The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  But Gerrit did not have to be. He thought her a liar and a spy—and she was both of these things—but she was speaking a lived truth when she said, “You are going to get these men and their families evicted, or worse.”

  “Are we back to your very low opinion of my competence? Because I have discovered that it is not my favorite topic.”

  “This isn’t about your competence. And it isn’t about what’s right or what’s really yours. Places like this don’t change. Neither do men like André. He won’t support you when the time comes, not unless you’re sure to win, anyway. And you can’t win here. Sheep rustling and coach robbing won’t secure you your inheritance. It will only goad your brother into retaliation. And not just against you. These men and their families will suffer as much, or more. And your conflict will degenerate into mob violence like it always does, until the patroon calls out his militia.”

  “His militia of eighty. By that time I will have eight hundred to stand against him.”

  “And as soon as he hears that you are recruiting, he will do the same.”

  “Then we must prevent him hearing until he’s behind the times. There’s logistics for you. And in that light, isn’t it fortunate for me that I’ve deprived my brother of both his carriage and his spy?”

  “I am not your brother’s spy. I’ve never even met him. My reasons for going to Harenwyck are my own. But the second you set up your drum someone is sure to run and tell him. That’s why the patroonships will never change. Human nature. There will never be a shortage of tenants willing and eager to sell out their fellows to earn the patroon’s favor or buy a few extra privileges.”

  “Someday you will have to tell me from whence your remarkable perspective on the highlands derives. For now, try not to spook the herd.”

  The sheep were in a pen beside the barn. It was a sizable flock, close to a hundred head by Anna’s estimate. She could smell the tang of the dairy house nearby, fresh curd drying on cool stone slabs. Her stomach growled, and she wished she had thought to make up a napkin of food like Pieter’s.

  Edwaert got down to open the gate, and Pieter—hair silver white in the moonlight—slipped into the enclosure and began urging the sheep toward the opening. There were a few surprised bleats and a great deal of sneezing, but finally the whole flock was out of the pen, with Pieter urging them toward the pasture and Gerrit using his horse to round up the lambs at the back.

  It had been done with remarkable speed and quiet.

  “You’ve left a lamb behind,” said Anna, turning as far as she could in the saddle.

  “Where?” He peered back toward the enclosure.

  “In the pen.”

  “There’s no time,” said Gerrit, quite reasonably. If they did not get the sheep onto the road fast, they would disperse over the pasture, and every minute they wasted increased the likelihood that his brother’s men would arrive.

  “You can’t just leave him without his mother.”

  Gerrit sighed and slid from the horse.

  As she knew he would.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  She waited a moment, stranded in a sea of sheep contentedly grazing.

  As soon as he disappeared into the enclosure, she lowered herself to the ground and began searching his saddlebags.

  She had just enough time to find and load his pistol.

  When he emerged she aimed the piece with care and said, “No closer, please.”

  He stopped where he stood. “I presume from the way you are holding that thing that you know how to use it.”

  “Very well, in fact,” she admitted.

  “My father always told me never to aim a gun you don’t intend on firing.”

  “It’s good advice.”

  “My brother would be grateful if you pulled that trigger,” said Gerrit, “but you might find Edwaert and Pieter less appreciative.”

  “I told you, I don’t work for your brother. At least not as a spy.”

  “But you’ll level a loaded pistol at me because I won’t let you fly to him.” Gerrit took a step forward.

  She cocked the pistol and he stopped. “I have to reach Harenwyck,” she said. “For reasons you could not possibly understand.”

  “Now you’re making Barbara Fenton’s mistake. Give me the benefit of the doubt and tell me these reasons. I might just surprise you by understanding them after all.”

  “Yes, perhaps you might understand them—but, much like her Dutch farmer, you wouldn’t be able to live with them.”

  Because she was a murderess, just like Barbara Fenton.

