The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  “No,” said Gerrit. “Or at least, not yet. They don’t think I can take Harenwyck with thirty men.”

  “Could be that’s because you can’t,” said Pieter.

  There was another scratch at the door, and this time when it opened the one called Dirck stood on the threshold. He didn’t spare a glance for the heaped food on the sideboard. “The patroon is going to repossess Edwaert’s sheep tonight for nonpayment of rent.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Gerrit sharply.

  “Mevrouw Duyser overheard two of your brother’s schouts talking. They’ll be getting a tithe each from the herd for the job. They would not do it for less, because they know Edwaert rides with us. And they mean to see it done before dawn, because they heard we were out a-roving tonight. They think they are free to take his property.”

  “Right,” said Gerrit. “Saddle the horses.”

  “What are we going to do, baas?” asked Pieter.

  “We’re going to help Edwaert to steal his own sheep, before my brother does.”

  “What about the girl?” asked Pieter.

  “There is not enough Parmesan cheese in the world to convince Mynheer Duyser to hold a girl prisoner for us,” said Gerrit flatly. “She comes with us.”

  Seven

  Gerrit did not know who he was angrier with, Miss Winters or himself. He’d been taken in by her, even after he’d seen the lockpicks, because she was pretty and smelled like oranges, and he’d wanted to drown in the folds of that airy cotton gown and sink into her softness. She’d lied to him, spied on him, and as good as called him a simpleton to his face—and she knew that he was a traitor to the country of his birth.

  The very worst of it was that he still wanted her.

  “I’m not exactly dressed for riding. Or sheep rustling,” she said. She was standing by the ransacked buffet and she still had the damned basket with the damned kitten in it, and it was impossible to hate a woman who was kind to small animals.

  “Would you prefer to go back to New York with Colonel Tarleton?” he asked.

  She paled, and he felt disgusted with himself. “No,” she said.

  “Then find some other shoes in your baggage. It’s in the room next door. Pieter will take you. And remember, the only way out of here is past the green dragoons. If you end up in Tarleton’s clutches, I won’t put my men at risk to get you back.”

  The look of disappointment on her face cut him to the quick. He knew he was lying, but it was just as well that she didn’t. Twelve against thirty were poor odds, and he could not be certain how many of the Halve Maen’s regulars would side with him in such a fight.

  When they came back a few minutes later, Miss Winters had traded her silk slippers for leather shoes with sturdy pinchbeck buckles, and Pieter was somehow still eating. He returned to the buffet and began wrapping the remaining rice fritters in one of Mynheer Duyser’s fine linen napkins. Gerrit doubted that André had paid quite enough to cover lost linens. Pieter reached for the last of the grilled fishes, but Miss Winters intercepted him and snatched the fish away. “Scrappy needs it more than you do,” she said.

  “You have already fed that cat twice its weight in fish,” said Gerrit.

  “It’s a kitten, and it’s growing,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” said Pieter. “Rice fritters travel better.”

  Gerrit very much doubted that.

  Downstairs Tarleton was nowhere in sight, but there were dragoons sleeping on the benches in the taproom and on bedrolls in the hall and Mynheer Duyser and his wife treaded softly among them to clear glasses and plates.

  He ought to be thinking about Edwaert’s sheep, but all he could think of as they crossed the yard to the stable was Miss Winters. She kept pace with the men easily, her skirts flowing in the slight breeze, cotton gown ghost pale in the moonlight. He did not know what to do with her.

  And she was far too quiet. When they reached the barn she waited in silence while the horses were saddled. She was too smart to try to run away while Tarleton was about, but he suspected she was plotting something.

  “We haven’t any sidesaddles,” said Pieter, as he threw Gerrit his gear.

  “Miss Winters will ride with me,” said Gerrit.

  “I’m quite capable of riding myself, astride,” she said. They were the first words out of her mouth in the last half hour, and they were cool and clipped.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Gerrit. “You ride with me.”

