The Dutch Girl (22 page)

“That would have been a far safer path than turning outlaw and robbing coaches, but you did not take it, because he is your brother, and while he might be wrong about a good many things, he is not a bad man.”

“Andries
is
better suited to be patroon of Harenwyck than I am. The issue is that there shouldn't be a patroon at all.”

“I take it you were recruiting,” she said, crossing the churchyard in her sturdy new
klompen
. “How many men agreed to join you?”

“Sixty.”

“That is not enough. John André wants two hundred,” said Anna. “And every time you beat the drum at an event like this you run the risk that some coward will betray you to your brother for a purse of gold.” There had been spies and informers at the Halve Maen the night her father was taken. And she was not the only one at the cider pressing with eyes and ears.

“I will not have to beat the drum again. Once word gets out of what I offer, I will have my two hundred men. More probably.”

Fear threaded through her. “Gerrit, please don't tell me you are offering them Wappinger leases.”

“No. Not new landlords with newer, fairer leases,” he said. “Your father tried that. You were right. He was blind in some ways. No court will ever find in favor of Indian land claims, because the precedent could unravel
the fabric of a whole nation. Whose farm was not once the domain of one tribe or another? But my claim jeopardizes no one's wealth but my brother's. I am the patroon of Harenwyck, Annatje. Andries has stolen the estate from me with lies and bribed witnesses. The Rebel courts accepted his calumnies because it suited them to do so, because it would suit them to control Harenwyck through him. But the outcome, in a
British
court, is bound to be in my favor. If I win British sponsorship, I can offer those who join me something far more than fair leases. As the real patroon of Harenwyck, I am free to dispose of my land exactly as I wish. Sell it, or give it away.”

“You will pay them in freeholds,” she said. It was brilliant. It was her father's legacy come to life. It was a dream she had shared with hundreds, indeed with thousands up and down the Hudson. And it was going to get Gerrit killed.

He pushed himself away from the wall and prowled toward her, his coattails brushing the headstones, and it was as though time had collapsed. She was seventeen again, and he was everything she wanted. “Annatje, I did not come here to talk about freeholds.”

She moved at the same time. He met her among the graves, and she came into his arms as though years had not passed between this meeting and their last.

His body was warm, a sharp contrast to the night air, and his mouth tasted like fresh apples, and she did not think she could ever drink in enough of this new Gerrit, familiar and changed. A body she knew and had loved
and had wanted to know better. She had desired him so very much—with a hunger that kept her up at night when they were young—but always he had stopped just short of that ultimate joining with her. They melted into each other now, hip to hip, thigh to thigh, as they used to do, and just like then—just like
always
—he broke away and stepped back.

“I like your new shoes,” he said, running his hands over her face like he still could not believe she was real. “I liked your old ones too. They were sunny yellow. I did not believe that you were dead when I came home from Leiden, but they showed me your clogs and told me . . . they told me that you had drowned yourself in the river.”

“That was the Widow's idea.”

“It was a good one.
Annatje, Annatje
,” he said her name over and over like he was conjuring her. “Tell me what happened after I left.”

She remembered all the things he liked. She kissed his neck softly, and heard his sharp intake of breath. She had always known how to bring him close, so close to losing control. She nipped his ear, and he groaned. Her fingers slid down his hard chest to the top of his breeches, and his hands met hers there and stopped them.

“Annatje, you must tell me what happened, how you escaped and came to be here, or else I will think I am making love to a ghost.”

She could feel the tension in every muscle of his body. He was trembling with it. He wanted her as badly as she wanted him, as badly as they had wanted each other when they were seventeen. If she seduced him now,
overcame his reservations, he would receive her story differently.

Lovemaking is a tool. And a tool can be a weapon.
The Widow would have advised her to draw Gerrit Van Haren's warm, strong body down into the grass between the graves. Afterward she could tell him about the things she had done. The bond formed between them, the tenderness of two vulnerable bodies meeting flesh to flesh, would elicit his sympathy, trigger his natural protectiveness.

She would not manipulate him like that.

