The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  Gerrit had almost forgotten. This was Harenwyck, and on the estate, the tenants tithed to the patroon.

  “Then join us and become a free man with no lease, no rent, no tithe.”

  The coachman snorted. “It’s all fine and good for you to play these games with your brother, my lord, but I have a family to feed. And a brother and a cousin who have their own leaseholds to protect. Apart from Van Harens, there are no ‘free men’ at Harenwyck.” He cast a jaundiced eye over the bandits emerging from the woods to surround the carriage. “Not honest ones, anyway.”

  Pieter strolled up beside Gerrit and cocked his head. “Honest or not, you’re no use to your family dead, Gerardus Bogart, and even if the patroon here won’t shoot you dead, reach for that pistol, and I will.”

  Gerrit watched Bogart weigh his choices: bad and worse, no doubt. Edwaert and Dirck emerged from the brush and stepped into the lantern light. The sound of another eight men hurrying up the road carried through the night air.

  Only a fool or a madman would take those odds.

  Bogart was neither. He climbed down, leaving his pistol behind on the bench. Pieter sprang up to take the reins. Gerrit realized then he’d been holding his breath. But he could not relax—not yet. He circled to the door, approaching it at an angle, just in case Ten Broeck was armed. Something scratched his upper thigh.

  He looked down. His pocket was putting up a fuss. The kitten inside was distinctly unhappy, and trying to claw its way out, but there was nothing Gerrit could do about that at the moment. If his information was wrong, if his associates had betrayed him, there could be a troop of dragoons following just behind the coach. Speed was of the essence. They needed the passengers dealt with and the carriage off the main road before they were detected.

  The coach had been repainted recently. The gilding looked fresh. So did the damned coat of arms. The wolf and lamb. Andries wanted the world to know that he was patroon, second son or not.

  Gerrit opened the carriage door.

  Inside was the same canvas lining Gerrit remembered from childhood. His parents had always sat facing forward, the position of privilege, reserved for adults, with he and Andries on the bench opposite. It had meant that whenever he rode with his family the world seemed to be rushing away from him.

  Gerrit had expected to find Ten Broeck in his father’s place, but the estate manager had ceded pride of place to a woman.

  One from whom Gerrit could not look away. She had a face of extraordinary character, even if she was not the usual sort of beauty Andries paid to keep him company. If she wore paint, it was so skillfully applied that Gerrit could not detect it. Her face was a neat oval tapering to a pointed chin. Her eyes were a pale gray that might have been blue—it was difficult to tell in the lantern light. Her hair was artfully dressed to fall over one shoulder in loose curls. It wasn’t blond, quite, but it wasn’t brown either. More the color of clover honey shot through with streaks of gold. She wore a jaunty little fichu and matching apron all in light translucent silk with white embroidery, the sort of things schoolgirls made to show off their needlework.

  Only she was anything but a schoolgirl. She had a woman’s body, delightfully outlined in a gown of soft Indian chintz, airy folds of white cotton printed with pink and orange flowers. It made him think of sunlit bedcurtains and summer afternoons. It made him hungry for sensual pleasures, the kind he had not known these three long years. The kind Andries was starving Harenwyck’s tenants to pay for.

  Gerrit lifted one of the coach lanterns and held it up to get a better look at her face. When she blinked in the bright light, like a woman waking to her lover’s touch, he knew he wasn’t going to send her back to New York. The roof of the coach was laden with boxes. They would be filled with all the other delicacies Andries ordered from Manhattan. Pieter’s sugared almonds and Jan’s Madeira wine. They could have it all. The only thing Gerrit wanted from the coach—besides the gold, of course—was her.

  • • •

  Anna blinked in the lantern light, blinded by the brightness after so many hours in the dark.

  “Get out, Mr. Ten Broeck,” said Gerrit Van Haren.

