The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  There were other lessons, in subjects that would never be learned or taught in any finishing school, and Annatje had studied them gladly as well, because she was determined to follow the Widow in one respect at least: she would never be anyone’s victim again.

  At the end of six months’ time, the silkwork picture that would ensure her success as a finishing school teacher was complete.

  • • •

  “And so Annatje became Anna,” she finished. “I taught privately for three years and then opened the academy. The sampler hangs above the fireplace where I teach my girls needlework. The Widow gave me money to buy the house, but I paid it back soon enough. I had no intention of ever returning to Harenwyck until the Widow’s successor turned up at my door.”

  Anna had never told anyone all of it. Not even Angela Ferrers. Not like that. To the Widow she had related a series of events, as though they had happened to someone else. Emotion, she had soon learned, carried no weight with that formidable woman.

  That did not make it weightless. Quite the contrary. And she had borne that burden with her for so many years—an indissoluble mix of outrage, shame, and grief—that she had forgotten what it was like to be free of secrets. Now, no matter what Gerrit thought, even if he turned from her in disgust, the burden was lifted. The only person whose reaction really mattered to her knew all.

  Sixteen

  Gerrit had known she was remarkable from the first time he saw her, clomping across the lawn in her yellow clogs. Her sharp gray eyes had taken in everything around her and had helped to open his own.

  They were fixed on him now, and he realized that she was waiting for him to say something. Almost any words he could think of would sound like consolation, or worse, absolution, and she did not need that from him. He wanted to tell her that she was the most remarkable woman he had ever met—because she was—but that would sound patronizing. And he wanted her to know how damned grateful he was to her for surviving—so they could be together now—but that sounded selfish.

  Finally he said, “This is the point where Barbara Fenton’s Dutchman should have set his chin and sworn vengeance against all her enemies. But you’ve already taken care of Vim Dijkstra, and my father found his own way to dusty death. Your Widow made a neater job of Mrs. Duvel than I likely would have. Have you no enemies left?”

  She looked him in the eye and said, “John André.”

  He opened his mouth to make some retort, but her expression told him that she was serious. “Annatje—”

  “He was responsible for the Widow’s murder. I would not be alive if not for her. But I do not ask that you kill him—I do not even want that on either of our hands. I ask only that you walk away from him.”

  “That is the one thing I cannot do.”

  “You can’t trust him, Gerrit. Not when the stakes are your very life.”

  “I don’t need to trust him, but I do need his six hundred men. Annatje, ask me for something else. Anything else.”

  “I want you safe, Gerrit. I have lost everyone who was dear to me to this place. I will not let Harenwyck destroy you too.”

  He believed her. “I have it the wrong way around, don’t I? It isn’t you who needs saving from villains—excepting my brother—it’s me. You’ve already faced all your demons and lived to tell the tale.”

  “Not all of them.”

  She took a step closer. Her clogs gave her petite frame a few extra inches of height, but she still had to stand on tiptoe to press her lips to his. They were warm and soft. He set his hands lightly on her shoulders, exquisitely aware, after all she had told him, of how she might feel about men who took instead of offered, of all the ways he could do this wrong.

  “Annatje, has there been no one else, in all this time?”

  “No one.” Her hands slid up his chest. Her every touch set him on fire, but it must be her touches that led them. He understood that. “Unless you count your brother kissing me just now in the arbor.”

  “I must rethink killing him,” said Gerrit. “Have I any other rivals?”

  She laughed. It was a musical sound. He had not heard it since the last time they had stood in this place. “The Widow tried. Oh, how she tried. She told me it was like falling off a horse, and that I must get back up or I would never be able to ride.” A giggle escaped her soft lips. “She was a subtle woman, but I could always spot the paramours she sent my way from a mile off. I did not want any of them. I felt nothing in that way, until I came back here. Do you understand?”

  She took a step closer and fitted her body to his, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. He did understand. He had not been celibate since their parting, but physical desire had come uncoupled from tenderness, from love, until now. He took her hands in his, kissed them, and tugged her down the grassy slope to the hidden grove where the oldest tombs lay.

  • • •

  The tombs were built from the same red sandstone as the gates of Harenwyck, and Anna knew that here she would cross another threshold. The men and women lying quiet beneath this earth had passed from life to death, but Anna would pass from death to life here and be reborn.

  She remembered the broad sepulchre on which they used to lie. It was as wide as a bed, its inscription long since worn away by the rain. Only the supple carving along the edge remained. The moonlight made the peeling layers of sandstone look stitched together, like sheets of scuffed red leather.

  Anna hitched herself on top of the stone and tugged Gerrit close. He kissed her on the mouth, along the edge of her jaw, in the hollow of her neck. She expected him to slide onto the stone beside her, to tangle limbs with limbs as they used to do, but he surprised her by dropping to his knees and folding back her skirts.

  She knew what he proposed to do, and was unsurprised to find she liked the idea very much. “They must be teaching far more than Calvinism at Leiden these days,” she said.

  “They have a telescope there for one thing, but I am hopeful that I can make you see stars without it.”

