The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  “But you do not think that is why he has left.”

  “No. He hasn’t been seen about the manor for days. I do not know what he is plotting, but it is nothing good. We have moved our camp, in case he is planning to betray us, but there is nothing I can do to protect you if you remain at the manor house.”

  “Are you suggesting I play Maid Marian with you in the woods?”

  “Not in the woods with me, no. My father was never able to make his scheme for floating mills at the Narrows work, but he built three of them, anchored off Harenhoeck. We are camped in one of them now. It is habitable, but that’s not where I’d like to see you either.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Annatje, my brother likes you. That much is obvious. Convince him to let you take the girls to New York. At least until I can deal with Jan and the Dijkstras.”

  “I can’t leave. Not yet. Not until I have persuaded your brother to give Harenhoeck and the Narrows to the Americans, or they will expose me as Annatje Hoppe, murderess. And if you go on robbing his coaches you will push Andries right into the arms of the British.”

  “And you into his?”

  He was not being playful now. She could see how deep the hurt went, how betrayed he still felt by his brother.

  “I am not Sophia, Gerrit. I have always wished we had been reckless together in the barn that year, that you had been my first, and not some stranger.”

  “Our firsts don’t matter,” said Gerrit taking her into his arms. “It is our lasts I care about, Annatje, and as soon as I have Harenwyck in my possession, I swear that we will be each other’s.”

  • • •

  The great manor house was dark and quiet when Anna returned. Only a single lantern burned beside the kitchen door. She let herself in with the key Mrs. Buys had given her and felt her way through the dark up the stairs to the main hall. In the wan starlight that filtered through the windows, painted patroons stared down at her in judgment. Good and bad, the lords of Harenwyck were all immortalized here, but nowhere on the estate was even the crudest memorial that her father had ever lived.

  There was light coming from the parlor door at the foot of the stairs, and Anna was surprised to find Andries, still in his velvet suit, sitting in a chair before a fire that was almost burned out. The patroon looked up when Anna appeared on the threshold, and his pale blue eyes searched hers as though seeing her for the first time.

  “Apparently Barbara Fenton is not the only ghost haunting Harenwyck,” he said.

  She did not follow his meaning. She stepped inside the room, but he remained seated. If she had not come to know him this last week, she would have taken it for more of his hauteur, but she recognized it now for what it was: admission into a familial sort of intimacy he shared with only a select few.

  “I received unexpected visitors tonight. Rie Dijkstra and her extended clan.”

  The room was still warm from the dying coals, but suddenly Anna felt very cold. “Who are they?” she asked blandly.

  He ignored her question.

  “They came to me with an extraordinary offer. Rie’s nephew Jan is part of my brother’s band of outlaws. But you know that already. What you don’t know is that young Jan is willing to deliver me Gerrit in exchange for the murderer who killed his uncle. In exchange for you, Annatje.”

  Seventeen

  Anna took another step into the room. Forward. “What did you say to her?”

  Andries Van Haren looked up. “Nothing, at first. The idea sounded so outlandish, but of course, it explained everything: how you knew Harenwyck well enough to escape from my brother and find the manor in the middle of the night; why the Americans sent you. They needed someone who could understand this place. And I had never really met you when we were children. Elizabeth and I didn’t pay any attention to the tenants. Our father’s dutiful children, in this at least. We simply weren’t raised to see you as people. Gerrit did, though, and our father hated that. Old Cornelis was already difficult enough—no, impossible—to please.”

  He sounded distant, caught fast in the grip of the past, but it was the present that Annatje feared. “So what did you tell Rie Dijkstra?”

  The patroon smiled wryly. “I relied upon my upbringing. My father’s example proves useful on occasion. I told her that I ought to have her whipped for her insolence, that she had forgotten her place, that she had no business slandering her betters. I told her that Miss Winters of Miss Winters’ Academy was a well-known lady in New York, a genteel Englishwoman with unassailable credentials and a verifiable family pedigree.”

