liberty of rising and pulling the bell. When she was seated again, she said, “Now, Anna—or do you prefer Annatje?”
“Anna will do. I presume your name is not Ashcroft.”
“No, it’s not. But Ashcroft is a familiar name. That was one of the things I learned from the Widow. Never use a name you will not answer to instinctively, immediately, even—or especially—when you hear it called in a crowded room. Anna is close enough to Annatje, but Winters is an interesting choice, since your family name is Hoppe.”
If she knew that much, she knew everything that mattered. The only question that remained was whether she would prove friend or foe. “Winters was my mother’s name.”
“A sensible option, then.”
The door opened. Mrs. Peterson entered with a tray. Miss Ashcroft smiled and asked how many girls were usually enrolled at one time. Here at least was a scene Anna could play to perfection. She made all the right noises about the school, as though she were conversing with the parent of a prospective student. When Mrs. Peterson was gone and the door was closed again Miss Ashcroft said, “Is there no one in New York in your confidence?”
“No.”
“That must be very lonely.” Miss Ashcroft sounded as though she was intimately acquainted with loneliness.
Anna had never been lonely. She’d kept her secrets gladly. Talking about them would not change the past. It would only destroy the adoptive family she had formed at the school and shatter all the joy she had found there. Some things were better kept close to the heart. “How do you know who I am?”
“Angela Ferrers willed me her estate. Property, money, and . . . contacts. At least the ones she did not divulge before her death. Her intention was unwritten, but plain enough. I have taken up, in a small way, the work the Widow once did, gathering information. As you observed, though, the Dutch keep themselves to themselves. That is why I am here.”
Anna did not have to ask for whom Miss Ashcroft gathered information. The Widow had been in French pay when Anna met her, though Anna had not learned that until later. Angela had worked for many flags and diverse factions in her varied career, but always against British interests. If this lady was the Widow’s protégée, she worked for the Americans, or one of their allies.
It didn’t matter. All that was behind her.
“I have not spoken or read Dutch in ten years. You would do better to look for a translator elsewhere.” She heard Dutch, of course, on the street, almost every day, but it was not the Dutch she had grown up with. The accent was different, closer to the way it was spoken in the Netherlands. The Jerseys had their own dialect too. Anna rarely heard the soft cadences of the Hudson Highlands in Manhattan, and when she did she walked quickly away. That life—that world—was behind her. She did not want to be reminded of all she had lost.
“I do not need a translator. I need a teacher. One who knows Dutch but appears to be wholly English. Someone who can be my eyes and ears on Harenwyck.”
Harenwyck. Anna could not hear the name without feeling her chest constrict, even after all this time.
She’d passed by the Dutch Church on Pearl Street one day just after a wedding. The bride and groom had been glowing with youth and optimism, and a well-wisher had asked them where they planned to set up house. The couple announced that they were bound for Harenwyck to take up a lease. They did not have the money to buy land themselves, so they would rent acreage on the manor until they could afford to buy.
Only they would never be able to afford to buy. Anna could have told them that. But she hadn’t. She’d hurried away down the street, face flushed, unable to conceal her reaction. Harenwyck. An estate so large she had never set foot off it in the first seventeen years of her life. Fields so golden, cattle so sleek, soil so black it should have been impossible for a family to go hungry there, but hers had.
“No.” She said it automatically, but the answer would have been the same after long deliberation. “I can never go back there.”
“You were barely seventeen when you left. A child. The chances that anyone would recognize the woman you have become are slight. And Miss Winters is so well established as a genteel New Yorker—a decidedly English type—that no one will see a fugitive Dutch girl when they look at her. I cannot claim that you will be in no danger, but I can assure you that the game is worth the candle. Harenwyck occupies a vital position on the Hudson. If we lose control of the valley, the way to New England will be open to Howe’s army. Make no mistake—if we lose the river, we will lose this war.”
“My family lost everything—my father lost his life—playing at revolutions with the Widow.” She could not speak of what she alone had lost. It was in the past, and she wanted it—needed it—to stay there. “I will not make the same mistake with her successor. But I will give you this for free: Cornelis Van Haren will never support the Rebels. He’ll play both sides for every advantage he can get, but when pressed he will defend his ancient privileges.” His great fiefdom, his seat in the assembly, his influence over the courts.
“Cornelis Van Haren is dead. His son is patroon of Harenwyck, and an entirely different kettle of fish.”
“Gerrit,” said Anna, remembering the quiet, dark-haired young man only a year older than herself. He had been kind. A very different character from his father. Even as a child. One of her earliest memories of the big house at the manor was of Gerrit.
Her father had taken her to pay their tithe to the landlord. She’d been nine years old, dressed in her best linen gown, shiny new klompen on her feet, painted bright yellow with pink flowers and red laces.
Ten-year-old Gerrit had spied her klompen and furrowed his brow. “It’s not raining out. Why are you wearing pattens over your shoes?”
