The Dutch Girl (17 page)

She had taken the Widow's advice when she learned of that lady's death and focused on work. The school had been whipsawed by the changing fortunes of New York during those months, and it had been easy to put off thinking about the Widow's demise.

No longer. She was treading in the Widow's footsteps, as she had once vowed never to do.

You stand at a crossroads, Annatje Hoppe. There is no going back. And if you stand still, you will die.

She
had
felt dead then, at her very lowest, in those first weeks after she had arrived in New York.

A woman who has lost everything, as you have, has two
choices. She can work to dismantle the system that stole her life, or she can try to fit herself again within the confines of that system, knowing full well that its mechanics—its injustice—might snatch it all away from her once more.

Anna had chosen to try again. To make herself fit. The Widow had accepted that. She had used her formidable resources to create a new identity, a new life for Anna. She had hired tutors, the discreet sort, to smooth out her English and teach her manners and singing and dancing and needlework, but she had insisted on other lessons too.

Anna knew that the desperate act of violence she had committed at Harenwyck had been a singular event, not part of her nature. The Widow had believed otherwise.

I must teach you to fire a pistol and kill neatly with a blade, because I do not know how to teach someone like you to accept injustice lying down.

The Widow had taught her more than that. She had taught her how to improvise weapons from whatever was closest to hand, how to pick a man's pocket, how to ride a horse bareback, and how to kill, if absolutely necessary, with her bare hands. But there was no certainty—even with the best technique—and there would be no protection in any of it up against a determined mob.

Which meant that Anna could no longer put off thinking about the manner of the Widow's death. The Widow's man of business, Mr. Sims, had appeared one day on Anna's doorstep with the deed to a house on Pearl Street that Anna did not want, and news she welcomed
even less. The Widow would not be coming back. Ever. There were no details, just that one stark fact.

Anna had tried to refuse this unwanted inheritance, but the deed was already in her name. Mr. Sims declined to act as her agent in the matter and sell the wretched place, and there was no one else Anna could trust with that damnable, damning piece of property with the body in the basement. When fire had broken out during the American retreat, she had prayed that the house would burn, but fate had not obliged her. Fate never did.

The only thing that Anna could be certain of was that the Widow had died violently and ended in an unmarked grave. It was a grim prospect, and one she had to confront herself, since she now walked the same path, but at least she found that end preferable to the alternatives: dying in jail or at the end of the state's noose.

Forward.

Anna descended the back stairs to the kitchen. She had not expected anyone to be up, but Mrs. Buys was sitting next to the hearth and she still had one small fire lit, but not for cooking. It was meant to warm the crate sitting on the hearth tiles.

“I brought the plate down to wash,” said Anna.

“No need, miss. My girls will take care of it in the morning. And we'll find you some more clothes. There are some nice enough things at the store in the castle. Not as fine as the gown you arrived in, may it rest in peace, but good enough until the patroon can get you new things up from New York. Now, come have a look at these little ones.”

Anna approached the hearth. The crate was swathed in soft wool blankets. Inside lay a very large striped gray cat wearing a put-upon expression and nursing three kittens. A fourth slept sprawled atop her: Scrappy.

Gerrit had promised to go back for her mother and he had. No wonder he had looked tired. Anna could only imagine how difficult it must have been to find the cat and her brood in the woods. “Scrappy seems to have lost her taste for milk,” observed Anna.

“Because
someone
spoiled her with fish and turkey, which are definitely not on the cat menu in my kitchen. Hopefully she will develop a taste for mouse,” said Mrs. Buys. “We could use a good mouser about the place. We haven't had any cats at the house for years. The old patroon—God weigh his heart—hated them. There's something else for you on the table.”

Anna brought her candle to the trestle. There, wrapped in another blanket, were her atlas and her book of engravings. There was also a very large box of capers on the table and a significant wedge of Parmesan cheese. With a surprising flush of pleasure, she recalled Gerrit's description of how his band divided up their plunder into gifts for their families and sweethearts.

