The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  The door to the small office he kept behind his bedroom was ajar and light spilled out. Anna could hear voices speaking in Dutch.

  “I do not like it, sir,” said Mr. Ten Broeck.

  “The tenants always start work late the day after the cider pressing,” said the patroon dismissively.

  Not this late, thought Anna. Never this late.

  “The grooms have not come to work at all. I had to saddle my own horse to tour the estate. Only the home farms show any signs of activity, the ones within a short ride of the manor, the holdings of your schouts and militia and favored tenants. The ones who are indebted to you for their prosperity. Go farther than a mile or two from the house, and there is no one stirring.”

  “You are reading too much into a night of overindulgence,” said the patroon. “I am not prepared to believe that it is the End of Days just because my tenants have taken the morning off.”

  “This is your brother’s doing,” said Ten Broeck. “One of the footmen said he was at the cider pressing last night. He was promising the tenants freeholds.”

  “And how many of them,” said the patroon reasonably, “can afford to buy their land? Precious few.”

  “He is not selling them,” said Ten Broeck. “He is giving them away in exchange for service in his so-called militia. If they march on the house, we may not have the men to repulse them. If they march on the house and come with wives and children in tow, armed with scythes and pitchforks, the men we do have will not fire into such a crowd.”

  The patroon said nothing at first. Then, his voice flat: “What are you suggesting I do, Ten Broeck?”

  “You have already tried the Americans. Their promises are empty. They do not have the men or the powder to spare us. Declare for the British. Take their oath. There is a British warship anchored near the Narrows. Send word to it. Act now, before it is too late to preserve the patroonship.”

  “How is it that you know about this British warship, Ten Broeck, while I do not?”

  “You have been unreceptive to British overtures, Mr. Van Haren, so I stopped putting them before you. But I have kept the channels of communication open in your name, in case it came to this. There is a certain Major André. He is said to be thick with General Clinton, his deputy adjutant general, and acts with his authority. His offers of aid are generous. Six hundred men to fight your brother, if you but take the oath.”

  It was the same offer John André had made to Gerrit at the Halve Maen, and Anna had no doubt that the British agent would treat equally—fair or foul—anyone who secured him control of Harenhoeck and the Narrows.

  “Mr. Ten Broeck,” began the patroon, but just then Anna heard feet upon the stairs behind her. Someone was coming. She smoothed her skirts and knocked upon the half-open door.

  “Come,” said the patroon.

  Anna entered. The patroon smiled when he saw her and rose. Ten Broeck popped up guiltily as well.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked, in English.

  “The servants get a late start the day after the cider pressing,” said the patroon, forestalling Ten Broeck from pressing his arguments. “A local tradition. I am sorry if you’ve been inconvenienced. Mrs. Buys is short staffed. I told my nieces to make up their own fires.”

  “They are too engrossed in Gibbon to be bothered by the chill,” said Anna.

  “Are they?” asked the patroon. “Perhaps the End Times have come.”

  “Not quite, but it will seem so when we have run through all the books in that library. And I can well see to my own fire.”

  “No need, Miss Winters,” said the patroon. “I will do it for you. I wanted a word anyway, about your supplies from New York.”

  Mr. Ten Broeck did not look pleased when the patroon abandoned him to lead Anna down the hall. He made up the fire in her room and then drew her away from the door to speak in low tones.

  “I do not want to alarm you unnecessarily, but it would be best if you kept the girls inside for the rest of the day. I dispatched schouts to evict Rie and Ida Dijkstra this morning, but they have not yet returned from the ferry. It is most likely just a product of the general lassitude. If the ferry master was not yet up they might have had to wait, and depending on the delay, they may elect to remain at the landing until morning. In any case, until they report back, I’d prefer that you and the girls stay close to the house.”

  “I understand,” she said. But she promised nothing, because she knew she would not be able to honor such an undertaking if Andries sent for André and Tarleton. She would need to warn Gerrit. And she would be obligated to alert the Americans.

  In the morning Anna woke to find her room cold, and no tea waiting for her. She dressed and went downstairs to find Mrs. Buys alone in the kitchen, cutting up a chicken.

  “Mr. Ten Broeck says this is Gerrit’s doing, but I do not credit it,” said Mrs. Buys. “He wants the patroonship, right enough, but he’s no plotter, and he would not risk the dear girls’ safety with a riot.”

  Mrs. Buys hacked a wing off the chicken and sent a morsel of raw meat flying onto the floor. A black ball of fur streaked from the hearth to catch it. Scrappy. It was a small comfort to Anna to find someone unmoved by the present tensions, but her attempt to scratch the kitten behind one ear was met by a tiny, proprietorial growl.

  “Everyone wants something to have and to hold,” said Anna, sparing a last look at Scrappy and her prize. “But I don’t believe Gerrit would do anything to put the girls in jeopardy.” Not intentionally, anyway. But he might make the mistake the British and the Americans were making. He might think the estate—or the mob—could be controlled by one man.

  Anna helped Mrs. Buys for an hour. She took her tea in the kitchen and kept the girls inside. She had the stiff board and the paper she had bought at the castle store, and she showed the girls how to cut stencils for theorem paintings: the cheerful sort with fruit and flowers, and the doleful kind for memorial pictures, the gravestones and urns and anchors.

