The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  “By your logic I should now conclude that you are a ratcatcher,” she said.

  “It’s not a rat; it’s a very small cat.” He plucked up her empty silk basket and deposited the creature inside.

  “Why do you keep a kitten in your pocket?”

  He snorted, seemed amused in spite of himself. “I don’t, as a rule. In this case, it’s expediency: the little beast was about to be run over by your carriage.”

  Anna took the basket out of his lap. That brought her into closer proximity with her captor and the surprising scent of bay rum. He’d worn it at seventeen when they had kissed behind the church and ever since she had associated the fragrance with the thrill of intimacy. It mingled now with the woodsy scent of the pine needles that still clung to his coat.

  Up close she could see that he was not dressed like an ordinary gentleman of the road. His suit was fine chocolate wool, the cuffs worn and frayed but the cloth unmistakably soft and rich. His shirt and stockings were cream silk, his shoes brocade with silver buckles. Everything he wore had once been of the highest quality and remained scrupulously clean, if not tirelessly mended.

  “What was such a tiny kitten doing in the middle of the road?” she asked.

  “His mother was crossing, and he wriggled free of her jaws just as your carriage thundered into view.”

  “She abandoned him,” said Anna, heartsick.

  “She would have been run over otherwise. She was not a small cat. I thought her a tom at first. The carriage would have struck her for certain, but the kitten was little enough that the coach and team might have missed or passed right over him.”

  Anna peaked inside the basket. The kitten was mottled gray with giant yellow eyes—perhaps not long opened on the world—and a decidedly stocky build. And it was trembling like a leaf.

  “It’s too young to be on its own, poor thing,” she said.

  For the first time all night Gerrit had the good grace to look ashamed. “I will go back in the morning and find his mother. We could hardly do it tonight. The militia patrols the estate.”

  “How do you know it’s a he?” Anna asked.

  “He’s too scrappy to be a girl. He squirmed out of his mother’s grasp in the middle of the road.”

  Anna lifted the kitten out of the basket and turned it over. “Be that as it may, he’s a she.” The kitten scrabbled madly up onto her shoulder and began chewing her hair. “Scrappy, though, is certainly an apt name for her.”

  “She thinks you’re her mother,” said Gerrit, clearly amused.

  Scrappy began kneading Anna’s shoulder with determination, eyes screwed shut and paws flexing. “She wants milk.”

  “She shall have cream when we get to the inn. And a fish, if they have any.”

  He liked cats. She remembered that. Gerrit reached across the carriage to stroke the kitten’s head. The back of his hand brushed Anna’s cheek. His touch was warm and electric, just like it had been in the woods behind the church.

  For years she had told herself that what they shared as children had been the thrill of infatuation, the fleeting passion of youth, a fairy kingdom impossible to revisit as an adult.

  She had been wrong.

  The truth was that she had met too young—and across an impossible divide of wealth and station—the one man above all others for her. And the circumstances, God knew, were just as impossible now.

  She disentangled the purring kitten from her hair and passed the warm, furry body to Gerrit just as they hurtled over a bump in the road. He put out his hands to steady her and the contact was illicitly thrilling. If only he knew it was her. But he could not. Ever. She deposited the kitten in his lap and drew back. “What sort of inn gives refuge to highwaymen?”

  The kitten rolled over in his lap. Gerrit rubbed its soft white belly, and she felt a flash of affection, saw in this strange man a glimpse of the boy who’d touched her heart. Loud purring filled the carriage.

  “I prefer to think of myself as a land-going privateer.”

  “I thought you said that the Rebels had sided with your brother over your inheritance.”

  “They have. Which leaves me with no choice but to turn to the British.”

  “So the British Army is licensing brigands as well as pirates now.”

  “In a sense. The Skinners and Cowboys are authorized to forage. How foraging differs from robbery and cattle thieving is difficult to say. Still, the British do not issue letters of marque for foraging. I’ve never understood why robbery on the King’s Highway can only get you hanged while robbery on the high seas, under the right circumstances, will get you knighted, but then that’s probably because I’m not a naval man.”

  “And how, exactly, does stealing your brother’s gold endear you to the British?”

  “It’s not his. And, unlikely as this may sound, I don’t want the gold for myself.”

  “Am I supposed to believe that you’re a latter-day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor?”

  “I’ll answer to Robin Hood, if that makes you my Maid Marian.”

  He flashed her a roguish smile and she glimpsed again the boy who had charmed her in the woods behind the church. She remembered what it had been like to while away long afternoons in his company. With him, Annatje Hoppe, the farm girl with no fortune and no prospects, who wore homespun and klompen, had always felt clever and beautiful. This was Gerrit’s gift: a natural ability to bring out the best in others. A half-remembered ballad came bubbling to her lips.

  “Alas,” she said, “I’m not a bonny fine maid of noble degree.”

  “I thought all schoolteachers were disappointed gentlewomen.”

  “Gentlewomen, not noblewomen.”

  “A degree without a difference.”

  “That is easy to say if you are already standing on the high ground.”

  “Or have no further to fall.”

