The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  Only Anna was in a position to broker such a bargain. To put the independence of two thousand families ahead of that of a nation—and herself. Because if she brought Andries and Gerrit together to divide the estate, Kate Grey and the Rebels would expose her, and the law would take its course.

  To have any chance of success, she must discover proof of her growing suspicions about Sophia Van Haren. If such proof existed—and, knowing young women like Gerrit’s late wife from her years of teaching, Anna was almost certain it did—it would be at the old manor house. Mrs. Buys, all unawares, had given Anna a clue. She ought to go there now, while everyone was at the cider pressing, but she did not relish exploring that mournful house with its table of doed koecks in the dark. And the dancing had given her an appetite, the sort she had thought she would never have again after New York, but she did not hunger for Andries Van Haren. It was his brother she wanted, and always would.

  It was easy to find the klompen maker. He had set himself up in front of the old brick shed opposite the meat roasters. Anna remembered him from her childhood. He had been old then, and he did not seem very much older now in his blue apron with his long-fingered hands. He sat upon a rough-hewn stool beside his workbench with his feet upon a chopping block, finishing the decoration on a pair of infant’s clogs. There was a tub of soaked wood beside him, chunks of maple, birch and ash too short to make good lumber and heaped almost as tall as Anna. Beneath the bench was a row of finished klompen lined up in pairs from largest to smallest.

  “Vil je een par klompen, mevrouw?”

  She had to bite her tongue to keep herself from responding in the same language. For a moment she felt the presence of her father behind her, urging her forward. He’d brought her to the klompen maker for a new pair of shoes every fall and insisted they be painted, even though she would outgrow them in a year.

  “I’d like a pair of clogs, please,” she said, shaking off the memory and pointing to the smaller pairs at the carpenter’s feet.

  He shook his head and switched to English. “Those will not fit you.”

  Anna was fairly certain she could fit into one of the finished sets, but if the klompen maker was willing to cut a pair just for her, there was nothing she would rather do than watch. His skills had fascinated her as a child, and she could remember looking on for more than an hour as he shaped the wood like butter, pair after pair.

  He chose a block of maple first and contemplated it, turning it this way and that. Then he shook his head and set it aside. He selected a piece of ash next, but this was not to his liking either. The pile was completely rearranged by the time he found the block he was looking for, a pale slab of soaked birch, and set it deliberately on the packed earth in front of him. “There.” He pointed to the block. “Stand, please.”

  Anna took her shoes off and stood upon the block while the klompen maker traced her feet with a pencil. “Sit,” he ordered, pointing to the stool he had just vacated.

  She sat. He placed her block upon the stump and chopped. His ax moved up and down like a kitchen knife and within minutes he had shaped the block into the rough form of two clogs.

  He moved to the bench and took up his drawknife, the handle worn and smooth, the long blade sharp as a razor. In his hands the wood seemed soft as fruit. He peeled each klomp like an apple, pale curls of birch falling softly to the ground like dogwood blossoms, until he had two pointed toes and two neat heels. His spoon drill scooped out the insides as fast as one of Mrs. Buys’ pumpkins, and in less time than it took Anna to eat her second olykoeck he presented her with two shoes, the tops decorated with carved lappets and buckles.

  She stepped into the klompen and wondered how something newly made could feel so familiar. The insoles were pale and pristine now but gradually they would darken with the print of her heels and toes and become indistinguishable from the last pair her father had bought her. “Thank you,” she said. Mr. Ten Broeck had given her a purse for expenses. She fished in it for a coin, but the klompen maker shook his head.

  “I will not take money from Bram Hoppe’s daughter.”

  For a second she was gripped by fear, but there was no one nearby to hear, and in the quiet the enormity of it hit her. There were still people here who had loved her father.

  “I remember you,” she said.

  The klompen maker smiled. “Then that is payment enough. You’ll find him in the usual place.” He did not have to say who he was. And she knew their usual place.

