The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  “No. Our carriage almost ran over her in the road and we could not find her mother.” It was very near the truth.

  Mrs. Buys was right. A second generous scoop of sand did the trick, and Anna was able to put Scrappy in a fresh—thank goodness—basket and follow one of the maids, a flower-faced girl whom the cook called Tryntje, to her room.

  It was not in the attic. It was on the second floor, at the back of the house, with easy access to both the back and main stairs.

  “The young misses are in the front, through that door,” explained Tryntje. She said it apologetically, but Anna was just happy not to be relegated to an attic. She had hoped simply for a room she could stand up in. She had been given a room finer than her bedchamber in New York. The ceiling was so high that the bed’s finials did not even come close to touching it. The bed frame itself was mahogany with carved posts and a fretwork tester dressed in blue and white chintz. The entire chamber was carpeted in a pleasing pattern of gray, green, and blue blocks, and the fireplace was surrounded by a full wall of paneling painted cornflower. It was a thoroughly English room. The only concession to Dutch taste was the tiled fireplace—but these were popular enough in English homes as well.

  “There’s water in the jug,” the maid was saying as she bustled about the room opening the bed-curtains and laying brushes and soap out on the dresser. “The clothes are mine and Mrs. Buys’. The patroon said to apologize—there are no ladies in the house to borrow something better from.”

  No ladies in the house. “What about the girls’ mother?”

  Tryntje stopped bustling for a moment. She arranged the brushes on the dresser, lining them up left to right, largest to smallest. Then she picked them up and did it again, reversing their order. Anna recognized this for what it was: a delaying maneuver.

  “Does she not live at the manor?” prompted Anna.

  Tryntje gave up on the brushes and began fussing with the clothes. “Mrs. Buys would not like me gossiping. Now, this is my best shift and that’s Mrs. Buys’ Sunday gown.”

  And that was the subject closed. Anna didn’t blame Tryntje. Jobs were hard to come by on the patroonship. A maid’s salary would be a lifeline for a tenant family if there came a bad harvest. Positions at the house had been sought after even in Anna’s day, when the old patroon had been well-known to corner maids in empty rooms. Even so, they were good positions, and Anna would not be the cause of Tryntje losing hers.

  Anna turned her attention to the clothes on the bed. The chemise was fine cotton, but so old that it was transparent as glass around the elbows and knees. The gown was good silk but had obviously been remade. The large damask pattern was thirty years out-of-date, and the shoulders had most likely been reshaped with remnants of old robings. It was the best they had, and they were giving it to her. And the maid was embarrassed because their best was old and worn. Anna did not know what to say. She was not Gerrit. She had not been born with the best of everything and only later discovered that others did not have as much. She was one of those others—one of these people. She had nicer things now, but inside she had not changed.

  “They’re as pretty as anything I had in my baggage,” she said. “Thank you, Tryntje. I’ll be sure to return them as soon as my gown is laundered.”

  The maid’s weak smile told Anna that laundering, or even mending, was unlikely to save her gown. She didn’t care. The room was warm and dry and the linens on the bed looked smooth and cool, and she was almost falling asleep on her feet. She thanked Tryntje again for the water, declined her offer to heat it in the kettle, and then for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours, Anna was alone.

  She stripped off her clothes, washed in the tepid water provided, put on Tryntje’s shift, and climbed onto the bed. Scrappy seemed content to curl up on the carpet. Anna thought briefly about bringing the kitten up on the bed to sleep with her, but the drop to the ground was too far for such a tiny animal, and Scrappy had spent enough time trapped in the basket. She could have the run of the room.

  Anna had already learned a great many things that Kate Grey and her Rebel friends would wish to know. There was probably paper and ink in the desk by the window, but she had not decided just yet how much to tell them. Gerrit’s involvement changed everything. She probably ought to write some of what she had gleaned in a letter to Mrs. Peterson, but her heart was slowing down and the feather pillow beneath her cheek was soft, and she was too tired even to draw the bed-curtains.

  It was midafternoon by the time she woke. She had slept through the whole morning and a good part of the day with the sun streaming in on her face, bed-curtains still wide-open. Someone—Tryntje, probably—had come and gone, leaving behind a pot of tea, a bowl of sugar, a pitcher of cream, and a bowl of porridge wrapped in towels to keep it warm. Someone had also brought a small sandbox for Scrappy and a chicken leg that was already more than half gone.

  The kitten herself had clawed her way onto the upholstered chair by the fire and was sleeping contentedly on a cushion. Anna did not feel too bad about the snags on the arms. Her kitten might have spoiled the patroon’s chair, but the patroon’s feud with his brother had cost Anna her best clothes, her favorite loom, her paint box, her atlas, and her prized book of engravings. Not to mention her lockpicks, her knives, and the very fine muff pistol the Widow had given her. Anna did not, however, begrudge Scrappy her ruined sewing basket. The cat had at least made use of it, as opposed to flinging it from a moving carriage.

  Anna ate. Scrappy got up and worried her chicken leg and then went to sleep again atop it, looking forlorn. Probably missing her mother and siblings.

  The Van Harens were home wreckers to a man.