  Her stomach chose that moment to growl again. Louder this time, like an animal yowling. A distinct and distinctively embarrassing sound, the same one Gerrit had turned toward in church that day all those years ago.

  He cocked his head and took a step closer. He was studying her face in the moonlight with disbelief writ large over his own.

  “It can’t be.”

  Her stomach growled again. “Not another step,” she warned.

  Recognition, full and absolute, lit his eyes. It was the same wonder he used to show when they looked together at the stars. He shook his head. “You’re not going to shoot me.”

  “I never intended to.” She raised her arm and fired into the night sky.

  Eight

  The pasture erupted into noise and motion. Sheep bleated and bolted, men cursed, hooves hammered the ground. Gerrit started toward her, but frightened livestock surged between them. For a second their eyes met across a sea of confused sheep.

  “Annatje!” Gerrit’s voice was loud as a shot.

  He knew. Anna threw the pistol down on the grass. She swept up Scrappy’s basket and took off running.

  The grass was wet and slippery. She clutched the basket tight to her chest and ran, dodging upset sheep. Strands of hair came free of their pins and tumbled in front of her face. For a second she was blinded and slammed into a body—thick with scratchy fleece—but the sheep was as frightened as she and ricocheted away in another direction.

  She scrabbled on as the ground became rockier and more uneven. When she hit a steep downward slope she stumbled and sprawled, knees cracking against fieldstone so hard that it brought tears to her eyes—but she got back up and kept going. She could hear shouting behind her, thought she might be able to discern Gerrit’s voice in the tumult crying her name and calling, “Don’t go”—but it could just as easily have been a trick of the wind and her own wishful thinking.

  She went on, because he knew. And if he caught her, even if he wanted to save her, she would surely hang. Because this was Harenwyck, the same Harenwyck she’d grown up in. It hadn’t changed at all, and she would be held accountable for what she’d done, if not by the law, then by the mob. Because at Harenwyck, they played rough music at night.

  If she reached the trees, he would not—could not—search for her, or Edwaert would lose his flock, and to lose your livestock was to lose everything. Gerrit would never let that happen to a friend. He cared about people and animals and even as a young boy, he had felt deeply that the strong ought to protect the weak. If he had to choose between apprehending a murderess whose crime was a thing of the past and the survival of an innocent family in the here and now, he would choose the latter, to save Edwaert.

  At least she prayed that he would. She was counting on that to make good her escape.

  As she slipped and slid through dung and rocks and mud, she was thankful that she had changed out of her kid slippers and into her more substantial walking shoes. As she reached the tree line and crashed into the dense forest, though, she wished she had worn her thick wool stockings and not the fine clocked silk. The sheer fabric was no protection against the forest. She could feel it shredding to ribbons as she plunged through the undergrowth, brambles and branches whipping and scratching at her ankles.

  Her chest gr
ew tight, her lungs burned, blood trickled down into her shoes, but she plunged on.

  The woods grew thicker. The sound of outraged livestock dwindled and finally ceased. Anna stopped. Her chest ached. She leaned against a tree and sucked in ragged gulps of cool damp air. It sounded unnaturally loud and ugly in the stillness. Once she caught her breath she set Scrappy’s basket down on the soft earth and fumbled with the clasp. She wished she had thought to hide the candle and flint in her pockets.

  The moon was bright enough to reveal poor Scrappy’s predicament. She was sitting up in her basket looking as disgruntled as a ball of fur could look. The fish Anna had tucked in with her at the Halve Maen had not traveled well. It had broken apart during her flight, and now lay mashed and crumbled in Anna’s fichu. It had gotten all over Scrappy’s coat during that jostling journey from the sheep pasture, and now flakes of fish clung to her fur in sorry clumps.

  Anna doubted she looked much better herself, and unfortunately she could not lick herself clean as the tiny cat was attempting to do.

  At least one of them would look presentable by the time they reached the patroon’s house. Anna latched the basket and took a moment to get her bearings. She’d entered the woods on the north slope of Ackerman’s rise. That meant she should be able to strike east through the forest and find the old mill path, and that would take her to the manor house.

