The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  It had been a long time since Anna had set foot in a tavern like the Halve Maen at night. Rural alehouses weren’t like their counterparts in New York. She never thought anything of stopping in at the Fraunces Tavern to take a break from her errands, and she had been entertained there more than once by parents come to town to visit their daughters. Manhattan’s public houses were not exclusively male domains—at least not the better sort, anyway—and Anna would have felt perfectly comfortable walking through the door of any of them after dark.

  The Half Moon—or whatever it was called now—was different. It had not been built for entertaining. It had been built for defense. Four solid stories with three-foot-thick walls pierced by arrow slits. The windows had been a later addition, and they looked it: small and oddly shaped. The ground floor housed the kitchens with their massive jambless hearths, and through the open batten doors Anna could see that at least three cooking fires were burning. A busy night, then. The sound of the bustling taproom above carried to her on the brisk night air.

  She climbed the wooden steps beside Gerrit, with Pieter and Jan following, the weighty strongbox carried between them. The stairs creaked just as she remembered. At the top Anna discovered that the tavern sign still bore the image of Henry Hudson’s ship entering New York Harbor, sails full and Dutch colors flying, though the vlieboot’s name had been painted over with the inn’s new moniker.

  The wide front hall was as she recalled it, running from the front to the back of the building with a narrow stair leading into the upper rooms and wide doors to either side opening onto the public spaces. The main taproom was full, and Anna’s heart skipped a beat when she saw with whom: Tarleton’s green dragoons.

  Six

  The uniforms of the British Legion were unmistakable. This was their erstwhile escort to Harenwyck. Their bearskin helmets were stacked on benches against the wall, and they were drinking and dicing and playing at cards. The aroma of hot meat braised in wine with onions filled the air. While Anna and Mr. Ten Broeck had traveled into danger, the green dragoons had been dining on fresh crusty bread and stewed rabbit at the King’s Arms.

  There were, as she had expected, no women present, save the landlord’s wife and daughter, busy serving tables, and an old woman sitting beside the cage bar, reflexively holding out her cup for a refill anytime one of the family members came by. Anna remembered her. Like the other fixtures—creaky rush-seat chairs, plank tables, tarnished tavern lamps—Mevrouw Zabriskie had changed little. Perhaps her straw yellow hair was whiter, but the old woman who lived in the woods and told fortunes for beer at the Halve Maen looked much as she had more than a decade ago. She wore her pale mane long and loose down her back like a young girl, and dressed in brightly colored castoffs, tonight a striped pink silk jacket and lampas petticoat in clashing ochre with a pair of riotous bargello shoes. Anna’s mother had called her a witch. As far as Anna knew the cunning woman paid no tithe for her cottage and produced no crops, but the old patroon had always tolerated her presence on his land, and it seemed that the new one followed precedent.

  Mevrouw Zabriskie had told her fortune once when she was a girl. She knew now that tarot was pure nonsense, but it had been frightening at the time: all hanged men and falling towers. Even so, Anna would take a witch over a certain dragoon any day.

  “What is the British Legion doing here?” she asked.

  “Perhaps they’ve had favorable reports of the season’s ale,” said Gerrit.

  With a sinking heart, she surveyed the room. It wasn’t difficult, even in that sea of green coats, to spot the man Gerrit must have come to meet. His auburn hair was burnished red in the firelight. He was playing five-card loo with several of his dragoons and a man in a civilian suit of dark gray wool.

  “You’ve come to meet Tarleton, haven’t you?” she said.

  “Do you know him?”

  “He was our escort to Harenwyck. And it would be better if we did not meet again,” she said.

  Just then Tarleton looked up. He nodded at Gerrit. Then his dark, coffee-colored eyes found Anna and she felt her empty stomach revolt.

  “Too late now,” said Gerrit, as Tarleton got up and started through the crowd toward them. “Is there something else I should know?”

