The Dutch Girl (27 page)

There were other reasons to visit Mevrouw Zabriskie. She told fortunes and served as a midwife, and sometimes she could help if you
didn't
want to have a baby. Anna suspected that the old patroon had tolerated her presence on the estate for that very reason. The new patroon, Anna had decided, had his own reasons.

Mevrouw Zabriskie's hut looked the part of a witch's cottage. It was one of the only structures at Harenwyck not built of stone or brick. The steep thatched roof gave it an antique air, and the drying racks outside—heavy with bundles of herbs and other things Anna did not care to examine too closely—added to the clearing's eldritch aura. And drying in trays on the ground were the moonseed berries she had taught Grietje and Jannetje to tell apart from wild grapes. In the right dose, it could have medicinal properties. In the wrong dose, it killed.

The ill-fitting batten door to the cottage stood open. It took a moment for Anna's eyes to adjust to the dark interior, but once they had she saw that apart from the building material and more cramped dimensions, it was much like that of any other cottage on the manor: a single room with a jambless hearth and a sleeping loft above. The walls, however, were lined with bottles of dried herbs and chicken feet, tiny bones and nameless powders, and there was a crude stone mortar and pestle on the table. Only the cheerful chintz curtain hanging
from the chimney rather undermined the unsavory aspect of the room.

Anna almost laughed—until she spied the posy she had dropped last night, suspended from the chimney by red string. The end was charred, as though someone had crisped it on a salamander.

“Come to have your fortune read, have you?”

Anna turned in the doorway to find Mevrouw Zabriskie behind her. She was dressed, as always, in mismatched finery: a bright yellow silk jacket over an orange striped petticoat—with a brace of hare hanging from a thick leather belt at her waist. Something about these limp, scrawny, glassy-eyed creatures made Anna's stomach turn and heart sink.

“No,” said Anna. “I wish to talk to the witch of the woods.”

“You've found her, then.”

“I meant the other. The patroon's sister, Elizabeth Van Haren. It was her I saw on the path near the patroon's house last week, wasn't it? If she's living in these woods, then you know where.”

Mevrouw Zabriskie looked her up and down. “If you want my help, you must let me read you first.”

“Very well,” said Anna. It was all superstition and nonsense, but she knew country people, because she had been one, and it was never wise to spurn their ways. She followed Mevrouw Zabriskie inside.

“Cup of tea?” asked the
mevrouw
.

“What kind?” asked Anna, suspiciously, recalling the moonseed drying outside.

“Black. Bohea,” replied Mevrouw Zabriskie.

She pulled a very Dutch tin canister painted with bright flowers off the chimney ledge and opened it for Anna to sniff. It was the freshest, richest tea Anna had smelled since the war started. Maybe she
was
a witch.

The old woman put two teacups and saucers down on the table. They matched the chipped pot in Mrs. Buys kitchen
kas
. When the tea had been poured, Anna placed her hand palm up on the table.

Mevrouw Zabriskie shook her head. “You grip your secrets too tightly, young miss, for me to read your palm.” She produced a battered deck of cards from her pocket and spread it on the table. The backs were painted dead black, nicked and chipped.
Tarot.

Anna noticed now that the cunning woman wore rings on every finger, all of them mourning jewels or
memento mori
: a macabre garden of skeletons, snakes, and twisted hair. She gathered the old cards into a stack and cut the deck, then turned over an utterly prosaic suit card: the two of wands. Anna let out a breath that she did not know she had been holding.

“Two of wands. I have read you before.”

Anna felt a shiver travel down her spine. Mevrouw Zabriskie
had
read her fortune as a girl, at the Halve Maen, while her father plotted insurrection. But of course that was not what she meant. “Yes. At the cider pressing,” said Anna. “Last night. You read my palm.”

Mevrouw Zabriskie shook her head. “Not last night. Not your palm. These cards, they know you. They know your past.” She peeled a card off the top of the deck and
laid it on the table. “Know your present.” Another card, this one closer to Anna. “And your future.” A final card, inches away from her heart, which was beating fast even though she didn't believe in such things. She had lost her faith—in almost everything—the day she learned of her father's death.

The cunning woman flipped the first card over. “
Justice.
But upside down it means
in
justice.”

