The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  He bent to kiss her.

  The Widow would have tilted her head back and tasted his mouth and conquered by yielding, or seeming to yield. She would have effortlessly transmuted this man’s desire for her into the outcome she desired. She would have delivered Harenwyck to the Rebels the same way that she had delivered Trenton to Washington.

  Here was more than carnal temptation. Here was the power to shape events, to alter nations, to topple kings. Anna had never doubted that the Widow had been motivated by a deeply held set of beliefs, but she had always wondered what moved men like André to play such dangerous games.

  Here at last was the answer: power. It was a heady feeling, difficult to distinguish from—perhaps not unmixed with—arousal.

  Anna sidestepped the patroon and edged toward the door. “I have lessons to organize, Mr. Van Haren.”

  He didn’t move a muscle, but his eyes swept her from head to toe and it was all she could do not to shrink under his scrutiny. Finally he said quietly, “Have Mr. Ten Broeck send to New York for what you need. And don’t let Hubble and Bubble lead you into too much mischief.”

  Now she did curtsy. Or at least she picked up her skirts and inclined her head just the slightest bit, because that abbreviated gesture helped put their interaction firmly back in the realm of the formal. It allowed her to glide from the room the way she taught her girls to and make a graceful exit.

  As soon as she was outside, she lifted her skirts again and ran, whether from the patroon or the shade of Angela Ferrers she could not have said.

  Thirteen

  Anna bypassed the meandering garden path and crossed directly over the lawn back to the house, hitching Mrs. Buys’ petticoats up so that she did not ruin the hems. By the time she had returned, Grietje and Jannetje were nowhere to be found, so Anna went to her room and began her list for Mr. Ten Broeck.

  It was not short. She had literally nothing but the clothes on her back. She needed petticoats, chemises, jackets, gowns, stockings, and presentable shoes. Gerrit had returned her books but not her paints or charcoals—or her embroidery thread, which had presumably met a bad end on the carriage floor. The linen canvas for the twins’ projects could come from Harenwyck—there would doubtless be some in the store at the castle—but the embroidery thread, the fine silk and wool in rich colors, would have to come from New York, and it would be several days at the very least before it arrived. Stitchery would have to wait. Likewise painting.

  Drawing might hold more promise if the store had any paper. She hoped that it did. If she could persuade Mrs. Buys to lend them a pot she could show the twins how to make their own charcoal.

  Anna went in search of Mr. Ten Broeck. When she had been a girl the estate manager had administered the patroonship from an office in the old castle. She stopped by the kitchens to ask Mrs. Buys the way, even though she had her bearings now and had traveled it many times, lest she appear to know more about Harenwyck than she ought. Anna did not think Gerrit would have vouchsafed her real identity to the housekeeper, but the woman was clearly observant. If Anna was not careful, Mrs. Buys would realize that she was no stranger to the manor.

  She found the cook in the kitchen supervising two maids cutting and cleaning their way through six bushels of pumpkins. The baskets were stacked on the floor, filled with their bright orange bounty, a still life waiting for the artist’s brush. Or hers, if she could find some paint.

  Mrs. Buys gave Anna excellent detailed directions—and a shopping list of her own.

  “Coffee, if they have any, which I fear they won’t. Sugar, whatever the price. Even if Mr. Ten Broeck refuses and tells you that the tenants will riot if he runs out. New York, we hear, is short on fresh meat and butter and eggs. But here in the valley, we are all out of everything else. No tea, no chocolate, no coffee, no sugar. Precious little salt. And that, in a few months, will mean no hams.”

  Anna assured Mrs. Buys that she would not come back empty-handed and took the mill path to the castle. The fort, or kasteel, as people called it, was as old as Harenwyck and looked even older. Like the Halve Maen it had been built from local stone. It dated from the early years of settlement, when the patroon did not live on the manor at all, but in a grand house in New York, and only visited Harenwyck from time to time to surprise his overseer and audit the account books.

  The walls were three feet thick with nothing but slender arrow slits to pierce the gloom of the first two stories. The windows on the upper two floors, where the estate manager had his office and the store was housed, had been added later. Anna remembered how dark and cool it had been inside on summer days, a relief from the sticky heat of the fields and forest.

  As castles went, though, it had always been a disappointment to her, especially after reading The Castle of Otranto. Harenwyck’s stone fort had always been too prosaic to be romantic—although as Mrs. Buys told it, the late patroon’s schemes to aggrandize his legacy sounded just as dark and destructive as Manfred’s.

  Anna found Mr. Ten Broeck in a storeroom counting his diminishing supply of sugar with the assistance of a slender young black man who was almost certainly a slave. The sight took her aback and disappointed her. She liked Mr. Ten Broeck, but her mother had been raised a Quaker and abhorred slavery. Her father had refused to defend tenants who owned slaves. In New York Anna did her best to follow her parents’ example. She did not do business with tradesmen who owned human chattel, but there was no avoiding the scourge of slavery. She could not refuse students from slaveholding families, or she would end up with no students at all.

  “I am sorry to interrupt.” She handed over Mrs. Buys’ list and her own.