  The cultured voice was the same one that had beguiled her with ghost stories and fairy tales in the woods behind the church, but as her eyes adjusted to the light she could see that his had changed. They were colder—harder—than she remembered. She searched his face for some trace of the boy he had been. His thick brown hair still had an unruly curl to it, but the softness of youth had been carved away—as if by a sculptor—to reveal high cheekbones, a wide mouth, and a firm jaw. A handsome villain, and if the pistol steady in his hand and the battered sword hanging at his hip were anything to judge by, a ruthless one.

  “Get out,” he repeated, this time with an impatient edge in his tone.

  Anna lifted her foot over the box on the carriage floor.

  “Not you.”

  She hesitated and looked at Mr. Ten Broeck.

  “This is madness, Gerrit,” said Ten Broeck. “Your brother will overlook a little petty thievery, a box of sweetmeats or a case of wine, but not this. Not robbery on the King’s Highway.”

  “There is no robbery taking place, Mr. Broeck. And we are not on the King’s Highway. This is Harenwyck land. My land. Your driver will reach home tomorrow, after a night at our expense in suitable accommodation, with the contents of his purse intact. And so will you. As for the contents of the coach . . . well, everything my brother claims to own is mine by right. Andries has stolen the estate from me by lies and judicial legerdemain, as I’ll prove, eventually. For now, though, I’ll be taking the Harenwyck gold into custody for safekeeping, along with all the other luxuries my brother imports from New York.”

  His eyes swept over Anna in a frank appraisal and she suddenly realized the truth: he didn’t recognize her.

  She should have felt relief. Instead, she felt something very much like jealousy. She had never been jealous of her students, never resented them for being born with more than she had worked to have. But those afternoons with Gerrit behind the church had been the closest she had come to romance in all her thirty-two years.

  And he had forgotten her. And, like Tarleton, he assumed she was for sale.

  “I think you mistake the nature of my business with your brother,” she said.

  He looked as though he was surprised that she could speak. “Do I?” he asked, one dark eyebrow subtly lifted. “Then pray tell me, what does bring you to Harenwyck, milady?”

  His mock courtesy galled her. She wanted to wipe the superior expression off his face. She wanted to tell him that he’d once been better than his father and his brother. She wanted to tell him the truth: that his wretched family had cast a pall over her life that stretched as far as New York—but telling him that would only get her hanged, so she said, “Your brother has hired me as a tutor.”

  “For private instruction and from a very fine academy, I have no doubt.”

  She should have kept the pistol with her in the carriage, or at the very least made her knives more accessible. One of the slim blades might do quite nicely. Gerrit Van Haren had not only grown up, but had inflated into a bladder much in need of a sharp poke.

  “I do not run a cavaulting school. It is a finishing academy for young ladies.”

  “I will take your word that it is a proper nunnery,” replied Gerrit, easily. “And I do look forward to enjoying the tuition that Andries has paid for, but just at this moment, I’m rather preoccupied. Mr. Ten Broeck, you may step down, and join Edwaert and Dirck and your driver for a lovely evening walk to the old mill, or you can be dragged out of the carriage and frog-marched cross-country barefoot. The choice is yours.”

  Gerrit stepped aside. Mr. Broeck shot a worried look at Anna and then climbed down. Before she could follow, Gerrit vaulted into the compartment and blocked her escape. Without ceremony he snatched up her stocki
nged ankles and lifted them back onto the bench. Instinct, honed under the tutelage of the Widow, took over, and she twisted and dove for the opposite door.

  In the enclosed space his superior size was a decided advantage. He reached around her and seized the door handle before she could touch it, then held it fast. “You’re very lithe for a schoolteacher,” he said pleasantly. “But I confess I am wounded. Was Mr. Ten Broeck such better company?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer before settling comfortably on the bench opposite. Then, quite coldly, he added, “Don’t try it again, or I’ll tie you to the roof with the other baggage.”

  She knew that he meant it. She might have mistaken his immediate intentions, but no matter what kind of boy Gerrit Van Haren had been, he was clearly a different man now, and a dangerous one.

