The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  She met his gaze with the directness that had teased at his memory and delighted him all night. “It’s my belief that a woman ought to know her place in the world.”

  Maybe he would let her go on to Harenwyck after all. He liked the idea of Grietje and Jannetje poring over an atlas, learning Latin and history and something more useful than embroidery. His daughters were the only good thing to come out of his mess of a marriage and he wanted them to have lives beyond the borders of the patroonship.

  And he liked Anna herself. She was easy to talk to, like the girl he used to kiss in the barn before he went off to college. He thought of his own childhood at Harenwyck and wished there had been someone as tart and wise as Miss Winters to challenge him. He could give that to Grietje and Jannetje if he let her go. But he wanted an excuse to make her stay, to keep her for himself.

  “How good are you with those lockpicks?” he asked.

  Her face turned guarded now. “Good enough. Why?”

  He tapped the strongbox, a lead weight on the rumbling carriage floor, with his foot. “Because I’d like to get this open without recourse to a hatchet and pry bar, if at all possible.”

  “That would make me an accessory to your crime.”

  “It’s not a crime if the gold really belongs to me.”

  “That’s for the courts to decide,” she said primly.

  “I’ve had my day in court, Miss Winters. The New York bench is in the pocket of the landlords, and justice is reserved for the rich and powerful.”

  “All the more reason,” she said sensibly, “for me to stay out of them.”

  “I’ll make a bargain with you,” he said.

  She did not look like she welcomed the idea. He pressed on anyway. “If you will open the strongbox for me, I will send you on to Harenwyck.”

  “And if I won’t?”

  “Highwaymen don’t sign articles, like pirates, but as gentlemen of the road they do make agreements. Money we split evenly, because everyone can agree upon its value. Gold never fails to please sweethearts or flatter complexions. Powder and shot are shared out evenly because every man benefits from his compatriot having a full cartridge case. Everything else is negotiable, but each man must have some prize from the night’s work. Jan will want the Madeira, and Edwaert something pretty for his wife. Dirck is after a timepiece for his father and if we do not luck into one soon I fear he will hold up the reverend in broad daylight and liberate his. Pieter will trade everything for a case of those sugared almonds. And if you will not open the strongbox for me, the one thing I will keep is you.”

  Five

  She had already made two mistakes. She could not risk making another. And the longer she remained in Gerrit’s company the likelier she was to betray herself. She’d shown too much understanding when they were speaking Dutch, and she’d displayed far too much knowledge about Harenwyck for an outsider. She needed to get away from him as quickly as possible. Easier said than done while she was trapped in a moving carriage with him, but she must be ready to make her escape as soon as they reached the inn.

  “Give me my lockpicks.”

  Gerrit pursed his lips and closed his eyes. “The speed of your reply wounds me, Miss Winters. Maybe I should keep you and resort to an ax with the box.”

  “You gave your word. And ignis aurum probat, miseria fortes viros,” she prompted.

  He sighed. “Fire tests gold, but adversity tests men.” He bent to move the paint box and the loom, and at last the strongbox lay revealed on the floor between them.

  “My tools, please,” she prompted.

  He searched the seats, the skirts of his coat, and the floor until he had five of her lockpicks, but not the one most likely to be of use. “Keep looking.”

  “Yes, ma’am. If I had any doubts that you truly were a schoolteacher, you have dispelled them. Ah.” He plucked one of her picks out of a corner of her embroidery loom where it had gotten stuck between the canvas and the frame. “Good God, what is this thing?” he asked.

  He held up the stretched canvas, which he had discarded earlier that night, and in the lantern light filtering through the window the pattern was unmistakable.

  “That is your family’s coat of arms, as you well know. I thought it would encourage the girls, especially if their skills are rudimentary, to work on something familiar.”

