The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  “There was trouble on the road,” she said at last. “We were held up by a highwayman. I believe Mr. Ten Broeck and your driver are to be released at dawn.” The patroon’s expression was unreadable in the half-lit room. “I escaped,” she added. And then, because it would be strange if she did not say it: “The bandits were led by your brother.”

  He took another step forward. His face was still shrouded in shadow, but a band of light had fallen across his pale blue eyes and she saw them turn very, very cold.

  “You were supposed to have an escort,” he said.

  “We did. They left us at the gates to Harenwyck.” And they sold you out.

  She was supposed to be at Harenwyck on behalf of the Americans. Kate Grey had wanted her to bring Andries decisively into the Rebel fold. There was probably no better way to accomplish this end than to tell him his older brother was plotting against him with the British.

  She said nothing.

  “Come,” he said. “We must get you to the manor and organize a party to search for Mr. Ten Broeck. Do you feel well enough to ride? I could send for the chaise, but I dislike the idea of leaving you here alone.”

  She did not much fancy the idea of sharing a mount with the patroon of Harenwyck—he was as cold and aloof as she remembered and possibly as much a snob as his father—but neither did she want to spend another minute in that house alone. “I will ride.”

  She moved to smooth her skirts and realized that the warm candle was still in her hand. She set it down beside the doed koecks. That’s when it occurred to her that these were his father’s funerary keepsakes.

  Good manners demanded some acknowledgment of that. In this case good manners demanded a bold-faced lie. “I am very sorry for your loss,” she said.

  He seemed to notice the cakes for the first time. “A quaint custom,” he said. “But the cook should not have baked them. I have never seen so many left over after a funeral. My predecessor was not much loved on the estate, and it seems that not even his hungriest tenants were willing to eat free bread in his memory.”

  Neither was Anna. She was ravenous now. Dawn could not be far off and she had not eaten anything since breakfast—but she was certain she would not have been able to choke down even one of the patroon’s cakes.

  She followed Andries Van Haren out of the desolate house and down the porch. He did not bother to lock the door behind him. Anna wondered if that was because there was nothing of value to him in the house—or because he knew that no Harenwyck tenant would dare vandalize the patroon’s property.

  At the bottom of the steps he had a fine brown mare tied to the post. She had been so engrossed in exploring the house she had not heard the approach of hooves. Andries gave Anna a leg up and as soon as she settled into the saddle exhaustion struck her. The chaise sounded like heaven, but she would not have remained in that house by herself for all the carriages in the world.

  Andries slung himself into the saddle behind her, leaving as much distance between their bodies as was possible on a shared mount. She tried to recall if she had ever seen his father as much as shake hands with a tenant. She did not think so. Evidently Andries had inherited the old patroon’s distaste for the people who worked his lands and put food on his table.

  They set off up the road that used to lead from the house to the old castle and the church, and Anna could see that it was even more overgrown than the way she had come. The wheel tracks were full of wildflowers. No cart or carriage had come this way for years. That made the patroon’s presence in such an abandoned place in the middle of the night very odd indeed. The strangeness of it bothered her. He had not been out looking for her. He had not even been aware his carriage had been stolen. And he had approached the house so quietly that she had not heard him until he was inside. He must have had some other purpose in the woods.

  “What were you doing here so late, my lord?”

  “My father styled himself lord of the manor, but it is not a tradition I wish to maintain. ‘Mr. Van Haren’ will do.”

  “What were you doing here, Mr. Van Haren?”

  “I was coming home late and saw your light.”

  “I did not have a light.” But someone had. Someone who had been sitting at that table with the doed koecks.

  “Then it must have been a trick of the moon.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Trespassers, then.”

  He did not seem particularly concerned or even interested in the fact that someone else had been in his house.

  “Your brother told me there was a witch in the woods.” She felt like a fool as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

  “There is a cunning woman who lives in the woods, but she is no harm to anyone.”

  “Not her. The English witch in the velvet gown. The one who murdered the regicides.”

  “Good God. Gerrit. Our nurse told us all that one when we were children, and my sister would not sleep for a week. I haven’t thought of it in years. Do not, I pray you, share that story with my nieces.”

  Her hackles rose. “I would never frighten my students like that.”

  The patroon sighed. “You have not met Grietje and Jannetje. They do not frighten easily. More likely, if you told them there was a witch in the woods, they would set out to bag her, and soon we would have old ladies caught in snares from here to Rensselaer’s place. I do hope that Mr. Ten Broeck was candid with you about the girls. They are hardly delicate young misses. Nothing like their mother, either of them. They do not even have her coloring. My nieces are true Van Harens: their father’s daughters.”

  It took her a moment to grasp his meaning. Their father’s daughters. Kate Grey had told her that they were the children of Elizabeth Van Haren, Andries’ runaway sister, but if their mother was not a Van Haren . . .

  “They are Gerrit’s daughters?”

  “You are on a first-name basis with my brother. What an exciting evening you must have had. You wouldn’t happen to recall where he was when you saw him last?”