  She surprised him when she made no further protest. They led the horses out into the yard. Gerrit gave Miss Winters a leg up onto Konjin’s back, and then slung himself into the saddle behind her. He did his best to ignore the supple curves of her body and the citrus sweetness of her scent. Pieter passed up the sewing basket with the kitten in it, and Gerrit heard it clink. A very unkittenlike sound.

  Miss Winters stiffened. “I’ll take Scrappy,” she said, shifting in the saddle to try to get hold of the basket. And that made it impossible to ignore the fact that he had a woman in his arms for the first time in three years.

  But it did not rob him entirely of his wits. He held firm to the basket and began to walk Konjin out of the innyard and down the rocky track that would take them to Edwaert’s farm the back way. Edwaert and Dirck and Pieter and the others followed.

  When they cleared the overhanging trees and came out into a wide field where the moon lit their way, he flipped open the lid on the basket. “Whatever have we here, Miss Winters?”

  • • •

  Anna ignored Gerrit’s question. There was enough moonlight for him to see exactly what the basket contained: one kitten and an assortment of implements pilfered from the Halve Maen to aid her escape.

  Gerrit looped the reins over his wrist and dipped his hand into her basket.

  “I hope she scratches you,” said Anna.

  “She’s licking me.”

  “A thoroughly undiscriminating beast, then. One can only hope that with age will come wisdom.”

  “She seems quite advanced for her tender years—or weeks. Already she has mastered the use of fire.” He plucked up the candle she had stolen from its sconce while Pieter’s back was turned and flung it into the field, along with the little flint she had found in her baggage. “And table manners withal—she apparently intends to cut her own food.” He pocketed the little knife the Widow had taught her to use. Anna would rather have seen it between his ribs just at that moment.

  “Ah. Our clever kitten is even a budding burglar.” He held up a handful of her picks and tossed them into the corn.

  “But a poor accomplice,” replied Anna. “You take altogether too much delight in discarding my property.”

  “What were you going to do with it?” he asked, placing Scrappy’s basket back in her hands.

  “Find my way to the manor house, of course.”

  “At night? Across three miles of unfamiliar country?”

  “I possess an excellent sense of direction.”

  “That may be, but a sense of direction wouldn’t have saved you from the witch.”

  “If you mean the woman telling fortunes at the Ha—at the King’s Arms, then you are sadly mistaken.”

  “How did you know the inn used to be called the Halve Maen?”

  “Pieter must have said.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “The sign above the door still has a painting of the ship on it. And not every old woman who sells cures or reads tea leaves is a witch,” she added, hoping to change the subject.

  “I did not mean Mevrouw Zabriskie. I meant the English witch. She of the velvet gown. Have you never heard of her?”

  “Should I have done?”

  “Perhaps she is not so famous in New York. Or wherever it is you’re really from.”

  “Obviously not,” said Miss Winters. “But then you wou
ldn’t expect New Yorkers to be entertained by such rustic nonsense as scare tales about witches and hobgoblins when they have concerts and lectures and the theater to amuse them.”

  “But it is the English theater that birthed this particular witch, so your sophisticated New Yorkers ought to own her. I’m told she was an actress on the London stage during the reign of Charles the First. Very young, very pretty, and part of that first generation of females allowed to tread the boards in England. A star on the rise—until Cromwell and the fifty-nine commissioners cut off King Charles’ head and closed all the theaters. You can imagine what might become of a pretty young girl thrown penniless onto the streets of London in those times.”

  She did not have to imagine it. “I don’t think I want to hear the rest,” said Anna.

  “It gets better, I promise you. But like all good stories, it gets worse first. Hardly had she time to say a prayer for the soul of the late king before she herself was preyed upon—and by the same pious hypocrites who closed the theaters. Public vices like the playhouse were an affront to Puritan virtue, but apparently using young women for your private entertainment was of rather less moment in the eyes of the Lord. A certain baronet who was one of the commissioners—and also a provost marshal—had her arrested for vagrancy and abused her while in his custody, and allowed his ‘worthy’ friends to do the same.”