  “Let them embroider something else.” He opened the door of the moving carriage. Trees rushed by. The night air raced in, cool and bracing. Without warning, Gerrit threw the frame out into the night. Anna heard it strike something—a tree most likely—with a sharp crack, and then clatter to the ground, gone forever. She had been quite fond of that particular loom.

  “Do you object to heraldry in general or just your family’s in particular?” She did not bother to hide her irritation.

  “Both, actually,” he said, latching the door. “What do seven-year-old girls want with slaughtered lambs and ravening wolves?”

  “Armorial subjects are very popular,” said Anna. “Almost obligatory, if your family claims a coat of arms.”

  “Did you make one yourself?” he asked.

  “Hardly. Mine was not that kind of family.”

  “That’s right. Teachers come from gentle, but not noble birth.” She couldn’t tell whether he was mocking her or not. “What sort of embroidery did you make? A devotional sampler?”

  “Do I look like I arrived with the Puritans on the Mayflower?”

  “Decidedly not. If biblical platitudes are out of fashion, then what is the current vogue?”

  “Fishing lady scenes remain very popular.”

  “But you’re not fond of them,” he surmised.

  “They are copied from prints. Invention is always superior to mimicry. A truly accomplished needlewoman is also an accomplished draftswoman. She can draw her own scene, and paint it in with thread.”

  “And what was your invention?”

  Her invention was just that: the story she had fabricated for herself, made up out of whole cloth with the Widow’s guidance, memorialized in the silkwork picture that hung in the school’s parlor and attracted students from as far away as Albany.

  “I stitched a portrait of my family’s home,” she said. “Before we lost it, of course.” She had lost her home, but it hadn’t been the redbrick manse in her embroidered picture. “And the trees and the pond. There is even a fishing lady, but she is my own, not copied from an engraving.”

  Gerrit clasped his hands together and leaned forward. She recalled the pose from their youth. It meant he was about to embark on a story. “I picture your father as a learned man. A lawyer or a divine. No, scratch that. A doctor. He taught you Latin and instilled in you a love of science. You read Pliny instead of Catullus, and sketched ducklings and carpenter ants with equal ardor. You lived in one of those severe New England houses with the steep roofs and tiny windows, the kind the Puritans built and everyone slaps a coat of yellow paint and a portico on and tries to pretend are classical. But they aren’t. They’ve got a medieval soul that sash windows and dentil moldings can never banish. You loved the house anyway because although you were raised on reason, you have a romantic nature, and you whiled away hours holed up in that maze of tiny, irregular rooms, lost in the pages of a novel. How am I doing so far?”

  He was a natural born raconteur, a lover of words, and she had listened to his flights of fancy for hours in the barn, sometimes adding her own embellishments. He’d made up a plausible background for the woman she presented herself as, for the woman she had become. “It was a very good story,” she said truthfully. “I like it better than my own.”

  Her own was as much a work of fiction as his. The only difference was that it was not a spur-of-the-moment invention. She had been telling it for years. It had not seemed so sad and gray before she heard Gerrit’s version.

  “My father was a surveyor,” she
recited. “He was away from home a great deal and often traveled in inclement weather. He caught a chill while working in the backcountry and died. My mother succumbed to grief shortly thereafter. The estate passed to my brothers, who my parents expected to provide me with a good portion, but whose wives persuaded them against settling enough on me to make a good marriage. My options were become the unpaid governess to my nieces and nephews, and housekeeper to my sisters-in-law, or teach. So I taught.”

  “Did I at least get the house right?” he asked.

  Anna thought about her real childhood home, the one-room tenant’s cottage with the sleeping attic, built Dutch-style on an H-frame, the two end walls of rough red sandstone, the rest narrow clapboard. There had been no privacy for reading, but then there had been no books save one battered old Statenbijbel. She liked Gerrit’s version of her life better.

  “The house,” she said, thinking of the fantasy in silkwork hanging in her parlor in New York, “was brick.”

  “You don’t sound as though you liked it.”

  “I like the house you described better.”

  “Then you should have stitched it.”

