The Dutch Girl (20 page)

He had surprised her again. She had been ready to lecture him, but he had just voiced most of her
arguments. “And the ones who already own slaves, like Mr. Ten Broeck?”

“My father hired Mr. Ten Broeck. It was perhaps the best thing he ever did for Harenwyck. Theunis is the finest manager we have ever had. I cannot accomplish what I want for the estate without him, but neither can I force him to free his slave.”

“And what of the slaves belonging to the estate? I thought, like most patroons, you owned at least a dozen to work in the castle and man the mill and the ferry.”

“My father's will manumitted all of his slaves.”

She did not believe it. “That does not sound much like the late patroon, based on what I have heard of him.” Old Cornelis would never have freed his slaves. Not in a thousand years.

“Sometimes people can surprise you, Miss Winters,” said the current patroon.

He was certainly surprising her. “I was given to understand that your father's will went missing, and you were forced to rely upon the testimony of its witnesses to uphold your claim to Harenwyck in court.”

“That was indeed the case.”

He said it with a finality that did not invite further questions, and Anna suspected that was with good reason. Old Cornelis' last wishes—naming Andries as heir, liberating the estate's slaves—appeared to be entirely too close to his younger son's desires. Too close, perhaps, to credit. Convenient, then, that a will which seemed
unlikely
to memorialize them had gone missing. It seemed almost certain to her that Andries had bought
the “witnesses” and their testimony with Harenwyck money. For enough gold or preferential treatment on the estate a man might swear to anything.

A man might be willing to see another man's brother disinherited.

And yet Andries had not done it
entirely
for personal gain. Harenwyck had owned at least a dozen slaves when Anna was girl. The number could have been twice as many by the time of the old patroon's death. The slaves had always done the hardest work: clearing land, turning the millstone when the river was slow, maintaining the roads. Andries may have lied under oath, but he had accomplished at least one just purpose. One that reduced his own inheritance through the loss of valuable human property.

“To answer your question honestly,” the patroon said, breaking in on her thoughts, “you will not see any slaves here tonight. The tenants who hold slaves do not bring them to the festival, because they do not see them—or wish to see them—as
people
. It makes it easier, I suppose, to justify keeping one's fellow man in bondage. If my brother were to gain control of Harenwyck, Miss Winters, he would sell the land to the tenants. One in nine or ten of them owns slaves now. When they are freeholders, the patroon will have no say over what they do. I'd expect the number of slave owners, and of slaves, to increase, wouldn't you?”

Anna had seen the power of the patroon used to oppress. She had not considered it could be used to reform, to liberate.

The bonfire was already a roaring blaze by the time they arrived. Near at hand, a pot for
olykoecken
was bubbling, and Grietje and Jannetje made a beeline for the sugary confections. Not unexpectedly, the woman hooking doughnuts out of the pot with an iron crook was not Mrs. Ackerman, who had been seventy if she had been a day when Anna was a child. That good
mevrouw
had been replaced by a younger woman, one with a pair of helpers.

The two children sprinkling sugar over the doughnuts and rolling them in paper were about the same age as Grietje and Jannetje. They wore cheerful matching kerchiefs and aprons that were powdered with sugar. Anna was pleased to see the twins ask politely if they could take a turn at the job.

The
mevrouw
at the pot cast a worried look at the patroon. She did not want to put a foot wrong, to displease him. Old Cornelis would probably have had her whipped if she'd allowed his children to labor like peasants.

“So long as you work more than you eat,” said the patroon, “I do not think there could be any objection.” Grietje and Jannetje jumped up and down with excitement and set to learning their tasks. They sugared a doughnut for Anna, and then one for their uncle, who stood there and coughed theatrically until they sugared a second for him.

As they stood eating their doughnuts Anna saw a familiar figure separate herself from the crowd. It was difficult to miss Mevrouw Zabriskie in her brightly
colored mismatched silks. She was selling posies of dried flowers, and when she came close Anna could detect the scents of lavender and jasmine even over the sweet perfume of the
olykoecken
.

