The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  That was why the schouts came the next night, tall, strapping Vim Dijkstra and a dozen well-armed bailiffs, because the patroon knew he must not let these men bring him to court. Not in a case that would attract public scrutiny, that could not be dealt with quietly, out of the sight of the English government in New York. The schouts broke down the doors to the Halve Maen, which were closed for a private meeting: just Annatje’s father, the lawyer, the sachem, three of their most trusted allies among the tenants, and Annatje.

  They dragged Bram Hoppe in his best suit of clothes out of the taproom. Annatje chased after them but the schouts were deaf to her cries. They took the lawyer too, when he demanded to see their warrants. For that, they gut punched him, in plain sight of onlookers, on the threshold of the Halve Maen. He doubled over wheezing and then they dragged him—unprotesting now—down the stairs, and flung him into the mud that pooled there.

  They shackled Bram Hoppe in the same irons that the castle sold for use with slaves, and chained him to the bed of a cart. The vehicle had last held chickens. Annatje could smell the pungent odor of their droppings.

  It was done with such speed and violence that the cart was already being struck up by the time the Halve Maen’s landlord and his family heard the disturbance and emerged from the kitchens. They stood at the top of the stairs, under the sign painted with Henry Hudson’s vlieboot, screaming in outrage. Annatje was only a few steps ahead of them. She half ran, half fell down the stairs to reach her father.

  “Get word to the Widow,” he said, his shackled hands clutching hers. The cart began to move. “Tell her everything that has happened.”

  “How?” Annatje was running at the back of the cart to stay with him. All she knew about the Widow was that she had a house on Pearl Street in New York.

  “Remember what I bought for her,” he said, remaining obscure in case the bailiffs overheard. “Go home, Annatje. You’re a clever girl. You’ll figure it out.”

  “I don’t understand,” she pleaded, feeling salty tears start in her eyes.

  But that was all they had time for. The cart picked up speed and broke their connection. Annatje pounded after it, but could not run fast enough. The cart dwindled into the night taking her father away with it.

  It was the last she ever saw of him.

  She walked back to the Halve Maen in a daze.

  The sachem was waiting there for her, resignation in his dark eyes. “They will not release him,” he said with the fatalism of a man who knew something of English courts and English law.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because they did not fear the lawyer.”

  “My father has a friend in New York. She will help. I must go home and figure out how to reach her.”

  “Has your mother come back?” asked the sachem.

  Mehitable wasn’t coming back. Bram had put it about that she was visiting her family in Pennsylvania, but Annatje did not think anyone believed it. Perhaps Daniel Ninham only thought it right to ask.

  “No.”

  “Then you cannot stay at Harenwyck, Annatje. Not alone. Come home with me to Stockbridge. We have a lawyer there who may be able to help.”

  “We already have a lawyer,” said Annatje. And he had silver buckles on his shoes. But Mr. Lindsey was no longer lying in the mud. In fact, he was nowhere to be seen at all.

  Mr. Ninham shook his head. “They will arrest him too if he challenges them. That is what the English do when they become too frightened to respect their own laws. Too frightened of what their own law might require.”

  “My father told me to go home.” It was printed in her memory like the plates from one of Gerrit’s books. Get word to the Widow. Go home. Remember what he bought for her. Figure it out.

  She went home. It had rained the night before and the mud sucked at her klompen. The sachem followed her all the way there, shook his head at the sad little brick cottage with the fragile batten door and poor old shutters, bolt and latches long since broken. But there had been no point in repairing them, or getting a proper lock for the door, because there had never been anything inside worth stealing.

  Daniel Ninham made up the fire and went to the shed for a hammer and nails and found lumber somewhere in the kitchen garden. Annatje watched him nail the shutters closed and reset the flimsy bolt on the door. He did these things with the familiarity of a man who knew her house well, because he had been there many times, and she had the terrible presentiment that he believed this would be his last visit.

  “You should come with me, Annatje. There is nothing for you here.”

  “My father said to go home.”

  “Men are not always wise in a crisis.”

  “You don’t think he will be back, do you?” she asked, the words catching in her throat.

  “I think I would want my daughter to leave and save herself. I think my friend would want me to save his daughter in spite of her stubbornness. I think that if you stay here, I will lose you both.”

  If she cried, if she showed him how frightened she was, he would make her go. She knew that. So she fought back the lump rising in her throat and said, “I’ll be fine, Mr. Ninham. And I promise you that I will get my father back.”

  The sachem sighed. “You take too much after your father. I only hope, for your sake, that you take a little after your mother, and that you’ll have the sense to run before it’s too late.”

  He did not try to make her go. He found her father’s pistol in the chest at the foot of the bed, carefully filled it with his own powder and shot, and placed it on the kitchen table. She was grateful for that. Gerrit was gone. Her mother had abandoned her. Her father had been taken from her. She had to get him back. She had to get word to the Widow.