  Anna watched the way Tarleton’s men—hard, confident men—made way for him. She spent her days surrounded by women, but power worked much the same in all groups. It would be a mistake to underestimate the colonel. “I rebuffed him on the road to Harenwyck. I suspect that he is not a man to take such slights graciously.”

  “I have a room spoken for upstairs if you would prefer to retire,” Gerrit said.

  It was her chance, and she ought to take it, ought to go upstairs and then slip down while Gerrit was speaking with Tarleton and disappear into the night. Gerrit was intent on Harenwyck. He would not be thinking of her. She knew she could sneak past him. But Tarleton . . .

  Would be waiting for her. Anna weighed her chances of evading him a second time, found she did not like them one bit. “I would prefer to stay close to you,” said Anna, “while Tarleton is about.”

  “When you say you rebuffed him, what sort of overture did you discourage?” asked Gerrit tightly.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Experience.”

  “I am very sorry to hear it, Miss Winters. I promise you he will not insult you again.”

  It was pure Gerrit, the outraged sense of justice and the instinct to do right—even for a woman he barely knew. If she did not already know him, she would have fallen a little in love with him then.

  Tarleton was almost upon them when Gerrit offered her his arm. He could not have known that Tarleton had done the same, but perhaps he had guessed how the man might react. The colonel’s smile was stretched tight when he reached them.

  “Van Haren,” said Tarleton. He did not acknowledge Anna. “I thought we had agreed that the passengers would be held overnight and released on the morrow.”

  “Mr. Ten Broeck and the driver are even now on their way to the old barn.”

  “And the girl?” asked Tarleton.

  “The services of Miss Winters,” replied Gerrit, “like my brother’s wine and his olives and sweetmeats, have been bought for Harenwyck, and because Harenwyck is rightfully mine, that makes them mine to dispose of as I see fit.”

  “You cannot just hold the girl,” said Tarleton.

  “Technically he cannot,” said the man with whom Tarleton had been playing cards. The stranger was dressed in a suit of dark gray wool, exceptionally well-tailored, and it set off his coal black hair and gold-flecked hazel eyes. His approach had been the very opposite of Tarleton’s. He’d threaded his way through the crowd, creating not so much as a ripple and come upon them all but unnoticed—until he spoke.

  “In theory,” he continued, “the patroons have not had the power to establish and administer their own courts of justice for almost a hundred years. But theory is one thing, and practice is another where the manors are concerned. Your father followed the old Dutch ways, did he not? Cornelis Van Haren had his own schouts, sheriff and bailiffs, to enforce the traditional laws of the patroonship.”

  “You know a great deal about the business of Harenwyck, sir,” said Gerrit, examining the stranger with wariness.

  “It is my business to know the character of all the strategic positions of interest to our government.”

  “Then I presume you are the gentleman that I am here to meet.”

  The gentleman nodded. “Major John André, at your service.”

  For a second, Anna forgot to breathe. Kate Grey’s words about the Widow came back to her: She was murdered 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 was face-to-face with the Widow’s killer.

  “I’m not sure an Englishman can fully understand the character of a place like Harenwyck,” Gerrit was saying, to the man who had murdered her mentor. “It is the Middle Ages come back to life. My father took it on himself to settle everything except capital matters in his own court, where he was judge and jury. When he did deal with capital offenses, he referred them to Albany, which always handed down the verdict he desired, because he and the other patroons owned the courts. But I am not my father. There will never be another sheriff of Harenwyck. The job got the last man killed, and not without reason. There will be no more estate courts when I am patroon. The Middle Ages can rest in peace.”

  “Reform is inevitable,” said André. “But the patroons are understandably reluctant to accept that reality. Many of them have sided with the Rebels on the promise that they may retain their ancient privileges under the new American government.” He was good, thought Anna, as good as the Widow. He had the trick of sincerity and he knew exactly what to say to appeal to Gerrit’s amour propre. “Shall we retire to discuss the situation in detail?” André indicated the door, and Gerrit fell into step beside him.

