The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

Her adversaries were not quick, but they were well armed. Anna heard a dozen or so shots ring out, felt something whistle past her cheek and—more poignantly—a bullet graze her calf.

  Only to strike deep in her mount. The pony screamed and stumbled. Anna squeezed her legs tight around the saddle and clung to the beast’s mane, hoping she would not be thrown, but the force of the pony’s convulsions was too great, and she pitched forward bodily onto the packed earth.

  Her shoulder smacked the road, and something in it popped. Her cheek smashed into the ground and was cut by rough stones. The impact knocked all the air from her lungs, and she could not draw breath to stand, but she knew she had to move.

  They were on her before she could recover her breath. Cruel fingers dug into her scalp, just as Vim Dijkstra’s had done all those years ago, and dragged her head up. Rie Dijkstra spat in her face, but still Anna could not will her lungs and body to answer.

  Then air came back in a painful rush. And with the pain, like the first breath of a second birth, came a flash of hope. Someone grabbed her jaw, swung her face around into the light of a lantern; a fist came out of the darkness to connect with her chin.

  Hope died aborning, and Anna knew no more.

  Twenty

  Gerrit reached the manor to find his men in place beside the militia. Edwaert came to take his horse.

  “Have Annatje and Pieter returned?”

  “No, baas.” Panic seized him. If she was not at the mill and she was not at the Halve Maen and she was not at the house, then it was not an uprising at all. The Dijkstras’ only goal was Annatje. André thought he had been using Rie and Ida, but they had been using him.

  “Gerrit!” His brother’s voice called to him from that absurd porch. Gerrit saw his daughters peering out from behind Andries, and Mrs. Buys looking worried beside them.

  Gerrit took the stairs two at a time. “It is not an uprising,” he said to his brother. “It is not about the manor. It is about Annatje. You sent Rie and Ida Dijkstra to the ferry, but the British killed the schouts. Now Rie and Ida have come back and I fear they have taken Annatje. She was on her way to the Halve Maen with Pieter, but she never arrived. You have to send the militia out to search for her.”

  “And leave the manor defenseless?” Mr. Ten Broeck shouldered his way past the girls and Mrs. Buys.

  “I will stake my life on it,” said Gerrit. “They are not coming here. If I knew where they were taking her, I could use my own men, but the estate is too large to find her with just a dozen searchers.”

  “Rie came to me two nights ago,” said Andries. “She had recognized Annatje. She wanted to make a trade. She offered me you, in exchange for Anna.” Gerrit had not known that part. Annatje had not told him. “Rie wanted to try Anna, the way Bram Hoppe used to try tenants, and then hang her, but she did not intend it to be a sham execution. They will take her to the place Bram Hoppe used to play his rough music. That is where Vim Dijkstra killed him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was there. Father made me watch.”

  There were so many things he had not known, but now was not the time for them. If they got Annatje back he would reconcile fully with his brother. “Where?”

  “The clearing near the old sandpit. I’ll come with you. We can take the militia, but we must leave a guard on the house.”

  Gerrit agreed. The sandpit was two miles, if they cut across the fields. There were not enough horses for the militia, but Gerrit’s men had mounts. He prayed they would be fast enough.

  • • •

  Annatje tasted blood. The blow that had knocked her unconscious must have been only seconds before, but already the world had shifted. She was looking up at the stars. And her arms hurt. That was because her captors were dragging her. They had left the road and were crunching through the forest over pine needles. Her muscles tensed automatically, but she forced herself to go slack because it was to her advantage that they think her dazed.

  Count them. She knew that was what she must do—what the Widow would have done first—but her head swam as she tried to tally the moving bodies. She had an impression of thick farmers’ calves and heavy homespun petticoats. More petticoats than stockings. She should not have been surprised. Her father had made rough music because it was the only justice available to the powerless and dispossessed, and women were so often that.

  She tried to get her bearings. She knew she had to take her first chance to escape, and that if she was fleeing from a large number of attackers while concussed—which she very likely was—the direction she ran in would be more important to her survival than any other factor. She must run toward help, not away from it.

  But the swishing of petticoats was distracting, and the velvet one kept changing places, moving around. Velvet. That meant something. She could not remember what. Anna tried to follow the shimmering petticoat, but it kept disappearing, until she looked straight up and found herself staring into the eyes of Barbara Fenton.

  It was a hallucination, Anna was sure of it, but a vivid one, because the beauty put a finger to her ruby lips, as though she were playing hide-and-seek with King Charles in the palace, and signaled for silence. Her baroque ringlets hung from her high, clear brow and brushed Anna’s face, and she mouthed This way and pointed into the woods.

  It was a hallucination, but it was all Anna had to go on right now, and if she was going to die, she was going to die fighting. With a burst of energy, she wrenched her arms free from her captors and broke into a run.

  Or a semblance of one. She stumbled but her fingers were so numb that she could not feel the pine needles of the forest floor, and she picked herself up and kept going. She did not look back. The girl in the velvet gown was in front of her and she knew that if she followed her she would find her Dutchman.