And silence was not an option. He was following too closely in Bram Hoppe's footsteps, and he needed to know precisely where they led.

Harenwyck, 1765

There was going to be rough music that night. Annatje's father called it an expression of the will of the people. Her mother would have called it mob justice. But then Mehitable Wing had run off with a Huguenot tin peddler from New Paltz, and there was no one to gainsay Bram Hoppe now.

Annatje was happy that she was gone. Her mother had always been whipsawed between the Quaker rigidness of her upbringing and the radical ideals of her husband, whose leveler philosophy took the seductive revelations of George Fox to their natural conclusions. Annatje's mother said she had been following her inner light when she married the “unconvinced” Bram Hoppe, but the Society of Friends had not seen it that way. They had promptly cast her out.

That spurning had left its mark upon Annatje's
mother. Mehitable had been raised in a sect of nonconformists whose bulwark against the outside world had been their profound sense of community. She felt its lack like a missing tooth, and she was forever tonguing and prodding it. She clung to her Quaker love of simplicity, and Bram Hoppe's dazzling oratory, the way men flocked to hear him, was anything but plain.

Annatje wished her mother had left
a year ago
, rather than six months, and never found out about her meetings with Gerrit. It was no comfort to Annatje that her mother had beaten her for her imagined sin of fornication and then become a fornicator herself. Gerrit was still gone, and Annatje was left with no one but her father. They had always been close, she and her father, but in the wake of Gerrit's departure for Holland, and her mother's shameful flight, Annatje's love turned into fierce devotion.

She took up the housework abandoned by Mehitable, and the hopeless household accounts. Not that they were difficult to balance. Everything the Hoppes earned when they sold their crop to the patroon, less his tithe for grinding their corn at the mill and his percent for taking it to market, was spent. Between food and fuel and seed, all of which, according to the terms of their lease, must be bought from Cornelis Van Haren, and the rent they paid him, there was never anything left to save toward improvements, let alone land of their own.

The system was designed to keep them tied to their leasehold forever, cogs in the patroon's wealth machine, and Annatje had never felt its injustice more keenly than
the Sunday morning when Gerrit had failed to appear in church. Afterward she overheard the patroon informing the minister that he had sent “the boy” to Leiden for university, and he would not be back for years.

There was an ocean between them, one whose breadth she had traced with her finger in the pages of the atlas. The same ocean Henry Hudson had crossed in the
Halve Maen
. But Gerrit would see the world she had only experienced on paper, and she was bound to Harenwyck by the terms of a lease signed by Willem Hoppe, her great-great-great-grandfather, a long-dead Dutchman who had crossed that same ocean.

Unless her father prevailed.

The Widow visited twice after Annatje's mother left. She came on her own the first time and drank whiskey, neat, with Bram. She was dressed like a good Dutch
mevrouw
in clogs and a broad-brimmed hat and a threadbare apron, and Annatje could not have told her from the farmwife next door tending her cabbages. Except that Annatje could sometimes feel the Widow's sharp eyes on her as she moved about the kitchen. Something about that gaze—about the quality of her attention—reminded Annatje of the falcon Gerrit had shown her last winter, or more familiarly, of a cat sizing up its prey.

When her father got up to go outside the Widow said, “You do not have a country accent, I notice.”

She had lost it speaking to Gerrit, but she could hardly say that. “My father is very well-spoken,” she said.

“But not well tutored. Not in the accents of Amsterdam, anyway. He sounds like what he is. An intelligent,
self-educated Dutch farmer, born and bred here in the valley.
You
sound like something else.”

“I'm just Annatje,” she said.

“More than that, I think. You know how to keep your counsel. I could make use of you,
just Annatje
, if you were willing to leave Harenwyck.”

“I can't leave. My father needs me.” There was no one else. And, of course, Gerrit would be coming back.

“At the moment, yes,” said the Widow, “but it is impossible to say what the future holds. If you change your mind, you will be able to find me, or someone who can reach me, at my house in New York. It's on Pearl Street. Green clapboard, white door. You will always find it open to you.”