  Anna did not want to be left behind with Tarleton, so she moved to follow, but the colonel smoothly intercepted her. “I shall take charge of Miss Winters, and escort her home to New York.”

  Her heart hammered in her chest. Tarleton had thirty men to enforce his will. And he was bent on more than seduction now. After their encounter in the woods he would want revenge.

  Gerrit slipped his arm beneath hers and pulled her out of Tarleton’s orbit. “No need, Colonel. I’m rather warming up to the idea of the girls having her for a teacher.”

  “Miss Winters,” said Tarleton, “is a lady with influential friends in New York. She’s an Englishwoman and not subject to your authority.”

  “Actually,” said John André, “we’re well within the bounds of Harenwyck now. If we acknowledge that Mr. Van Haren is indeed patroon, and the estate has contracted with the lady, she is subject to his authority by local custom, if not by law.”

  Tarleton laid a hand on the hilt of his pistol. “My British Legion is not subject to ‘local custom.’”

  It was a threat. There was no way around it. Gerrit had perhaps a dozen men that Anna had seen. He might have more, but there was no way to know. Tarleton had thirty dragoons, and he was clearly willing to use them to get what he wanted.

  “Your troop,” said Gerrit, sounding just the sort of medieval patroon he despised, “is eight miles inside of Harenwyck at the moment, through woods controlled by my men. So unless your horses can swim the Hudson, Colonel, you won’t be leaving the estate with the girl.”

  Tarleton’s men, as Anna had suspected, were as naturally violent as their commander. A green-jacketed sergeant—a brawny, lantern-jawed man—rose suddenly from a table nearby and, almost before Gerrit had finished speaking, clapped a hand on his shoulder, seizing hold of it in thick, tightening fingers like a vise.

  “You need a lesson in manners, cheese-head,” he said.

  Anna heard the slur on occasion in New York. She had never heard it uttered at Harenwyck, and definitely not against a member of the patroon’s family.

  Gerrit made no reply, but calmly turned, catching the wrist of the hand grasping his shoulder. The sergeant pulled up a knee, thinking to batter his adversary’s chest, but Gerrit shifted position smoothly, hooked his free arm underneath the knee even as it rose. Twisting and lifting—almost without effort, it seemed—he used the larger man’s momentum and weight against him. The dragoon voiced a great roar of surprise as he found himself thrown bodily backward, almost somersaulting, to crash down against the hardwood floor.

  Anna was also surprised, almost amazed, at just how expertly Gerrit had dealt with the burly soldier. As readily as she’d dealt with his colonel in the woods, she thought, but this man was much larger than Tarleton, and had been spoiling for a fight rather than taken unawares.

  Further intelligence of the sort of man the boy she’d cherished in her memory had become, but there was no time to examine her feelings on the subject. The sergeant, the wind knocked out of him, gasped for air and glared at Gerrit, standing above him, with murderous intent. Gerrit gave a quick, ambiguous nod to Pieter, who had lingered near the door when they entered, while all around the taproom, soldiers now pushed away from tables, balling fists and looking to their weapons; at any instant, the tension looked to dissolve into chaos and bloodshed.

  “Ban,” said John André in a soft warning voice. He did not seem alarmed by the prospect of the violence about to explode around him, only impatient. “This is not the time.”

  It was not an order. A major could not give orders to a colonel. But clearly, André had some authority that trumped the hierarchy of command. Banastre Tarleton smiled, lips thin and tight, then lifted a hand to quell his men. The effect was impressive. Those who saw the gesture sat back down almost immediately, as though nothing untoward had occurred; those who had not were very quickly restrained and informed by their fellows.

  “Thank you, Sergeant, but I will handle things my own way,” Tarleton said to his vanquished champion. “And when I want you to teach anyone anything—or indeed, to kill someone—I shall make that very plain. See you remember that.”