  Anna realized that she had been holding her breath. Relief flooded her. Evidently Andries had given a performance worthy of the old patroon—for her.

  “Was she convinced?”

  “No. She saw you at the cider pressing tonight and said she would swear in a court of law that you are Annatje Hoppe. I threatened to revoke her pension if she dared commit such an offense against a member of my household.”

  “But obviously you know that she is right. I am Annatje Hoppe. Why are you protecting me?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  He wanted her. She knew that. But he was not using her predicament just as leverage to bed her. And he was too focused, to driven, too intent on Harenwyck’s future to jeopardize it.

  “Flattering,” she said, “but not the whole truth. I think the time for lies is past, don’t you?”

  He turned from her to look into the fire, and she realized the patroon of Harenwyck, this proud, haughty man, could not meet her eyes. “For the same reason,” he said, staring into the flames, “that I am trying to keep the estate out of Gerrit’s hands and hold the manor together. To make amends for the sins of my father. I was there that night, the night your father died.”

  The world turned upside down. Anna felt for the chair opposite Andries to steady her. “How? Why?”

  The patroon poked at the blaze and stared into it as though the fireback were a window to the past. “Gerrit was always a disappointment to our father. Old Cornelis thought that his heir was weak. A dreamer. Unsuited and unfit to be patroon. No son of his, he used to say. You can imagine how much our mother appreciated that.

  “My father was determined to make sure that I didn’t turn out soft like his firstborn. The night Bram Hoppe was arrested he rousted me out of bed. He had one of the schouts with him. They made me get dressed and saddle my horse and then follow the schout into the woods. He took me to the clearing beyond the old sandpit. The bailiffs had a man there, and I thought from afar that he was standing on his tiptoes, and that everyone was playing some kind of madcap game.

  “I had never set eyes on this man before. When I got up close I saw that he had a noose around his neck, and my father’s men were taking turns raising and lowering him from a tree. Every time they let him down they set upon him, beat him again. His face was so battered. So misshapen from the punishment that to this day I do not know what he looked like. Not really.”

  The room spun around her. She could not tell which way was up. Strong arms caught and lifted her and the spinning became far, far worse as she was carried across the room to something smooth and soft. The sofa. It had to be the sofa, but she could not see it because her vision would not answer. When at last the room stopped swimming she was looking up into the concerned face of Andries Van Haren.

  “I am sorry,” he said, kneeling beside the sofa. “That was thoughtless of me. I have never told anyone about that night before, not even Sophia. I was so ashamed. Ashamed that I stood there and did nothing, that I just watched a man die.”

  “How old were you?” asked Annatje.

  “Fourteen.”

  “There was nothing you could have done.” But Annatje thought about all the things she could have—should have—done if she’d been the woman then that the Widow made her afterward. Forward.

  “It was not just
that night,” said Andries. “Not something I could put behind me and forget. There were more than a dozen men in that glade with me. I never saw Bram Hoppe’s face, but the faces of his killers were printed on my memory. For nearly a decade, while my father was still alive, I saw them on the estate, at the castle buying seed, working on the new house, attending church, carrying their children on their shoulders as though they were blameless men. Murderers, all of them, hiding behind the authority of a murderous patroon. Every time I encountered one of them, it reminded me of my own cowardice. When my father died I evicted all of them, on one pretext or another, with the help of Mr. Ten Broeck. I did not move against the Dijkstras because Vim was already dead, at your hands, and I did not think that his relict and family should have to pay for his sins. A mistake,” he said rising, “soon to be corrected.”

  “If you evict them now they will take it as proof that I really am Annatje Hoppe.” She shivered, whether from the thought of the mob or the chill of the far side of the room she could not say.

  “They are already convinced it is you,” said the patroon, rising and crossing to the fire. “And I don’t believe they are much interested in proof, apart from the facile kind that will raise and move a mob. I cannot afford that now, not with the manor cut off from New York by my brother, Gerrit. There will be no rough music. Rie and Ida Dijkstra will be taken to the ferry first thing in the morning and banished from Harenwyck.”