  Mr. Ten Broeck looked tired and his smile did not reach his eyes, but he dismissed his slave and took Anna’s lists and read down them, nodding and murmuring, “Yes. We have that. Hmm. No. Yes. Possibly.”

  At last he looked up, removed his spectacles, and said, “Come, come,” and led Anna up to the store.

  In spite of Mrs. Buys’ gloomy predictions, and in light of the Cowboys and Skinners wreaking havoc on the farms along the borders, she had not fully expected this. The main room of the shop was dangerously depleted of stock, nearly empty in fact. Where there should have been stacks of rakes, hoes, blades, pots, pans, and iron spiders, there were instead a few dusty pieces of equipment in odd sizes. The ones seldom used or needed. At this time of year sacking should have been stacked to the ceiling and bales of cord should have crowded the windows, but there was almost nothing for the patroon or his tenants to pack and tie their crops with. And empty shelves led to riots.

  “Ours was not the first vehicle that the patroon’s brother and his men waylaid,” said Mr. Ten Broeck with a candor born of necessity. There was no hiding the extent of the problem. It was not just farm implements and equipment that were in short supply, it was the everyday luxuries of which the Dutch were so fond: the spices they baked with; the coffee they brewed, sweet and hot; the chocolate they drank in the morning.

  Without further comment, Ten Broeck left her with a large, matronly woman who had charge of the store, returning to his office and work.

  There was paper at least, which was a great relief. She could take the girls into the woods to hunt for wild vines to make charcoal. There was also stiff paperboard she could use to make stencils for theorem drawing on days when the weather was too poor to venture out.

  The stockings available in the store were coarse wool, and Anna would have preferred none at all over the scratchy hose, but the woman who kept the store held up a finger to signal one moment and disappeared into a smaller room beyond. When she returned she had a box of fine silk stockings with clocking.

  “If we leave them out they get snagged,” she said in pleasantly accented English, unrolling the delicate silk carefully. “Farming hands aren’t soft hands,” she explained. “Mostly they’re bought for weddings.”

  Anna knew, but she couldn’t say t
hat. Her parents, like most tenants, had each owned one good set of clothing. Her mother wore the same gown in which she had been married to church on Sundays. She always took it off as soon as they got home and folded it carefully in the locked chest where all their best things were kept. It had looked almost as fresh fifteen years on—when she ran off with her tin peddler—as it had the day she wedded Bram Hoppe.

  Her father’s suit had not been quite as well preserved. He had long since stopped going to church on Sundays, because he saw the reverend as little more than a mouthpiece of the patroon, but he had worn his wedding suit to meetings with the Wappinger and the Stockbridge Indians when they issued their own leases to Harenwyck land, as they steadfastly claimed they had a legal right to do since the Dutch had never paid them for it. And Bram wore it every time he stood up before the patroon on the minor charges the schouts harassed him with: most often public drunkenness or creating a disturbance. He wore it when he assembled the tenants to talk sedition, and he had worn it on the night the bailiffs arrested him one final time. He had worn it too in jail, and he had died in it.

  It seemed that nowhere at Harenwyck could Anna escape the past. The store held other memories as well. As a child she had often accompanied her mother shopping for staples. There was never any money for luxuries like the bright silk ribbons that hung from spools on the wall or the good cloth shoes imported from London that the prosperous tenants sometimes bought. And they would never have been able to afford the ready-made silk petticoats in delicate shades of pink, lilac, and green that Anna selected today, or these gaily colored caraco jackets from Amsterdam in cotton sateen. Anna chose two and picked out several changes of lacing ribbons to match. She also picked out five chemises so she could have a fresh one every day without imposing too greatly on the laundress. And she selected a soft pair of cotton jumps to wear instead of her stays when she took the girls out looking for vines in the woods.

  She justified the purchases to herself because even if she wrote to Mrs. Peterson today, her own clothes would not arrive for at least a week.

  It was not the first time, of course, that she had been forced to acquire an entirely new wardrobe. She had arrived in New York after her desperate flight from Harenwyck with only the clothes on her back. For a week until the Widow arrived she had worn those same clothes, and they had practically been rags by the time Angela Ferrers came to her rescue.

  The Widow had outfitted Anna for her new life with clothes suitable for a fashionable young spinster. They had been far more elegant than anything she had ever owned and the choosing of them had been an education in itself. Anna had never worn silk, had never owned a set of stays fitted just for her, had not known how to tell good cut from bad. She had always worn her mother’s hand-me-downs and that Quaker lady had not seen the point in altering garments to fit. The Widow had not just taught her how clothes ought to lie on her body, but she had explained why some things flattered more than others, tutored her in how to choose color, pattern, and shape to enhance her best features and disguise or minimize any flaws. It was a set of skills she taught her own students, and because of it they were widely agreed to be the best turned out young women in New York.

  Anna employed all her hard-learned acumen at the castle store to assemble a wardrobe that would both suffice and flatter until her own things arrived. She only wished that there were leather shoes available for walking about outside the manor house. She had destroyed her own on her flight from the farm, and the delicate silk ones on offer would be ruined in a single rainstorm. But when she asked the storekeeper for a pair she was advised to get klompen at the cider pressing.