  She tucked her feet up under her on the bench. The carriage seemed far smaller than when it had been occupied by just her and Broeck, especially with Gerrit leaning over the boxes on the floor. He produced a knife from his pocket and cut the leather strapping that held her possessions together atop the patroon’s strongbox.

  The carriage swayed on its springs. A long gaunt face framed by poker-straight white blond hair appeared in the open carriage door. The man standing on the running board looked sharply up at Gerrit. “Any almonds, then?” he asked in Dutch.

  Gerrit lifted Anna’s prized book of engravings by one corner and held it carelessly up to the lantern light. “Does this look like almonds to you, Pieter?” Gerrit replied.

  “That,” said Anna, “is Domenico de’ Rossi’s Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne.”

  The loose pages, the ones too often copied by the girls, where the binding had grown weak and failed after endless hours lying open in the sun of the school’s third-floor studio, slipped out in a papery rush and fluttered down like leaves in a gale. Anna snatched the Laocoön and Apollo Belvedere plates from the air as they fell.

  Gerrit stared at her and suddenly she could not recall if he had asked about the book in English or in Dutch. To cover her mistake she said, “Please be careful with that. It’s old and delicate and very valuable.”

  Gerrit set the book down on the bench beside him. “In New York, maybe, but up here, if you can’t eat it, plant it, ride it, or kill someone with it, it won’t fetch much.”

  The man named Pieter sighed. “No olives either, I suppose,” he said in Dutch.

  “No olives either,” confirmed Gerrit in the same language. He was still looking at her, she realized, studying her face. “Spreek je Nederlands, juf?” he asked.

  Do you speak Dutch, miss? He had asked the question informally, as he would a child or a servant or a woman of low status, but addressed her—with a tinge of sarcasm—as one might a school mistress. It took an act of will not to reply in the same language, in the fine accents she’d practiced with him when he’d corrected her speech as a child. Of course, that was why he had spoken as he did: to see her reaction.

  I know you, she wanted to say, and you are not this man.

  But fifteen years was a long time, and she was not Annatje Hoppe anymore. She gave him the blank look she had perfected in New York and said, “It’s very rude to speak another language in front of a person who doesn’t understand it.”

  That, apparently, was schoolmarmish enough to satisfy her captor. “What use, I wonder,” he asked, “does a pretty girl have for such a book?”

  “I told you. I’ve been hired to tutor the Van Haren girls.”

  He nodded at the engraving of Laocoön in her lap. “Is that really a suitable area of study for young ladies?”

  Anna stopped smoothing the page with her hands and set it on the seat beside her. “Drawing is thought to be an essential element of a polite education.”

  “I meant the subject matter.”

  “For some obscure reason the ancients are always considered respectable, no matter their state of dress.”

  His eyebrows rose at that. “You’re not my brother’s usual type.”

  “Does your brother have a usual type in schoolteachers?”

  “My brother has a usual type in women. The quiet, biddable sort. And he prefers it when they belong to someone else.”

  She had never heard him speak with bitterness before. Not even about his father. But they had been children when they had known each other and experience had obviously changed them both.

  Gerrit tapped on the roof, just as Mr. Ten Broeck had, and the carriage lurched forward.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, as the vehicle began to turn around.

  “Your night won’t be as rustic as Mr. Ten Broeck’s. We’re bound for an inn.”

  A look of alarm must have crossed her face.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not always bent on debauchery. In fact, I have a meeting there with some associates.”

  “In a stolen coach?” Which was now picking up speed at an alarming rate. Anna braced her arms on the walls. “With a fortune in stolen gold?”

  “The coach is mine,” said Gerrit, settling back comfortably onto his bench. Anna envied him. He was a head taller than her and his shoulders were too broad to be buffeted by the jostling of the coach, while she could barely keep her seat. “The courts only found in favor of Andries and his pack of lies because they are controlled by the Rebels, and the Rebels want Harenwyck whole.”

  “I thought that your father disinherited you.”