  Anna watched him kneel beside the hearth and methodically begin to layer wood atop the dying coals. He was saving her life, at no small cost to his ambition. “You will lose your best chance to catch your brother and put an end to his rebellion,” said Anna. Every step she took, it seemed, dragged her further away from her goals of delivering Harenwyck to the Rebels and extricating Gerrit from danger.

  “If I cannot deal with my brother without the connivance of a clan of bloody-minded extortionists like the Dijkstras, then I do not deserve to be patroon.”

  “What about Gerrit? Are you going to warn him that there is a traitor in his midst?”

  Andries Van Haren paused in his labor and became perfectly still. The room became pin-drop silent. “Is he your lover?” asked Andries.

  He was protecting her at great cost to himself. He deserved the truth. The Widow would have accounted her a fool. “Yes. I love Gerrit.” She found an unexpected joy and wonder in speaking the words, breaking a silence she had kept for more than a decade.

  “I suppose he thinks that is poetic justice, then, because he believes that I cuckolded him.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. Never. Not even after Gerrit left Sophia here alone and miserable, married to a man who did not want her. For the past eleven years my brother has steadfastly believed me to be guilty of a sin I did not commit. That is between us. But he is jeopardizing everything I am trying to accomplish at Harenwyck. I may not be the profligate sinner he paints me as, but neither, as I told you, am I a plaster saint. He has surrounded himself with a band of opportunistic ruffians for the dubious purpose of wresting the estate away from me. Brother Gerrit can watch his own back.”

  • • •

  The girls slept late the next morning. Anna did not sleep at all. She spent the night lying in her great carved bed and staring up at the canopy. She must write to Kate Grey. She had to say something of Gerrit and the situation on the estate. The patroon’s brother has formed an alliance with the British. If he raises two hundred men Tarleton will invade the estate with six hundred and the narrows at Harenhoeck will be lost to you.

  But the patroon’s brother was the man she had loved since girlhood, and delivering such a missive was as good as aiming a pistol at his heart. And time was running out. News of the freeholds Gerrit was offering would spread like wildfire. Very soon, Gerrit would likely have his men and the British would invade Harenwyck—unless she could somehow convince him to reconcile with his brother, Andries. The key to that, she suspected, lay at the old manor.

  The silence of the house became oppressive as the morning stretched without the bustle of cooks and housemaids. Everyone was sleeping off a night of indulgence—except Anna. The whole plantation was likely to be in the same state of torpor, which meant that Anna could return to the Van Harens’ old manor unseen.

  It didn’t take her long to reach the abandoned house, and she did not meet a soul on the road or along the path. Only here and there did a chimney smoke, tentative puffs that spoke of fires too long banked being brought to life.

  It was the deep porches that made the house look so forbidding, Anna decided. When she had been a girl the manor had been a site of ceaseless activity. The slaves in the kitchens had come and gone from the great double doors below the porch, and the air had always been perfumed with cook fires. Anna remembered the flowers in pots that used to line the stairs, the fruit drying in the sun.

  All that was gone now, and only a pile of broken crockery remained heaped against one wall as a reminder of the life that had once bloomed there. Anna climbed the stairs. They creaked, but the sound was not as loud as it had seemed by night, drowned by the music of crickets and birdsong.

  Inside, the sad dining room was just as she had last seen it, mouse-eaten chairs askew and a thick blanket of dust covering the ugly table. The parlor opposite was prettier than she had realized, with the delicate green paneling glowing softly in the morning sun.

  The doed koecks were gone. The table had been dusted. The wax from that lone candle had been removed. The item she had come for was still there, though. Sophia Van Haren had been an unhappy bride, but before she became the lady of Harenwyck, she had been a schoolgirl like Mary Phillips and Becky Putnam and all the others Anna had taught. And because the natural inclinations of the human heart were so often at odds with what was expected of genteel young women, they all had secrets, things they knew they must not share with the world. Desires, undertakings, deeds that were of the greatest moment to them. Girls like Becky Putnam kept love letters—unless they were lucky enough to have teachers like Anna who insisted they be burned—like a miser his gold, because tangible things such as ink and paper were sometimes the only refuge for, and reflection of, their true selves.