  “But won’t they all look the same if you’re just making your picture up out of stencils?” asked Grietje.

  “No,” said Anna. “The stencils are only outlines. No one can tell you how to combine them, where to put the apple and where to place the pear, how to color or shade them, whether the fruit is soft and ripe or hard and green. That’s why no two ever look alike.”

  The girls became engrossed in their projects and Anna cut a stencil just for herself, one to mask her long-deferred letter to Kate Grey, when she knew what she must write in it.

  After the midday meal Mr. Ten Broeck arrived with his family in a cart piled high with furnishings, clothes, dishes, silver, a very excited dog, and what appeared to be every small thing of value from his home. His slave had driven them.

  “We saw lights in the field last night,” explained Ten Broeck. “It is starting.”

  Andries came home from his morning tour of the manor with a dozen men carrying muskets and rifles. He positioned them around the house. Ten Broeck’s girls huddled together nervously. Their mother retired to a bedchamber and would not come out. Jannetje and Grietje ran from window to window arguing strategy with one another and badgering Anna to teach them Latin so they could read Caesar and tender their uncle some useful defensive advice.

  The patroon retired to his study. Anna found him there cleaning a pistol.

  “You think Mr. Ten Broeck is correct, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you?” he asked. His manner was controlled, but taut with suppressed anger, as though he saw himself beset and betrayed by those who should most welcome his leadership and reforms.

  “I’m not certain. A riot does not seem to me Gerrit’s style. What do you plan to do?”

  “Ten Broeck wants me to take the British oath.”

  “And will you?” She did not want him to.

  “What choice have I? I cannot get a message
to the Americans. My brother has seen to that.”

  “Perhaps you can’t,” she said. “But I can.”

  “How?”

  “I have a contact on the estate.” Mevrouw Zabriskie had been in the Widow’s confidence. She would have a reliable means of sending messages. But that was not Anna’s secret to share.

  “Even if you could get word to the Americans,” said the patroon, “and they had the men to help us, they could never get here in time.”

  Anna had known this was coming. She braced herself inwardly.

  “Then tell your brother the truth. About Grietje and Jannetje. With some understanding, some hope of forgiveness, you and he could find a compromise.”

  Andries’ lips tightened into a thin line, and his complexion seemed suddenly ashen, but his gaze was level. He saw that she knew, Anna realized, if not how, and declined, for the moment, to pursue the whys and wherefores.

  “Gerrit will never listen to any offer that comes from me,” said the patroon. “And why should he? I didn’t cuckold him, but I deceived him for eleven years.”

  Anna suspected Andries had in mind the “burned” will and his insistence that Harenwyck was his rightful patrimony as much as things relating to Sophia and her children, so she pressed on, trying to point up rifts that could yet be bridged.

  “To protect someone you cared for, those who could not protect themselves,” she said. “Sophia, the girls . . . even the tenants. In that way, you and your brother are very much alike, Andries. What you did was wrong, but you and Gerrit were young when you made many of those decisions, and your reasons are the kind he would understand.”

  After a space, when the patroon said nothing, she continued.

  “If you speak to him, explain, you could offer him a compromise. Sell freeholds to the tenants who have enough money to buy the land they are leasing. Build your school and hire your doctor and make your improvements for those who don’t. Or split the estate between you so each of you can order things in the way you see fit.”

  Andries seemed surprised at this last suggestion, but something in his blue eyes suggested he saw in it a possible way clear. But when he spoke, his voice was low, resigned. “You may be right, but this is pure fantasy. There is little time, and I do not even know how to find my brother at the moment. Or why, come to that, he’d believe anything I might say about Sophia and our father after all these years.”

  “I do,” said Anna. “I can take an offer from you to work out your differences, or, failing that, to divide the estate, to him, along with this.” She unfolded Sophia’s testament and placed it on the table.

  The patroon read it, fingertips smoothing the paper out. Then he placed his palms flat on top of the document as though he could absorb some trace of the woman he had loved through her written words.

  “How did you come by this?”

  “It was hidden in the pole screen Sophia embroidered.” Off Andries’ astonished look she added, “It is a common schoolgirl hiding place. I have been to see your sister—it was her you were going to meet that night at the old manor, wasn’t it?”

  “If you have been to see my sister then you know why she insists upon discretion.”

  “Her secrets harm no one. They are safe with me. Sophia’s testament is another matter. Your sister gave me her permission to share this with Gerrit. I would like yours.”

  He folded the paper carefully. “Sophia wanted to tell Gerrit. So many times, she wanted to tell him. We convinced her not to. We were wrong. I know that now. She died with this on her conscience. That was my doing.”

  “Because you thought you knew what was best for her and Grietje and Jannetje.” As he thought he knew what was best for the tenants on the estate.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Take one of the schouts with you. And give this”—he handed her back Sophia’s testimony—“to my brother.”

