The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  Annatje slept. She woke several times that afternoon, despite her exhaustion, shaken from sleep by the clap of the front door slamming closed or the crack of the back door swinging shut. They were distinctive sounds, and they marked the housekeeper’s comings and goings. Annatje wondered if she bothered to close doors more softly when her employer, the Widow, was in residence.

  It was evening before she woke fully. Mrs. Duvel had not returned with her clothes. The air in the room had grown stale. Annatje attempted to open one of the windows, but they were all stuck. She tried the door and found it locked.

  It might be a sensible precaution for a woman who lived alone and found herself saddled with an unwanted visitor—if that visitor had been a man or a physically imposing woman, but Annatje was neither. Dread crept upon her in stages. The Widow had told her to come here, but that had been months ago, and according to Mrs. Duvel, Angela Ferrers had not been here for two years.

  It was morning by the time a key turned in the lock, and Mrs. Duvel appeared. She had a man with her. He was dressed something like Mr. Lindsey, the lawyer, in a suit of finely woven wool: not the kind you loomed at home but the sort you bought at the castle, dyed a deep dark blue. The buckles on his shoes were pinchbeck, and he wore fine silk stockings and a gold ring. His hair was the color of old straw and tucked up under a wig that even Annatje recognized as very old-fashioned and out-of-date.

  He looked Annatje up and down the way the estate manager looked at cattle. He pursed his lips and announced, “A guinea. No more, though,” and Mrs. Duvel asked him to wait in the hall. She closed the door behind her and spoke in her high-pitched voice.

  “My employer does not even pay me enough to keep up this house and manage all of her affairs here, let alone to feed an extra mouth.”

  Annatje stood up. “I did not mean to impose,” she said stiffly. “If you will give me my clothing back, I shall leave.”

  “And go where? You are the Dutch girl the bailiffs from the valley are searching for, aren’t you?”

  Annatje said nothing and Mrs. Duvel smiled her thin-lipped smile. “You owe me for your meal and the shift, girl, for the use of this room, and for my silence.”

  “The Widow will pay you anything I owe.”

  “The Widow isn’t coming back. Most likely she is dead. You can continue to take advantage of my kindness and do as I say by way of recompense, or I will fetch the law and let them know that there is a murderess sheltering under my roof.”

  Mrs. Duvel left. The man in the old-fashioned wig entered once more.

  She lay in the sagging bed on the stale linen and stared up at the ceiling while a stranger handled her the way she had handled sheep when they needed shearing: as a dumb beast. With Gerrit her body had been warmth and light, a source of astonishing joy. With the straw-haired man she was cold. She was meat. There was the dry cold of his fingers pinching her nipples and the wet cold of him striving between her legs, sharp at first and painful and then just a coarse, sandpapery sawing at her soul, to the grating sound of the bed ropes creaking.

  Her body was not her own in that room. That is how she thought of it, how she had to think of it, when she could think of it at all. She had sold her body in exchange for some stale bread and a shift and the fragile hope that Mrs. Duvel would not call the bailiffs down on her for another day. That by staying alive, by enduring, the time would come—the Widow might return or some other chance might arise—when she might save her father.

  On the days when Mrs. Duvel could not find a customer, she did not feed Annatje or bring her water. Annatje had thought it would get easier, but each man was worse than the last: more humiliating, more dehumanizing.

  After a week, Annatje decided that she would prefer to take her chance with the schouts, find some other way to contact the Widow—if she was still alive—and rescue her father. But she discovered that the windows were not just stuck, they were nailed shut, and Mrs. Duvel kept the door locked. When Annatje declared that she would not service another man and bade her call for the bailiffs if she must, the housekeeper simply locked the door and left Annatje alone, with no food or water, for three days.

  On the fourth day the Widow returned.

  Annatje heard the front door open below and close with a soft swish quite uncharacteristic of Mrs. Duvel’s loud comings and goings. She pressed her ear to the floorboards. There was fast movement below, Mrs. Duvel rushing up from the kitchen to meet some visitor, and then voices: the Widow, measured, neutral, inquisitive. Mrs. Duvel: high, fast, nervously self-justifying.

