The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  “It is not your teaching that concerns me. Let us be frank with each other. We both know you are more than you would seem, that you are in contact with our mutual friends in Congress.”

  She had warned Gerrit that his brother was not stupid. She ought to have taken her own advice more to heart. “I have no friends in Congress,” she said truthfully.

  “But you know people who do,” countered the patroon smoothly. “If you are here for more than the money they have offered you, Miss Winters, if you favor independence, if you truly wish to see America throw off Britain’s shackles, then I would ask you not to include last night’s encounter with my brother in your next letter to whomever pays you. This business with Gerrit is a family matter and will shortly be resolved, but outsiders might not see it that way.”

  Outsiders would likely question the firmness of the patroon’s hold over Harenwyck. “The only one paying me to be here is you.” It was the truth.

  “But you will not deny that we have mutual friends.”

  “I would not call them friends. I won’t deny that I was encouraged to accept Mr. Ten Broeck’s offer, but my reasons for doing so are my own.”

  They had reached the end of the studiously unstudied path and come to the steps of the teahouse. The petite folly was a single room wide and deep, two stories tall, and decidedly Dutch in style, with a tip-tilted gambrel roof that gave it an antique air. Indeed, it might almost have been a monument to the old, abandoned manor.

  The patroon held the door for her. The interior was cool and dark.

  “I fear,” Andries said, opening the shutters and revealing a paneled room painted butter yellow and furnished with cushioned window seats and a table and chairs, “that we have gotten off to a poor start, you and I. That is my fault. I owe you an apology for my behavior when I found you at the old manor. I was brusque. In my defense I shall say only that I do not often come upon damsels in distress wandering the woods at night.”

  He leaned against the window that looked out on the falling terrace. It was the sort of embellished wilderness the English so loved. Green grass rolling away in a cascade of gentle swells, pierced by natural-seeming staircases cut into the hillside.

  “There are those who would say that a man’s behavior in such circumstances—especially when they are not usual for him—is the measure by which his character should be judged.”

  “And what might those same people say when the man being fitted, liked a milliner’s mannequin, for his ‘character’ has just been robbed by his own brother?”

  “I expect they would say that Esau was unworthy of his inheritance—but the elder brother’s sins do not absolve the younger’s. As I recall, Jacob schemed and lied in order to steal Esau’s birthright.”

  “Because he knew he could put the patrimony to better use. What, exactly, do you think my brother is going to do with my box of gold?”

  Nothing. “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “He will give it away. Foei! He likes to play Robin Hood on the Hudson. No doubt it makes him feel better, temporarily, for abandoning his responsibilities, for running away to join the army and leaving his wife, his children, and the estate for others to worry about.”

  Anna did not like the idea of Gerrit as a man who would shirk his duties to wife and daughters. The estate was another matter entirely. “There are those who would not see Harenwyck as a responsibility to be manfully shouldered, but as an injustice to be set aright. The Wappinger and the Stockbridge Indians, for example. They still press claims to own much of your land, do they not? And then there are the squatters from Massachusetts. You had to drive them out with force last time, but they have a point: you have more land than tenants. That seems a grave injustice to a man who has no land at all.

  “And there are those who would argue that the tenants—those who have cleared and planted the valley and built the barns and houses—now own the land they’ve worked by natural right. That it was a wilderness when their ancestors came here, and that they should no longer labor under a yoke their neighbors in other colonies do not bear simply because your great-great-grandfather paid their passages across the Atlantic.”

  It was a bold speech, she knew that, but under the circumstances, Anna saw no point in censoring herself. He knew why she was there, and he knew she was no ordinary schoolteacher. He might be a Rebel, but she was a leveler’s daughter.

  Andries cocked his head. “Is that a night with my brother and his followers talking, or is that the position of our friends in Congress?”

  “It is my personal observation regarding this place, and the Hudson domains in general. Nowhere else in the colonies do so few men own so much land, or is so much wealth concentrated in the hands of such a tiny number of families. Your brother envisions a more free and equal valley.” So had her father, of course, and he was dead.

  “Yes, under my brother the tenants would find themselves more free to starve. His largesse with my gold makes him popular with the farmers, who think he is just returning their money to them from the greedy clutches of the landlord. It is always the same. Today they will spend his gold, and tomorrow they will have nothing to show for it.”

  “Certainly they will not have a great estate, like this one,” she said.

  “They do not live in my house, no, but its construction employed hundreds of tenants after the harvest was in, and for far more than the service days required of them. It lined their pockets in the winters when there was no other work to be had. And barely a tenth of the manor’s profits end up in my coffers.”

  “Then where does the rest go?”

  “Back into Harenwyck. Do you have much experience with farming, Miss Winters?”

  More than you. “No.” She had sown corn and harvested it, threshed wheat and milked cows and churned butter and carded flax until every muscle in her body ached. And, as often as not, she had still gone hungry to bed.