The Widow said nothing of their exchange when Bram Hoppe returned.

The next time Angela Ferrers came she brought a lawyer with her. Mr. Lindsey was young, ambitious, and eager to make a name for himself in New York politics. He had studied law at King's College and argued a recent case—successfully—against the Crown. The Widow did not return herself after that, but the lawyer became a regular guest in their home, working late into the night with Bram Hoppe and leaving in the wee hours of the morning with a case of documents under his arm.

Annatje's mother had never liked it when Bram gathered a “committee” of tenants and led them on a “visit.” His mob would call on neighbors who refused to stand firm against the patroon on the price of corn, or worse, new tenants who dared to take up leases after old,
progress-minded ones had been evicted. Bram Hoppe would call the coward out of his house—or drag him, if need be—and the assembly would try him for his crimes. They were always found guilty, of course, and the committee would haul the miscreant out to a tree and fix a rope around his neck to symbolize their verdict. Sometimes they even hanged him a little. Just until he thought it might be real. Then they would drop the man to the ground and let him run a gauntlet of his outraged neighbors homeward.

Mehitable judged that to be violence—though Bram maintained that it was largely the shamming of violence—and she refused to attend, but she used to go and listen to him talk at the Halve Maen. Now Annatje took her place.

That night her father sat in the center of a circle of pulled-up chairs, his friend from when he had campaigned in the last war against the French, Sachem Daniel Ninham, at his side. They talked about the “dignity of man” and “natural rights,” about land stolen and honest men: Wappinger men—of Sachem Daniel's tribe—who farmed and had families just like they did, and had been swindled.

As
they
were being swindled.

It was also a kind of music, this talking. Not rough, but smooth: her father in his beautiful tenor, and the sachem in his bass tones.

They talked, and they wrote out leases. Every farmer who stepped forward and recognized the legitimacy of the sachem's claim to the land that made up Harenwyck
received a hundred-year lease for the grand total of one dollar. Angela Ferrers' lawyer was there to witness the documents, and he was going to stand up in court for the sachem and Annatje's father and argue that the patroon had no right to his land. When all the leases were signed they would make a list of those tenants who had not accepted them, and then the rough music would begin in earnest.

Everyone at the gathering could see that Mr. Lindsey was no country lawyer. He wore silk stockings and silver buckles on his shoes and spoke the good Dutch that Gerrit had tried to teach Annatje. He was going to be heard in the court at Albany, and he could not be ignored because he was not an ignorant tenant. He was the son of a prominent New York merchant with friends in high places. The Hudson patroons had always been able to get their way in the New York courts because they not only had money and power, but acted in concert and toward interests that did not conflict with those of other powerful men. It was an easy thing to deny justice to a poor tenant farmer, a much trickier matter to cross the son of one of New York's most influential families.

That was why the
schouts
came the next night, tall, strapping Vim Dijkstra and a dozen well-armed bailiffs, because the patroon knew he must not let these men bring him to court. Not in a case that would attract public scrutiny, that could not be dealt with quietly, out of the sight of the English government in New York. The
schouts
broke down the doors to the Halve Maen, which were closed for a private meeting: just Annatje's father,
the lawyer, the sachem, three of their most trusted allies among the tenants, and Annatje.

They dragged Bram Hoppe in his best suit of clothes out of the taproom. Annatje chased after them but the
schouts
were deaf to her cries. They took the lawyer too, when he demanded to see their warrants. For that, they gut punched him, in plain sight of onlookers, on the threshold of the Halve Maen. He doubled over wheezing and then they dragged him—unprotesting now—down the stairs, and flung him into the mud that pooled there.

They shackled Bram Hoppe in the same irons that the castle sold for use with slaves, and chained him to the bed of a cart. The vehicle had last held chickens. Annatje could smell the pungent odor of their droppings.

It was done with such speed and violence that the cart was already being struck up by the time the Halve Maen's landlord and his family heard the disturbance and emerged from the kitchens. They stood at the top of the stairs, under the sign painted with Henry Hudson's
vlieboot
, screaming in outrage. Annatje was only a few steps ahead of them. She half ran, half fell down the stairs to reach her father.