At first she did not understand his question. Klompen were shoes. Everyone wore them, except for coachmen and soldiers, who wore boots. And hers were special for today. Painted and pretty. Her father had pronounced them little drops of sunlight. Not like the bare wooden ones she wore in the fields.
Then Anna spied the patroon’s lady and her friends. They were sitting on the high, deep porch of the house, shaded by the gently sloped roof, drinking tea at a table with legs carved like the claws of a great bird. The ladies looked like fairies. Their dresses rustled like tall grass, yards and yards of bright silk shining like water, and their shoes . . . their shoes were not klompen. They were not made out of wood. They were not carved with stars or hearts, or painted sunny yellow or sky blue. They were delicate silk slippers, colored like jewels, embroidered and trimmed with ribbon.
Before she could fully grasp the gulf that separated a poor tenant’s daughter from a lord—far wider than the stretch of lawn between herself and the tea table—he did. She saw it on his face. His cosseted childhood came to an end in front of her. He saw for the first time the walls that separated the patroon’s family and peers from their tenants—walls both physical and social. The sandstone of the old manor house and the lacquered panels of a liveried carriage, buttressed by inward – and outward-facing retainer
s: the servants in the hall and the schouts, bailiffs, and other agents that insulated Gerrit’s class from hers.
With all the gravity a ten-year-old could muster he took it upon himself to salvage the situation. He bowed low, as though she were a lady and an equal, and introduced himself as Gerrit Van Haren.
It was seven years before he spoke to her again. She saw him nearly every week, though, standing up at the front of the church during services in the broad Van Haren box pew with its tiled stove and silk cushions, his broad shoulders cased in brown velvet, his chestnut hair falling loose down his back. Every time she thought about talking to him, she looked down at her feet. She was still wearing klompen, and he was still wearing shoes.
It was her growling stomach that brought them together again when she was sixteen and he was seventeen. He had heard it, all the way at the front of the church, three rows forward from the Hoppe pew.
After the service, Gerrit offered her koekjes from his pocket. Up close it was impossible to ignore the changes in him, the broadening of his shoulders, the deepening of his voice, the shadow about his chin.
They ate the cookies together in the burying ground behind the church. Or more accurately she devoured them while he entertained her with wild stories—entirely fabricated—about the men and women buried in the graveyard. Flights of Gothic fancy complete with ghosts and witches and haunted abbeys and brooding old mansions.
He’d been too kind to remark on her hunger, or ask the source of it. Or maybe he had been too embarrassed, because he knew where the tenants’ beef and butter and corn went: to the manor house, to pay the rents that increased each year. They were called a tithe out of tradition, but they had long since ceased to be just a tenth of tenant crops. But you paid because you’d cleared the land and built the cottage yourself—had invested everything in someone else’s land—and to lose your lease was to lose all.
The following week Gerrit brought enough cookies for Anna and himself; buttery treats, tasting of cardamom and orange water. They infused the pockets of his velvet coat with their perfume, and the scent blended sweetly with the bay rum he wore.
When it turned cold they met in the old barn where the wheat was threshed and the flax was carded in summer. Their meetings continued for a year, until Anna’s mother found out about them, and beat her. She told Anna that there was only one thing that the patroon’s son could want from a tenant’s daughter.
The lecture had made her skin crawl. She had felt the way Gerrit must have done that day on the lawn, when he had become suddenly aware of the gulf that separated him from most of the people on the estate. Only this wasn’t just the gulf that separated the rich from the poor, the powerful from the weak. This was the chasm that separated men and women, and according to her mother, it could not be bridged by friendship or affection.
After that Anna’s mother kept her home from church for a month. And sometime during that month, Gerrit left for school in Leiden, and she never saw him again.
“He will recognize me. I knew Gerrit when we were children.” More than knew him. Even now she could remember the bay rum and cardamom scent of him, the lazy hours spent together in the woods or up in the hayloft.
Miss Ashcroft shook her head. “Gerrit is not patroon. He ran away to join the Rebels in ’seventy-five and Cornelis disinherited him. It is Andries, the younger brother, who is lord of the manor now.”
Andries. She remembered him too. A tall blond boy. “There were three children,” said Anna. “Gerrit, Andries, and a younger sister.”
“Yes,” said Miss Ashcroft. “Elizabeth. Information about what goes on among the more remote patroon families is hard to come by. As you know, New York’s gossips and broadsheets waste little time on the Hudson aristocracy in general—despite their wealth—because they are of little interest to young women, and the parents of young women, of marriageable age: they’ve long sought spouses, and been content to socialize, almost exclusively among their own. For the most part, families like the Van Harens keep themselves to themselves, and their tenants are reluctant to share ‘intelligence’ for fear of reprisal. But by all accounts Elizabeth eloped to get away from her father. It is presumably her children—twin girls—that Andries is raising. Cornelis Van Haren was not well liked, either by his tenants or his family. Andries, it seems, is doing his best to make amends.”
