The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  After that she did not stray far from the estate manager’s side.

  Their journey resumed, and the afternoon passed if not comfortably, then supportably, the leagues rolling by in Ten Broeck’s pleasant, safe company, until the sun dipped below the horizon, and they slowed to a halt on a flat stretch of road that felt smoother than the previous miles.

  “Are we here?” she asked. Her back had begun to ache from sitting so long and she was hungry and eager to be done with traveling—and to bid farewell to their escort.

  “No,” said Ten Broeck, a note of concern entering his voice. “This is the border of Harenwyck.”

  Ten Broeck opened the carriage door and Anna craned her neck to see beyond the horses. A red sandstone arch straddled the road. It was weathered, but the inscription was still legible:

  Harenwyck 1630

  She could not remember seeing the arch on her way off the estate, but then she had come miles through the woods, off road, to avoid the men searching for her.

  Tarleton sat his horse at the head of the column. He signaled his men and they wheeled as one to fall in behind him. A picture of equestrian grace, he trotted up to the carriage window.

  “We shall leave you here, Mr. Ten Broeck,” announced Tarleton.

  Even in the failing light Anna could see that Mr. Ten Broeck’s face was a mask of concern. “We are twenty miles from the new manor house.”

  “We are twenty feet from Harenwyck,” said Tarleton. “The patroon’s gold has been delivered to the patroon’s very gates. What happens on Van Haren land is, I think, still very much the patroon’s responsibility. ‘Lord of the manor,’ and all that, yes?”

  Tarleton did not wait for Ten Broeck’s reply. The colonel spared Anna a look that promised he would not soon forget her, or their brief engagement in the woods. Then he spurred his horse down the road. Thirty mounted men followed in near-perfect order, creating earthly thunder and leaving a cloud of choking dust behind.

  “How very like our English masters,” said Ten Broeck drily, watching them go, “to give with one hand and take away with the other. A warning from General Clinton, no doubt. A reminder that he can withdraw his protection at his will and pleasure.”

  Anna listened to the sound of the legion’s hooves dying away in the distance. Mr. Ten Broeck’s distress was genuine, but all she felt was relief. Tarleton was gone. It was likely that if their journey together had continued, he would have cornered her again, and she doubted he would be so easily eluded twice. She had surprised him—in seizing the initiative and in exhibiting some modicum of skill—but the colonel was an active man, strong and agile, and now forewarned and forearmed.

  “Surely we are safe now that we are on Van Haren land,” she said, recalling the neat cottages and tirelessly tended fields, orchards, and gardens of her childhood.

  “Just so,” said Mr. Ten Broeck, but something in his tone did not convince.

  Mr. Ten Broeck tapped the roof of the coach, his walking stick making a dull thump on the canvas headliner, and the carriage lurched and began rumbling forward again into the landscape of her childhood.

  It was changed beyond recognition. The first cottage they passed had been burned, the fields with it. The second a few miles later was boarded up.

  “What has happened here?” she asked.

  “There has been some unrest,” admitted Ten Broeck. “Some incidents with the Skinners and Cowboys. Unhappy consequences of this war.”

  “But the patroon has a militia.”

  “He has a militia, but the estate spans two hundred thousand acres and they cannot be everywhere at once.”

  “It looks as though they have been nowhere at all,” she said, after a moment’s pause. She knew how close to the bone tenant farmers lived. The families whose homes they were passing would never recover.

  “The Skinners and loyalist cattlemen are often better armed and better mounted,” said Ten Broeck.

  “Why do they raid Harenwyck when the patroon sells his butter and beef to their side?”

  “Because Clinton needs provisions too badly to scruple over where they come from and the Skinners and Cowboys can undersell the patroon. They don’t have to bear any of the cost of raising the cattle they steal. It’s pure profit for them. But you needn’t fear. They dare not come near the manor house. And some of the destruction you see here is tenants against tenants. Old grievances given new life by politics. I assure you there is no threat to the patroon or the manor.”

