The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  “If I go back to Harenwyck, if someone recognizes me, I’ll hang.” She was trying to talk herself out of it. She was safe here. She had Mrs. Peterson and Miss Demarest and the girls, and even if she could not marry and start a family herself, she had a role in shaping such futures for the young women she taught. There was value in that. And security.

  “It would be safer to stay here,” agreed the woman who said her name was Kate Grey.

  Anna believed her. She’d been a terrible judge of people when she’d arrived in New York, but a decade teaching adolescent girls had schooled her in the art of mendacity as her years with the Widow never had.

  “But not by much. And this,” her visitor continued, “is your opportunity to make your father’s death and all that you have suffered mean something.”

  Miss Ashcroft—Kate Grey—was nearly as good as the Widow. She was fired by the same zeal. She made no false promises or assurances of safety, simply laid out what was at stake. But Anna was not naive enough to think she was free to choose. She had seen the carrot, but the Widow had taught her to keep one eye out for the stick.

  “Safer, you say, but not by much. So what happens if I elect to stay here, at the school, and you have to find some other spy to send to Harenwyck?”

  “You own an empty house on Pearl Street,” said Kate Grey. “The deed is in your name, and there is a body in the basement.”

  “If you know that, then you know that I didn’t put it there.”

  “Yes. But you will have a difficult time convincing a jury of it.”

  “So the high ideals of your revolution embrace blackmail, then.”

  “Your position as a finishing school teacher has insulated you from the suffering in the countryside, Miss Winters. There are families who have had everything taken from them. They were not given a choice in the matter. The Widow rarely acted out of sentiment. She rescued you for a reason and educated you for a purpose. I doubt that it was to teach watercolors and dancing lessons.”

  Miss Ashcroft stood up and tied on her plain hat. “The patroon’s man of business will likely call on you tomorrow, or the day after. He is here to sell Van Haren’s produce, and to buy seed and pots and pans and kettles and harness to sell to the tenants of Harenwyck at prices that will keep them forever in debt and tied to the land.”

  She knew it. Her butter and her flax had made that journey. She’d bought buttons and needles and copper pans in the manor house store at dear prices, and every year, no matter how much more her family had produced, they found themselves a little poorer.

  “If you accept his offer,” continued Kate Grey, “and travel to Harenwyck, you can write to me care of your housekeeper here. Mrs. Peterson will forward your letters.”

  Of course. The Widow had found Mrs. Peterson for Anna. Mrs. Peterson alone knew what Anna had been before she became a teacher, though not where she had come from, or what she had fled.

  “And what do you expect me to do at Harenwyck itself?”

  “Whatever it takes to bring Andries Van Haren to our side.”

  A picture of Gerrit’s chilly younger brother, glittering, blond, handsome, and decidedly aloof, swam into her mind. “Just because I understand the patroonship doesn’t mean I have any insight into the mind of the patroon. I am only a tenant farmer’s daughter.”

  “You are surely more than that, but your adversaries are as well. Beware of John André. He is charming, accomplished, clever, and quite deadly.”

  “Am I expected to seduce him too?” asked Anna, sourly.

  “Expectations are dangerous where someone like Captain André is concerned, except perhaps that feminine wiles will leave him unmoved. He is ruthless and all too willing to sacrifice his pawns. If you encounter him, be on your guard. Use your instincts. The Widow thought you were a sound judge of character.”

  “I cannot imagine why.”

  “Perhaps because you never trusted her.”

  Anna stood in the door and watched her visitor disappear into the traffic on the street. She did it very well, this Kate Grey, walking with her head tilted so the brim of her hat obscured her face, elbows held close to her body so she took up hardly any room at all. The dun-colored gown blended into the dusty cobbled street, and then she rounded a corner and was gone.

  Kate Grey was right about the Widow. If she had been alive, she would have expected Anna to go to Harenwyck. But Kate Grey was wrong about Anna’s life in New York. It was not lonely. It was full of companionship and sometimes even gossip and drama, usually the harmless kind that young women relished and which Anna enjoyed vicariously through them.