“What spinster does not think she has been ill done by?” asked Anna. She knew how fortune-telling worked. The Widow had shown her, because it was a useful tool with those who did, or wanted to, believe. Tarot was a form of theater, part illusion, part suggestion, part appeal to emotion, a sleight of hand abetted by a little knowledge of the subject and a fine-tuned understanding of human nature. Mevrouw Zabriskie would know that Anna was a teacher, unmarried, and unlikely to be happy about it.

“There are seventy-eight cards in this deck,” said Mevrouw Zabriskie. “Fifty-six of those are suits. Twenty-two are trumps. The trumps do not show themselves for trivial disappointments.”

She flipped the next card over. “And you, it seems, have not been so very disappointed recently, yes?” said Mevrouw Zabriskie.
The Lovers
were naked and very carnally entwined. She and Gerrit had made love with their clothes on, with perhaps less serpentine contortions than the coupling depicted on the card, but it had been no less carnal for all that.

Mevrouw Zabriskie looked up at her through thick blond lashes. “Finish your tea.”

Anna wanted to refuse, but she wanted to see Elizabeth Van Haren more, so she drank off the last of her tea. Mevrouw Zabriskie beckoned with one beringed hand, and Anna passed her cup across the table. The cunning woman placed the saucer over the cup and flipped both upside down.

All Anna saw was a brown mess of unfurled leaves, but Mevrouw Zabriskie, of course, would pretend to see more. No doubt a tall, handsome man with piercing eyes. That would cover most of the population of the valley—seen through the eyes of love, anyway.

The cunning woman curled her lips into a pleased smile and cackled. “Your lover is the patroon.”

Mevrouw Zabriskie was a charlatan, just as Anna had thought. “You are saying that because you saw me with him last night, talking and dancing. It is an excellent guess, but it is also wrong.”

“I did not mean Andries Van Haren.”

That gave Anna pause, because she believed Gerrit
was
the rightful patroon. Anna did not credit secondhand recollections of a conveniently missing will, and she doubted anyone else really did either. Perhaps there was something in the tarot. Or perhaps Mevrouw Zabriskie heard everything that happened on Harenwyck because she delivered its babies and washed its dead.

The old woman flipped over the last card, the one closest to Anna.

“
The Hanged Man
. It seems there is a noose in your future.”

That was not her future. It was her father's past.
He had a noose around his neck, and my father's men were taking turns raising and lowering him from a tree.
“The cards are allegories,” said Anna. “They're not meant to be taken literally. They are only paper,” she added to reassure herself.

“Just like a treaty, or a deed, or a will. Or the testament folded in your pocket.
Only paper
.” Mevrouw Zabriskie pinched another card off the top of the deck. “
The Tower.
A house made uninhabitable by death.”

Anna saw the house on Pearl Street flash before her eyes. She plucked the card out of Mevrouw Zabriskie's fingers and threw it on the fire. The terrified figures falling from the tower on the card's face seemed to move and writhe before the fire consumed them.

Mevrouw Zabriskie set the deck down. The reading was over. Anna knew it was only the passage of clouds, but she had the sense that the cottage grew brighter when the old woman relinquished the deck.

She said nothing of the loss of her precious card. “If you want to take tea with me again, you know where to find me.”

“And what about whiskey?” asked Anna. There was no place else on the patroonship where the Widow could have developed a taste for the stuff, where her father could have bought that dark glass bottle.

“You're one of hers, then,” said Mevrouw Zabriskie. “I should have guessed. She didn't believe in the cards
either, but they
knew her
. They can tell you where to find her body.”

Not even Mr. Sims, the Widow's man of business, had known that. All she needed now was what the
mevrouw
had agreed to provide: where to find Elizabeth Van Haren.

“No, thank you,” said Anna, her throat dry despite the tea. “I am on the trail of different ghosts today.”

The cunning woman gave her directions leading deep into the forest. The path was little more than an Indian trail. “Look for the hatchet marks,” Mevrouw Zabriskie said.