  Annatje listened as feet climbed the stair. Soft steps in light shoes. She had experienced the world outside her room almost entirely through sound for the past week, learning to judge who approached her by the weight of their tread on the stairs, sometimes by the sound of their breath in the hall.

  The key turned in the lock. Annatje jumped up from her listening place on the floor. The Widow entered, though for a moment Annatje did not recognize her. She was not the Dutch mevrouw of the cabbage fields that Annatje had known at Harenwyck. This was an English beauty in Spitalfields silk with fly fringe robings. Her hair was powdered to match the oyster hue of her gown, and she wore a citrine on a ribbon around her neck that was big enough to choke a pigeon. The pale glittering effect of the ensemble lit the shabby room and made her look an angel.

  When she saw Annatje, barefoot in her dirty shift with her unwashed hair, her handsome face became very cold for a moment, then the expression was gone, replaced by a polite mask. Annatje wished she had the trick of that. She feared everything she had lived in the past two weeks was writ plain on her face, including the naked desire, swiftly checked, to throw herself into this woman’s immaculate arms and sob.

  “I am sorry I could not come sooner,” said the Widow. “Word of your father’s circumstances reached me when I was no little distance away, and it took me longer than I would have liked to reach Harenwyck. By that time your father was already in Albany, and so I was obligated to travel there before I could come here.”

  She closed the door, softly, behind her. “I am glad you found me, Annatje, but before all else, I must know exactly what has been taking place in this house during my absence.”

  Annatje did not have the vocabulary to describe everything that had happened, but the Widow supplied the words where hers were lacking, and allowed certain silences to speak for themselves.

  “Wait here for a space,” said the Widow. “The door will not be locked, but I think you might prefer to remain inside the room until I return.”

  The Widow swept out of the chamber in a cloud of silk and gardenias. She left the door slightly ajar, and it took all of Annatje’s will not to bolt from the hated room, down the stairs, and out into the street.

  Instead, she listened to the Widow make her way to the parlor below and ring the bell, and then to Mrs. Duvel’s heels snapping upon the floor. The Widow’s voice this time was clipped. From the rising and falling of her tone, it was apparent that she asked three questions. Annatje could not make them out. Mrs. Duvel’s replies were equally indistinct, but heightened in pitch and intensity—until her words were quite suddenly cut short by the almost musical sound of something breaking, a teacup or some other delicate, resonant object, followed by the soft thump of a heavier object against carpet.

  Then there was silence.

  Annatje backed away from the door and sat upon the unmade bed. She tried to shut out the sounds that followed and their import. If Angela Ferrers was an angel, today she was the kind with a fiery sword.

  The Widow returned a quarter of an hour later and bade Annatje follow her into a room that, though only across the hall, felt as though it belonged to a different house. Painted roses papered the walls. Striped carpets lined the floors. The carved bed was covered in dimity drapes, and there were softly gathered shades filtering the light through the windows.

  “There are
clothes in the cupboards,” said the Widow. “There is water in the basin. You will find soap and tooth powder and most necessities in the drawers. Everything should be serviceable, if suffering from a lack of proper housekeeping. When you feel refreshed, please join me downstairs.”

  Annatje washed and dressed. The soap was scented with gardenias, the Widow’s signature, and Annatje guessed this room was hers. The clothes in the cupboards ranged from Quaker simplicity to damask ostentation. Annatje chose a gown that wrapped around the body and closed with a tie because its shape did not demand stays and her ribs were still bruised from Vim Dijkstra’s “lesson.”

  When she looked at her face in the glass it appeared unmarked—yet completely changed. Hunger had stripped the youthful fat from her cheeks and sharpened her chin. A week on the road had bleached her hair from mouse brown to honey gold. And her eyes would never be the same. They knew.

  She looked, in fact, a different woman.