  And that she knew for a flat-out lie, because starving tenants were dangerous tenants, especially to the man who collected their rents, but she was too unsettled and exhausted to argue.

  She’d had no appetite earlier in the day, but now her stomach was growling and her back ached. She wanted her own bed and dinner in her own parlor with Mrs. Peterson and Miss Demarest, but she wouldn’t be home for weeks, possibly months, and her homesickness became suddenly acute.

  Anna shut her eyes, and discovered the peculiar, disjointed sleep of the traveler, where the motion of the journey incubates and invades dreams.

  She woke, her body falling into space, as the carriage lurched forward and then sprang back. Hands gripped her shoulders and steadied her. For a moment she did not know where she was. She had dreamed she was asleep sitting up in her chair at home. But the seat beneath her was too hard and the windows beside her were too close and too small. She struggled to remember where she was and then, for a second, who she was. A name. A name. Her name. She reached for it, as if searching for the doorway in a dark room at night. Annatje. Annatje Hoppe of Harenwyck. She was at Harenwyck. Only that wasn’t right.

  “Miss Winters?”

  She looked up into Mr. Ten Broeck’s face; the weak light from the coach’s lanterns was reflected in his kind brown eyes. She was Anna Winters now, because there were years between Annatje and Anna. But she was back at Harenwyck, where they had wanted to hang her.

  But if they were at Harenwyck there should be lights and footmen and the sounds of a busy household. Outside the carriage windows were only trees and the deep, quiet dark of full night.

  Something was wrong. She knew it the same way she had known it in the cottage that night so long ago, before she heard the rustle of movement on the path, before the heavy knock upon the door. That same queasy frisson of fear ran from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.

  “Why have we stopped?” Her voice sounded calm. She was anything but.

  “I’m not sure,” said Mr. Broeck. He wore that reassuring smile of his, but as soon as he’d let her go, his hands had wrapped themselves around his walking stick, and he held it now like a club.

  She wished she had a weapon. Thanks to the Widow, she could probably make better employment of Ten Broeck’s stick than he could, though she couldn’t think how to convince him to relinquish it. There was a pistol in her chest on top of the coach, but that wasn’t going to do her much good at present. There were knives in her paint box, tucked among the brushes, where a casual observer might mistake them for artist’s tools, but her case was strapped to the strongbox on the floor. All she had in her embroidery basket—which had tumbled off the seat and was now lost in the mess on the floor—was a set of lockpicks hidden amongst the skeins.

  Then she heard voices: the coach driver’s, which she recognized, and another. It teased at her memory, the tenor familiar, but the tone new. It came to her in a heartbeat, triggered by the growling of her stomach, the hunger that had been her constant companion in childhood and today had dogged her since the inn. The voice belonged to a man who should not be here. The boy who had remarked on her klompen when she was nine, and brought her cookies at sixteen, and kissed her—whom she’d kissed—in the woods. The one man, alone, who would be sure to recognize her, and to get her hanged: Gerrit Van Haren.

  Three

  Gerrit lay in the brush on the side of the road, flat
on his stomach, watching the cat cross back and forth. The dark-furred beast had already made the trip twice, bold as brass, strutting like he had every right to be there. Certainly he had as much right as Gerrit and the dozen renegade Harenwyck men hiding in the trees.

  The feline bore more than a passing resemblance to the barn cat that had patrolled the stores at the manor house when Gerrit was a boy. He could remember being ten or perhaps eleven years old, and sneaking the tom inside to sleep with him on cold winter nights. They’d kept each other snug, Gerrit and the tom, and he could still recall the comforting warmth of having that heavy, purring body slung across his feet at night.

  Then Gerrit’s father had found out. He had beaten Gerrit and banished the cat, ordered the estate manager to take the tom to the gates of Harenwyck and leave him there. That had been more than a decade ago, and this spry creature could hardly be the same feline, but Gerrit liked the idea that this was one of his descendants. Gerrit felt an instant kinship with the creature. That the cat was prowling an empty road twenty miles from the manor house meant that like Gerrit, he was not a welcome visitor at Harenwyck.

