The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  “Barbara Fenton’s Dutchman probably said the same thing.”

  “Now I’m sorry I told you that one.”

  “I was too, last night. I ran nearly three miles through those woods—all the way to the old manor house—because I was half convinced I was being chased by Barbara Fenton’s ghost.”

  “Did you see her?” asked Gerrit with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Yes.”

  He sobered then. “What did she look like?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m not really even certain I saw anything. A pale figure—that is all I am certain of. Now you must go, Gerrit. Your brother does not strike me as a stupid man. He will realize, at some point quite soon, that he is being led on a wild-goose chase, and then he will come back here with his schouts and his militiamen.”

  “I’m not leaving until you tell me what happened that night, and what became of you afterward.”

  “And I won’t tell you—later—unless you go now.”

  He sighed and popped the last morsel of cookie into his mouth. When he was done with it he said, “If we’d had a few more officers with your resolve in the Continentals we might have kept New York. And unlike General Washington I recognize an impossible position when I’m in it. I’ll go, on the condition that you promise to meet me next week, and tell me everything. And then we will figure out what to do, together.”

  He was not going to leave unless she promised, and if he did not leave soon he was very likely to get himself killed. So she promised.

  Gerrit came around the bed into the firelight and he kissed her again, and this time she could not resist pressing closer to him, mapping the changes that time had wrought in his body with hers. He had been tall at seventeen, and wiry, but now he was fleshed with lean, sculpted muscle. He had washed and changed his clothes, and he smelled of soap and fresh linen. His dark coat was weather-beaten homespun, soft from many launderings, and his breeches were the silky deerskin the Wappinger tanned. He tasted like sugar and cardamom, and his heart was beating fast in his chest, echoing Anna’s.

  Everything she had missed. Everything she had been cheated of. Everything she had told herself she could live without because no man could ever be trusted with the secrets she lived with.

  She pushed him away with regret. Looking up into his face was like looking up into the sun. She had always felt more alive under his gaze.

  She buttoned his coat against the night air. From afar he would be able to pass as a tenant. Up close an observant man—or woman—would know he was not. His bearing was all wrong, even near exhaustion; his fingernails were too clean, and while his hands were callused they were not convincingly weather-beaten. She saw other things as well. “When did you last sleep?”

  “The night before last,” he said.

  She could see as much in the dark circles beneath his eyes, the fine lines at the corners. “What was so important that you could not rest your head for a few hours?”

  “You.”

  Something inside her broke then, like a cord stretched too tight, or a dam holding back too much water, and she was caught fast in the flood. The rising tide threatened to overwhelm her. “Leave now,” she said, backing away from him, “before you can’t leave at all.” And before I drown.

  “Meet me after the cider pressing next week,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “You’ll know where, my klompen girl. And for God’s sake, Annatje, until then, be careful. Stay near the house. And away from the old manor.”

  “And its ghosts?” she asked teasingly.

  “And its ghosts,” he said, with a seriousness that prickled the hairs on her neck. “Yours are not the only secrets on Harenwyck.”

  “Kindly bring my pistol. And my knives,” she said as he slipped out the window.

  He paused there on the sill for a moment. “I am sorry about your things, but I have left you something downstairs in the kitchen that might go a little ways toward making up for them.”

  Then he was gone. For a moment she allowed herself to be carried high by the thrill of their meeting. Then she had to fight back the floodwaters again because it was just as impossible now as it had been then, only now she had the bitter experience to know it. Finally, she took refuge in the practical. She dusted the crumbs Gerrit had left on the coverlet and picked up the cookie plate. That was another skill the Widow had taught her. When passions threaten to overwhelm, focus on the details. And go forward. Always forward.

  She had taken the Widow’s advice when she learned of that lady’s death and focused on work. The school had been whipsawed by the changing fortunes of New York during those months, and it had been easy to put off thinking about the Widow’s demise.

  No longer. She was treading in the Widow’s footsteps, as she had once vowed never to do.

  You stand at a crossroads, Annatje Hoppe. There is no going back. And if you stand still, you will die.

  She had felt dead then, at her very lowest, in those first weeks after she had arrived in New York.

  A woman who has lost everything, as you have, has two choices. She can work to dismantle the system that stole her life, or she can try to fit herself again within the confines of that system, knowing full well that its mechanics—its injustice—might snatch it all away from her once more.

  Anna had chosen to try again. To make herself fit. The Widow had accepted that. She had used her formidable resources to create a new identity, a new life for Anna. She had hired tutors, the discreet sort, to smooth out her English and teach her manners and singing and dancing and needlework, but she had insisted on other lessons too.

  Anna knew that the desperate act of violence she had committed at Harenwyck had been a singular event, not part of her nature. The Widow had believed otherwise.

  I must teach you to fire a pistol and kill neatly with a blade, because I do not know how to teach someone like you to accept injustice lying down.

  The Widow had taught her more than that. She had taught her how to improvise weapons from whatever was closest to hand, how to pick a man’s pocket, how to ride a horse bareback, and how to kill, if absolutely necessary, with her bare hands. But there was no certainty—even with the best technique—and there would be no protection in any of it up against a determined mob.