  Gerrit sighed. “He did. Perhaps. Once upon a time, he said as much, in his study, with my brother at his elbow. Or perhaps it was more of his bluff and bullying. Of one thing I am sure: he never made a will to formalize it. If he had, be certain Andries would have presented it in probate. He did not.

  “Without a will, under Dutch rules of inheritance, Harenwyck passes to me. So my brother of necessity concocted a story, plausible enough, that Cornelis Van Haren had made a last will and testament naming him as sole heir. Then I came home, shortly after my father’s death, refused to accept its terms—and burned it. In truth, I came home to find that Andries had already declared himself patroon and hired a militia to keep me out. I never even got near the house.

  “To settle matters, Andries produced men who claimed to have witnessed this will, and recalled its basic terms. As far as the courts are concerned—the New York Court of Chancery in particular, where my brother applied all his considerable influence—Harenwyck is now the lawful inheritance of Andries, just as my father wished it. You see, at equity, a rogue like me cannot be permitted to unjustly profit from his misdeed. By destroying my dear father’s will I sought to pull his estate back into intestacy, where the common law would make me heir. The will, and fair play, must be upheld! Never mind the damned thing never existed, and Andries and his ‘witnesses’ were perjurers. Such is the course of justice, as twisted by my brother and his Hudson peers.”

  “But the New York courts are controlled by the Rebels,” she said. And Kate Grey’s allies. And Kate Grey had said nothing of any of this. It was possible that she had not known. And equally possible that she had known and decided against sharing all the facts with Anna. “Surely it must count for something that you fought for them with the Continentals.”

  “It appears the teacher has done her homework on the Van Haren family.”

  Anna knew she had made another mistake. She must be more careful. She was supposed to be a stranger to Harenwyck. “It seemed only sensible to find out as much about the patroon as possible, before accepting his offer.”

  “How much is he paying you?”

  “Enough,” she said.

  “I’ll double it.”

  “You would like to brush up your English grammar and improve your needlework?”

  “Just now, I would like to reach my chest of gold, but find it buried beneath a heap of female impedimenta.”

  He set her book down and resumed rummaging through the bagga
ge. He plucked Anna’s sewing box out of the jumbled mess on the floor and examined it in bafflement, unfastening the clasp and flipping it upside down.

  The lid swung open with the motion of the coach and Anna’s silks spilled out like tumbled jewels. Glinting among them were streaks of shining silver. Her lockpicks clattered over the mahogany paint case and the maple strongbox to land ringing upon the floorboards and dislimn Anna’s painstakingly crafted identity as Miss Winters, headmistress of Miss Winters’ Academy.

  Four

  Anna held her breath as Gerrit raised an eyebrow and fished a steel pick out of the tangled heap. He held it up to the light and it glinted. She kept them polished because that made them easier to work with in the dark. With a sinking heart she knew that he knew what it was.

  “Is burglary among the normal subjects for a finishing school?”

  “Adolescent girls are much given to drama,” said Anna. It was, after all, true. “They have a tendency to lock themselves in rooms when romance disappoints.” Also true, if not the exact reason she had brought the lockpicks.

  “And how often is that?”

  “Most Tuesdays,” said Anna. “That is when the post arrives.”

  “Now you sound like a schoolteacher,” he said. “But I find it difficult to believe you are only that.”

  “Because I own a set of lockpicks?”

  “Because you’re too pretty not to make more profitable use of your looks.”

  “You have a very low opinion of the female character, sir.”

  “Not uninformed by experience,” he replied, continuing his investigation of the contents of the coach. “My strongbox had better be at the bottom somewhere.”

  “It is beneath my loom and paint case.”

  He tossed the loom aside and lifted her case of paints onto the seat beside him. Anna could hear the brushes rattling with the motion of the coach from inside the box. When Gerrit leaned forward again, something mewed. “Blast it,” he said. He shifted and dug in his coat pocket and produced a small ball of wriggling gray fur.