  “Even dressed in rags, you will always be the son of a patroon. If you are disgraced, you do not fall. You are cast out, not down. It is only those of us in the middle who must cling to each slippery rung of the ladder for dear life.”

  “Unless you jump. Leap off the ladder into the unknown.” His voice was almost wistful.

  “In a man that would be called boldness. In a woman, it is called something else.”

  “That is a surprising point of view for a bold woman.”

  “What makes you think I’m bold?” she asked.

  “For one thing, you are arguing with a highwayman, a notorious struikrover, and for another, you are a veritable Marian, ranging the wood to find Robin Hood, the bravest of men in that age.”

  He knew the ballad too. Of course he did. She’d found it in one of the books he’d brought her. And they were back to flirting. She wished she did not like it so much. She wished that fragments of that ballad were not percolating to the surface of her memory, waking up part of her that had been asleep too long, like black coffee in the morning. “Marian,” she said earnestly, “searched for Robin dressed as a boy.”

  “I grant that you would not make a very convincing boy, but I doubt Marian did either. Or most of Shakespeare’s heroines, for that matter. And you won’t hear me complaining. That’s a very pretty gown.”

  It was the best thing she owned, her very proper schoolmistress gown, bought secondhand and altered to fit her by Mrs. Peterson, with Miss Demarest’s help. And, just now, Anna had never felt so pretty in anything in her life. She struggled to ignore the feeling. “Nor am I armed with quiver and bow, sword, buckler, and all.”

  “But I could still draw out my sword,” he suggested, his meaning clear, “and to cutting we could go.”

  It was the same proposition Tarleton had made earlier that day, based in large part on the same assumptions, that as a woman in commerce among the goods and services she traded would be those of her body. With Tarleto
n the idea had repelled her. With this man, she had to admit, it thrilled her. It was truly the world turned upside down. Tarleton was a respected member of the gentry, a rising star in the army. Gerrit was a disgraced aristocrat turned highwayman. And she had never felt safer with anyone in her life, even though he held, all unwittingly, power of life and death over her.

  There was nothing and no one to stop her climbing across the heap of boxes and into the arms of the only man she had ever wanted. Except that it wouldn’t be real, because he didn’t know it was her. And, outlaw of sorts though he was, he was still so honest and so good—he’d nearly gotten himself run down to save a kitten—he would be honor bound to turn her over to justice if he found out the truth: that she was Annatje Hoppe, the fugitive Dutch girl, the one who had killed a schout and fled Harenwyck for her life all those years ago.

  The thought stole all the joy from their banter. “I seem to remember that Marian got the better of Robin in that version. The blood ran apace from bold Robin’s face, didn’t it?”

  “Ah, but when she realized it was Robin,” said Gerrit, still delighting in their wordplay, still hopeful it would lead somewhere, when she knew it was a door already closed, “with kisses sweet she did him greet, like to a most loyal lover.”

  “That is because Robin and Marian were reunited sweethearts,” said Anna. “We are not.” Of all the lies she had told across the years, this was the first she regretted. “And I will not call you Robin unless you distribute your largesse, flinging coins like a Roman emperor or a Venetian doge, when we get to this inn.”

  He appeared to consider it. “I suppose Pieter could hold the reins while I toss coins from the running board, but it wouldn’t do my brother’s tenants any good. The only thing they want is the land they’re working, and he won’t sell it to them.”

  “And you would?” She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice. It was too pronounced for the woman she pretended to be—a stranger to the patroonship—but he was too caught up in their exchange to notice.

  “Yes. I would sell to them. America has no future without land. A republic can’t be built out of plantations and patroonships. It needs freeholders with a stake in the government.”

  “That is a very revolutionary sentiment for a man on his way to the King’s Arms.”

  “I believe in independence. It is the Continental Congress that does not believe in me. I fought for them for three years, but when my father died, Andries told them that I planned to break up the estate, to sell Harenwyck to the tenants. He claimed that my father had disinherited me—even though he could produce no proof and the will has conveniently disappeared. The courts sided with Andries because the courts are controlled by Rebels, and the gentlemen running this revolution don’t trust all of Harenwyck’s tenants to side with them: don’t trust them with the rights to vote, or without a master to move them. Propertied men in New England are one thing; poor Dutchmen, apparently, are another.”

  She felt something tighten in her chest and realized it was grief. This was the idealistic boy she remembered, the one who stole books from his father’s library and brought them to her all summer long. The one who championed underdogs—like her father. Like her. A decent man who knew right from wrong. And that was why she could not reveal herself to him, because she ought to have hanged fourteen years ago for killing that bailiff. She had lived a decade on borrowed time. These moments were borrowed too. She knew that. And still, she could not resist matching minds with him.

  “So you are more like one of the Gracchi than Robin Hood. A land reformer with republican ideals. Does that make you Tiberius the elder, or Gaius the younger?”

  “That’s like asking if I’d rather be clubbed to death or compelled to suicide.”

  “And which would you rather?”

  “Suicide,” he replied without hesitation.

  “You are equally dead,” she replied, “but in that instance you’ve done your enemy’s work for him.”