  She descended the stairs to find the Widow in the back parlor, an elegant room Annatje had only glimpsed on her way in. She was boiling water in a copper kettle over the fire. Everything, including the kettle, appeared very fine but blurred by a layer of grease and dust. The only dust-free surface in the room was the mantel. There was a gilded set of four porcelain vases sitting atop it, rearranged to disguise the fact that a fifth had very recently gone missing. Nothing could hide the ring left behind by the absent vessel. The paint around it had changed color in the sun.

  “Where is Mrs. Duvel?” asked Annatje.

  “Mrs. Duvel is no longer in my employ,” said Angela Ferrers, lifting the brass kettle off its hob.

  “I did not hear her go out.” The sounds of the doors were distinctive. She knew them well. Mrs. Duvel had not left the house.

  “And you will not see her again,” said the Widow.

  She had thought she had crossed a threshold in the room above, entered the adult world irrevocably, but that had been merely an alteration to the body—a violation, yes, but ultimately, as meaningless as cutting her hair or clipping her fingernails. She had killed a man at Harenwyck, but that had been self-defense.

  This was something different.

  “Mrs. Duvel failed me,” said the Widow. “She should have sent word to me immediately when you arrived, but she kept your presence here secret, for her own purposes, her own gain. I cannot forgive that, even if I blame myself. I placed trust in her because she proved, on several occasions, to have few qualms and strong nerves. But her judgment in this matter was sorely lacking.”

  “If Mrs. Duvel did not send word, how did you know that I was here?” asked Annatje.

  “I didn’t. I received news of your father’s arrest from a friend at Harenwyck.”

  Annatje guessed who that friend might be, but she said nothing.

  “It was only once I reached the estate that I learned what happened with the schout. Do you know, the patroon had his whole militia out hunting you, and the army too? I had not thought it likely that you would evade them and survive the journey, but I hoped that you might, so I came here.”

  The Widow lifted the copper kettle off the fire and poured water into a dish of yellow flowers and black kernels. Anna recognized the contents: tansy and moonseed. Mevrouw Zabriskie brewed something like it for the maids at the manor. It didn’t always work, and the effects weren’t pleasant, but it had been more than one girl’s salvation.

  “Is that really necessary?” asked Annatje.

  “The choice is entirely yours,” said the Widow. “And it is not without risks, but the risks of childbirth are greater. Only you can decide how to weigh the odds that you have fallen pregnant this past week against the unpleasantness contained in that cup.”

  “My luck has not been very good of late,” said Annatje, and she drank the sour brew down in one go.

  “You are a very resourceful young woman, Annatje.” The Widow spooned ordinary black tea now, rich and soothing, into a pot. “You have the intelligence and will to become anything you want. You have survived ordeals that would break most others. Now the question before us is what you would like to do next.”

  “I want to help my father.”

  The Widow paused with the teapot in her hand. “Ah. Forgive me, but I thought you knew. That Mrs. Duvel might have . . . Annatje, your father is dead.”

  It couldn’t be. Only two weeks had passed. It could not be more. “But there has been no time for a trial.”

  “There was no trial. They say Bram Hoppe died in jail. He may have died on the very night of his arrest—in any case, I rather doubt he actually reached the jail alive. The patroon could not risk it. They had already buried him by the time I reached Albany. The official cause was a fever, and they tried to keep it quiet as long as possible—to avoid sparking further riots—but they could not keep his death secret for long.”

  Annatje wanted to deny the facts being placed before her, or, failing that, press for details, ask a hundred questions, but she was unable to speak.

  “I am sorry, Annatje. I underestimated Cornelis Van Haren. He has put down the rioters with such brutality, so many arrests and beatings, that Harenwyck and the other manors are unlikely to rise again in this generation. Not unless another Bram Hoppe emerges to lead them, and I do not think we will see your father’s like again soon. I may not be here when the opportunity next arises to finish his work, his revolution, but you could be.”

  “No,” said Annatje flatly. Her father was gone. She would never see Gerrit again. There was nothing for her any longer in the place she’d called home. Nothing but memories. “I am done with the manors. Done with Harenwyck. And I want no part in your intrigues.”