  Like a pack of dogs her captors gave chase, shouting. But there was more shouting now from ahead of her, and someone was calling her name. “Annatje!”

  The witch in the velvet gown disappeared, and Anna burst into a clearing filled with light and noise. Her knees gave out and she fell to the ground, and it felt like the beach beneath her, all sand but warm and dry, and there were strong arms folding around her and she was resting her head against a familiar shoulder and she was home.

  “Gerrit,” she said.

  He spoke her name over and over like a litany and rocked her and held her close.

  “How did she know which way to run?” That was Andries. He was standing over her, and she was too tired to look up, but she answered him:

  “It was the witch in the velvet dress,” she said. “Barbara Fenton showed me.”

  “She is delirious,” said Gerrit. “Annatje, can you ride?”

  “No.” The idea made her feel ill.

  He carried her back to the manor. The girls were very excited to see her and ran to the library in search of a medical treatise to tend her cuts and bruises. When they returned with a book on animal husbandry Mrs. Buys banished them and helped Anna to wash and put on a fresh chemise and climb into bed. There were probably a great many things that had to be done, but she did not care, just then, about any of them.

  Except for Pieter. She asked Mrs. Buys what had become of him. “The militia found him on the road.”

  “Alive?”

  “Alive enough to eat two chickens and a pie I was saving to serve tonight.”

  Sometime later the door opened and Gerrit climbed into the bed beside her. She reached for him.

  “You’re not well enough,” he said.

  But she was.

  She had never woken up beside anyone before. It was a wonder to stretch her arms and touch the warm, bare flesh of the best friend she had ever had, who was also now her lover.

  “What will you do about the estate?” she asked.

  He gave a loud, unconvincing snore.

  She kicked him.
<
br />   “I was asleep,” he lied.

  “You cannot sleep all day, and the problem will not solve itself.”

  He pulled her into his arms. “I spoke with Andries last night. We agreed to divide the estate. He will keep the farms that prefer to remain leaseholds. That is the majority of the land. But he will agree to sell to any tenant who can afford to buy. The manor is his, along with the adjacent farms, but the old house is to be a school for the tenants. Or whatever you would like to make of it.”

  “And the Dijkstras?” she asked.

  “Evicted for good this time, along with their supporters. They ought to pay a greater price for what they did last night, but a trial would dredge up too much of the past. Their influence on the estate is finished. They will not be back. And you and I, my klompen girl, have to get married.”

  • • •

  Gerrit spent the day closeted with his brother and three lawyers drawing up an agreement to divide the estate. Mr. Ten Broeck was notable by his absence. “Andries could not forgive him for treating with the British in secret,” Gerrit explained, when he visited the kitchen to see his daughters and purloin a plate of koekjes. Anna had decided that the girls’ lessons must continue. Shortly, there would be enough upheaval in their lives. For now she wanted them to enjoy the security of the familiar. “He has been given a week to remove himself and his family from the estate.”

  In the afternoon, while the girls sketched, Anna wrote a masked letter to Kate Grey. She related a rough outline of the events that had occurred at Harenwyck, with certain facts and names omitted, that the patroon had elected to provide the Rebels full access to Harenhoeck, and concluded by stating that she hoped and assumed her obligations had been discharged.

  At dinner Anna announced her intention to retrieve Sophia’s embroidery, the chair and table, fire screen and loom, from the old house. “They should not be left to rot.” And Andries must not spend his evenings, after she and Gerrit left for New York, sitting in that dusty, decaying house with his dead lover’s things.

  “Take Pieter with you,” said Gerrit. He looked like he expected her to protest. She didn’t. Nor did she relate the tale of Barbara Fenton. She had decided that the apparition had been the product of her own mind, conjured by need and desperation. Anna had grown up at Harenwyck. As a girl she had known those woods well enough to find her way home in the dark. The ghost could only have been memory given form and put in the service of survival. Even so, she would always be grateful to the shade of Barbara Fenton, real or imagined. That did not mean that she had any wish to meet it again.

  At the end of the week she received a missive from an unexpected quarter. Mr. Sims had been the Widow’s man of business. It was he who had conveyed to her the deed to the house on Pearl Street, the one where Anna had spent those wretched first days in New York kept prisoner by Mrs. Duvel—and where the Widow had buried her venal servant’s body in the basement. Mr. Sims wrote to tell her that the house had burned down.

  Anna checked the date of the fire against her memory and discovered that it had occurred on the same day she had consigned Mevrouw Zabriskie’s eerie tarot card to the flames. The Tower. A house made uninhabitable by death. She did not mourn its demise in the slightest. And she gladly accepted Mr. Sims’ generous offer to handle the sale of the property for her. He had not been willing to do so a year ago, and in his change of heart Anna detected the hand—and blessing—of Kate Grey. She could return to Manhattan and the school without fear, of blackmail or exposure. Her old sins, such as they were, were truly buried and burned.