Anna walked for an hour. The cottage, when she found it, was ancient, its timber bones as old as the estate itself. An abandoned leasehold, no doubt, one of those early farms that failed, where the tenants had succumbed to disease or starvation or Indian attacks, or simply run away in search of better prospects. It might easily have belonged to Barbara Fenton and her Dutchman, if they had ever existed, but it belonged to the patroon's sister now, and the girl with whom she had run away.

They were sitting on a table outside the cottage shelling beans when Anna approached. Elizabeth Van Haren was marked by her gilded hair, visible beneath a farmwife's kerchief. Her companion had a darker complexion and thick hair, black as a raven's wing. They both wore homespun, and if Anna had come across them without foreknowledge she would have assumed them to be peasants.

They exchanged looks with each other when they
heard her approach, but they did not rise to greet her. Elizabeth Van Haren went on shelling beans and said, “Are you lost, Mevrouw?”

“My name is Anna Winters. The patroon hired me to tutor Grietje and Jannetje. I am also a friend of Gerrit's, and I am here to talk with you about his late wife.”

“And what would I know about such things?”

“Everything, I should think.” Anna unfolded the testament in her pocket and spread it on the table beside the pea pods.

Elizabeth's hands stilled. “Where did you find that?”

“Hidden in the embroidered screen.”

The patroon's sister sighed. “We searched for it after she died, but we could never find it.”

“That is because your father never sent you to be educated at a finishing school. Young women become very clever at hiding things from their teachers,” said Anna.

“We tried to convince her not to do it, that the truth would only hurt the twins in the end, but Sophia hated living like that, with everyone thinking she had betrayed Gerrit so lightly. She held out hope that she might be vindicated some day, once the old man was dead. She knew he would never let the real story be known while he lived. She was terrified of him, and with very good reason.”

Elizabeth Van Haren paused to point to Anna and mime drinking. Her companion nodded and smiled, and disappeared into the cottage.

“Lettitje Bronck, I take it? She is not your servant,
nor just your friend. I teach girls, Elizabeth, and there is no shame in honest words or honest passions.”

Elizabeth's pale eyes widened slightly in surprise, but she did not flush or spout reflexive denials. She simply nodded.

“Lettitje is deaf,” explained the patroon's sister. “My father's doing. He found us
together
, and he beat her for it. I feared for her life. He raised his hand to me only when I said I wouldn't marry his odious miller. There was nothing for us at Harenwyck. So we ran away. Only we weren't very good at it. We didn't bring food or money or clothing. We just fled into the night. And of course no one from the estate would help us, for fear of my father.”

“No one except your brother,” said Anna.

“No one except Andries,” agreed his sister. “Gerrit was away at school. Mevrouw Zabriskie took us in, but we knew she could not keep us. The patroon had his
schouts
out scouring the countryside for us. Andries found the cottage, and fixed the roof and the doors, and he kept our secret. He brought us food, until we were able to begin producing our own. We thought we had thwarted the old man, and were going to live happily ever after, but then my father brought Sophia to the estate.”

“For Gerrit to marry,” supplied Anna.

“No.
For himself.
He wanted the mills. And he wanted her. It was only when she fell pregnant that he got the idea of marrying her to Gerrit. You see, he never believed that Gerrit was his son. Without reason, so far
as I know, although I'm sure my father gave our mother cause enough. But my father was convinced his wife had cuckolded him. It galled him that his heir was a bastard. He couldn't prove it, but he devised a plan to put things ‘right.' If he could marry Sophia, pregnant with his own child, to Gerrit, then his blood heir would be sure to inherit Harenwyck in time. And he'd revenge himself on the wife he thought betrayed him by cuckolding her bastard son.”

The calculating greed and cruelty of it turned Anna's stomach. “Why did you let him do it? Why did Andries? Why didn't you warn Gerrit?”

Elizabeth looked down at her hands, and her voice was wistful but resigned. “Because Gerrit would never have married her if we had. And my father and Sophia's made it plain they would turn her out on the street if she did not persuade Gerrit to fall in love with her. Can you imagine it? It would have destroyed her. A frail girl like that, pregnant and penniless? She wouldn't have survived a day. Andries begged our father to let him marry her—he was so in love with her, poor boy—but our father wasn't having that. His line, his petty ‘revenge,' was all that mattered. And Andries couldn't run away with her, because of
us
.”