  The riots began the following afternoon. Annatje did not learn this until later. All day she searched the house for some clue as to how she was supposed to contact the Widow. There were precious few cupboards. They had never been wealthy enough to own a kas. But there were shelves surrounding the open hearth, and she searched these for a scrap of paper or notebook or token of some kind. Annatje emptied the salt box and unwrapped the sugar cone. She turned the mattresses over, picked open the stitching, and emptied the straw filling onto the floor and found nothing. She checked every loose brick in the walls and turned her arms black with soot exploring the jambless chimney.

  With Gerrit she had always felt so clever. She did not feel so clever now, standing in the wreckage of the home she had kept so faithfully for the past six months, with her father gone and no idea how to do as he had asked.

  It had taken her the morning to dismantle the cottage. She had taken everything in the house apart in a panicked frenzy. It took her the whole afternoon to put it back together, and her sleepless night began to tell on her long before she was done. She felt as though she were floating, every movement dreamlike and slow. She wished she were dreaming, that she could lay her head down on her pillow and wake up to find her father home.

  Evening fell and she had only the shelves left to restore to order. She had moved their contents to the table to examine every box, every bottle, every paper package. Now she was putting everything back in place. The sugar, the sugar tongs, the box of tallow-dipped rushes, the chipped earthenware plates, the Widow’s bottle of whiskey.

  It came to her in a flash of insight. Her father had bought the backwoods whiskey for Angela Ferrers because he knew she liked it. There was only one place on the patroonship to get home-brewed whiskey, only one place that the Widow could have acquired a taste for the local mash and distillation: from Mevrouw Zabriskie, who brewed gin and other ardent spirits at her cottage in the woods.

  Annatje needed to write her letter and deliver it now. Her father had already spent one night and one day in jail. Without money or friends he might be held in the sort of conditions that would eventually make a trial unnecessary. And now she could not f
ind the paper or remember where she had put it after her wild search of the house. She found the ink, homemade stuff that streaked and ran, but it would have to do. The paper turned out to be on the shelves. She wrote as quickly as she could, then folded and tied the letter closed with string. They had no wax candles, only rush lights.

  She put on her cloak and her klompen and took up the pistol that the sachem had loaded for her, because nothing must stop her from delivering the letter tucked flat inside her stays. She was ready to go, on the brink of departure, when she heard the horses approach.

  It was Vim Dijkstra and another schout, one of those who had taken her father. Annatje watched them through the cracks in the shutters as they dismounted and approached the door. Dijkstra rapped sharply on the warped boards and shouted, “Annatje Hoppe! Come out!” A big, hectoring voice for a big, bullying man.

  She froze, afraid to move a muscle lest they hear her. She willed them to go away.

  “Go check the barn.” Dijkstra’s voice. He was circling the cottage, searching for some sign of occupancy. Annatje could hear him pass by each window through the weathered shutters. She heard his heavy boots crunch into the pebbles outside the door, and then it burst open without warning beneath the impact of his shoulder. The sorry old repaired bolt snapped off and clattered to the ground, and Vim Dijkstra filled the doorway.

  There was hardly any light in the cottage, but the moon outlined his tall, heavy silhouette. “Come out!” he barked again.

  Annatje did not move. “You cannot arrest me. I’ve done nothing,” she said.

  “You’re not arrested. You are evicted. But if you don’t come now, then I will arrest you.”

  “Come where?”

  “The patroon has ordered me to load you on the ferry. We don’t want to see you again on Harenwyck. Now, you can ride with me, girl, or I can drag you behind my horse the whole way.”

  “No, thank you. I can find my own way off the estate.” And she could not leave until she had delivered her letter into the hands of the Widow’s contact. Her father was relying on her. She was all he had. He was all she had.

  “No, thank you,” he mocked, flutingly. “Always putting on airs, thinking you’re better than the other tenants just because the patroon’s boy diddles you silly behind the church.”

  He reached for her, and Annatje dodged and tried to get around him to the door. His big fist shot out, connecting with her stomach with terrible force. Pain exploded inside her. All the air rushed out of her lungs. She crumpled to the floor, unable to scream, unable even to breathe.

  “Looks like you need taking down a peg or two,” sighed Vim Dijkstra, “just like your bastard father.” He kicked her, and she curled into a ball, and he kicked her again.

  “The patroon said it would be a fine thing all around if his boy Gerrit didn’t have your pretty face to moon over when he comes home.”

  Dijkstra plucked a dull knife off the rack on the wall. “Thing is, he might run off in search of it, knowing that one. So, as I see it, I wouldn’t really be doing my job if I let you leave here with both those pretty gray eyes.”

  She could still barely breathe. Her father’s pistol, loaded and primed, remained tucked inside her jacket. Vim Dijkstra crouched beside her. The knife rose in the moonlight. He tangled a fist in her hair, wrenched her face violently to one side, and touched the cold nicked blade to her scalp.

  She clutched the pistol in her numb hands and aimed, as best she could, dead center at the shadow looming over her . . . and fired.

  The report was loud in her ears, but muffled by Dijkstra’s bulk. His body jerked grotesquely, then collapsed atop her, and she struggled to get out from under it. Wet warmth slicked her hands. Blood. The gory hole in his back told her plainly that he was dead. The shout from the barn told her plainly that she must go, and go now.