  Tonight they were both hunters in the dark. The difference was that Gerrit was after far more dangerous prey.

  The night was inky black, the moon barely a sliver of tarnished silver in the sky. The coachman would not see the felled trees in the road until it was too late to stop and turn around, and by that time, Gerrit’s men would be behind the carriage, dragging another barrier into place, stopping the road like a bottle and cutting off all retreat.

  Gerrit had chosen this spot with care. The Continental Army had been god-awful at drill and discipline, particularly the loutish New Englanders he’d been handed to command. The retreat from New York had been a shambles and a sickening waste of lives. Though his highland Dutch compatriots this evening might not show to best effect on the drill field either, they were unmatched at this form of warfare. They had been practicing it for the past hundred years, against the Indians and the French and occasionally one another. No one exceeded them at ambush and highway robbery.

  That was a good thing, because they could not afford to fail. Not if he meant to wrest Harenwyck from his brother, Andries. It was all that mattered to him: justice for the tenants. He wanted the power of the landlords broken. Congress ought to want the same, but even though Gerrit had joined their army and fought for them, the Rebels had sided with his younger brother over the estate. Andries now had the New York courts, at least the ones controlled by the Americans, on his side. Gerrit could never hope to fight him there. But if he was successful tonight, if he could capture the carriage and its cargo of gold—a far bigger prize than anything he had attempted heretofore—the British would be forced to take him seriously.

  And he would become a traitor to the American cause. He didn’t like it, but there was no other way open to him. He was no saint. If he had to choose between the independence of his country and the best interests of the tenants who had sweated to keep his family in luxury this past century and a half, he would choose the oppressed of Harenwyck. Every time.

  “Damned cat,” muttered Pieter, lying beside him. Gerrit had known Pieter Ackerman since they were both ten. That was the year everything had changed. The year the little girl in the yellow clogs had come with her father to pay their family’s rent and Gerrit had learned the truth about his charmed life at Harenwyck: it was built on injustice and lies.

  Gerrit had shoes on his feet and wood in his fire and food on his table when—because—others did not. Because some dead Dutchman in Amsterdam had decreed it so a century ago, all the land in the valley belonged to the patroons, and all the work was done by the tenants. Farmers paid the price of their land in rent ten times over in a single generation but would never own it.

  His father had kept all that from him. Until that day, Gerrit had never even talked to one of the tenant children. Then and there, Gerrit had resolved to change that, but it hadn’t been as simple as bowing to the girl in the sunny klompen. His efforts to talk to the children threshing wheat in the barn or shelling peas in the kitchen were failures. The tenant children knew better than to pause from their work to speak with the patroon’s son. Except for Pieter.

  “The cat’s just hungry,” said Gerrit.

  “So am I,” said Pieter. “Think your brother bought us any of those fancy almonds again?”

  “Probably,” said Gerrit. “Maybe a more generous supply, since we left none for him the last time.” A month ago they had robbed Andries’ wagon from New York and come away with six bolts of good cloth, a box of sugared almonds, a jar of Spanish olives, four hams, a Parmesan cheese, and a case of Madeira. Gerrit’s brother enjoyed his luxuries.

  “I liked the almonds,” said Pieter. “The wine was too sweet, though.”

  “You drank it all down anyway,” Jan observed, from somewhere in the thicket beside them. “And I liked the wine.”

  Gerrit was resolved to sample some of Andries’ delicacies himself this time, before Pieter devoured them. The stuff was impossible to sell for hard cash at Harenwyck, so Gerrit and his men might as well benefit. Farm wives had little use for Jordan almonds or Madeira wine.