  “There’s a nobility in taking that away from your enemies. He can’t kill you if you’re already dead.”

  “But dum spiro spero. Where there is breath, there is hope. How do you know that you mightn’t have prevailed, in a fair fight?”

  “Gaius knew it wasn’t going to be a fair fight. He saw his older brother murdered in the forum by the senate. They would not even give him the honor of dying by the sword. They beat him to death with broken staves from the senate benches and cast his body into the Tiber.”

  “And yet,” she said, “he had tried to continue his brother Tiberius’ work. More than that. Gaius went further and tried to expand the vote, to enfranchise all Latin-speaking people. He knew the risks, all too well. And he still thought the game worth the candle.”

  “But was it?” asked Gerrit. “The franchise was extended to the whole Roman world two hundred years later without bloodshed or loss of life.”

  “Only because Caracalla wanted to expand the tax base,” said Anna. “And you forget all the men and women who lived and died in the years between. How different might their days have been as full Roman citizens with citizens’ rights?”

  “That is exactly what Congress fears, I suspect. Thousands of new freeholders, entitled to vote by virtue of their landownership. Representation is a tricky thing. We wanted it for ourselves in Parliament, but we’re not sure we’d trust our neighbors with it. Sturdy New Englanders maybe, but not Dutch tenant farmers, no better than peasants—men stupid enough to sign themselves into serfdom for a few acres of uncleared land.”

  She could feel her hackles rise, even though she knew he was being sarcastic. “It is not stupidity if you have no other real choices. There are far worse things than tenant farming. Worse things than serfdom.” She had experienced some of them, alone, cold, hungry, and friendless in New York.

  “I know that.” All levity had left him. They had been speaking, she realized, for some time now, as equals, about things she cared about. About things that were important, the subjects that had drawn her to books and learning and kindled her desire to be a teacher in the first place. And none of it touched on needlework or dancing or decorative painting.

  “If you have no faith in Congress and no love for the Continental Army, then what will you do with the gold?” she asked him.

  “Keep it—and everything else he desires—out of my brother’s hands.”

  • • •

  Gerrit knew that he should not have kept the girl. He ought to have had her marched off with Mr. Ten Broeck to spend the night in the old Peterson barn and be released at dawn. There was bound to be trouble over it, and he found he didn’t care. He could not remember the last time he had enjoyed a woman’s company—anyone’s company—so much.

  No, that was wrong. He could remember. It had been the summer before he left for Leiden, when he had courted his klompen girl behind the church. He had forgotten about her for a time after their first precocious meeting as children, but then suddenly girls had been all he could think about, and one girl in particular who wore sunny yellow clogs seemed to be everywhere he looked.

  He had prayed for an excuse to talk to her, and the Lord had answered him. Her stomach had growled louder than the homily and added a distinctly off-key note to the singing. He’d watched her devour the cookies, sitting cross-legged on a weathered tomb behind the church, and he’d found the sight inconveniently erotic. She had turned into a beauty, his klompen girl.

  But that was not why he had loved her. There had been plenty of girls, some even prettier than Annatje, who had tried to attract his attention. Annatje was different. He had never met anyone, before or since, who was so curious about the world. Her mind ranged across a vast expanse of subjects. She craved books and stories and he had delightedly shared whatever could be found in the sorry Harenwyck library. He had thought, more than once, that she was a better candidate for Leiden than he.

  But Annatje
had not been there when he came back from college. His father had told him she was dead. He had not believed that, or the other things that were being said, but the schouts brought him her clogs as proof that she had taken her own life, and he had decided that if he must marry someone, it might as well be Sophia.

  He had been struck by Sophia’s beauty when they first met. Her father was land poor but cash rich, the opposite of every patroon, and Gerrit’s father had been keen on the match. Gerrit himself had been determined to dislike her. He’d been fresh from his studies in Leiden, fired by the liberal ideas gaining currency in the Dutch Republic, and had come home with plans to reform the estate. But his father was having none of it. Gerrit’s chief responsibility as the next patroon was to marry advantageously. They could discuss reform as soon as the succession was secure.

  The beautiful Sophia had surprised him by seeming to like him. She was tiny, delicate, and moved in a rustling cloud of silk and gardenia. She ate daintily, shared all his preferences in food, agreed with all his opinions on politics, estate management, and domestic arrangements. It did not occur to him until too late that she evidenced no opinions of her own. He had never met any ladies who did. Except for the girl in the yellow klompen.

  There had been women in Holland, of course, but mostly dairymaids and serving girls with no education. The occasional burgher’s wife or pretty widow wasn’t interested in him for conversation. And certainly hadn’t read Cassius Dio on Caracalla.

  Miss Winters was a decidedly unusual lady. Sophia, of course, had been regarded as very accomplished. She’d been educated at a school something like Miss Winters’ Academy. She sang and danced and painted and stitched. But he did not think he had ever seen her open a book. Not even a recipe book. Apparently not all finishing schools were the same.

  There was another tome on the pile of baggage separating him from his brother’s gold. He picked it up—more carefully this time, lest he earn another scolding—and flipped it open.

  “What does a finishing school teacher want with an atlas?” he asked.