The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

Anna had chosen to try again. The Widow had agreed to help her, hiring Latin tutors, arranging music lessons, finding a dancing master. But she had also insisted on training Anna in the art of espionage—and killing neatly with whatever weapon might be close to hand.

  Schoolteachers, Anna had insisted, are not required to be crack shots or skilled lockpicks. Quite the contrary.

  You will make a good schoolmistress, said the Widow, because you are a quick study and have already learned to play roles as necessary to survive. But it is not a role you can play forever. Not so long as Harenwyck endures. What you did there was not a mistake or an isolated event. It is who you are: a woman who will not accept injustice.

  Anna had denied it at the time. She had wanted to put Harenwyck and the killing of Vim Dijkstra in her past, but she was coming to understand that what she had done would always be with her—and that the Widow might have been right about her after all.

  Fourteen

  After her trip to the castle, the next week flew by faster than any Anna could recall since childhood. She took the girls to the riverbank and searched for wild grapevines. She was shocked to learn that they had never foraged before. Spending an afternoon gathering blackberries had been one of the delights of Anna’s childhood, before all the trouble started, and it was one of the things she missed most now that she lived in the city.

  It took them a little while to find grapes, and along the way Anna taught Grietje and Jannetje how to tell the wild concords apart from their poisonous look-alike, the moonseed: a vine that appeared almost identical to the untrained eye. The main differences were the tendrils—moonseed vines did not have them—and the seeds themselves. Grapes had many, their poisonous imposter only one.

  Anna was surprised to find moonseed vines that showed obvious signs of cutting. No one foraging in the valley would make the mistake of thinking they were grapes. Someone had been harvesting them for other purposes, and Anna knew enough about the plant’s uses to guess who and what for. The seeds could be made into a powerful purgative. On the estate, only Mevrouw Zabriskie was a skilled enough herbalist to dabble in such dangerous cures.

  The twins collected a basket of vines and a basket of grapes. Anna hoped that the fruit would go some ways in compensating Mrs. Buys for the use of a pot and one of her fires to make the charcoal. The musky wild grapes made excellent jelly, and their frosty skins told Anna that they were near their peak for the season.

  The irony of a finishing school teacher instructing the patroon’s nieces in woodcraft and charcoal making was not lost on Anna. She was surprised, though, by how much she enjoyed these practical lessons. It harkened back to her own childhood, to the period before the riots, when her parents had been happy and she had been too.

  Anna took the girls on rambles across the estate to teach them basic drawing skills. She believed the method superior to copying from plates, but it had always proved impractical in the bustle of New York. At Harenwyck they sketched pumpkins on the vine, fields and houses, ducks in the river. Anna showed Jannetje and Grietje all the little tricks for transferring what the eye saw to the page with as much faith as possible.

  And she made them do something their grandfather, the old patroon, never did with anyone, ever: ask permission. When they sat down to sketch a particularly well-sited tenant cottage on a hill, Anna made Grietje and Jannetje knock on the batten door and ask the mevrouw of the house for her consent. The young farmwife was amused by the girls and brought them buttered slices of bread in the afternoon while they worked. When they were done, Jannetje descended the hill and presented the woman with her drawing.

  When she came back up she said to Anna, “The mevrouw said she did not have any other pictures in her house.” Jannetje furrowed her brow and then added, “But we have so many at the manor.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Anna. Jannetje had glimpsed the gulf her father had seen the day Gerrit and Anna met. Anna wondered if Jannetje and Grietje would be able to see the injustice of it as sharply as Gerrit had. He had been raised as the heir, almost entirely insulated by the armor of privilege. Girls were different. They were not raised to rule. They were raised to be biddable and sweet like Gerrit’s poor unloved wife. And if they rebelled they ended up like Gerrit and Andries’ sister, Elizabeth, driven from her home, never to be seen again.