  Which meant that Anna could no longer put off thinking about the manner of the Widow’s death. The Widow’s man of business, Mr. Sims, had appeared one day on Anna’s doorstep with the deed to a house on Pearl Street that Anna did not want, and news she welcomed even less. The Widow would not be coming back. Ever. There were no details, just that one stark fact.

  Anna had tried to refuse this unwanted inheritance, but the deed was already in her name. Mr. Sims declined to act as her agent in the matter and sell the wretched place, and there was no one else Anna could trust with that damnable, damning piece of property with the body in the basement. When fire had broken out during the American retreat, she had prayed that the house would burn, but fate had not obliged her. Fate never did.

  The only thing that Anna could be certain of was that the Widow had died violently and ended in an unmarked grave. It was a grim prospect, and one she had to confront herself, since she now walked the same path, but at least she found that end preferable to the alternatives: dying in jail or at the end of the state’s noose.

  Forward.

  Anna descended the back stairs to the kitchen. She had not expected anyone to be up, but Mrs. Buys was sitting next to the hearth and she still had one small fire lit, but not for cooking. It was meant to warm the crate sitting on the hearth tiles.

  “I brought the plate down to wash,” said Anna.

  “No need, miss. My girls will take care of it in the morning. And we’ll find you some more clothes. There are some nice enough things at the store in the castle. Not as fine as the gown you arrived in, may it rest in peace, but good enough unt
il the patroon can get you new things up from New York. Now, come have a look at these little ones.”

  Anna approached the hearth. The crate was swathed in soft wool blankets. Inside lay a very large striped gray cat wearing a put-upon expression and nursing three kittens. A fourth slept sprawled atop her: Scrappy.

  Gerrit had promised to go back for her mother and he had. No wonder he had looked tired. Anna could only imagine how difficult it must have been to find the cat and her brood in the woods. “Scrappy seems to have lost her taste for milk,” observed Anna.

  “Because someone spoiled her with fish and turkey, which are definitely not on the cat menu in my kitchen. Hopefully she will develop a taste for mouse,” said Mrs. Buys. “We could use a good mouser about the place. We haven’t had any cats at the house for years. The old patroon—God weigh his heart—hated them. There’s something else for you on the table.”

  Anna brought her candle to the trestle. There, wrapped in another blanket, were her atlas and her book of engravings. There was also a very large box of capers on the table and a significant wedge of Parmesan cheese. With a surprising flush of pleasure, she recalled Gerrit’s description of how his band divided up their plunder into gifts for their families and sweethearts.

  “Would you like me to put these away, Mrs. Buys?” Before the patroon sees them and knows you let his brother in.

  “There isn’t any point, I’m afraid. The patroon is bound to notice the cat. Master Gerrit wants the girls to have two of the kittens. The two little black ones. Twins for twins, he said. His brother will scowl, but he’ll give in.”

  “This feud between them,” said Anna, “it’s about more than the estate, isn’t it?”

  Mrs. Buys looked up. She had changed out of the bed jacket and petticoats she cooked in and was wearing a remodeled banyan. Another castoff from one of the ladies of the house, Anna guessed, just like the gown Mrs. Buys had lent her. “You’re a sharp one, aren’t you?” she said, but there was no disapproval in it.

  She got up and bustled to the great kas opposite the hearth, where the better things were kept. “I won’t have the maids gossiping about the family, but you’re no maid.”

  The older woman opened the paneled doors and brought a china pot down from a high shelf. It too was a castoff from the house, chipped at the spout but too fine, with its painted flowers and gilded handle, to throw away. Anna realized she was being admitted to a very select society—those Mrs. Buys thought were good enough for the Van Haren hand-me-downs.

  “Grietje and Jannetje are good girls. You’ll have seen that for yourself. But they were young when their mother died, and there have been no real ladies in the house since to set an example for them.”

  “They are kind to each other,” said Anna honestly, “and for that I suspect we have your example to thank, Mrs. Buys.”

  The housekeeper smiled, setting two mismatched but lovely Batavia tea dishes down on the table. “We’ve done our best, the maids and I, but we can’t spend all day with them, and I am afraid that they do run a bit wild.”

  “I was told the patroon had a younger sister. Does she not take an interest in the twins?”

  “Elizabeth. You’ll have seen her portrait in the hall. Mistress Elizabeth ran away years ago. Truth to tell, it was all the old patroon’s fault. He had plans for her, you see. Wanted her to marry a man twice her age, a burgher from Albany with money and a seat in the legislature.”

  Mrs. Buys clipped a generous lump of sugar off the cone for their tea. “Old Lord Cornelis and his crony had some scheme about anchoring floating mills at the Narrows and setting up as agent for every manor in the valley.”

  “I take it she did not agree to the marriage.”

  “No.” Mrs. Buys sighed. “And the patroon was never a kindly man when thwarted. He beat her and she ran away, taking her maid with her. The patroon put it about that she eloped to New York, but I worked in the kitchen then, and I can tell you that pretty as she was, she had no suitors, not even secret ones. Servants know such things. Andries searched for her for months, but if he found her, we never knew it, and he didn’t tell his father.