  “I’m not certain,” she lied. “I don’t really know the area.”

  “Then you were remarkably lucky to find your way to the old manor.”

  “Yes. Very lucky,” she said.

  For years she had wondered if those afternoons behind the church had meant the same thing to Gerrit that they had meant to her. She had known how unlikely that was. She had convinced herself that it did not matter, that it was only natural that what they had shared should mean more to her. He was the heir to a fortune—destined to lead a richer life than hers. But some part of her, inherited from her dreamer of a father, had held on to a secret hope that she had not been one among many—that she had been special. Earlier, in the carriage, when he had flirted with her, she had hoped the same thing: that it was more than the expression of a physical attraction, that some part of him recognized her. She was such a fool.

  Gerrit was married.

  • • •

  Gerrit was bone tired by the time he reached the old blockhouse. They were straggling in, his little band of sheep rustlers, some leading their horses and carrying recalcitrant lambs over their shoulders. Dawn was not far off and everything was wet with dew, including the hundred sheep they had just herded up the hill. Even better, he could smell rain in the air. It smelled nicer than damp sheep.

  The blockhouse would be warm and dry. He wished he could stay. Gerrit had found the abandoned defense work when he was a boy and used to wander the woods for hours on his own. His father hadn’t known it was up there, nor, when Gerrit had told him about the place, had the old man cared. The Indians had long since stopped attacking Harenwyck with war cries and tomahawks. They preferred now to battle the patroons in court, suing to get their land back, even crossing the ocean to petition King George.

  Long ago all this land had belonged to others, and once its theft was fresh. And once upon a time th
e blockhouse on the hill had been all that stood between the tenants and the just retribution of the dispossessed. The tower had been built in the Dutch manner out of local stone with a tiled roof—all but impossible to burn—and entirely forgotten by the time Gerrit was a boy. The terrain surrounding it was too rocky and steep to plant, and the trees that some early tenants had cleared to create a defensible line around the tower were beginning to grow back, but there was enough room for Edwaert’s sheep to graze for a little while.

  Gerrit led his horse inside the blockhouse, where most of the men were already rubbing down their mounts. Pieter came to take his saddle.

  “Please tell me we have my brother’s wine upstairs,” said Gerrit.

  “The whole case,” said Pieter. “Along with the almonds. There was a box on top of the carriage. And there’s a cask of little green things. Like raisins, but salty.” He made a wry face.

  “Those would be capers,” said Gerrit. He doubted they would prove very popular in the blockhouse. “All I want is a bottle of the wine and an empty basket. I’ll be back before noon.”

  “You’ve been up for twenty-four hours, baas. A man goes too long without sleep, he gets careless, and you can’t afford to be that now. Your brother can see you hang for what we did tonight.”

  “Unfortunately this errand can’t wait.”

  Pieter looked skeptical but kept his peace, disappearing up the hatch to the room above where the men were already settling in to dicker over their spoils. There would likely be nothing left except the capers by the time Gerrit got back, but he realized then that there was nothing he truly wanted from the carriage in any case—except Annatje Hoppe.

  Gerrit had promised her that he would go back and find the kitten’s mother. He had promised her other things too, lying in the hayloft, and out behind the church staring up at the stars. She had not believed him then, and perhaps youth excused such oaths, but he did not excuse himself. Not with all that had come after. He’d nearly forgotten about her in Leiden, just as she had told him he would, and when he came back there was another family living in the Hoppe cottage. Bram Hoppe was dead, and his runaway daughter was wanted for murder and believed to have killed herself.

  Pieter, of course, was right about the men. Gerrit risked losing them—he risked losing Harenwyck itself—if his band of displaced, evicted men found out he’d recognized and concealed her. But he risked losing respect for himself if he failed her now as he had failed her when he was seventeen.

  And she had risked herself tonight trying to protect him. He winced now at how cruel he had been to her at the Halve Maen after she tried to warn him about André. A prim schoolteacher calling him naive had been an insult to his manhood. Annatje Hoppe warning him about the fate of revolutionaries . . . he had been Agamemnon ignoring Cassandra.

  He owed her an apology. He owed her more than that. And he wanted to know where she had been all this time, and why in God’s name she had come back to Harenwyck . . . and if kissing her was as thrilling as it had been when he was seventeen. Because nothing had ever been so thrilling since.

  Pieter was right about the danger—both to his ambition to reclaim Harenwyck and to Annatje herself—but Gerrit could not just walk away from her. He would talk to Jan. The man had not known Annatje. And even if he had been devoted to his uncle—or moved by his aunt’s and mother’s grief—he must have known that Vim Dijkstra had been a violent bully on behalf of the old patroon. Gerrit would make Jan see that whatever had really taken place that night—and they had only ever known half the story, because Annatje had disappeared—his own father, the late patroon, was the one at fault. That the girl was not a cold-blooded murderess.

  He would make Jan understand.

  By the time Pieter returned with a basket and a bottle, Gerrit was the only one left downstairs.

  Pieter handed him the basket. “The girl’s not going to fit inside.”

  “The basket isn’t for the girl.”