  Anna had seen it happen to girls she had taught. Not many of them, fortunately. Families that thought female education—at least the sort Anna offered—worth paying for were more often than not reasonably enlightened. Most of her girls made good marriages to good men. Anna liked to think this was because she taught them to be astute judges of character. But there were always the girls whose parents had plans for them, who saw education for their daughters in the same light that they saw gowns for dances—as a necessary expense, or a necessary evil, to package their daughters as more appealing goods for the marriage market.

  Grietje and Jannetje might lack polish, but Anna couldn’t help but think that in some ways they had gotten lucky at Harenwyck. Mrs. Buys’ occasional supervision and Andries’ benign neglect had allowed them freedom to grow into distinct personalities. She doubted either would accept the first man she was presented with, no matter what the patroon dictated.

  Unfortunately, by the end of the week no packages had yet arrived from New York, and Anna was feeling the distinct need to vary her curriculum. She had no opportunity to press the patroon to send another messenger to New York. She saw hardly anything of Andries that week, and when he did appear he was always dressed for riding and wearing the dust of the road.

  “Out chasing his brother,” sighed Mrs. Buys. “And much good it will do him.”

  When he was at home the patroon kept his distance from Anna and she did not know if that should make her worried or relieved.

  The day of the cider pressing arrived. The excitement on the estate was palpable. Anna felt it too—a pleasurable anticipation that surprised and delighted her. She had not realized how much she had missed the rhythms of rural life, the rituals that celebrated the harvest and the turning of the seasons. The festivities would be held, as they had been for as long as anyone at Harenwyck could remember, that evening, in and around a great barn and outbuildings about a mile away from the new manor. Near the old church and burying ground she knew so well from her childhood.

  It had always been a great occasion among the tenants, but Anna had not expected the patroon to mark it, or the girls to even be aware of it. When she had been a child, Cornelis Van Haren had appeared briefly for the very first turn of the stile, watching impassively as three strong men put the great stone wheels into motion. He had not brought his family, and he had not stayed for the dancing and drinking that followed. Anna had, even when she was too young to take part.

  Gerrit had only come after Anna told him about it. She had been amazed that he had not known of it, the highlight of her year, as dear and special as Christmas. It was the finest spectacle the valley had to offer: hundreds of girls twirling in their best petticoats, musicians playing, everyone wearing their best shoes if they had them, or their finest clogs if they did not. The old patroon had only come to see that the work began on schedule, to watch proprietarily as the cloudy cider ran down the spout and into the barrels—not for the company or the food or the drink that all seemed so festive and rich to Anna.

  She could remember watching him accept a doughnut hot from the pot, wrapped in the finest napkin Mrs. Ackerman owned. Old Cornelis hadn’t even tried to look pleased with it. Anna had already eaten her olykoeck, and wished she could have another, but that was beyond her wildest dreams of avarice. The patroon had discarded his untasted on the trail back to the house, tossing the doughnut and the napkin into the field like trash.

  Later she had spied the fine linen gleaming in the moonlight. She had wanted to pick it up off the path and take it home and wash it, but her mother had scolded her. They were not that poor. Anna’s mother had je
alously guarded the subtle distinctions in wealth and status between tenants, right up until the day she left. But Anna sensed early on that such distinctions meant nothing to people like Cornelis Van Haren: the old patroon had made it quite clear that the entire harvest festival was a peasant affair.

  So Anna was shocked when Andries Van Haren shed his riding clothes for a suit of forest green velvet that set off his pale blue eyes and golden blond hair, and called Anna and the twins from their history lesson to get ready for the festival. “I presume you will allow me to escort you,” said Andries Van Haren, offering her his arm.

  “I did not realize that the family attended,” said Anna lamely. She’d planned on slipping out of the house to meet Gerrit at the festival after the girls were in bed and the servants had all left to don their best things, but she could hardly refuse the patroon’s invitation—at least not without prompting unwanted questions.