  “There’s an old man who makes them. He sets up near the bonfire, and he’ll carve them to fit your feet in a quarter of an hour. Better than leather shoes in the rain and muck.”

  Anna had sworn she would never wear klompen again, but she knew from experience that the woman was right. She’d envied the farmwives she had seen walking on her way to the castle—they’d looked far more comfortable in their clogs than she had felt in her worn-out shoes.

  On her way out Anna stopped by Ten Broeck’s office to thank him for the clothes and paper and collect Mrs. Buys’ sugar and coffee. “How soon do you think we can expect a box of paints and embroidery floss from New York?” she asked. “I doubt the Skinners or Cowboys have much use for such.”

  Mr. Ten Broeck did not answer at once. “The roads,” he said finally, “are very poor just at present.”

  “They were fine just a few days ago, and it has not rained.”

  Ten Broeck sighed. “I must think twice now about enrolling my daughters in your school if you will train them up to be so sharp. The patroon does not want it known widely, Miss Winters, but his brother has effectively cut us off from easy communication with New York. We do not have the men needed to protect the house and the tenants and mount a full escort for a courier. Two days ago the patroon sent his chariot to the city, and it was waylaid just beyond the borders of Harenwyck. The driver returned on foot yesterday morning. That afternoon, the patroon dispatched two riders, but they were turned back well before they even reached the old gate.”

  Anna had planned to write a masked letter to Mrs. Peterson for Kate Grey and send it on with the rest of the Harenwyck post. The code mask had been among the stencils she had lost with her baggage, but she knew its shape and dimensions by heart and could draw and cut a new one anytime—as could anyone who had been in regular contact with the Widow. Now, though, if she wanted to send her intelligence on to Angela’s successor, she would have to find another way.

  Use your instincts. That was what Kate Grey had said. Anna’s instincts told her that the Widow had spent a great deal of time at Harenwyck during the last revolt. She would have had other contacts besides Anna’s father. Anna must find them.

  “What will the patroon do?” Anna asked.

  “He will call upon his allies for aid.”

  Mr. Ten Broeck very purposely did not say which allies. He must accept the help of whichever side answers his call.

  That would have been the Widow’s appraisal of the situation. It was Anna’s as well. The problem was that Anna was supposed to be acting for Kate Grey and the Americans. She was supposed to be serving as their eyes and ears, and if possible, their agent to convince Andries Van Haren to side decisively with the Rebels. She ought to relate everything she knew about Gerrit: the size of the force at his disposal, the location of his encampment, the nature of his feud with his brother. She ought, especially, to tell them about Gerrit’s meeting with André and the overtures that dangerous gentleman had made on behalf of the British.

  But to do so would be to betray Gerrit, whose aims were, in many ways, her own. Even if his methods were criminal and, depending one’s point of view, treasonous. Nothing was as simple as she had hoped it might be on the road from New York.

  “It would help tremendously,” said Mr. Ten Broeck, as if glimpsing her thoughts in a dark glass, “if you could recall anything at all the patroon’s brother or his men might have said as to the whereabouts of their camp. It would be best if the patroon could bring his brother to heel without recourse to outside aid—better for everyone on the estate. Once invited in, armies are damnably difficult guests to show the door.”

  She was supposed to be on the patroon’s side—so long as Andries sided with the Americans. Kate Grey had strongly implied that independence would transform the manors and destroy the tenant system. Andries Van Haren had a bold vision to transform the estate in a different way, but Anna did not believe that he would give up power any more readily than his father had. He would not, as he admitted, sell land to his tenants. He would never dissolve the manor.

  Gerrit would. The Americans ought to be backing him, but Anna was not naive. She knew that it was unlikely that those in charge truly cared about the estate, or the tenants. They wanted Harenhoeck and, with it, a stranglehold on the Narrows, and the
y would back whichever brother could deliver that strategic location to them.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Ten Broeck, but they did not speak freely in front of me. Certainly not in English.”

  “Even names would help. We need to know more of Gerrit’s associates. We can apply pressure through their families. The patroon has the power to evict tenants who disrupt the peace. Even if no one gives up Gerrit’s location, a few examples . . . could help quiet the estate.”

  Examples. Naked force backed by the force of law. And it would all start again. The riots, the arrests, the deaths. For a moment she was back in that cottage, with the pistol in her hand and Vim Dijkstra’s fingers curled cruelly around her hair. Her breakfast threatened to rise. With an act of will, she quashed the memory and said, “I am sorry”—when she was not sorry at all—“but these Dutch names all sound alike to me.”

  Anna took the long way back to the manor this time, through the forest path that no one now bothered to keep clear. It was hard going with her packages, but she did not care, because she desperately needed to be alone.

  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. But that, Andries, was the wrong question to ask.

  Anna had not come to Harenwyck for Kate Grey or the Continentals or Congress. Kate Grey had threatened her with the bailiffs, but Anna too was one of the Widow’s acolytes. She had disappeared once. She could do so again, transform herself into someone else—like Barbara Fenton—even slip across the sea and beyond the reach of the law.

  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.