  He was right. He kissed his way up her thigh, and when he put his mouth on her it was with delicate skill. More than that: He knew, from intimate acquaintance, no matter that it was years ago, exactly how to read her. He knew how her muscles twitched, how her belly quivered, how her breath hitched when she was climbing, when she was close. He knew how to draw out her pleasure, and the low rumbling in the back of his throat indicated that what he was doing pleased him almost as much as it did her.

  The crisis left her dizzy but excited, reaching for him with eager hands. When he climbed up on the stone beside her, he too was trembling, but he let her guide him onto his back and moaned when she freed him from his breeches and straddled him. They moved together like that, slickness against hardness, until they found where they fit, until they could strive together for what they both sought.

  Afterward they lay tangled there, heartbeats slowing, bodies cooling, and he said, “If we were married, we could do this every night. Perhaps in a bed. Possibly that would be softer.”

  “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Yes. Unless it is against your leveler principles. In which case I’m asking you to live in sin with me. Both options include a bed.”

  It was not against her leveler principles. It was the daydream, secret and forbidden, she had never shared with anyone: to marry Gerrit Van Haren, the boy who had brought her cookies and maps and books and kissed her beneath the stars. It had been impossible then. She’d understood that even before her mother had beaten her for her foolishness. It was just as impossible now, for entirely different but equally compelling reasons. For a few seconds, though, while his words still lingered in the air, she could stand in the space between the question and the answer and imagine a future with this man who was friend, confidant, and lover.

  The words stuck in her throat. She forced them out. “I’m sorry, Gerrit, but the answer to both questions is n
o.”

  He was in no position to marry anyone, and neither was she. The nephew of the man she had killed was skulking somewhere about the estate, perhaps preparing to expose her. There was also the matter of the crafty Rebel spy mistress who had blackmailed her into coming to Harenwyck in the first place, and could set the bailiffs on her at any time.

  But those were not the grounds on which she was refusing him. She was refusing him because it was the only leverage she had to make him see reason. “You won’t live long enough to marry me,” she said, “if you go on distributing freeholds to the tenants. Your father got away with murder because that sort of murder was in every landlord’s interests. They will crush you, Gerrit, as they crushed my father.”

  He rolled off the stone and began buttoning his breeches. “Surely, after everything you have suffered, you must see that so much power, over the lives of so many, should not rest in the hands of one man.”

  She helped him tuck in his shirt before sliding off the stone and straightening her petticoats. “Your brother is not the old patroon.” She had been convinced that her story could persuade him.

  “No. Andries is not like my father. Andries is not even a truly bad man. It is the order of things, the system, that is wrong, and I mean to destroy it, Annatje. To finish the work your father started before mine had him murdered.”

  She took his hand and began leading him back up the hill to the church. “Like Gaius Gracchus finished his brother Tiberius’ work? If you do that, your story will end the same way. Gerrit, let your brother have Harenwyck. Let him give it to the Americans. Let them break up the estates. Do that and there is nothing—nothing at all—to stop us leaving here together.”

  “The Americans have put a Virginia planter—a slaveholder and landlord of vast acreage—in command of their army. They will never break up the manors, Annatje. The men in Congress are not levelers like your father. They want different men in power, but they do not want to change how that power is concentrated. If the patroonships are to be dissolved, someone other than Washington and Congress will have to do it.”

  They reached the top of the rise where the smaller graves stood in the shadow of the church. “You may be right, but why, Gerrit, must that someone be you?”

  “For years I thought that I could never be free of Harenwyck, that it would cast its shadow over my life so long as the tenant system kept so many farmers yoked to its plow. I could never see past that, though, past the moment when the estate was divided into freeholds and sold. I could not picture myself living in that absurd mansion, or anywhere else for that matter, and trying to raise Grietje and Jannetje on my own. But I can now, because of you.”

  “Gerrit, I am a murderess. If I do not deliver Harenwyck to the Rebels, that fact is bound to come out, and it will taint every young woman who has passed through my school. You cannot possibly want me educating, let alone raising your daughters now. I am the ghost of Barbara Fenton, haunting Harenwyck in my tattered finery.”

  “You are not Barbara Fenton. She killed in cold blood, out of revenge. You killed in self-defense. A brute of a man who beat you, then threatened you with a naked blade. It is not at all the same thing. And you did not choose what happened to you in that house.”

  “I could have—I should have—fought and run screaming out the door.”

  “And died in jail just like your father, as you almost certainly would have. If you even escaped Dijkstra and that house at all.”

  He took her hands in his. “Annatje, it would not matter to me if you had sold yourself on the street for a scrap of bread. You did what you had to do to survive, and I am glad of it, because we can finally be together. I want us to make the kind of life we talked and dreamed of when we were young, to plot it with books and maps and charts of the stars. But I cannot wake up next to you, Annatje, knowing that Harenwyck abides. Not when my father had yours butchered to preserve it.”

  “You see? I told you she was going to meet him.”