  Only today’s gossip was not harmless. Anna knew as much from the few words she caught as she approached the parlor, terms that did not belong in the vocabulary of gently reared young maidens. When the boards in the hall creaked beneath her feet, the voices inside fell silent.

  She entered the room to discover the scene she had expected. All six of her students were stitching with extraordinary concentration.

  Anna marched straight up to Becky Putnam and put out her hand. “I’ll take the letter, Rebecca.”

  Becky looked up from her embroidery loom, all wide-eyed innocence. “What letter, miss?”

  “Why, the one you were just reading aloud. From a gentleman, I gather.”

  “But I don’t know what you mean, Miss Winters. We were only trading recipes for blackberry preserves.”

  Anna weighed her choices. She knew exactly where the letter was now, because every schoolgirl ever born thought she had invented that particular hiding place. Knowing where girls hid things could be useful. If she showed her hand, none of those present would ever use such a hiding place again. They would have to become cleverer about their indiscretions—which might be inconvenient for Anna. But then, if Anna allowed Becky to get away with her deception, the girl might become an incorrigible liar.

  Anna decided that the benefits of this particular lesson outweighed the costs. She placed her hand on the top of Becky’s embroidery loom. It was a pretty thing, a slender frame of polished tiger maple on brass casters, easy to move about the room as the sun changed position, the perfect height for a seated needlewoman to stitch away the afternoon. It was hinged at the top and could be tilted this way and that, or flipped entirely in case any stitches needed to be picked out. It was finer than the other frames in the room, finer than what the other girls had, and maybe because of that, because wealth and position made her bold, Becky gripped the bottom hard and held it fast.

  Anna raised both her eyebrows. Becky withered beneath her stare, and released the frame. Anna flipped it over. She was unsurprised to find an elaborately folded letter tacked to the back of the canvas. The sender had taken a great deal of time with his love token, inking and folding it so that the verses made sense no matter which way one read it. Anna opened the puzzle purse to find that the illustrations inside were no less . . . ardent.

  “Where did you get this?” Anna asked.

  “I had it from Mrs. Peterson,” admitted Becky. “She did not know the contents,” the girl added hastily.

  Anna handed the letter back to Becky. “Take it to the garden. Read it, by yourself,” instructed Anna, “and then burn it.”

  “I can’t burn it,” said Becky. “He must have spent days writing it.”

  And illustrating it, no doubt. “Your parents are unlikely to find it as amusing as your friends do. Nor will they be as understanding as I am.”

  “I would keep it hidden,” insisted Becky.

  “And someone would find it, just as I have.”

  Becky paled at the unwelcome prospect. “I shall take it out to the garden now,” she decided.

  Becky departed. Anna sent the remaining girls up to the studio at the top of the house, where the light was very fine for sketching in the afternoon, and descended to the cellar kitchen.

  Mrs. Peterson
was mixing dough. She was an excellent baker, and she looked the part, plump and homely in her saffron linen jacket and skirt. Her little cakes were as fine as anything Mr. Fraunces offered at his tavern or sold from his bakeshop in Vauxhall Gardens. They were light and airy confections, made with the finely milled wheat flour that Anna’s prosperity afforded. And yet, just at that moment, Anna hungered for the homely little koekjes from Harenwyck, Dutch treats, leavened with potash and spiced with cardamom and orange water and stretched with cornmeal.

  “You’ve been passing letters for the girls again,” said Anna, helping herself to one of the ginger cakes cooling on the rack.

  “There’s no harm in it with Becky,” said Mrs. Peterson, pouring her batter into a buttered dish. “She’s too sensible to do anything foolish. It’s the other one, Mary, you’ll need to watch.”

  Anna decided against mentioning the illustrations in the letter, because Mrs. Peterson was right. Becky was sensible. She would burn the love token, no matter how cleverly inked and folded it was.