  “Very well.” The Widow did not try to change her mind. “I will do everything in my power to help you build a new life, whether that means clinging to the familiar, or striking out in a new direction. First, though, we must make sure that no one goes looking for Annatje.” She nodded toward a neatly folded pile of clothing sitting on a chair against the wall. Her clogs rested atop it. The ones her father had bought for her just that year. They were as fine as the ones made for weddings, had been much admired at the last cider pressing, their tops carved with snowflakes and stars, their heels adorned with her initials: AH. Annatje Hoppe.

  “Harenwyck,” continued the Widow, “is extraordinary in some ways, but quite ordinary in others. Almost all rural communities have a place that becomes a focal point for despair. Where the failing farmer goes to fling himself from a great height, or the girl with a swollen belly and no husband goes to drown herself and her babe. Where a runaway Dutch girl—father in jail and schouts on her trail—might go to end her misery.”

  “I would never do such a thing. Dum spiro spero.” Gerrit had taught her that. It was Latin. She had always wanted to learn more. “While I breathe, I hope.”

  The Widow smiled, pleased. “You would not, but many—a great many—would. The patroonships are more prone to tragedies, large and small, than most communities, Annatje. And so, I think, there must be such a place at Harenwyck.”

  There was. “The Narrows,” said Annatje. It was where Maarten, her father’s oldest friend, had drowned himself two years ago. After two disastrous harvests, and enough genuine and trumped-up charges—public drunkenness and disorderly conduct—that eviction must have appeared imminent.

  “Harenhoeck,” said the Widow. “Very well. Annatje Hoppe will die at Harenhoeck. Her clogs will be found on the rocks. The schouts will stop looking for her, and everyone will forget the little Dutch girl who was wanted for murder.”

  They were the last tangible reminder she had of her father, but they were just things.

  “I do not think I can ever forget,” said Annatje. She was not speaking of Vim Dijkstra. She felt no remorse for his death, only a cold kind of horror. And she was not thinking of the men upstairs, though she wanted to leave that house and never set foo
t in it again. She was thinking of her father, and her last glimpse of him, and his plea to her.

  “Never forget,” said the Widow. “But never look back. The only way from here is forward. There are Dutch communities in the Jerseys where you might feel at home, pleasant towns with good freeholds. With a few small alterations to your appearance and some well-placed introductions, we could find you a husband.”

  “No.”

  “Not all men are like the ones who frequented this house,” said Angela Ferrers.

  “I know.” Some were like Gerrit. Or perhaps only Gerrit was like Gerrit. Her memories of their breathless explorations in the barn had survived miraculously untouched, separate and apart from the sordid things she had experienced upstairs. She would cherish those memories. “But I have no desire to farm again, or keep house. I like books. And learning things. Maps. And art. Latin,” she added impulsively.

  The Widow considered. “You could teach girls. You would also need to learn the feminine accomplishments, which sadly do not include Latin and geography, but fancy needlework and painting flowers on velvet are easy enough subjects to master if you put your mind to it. And as long as you offer tuition in these areas, there will be scope for you to teach other, more enriching subjects as well.”

  The Widow put her considerable resources to work building Annatje a new identity and a new life. She hired tutors to eradicate her Dutch accent and perfect her English, to teach her French, Latin, even a little Greek. There were dancing, drawing, and painting masters, the sort who usually taught the mistresses and bastards of wealthy men and so understood the value of discretion.

  There was one woman who was not a tutor, but a genuine member of the class Annatje was learning to ape, who came to teach her needlework. She brought a roll of canvases with her, some finished, some barely started, all of them the sort of large landscape compositions meant to grace a fireplace mantel. Her family name was never spoken, but Hannah appeared to be a genuine friend of the Widow, and they all took tea together after lessons, Annatje, the Widow, and this lady. It was Annatje’s first real experience of the easy feminine companionship she later found at the school, and it was a balm to her soul.