  “Please tell me that the story improves soon,” said Anna.

  “It does. I do promise. Barbara Fenton—for that was her name—decided that the god of the Puritans was neither merciful nor just, so she turned in her despair to his ancient adversary, and pledged herself, body and soul, to dark powers. She signed the Devil’s book, like all good witches, and after enduring the loathsome attentions of the baronet and his friends for months, I can only imagine that consorting with the Devil was something of a relief.”

  It would have been.

  “Oude Nikken gave her the power to free herself, right enough. But if it was a bad time to be an actress in England, it was an even worse one to be a woman suspected of witchcraft after a seemingly impossible escape from a locked room.”

  “I thought you said that the story was going to get better.” Anna found that she was clutching Scrappy’s basket so tightly that the wicker was printed on her fingers.

  “It does now,” said Gerrit. “I told you that Miss Barbara Fenton was an actress, and a fine one. The equal of Kitty Clive or the Divine Fanny in our own century. Had she been born just a few years later, she would have been Susanna Centlivre or Nell Gwynn.

  “In any case, Barbara had played the Witch of Edmonton. She knew Elizabeth Sawyer’s fate, and she was determined not to share it. She disguised herself as a Puritan and so thoroughly did she inhabit the role that she was invited to join one of those communities of emigrants setting out to build their Jerusalem in the New World. She traveled with them to Holland, where the first patroon was still energetically recruiting. Every fifty settlers he dispatched to Harenwyck earned him the right to more land. Barbara met and married a poor but large-hearted Dutchman, and they set out for New Netherland to take up one of the patroon’s leases.

  “They lived happily in a cottage not far from here for many years, but though she loved her farmer, she sometimes put on her velvet gown—a relic of her former life that she had not been able to part with—went out into the woods, and called up hare and deer and owls to be her rapt audience.

  “Then one day a rumor reached Harenwyck that two of the regicides who had signed Charles the First’s death warrant had been forced to flee the Netherlands one step ahead of the English sheriffs charged with capturing them, and were now in New Amsterdam. The monarchy had been restored and the theaters reopened by then, if too late for Barbara Fenton. Fame and fortune, you see, had passed her by. But now at least her opportunity for revenge was at hand.

  “She walked all the way to Manhattan, and there she played the greatest role of her life: devoted Puritan goodwife succoring the English ‘martyrs.’ She sought and found these men, who were among those who had abused her, and such was the quality of her acting—perhaps, admittedly, aided by the passage of time—that despite past, all-too-close acquaintance, they neither of them recognized her. She told these gentlemen that the patroon was a godly man in sympathy with their plight, that he would gladly offer them shelter at Harenwyck, but that they must come with her quickly and in secret, lest their pursuers catch their trail.

  “The gentlemen—heroes still in their own minds, albeit justly afraid of unjust death—quickly agreed and left with her at once. She took them to her cottage in the woods, where she had laid a repast in readiness, all of it most richly seasoned and most carefully poisoned. They ate and they drank and they thanked her for her generosity, even as the venom began to course though their veins.

  “It was important to Miss Fenton that they know who she was and why they were going to die, so she chose a slow poison that paralyzes first. And when they were incapable of movement, she brought her dressing table and her chair and her looking glass down to the parlor and arranged them before her attentive audience. She applied her paint and dressed her hair and donned her paste jewels and her velvet gown, then turned to face them. And so, with the finality of a clashing gong, the Puritan goodwife was revealed to be the actress they had so misused, like a vengeful specter raised from their common past.

  “When the poison had at last separated the gentlemen’s gross physical bodies from their immortal souls, she cleaned the house very thoroughly, because she did not want her husband to accidentally ingest poison. And as the sun set, he arrived home from the fields to find a pair of strangers seemingly frozen at his table, and quite dead. His wife, who was dressed in finery he had never seen before, looked almost equally a stranger to his eyes.