“Would you like me to put these away, Mrs. Buys?”
Before the patroon sees them and knows you let his brother in.

“There isn't any point, I'm afraid. The patroon is bound to notice the cat. Master Gerrit wants the girls to have two of the kittens. The two little black ones. Twins for twins, he said. His brother will scowl, but he'll give in.”

“This feud between them,” said Anna, “it's about more than the estate, isn't it?”

Mrs. Buys looked up. She had changed out of the bed jacket and petticoats she cooked in and was wearing a remodeled banyan. Another castoff from one of the ladies of the house, Anna guessed, just like the gown Mrs. Buys had lent her. “You're a sharp one, aren't you?” she said, but there was no disapproval in it.

She got up and bustled to the great
kas
opposite the hearth, where the better things were kept. “I won't have the maids gossiping about the family, but you're no maid.”

The older woman opened the paneled doors and brought a china pot down from a high shelf. It too was a castoff from the house, chipped at the spout but too fine, with its painted flowers and gilded handle, to throw away. Anna realized she was being admitted to a very select society—those Mrs. Buys thought were good enough for the Van Haren hand-me-downs.

“Grietje and Jannetje are good girls. You'll have seen that for yourself. But they were young when their mother died, and there have been no real ladies in the house since to set an example for them.”

“They are kind to each other,” said Anna honestly, “and for that I suspect we have your example to thank, Mrs. Buys.”

The housekeeper smiled, setting two mismatched but lovely Batavia tea dishes down on the table. “We've done our best, the maids and I, but we can't spend all day with them, and I am afraid that they do run a bit wild.”

“I was told the patroon had a younger sister. Does she not take an interest in the twins?”

“Elizabeth. You'll have seen her portrait in the hall. Mistress Elizabeth ran away years ago. Truth to tell, it was all the old patroon's fault. He had
plans
for her, you see. Wanted her to marry a man twice her age, a burgher from Albany with money and a seat in the legislature.”

Mrs. Buys clipped a generous lump of sugar off the cone for their tea. “Old Lord Cornelis and his crony had some scheme about anchoring floating mills at the Narrows and setting up as agent for every manor in the valley.”

“I take it she did not agree to the marriage.”

“No.” Mrs. Buys sighed. “And the patroon was never a kindly man when thwarted. He beat her and she ran away, taking her maid with her. The patroon put it about that she eloped to New York, but I worked in the kitchen then, and I can tell you that pretty as she was, she had no suitors, not even secret ones. Servants know such things. Andries searched for her for months, but if he found her, we never knew it, and he didn't tell his father.

“Master Gerrit was in Leiden at school. When he came home the patroon tried his scheme again. He couldn't wed Gerrit to the burgher, of course, but he could marry him to the burgher's daughter. That poor girl was bought and sold like a sack of meal.”

“Did she not
want
to marry Gerrit?” It seemed inconceivable to Anna.

“No. Sophia wasn't suited to Master Gerrit at all.
She was quiet, shy, and did not enjoy his flights of fancy. She preferred Andries, it was plain to us all, and the feeling was mutual. But the old patroon wanted her money and her father's mills attached to Harenwyck, so it was the heir or no one for her. As if she had a say.”

Mrs. Buys looked down into her teacup a moment. “Sophia would have done better to stand up for herself and run off like Elizabeth, I suppose, but she was a timid, biddable creature, and she did what her parents ordered. The only thing she took pleasure in was embroidery, but you won't find her work here. Gerrit never loved her, miss, but his brother did, and Andries couldn't bear to disturb anything of hers after she died. It's all back at the old house, rotting.”

“I think I may have seen some of Sophia's embroidery at the old house last night. It was very fine,” Anna lied.

“Was it? I've never had much use for anything beyond a darning stitch myself, but I suppose you are the expert. She certainly spent enough hours at it.”

Anna was not surprised. She'd plowed her own unhappiness into similar pursuits those first few months after the Widow had found her, and had known her girls to focus deeply on such painstaking crafts when they were miserable over something.

