The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  • • •

  Gerrit was glad that Miss Winters could not understand their conversation. He had convinced Dirck and Pieter and Edwaert and all the men who had followed him into the Continental Army—and back out of it—of the necessity of switching sides, but now that he was drinking brandy with the enemy he felt like a traitor.

  “I was educated on the Continent myself,” said André, speaking in the flawless accent of an Amsterdam burgher. “At Geneva. I would have liked to have gone to Leiden—the observatory there is extraordinary—but Leiden’s Calvinism wasn’t strict enough for my Huguenot father’s tastes.”

  André was trying to put him at ease with what some would deem treason, searching for common ground. Gerrit had been to the observatory once. The student he shared lodgings with had invited him. He had accepted the invitation with eagerness, excited at the idea of seeing the stars up close. At Harenwyck Gerrit had whiled away hours lying in the fields looking up at the night sky. The constellations had fascinated him, an ever-changing pageant of lions, bears, monsters, women, and witches, an irresistible brew of lurid adolescent imaginings and respectable classical learning—but through the lens of the twelve-foot telescope, divorced from their neighbors, the stars had turned out to be nothing more than pinpoints of light.

  On the subject of fathers steeped in Calvinism, however, Gerrit suspected that he and André saw eye to eye. “My father wanted me to study law,” admitted Gerrit, “no doubt to help him contest the Wappinger and their land claims, and the tenants and their lease disputes. So I read history instead.” He had never been able to see the point in the law, since his father had always been able to bend it readily enough to serve his will.

  “Mine wanted me to pursue mathematics,” said André, “and become a merchant, like him. I did indeed study mathematics—but as part of military science—along with drawing, which my father despised as a feminine pursuit.”

  Gerrit spared a glance at Miss Winters, who was slipping a fish into her basket and cooing in a very unschoolteacherish manner. He had to remember to do something about that kitten. If he could not keep his sworn oaths to nations, he must keep his small promises, must fulfill his lesser obligations, or he would be nothing at all.

  “A continental education must be unusual in the British Army,” observed Gerrit. It had certainly been almost unheard of amongst the colonists, particularly the New Englanders, who often took provincialism to new heights.

  “A foreign education—along with foreign blood—is both curse and blessing,” said André. “The English, in my experience, alternate between despising and envying foreigners. They discount our bravery and dismiss our military acumen, but hire our mercenaries by the thousands. They are suspicious of all but the plainest English cooking, and yet covet European chefs. I was born in England, but my family name ends in a vowel, so the children at my grammar school pretended to detect a whiff of garlic whenever I entered the room. I am acquainted with the prejudices that you face among your countrymen and in trying to deal with my colleagues. I want you to understand that I do not share them, and that they pose no obstacle to our negotiations, but there are other factors in play that will cause my superiors to be circumspect.”

  “You mean,” said Gerrit, “my late service with the Continental Army.”

  “No,” said André, with some amusement. “General Clinton finds it entirely credible that a man—particularly a Dutchman—might recant his revolutionary fervor when faced with the prospect of gaining, or losing, a great inheritance. There, at least, prejudice works in your favor. And your military experience in this case is an asset. The general is not one of those officers who underestimates American fighting men.”

  “Then what is the obstacle?”

  “Your brother,” said André. “He has not taken the Rebel oath. Oh, he meets with them in secret. We know that. And he has expressed the greatest sympathy for their aims. He even fancies himself something of a leveler, which must involve some very creative thought for a man who holds more than a thousand souls in leases that last three lifetimes, not to mention slaves. But, most important, he holds the patroonship in a quiescent, tractable state. Other manors are plagued by riots and riven by civil strife, while Harenwyck remains relatively calm.”

  “That is because he uses my father’s tactics,” said Gerrit. “He keeps his favorites on his side with patronage and bribes, and the troublemakers in their place with threats.” Like the driver tonight.

  “But keep them he does,” said André. “And whichever faction your brother sides with will be able to march an army through Harenwyck straight to the Hudson, the highway to the north. Harenwyck whole, Harenwyck with unfettered access to the Narrows is what General Clinton wants. He will not back you until you show that you can deliver him that. Harenwyck splintered into a bloody patchwork of hostile territories is worse than useless to him.”

  “The tenants will back me,” said Gerrit, hoping it was true, “once they no longer have Andries to fear.”

  “I do not doubt you, my lord, but my superiors will require proof.”

  “What sort of proof?”

  “A show of capability and commitment. Raise two hundred Harenwyck men to fight for the King by the end of this month, and we will bring you six hundred to subdue and secure the estate: cavalry, infantry, and fieldpieces. But it must be done quickly. Events are in motion on the Hudson. Harenwyck is not the only strategic asset that the general has his eye on.”

  It would be enough. Gerrit’s brother, Andries, had only eighty men under arms and no artillery. Eight hundred men together would be overwhelming numbers. Eight hundred would mean that Andries’ militia would lay down their arms just like the coachman had, and no one would have to get hurt.

  “I can do that,” said Gerrit, praying it was true. He would have barely two weeks to raise the men, but he had an idea how to do it. “I will need powder and shot. They’d be fools to join me with empty muskets.”