  If Anna was right about Sophia Van Haren, she would not have gone to her grave without memorializing the truth that had defined her adult life: the name of the man who had fathered her daughters.

  The clumsily embroidered fire screen was covered in a thick layer of dust. Anna lifted the framed embroidery off its pole and laid it on the game table. The canvas should have slipped out the top of the frame easily—had it been professionally mounted—but the fabric had never been stretched tight and humidity had caused it to bunch and become stuck in the frame. Anna used the knife she had brought to pry the mitered corners of the frame apart and release the silkwork picture.

  She peeled the picture from the card to which it had been glued, and found what she was looking for behind the canvas. The document was written in a girlish hand, the sort of round, looping script that Anna taught her own charges. It was signed in the same hand, by Gerrit’s late wife, Sophia; and witnessed by Gerrit’s missing sister, Elizabeth Van Haren, long after that lady had supposedly fled Harenwyck. There was another name as well, one that was unfamiliar to Anna: Lettitje Bronck. Her halting, cramped signature suggested she had little education and was unused to writing.

  Anna folded the mildewed document and tucked it safely in her pocket. She knew where she must go now, but she needed to make a thorough investigation of the rest of the house first.

  There were three empty chambers at the back of the ground floor that had once been bedrooms—the two grander having once boasted tester beds, by the marks on the bare floors—but nothing of their furnishings remained. Another parlor behind the dining room had also been efficiently stripped.

  Anna lit a taper she had brought with her to descend to the kitchens, and when she opened the shutters, she cou
ld see that the thrifty servants had left nothing useful behind. At least not on the shelves. But there was a cord of seasoned wood stacked next to the hearth and a pile of ashes inside the yawning bake oven. The bricks, as she had suspected, were still warm.

  Someone was using the bake oven here; someone who did not much fear the patroon’s displeasure. Few tenant cottages had bake ovens, it was true, but few tenants would be bold enough to trespass in the patroon’s house for the pleasure of a hot, crusty loaf. Even fewer would dare use the front door when they came to borrow the oven, but the double doors from the kitchen to the yard were barred from the inside with balks of timber.

  Anna knew the path through the woods, but she had never taken it. Her mother had forbidden her to consult Mevrouw Zabriskie. Mehitable had called the Pole a witch and worse. Anna knew that other girls on the estate used her cure for cramps, and she’d had it once herself: a musty-smelling tea brewed from lady’s mantle, lovage, and valerian. It had tasted foul, but it had worked in less than an hour.

  There were other reasons to visit Mevrouw Zabriskie. She told fortunes and served as a midwife, and sometimes she could help if you didn’t want to have a baby. Anna suspected that the old patroon had tolerated her presence on the estate for that very reason. The new patroon, Anna had decided, had his own reasons.

  Mevrouw Zabriskie’s hut looked the part of a witch’s cottage. It was one of the only structures at Harenwyck not built of stone or brick. The steep thatched roof gave it an antique air, and the drying racks outside—heavy with bundles of herbs and other things Anna did not care to examine too closely—added to the clearing’s eldritch aura. And drying in trays on the ground were the moonseed berries she had taught Grietje and Jannetje to tell apart from wild grapes. In the right dose, it could have medicinal properties. In the wrong dose, it killed.

  The ill-fitting batten door to the cottage stood open. It took a moment for Anna’s eyes to adjust to the dark interior, but once they had she saw that apart from the building material and more cramped dimensions, it was much like that of any other cottage on the manor: a single room with a jambless hearth and a sleeping loft above. The walls, however, were lined with bottles of dried herbs and chicken feet, tiny bones and nameless powders, and there was a crude stone mortar and pestle on the table. Only the cheerful chintz curtain hanging from the chimney rather undermined the unsavory aspect of the room.