  “My father did not appreciate the charm of country airs or olykoecken leavened with cider, but then he did not have the sweetest disposition himself. Particularly in his later years. My sister-in-law, Sophia, always wanted to go, but she was too terrified of the old patroon to disobey him. That is why I’ve taken Grietje and Jannetje each year since he died, so that they might enjoy what their mother could not. She would have liked that. And I think it is safe to say that they are now olykoecken connoisseurs.”

  “The ones with bits of apple are the best. I can eat six,” said Grietje proudly, her sharp ears catching the only part of the conversation that truly interested her, “without getting sick.”

  “Our father can eat a dozen,” said Jannetje pointedly, daring the patroon to contradict her.

  “He can,” admitted the patroon. “That is one arena in which I refuse to compete with my brother.”

  There would be no sneaking anywhere, so she might as well enjoy her new clothes. Anna wore one of her Dutch chintz jackets laced with a green ribbon on top of a pink silk petticoat and felt very smart in it. The outfit would have looked rustic in New York, but it suited a country event like a cider pressing and made her feel . . . young.

  She had not felt young—not really—since leaving Harenwyck. Andries Van Haren, she realized, was not the only one who carried outsized responsibility on his shoulders. She had been responsible for herself, alone in the world by eighteen, and soon thereafter responsible for a business and the welfare of a dozen or more young women.

  Not tonight, though. Tonight she could be Annatje again in her heart, as she might have been if fate had not intervened. As she might have been if her father had lived. And tonight she could sample the adult pleasures she had been too young for then. She could drink strong beer with rum and maple syrup and kick up her skirts in one of the country dances that did not require couples.

  It was madness, but she felt a surge of elation as she stepped out into the night air. The manor house was all but dark, the servants already departed for the festival. The patroon offered Anna his free arm. In the other he carried a crook and a lantern to light their way. Anna could smell wood smoke in the air and as they drew nearer to the old barn, she drank in the distilled scent of autumn: the sugary aroma of decayed leaves, the fruity musk of the apples waiting to be crushed on the great stone, the warm spices frying in the olykoecken pot.

  Grietje and Jannetje ran ahead down the path leaving Anna alone with the patroon, and in closer proximity to him than she had been since that day in the teahouse. She was glad for the light. It was a dark night and the path was uneven and she did not want to lean too heavily on Andries Van Haren’s strong arm. It was impossible to be unaware of his physical presence. The lantern gilded his shining hair, which was tied back with a dark green velvet ribbon to match his suit. His height, his sharp cheekbones, and his blue eyes all conspired to make him appear a sending from faerie land, Oberon come to trick Titania.

  Or to beguile Anna. She could not deny that she was drawn to him. It was more than his physical beauty that called to her. He was as passionate a reformer as his brother, and he was setting an example for Grietje and Jannetje that she approved, teaching them by word and deed that the tenants were people too. Where he had learned this, she did not know, but she was coming to understand that he was no longer the distant, aloof boy she remembered. And in the teahouse he had proved that he was not cold. Quite the contrary.

  “Do you always attend the cider pressing, Mr. Van Haren?” She could not remember seeing him there as a child, though they must have been quite close in age.

  “I have only begun to attend recently, with my nieces,” he said. “As a boy I longed to come after my brother told me what it was like, but my father always discouraged the family from attending. I’m ashamed to admit that I was no more eager to risk his displeasure in that respect than Sophia.”

  “And is it everything you had hoped?”

  “Everything and more. You will laugh when I tell you that I was twenty-five before I tasted my first cider olykoeck, and I am determined to make up for lost time. I hope you will not find the proceedings too bucolic.”

  “I am certain I won’t. I’m fond of country dances. But I have to admit that your patronage of the festival surprises me. Even in New York the Hudson patroons are said to abide in feudal splendor, decidedly apart from the rustic pursuits of their tenants.”

  He turned to look at her and she was struck by the intensity of his gaze. “I mean to change that,” he said. “The festival represents the very best of what the estate could be, what it should be: a community with common goals. Tonight at least, every soul on the patroonship should work and celebrate together.”