  The small piping voice came from the other side of the churchyard, and it belonged to Gerrit’s younger daughter. Her eyebrows were roof high in smug satisfaction, while Jannetje pouted beside her, arms crossed over her chest in vexation, or disappointment.

  “You were right,” said Jannetje. She stamped forward and looked up at her father, her little chin raised pugnaciously. “Why haven’t you come to see us?”

  For a moment Gerrit looked stricken. Then he said, “I have not come to visit you because I did not want you to have to lie to your uncle about it, but I am very glad to see you now.” He dropped to his knees and opened his arms, and both girls flew into his embrace without hesitation.

  They were a study in contrasts, Gerrit and his daughters, golden-haired and fair where he was dark. He hugged them tight, and Anna could see how much it cost him to let them go at last, knowing he could not keep them with him.

  “Grietje, Jannetje, you must not tell Uncle Andries that you saw me, or that Miss Winters was here with me. Do you understand?”

  “Uncle Andries says you are trying to destroy Harenwyck,” said Jannetje.

  “He is right. I mean to divide up the estate, and sell the tenants their land, so the men and women who do all the work can keep the fruits of their labor. The way it is now isn’t fair. Soon you will be old enough to see that when you visit the castle and the farms.”

  “Uncle Andries says you think it’s wrong for people to be rich,” said Grietje.

  “It isn’t wrong to be rich, if you come by your wealth honestly, through hard work, but the leases at Harenwyck are designed to make us rich by keeping hardworking men poor. And that is wrong.”

  “But I don’t want to leave our house,” said Grietje.

  “We don’t have to sell the manor house. Or the farms that are part of the Van Haren manor proper. But two hundred thousand acres is too much land for any man to claim and control. Such avarice has been the downfall of empires before.”

  “Like Rome?” asked Jannetje.

  “Just like Rome,” agreed Gerrit.

  “We have been reading Mr. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,” explained Anna.

  “It is not as boring as it sounds,” said Jannetje. “But it is not as good as pirates.”

  “Reverend Blauvelt would tell you that Gibbon was worse than pirates,” said Gerrit, instantly elevating the Decline to the twins’ new favorite book in the library. “He lays the blame for the fall of the empire squarely on Christianity, though I think he would acknowledge that the latifundia, the Roman patroonships, played a strong supporting role.”

  Anna suspected that Gerrit was right about the reverend. She had sat through only one of his sermons, and found him to be even more of a stick than the divine who had presided over the church in her childhood.

  Gerrit made the girls promise to say nothing of their meeting to Mrs. Buys and return to the housekeeper before they were missed. “It would be unfair to ask her to lie for you,” admonished Gerrit. And the patroon would have only so much patience with her loyalty to his renegade brother.

  When they were gone, he turned to Anna and said, “You are very good for them.”

  “And you love them,” said Anna, “even though they aren’t yours.”

  His face told her that it was still a raw wound. “Did someone tell you?”

  “No. I guessed.” Her voice dropped to a soft sympathetic tone. “Gerrit, they do not look like you.”

  “They look like all the Van Harens except me,” said Gerrit. “My father, who never had much use for any of his own children, Elizabeth, Andries, and myself included, adored them. He took such delight in the girls, in fact, was always so smug about them, that I think he knew Andries had cuckolded me. It was like a private joke to him. He never much cared for me, and my happiness meant less than nothing to him. It was Harenwyck he loved. Sophia, bringing her father’s floating mills, was meant to ensure that Harenwyck’
s wealth and influence continued to grow. He didn’t care a fig if the girls were mine or my brother’s. All he really wanted was to be certain that heirs of his blood would inherit the estate.”

  Anna suspected that old Cornelis had been even more conniving than Gerrit realized, but she had no proof. She wasn’t sure she wanted any.

  “Why did you marry her, Gerrit?”

  “Because you were dead, or so I believed. And she hung on my every word, and I thought she liked me, came to think she loved me. She didn’t. Not really. She was already a fixture at Harenwyck by the time I came home from Leiden. Her father and mine had by then come to some kind of bargain. One that was more to old Cornelis’ benefit than anyone else’s, if the sourness of Sophia’s father was anything to go by. He did not seem exactly pleased with the situation, but he was committed to the match. I asked Sophia once why she did it—why she let me, made me, believe she loved me—and she said that she didn’t have any choice.”

  “Many women don’t,” said Anna.

  “Should it matter whether Grietje and Jannete are my daughters or my nieces? They were the only good thing to come out of my marriage, and they are not to blame for the sins and weaknesses of their parents.”

  “It shouldn’t matter,” said Anna. “They are good girls. A pleasure to teach. I shared our old atlas with them.”

  “Is it still there?” he asked, brightening. “Up in that mean little cabinet of books that passes for a library?”

  “A little older,” she said, “but still there. Like the klompen maker.”

  “Salomon Beck marched on the manor with your father. He can be trusted. The Dijkstras, unfortunately, cannot. Jan has not returned to the blockhouse. It is possible that he has left because he sees me as a traitor and has no desire to fight for the British.”