  She had killed a man.

  She bolted out the door.

  A dark shape on the path was hurtling toward her. She darted around the corner of the house and ran for the road. A few seconds later she heard Dijkstra’s companion shouting, “Moord!” Murder.

  From the road she heard other riders approaching. Their shouts soon joined his like the homing cries of birds, and a dozen mounted men converged on the house.

  Annatje fled into the forest. She could not deliver her father’s message to the Widow’s associate now. The house and the schouts were between her, and her objective, and the only direction she could run . . . was away.

  There was just one option now. She must reach the Widow herself at her house on Pearl Street in New York.

  Numb, cold, all sounds distant and muffled to her ears, Annatje stumbled through the forest all night, her second without sleep. She could not manage a third. At dawn she collapsed in the shadow of a stone wall that marked the edge of some forgotten leasehold. When she woke it was nearly evening again—she had slept away the whole day—and a woman was standing over her. The mevrouw wore a red kerchief on her head and a flour sack apron, and she said, “The schouts are out searching for you.”

  She was the wife of one of the rioters. Her husband had been taken too. She told Annatje what had happened during the day and the night that she had been frantically searching her cottage for some link to the Widow.

  Word had spread of Bram Hoppe’s arrest and there had been a full-scale uprising. A thousand tenants, men and women, had marched on the patroon’s house and demanded his release. It had not been like the peaceful delegation her father had led, and Annatje had marched with, the previous year. This had been an angry mob—some armed, some bearing torches—and they had threatened to burn the patroon out.

  The schouts proved more organized, and ruthless, than the leaderless tenants. The patroon’s men had dispersed the mob, driven them back into the woods or to their homes; and now the army was on the estate, rounding up the rioters and evicting people from their leaseholds. The mevrouw in the red kerchief gave her a loaf of bread and a purse full of pennies.

  “The schouts will not wait for the law. They mean to hang you for killing Vim Dijkstra, and you can be sure they have the patroon’s blessing to do it. Keep off the roads, girl. Go across the country. Travel only at night. And run as far and as fast as you can.”

  Annatje did. She walked for days. South and farther south, stopping to wash and drink from little brooks and streams because they would be looking for her near the river. She navigated by the stars Gerrit had taught her, and when the bread ran out she ate wild grapes because she must save her coins for the ferry.

  There would be soldiers at the landing. She knew that. And they might be on the lookout for a fugitive Dutch girl. She had left home wearing two petticoats. She untied the worn one on top and climbed the wall of an orchard in the dead of night to gather a bushel of dropped apples. When she paid her fare and boarded the ferry, she wore a smile she did not feel and carried a sack over her shoulder, and so became a farm girl intent on selling fruit for some extra coin in the city.

  When she knocked upon the Widow’s door on Pearl Street, she had not eaten anything but fruit in three days. The woman who answered was not the Widow, but she was about the same age as that lady, something indeterminate between thirty and forty. She was tall and rail thin, with bony hands.

  She did not want to let Annatje in.

  “The Widow,” Annatje began, using the only name she was sure her father’s ally answered to, “said that her door would always be open to me. I must get her a message. Urgently.”

  “She has not been here for two years,” said the woman, in an incongruously small, high-pitched voice. “I have no idea when she will be back again. Maybe never.” She said this last with a tight smile that made it plain she resented the anxiety and uncertainty of keeping house for a woman who did not regularly reside there.

  “But you can get her a message,” insisted Annatje.

  “I can, but there’s n
o telling how long it will be before she replies—if she wishes, or is able, to reply at all.”

  “I’ll wait.” And she stepped across the threshold of the open door.

  The woman’s name was Mrs. Duvel, and she grudgingly served Annatje a meal of stale bread that was clearly meant for crumbs. When Annatje expressed a desire to sleep she led her up a back staircase to a third-floor chamber with nothing but a straw pallet on the floor. Annatje knew it was a slight, but she did not care. She had not slept indoors for a week, perhaps more. She no longer knew what day she had left Harenwyck.

  When Annatje stepped past Mrs. Duvel into the pool of light from the landing window the housekeeper stopped her. She gripped her chin with a gnarled hand and turned her face this way and that, examining it like a cracked egg.

  “Not this room after all, I think,” she said, turning around and beckoning Annatje to follow her back down the stairs.

  The first room had been at the front of the house, on the third floor, facing the street, with all the attendant dirt and noise that entailed. This new room was on the second floor, at the back and much quieter. It held a hired man’s bed and the ghost of some musky perfume. There was no other furniture in the room.

  Annatje did not know why Mrs. Duvel changed her mind, and she did not much care. She wanted to crawl into the bed in her travel-worn clothes and sleep for days, but Mrs. Duvel insisted she bathe and change. She brought her water and a chemise and stood by while Annatje washed the dirt of the road from her skin and hair. Then Mrs. Duvel took away her dirty clothes and battered clogs to clean them.