  “It is a cash-poor business. My tenants pay me their rent largely in kind: in butter and eggs and flax. As part of their lease agreement, they must sell me their crops for whatever value I deem fair. In practice, if I do not offer them a price they like, they sell their corn under the table elsewhere.”

  “But you can take them to court if they do that. Or threaten to.”

  “Certainly that was my father’s approach, but it is not mine. The manors do not have to be serfdoms. Once, they held out the promise of a new life. A man who could not afford to buy land could lease it and prosper here.”

  If he was willing to tie himself, his children, and his children’s children to that land. Perhaps.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “but the farms on the road did not look so very prosperous to me.” Burned out and boarded up. Lives shattered, as hers had been.

  “You see the crux of the problem. To be cash poor during peace is an inconvenience. To be cash poor during war is disaster. Without money, I cannot expand my militia. I cannot buy the men that I do have sufficient powder and shot. I cannot fulfill the duties of the patroon and defend the families under my protection or their property from the Skinners and Cowboys, or from our neighbors in Massachusetts who are inclined to take by force what they have been unable to secure by law.”

  “Your situation probably suits General Clinton very nicely,” said Anna. “He turns a blind eye while his ‘foragers’ ravage your farms, then demands your loyalty in exchange for his protection.”

  “He is playing with fire,” said the patroon. “Neither Clinton nor the Americans truly understand the manors. Both sides want Harenwyck, in particular, because they both need control of the narrows at Harenhoeck. That means being able to march troops through the estate, transport material over land to keep the river secure. Neither of them will be able to do that if the tenants are in full revolt.”

  “Like they were in ’sixty-five,” she said, “when there was no war.”

  “Again you
are remarkably well-informed, Miss Winters.”

  Andries had been standing in the window this whole time, the farthest point possible from the door and from Anna. She had a suspicion about his behavior, and she set out to test it. Anna walked the perimeter of the room, closing the distance between them. “The trouble in the valley, then, was no secret,” she said. And of course she had lived it.

  The patroon moved in time with her—like opposing figures in a clockwork—to maintain the distance between them. “The trouble in the valley, then,” he said, stepping to the next window, “was my late father. He thought that the patroonship existed at his will and pleasure, to serve him, but really, it is the other way around. The patroonships were granted to encourage settlement, to build a Dutch colony. Most of them failed early on because their proprietors failed to see that the essential element is not the land, it is the tenantry. My father’s greatest mistake was believing that the patroon’s job is to manage an estate.”

  “Isn’t it?” She moved once more, and he did likewise, keeping the table, the chairs, and the floorcloth between them. She suppressed a sudden urge to vault over the furniture, upset his careful calculations of distance and reserve, and shatter his cold composure.

  “No. A patroon’s occupation is to manage people. It is leadership. The first patroon led five hundred souls across the Atlantic and into a new world and new lives. I want to do the same for the two thousand tenants we have now. But I cannot do it without money. Without hard coin, I cannot pay the tenants for the improvement projects I’ve in mind. Projects that could put cash into their pockets today and buy them richer futures tomorrow. Better, faster roads to get their goods to market. A ferry that will take them not just across the river, but all the way to New York and back. They make do with a part-time midwife and a ‘wisewoman’ in the woods, but they should have a doctor, paid for from rent the same way that the reverend is, and a school, funded likewise, for their children.”

  Anna had thought she had seen and heard too much in her young life to be shocked by anything, but the idea of a school on the manor for tenant children beggared the imagination. She could not help but wonder what her life would have been like if such a thing had been possible when she was a child. Cornelis Van Haren would never have countenanced it, of course. Would never even have considered it.

  “And when those children decide they do not want to be farmers? Or they save enough money to buy their own land? What will you do then?” she asked.

  “They can sell their leases to newcomers, or back to me.”

  “Or buy their land outright?”

  “That would be neither to their benefit nor to the estate’s. There are advantages to size, Smith’s ‘economies of scale.’ The estate must remain intact—they can buy land elsewhere, if they must.”

  He paused a moment, surveying the prospect from the window almost wistfully. “It is a peculiarly American mania, this thirst to own land. Most men would be better off as renters. Do you have any idea how many smallholdings fail every year? How deeply most farmers are in debt? The rent system transfers all the risk from the farmer to the landlord, to the patroon. A man can own nothing, not even a change of clothes, and if he signs a lease here, he can be sowing a field tomorrow. A smallholder is at the mercy of the market. If he reaches New York and discovers there is a glut of flax, he must take whatever price is being offered. He can go bankrupt overnight. An estate the size of Harenwyck, though, sets the price in the market.”

  “But with the risk comes a disproportionately greater share of the rewards,” said Anna. “You take a tithe of their crop when they sell it to you, as a fee for bringing it to market. You take a tithe of their wheat and their corn when they bring it to your mill, for the service of grinding it, and they are not permitted to take it elsewhere. You charge twice or more what every necessity of life costs in New York, and you mandate that they must buy every necessity of life from you.”