“Get word to the Widow,” he said, his shackled hands clutching hers. The cart began to move. “Tell her everything that has happened.”

“How?” Annatje was running at the back of the cart to stay with him. All she knew about the Widow was that she had a house on Pearl Street in New York.

“Remember what I bought for her,” he said,
remaining obscure in case the bailiffs overheard. “Go home, Annatje. You're a clever girl. You'll figure it out.”

“I don't understand,” she pleaded, feeling salty tears start in her eyes.

But that was all they had time for. The cart picked up speed and broke their connection. Annatje pounded after it, but could not run fast enough. The cart dwindled into the night taking her father away with it.

It was the last she ever saw of him.

She walked back to the Halve Maen in a daze.

The sachem was waiting there for her, resignation in his dark eyes. “They will not release him,” he said with the fatalism of a man who knew something of English courts and English law.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they did not fear the lawyer.”

“My father has a friend in New York. She will help. I must go home and figure out how to reach her.”

“Has your mother come back?” asked the sachem.

Mehitable wasn't coming back. Bram had put it about that she was visiting her family in Pennsylvania, but Annatje did not think anyone believed it. Perhaps Daniel Ninham only thought it right to ask.

“No.”

“Then you cannot stay at Harenwyck, Annatje. Not alone. Come home with me to Stockbridge. We have a lawyer there who may be able to help.”

“We already have a lawyer,” said Annatje. And he had silver buckles on his shoes. But Mr. Lindsey was no
longer lying in the mud. In fact, he was nowhere to be seen at all.

Mr. Ninham shook his head. “They will arrest him too if he challenges them. That is what the English do when they become too frightened to respect their own laws. Too frightened of what their own law might require.”

“My father told me to go home.” It was printed in her memory like the plates from one of Gerrit's books. Get word to the Widow. Go home. Remember what he bought for her.
Figure it out.

She went home. It had rained the night before and the mud sucked at her
klompen.
The sachem followed her all the way there, shook his head at the sad little brick cottage with the fragile batten door and poor old shutters, bolt and latches long since broken. But there had been no point in repairing them, or getting a proper lock for the door, because there had never been anything inside worth stealing.

Daniel Ninham made up the fire and went to the shed for a hammer and nails and found lumber somewhere in the kitchen garden. Annatje watched him nail the shutters closed and reset the flimsy bolt on the door. He did these things with the familiarity of a man who knew her house well, because he had been there many times, and she had the terrible presentiment that he believed this would be his last visit.

“You should come with me, Annatje. There is nothing for you here.”

“My father said to go home.”

“Men are not always wise in a crisis.”

“You don't think he will be back, do you?” she asked, the words catching in her throat.

“I think I would want my daughter to leave and save herself. I think my friend would want me to save his daughter in spite of her stubbornness. I think that if you stay here, I will lose you both.”

If she cried, if she showed him how frightened she was, he would make her go. She knew that. So she fought back the lump rising in her throat and said, “I'll be fine, Mr. Ninham. And I promise you that I will get my father back.”

The sachem sighed. “You take too much after your father. I only hope, for your sake, that you take a little after your mother, and that you'll have the sense to run before it's too late.”

He did not try to make her go. He found her father's pistol in the chest at the foot of the bed, carefully filled it with his own powder and shot, and placed it on the kitchen table. She was grateful for that. Gerrit was gone. Her mother had abandoned her. Her father had been taken from her. She had to get him back. She had to get word to the Widow.

The riots began the following afternoon. Annatje did not learn this until later. All day she searched the house for some clue as to how she was supposed to contact the Widow. There were precious few cupboards. They had never been wealthy enough to own a
kas
. But there were shelves surrounding the open hearth, and she searched these for a scrap of paper or notebook or token
of some kind. Annatje emptied the salt box and unwrapped the sugar cone. She turned the mattresses over, picked open the stitching, and emptied the straw filling onto the floor and found nothing. She checked every loose brick in the walls and turned her arms black with soot exploring the jambless chimney.