  Anna tucked the document inside her stays. “I won’t take the schouts with me.” If Gerrit refused, she would not betray his hideout to the patroon. If Gerrit refused, Andries would turn to the British, and Anna would have to go to Mevrouw Zabriskie and send word to Kate Grey. “But I will take that pistol.”

  • • •

  On the road, mounted on the pony that the patroon had saddled for her, Anna could see why Ten Broeck was so worried. No one was in the fields. There were no women in their gardens. No children walked the path to the castle with baskets of eggs or produce to trade for spices or salt or nails.

  Anna had seen the estate like this before, during the turbulent year of her father’s revolt. There were two thousand leaseholders at Harenwyck. Barely a fraction of them would take up arms. Most of the tenants would bar their doors and windows and hope the violence passed them by, that their neighbors would not seize the opportunity to avenge some past slight, real or imagined, under the cloak of a riot.

  Even the castle was shuttered, no doubt on Mr. Ten Broeck’s orders. The Widow would have called this a mistake. Anna did as well. Shuttering the store said that normal life had been suspended, that order had given way to chaos and misrule. Andries Van Haren’s goodwill and good works should have gone a long way to keeping the estate quiescent, but that depended on keeping up an appearance of control.

  Anna made good time on the main roads, but as soon as she turned off on the track leading to the Narrows she was forced to slow her mount to a walk. Harenhoeck was a lonely spot, the land too rocky and steep to farm, and the path was seldom used. No doubt the old patroon would have improved it if his scheme for the mills had come to fruition, but it hadn’t, and whole stretches of the rutted track remained barely passable.

  The way climbed steeply through thick forest and then descended as a rocky path that led to a long dock. Anna did not recall the dock from her childhood. She saw no signs of a camp, but the path here had been cleared recently, the brush freshly cut back. The sun was already beginning to set, burnishing the tops of the trees orange. An owl that was not an owl hooted somewhere above. Gerrit, obviously, had set a lookout, so she was unsurprised when the ruffian named Pieter appeared at the water’s edge to meet her, his thatch of white blond hair catching the last of the fading light.

  He eyed her warily. “You’re not going to start a stampede again, are you, mevrouwtje?” he asked in Dutch.

  “I don’t know. Do you have enough sheep on hand?”

  Pieter sighed. “I suppose if any woman is a match for him, it’s you.”

  He helped her dismount, beckoned her onto the dock.

  Anna had only been on a boat twice in her life, the ferry to and from Manhattan. Those crossings had been relatively smooth. The dock pitched and heaved underfoot, responsive to rough waters of the Hudson at this narrowing. She felt like it was going to throw her off. There was no railing: just a long row of rotting planks, barely six feet wide, resting on pontoons stretching out into the churning water.

  The planking led to a chain of three low structures: floating wooden millhouses, anchored all in a row. The first was cavernous and dank. The sluices were closed but Anna could feel the river rushing past beneath her feet. The giant wheel, locked in place, loomed over them in the darkness.

  The second house was heaped with boxes, the spoils of Gerrit’s banditry, and contained no wheel. Perhaps it had in fact always been intended more as a warehouse, or perhaps it had never been completed.

  The third millhouse was warm and dry, heated with stoves and lit with good beeswax candles—stolen, no doubt—and filled with a small band of men playing cards and cooking skewers of meat and making music on country instruments, a fiddle and a lute.

  The music stopped abruptly when she entered, and the card players looked up, Gerrit among them. He smiled when he saw her, and despite everything—all the danger and uncertainties ahead—she felt a quick smile touch her lips in return, simply to see his face again and find him alive and well.


  “So you have come to play Maid Marian with me at last?” he asked in Dutch.

  Something was amiss. She knew how riots began, what plotting looked like, and it did not look like this. “Gerrit,” she said. “I’ve come because your brother, Andries, thinks you’re about to march on the house, but you’re not, are you?”

  “No,” he said, rising to take her hands in his and draw her to him. “No, I’m not. I barely have a hundred men enlisted yet. And they’re not interested in attacking the manor on their own. They’ll rise if and when the British arrive, but they’re not going to antagonize the patroon without a fair certainty that they will win. It was ever thus on the manor,” he said wryly, “as I’m sure your father knew.”

  “I don’t understand. No one is in the fields. There are no servants at the manor. Something is happening.”

  Gerrit’s concern was plain. “When did this start?”

  “Yesterday morning, after the cider pressing.”

  “Whatever it is, Annatje, it is not me.”

  She felt a prickle of unease run down her spine. “Then why is there a British warship in the river carrying your John André?”

  “We were supposed to rendezvous Saturday. By then I had hoped to have my two hundred men so André would give me Tarleton’s six hundred.”

  “Major André has made the same offer to your brother, although Andries need only take the oath in exchange for British troops and protection.”

  She stopped the question forming on his lips with a lifted hand. “Gerrit, there is something I need to show you,” she said.

  He must have read the look on her face because he lifted a lantern off one of the hooks on the wall and led her wordlessly around the great wheel to the other side of the millhouse, where a folding desk and a campaign bed had been set up and a stretched canvas afforded them some privacy.

  “Your wife wrote this,” said Anna, “because she hoped that someday you might know the truth about her. About why she acted as she did.”