  As a child she had flown through these woods heedless of low-hanging branches and snarling brambles. She’d worn fewer petticoats then, of course, and no cumbersome hip roll. The trees plucked at her with green fingers, and when she stopped to disentangle herself from a sweet birch, she discovered that her hair, which had come entirely undone in her flight, was full of twigs and leaves. She slipped twice, sliding flat on her bottom down a gentle slope that was carpeted in pine needles, and wished she still owned a pair of sturdy klompen with hatch-marked soles.

  She almost missed the path when she came upon it. It was narrower than she remembered, more a tunnel through the forest than a road. It stretched unbroken into darkness behind and before her, and suddenly she did not want to turn her back on such deep shadows.

  But now, just as on the day she had fled Harenwyck, there was no going back. She picked up her skirts and plowed onward.

  • • •

  His father had told him she was dead. She was nothing of the sort. She was gloriously, maddeningly alive, all the promise of her girlhood come to fruit in a woman who was as competent—as formidable—as she was beautiful. She was alive and a moment ago, here with him again.

  And he could not go after her.

  “Gerrit!” Pieter reined up beside him and followed Gerrit’s line of sight into the woods. “We don’t have time.”

  “I know.” They were likely to lose half Edwaert’s sheep as it was.

  He couldn’t look away from the woods.

  “You can’t go after her.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about it.”

  “You’re a terrible liar, baas. I heard you in the pasture. You called her Annatje. That was Annatje Hoppe, your klompen girl.”

  He was a fool. He should not have said her name out loud. But he had been so surprised—so desperate to keep her—that he had shouted out her name for the whole bloody estate to hear. Annatje Hoppe. The girl the schouts had tried to hang.

  “Are you going to tell anyone?” Pieter had been his friend since they were both eleven years old. He had followed Gerrit into the army and back out of it. The ties of friendship bound them, but Anna—no, Annatje—had been right: he would always be the son of the patroon. Cast out, but not cast down. Men like Pieter, women like Annatje, had fewer choices, and Gerrit had no right to make demands on them.

  “No,” said Pieter. “But I’m not the only one who’ll have heard you.”

  Dread ran through Gerrit like fever. He climbed into his saddle and guided his mount to follow Pieter’s along the edge of the road, where so many of the sheep were now stamping in a confused huddle. “Who else?” he asked, queasy with the thought that anyone had.

  “Edwaert, for certain. Jan maybe. Good ears, that one.”

  And Pieter did not need to tell Gerrit: Vim Dijkstra, the man Annatje had killed, had been Jan’s uncle. The brother of Jan’s mother, and that good Dutch mevrouw grieved him deeply still.

  Pieter began urging the sheep up onto the road. “What do you think he will do?” asked Gerrit.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Pieter. “His mother, Rie, was out for blood back then. She only gave up because we all thought Annatje Hoppe was dead and gone. If Rie finds out the girl’s alive, she’ll raise a mob and hang her. That much is certain. It will be rough music all over the estate.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” said Gerrit. “You didn’t recognize her. I didn’t recognize her at first.” And he had never been so close to anyone in his life as he had been to her that year. Never shared and exposed so much of himself. Not to his brother, even before the business with his wife; never to Sophia, who had not been interested in the workings of his mind or his heart; not even to Pieter, the closest friend he had ever had.

  Pieter looked sidelong at Gerrit. “For a man who didn’t recognize his childhood sweetheart, you certainly spent a long time in that carriage with her.”

  “I didn’t know it was her then.” But he knew now that some part of him had recognized something in her. He had explained it to himself as mutual attraction, the magnetic pull of kindred spirits, the earthy tug of lust, but something in him had known.

  “I believe you,” said Pieter, “but most won’t. You can’t have her and keep them.” He nodded at the shadows in the darkness ahead of them where Edwaert and Jan and the rest were doing a remarkably quiet job of rounding up a hundred far-scattered sheep in the dark—probably because they were no strangers to impromptu livestock removals . . .