  “But, Miss Winters, I bought the grindstone, and I pay the miller. I pay to transport all those necessities from New York, and the roads are dangerous, as you have seen firsthand. Yes, there is profit, as well as risk and responsibility, in my vocation, in leading people. How can it be otherwise?”

  He paused again, seemed to suppress a sigh. “I shall not ask you to lie to your friends in Congress, Miss Winters. I ask only that you delay a few days in reporting the events of your arrival here.”

  She had not decided what she would communicate to Kate Grey, so she changed the subject.

  “I am given to understand that you import things from New York besides necessities,” she said. “Such as company.” It was an entirely unsuitable subject for a gentlewoman to discuss with her employer, but they had been speaking as equals thus far, and if she was going to sleep under his roof she felt the matter should be raised. Still, she had not realized quite how much the idea annoyed her until now, and she did not like the feeling. Did not like caring.

  “And which of your sources told you that?”

  “Your brother leapt to a rather unflattering conclusion about the nature of my engagement at Harenwyck. He implied that you often bring prostitutes to the manor.”

  “Discretion has never been one of Gerrit’s gifts,” said the patroon flatly.

  “So you don’t deny it.”

  “Why should I? I am not married, Miss Winters. I betray no one by paying for companionship.”

  “You are the patroon. One might think it would be unnecessary for you to pay for such a thing.”

  “You mean because there is no shortage of women who would like to be the next lady of Harenwyck? The sort of woman desirous of marrying a patroon does not tend to be particularly interested in the man behind the title. Or were you instead suggesting that I exercise droit du seigneur upon the pretty maids who work at the manor house? That was indeed my late father’s habit, but it is not mine. It may seem to you eccentric in a patroon, but I prefer my partners willing. The idea of cornering poor Tryntje while she busies herself making up the beds does not appeal at all. My father liked to pretend that the maids appreciated his attentions, that it was all a little game they played, to their mutual enjoyment. But he knew well enough their smiles were feigned, just as they knew that if they refused him, their positions in the household would be forfeit, and their families might even be evicted. The choice between submitting to your employer’s advances and starving is no choice at all.”

  She knew that he spoke the truth about Cornelis Van Haren. She had been warned as young as twelve years old to stay away from the manor house and never to be alone with the old patroon. The tenants had all known what he was like. She had not considered that his family might know as well—nor how they would feel about it if they did. Andries Van Haren’s empathy for the women in his employ seemed at odds with the aloofness he had displayed toward her, the careful distance he was keeping between them even now.

  “The women you procure from New York,” she said, “may have passing little choice as well. Few select that life when there is any other alternative. And some are forced into it with threats and violence.”

  “Believe it or not, Miss Winters, I do not have Mr. Ten Broeck out scouring the Holy Ground for my night’s entertainment. The ladies who visit Harenwyck are very well established in their profession, and are very well paid for their ‘trouble.’”

  “Now, perhaps,” said Anna. “But the leap—or fall—from daughter or wife to prostitute is seldom a graceful one, and the landing is never soft. Some probably started out just like the maids your father cornered. Is there really such a great difference, Mr. Van Haren, in being the first or the hundredth man in line?”

  “I suppose,” said the patroon, with surprising candor, “the difference to me is that I did not push them when they fell. They may have few choices, but unlike the maids they can refuse me without fear of retribution. It is an honest bargain: my money for their . . . time . . . and no one
is hurt, or deceived. That is more than I can say for my brother’s style. He used to seduce our tenants’ prettier daughters with scraps from the patroon’s table.”

  She felt all the color drain from her face.

  “You’ve no need to fear further encounters with my brother here,” Andries said, misunderstanding her distress entirely. “I have set a strong guard. He won’t get near the house again. The militia, under strength as it is, can at least protect the grounds and buildings. Indeed, if you were an ordinary servant, I would say that you have nothing to fear at all here at Harenwyck. I do not molest my staff and have never taken liberties with any of my dependents here on the estate. But then you are not an ordinary servant, are you?”

  He took a step toward her, the first all day, and her mouth went dry. She had been so blind. Now she understood their dance, his careful distance, his impersonal touch last night. This was not detachment, not revulsion, it was appetite under tight rein, and just now, kept barely in check.

  “I try to be a good man, or at least a better one than my father,” said Andries Van Haren, who was not cold at all. “But I am no saint, Miss Winters. And I doubt you are one either. I cannot help but ask myself how much the Rebels are paying you, and just how far they—and you—are willing to go to secure Harenwyck.”

  He took another step forward. Her heart pounded in her chest. Fear or desire, she could not have said. It struck her all at once like a thunderclap, an awakening as unwelcome as it was startling. Seeing Gerrit last night had loosed something in her, something pent up tight inside. For nearly a decade she had hidden in the feminine world of the school, a secular cloister where passion was something that happened to other people. Now she was alone with a man who, it seemed clear, fought daily to master his.

  He closed the distance between them and caged her in the window embrasure with his well-made body. “I wonder,” he said, brushing her cheek with the pad of his thumb, “whether I’m meant to seduce you, or you’re meant to reform me. Shall we find out?”