  Mary Phillips, though, was not sensible. The girl had been in one scrape after another ever since she had arrived at the school. Anna had tried talking with her, warned her of the dangers she courted, but ultimately realized that the girl would have to make her own mistakes, just like Anna had. Still, the fewer opportunities for those mistakes, the better, for all concerned. “Could Miss Demarest watch her, do you think, and manage the school, if I went away for a while?”

  Mrs. Peterson halted on her way to the oven and set her dish down. “And where would you be thinking of going?”

  “North, on a private tutoring engagement.”

  “She did a fair bit of traveling, in her day,” said Mrs. Peterson. She did not have to say who “she” was. They were speaking of the Widow.

  She did, Anna thought. And one day she didn’t come back.

  Two

  Anna had never traveled so far in such style. More than a decade before she had made the journey from Harenwyck to New York on foot, mile after mile in her sturdy klompen. It had taken her days—she had lost track of how many on the road—to reach the ferry, and hunger and cold had been her constant companions.

  Today was different. She was warm and well fed in Andries Van Haren’s well-sprung coach, and the slippers on her feet were soft pink silk. They were not the most practical footwear for a trip into farm country. They were, in fact, the finest shoes she owned, and she kept them stuffed with paper in the bottom drawer of her good chest, reserving them for the recitals parents attended, the ones where her students showed off their progress on the harpsichord and the dance floor. She had chosen to wear them to Harenwyck precisely because they were inappropriate, because they would mark her as the city creature she pretended to be.

  And because they were not klompen.

  The carriage was an elegant four-seater with black lacquer pillars and gilded panels, the doors emblazoned with the Van Haren coat of arms: a black wolf grasping a dead lamb in its jaws on a yellow shield, doubtless “earned” from some medieval feat of butchery.

  Her personal possessions and those items of school equipment too delicate to ride atop the coach were heaped on the seat beside her: a basket of embroidery floss to occupy her on the journey, the atlas she used to teach geography, the book of engravings that her students sketched copies from, the standing loom for large projects, and a box of fine paints imported from London.

  On the bench opposite, facing backward because he had insisted that she have the finer perch, sat Theunis Ten Broeck, Andries Van Haren’s estate manager and “man of business.”

  He had called on Anna, as predicted, the day after Kate Grey. Ten Broeck was a genial, lively man in his fifties who, unlike Kate Grey, had expressed delight over everything in the house. In a mellow baritone—whose guttural R’s and staccato rhythms recalled the language of her childhood—he had praised every detail in Anna’s needlework landscape: the fine trees, the little ducks, the fishing lady and her beau, the stately house and well-kept grounds. He had declared the tight little parlor they used for dancing practice a “grand space for a whirl.” The skylit attic where she taught painting was a “dazzling aerie,” the kitchen a “testament to sound home management.”

  The estate manager, it turned out, had three daughters, and was keenly interested in the latest ideas in female education. He wanted his girls to be able to compete for husbands with the fashionable young women in New York. “To marry better than their unfortunate mother did,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. But his silk suit and clocked stockings and the silver buckles on his shoes told Anna that Ten Broeck had done well for himself at Harenwyck. His daughters would have good portions to take into their marriages, and a little city polish went a long way for a girl with money. Anna had never envied her students that. Not the money. It was the love their parents lavished on them that she coveted, the thought and care and caution invested in their futures.

  Ten Broeck had also sung the praises of the patroon’s new house on the estate, the fine English mansion that had replaced the old Dutch cottage which had itself seemed so grand to Anna. But Ten Broeck was uncharacteristically silent on the subject of the patroon and his nieces. It didn’t matter. She had already decided to accompany him back to Harenwyck. It was that, or wait for the bailiffs to appear at her door, and she had decided a long time ago that she would always meet fate head-on.