“Do you think Mr. Van Haren would object to the twins making use of Sophia's old things?”

“I'm not sure. Better to ask first. The patroon doesn't like people in the old house. He's had offers to rent it, but he doesn't want tenants there.”

And he made midnight—no, well
past
midnight—trips there alone. There was something—or someone—at the old manor that Andries Van Haren wanted kept secret, and that meant that, ghost or no ghost, Anna was definitely going back.

Anna had no opportunity to return to the old manor the next day. Or the day after that. Andries Van Haren came home late that night in a foul mood that was not improved the next morning when he discovered the cat.

“I presume my brother brought the beast,” said the patroon, in English, towering over everyone in the kitchen and peering into the crate with a jaundiced eye. “More of his peculiar largesse.”

The maids and kitchen boys had scattered like so many marbles the moment he strode in. Anna stood her ground beside the box. “The young misses have already named them,” she said, hoping to deflect a little of the patroon's ire from Mrs. Buys.

“I suppose that settles it, then.” He did not sound happy about it. “Miss Winters, a moment of your time.”

It was a command, not a request.

Anna followed him out the back door of the house where there was a pillared porch fully as grand as the one gracing the façade. It was her first opportunity to see much of the new manor, and what she saw was impressive. There was a garden here, laid out in the English style, a cultivated wilderness with grassy slopes stretching to a grove of trees. In the distance, hazy through the morning mist, stood a garden folly: a two-story teahouse built of red sandstone. The entire effect was such a contrast to the old manor—which had been thoroughly Dutch and practically medieval—that she could almost forget she was at Harenwyck.

“Mr. Ten Broeck tells me that you hold some very advanced ideas about female education,” he said as they stepped onto the path that led to the folly.

“I'm not certain that my ideas are advanced as much as certain other people's are somewhat backward.”

He laughed. That surprised her. It was not a smug or haughty sound. It caused her to turn and look at him. He was imposingly tall and erect, but there was a looseness to his posture, a relaxed grace that she had not observed before. Something like that of his father's in the hall portrait. This was in fact the most free and easy she had seen Andries.

This made her smile. He smiled back, and that surprised her even more. She had never seen any of the Van Harens—except Gerrit—smile. She suddenly evolved the conceit that the farther Andries Van Haren got from the manor, from the trappings of his patroonship, the less power the role exerted over him.

“Let us agree to call your ideas sensible, then.”

“That will suit me fine,” said Anna, “though I caution you as a single man to refrain from calling women sensible. Most do not find it flattering.”

“But you are not most women, are you?”

In too many ways.
“In the sense that I have no husband and no family of my own, I am not most women.”

“That was not exactly what I meant.”

“But they go hand in hand. When you are forced from the path most others take, you are unlikely to arrive at the same destination.” This rang as true to her false tale of disappointed love and spinsterhood as it did her real history.

“And do you believe that we as a people—Americans, I mean—have been forced from the path? That, following now a separate course, we have a natural right to sever our ties with England?”

It was an overtly political question, and a refreshing novelty. Parents never asked her about her politics, because they presumed that as a woman she did not have any views of her own. Or at least, none worth airing. They might as well ask a kettle or a fish or a toddling child. But she was not here to talk about her views. She was here to discover the patroon's—and bend them to her will as the Widow might have done.

“Does it matter what my political views are, Mr. Van Haren? I teach singing and sewing. Neither subject provides much scope for political philosophy of any stripe.”

“It is not your teaching that concerns me. Let us be frank with each other. We both know you are more than
you would seem, that you are in contact with our mutual friends in Congress.”

She had warned Gerrit that his brother was not stupid. She ought to have taken her own advice more to heart. “I have no friends in Congress,” she said truthfully.

“But you know people who do,” countered the patroon smoothly. “If you are here for more than the money they have offered you, Miss Winters, if you favor independence, if you truly wish to see America throw off Britain's shackles, then I would ask you not to include last night's encounter with my brother in your next letter to whomever pays you. This business with Gerrit is a family matter and will shortly be resolved, but outsiders might not see it that way.”