  He scanned the road once more. The damned cat was crossing again. The white streaks in his coat betrayed all his feline stealth. This time the little brute had something stuffed in his mouth, a plump gray mouse or baby rat, and that must explain the repeated trips. The tom, at least, had found his prey. Gerrit envied him. He wanted the Harenwyck coach in his grasp. He wanted the strongbox and the fortune in gold that Andries would need to keep his militia paid and his favorite tenants bribed. Gerrit was going to deprive his brother of everything useful, everything he needed to hold on to Harenwyck.

  Gerrit wished he could keep Ten Broeck. The man was an able estate manager, and depriving Andries of his services would cripple the patroonship, but Ten Broeck was well-liked by the tenants—a fair man, all agreed—and Gerrit could not hold Ten Broeck without risking the ire of the populace.

  The doxy was another matter. His sources on the road reported that she was a higher-priced strumpet than Andries usually sent for. Her he could keep from his brother, and his brother would know why. Gerrit would send her back to New York on foot. It would make Andries look like a fool, and that would weaken his position with the Rebels and British alike.

  Gerrit checked his pistol, and then finally he heard the sound he had been waiting for all night: the jingle of harness and tack. The cat heard it too. The tom froze in the middle of the road and turned, ears pricked, in the direction of the sound. His dinner took the opportunity to struggle free. The wriggling burden dropped to the ground and let out a plaintive mew.

  It was not a mouse. And the tom was not a tom. Just as the glow of lanterns diffused the gloom, the mother cat took off running, leaving her kitten behind.

  Gerrit cursed and stood up.

  “Not yet!” hissed Jan, who had been doing this long before Gerrit turned outlaw, and knew his business. “They aren’t close enough.”

  The kitten mewed again. Gerrit sighed and strode to the middle of the road, scooped up the trembling animal, and dropped the warm bundle of fur, claws, and teeth in his coat pocket.

  By then, of course, it was too late. The driver had seen him, and the barricade as well. The coachman reined his team in thirty paces shy of the intended ambush spot and Gerrit’s carefully laid plans evaporated. The driver began the dangerous business of trying to execute a turn on a dark road with skittish horses.

  His men were waiting for a signal. If Gerrit did not attack now, the carriage—and the patroon’s strongbox—would get away, and Harenwyck would slip even further from his grasp.

  Gerrit’s father had told him never to aim a weapon he didn’t intend to use. It had been, perhaps, the only piece of good advice old Cornelis had ever dispensed. It had served Gerrit well in the army but was proving useless here, where
there were no uniforms and it was too often impossible to distinguish enemies from friends.

  Like the coach’s driver. Gerrit recognized his face, or the blurred shape of it moving in the dark, anyway. He could not remember the man’s name. The driver had been a groom or stable boy when Gerrit was a child—something to do with horses at any rate. Gerrit did not believe he had ever spoken with the man, which was unfortunate. He had no memory of kindness or cruelty to hang his next move on. The driver might be a good man or bad, like any of those Gerrit had fought—and killed—in the war.

  Without doubt this was a Harenwyck man, a tenant, one of the people Gerrit was risking his honor, his freedom, and his life, to liberate from the grinding serfdom of the patroonship—and there wasn’t a hope in hell of doing that without hurting some of them.

  Gerrit strolled to the center of the road with the nonchalance of a man who had nothing left to lose, because that, in fact, was what he was.

  “Stand and deliver,” he intoned. A ritual greeting, the highwayman’s litany. His voice, trained to give orders in battle, carried on the air. It had the weight and ring of gospel authority in it, but the driver did not appear to be a God-fearing or highwayman-fearing man. He snapped the reins and urged his skittish horses forward.

  Gerrit raised his pistol and aimed it at the driver’s head.

  The coachman found religion and reined up. The horses did not like it, and if they had been a whit friskier, Gerrit would have been trampled. As it was, they came to a stop so close that he could feel the heat of their breath in the night air.

  “Climb down, sir!” Gerrit shouted.

  The driver shook his head. He had a pistol beside him on the bench. Gerrit suspected it was loaded. “The patroon will evict me if I give up his coach.”