  Anna and Gerrit were married in the old church at Harenwyck. She was too excited to eat breakfast before the ceremony, and when her stomach rumbled during the exchange of vows loudly enough to interrupt the reverend’s droning Dutch service, Gerrit broke into laughter and kissed his bride, and told the scandalized divine to get on with it. Pieter stood—shifting his feet in his pinched dress shoes but beaming like a disreputable, thatch-haired angel at his old baas and his beloved—as Gerrit’s best man.

  The following week Anna and Gerrit traveled to New York and took up residence as man and wife at the school. They brought Scrappy with them, predictably much put-upon by the move. Pieter followed a week later, claiming he was done with farming and ready to give city life a try. Anna resumed teaching, and a month after that Andries brought the girls to Manhattan to enroll at the academy.

  That spring the Rebels confiscated Harenwyck, despite the patroon’s steadfast support of their cause. Mr. Ten Broeck’s correspondence with the British surfaced at an inopportune moment, when Congress was in need of money, and they ordered the seizure and sale of all that remained of the estate. Much of it was bought by other patroons. Among them, Andries’ new father-in-law, an upriver landowner with a hundred thousand acres of his own.

  Gerrit wished his brother joy with his new bride, but the day after the lavish nuptials, he entered upon a new career in politics and, to no one’s great surprise, became a tireless campaigner for land reform. It was a crusade for which the time had finally come, and for which he had his wife’s full and committed support.

  The school prospered in the wake of the war, buoyed by a vogue for female education and republican virtues. Anna added Dutch to the curriculum, even though there was little call for it. And once a year, Gerrit Van Haren, who might have been patroon of Harenwyck and lord of two hundred thousand acres, made a journey on foot to the valley where he had been born and returned with a gift for his cherished wife, made by hands that had shaken her father’s: a pair of clogs for his klompen girl.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The pervasive foundation myth of early America is the elementary school version of the first Thanksgiving: Pilgrims, Puritans, and the Mayflower; pass the turkey, please. If we trouble to think of the native peoples who were here before the English, we count ourselves enlightened, and pass the pumpkin pie. It’s a comforting, comfortable fable, but seven years before Mary Chilton touched Plymouth Rock—if she ever did—the Dutch were already established on Manhattan Island. They brought with them from the Netherlands perhaps the most open, tolerant society Europe had ever seen, and prefigured the melting-pot character of the New York we know today. New Amsterdam was annexed by the English Crown in 1664, but the Dutch didn’t go anywhere. Their culture and language persisted, in places, into the twentieth century, and their radical political ideas helped shape debate during the American fight for independence—and beyond.

  But Dutch settlement was also steeped in mercantilism. Paradoxically, the manorial system they established on the Hudson River to encourage colonization introduced a feudalism to the New World that had long since died out in Western Europe. The Dutch West India Company doled out vast tracts of land up and down the river and its tributaries to a handful of “patroons,” whose holdings, rights, and privileges survived the transition to English rule surprisingly intact. And the system proved astonishingly persistent. Though the patroonships were riven by tenant uprisings during the Stamp Act crisis and in the midst of the Revolution, it would not be until the 1850s that the last of the great manors was dissolved.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Alexander, Kimberly S. “Myra Montgomery’s World: Haverhill, Boston, and Beyond.” Historical New Hampshire 67, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall/Winter 2013).

  Blackburn, Roderic H., and Nancy A. Kelley. New World Dutch Studies: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776: Proceedings of the Symposium. Albany, NY: Institute, 1987.

  Countryman, Edward. A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

  Edmonds, Mary Jaene. Samplers & Samplermakers: An American Schoolgirl Art, 1700–1850. New York: Rizzoli, 1991.

  Fabend, Firth Haring. A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1800. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

  Fingerhut, Eugene R., and Jos
eph S. Tiedemann. The Other New York: The American Revolution beyond New York City, 1763–1787. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

  Goodfriend, Joyce D. Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

  Goodfriend, Joyce D., Benjamin Schmidt, and Annette Stott. Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America, 1609–2009. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

  Humphrey, Thomas J. Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004.

  Johnson, James M., Christopher Pryslopski, and Andrew Villani. Key to the Northern Country: The Hudson River Valley in the American Revolution. Albany: State Universty of New York Press, 2013.

  Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005.

  Panetta, Roger G. Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture. Yonkers: Hudson River Museum/Fordham University Press, 2009.

  Postma, Johannes Menne. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  Rink, Oliver A. Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.

  Rose, Peter G. Food, Drink and Celebrations of the Hudson Valley Dutch. Charleston, SC: History, 2009.

  Shattuck, Martha Dickinson. Explorers, Fortunes & Love Letters: A Window on New Netherland. Albany, NY: New Netherland Institute, 2009.

  Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

  Tuchman, Barbara W. The First Salute. New York: Ballantine, 1988.

  Schulte Nordholt, J. W. The Dutch Republic and American Independence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

  Walters, Kimberly, A Book of Cookery by a Lady. Woodbridge: Kimberly Walters, 2014.