  Anna made the best of the gown she had been given, folding back the excess fabric and pinning it closed over her stays. The silk was a rich shade of orange, like fiery autumn leaves, and Anna felt fortunate that it could be made to fit as well as flatter.

  Her clothing, in reality, was the least of her problems. She had lost all of her school equipment. The Van Haren girls could not embroider a sampler out of thin air. Farm-dyed wool was not a reasonable substitute for silk thread, and linen thread was of no use at all. She had a great deal of work to do.

  Last night she had come up the back stairs and seen little of the house. This morning she went down the front stairs. They were massive and branched upon a landing where family portraits hung amidst a display of weaponry. The halberds and harquebuses, Anna supposed, served the same purpose as the coat of arms: to lend an air of legitimacy to an estate earned not on the battlefield but in counting houses. Anna doubted that the display convinced the Wappinger Indians, who had been trying to reclaim their land for the last century, first from the Dutch and now through the English courts. The colonists had resorted to arms to defend their land over the years—from the natives, from the French, and even from their neighbors in Massachusetts—but Anna could not help but wonder how many of the pikes and hackbutts and muskets ranged along the wall had actually been wielded by Van Harens.

  The portraits at the top of the double staircase were the oldest, all of gentlemen with wide-brimmed hats and ladies with dinner-plate ruffs. As Anna descended, the fashions became lighter and more modern but the faces that looked out from the frames changed little. The Van Harens were a distinctive-looking family. The first patroon might have been a merchant, but he’d had a long, aristocratic face with laughing blue eyes and thick blond hair, and he had bequeathed these—along with two hundred thousand acres on the Hudson—to his heirs.

  The last patroon had a place of honor at the foot of the stairs. He had chosen to be painted with his favorite hunting dog, a long, lean hound, as black and fearsome as the wolf on the family arms. Cornelis could have been no more than forty when the portrait was done, and there was a loose grace to his pose that had been lost to age by the time Anna knew him. He stood beside a tree, a long fowling rifle in one hand, the old manor house in the bac
kground. Like all the bygone Van Harens the old patroon had been tall and slender and blond.

  All the Van Harens except Gerrit, whose coffee hair and eyes set him apart from the rest of his family. Anna supposed he took after his mother, although she could not remember what Cornelis’ wife had looked like—only an impression of rustling petticoats and silk shoes—and hers was not among the family portraits in the hall. Gerrit’s likeness must have been painted after he returned from Leiden, for he looked older than when Anna had known him, but not as mature as he looked now. The picture was very fine—its subject strikingly handsome, though some quality of physiognomy or pose gave the younger Gerrit a serious, brooding aspect, worlds removed from the easy grace, and almost palpable sense of entitlement, reflected in his father’s portrait.

  Anna reluctantly turned her gaze from Gerrit’s likeness. There was a companion picture beside his, and the lady had to be his wife, because the two portraits faced each other and had the same classical backdrop: a fantasy setting of stone pillars and red curtains with the fields of Harenwyck and the sparkle of the Hudson visible beyond.

  Gerrit’s wife was everything Anna was not. Raven-haired, petite, and fine-boned—so delicate in fact that it seemed like the breeze ruffling the curtain behind her ought to blow her away. The sort of woman Fragonard always painted sitting in a swing.

  Anna wondered that the family had not taken these portraits down. She could not imagine the old patroon leaving up his renegade son’s portrait, but perhaps Andries was cut from finer cloth. He was raising his brother’s daughters, after all, even while that same brother robbed his coaches and stirred discontent among his tenants.

  And there was no portrait of Andries himself. A second son, not destined for the patroonship, would not merit the expense. One might think that a usurper would rush to acquire the symbols of legitimacy, but Andries Van Haren had not.

  The floor of the front hall was real marble, and there were four grain-painted doors framed by elaborate carvings. Three were open, revealing carpeted parlors and a dining room lined with a fancy painted floorcloth.

  The fourth door was closed, and Anna could hear raised voices coming from inside.

  The patroon, speaking Dutch, fast and angry: “He has our butter and our beef, and if he is backing Gerrit, then he has our gold as well,” said the patroon.

  “General Clinton is using your brother to force you to choose a side.” Ten Broeck’s gravelly voice was lower and more reasonable. Anna was glad to know he had been released safely.

  “Then he could have spared me the trouble of driving the Harenwyck herd to market and just had his Skinners and Cowboys rob me here.”

  “Obviously he preferred to save himself the trouble of having to milk your cows and churn your butter. And he still hopes you will choose the side of government.”

  “When the government is backing my brother’s attempt to overthrow me?”

  “They will disown and discard Gerrit the minute you let them station a British garrison here. All they want is Harenhoeck. They do not care who gives it to them.”

  “You know I cannot do that, Theunis.”

  “What I know,” the older man said patiently, “is that though you may believe in the American cause, our supposed allies have given us no powder, no shot, and no muskets with which to defend the estate if Clinton runs out of patience. We have had nothing from them. And our stores are running dangerously low. If either army were to invade in force, they would take us easily. And if the tenants should rise, we are virtually defenseless.”

  “It isn’t polite to listen at doors.”