The patroon bought three posies, one each for Anna and the girls. Mevrouw Zabriskie selected a bright purple one for Anna and pressed it into her hand. She took the opportunity to turn Anna's palm over and made a show of great interest in what she thought to see there.

“Where is your husband,
joung frau
?” asked Mevrouw Zabriskie.

“I don't have one,” said Anna, tugging her hand back gently.

Mevrouw Zabriskie's grip tightened, and she tracked a tickling finger over Anna's palm. “But you have changed your name. I can see it here, in your broken life line. The end of one woman, the beginning of another.”

Anna snatched her hand away rather too quickly. The posy dropped in the mud. “I am sorry,” said Anna, “but you are quite mistaken. I have never been married.”

Mevrouw Zabriskie looked into her eyes as though seeing her for the first time, and nodded. “As you say,
joung frau
.”

But Anna knew that the cunning woman didn't believe her. Mevrouw Zabriskie clucked and bent to pick up Anna's dropped posy, her pale blond braids touching the ground. She pocketed the dusty bouquet thoughtfully and handed Anna instead a fresh posy from her bag.

Anna took it and smiled for Andries' benefit, but she
did not like the way the old woman had scrutinized that dropped bouquet. She had looked as though she was putting it away for later, and Anna found the thought unsettling.

She put the cunning woman from her mind and followed the patroon on his circuit of the entertainment. Part of her wished she had been able to come here on her own as she had planned, anonymously, to hover on the edges of the crowd and relive privately her memories of this place, but it was impossible to be invisible at the side of Andries Van Haren. It was unfortunate that she could not refuse his invitation without inviting unwanted questions, arousing dangerous suspicions. If Gerrit was right and Jan had heard him call her Annatje, if Jan was plotting with his relatives, if they wanted a look at her, this girl who might be Annatje Hoppe, they would be able to look their fill tonight, and there was nothing she could do about it without attracting unwanted attention to herself. The patroon was squiring her around like she was a lady, and his sweetheart.

She suspected that the irony would be lost on the Dijkstras. Vim had not been an imaginative man, even in his cruelty. His clan's bullying had always been the opportunistic sort, licensed, even encouraged by the old patroon. His son was another matter. Anna was glad to see that men did not make way for Andries, obediently or sullenly, like they had his father, or for that matter, like the dragoons had for Banastre Tarleton at the Halve Maen.

The patroon led her into the barn—hulking and
ancient—where the great press was ready to begin turning. There was a horse standing by to do the work later when the men became tired, Anna was glad to see, but it was not hitched to the gate yet. She remembered that it was something of an honor to start the press, reserved for the strongest or the most respected, or sometimes just the handsomest, men on the estate. For many years her father had been all three.

She felt memory threaten to overwhelm her, and she turned away from the sight of the press to watch Andries pop the last of his
olykoecken
into his mouth and wipe his lips on his sleeve. He crumpled the oily paper into his pocket and shrugged off his velvet coat.

“Would you mind holding this?” he asked. He pressed the silk-lined velvet, still warm from his body, into her hands, and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

“You are going to take a turn at the press?” It was a tenant tradition—a
peasant
tradition—and it was unheard of, as far as she knew, for a patroon to take part.

He smiled warmly now. “Give me a lever and a place to stand, Miss Winters, and I will move the earth.”

There were two burly men already waiting at the stile, one running to fat with the massy forearms and jolly red face of a blacksmith, and the other a muscular young man built along more classical lines. They made way for the patroon, but not like underlings. They slapped his back and offered him joking encouragement in Dutch. She noted how Andries called the older man
by name—“Oosthuizen”—and he in turn addressed the patroon simply as “Mr. Van Haren.”

It was then Anna knew Andries wasn't just going to join these other men in this traditional rite. He was going to
start
the press himself.

He was an exceedingly well-shaped man, but considerably lighter of build than either of the two tenants who had apparently been chosen for the honor, and he was going to have to get the great stone, weighing nearly three-quarters of a ton, moving.