  “Whatever you say, baas.”

  Pieter had gone upstairs wearing one pistol. He had come back down with three. “We’re after a cat, Pieter, not a lion. And it will be morning before my brother knows his carriage is missing.”

  “It’s not your brother I’m worried about, baas. I took a head count when I went upstairs.”

  Gerrit knew what he was going to say before he said it. There was only one man whose absence mattered after Gerrit’s indiscretion at the farm.

  “Everyone came back from Edwaert’s. Everyone except Jan.”

  Ten

  Dawn was coloring the sky by the time Anna and Andries Van Haren reached the new house. She had nodded off once in his arms, and the young patroon had shaken her ungently awake, evidently unwilling to have an unconscious woman drool on his shoulder.

  The new house was far grander than Mr. Ten Broeck had let on. He had told her it was modern and well lit, with good windows. It was much more than that. It was the largest house Anna had ever seen, built of red sandstone, trimmed in sparkling granite, four stories tall and nine windows across with a pillared portico entrance atop a granite stair and two massive wings projecting out the back.

  The patroon slid from his horse and helped Anna down. He took her basket first, quite sensibly, as though assisting women sodden with dew who had spent the night in the woods was an expected—if somewhat distasteful—chore, and then helped her to the ground with the same impersonal touch he had used all night. The short grass was almost as wet as her skirts.

  He made no effort to conceal the fact that he was trying to have as little physical contact with her as possible. Gerrit had implied that his brother brought courtesans from New York. Anna wondered if he displayed the same disdain for common people with them. If so, she hoped they charged him double.

  No one came to take his horse, which she found odd. No one knows he was out, Angela Ferrers would have surmised. Just at that moment, though, Anna did not care whether Andries Van Haren had been communing with nature in the woods or with King George at Buckingham House. She wanted a meal and washing water and a bed.

  A plaintive mew reminded her that Scrappy also had wants.

  “Your basket appears to have become upset with you,” said the patroon.

  “That would be my kitten. She needs a sandbox, rather urgently, I suspect.” Anna was not actually certain that Scrappy knew how to use a sandbox, but that doubt was unlikely to make the kitten a welcome guest in the patroon’s home.

  He made no comment about the kitten.

  The patroon tied his horse to the railings and knocked on the kitchen door below the granite stairs. It did not open at once, but finally a bleary-eyed kitchen boy in wool socks and a long shirt appeared, and then things moved almost too quickly for Anna to keep track.

  The boy was told to rouse the housekeeper, the groom, and the steward, in that order. The housekeeper, who was also, apparently, the head cook, appeared in her bedgown and received her instructions. Miss Winters was to have a hot meal, washing water, a change of clothes, and a bed made up. And a sandbox for her cat. This necessitated two maids being sent for, who goggled at Anna’s state and asked, in Dutch, if the witch in the woods had gotten her.

  The patroon’s expression quieted them immediately, but their reaction still sent a chill down Anna’s spine. She forced herself to stare quizzically at them as though she did not understand the language and let the cook, Mrs. Buys, shush them back to their work. Mrs. Buys had very good English, and spoke to Anna in the kind of running patter that soothed children and small animals and—just at that moment—exhausted schoolteachers.

  “We’ll have your breakfast up in a jiffy. My girls bank a good fire, and the coals are always hot and ready to go of a morning.” She proved her point by digging a scoop of glowing embers out of the pile against the fireback and layering them first with fatwood kindling and then with a small split log. It was hot enough to cook in less than
ten minutes, and the chimneys were so new and so modern that there was hardly any smoke. The kitchen began to fill with delicious smells as the rest of the fires were lit.

  The meal set before Anna was fit for the upstairs table, and Anna’s fears that she would be treated as a servant here evaporated. There was half a chicken swimming in butter with parsley, a bowl of green peas dotted with bacon and crunchy koolsla with poppy seeds. It was better food and more of it than she had ever sat down to in her years living on the patroonship, but it was not what she wanted.

  A fine English lady would not ask for such a thing, but at that moment, after all she had been through, Anna did not care. “May I have some of the porridge, please?” It was bubbling in a big pot hanging on a crane over the fire, and the aroma of sweet corn and butter and brown sugar made her mouth water.

  Mrs. Buys did not seem to know that genteel schoolteachers should not eat porridge. “I prefer it myself, even though the patroon doesn’t stint on meat for his servants’ meals.” She smiled and bustled and filled a porringer for Anna, and then one for herself. She shaved a tablespoon of extra sugar off the cone for each one, and Anna had to stop herself from digging in before Mrs. Buys was done stirring.

  It was the best thing Anna had ever tasted.

  Scrappy did not know what to make of her sandbox, and, watching her throw sand all over the immaculate kitchen floor, Anna’s heart sank. Mrs. Buys just tutted and sent the maids for another scoop from the sandpit, watching Scrappy roll around in the material she was supposed to use to answer the call of nature.

  “She doesn’t like being able to dig down to the bottom of the box,” explained Mrs. Buys. “Did you bring her all the way from New York?”