  Down the path and through intervening foliage, Anna made out the first tantalizing glimpses of the kindling bonfire, casting light and shadows against the great barn in which the pressing would occur, and across myriad tiny human figures as though conspiring with the patroon to make his point. Still . . .

  “Every soul?” she could not stop herself from asking. “Does that include Mr. Ten Broeck’s slave, and others like him? In New York they are forbidden from gathering.”

  “New York fears another fire ever since the Negro Plot in ’forty-one. And, frankly, the city is right to be afraid. If anything, the lot of the blacks has deteriorated in the last thirty years. If I were a slave in New York, I would want to burn it too. Slavery is a sin no good Christian should countenance. And even if a man is not a Christian, he ought to find it an affront to human dignity. I will not allow any of my current tenants to buy new slaves, or new tenants to bring slaves with them into their leasehold. If they do so, they are evicted.”

  He had surprised her again. She had been ready to lecture him, but he had just voiced most of her arguments. “And the ones who already own slaves, like Mr. Ten Broeck?”

  “My father hired Mr. Ten Broeck. It was perhaps the best thing he ever did for Harenwyck. Theunis is the finest manager we have ever had. I cannot accomplish what I want for the estate without him, but neither can I force him to free his slave.”

  “And what of the slaves belonging to the estate? I thought, like most patroons, you owned at least a dozen to work in the castle and man the mill and the ferry.”

  “My father’s will manumitted all of his slaves.”

  She did not believe it. “That does not sound much like the late patroon, based on what I have heard of him.” Old Cornelis would never have freed his slaves. Not in a thousand years.

  “Sometimes people can surprise you, Miss Winters,” said the current patroon.

  He was certainly surprising her. “I was given to understand that your father’s will went missing, and you were forced to rely upon the testimony of its witnesses to uphold your claim to Harenwyck in court.”

  “That was indeed the case.”

  He said it with a finality that did not invite further questions, and Anna suspected that was with good reason. Old Cornelis’ last wishes—naming Andries as heir, l
iberating the estate’s slaves—appeared to be entirely too close to his younger son’s desires. Too close, perhaps, to credit. Convenient, then, that a will which seemed unlikely to memorialize them had gone missing. It seemed almost certain to her that Andries had bought the “witnesses” and their testimony with Harenwyck money. For enough gold or preferential treatment on the estate a man might swear to anything.

  A man might be willing to see another man’s brother disinherited.

  And yet Andries had not done it entirely for personal gain. Harenwyck had owned at least a dozen slaves when Anna was girl. The number could have been twice as many by the time of the old patroon’s death. The slaves had always done the hardest work: clearing land, turning the millstone when the river was slow, maintaining the roads. Andries may have lied under oath, but he had accomplished at least one just purpose. One that reduced his own inheritance through the loss of valuable human property.

  “To answer your question honestly,” the patroon said, breaking in on her thoughts, “you will not see any slaves here tonight. The tenants who hold slaves do not bring them to the festival, because they do not see them—or wish to see them—as people. It makes it easier, I suppose, to justify keeping one’s fellow man in bondage. If my brother were to gain control of Harenwyck, Miss Winters, he would sell the land to the tenants. One in nine or ten of them owns slaves now. When they are freeholders, the patroon will have no say over what they do. I’d expect the number of slave owners, and of slaves, to increase, wouldn’t you?”

  Anna had seen the power of the patroon used to oppress. She had not considered it could be used to reform, to liberate.

  The bonfire was already a roaring blaze by the time they arrived. Near at hand, a pot for olykoecken was bubbling, and Grietje and Jannetje made a beeline for the sugary confections. Not unexpectedly, the woman hooking doughnuts out of the pot with an iron crook was not Mrs. Ackerman, who had been seventy if she had been a day when Anna was a child. That good mevrouw had been replaced by a younger woman, one with a pair of helpers.