  All the same, her heart had ached when she stood on the stoop of the house, looking back at Mrs. Peterson and Miss Demarest and the girls—even the troublesome Mary Phillips—assembled to bid her farewell. The school was in good hands with Miss Demarest. Anna had no fears on that account. It was what might happen if Anna was found out as Annatje Hoppe that terrified her. The school would be destroyed, along with the reputations of her friends and colleagues. The only way to safeguard the academy’s future—and her own—was to journey into her past, to Harenwyck.

  The carriage trundled through the early-morning streets of New York, past the soldiers, who were everywhere now, always searching the docks for extra work. Their red coats made the merchants feel safe, but the mechanics and laborers resented the competition, and Anna had given Mrs. Peterson strict orders not to hire any of them for odd jobs while she was gone. If the British lost control of the city, the mob would have its day, and Anna did not want her school or her girls to be objects of retribution.

  At the ferry they were obliged to get out and wait while the coach was unhitched and horses, vehicle, and passengers were rowed across the swift-running Hudson. It was only the second time Anna had crossed the churning body of water that separated the mainland from Manhattan, her old life from her new.

  Ten Broeck helped her to disembark on the other side. For several minutes she continued to feel the toss and pitch of the boat on dry land, and she was still swaying slightly when a troop of horse from the British Legion, smart in their short green jackets and leather and bearskin helmets, trotted up to meet them.

  “Our escort,” explained Ten Broeck, his deep voice almost apologetic.

  “Does the patroon’s carriage always merit a detachment of cavalry?” Anna asked Ten Broeck as the troop’s young commander slid from his horse with practiced grace. He was not as tall perhaps as he had appeared in the saddle, but he was exceedingly graceful and well made, and he had the darkest brown eyes she had ever seen.

  “No, but his strongbox does.”

  The patroon’s strongbox was maple banded with iron and required two men to lift from the cart. And it merited not only thirty horses, but a lieutenant colonel as well: one whose name Anna had often heard whispered in her parlor. He removed his helmet and bowed just a trifle too deeply before her.

  “Banastre Tarleton, at your service.”

  Ten Broeck presented her as Miss Winters of Miss Winters’ Academy, and Tarleton’s brows knit.

  “Surely not,” said Tarleton. “I have it on the best aut
hority that Miss Winters is a snaggletoothed dragon, not a lovely young lady.”

  Now she understood why her girls whispered about this ambitious man—barely in his twenties—in such breathy tones. He wasn’t just handsome, with his compact, horseman’s frame, fine features and thick auburn hair glinting red in the sunlight. He was charming.

  “That ‘authority’ would be Mary Phillips, I’ll wager,” said Anna.

  His crooked smile made him more charming still. “Do schoolmistresses wager?”

  “Yes, but only rhetorically. And, occasionally, on horse races,” she added. Miss Demarest had a passion for racing. She even won a little money at it, from time to time. “I hope Miss Phillips is acquitting herself well in the social whirl.”

  “She is indeed. Along with her charming sister. They are very accomplished young ladies and a credit to your school.”

  “Either you are a flatterer, or you have never seen her needlework,” said Anna.

  The colonel laughed. “I have never seen her needlework. Nor asked to. But she dances very prettily.”

  Mary did dance prettily. And her father owned two wharves and an estate in the Jerseys, which made her dancing prettier still to ambitious young men in search of a fortune.

  The colonel loaded the strongbox into the carriage himself. It took up most of the room on the floor of the coach. Between Anna’s school equipment and the fortune in gold at her feet the carriage became very cramped indeed. Tarleton apologized for the inconvenience and took the time to rearrange her baggage. He secured Anna’s paint box, atlas, and embroidery loom to the strongbox with a lattice of leather strapping so that she had a little more room on the bench.

  And then they were off, rumbling through an autumn tunnel of dense forest roofed with a canopy of red oak and sugar maple and black birch. She didn’t remember the road being so beautiful, mysterious even, when she had traveled it before. Thinking back, she had not really seen the road or appreciated the scenery at all. She’d made that entire journey from Harenwyck looking over her shoulder, listening for signs of pursuit. Now she was returning, because there was no other way forward.