  The church had been one of the first structures built at Harenwyck. It was almost as old as the stone arch, but not nearly so old as the blockhouse. The walls were local fieldstone, the windows were picked out in white paint, the shingle roof sloped down and tilted up in a shape as familiar as the back of Anna’s hand.

  Gerrit was leaning against the stone wall at the back, looking up at the stars, when she came around the corner, and it was difficult to believe that after visiting this place in her dreams for so many years she was finally back. His coffee hair was tied loosely at the nape of his neck, and the tail snaked over his shoulder in a lazy wave. He wore a suit of soft homespun linen the color of molasses. With his hat pulled down he would have been able to pass unseen among the crowd at the cider pressing.

  “Did you enjoy dancing with my brother?” Apparently he had been there.

  “Yes,” she said honestly. “I have never danced like that, with a real partner. Only dancing masters and students.”

  “The irony is that I never wanted to be patroon—until I saw you dancing with Andries tonight, the tenants bowing and curtsying to you, and all I could think was: that should be me, with you on my arm. And then when I saw him lead you to the arbor, I thought, one well-aimed shot and I will be patroon. He has no heir but me.”

  “That would have been a far safer path than turning outlaw and robbing coaches, but you did not take it, because he is your brother, and while he might be wrong about a good many things, he is not a bad man.”

  “Andries is better suited to be patroon of Harenwyck than I am. The issue is that there shouldn’t be a patroon at all.”

  “I take it you were recruiting,” she said, crossing the churchyard in her sturdy new klompen. “How many men agreed to join you?”

  “Sixty.”

  “That is not enough. John André wants two hundred,” said Anna. “And every time you beat the drum at an event like this you run the risk that some coward will betray you to your brother for a purse of gold.” There had been spies and informers at the Halve Maen the night her father was taken. And she was not the only one at the cider pressing with eyes and ears.

  “I will not have to beat the drum again. Once word gets out of what I offer, I will have my two hundred men. More probably.”

  Fear threaded through her. “Gerrit, please don’t tell me you are offering them Wappinger leases.”

  “No. Not new landlords with newer, fairer leases,” he said. “Your father tried that. You were right. He was blind in some ways. No court will ever find in favor of Indian land claims, because the precedent could unravel the fabric of a whole nation. Whose farm was not once the domain of one tribe or another? But my claim jeopardizes no one’s wealth but my brother’s. I am the patroon of Harenwyck, Annatje. Andries has stolen the estate from me with lies and bribed witnesses. The Rebel courts accepted his calumnies because it suited them to do so, because it would suit them to control Harenwyck through him. But the outcome, in a British court, is bound to be in my favor. If I win British sponsorship, I can offer those who join me something far more than fair leases. As the real patroon of Harenwyck, I am free to dispose of my land exactly as I wish. Sell it, or give it away.”

  “You will pay them in freeholds,” she said. It was brilliant. It was her father’s legacy come to life. It was a dream she had shared with hundreds, indeed with thousands up and down the Hudson. And it was going to get Gerrit killed.

  He
pushed himself away from the wall and prowled toward her, his coattails brushing the headstones, and it was as though time had collapsed. She was seventeen again, and he was everything she wanted. “Annatje, I did not come here to talk about freeholds.”

  She moved at the same time. He met her among the graves, and she came into his arms as though years had not passed between this meeting and their last.

  His body was warm, a sharp contrast to the night air, and his mouth tasted like fresh apples, and she did not think she could ever drink in enough of this new Gerrit, familiar and changed. A body she knew and had loved and had wanted to know better. She had desired him so very much—with a hunger that kept her up at night when they were young—but always he had stopped just short of that ultimate joining with her. They melted into each other now, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, as they used to do, and just like then—just like always—he broke away and stepped back.

  “I like your new shoes,” he said, running his hands over her face like he still could not believe she was real. “I liked your old ones too. They were sunny yellow. I did not believe that you were dead when I came home from Leiden, but they showed me your clogs and told me . . . they told me that you had drowned yourself in the river.”

  “That was the Widow’s idea.”