  “She loved him, so she explained what she had done and why, what horrors had befallen her all those years ago. He loved her too, so he said he would not expose her and that he would help her to bury the bodies, but after that he must leave. He vowed he would never love another woman, but he was in truth a godly man, and could not share the bed of a murderess. And so like so many tenants did in those days, he fled his lease. He changed his name and searched for a better life somewhere else in the New World, and Mevrouw Fenton never saw him again.

  “After he left, they say, she cried every night for ten days. Then went out into the woods and hanged herself in her fine velvet gown. Her ghost has haunted these parts ever since.”

  “I think,” said Anna, “that I wouldn’t mind meeting Barbara Fenton.”

  • • •

  Try as he might, Gerrit could not stay angry at the maddening Englishwoman in his arms. If she really was English. He still did not know how or why she spoke Dutch or even if Anna Winters was really her name, but when he had seen the embroidered fichu folded up beneath the sleeping kitten all his ill humor had faded away. That scrap of translucent silk was the work of many hours, embroidered, he recalled from when it had covered her collarbones and décolletage, with lifelike strawberries and vines in pure white silk thread.

  And she had given it to the cat to sleep on. She had, of course, been planning to knife Gerrit in the ribs and then escape with said cat with the aid of a single candle and a piece of flint, but he preferred to believe that she would have avoided piercing any vital organs. She had enjoyed his story about the witch. Certain parts had been rough going, and he’d worried that he had breached some kind of finishing school teacher rule with the details of Barbara Fenton’s plight—but she had plainly liked the ending, and that was what mattered. It was possible she was part witch herself. He’d never seen anyone take food away from Pieter Ackerman and live to tell the tale.

  “Would you have abandoned her?” asked Miss Winters, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Abandoned whom?”

  “Barbara Fenton. Would you have abandoned her as her husband did?”

  Gerrit t
hought a moment. He had walked away from his marriage to Sophia over less, but had he ever really loved her?

  “I don’t know. I like to think that real love is two people, or a family, standing together against the world. Perhaps he should have stood by her. But if I had been Barbara Fenton’s husband, I should have wanted her to come to me before she made that trip to New York.”

  “So you could have stopped her?”

  “So I could understand—and then perhaps plot vengeance with her.”

  “How many men, do you think, would still love their wives if they found out she had been with so many others?”

  “I suppose that depends on who their wives had slept with, and why and when. But a fair number, I should think, including more than a few ‘godly’ Puritans and worldly English monarchs.”

  “But not,” said Anna sadly, “Barbara Fenton’s Dutchman.”

  • • •

  Anna saw the steep roof of the cottage at the top of the hill, distinct even by moon – and starlight. She knew its outline intimately, because her childhood home had been nearly identical. Most of the old cottages at Harenwyck had been constructed along similar lines.

  The first patroon had required all of his settlers to build in brick, but brick was expensive, and thus each tenant was supplied only so many. If a tenant wished a larger home he had to buy more bricks—from the patroon naturally, who sold his bricks at a dear price. The result had been hundreds of tiny one-room cottages with sleeping lofts above, built on the traditional Dutch H-frame, with the steep curving roof and a jambless chimney at one end.

  Glass had been another luxury the patroon did not provide. This house was more prosperous than the Hoppe farm. There was glass in all the windows, and the original cottage was now the kitchen of a larger house built of clapboard and sandstone. For a time at least, Edwaert, or his predecessors, had done well at Harenwyck.

  And now they were reduced to stealing their own sheep before the patroon took them. Anna looked up at the night sky and the curved roof and knew that nothing had changed at Harenwyck in the time that she had been gone. Nothing ever did. It was changeless as the stars. Kate Grey had been wrong. The time wasn’t right to do what her father had failed to a decade ago. It never would be. And because of Kate Grey, Anna was caught fast in Harenwyck’s grip again.