  “But she’s one of them,” said Gerrit. Although that wasn’t quite right. She had been one of them. The fierce little revolutionary who followed her father everywhere, who rioted right along with the farmers and the Indians and had even marched on the manor and confronted the patroon—before his father called in the army. Only she wasn’t that girl anymore. She had become someone else even more fascinating. A woman with a mastery of the feminine accomplishments his wife had been so devoted to—but who also knew how to load and fire a pistol and was clever enough to start a panicked stampede to aid her escape. “Her father was a tenant,” Gerrit added, less convinced that would make a difference.

  “Her father got their fathers beaten, jailed, even evicted. Bram Hoppe’s revolt ended in disaster. There were dozens of arrests that night. And almost as many evictions. Take up with Bram’s daughter and everyone will think your revolt will follow the same path. Doomed and foredoomed.”

  “I just want to talk to her,” said Gerrit. “To find out why she’s here.” And how Annatje Hoppe had become the equally extraordinary Anna Winters.

  “You were long past talking by the time we got to the Halve Maen,” said Pieter. “Half the valley saw you challenge that mad bastard Tarleton for her. That’s not a scene they’re likely to forget anytime soon. If the tenants find out that she’s Bram Hoppe’s runaway daughter, some of them will take your part, but at least as many will wash their hands of you. There is no earthly way you can raise two hundred men on this estate with that girl at your side, baas.”

  “Then I’ll just have to raise the men before anyone finds out about her.”

  “You mean if Jan didn’t hear you and if he isn’t already on his way to Rie with the news.”

  Gerrit looked down the road. In the darkness, spread out among the sheep, the men were just so many dark shapes: impossible to tell one from another, or if one of them was missing.

  “If Jan knows, there will be no place at Harenwyck that’s safe for the girl. Vim Dijkstra was your father’s favorite schout. Everyone knew he spoke for
the patroon, and he used that to good effect, to make himself big and powerful among the tenants. His widow still has influence. Rie’s not the only one who will want Annatje Hoppe’s blood. Ida Dijkstra uses the pension the patroon awarded her for her loss to make loans to the other tenants. She uses Jan as an enforcer. If you don’t pay, he pays a visit to you with some friends. If Mevrouw Dijkstra learns that Annatje is here, they will come for her.”

  “Then they’ll have to come through me.”

  “They will. Right through you. And you’ll never be patroon.”

  “Vim Dijkstra may have been feared,” said Gerrit, “but he wasn’t loved. Annatje’s father was.” Gerrit had heard him speak, felt the power of his oratory.

  “Bram Hoppe is dead, and his daughter is wanted for murder.”

  “She’s no murderer.” Gerrit knew that in his heart, whether she’d killed a man or not. And Vim Dijkstra had been no saint. The schouts had gotten away with much brutality under the old patroon because a man would rather be beaten than evicted.

  “You weren’t there that night, baas. You don’t know anything. It was chaos on the manor. Your father called the army in to put down the tenants after Bram Hoppe was arrested. There was violence of all kinds that night. And everyone on the estate knew how devoted that girl was to her father. It’s not hard to imagine her shooting down the sheriff who arrested him.”

  It was hard—almost impossible—for Gerrit to imagine it because he knew her, but Pieter was right. On the manor Annatje had been branded a murderess, an unnatural woman, an unfortunate, but perhaps an inevitable product of her leveler father’s revolutionary principles.

  Anna Winters was such a completely different animal. Somehow his wild and freethinking klompen girl had transformed herself into the image of a prim spinster. And become an adept liar. As a girl she had been a creature of pure emotion, her feelings always on the surface, easy to read in her expressive gray eyes. No longer. He had been thoroughly taken in by her in the carriage, had even believed her sad story of the brick house and the unsympathetic brothers.