  “It was a good one. Annatje, Annatje,” he said her name over and over like he was conjuring her. “Tell me what happened after I left.”

  She remembered all the things he liked. She kissed his neck softly, and heard his sharp intake of breath. She had always known how to bring him close, so close to losing control. She nipped his ear, and he groaned. Her fingers slid down his hard chest to the top of his breeches, and his hands met hers there and stopped them.

  “Annatje, you must tell me what happened, how you escaped and came to be here, or else I will think I am making love to a ghost.”

  She could feel the tension in every muscle of his body. He was trembling with it. He wanted her as badly as she wanted him, as badly as they had wanted each other when they were seventeen. If she seduced him now, overcame his reservations, he would receive her story differently.

  Lovemaking is a tool. And a tool can be a weapon. The Widow would have advised her to draw Gerrit Van Haren’s warm, strong body down into the grass between the graves. Afterward she could tell him about the things she had done. The bond formed between them, the tenderness of two vulnerable bodies meeting flesh to flesh, would elicit his sympathy, trigger his natural protectiveness.

  She would not manipulate him like that.

  And silence was not an option. He was following too closely in Bram Hoppe’s footsteps, and he needed to know precisely where they led.

  Fifteen

  Harenwyck, 1765

  There was going to be rough music that night. Annatje’s father called it an expression of the will of the people. Her mother would have called it mob justice. But then Mehitable Wing had run off with a Huguenot tin peddler from New Paltz, and there was no one to gainsay Bram Hoppe now.

  Annatje was happy that she was gone. Her mother had always been whipsawed between the Quaker rigidness of her upbringing and the radical ideals of her husband, whose leveler philosophy took the seductive revelations of George Fox to their natural conclusions. Annatje’s mother said she had been following her inner light when she married the “unconvinced” Bram Hoppe, but the Society of Friends had not seen it that way. They had promptly cast her out.

  That spurning had left its mark upon Annatje’s mother. Mehitable had been raised in a sect of nonconformists whose bulwark against the outside world had been their profound sense of community. She felt its lack like a missing tooth, and she was forever tonguing and prodding it. She clung to her Quaker love of simplicity, and Bram Hoppe’s dazzling oratory, the way men flocked to hear him, was anything but plain.

  Annatje wished her mother had left a year ago, rather than six months, and never found out about her meetings with Gerrit. It was no comfort to Annatje that her mother had beaten her for her imagined sin of fornication and then become a fornicator herself. Gerrit was still gone, and Annatje was left with no one but her father. They had always been close, she and her father, but in the wake of Gerrit’s departure for Holland, and her mother’s shameful flight, Annatje’s love turned into fierce devotion.

  She took up the housework abandoned by Mehitable, and the hopeless household accounts. Not that they were difficult to balance. Everything the Hoppes earned when they sold their crop to the patroon, less his tithe for grinding their corn at the mill and his percent for taking it to market, was spent. Between food and fuel and seed, all of which, according to the terms of their lease, must be bought from Cornelis Van Haren, and the rent they paid him, there was never anything left to save toward improvements, let alone land of their own.

  The system was designed to keep them tied to their leasehold forever, cogs in the patroon’s wealth machine, and Annatje had never felt its injustice more keenly than the Sunday morning when Gerrit had failed to appear in church. Afterward she overheard the patroon informing the minister that he had sent “the boy” to Leiden for university, and he would not be back for years.

  There was an ocean between them, one whose breadth she had traced with her finger in the pages of the atlas. The same ocean Henry Hudson had crossed in the Halve Maen. But Gerrit would see the world she had only experienced on paper, and she was bound to Harenwyck by the terms of a lease signed by Willem Hoppe, her great-great-great-grandfather, a long-dead Dutchman who had crossed that same ocean.

  Unless her father prevailed.