  “You have gold,” said André, rising from the table. “Transmuting that commodity into gunpowder and lead shot is no great alchemy, or at least should prove a little easier than turning water into wine.”

  But not by much. There were no working powder mills in the Hudson Highlands. Powder had to be imported to the estates, just like their iron and glass, and it was scarcer now than ever. The only way Gerrit was going to acquire enough for two hundred men was by stealing it from Rebel stockpiles, as André well knew. “And when I have these two hundred men, how will I contact you?”

  “Correspondence left with the publican here will reach me,” the Englishman replied, rising from his chair. “A piece of advice in the meanwhile. I have another appointment tonight and, unfortunately, I cannot take my impulsive friend downstairs with me.”

  “Is that wise?” asked Gerrit. “You can hardly be taken for a spy, even out of uniform, when you are traveling with Tarleton’s dragoons, but on your own, hereabouts, with lines between armies ever shifting, you could find yourself in some difficulty.” He could find himself hanged, in point of fact, and with very little fanfare, given the dispositions of Washington’s officers.

  “Spare no worry on my account,” said André. “But do not, I pray you, leave Ban alone with your pretty teacher, or delectable as she is, she will go the way of your brother’s olives and sweetmeats.”

  • • •

  Anna watched the door close behind John André. While Gerrit and the British agent had been talking, she had been feeding the kitten—and listening.

  After Scrappy had inhaled the initial slice of turkey, Anna had returned to the sideboard and decided that someone ought to eat at least a fraction of the luxurious—by highland standards, anyway—repast that had been laid out.

  There were tiny river fish grilled whole. Her father had called them sunnies for their golden hue. As a small child, she had loved to go to cast a line with him on the rocky banks of the Hudson, t
hough she had not understood until later that he only fished when their crops failed or their hens refused to lay. She could not bear to eat one herself, but the kitten thoroughly enjoyed the offering, crunching one up, bones and all.

  She was going to have to get a new sewing basket.

  There was squash baked with a crust of Parmesan cheese. Anna wondered where the Halve Maen was getting Italian cheese in the highlands; then she realized that she had ridden in with the answer: from a highwayman. She did not think that kittens as a rule ate squash, but she knew they liked cheese, and the little beast accounted the Parmesan crust a great delicacy, licking her paws thoroughly clean afterward. And all the while Anna had listened to John André talk.

  Anna remembered what Kate Grey had said of him. He is ruthless and all too willing to sacrifice his pawns.

  John André was going to get Gerrit killed.

  There wasn’t a damned thing she could do about it without risking herself.

  Anna knew what men like André—and women like the Widow—did. She knew what late-night meetings in private rooms led to. Anna had sat on the bench in front of the jambless hearth shelling peas while her father and the Widow talked that first time, her mother busy about the fire cooking a meal for the woman whose schemes were going to destroy her family. It was the same conversation, then as now: men and arms and numbers and odds. Undertakings and promises. Her father and the Widow had drunk cloudy homemade gin and after Angela Ferrers had gone, Anna’s parents had argued the whole night through.

  The second meeting had followed a similar pattern, and by the third her mother was gone, decamped with a Huguenot tin peddler from New Paltz. Anna never saw her again.

  It was that third meeting that changed everything. It was spring by then, and her father had gone out and gotten a bottle of the corn whiskey that was sold illegally on the estate—only the manor store and the Halve Maen had the right to sell spirits on the patroon’s land—because the Widow had mentioned she preferred it to gin. And the talk that night had not been about leases and suits and lawyers and the natural rights of tenants, but about rough music and bringing the patroon—lofty Cornelis Van Haren—to his knees.

  By autumn her father was dead and Anna was . . . no longer Anna.

  She could not let the same happen to Gerrit. He had been willing to put himself between Anna and Tarleton and Tarleton’s thirty dragoons. And in some strange way—for all he had changed—he was still the youth she’d cared so much for, all those years ago.

  She watched Gerrit now as he reached across the table for the bottle of brandy that André had left. It was nearly full. He poured himself a brimming glass and drank it off in one go.

  He needed advice. He needed someone like the Widow. And the only person like the Widow within a hundred miles and on his side—which John André was decidedly not—was Anna.

  “Gerrit,” she said. It came naturally to her lips, his given name, though their acquaintance, as far as he knew, had been far too short to merit it.

  “Forgive me,” he said looking up. “You must be starving. And exhausted. Have something to eat, and I shall arrange a room for you here. In the morning we can send to the manor house; no doubt Andries will dispatch one of his other conveyances for you. At last count he had five, including a chariot and a chaise.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “but I have something I need to tell you first.”

  His puzzlement was plain on his handsome face. He picked up the bottle once more and said, “What?”

  “I lied earlier, about not speaking Dutch.”

  For a moment he was utterly still. All was silence in the chamber and the sounds of the taproom, a muffled music of talk and tankards, played in the space between them. Then he set the bottle down very carefully. “Why?” he asked.