Outsiders would likely question the firmness of the patroon's hold over Harenwyck. “The only one paying me to be here is
you
.” It was the truth.

“But you will not deny that we have mutual friends.”

“I would not call them friends. I won't deny that I was encouraged to accept Mr. Ten Broeck's offer, but my reasons for doing so are my own.”

They had reached the end of the studiously unstudied path and come to the steps of the teahouse. The petite folly was a single room wide and deep, two stories tall, and decidedly Dutch in style, with a tip-tilted gambrel roof that gave it an antique air. Indeed, it might almost have been a monument to the old, abandoned manor.

The patroon held the door for her. The interior was cool and dark.

“I fear,” Andries said, opening the shutters and revealing a paneled room painted butter yellow and furnished with cushioned window seats and a table and chairs, “that we have gotten off to a poor start, you and I. That is my fault. I owe you an apology for my behavior when I found you at the old manor. I was brusque. In my defense I shall say only that I do not often come upon damsels in distress wandering the woods at night.”

He leaned against the window that looked out on the falling terrace. It was the sort of embellished wilderness the English so loved. Green grass rolling away in a cascade of gentle swells, pierced by natural-seeming staircases cut into the hillside.

“There are those who would say that a man's behavior in such circumstances—especially when they are
not
usual for him—is the measure by which his character should be judged.”

“And what might those same people say when the man being fitted, liked a milliner's mannequin, for his ‘character' has just been robbed by his own brother?”

“I expect they would say that Esau was unworthy of his inheritance—but the elder brother's sins do not absolve the younger's. As I recall, Jacob schemed and lied in order to steal Esau's birthright.”

“Because he knew he could put the patrimony to better use. What, exactly, do you think my brother is going to do with my box of gold?”

Nothing.
“I'm sure I don't know.”

“He will give it away.
Foei!
He likes to play Robin Hood on the Hudson. No doubt it makes him feel better, temporarily, for abandoning his responsibilities, for running away to join the army and leaving his wife, his children, and the estate for others to worry about.”

Anna did not like the idea of Gerrit as a man who would shirk his duties to wife and daughters. The estate was another matter entirely. “There are those who would not see Harenwyck as a responsibility to be manfully shouldered, but as an injustice to be set aright. The Wappinger and the Stockbridge Indians, for example. They still press claims to own much of your land, do they not? And then there are the squatters from Massachusetts. You had to drive them out with force last time, but they have a point: you have more land than tenants. That seems a grave injustice to a man who has no land at all.

“And there are those who would argue that the tenants—those who have cleared and planted the valley and built the barns and houses—now own the land they've worked by natural right. That it was a wilderness when their ancestors came here, and that they should no longer labor under a yoke their neighbors in other colonies do not bear simply because your great-great-grandfather paid their passages across the Atlantic.”

It was a bold speech, she knew that, but under the circumstances, Anna saw no point in censoring herself. He knew why she was there, and he knew she was no ordinary schoolteacher. He might be a Rebel, but she was a leveler's daughter.

Andries cocked his head. “Is that a night with my brother and his followers talking, or is that the position of our friends in Congress?”

“It is my personal observation regarding this place, and the Hudson domains in general. Nowhere else in the colonies do so few men own so much land, or is so much wealth concentrated in the hands of such a tiny number of families. Your brother envisions a more free and equal valley.” So had her father, of course, and he was dead.

“Yes, under my brother the tenants would find themselves more free to starve. His largesse with my gold makes him popular with the farmers, who think he is just returning their money to them from the greedy clutches of the landlord. It is always the same. Today they will spend his gold, and tomorrow they will have nothing to show for it.”

“Certainly they will not have a great estate, like this one,” she said.

“They do not live in my house, no, but its construction employed hundreds of tenants after the harvest was in, and for far more than the service days required of them. It lined their pockets in the winters when there was no other work to be had. And barely a tenth of the manor's profits end up in my coffers.”