  “Yes, sir.” The big sergeant picked himself up off the floor and rejoined his comrades with no more than a few black looks back at Gerrit.

  The colonel’s tone had been calm, almost amused, but Anna was not the only one to observe that his hand was still on his pistol.

  “Perhaps it would be better to consult the lady herself,” suggested André equably. He showed no reluctance, Anna noticed, to come between these two “killing gentlemen.”

  The three men turned toward Anna. “I am traveling on to Harenwyck.”

  When Tarleton started to voice his protests, André interrupted. “Miss Winters is not a dragoon, Ban, and you can’t exactly command her to return to New York with you.”

  Tarleton did not like her answer, but André obviously had some hold over him, because he removed his hand from his pistol with great care and said, “Have you actually seen the girls since you have been back, Van Haren?”

  There was malice in the question. Anna could feel it, even if she didn’t know its source.

  Gerrit’s voice was frosty in response. “I have not seen Grietje or Jannetje in four years.”

  “What a pity,” said Tarleton. “They are quite a striking pair. Quite. And there is a marked family resemblance. They have the Van Haren coloring, with all that golden hair.”

  “I would have thought that the Van Haren girls were too young even for you, Ban,” said André, his patience appearing to wear thin at last.

  He turned to Gerrit. “I have a private room spoken for above, my lord, if you and the lady would like to join me. And I am certain that the colonel is eager to return to his game.”

  Anna glanced back at the table where Tarleton, André, and three dragoons had been playing cards. The bank was heaped in the center of the table, and it told its own tale: a pile of coins, some paper money of dubious value, a ring, a seed pearl pin, and a pair of very fine silk kneebands with silver buckles.

  She did not, as a rule, pay attention to gossip, or much credit it when she did. But when her students talked a great deal too much about a man, she thought it wise to learn the facts. In Tarleton’s case the facts were these: He had gambled away a fortune before twenty and nearly ended in debtors’ prison. With his inheritance exhausted, he had prevailed upon his mother to buy him a commission. He had made a success of himself in the army, rising fast on pure merit and élan. It surprised Anna that he still played, even for small stakes, when he had skirted so close to disaster, but she suspected that the sort of risk taking that drove him to gamble was precisely what distinguished him on the battlefield.

&nb
sp; Anna realized that she was thinking like the Widow now, and that was probably just as well, since this was the Widow’s arena: politics and war. And now Anna was facing the man who had killed her.

  John André was difficult to read. She studied him as he led the way up the stairs. He was dressed appropriately enough for the highlands. His suit was simple wool, but finer and better cut than any farmer could afford. If she had met him on the street she would be hard-pressed to say whether he was a city lawyer or a country gentleman, although—she must admit—an exceptionally well-formed one, to judge from his coat’s breadth of shoulder and trimness of waist.

  Anna had never been up to the second floor of the Halve Maen, but she found it achingly familiar, because it was the first truly Dutch home she had entered since leaving Harenwyck. The room André had been given must have been the best in the house, because there was a massive carved and painted kas against one wall, and the jambless fireplace was surrounded by blue and white tiles and hung with a fine wool curtain on brass rings.

  A cold meal had been laid on the sideboard. Anna knew she ought to eat—she hadn’t had anything since breakfast—but she was too wrung out to take any food. Not so the kitten, which must have smelled the rabbit below, and now the roast turkey, and was mewing mournfully. Anna slipped a slice of meat inside the basket before joining Gerrit and André at the table by the fire.

  “I understand,” André said to Gerrit as he passed him a glass of brandy, “that you studied at Leiden.”

  “Yes,” said Gerrit. “Before the war.”

  “Then perhaps Miss Winters will forgive me if I take the opportunity to practice my Dutch with you.”

  André favored her with a smile that was meant to charm, but it chilled her to the bone, because this handsome, cultured man had tortured the Widow and presided over her murder. Anna forced herself to smile back. She had only one advantage at the moment. André did not know that she spoke Dutch.