  “Habit. Because no one wants a Dutch woman for a finishing school mistress.” That was true, even if it wasn’t her truth.

  “Does my brother know?”

  “That I speak Dutch? No.”

  He was silent for too long, and when he spoke, his voice was cold. “Then the real question becomes, did you come to the highlands to spy on him, or on me?”

  “If I had come to the highlands to spy on you, would I be telling you now that I speak Dutch?” It was amazing how easy it was to sidestep the truth.

  “Why are you telling me now?” She could hear the impatience in his voice.

  “Because the man with whom you have been dealing, this John André, is dangerous.”

  “I should hope so,” said Gerrit, “since he is a British officer out of uniform in contested territory. If he weren’t a dangerous man, he wouldn’t stay alive for very long. The Americans could hang him for a spy. I gather, from his deportment, that the prospect does not worry him overmuch. That is all to the good. If I’m to wrest Harenwyck from my brother, I will need the help of dangerous men.”

  “But not that one,” said Anna. “He is more than dangerous. He is a murderer.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m not free to say.” She could hardly tell him about the Widow, but she had to convince him. “But I know of what I speak. I have met people like him before. They are manipulators, puppet masters. They plot and pull the strings of people like us as though we are marionettes. They play at revolutions and insurrections, but they are very seldom there when the killing starts. That man does not give a damn about you or Harenwyck or the tenants. All he wants is British control of Harenhoeck on the Narrows, so the Rebels cannot lay their chain across the river. John André will have done his research on you and your family, and he will say whatever he thinks will win you to his side. He woos you with talk of rigid Calvinist fathers and promises of reform. He is trying to seduce you to his cause.”

  “I rather thought he was trying to seduce me in general,” said Gerrit. “And that kind of attraction can cut both ways.”

  “He prefers men,” agreed Anna. “But spymasters with his sort of cunning do not make fools of themselves over pretty faces. Even ones as pretty as yours. John André might allow you to think you are playing him, but it will be his hands upon the strings.”

  “Thank you for that detailed appraisal of my gullibility and stupidity.”

  “I have dealt with people like him before and you have not. That hardly makes you stupid.”

  “Just naive, then,” he said. “After all, I was taken in by you. Anna Winters, English gentlewoman. Who are you really?”

  “Miss Winters and her school are very real.” Both seemed like a fever dream. She was back at Harenwyck. It felt so strange. Perhaps she would wake up in a moment and discover she had never left. But she was here with Gerrit, so it must be real, and she could not let him share her father’s fate.

  “What about the brick house and the ducks and the fishing lady?”

  Inside her a voice cried out to reveal herself. I am Annatje Hoppe, don’t you remember? You kissed me behind the church and terrible things happened to me later but I survived and I have come home. But that would get her hanged and do Gerrit no good at all.

  “I stitched them.” The embroidery was still there above the mantel in her parlor in New York.

  There was a scratch at the door, interrupting her thoughts, and Gerrit said, “Come,” without taking his eyes off her.

  The door opened. Pieter entered, smiling and smelling of fresh air and the outdoors. “The coach is taken care of, and the gold with it,” he said in Dutch, eyeing the sideboard. “Aren’t you going to eat some of that?”

  “I think we’re quite done here,” said Gerrit.

  “Are the sunnies any good?” asked Pieter, again in Dutch.

  “I don’t know,” replied Gerrit, in the same language. “Ask Miss Winters.”

  “Did you try the fish?” he asked in English.

  “No,” said Gerrit. “Ask her in Dutch.”

  Pieter�
�s brow knit. “I don’t understand, baas.”

  “Of course not,” said Gerrit. “That is because you and I, Pieter, are gullible rustics.”

  “Please stop,” said Anna.

  He didn’t. “We’re such chawbacons that we can’t see beyond a pretty face and a pretty—”

  “Don’t!” she cried out. “You are better than this.”

  “Ah, but you understand Dutch, so you know that I am not in fact better than this. You know what André and I were talking about: betraying my oath to the Americans.”

  “Can I have the turkey?” asked Pieter.

  “Good God, of course. Help yourself.”

  For a moment, Anna watched Pieter heap his plate with turkey and coleslaw and rice fritters and a generous scoop of the baked squash with cheese. Her appetite woke at last, but she could hardly eat now. Gerrit was still regarding her with something like disgust in his eyes.

  “Just what am I supposed to do with you?” he asked her.

  “I will go on to the manor house tonight,” she said, “and relieve you of the dilemma.” She could not bear to have him look at her like that. She would happily tramp three miles in the dark to be away from him now.

  “No, you won’t. You heard everything that André said. I can’t let you go tattling to my dear brother.”

  “I have no plans to tell your brother anything,” she said truthfully. But if she did not reach Harenwyck, Kate Grey would set the bailiffs on her.

  “Please, Miss Winters, we both know I can’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth. As the proverb has it, deceive me once, the fault is thine; when twice, ’tis only mine.”

  “The only thing I have deceived you about is myself. Everything I said about André is true.”

  Gerrit shrugged. “True or false, we need his help.”

  “So are we with the British now?” asked Pieter between bites of rice fritter.