  “But that one is only a fantasy.”

  “No more so than the Van Haren coat of arms. Do you know its origin?”

  “No. Something to do with knights and swords and services to a king, I expect.”

  “Hardly. The first patroon was a jeweler. All you needed—provided you knew the right people—one hundred and fifty years ago to be granted a patroonship under the West India Company’s Charter of Rights and Exemptions was to settle fifty persons over the age of fifteen in New Netherland. In other words, all you needed was money. Money to recruit them and pay their passage and supply the basic needs of life for a few years. After that, the land, and the people on it, in effect, belonged to you. A perpetual profit machine powered by human lives. The first patroon of Harenwyck never even set foot in America, but he wasted no time inventing a coat of arms for himself. The heraldry of the Van Harens is purest fantasy—and I can’t help feel its allusions cut rather too close to the bone. If Grietje and Jannetje are going to embroider a fantasy, it might as well be something entirely their own. Not that of a grasping old gem cutter, or, come to that, of my good father and brother.”

  “They won’t be embroidering anything at all,” said Anna, “until someone makes me a new frame.”

  For a second he looked sheepish. Then he said, “Get my box of gold open and you may have a dozen frames.”

  He handed her the collected set of lockpicks. There was just enough room on the floor of the coach for her to crouch beside the strongbox—and discover that it was facing the wrong way. It was wedged in tightly between the walls of the coach, with no room to turn, and the side with the lock completely inaccessible.

  She explained her problem.

  “We’ll wait until we reach the inn, then,” said Gerrit.

  She wanted to ask him which inn he meant. She wanted to get her bearings. She had thought she would remember more about Harenwyck, but the gates had been strange to her, and they’d traveled some ways from there by now. Anna knew she must take the first opportunity to escape, but that would be easier if she had any idea where she was.

  • • •

  Gerrit was enjoying himself. Things could have gone very, very wrong on the road, but they hadn’t. He had possession of Andries’ carriage. That was good. No one had gotten hurt. That was better. And the girl made him feel alive and excited, like the world was full of opportunity again. He could not remember the last time he had felt that way.

  He probably shouldn’t have thrown her loom out the door. It was amazing how the sight of that coat of arms set him off, how anything to do with Andries and his family could set him off. He knew there was a world beyond Harenwyck. His raison d’être was to dismantle the damned place, for God’s sake. But as long as the patroonship stood unchanged, it would cast its shadow over his life.

  Talking with the pretty teacher was like a glimpse of that wider world.

  He’d been so smitten that he’d gone and spun her a story, the kind his father had hated, but that the pretty girl with the sunny klompen had always loved. Annatje had done more than listen to his tales, though. She had joined her invention to his. When she didn’t like the ending of a story, she changed it. The heroine, she used to say, ought to get to win once in a while, and live happily ever after. Annatje had not lived happily ever after, but she had convinced him that endings could be changed, that just because something always had been didn’t mean it always had to be.

  He’d said something to that effect to his father, and the old man had shipped him off to Leiden.

  Gerrit had tried to explain to his father that his mind had always worked that way, that people and places and things suggested stories. He’d explained to his father that he knew it was just an amusement, something to entertain ladies—that at least was something the old goat, who had chased everything in petticoats on the estate for decades, would understand—but his father had seen the deeper truth: Gerrit would never look at a tenant and see just numbers in a ledger. He saw families, histories, whole lives and lines being subordinated to someone else’s—all because Gerrit’s great-great-great-grandfather had made a few sharp trades in cut diamonds, and known whose palm to grease in Amsterdam.

  He probably shouldn’t have threatened to keep Miss Winters, as if she were a case of wine or a crate of olives. He was not Cornelis. People’s lives were not his to play with. But he had thought—just for a moment—that she might feel the same thrilling attraction that he did, and want only for an excuse to act on it.