  “Master Gerrit was in Leiden at school. When he came home the patroon tried his scheme again. He couldn’t wed Gerrit to the burgher, of course, but he could marry him to the burgher’s daughter. That poor girl was bought and sold like a sack of meal.”

  “Did she not want to marry Gerrit?” It seemed inconceivable to Anna.

  “No. Sophia wasn’t suited to Master Gerrit at all. She was quiet, shy, and did not enjoy his flights of fancy. She preferred Andries, it was plain to us all, and the feeling was mutual. But the old patroon wanted her money and her father’s mills attached to Harenwyck, so it was the heir or no one for her. As if she had a say.”

  Mrs. Buys looked down into her teacup a moment. “Sophia would have done better to stand up for herself and run off like Elizabeth, I suppose, but she was a timid, biddable creature, and she did what her parents ordered. The only thing she took pleasure in was embroidery, but you won’t find her work here. Gerrit never loved her, miss, but his brother did, and Andries couldn’t bear to disturb anything of hers after she died. It’s all back at the old house, rotting.”

  “I think I may have seen some of Sophia’s embroidery at the old house last night. It was very fine,” Anna lied.

  “Was it? I’ve never had much use for anything beyond a darning stitch myself, but I suppose you are the expert. She certainly spent enough hours at it.”

  Anna was not surprised. She’d plowed her own unhappiness into similar pursuits those first few months after the Widow had found her, and had known her girls to focus deeply on such painstaking crafts when they were miserable over something.

  “Do you think Mr. Van Haren would object to the twins making use of Sophia’s old things?”

  “I’m not sure. Better to ask first. The patroon doesn’t like people in the old house. He’s had offers to rent it, but he doesn’t want tenants there.”

  And he made midnight—no, well past midnight—trips there alone. There was something—or someone—at the old manor that Andries Van Haren wanted kept secret, and that meant that, ghost or no ghost, Anna was definitely going back.

  Twelve

  Anna had no opportunity to return to the old manor the next day. Or the day after that. Andries Van Haren came home late that night in a foul mood that was not improved the next morning when he discovered the cat.

  “I presume my brother brought the beast,” said the patroon, in English, towering over everyone in the kitchen and peering into the crate with a jaundiced eye. “More of his peculiar largesse.”

  The maids and kitchen boys had scattered like so many marbles the moment he strode in. Anna stood her ground beside the box. “The young misses have already named them,” she said, hoping to deflect a little of the patroon’s ire from Mrs. Buys.

  “I suppose that settles it, then.” He did not sound happy about it. “Miss Winters, a moment of your time.”

  It was a command, not a request.

  Anna followed him out the back door of the house where there was a pillared porch fully as grand as the one gracing the façade. It was her first opportunity to see much of the new manor, and what she saw was impressive. There was a garden here, laid out in the English style, a cultivated wilderness with grassy slopes stretching to a grove of trees. In the distance, hazy through the morning mist, stood a garden folly: a two-story teahouse built of red sandstone. The entire effect was such a contrast to the old manor—which had been thoroughly Dutch and practically medieval—that she could almost forget she was at Harenwyck.

  “Mr. Ten Broeck tells me that you hold some very advanced ideas about female education,” he said as they stepped onto the path that led to the folly.

  “I’m not certain that my ideas are advanced as much as certain other people’s are somewhat backward.”

>   He laughed. That surprised her. It was not a smug or haughty sound. It caused her to turn and look at him. He was imposingly tall and erect, but there was a looseness to his posture, a relaxed grace that she had not observed before. Something like that of his father’s in the hall portrait. This was in fact the most free and easy she had seen Andries.

  This made her smile. He smiled back, and that surprised her even more. She had never seen any of the Van Harens—except Gerrit—smile. She suddenly evolved the conceit that the farther Andries Van Haren got from the manor, from the trappings of his patroonship, the less power the role exerted over him.

  “Let us agree to call your ideas sensible, then.”

  “That will suit me fine,” said Anna, “though I caution you as a single man to refrain from calling women sensible. Most do not find it flattering.”

  “But you are not most women, are you?”

  In too many ways. “In the sense that I have no husband and no family of my own, I am not most women.”

  “That was not exactly what I meant.”

  “But they go hand in hand. When you are forced from the path most others take, you are unlikely to arrive at the same destination.” This rang as true to her false tale of disappointed love and spinsterhood as it did her real history.

  “And do you believe that we as a people—Americans, I mean—have been forced from the path? That, following now a separate course, we have a natural right to sever our ties with England?”

  It was an overtly political question, and a refreshing novelty. Parents never asked her about her politics, because they presumed that as a woman she did not have any views of her own. Or at least, none worth airing. They might as well ask a kettle or a fish or a toddling child. But she was not here to talk about her views. She was here to discover the patroon’s—and bend them to her will as the Widow might have done.

  “Does it matter what my political views are, Mr. Van Haren? I teach singing and sewing. Neither subject provides much scope for political philosophy of any stripe.”