“Then where does the rest go?”

“Back into Harenwyck. Do you have much experience with farming, Miss Winters?”

More than you.
“No.” She had sown corn and harvested it, threshed wheat and milked cows and churned
butter and carded flax until every muscle in her body ached. And, as often as not, she had still gone hungry to bed.

“It is a cash-poor business. My tenants pay me their rent largely in kind: in butter and eggs and flax. As part of their lease agreement, they must sell me their crops for whatever value I deem fair. In practice, if I do not offer them a price they like, they sell their corn under the table elsewhere.”

“But you can take them to court if they do that. Or threaten to.”

“Certainly that was my father's approach, but it is not mine. The manors do not have to be serfdoms. Once, they held out the promise of a new life. A man who could not afford to buy land could lease it and prosper here.”

If he was willing to tie himself, his children, and his children's children to that land.
Perhaps.

“Forgive me,” she said, “but the farms on the road did not look so very prosperous to me.” Burned out and boarded up. Lives shattered, as hers had been.

“You see the crux of the problem. To be cash poor during peace is an inconvenience. To be cash poor during war is disaster. Without money, I cannot expand my militia. I cannot buy the men that I
do
have sufficient powder and shot. I cannot fulfill the duties of the patroon and defend the families under my protection or their property from the Skinners and Cowboys, or from our neighbors in Massachusetts who are inclined to take by force what they have been unable to secure by law.”

“Your situation probably suits General Clinton very
nicely,” said Anna. “He turns a blind eye while his ‘foragers' ravage your farms, then demands your loyalty in exchange for his protection.”

“He is playing with fire,” said the patroon. “Neither Clinton nor the Americans truly understand the manors. Both sides want Harenwyck, in particular, because they both need control of the narrows at Harenhoeck. That means being able to march troops through the estate, transport material over land to keep the river secure. Neither of them will be able to do that if the tenants are in full revolt.”

“Like they were in 'sixty-five,” she said, “when there was no war.”

“Again you are remarkably well-informed, Miss Winters.”

Andries had been standing in the window this whole time, the farthest point possible from the door and from Anna. She had a suspicion about his behavior, and she set out to test it. Anna walked the perimeter of the room, closing the distance between them. “The trouble in the valley, then, was no secret,” she said. And of course she had lived it.

The patroon moved in time with her—like opposing figures in a clockwork—to maintain the distance between them. “The
trouble
in the valley, then,” he said, stepping to the next window, “was my late father. He
thought that the patroonship existed at his will and pleasure,
to serve him
, but really, it is the other way around. The patroonships were granted to encourage settlement, to build a Dutch colony. Most of them failed early on because their proprietors failed to see that the essential element is not the land, it is the tenantry. My father's greatest mistake was believing that the patroon's job is to manage an estate.”

“Isn't it?” She moved once more, and he did likewise, keeping the table, the chairs, and the floorcloth between them. She suppressed a sudden urge to vault over the furniture, upset his careful calculations of distance and reserve, and shatter his cold composure.

“No. A patroon's occupation is to manage
people
. It is leadership. The first patroon led five hundred souls across the Atlantic and into a new world and new lives. I want to do the same for the two thousand tenants we have now. But I cannot do it without money. Without hard coin, I cannot pay the tenants for the improvement projects I've in mind. Projects that could put cash into their pockets today and buy them richer futures tomorrow. Better, faster roads to get their goods to market. A ferry that will take them not just across the river, but all the way to New York and back. They make do with a part-time midwife and a ‘wisewoman' in the woods, but they should have a doctor, paid for from rent the same way that the reverend is, and a school, funded likewise, for their children.”

Anna had thought she had seen and heard too much in her young life to be shocked by anything, but the idea
of a school on the manor for
tenant
children beggared the imagination. She could not help but wonder what her life would have been like if such a thing had been possible when
she
was a child. Cornelis Van Haren would never have countenanced it, of course. Would never even have considered it.