She did not want him to fail.

She ought to find the twins. She ought to talk to them of Archimedes and simple machines and the workings of force, and balance and friction, but her heart was in her throat for the patroon of Harenwyck.

Her father would be turning in his grave.

Andries Van Haren stepped up to the stile and placed his palms on the wood, smooth with age, where her father's hands had once rested. A cheer went up, and the patroon laughed, and she felt as she had when Miss Demarest had taken her to the horse races. Anna had placed no bets that day, but Miss Demarest had. Somehow Anna had found herself caught up in the tension of the race, standing on tiptoe, craning her neck to see the course.

The patroon pushed. The stile did not budge. He pushed again. Nothing. He took a step toward the end of the stile to reposition himself, and Anna should have been explaining the law of the lever, the equation that
translated force, distance, and fulcrum into work, but instead she was focused entirely on the man applying it.

Andries pushed. The wood creaked, rocked, and then began to move.

Andries Van Haren threw himself into that backbreaking labor. Through the fine lawn of his shirt she could see his muscles ripple. Through the silk of his stockings she watched his calves flex. The stone turned. A cloud of fruity mist exploded into the air and another, louder cheer went up. The two tenants who had been standing by now took their posts at the stile, and together the three men pushed until momentum lent them a welcome fourth hand.

The musicians struck up, fiddles and flutes soaring with Anna's spirits, and the dancing began in earnest. She watched as Andries and the other men circuited the great stone and the perfume of apples intensified. The fresh cider would be thick and cloudy, cool and refreshing. She could remember her father giving her a taste from his brimming glass when she was a girl. But most of it would go into barrels and ferment and come out in the first weeks of winter dry, clear, and crisp.

Anna's eyes returned to Andries at the stile. She knew on some level that his presence here was a calculated gesture. Indeed, she wondered whether more of this was orchestrated than met the eye. The two men he had joined at the press seemed happy and prosperous—favored tenants? Paid militiamen? But theater or not, the patroon's participation was effective. There was nothing he could do about the shortages at the store or the
ravages of the Skinners and Cowboys, but symbolically he could say:
I am here; I am one of you; we are all in this together.
He was as canny a political mover, as skilled a showman as her father had been—and perhaps just as sincere.

But it was not enough, because he would never give them the one thing they truly wanted: land of their own. They had rioted for just the promise of it in '65, staked their lives on slips of paper written by an Indian sachem, and on the rhetoric of Bram Hoppe.

Most of the tenants might
like
this patroon, but the people of Boston had liked the King too. That did not mean they wanted to be ruled by him. Anna could see the eddies in the crowd, the ripples where men were passing beakers of fortified beer—and messages. These were the types of gatherings that men like her father had always used to recruit like-minded followers. In the dark corners of the barn men clustered and talked in low tones. Anna could guess what—or who—they were discussing. Gerrit would be here somewhere tonight, in this throng of thousands, trying to find his two hundred men.

And he would end up just like her father if she did not do something about it.

A cheer went up as the patroon relinquished his place at the stile to another man. There was a mug of beer waiting for Andries, dark and foaming. He drank it off and received the congratulations and back claps of his tenants, who seemed genuinely pleased to have him there. But even as they praised him and offered him
doughnuts and skewers of meat, and a swig of something stronger from a jug—his eyes were searching the crowd.

They settled on Anna.

He set his empty tankard on a bench and threaded his way through the crowd to her. She held out his jacket. He slipped into the silk-lined garment and took her by the hands. “Let's dance.”

He pulled her into the whirl. She knew how it was done, of course. The Widow had found discreet tutors to teach her all of the things that Anna Winters was supposed to know, including how to dance. She had practiced carriage and rhythm, the steps of formal and country dances, how to follow, and how—if needed—to lead while
appearing
to follow. And of course Anna employed an exceedingly good dancing master at her school, one who often prevailed upon her to join in during classes to make up the numbers.