As a boy Andries had possessed a quick wit and a cold demeanor. He and Anna had never spoken, but she had overheard him cutting one of the schouts, the private bailiffs who answered to no law but the patroon’s, down to size. He had been aloof like his father. He would not know her from Eve.
“Andries Van Haren,” continued the woman who called herself Ashcroft, “controls two hundred thousand strategic acres on the Hudson, including Harenhoeck.”
Anna could picture it now, that narrow point on the Hudson. On a clear day you could make out what a man was wearing on the other side. It had been considered a great feat to swim it when she was a child.
“The current there,” said Miss Ashcroft, “is such that a chain can be stretched across the river without breaking. Van Haren is ready to declare for the Americans, to give us Harenhoeck, but he wants something. Washington needs to discover what.”
“I know a little of revolutions.” Anna had been there in ’65 when the tenants had risen. She could still close her eyes and see the mob. She could remember the light in their eyes, her father’s ringing voice and rousing words. And what had happened when the sheriffs had come for him. “Why do you think it will turn out differently this time?” Anna demanded.
“Because this is more than an uprising of tenants. Because men—and women—of every station are risking their lives and fortunes. Because the times are right to do now what your father tried to do then. There will be no lords and tenants in this new America. Only freemen and freeholders. The same vision your father swayed a multitude with.”
His vision had ended in failure and Anna too had paid the price for the risks he had taken. She believed in the American cause because it was rooted in the same ideals of equality that her father had espoused, but she had already fought one revolution, and lost. It was for others to fight this one.
“Why me?” Anna asked. “Surely you can find someone else who speaks Dutch to listen at doors. There must be hundreds of families on the patroonship who are chafing under the Van Haren yoke and would gladly spy on that family.”
“True enough. And we have allies already at Harenwyck, but none so well placed as you could be. Andries Van Haren has sent his man of business to New York to sell his wheat, his linen, his flax, and his beef, and to hire a teacher for his nieces. This is our opportunity to place an agent directly in his household, one he will speak freely in front of because he will not know that she is Dutch.”
“And once I am there? I am not the Widow. I have no skill at espionage.”
“She would have disagreed. According to her notes, you ride, you shoot, and through her you acquired some skill with lockpicks and a certain . . . agility in difficult situations.”
“A lifetime ago,” said Anna. When she had been young and scared and determined never to fall under another’s power again.
“And you understand men.”
Anna did not reply at once. She could see how a woman who was like the Widow—but not the Widow herself—might arrive at such a conclusion. It would suggest itself in the broad outline of Anna’s life, the events that had taken her from Harenwyck to New York, from Annatje to Anna.
“I thought you wanted eyes and ears.”
“What I want, what Washington needs, is Harenwyck. If the Widow were alive, she could deliver it to him. Did you know she was at Trenton? Or, more accurately, she was at Mount Holly with the Hessian commander when he should have been at Trenton, and by her wiles Washington snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.”
“She was a singular woman,” said Anna. The Widow ha
d rescued her and given her a new identity and a new life. She could have been no older than forty when she was killed, and might have been a good deal younger—she had the sort of spare beauty that seemed ageless—but Anna had always sensed that the Widow had experience in excess of her years. “How did she die?”
“She was murdered,” said Miss Ashcroft, looking Anna straight in the eye, “by the same British intelligence officer who has fixed his eyes on the narrows at Harenhoeck. A man named John André. He had her tortured, and then he stood by while someone else slit her throat.”
Anna stilled the impulse to touch her own neck. She had known that the Widow had died violently. The lawyer had implied as much with his silence. But she had not been prepared for the visceral horror of it. Whatever else the Widow had been or done, the woman had saved her, helped her build a new life on the ashes of the old. The ashes of her and her father’s lives on Harenwyck.
“I realize that I am asking you to give up the relative safety you enjoy now,” said Miss Ashcroft, “but the Widow thought highly of you. And I do not believe that a thinking woman with integrity can remain neutral in this fight— especially not one who has experienced injustice firsthand.”
“Why should I trust you,” asked Anna, who, however deep her reservations, could not deny the force of the woman’s argument, “when I don’t even know your real name?”
“Because I will do what the Widow did not, even in death. I will give you my real name. It is Kate Grey. My father is one of Washington’s commanders. They call him the Grey Fox. My husband is an English lord who has been attainted a traitor. He is wanted by the Crown for treason and by the army for desertion. I spied for the Americans in Philadelphia, and while I was there, I killed a British officer. There is a price on my head, and I still thought it worth coming to New York, entering the lion’s den, to beg your help. You hold my life in your hands. I have some of the Widow’s skill, but none of her ruthlessness. If you ran to the fort now, I would not escape Manhattan alive.”
The Dutch Girl Page 2