  Of course it was possible that she did feel it but knew better than to act on it. And she was right. No matter how far he fell, he would always be the heir to Harenwyck, a patroon’s son. That was why this meeting was taking place at all. Howe’s officers would not be courting the son of a tenant farmer, no matter how successful his raids. It was Gerrit’s claim to the patroonship they were after, the ability to deliver two hundred thousand acres and two thousand able-bodied men to their side. He would always be able to trade on that, no matter what his situation.

  Whereas Miss Winters had nothing to trade upon but her reputation.

  Her caution was probably well-founded. He liked what he knew of her, and he most definitely wanted her—in a way that made him feel like a whole man again after Sophia’s betrayal had burned away all his appetites—but a gently raised bluestocking had no place at the side of an outlaw, and no place in the Hudson Highlands for that matter.

  Gerrit had spent endless hours arguing with his father after he returned from Leiden. He had believed Cornelis ought to sell tenants their land anytime they could come up with the money, because it was the right thing to do, but Cornelis had been a blasphemous rake of the old school and hadn’t given a damn about right and wrong in the eyes of God or man. He liked money and he liked power, and he didn’t see why he should give up any of either. “You won’t talk such nonsense when it’s all yours,” his father had told him.

  Gerrit had never wanted Harenwyck. He had never wanted to sit at that table in front of the old castle and collect rents, watching his coffers fill with money other men worked for. But he did want Miss Winters, and keeping her was just as wrong.

  “I promise to set you free after we open the strongbox,” he said. “I’ll hire you an escort at the King’s Arms. You can go on to Harenwyck, and my brother, if you insist, in the morning, but I’ll pay you double whatever Andries has offered you to turn around and go home to New York.”

  She had settled back into the shadows of the seat after the strongbox proved inaccessible and her face was unreadable now. “I wish I could,” she said. “But I have already agreed to your brother’s terms and taken his money. Even if I had not, circumstances would not permit me to change my plans.”

  He knew determination when he heard it. He�
�d had a Latin master who knew how to use that tone. If Miss Winters insisted on traveling to Harenwyck, Grietje and Jannetje—or Hubble and Bubble as they were known around the estate—were in for a surprise.

  He would have liked to draw her out again, to find out why she was compelled to go on with this journey, but it was clear she did not want to share her reasons with him, and he contented himself for the moment with looking at her. It would have been rude, bordering on insulting, in another context, to stare at a lady so, but he’d already engaged in robbery on the King’s Highway—the law would see it that way, even if he did not—so drinking in the appearance of a lovely young woman was surely the least of his crimes that evening.

  • • •

  Anna recognized the stepped roof and the slate tiles gleaming in the moonlight as soon as the carriage rounded the bend. The Halve Maen. Although Gerrit had called it the King’s Arms. Her father had liked to drink there. He used to say the air was freer because it was in sight of the river, which the patroon did not own, but Anna suspected he liked to drink there because it was a long walk from the cottage and her mother only seldom thought it worth the trip to roust him from his cups.

  Whatever the name, Anna was glad, because she knew how to get home from there. Or more accurately she knew how to reach the cottage where she had grown up and from there how to reach the manor house—if only she could slip away from Gerrit long enough to make her escape.

  She could not leave the kitten behind. It needed warmth and milk, both things that a band of rogues on the run in a stolen carriage could hardly be relied upon to provide. She double-checked that the basket contained no silk threads for the kitty to eat, then took her fichu and tucked it in next to the purring kitten so there would be something soft for the creature to curl up against. She’d be cold without it covering her shoulders, but the kitten needed it more.

  Gerrit helped her from the carriage with perfect courtesy and Pieter and Jan, who had ridden on top, pardoned themselves before sidling past her to haul out the heavy strongbox. Come to think of it, she had been the victim of an uncommonly courteous robbery. Gerrit’s men behaved less like rogues and more like soldiers, but as Ten Broeck had explained, the line that separated the two was illegibly blurred on the Hudson just now.