  The Widow visited twice after Annatje’s mother left. She came on her own the first time and drank whiskey, neat, with Bram. She was dressed like a good Dutch mevrouw in clogs and a broad-brimmed hat and a threadbare apron, and Annatje could not have told her from the farmwife next door tending her cabbages. Except that Annatje could sometimes feel the Widow’s sharp eyes on her as she moved about the kitchen. Something about that gaze—about the quality of her attention—reminded Annatje of the falcon Gerrit had shown her last winter, or more familiarly, of a cat sizing up its prey.

  When her father got up to go outside the Widow said, “You do not have a country accent, I notice.”

  She had lost it speaking to Gerrit, but she could hardly say that. “My father is very well-spoken,” she said.

  “But not well tutored. Not in the accents of Amsterdam, anyway. He sounds like what he is. An intelligent, self-educated Dutch farmer, born and bred here in the valley. You sound like something else.”

  “I’m just Annatje,” she said.

  “More than that, I think. You know how to keep your counsel. I could make use of you, just Annatje, if you were willing to leave Harenwyck.”

  “I can’t leave. My father needs me.” There was no one else. And, of course, Gerrit would be coming back.

  “At the moment, yes,” said the Widow, “but it is impossible to say what the future holds. If you change your mind, you will be able to find me, or someone who can reach me, at my house in New York. It’s on Pearl Street. Green clapboard, white door. You will always find it open to you.”

  The Widow said nothing of their exchange when Bram Hoppe returned.

  The next time Angela Ferrers came she brought a lawyer with her. Mr. Lindsey was young, ambitious, and eager to make a name for himself in New York politics. He had studied law at King’s College and argued a recent case—successfully—against the Crown. The Widow did not return herself after that, but the lawyer became a regular guest in their home, working late into the night with Bram Hoppe and leaving in the wee hours of the morning with a case of documents under his arm.

  Annatje’s mother had never liked it when Bram gathered a “committee” of tenants and led them on a “visit.” His mob would call on neighbors who refused to stand firm against the patroon on the price of corn, or worse, new tenants who dared to take up leases after o
ld, progress-minded ones had been evicted. Bram Hoppe would call the coward out of his house—or drag him, if need be—and the assembly would try him for his crimes. They were always found guilty, of course, and the committee would haul the miscreant out to a tree and fix a rope around his neck to symbolize their verdict. Sometimes they even hanged him a little. Just until he thought it might be real. Then they would drop the man to the ground and let him run a gauntlet of his outraged neighbors homeward.

  Mehitable judged that to be violence—though Bram maintained that it was largely the shamming of violence—and she refused to attend, but she used to go and listen to him talk at the Halve Maen. Now Annatje took her place.

  That night her father sat in the center of a circle of pulled-up chairs, his friend from when he had campaigned in the last war against the French, Sachem Daniel Ninham, at his side. They talked about the “dignity of man” and “natural rights,” about land stolen and honest men: Wappinger men—of Sachem Daniel’s tribe—who farmed and had families just like they did, and had been swindled.

  As they were being swindled.

  It was also a kind of music, this talking. Not rough, but smooth: her father in his beautiful tenor, and the sachem in his bass tones.

  They talked, and they wrote out leases. Every farmer who stepped forward and recognized the legitimacy of the sachem’s claim to the land that made up Harenwyck received a hundred-year lease for the grand total of one dollar. Angela Ferrers’ lawyer was there to witness the documents, and he was going to stand up in court for the sachem and Annatje’s father and argue that the patroon had no right to his land. When all the leases were signed they would make a list of those tenants who had not accepted them, and then the rough music would begin in earnest.

  Everyone at the gathering could see that Mr. Lindsey was no country lawyer. He wore silk stockings and silver buckles on his shoes and spoke the good Dutch that Gerrit had tried to teach Annatje. He was going to be heard in the court at Albany, and he could not be ignored because he was not an ignorant tenant. He was the son of a prominent New York merchant with friends in high places. The Hudson patroons had always been able to get their way in the New York courts because they not only had money and power, but acted in concert and toward interests that did not conflict with those of other powerful men. It was an easy thing to deny justice to a poor tenant farmer, a much trickier matter to cross the son of one of New York’s most influential families.