  Anna whirled to find two girls watching her from the parlor across the hall. They were twins, and looked identical, dressed alike in robin’s egg blue silk gowns. Anna had been told that the girls were eleven, but they were tall for their age, as so many Dutch children were. They would have looked at home in any New York parlor—if not for the mud caked to their hems and the grass stains on their silk slippers. Both girls wore their blond hair loose down their backs, long tresses woefully in need of a brushing.

  “It isn’t polite to spy on people either,” said Anna, guessing that the girls had been watching her for some time. “But I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  The girls looked at each other. When they turned it was possible to see that they were not quite identical. One was slightly taller and had a small scar above her right eyebrow. She spoke for both of them when she said, “That seems fair.”

  The smaller girl took a step forward and scrutinized Anna. “Are you the teacher Uncle Andries brought up from New York?”

  “I am.”

  Excitement lit the girl’s face. “Did you bring any novels?”

  “Grietje,” warned the taller girl.

  “Yes,” said Anna, “but my baggage has not yet arrived.” Because your father stole it from me.

  They were Gerrit’s daughters. Anna supposed that explained his strong feelings about her choice of embroidery subjects, but it did not help the fact that he had deprived her of all her school equipment.

  “You mean you will let us have novels?” asked the taller one, who must be Jannetje.

  “As long as you do your other reading and advance in all of your subjects, I see no reason that you should not read novels.”

  “Reverend Blauvelt says they give women ideas.”

  “Well, someone has to,” said Anna.

  The door opened behind her. She was glad she had taken a few steps closer to the dining room while talking to the girls, so it did not seem quite so much like she had been eavesdropping.

  “Miss Winters,” said her employer. Anna turned to face Andries Van Haren.

  Last night she had been too exhausted, and it had been too dark, for her to study him. Now she saw what she had missed in the moonlight. He was handsome. Not like Gerrit, who would always be the standard by which she judged masculine beauty, but like the rest of the Van Harens, who were tall and blond with laughing blue eyes, only his did not appear to be laughing right now. If she was trying to capture their likenesses, she would have to render Gerrit in the rich pigments of oil paint and Andries in the delicate coloring of pastels.

  She saw something else as well. It was only a suspicion for now, but a heartbreaking one, the sort better kept to oneself.

  “Mr. Van Haren,” she said. As a child she had been told to always curtsy to the patroon. She refused to do so now, though her knees itched to bend.

  “I see you have met Hubble and Bubble.”

  Behind her the girls giggled.

  “Yes. We were just getting acquainted.” If a backdrop of mutual blackmail could be called “getting acquainted.”

  “Excellent. What sort of lessons do you have planned for today?”

  He asked in the manner of a man who does not particularly care to listen to the answer, but who does want credit for asking the question. She gave him the answer that his hauteur deserved: “Our lessons today will have to be improvised. Your brother stole all of my school equipment.”

  “That’s all right,” said Jannetje. “We don’t like lessons very much anyway.”

  The patroon had the good grace to look embarrassed. “Make a list for Mr. Ten Broeck. As soon as certain matters are taken care of, he will have everything that was stolen replaced.”

  “What matters?” The question bordered on rudeness, but she was not a servant or a child, and she needed to establish that she would not be treated like one.

  Ten Broeck appeared in the door. When he saw Anna he came forward and took her hands. “Miss Winters, I am so relieved to see you safe. I must apologize. I fear I did not acquit myself particularly heroically last night.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for, Mr. Ten Broeck. The bandits outnumbered you ten to one. I’m afraid the patroon’s gold was as good as lost from the moment our escort abandoned us, along with all my scho
ol equipment and personal possessions. I hope you will be able to send someone to New York today.”

  “Not today, Miss Winters,” said the patroon, in a tone that was meant to dismiss her and her concerns.

  “But I will send a man tomorrow,” said Mr. Ten Broeck, who was obviously used to his employer’s imperious manner and understood the need to temper his dicta. “There is no one to spare at present. Our kidnappers were busy last night, and the patroon’s coach was not their only target. They stole a flock of sheep from one of the tenants. This afternoon the outlaws were overheard boasting of their plan to drive their stolen sheep to Wyckoff’s ferry.”

  “With a little luck,” added the patroon, “we will catch our bandits tonight and have the gold, my carriage, and your possessions, of course, back by morning.”

  “You say ‘our bandits,’ but you mean our father,” said Grietje, who obviously did not like that idea at all.

  Neither did Anna. If Gerrit was captured, the first thing that he would tell his brother was that Harenwyck was sheltering a murderess.

  “Come, girls. Let us see what sorts of books the patroon keeps in his library,” said Anna.

  “It’s not a very good library,” vouchsafed Jannetje, as she led Anna up the stairs.

  “There aren’t any novels,” explained Grietje.

  There weren’t any novels. There was, however, an atlas. It was not Anna’s trusty English Universal History of the World by Bowen. It was a Dutch atlas, printed in Amsterdam and written in French. It was the very book that had opened a door for her all those years ago, had shown a provincial little Dutch girl that there was a world beyond the borders of Harenwyck. She had not been able to read it then, of course. She had not known French. Gerrit had smuggled it out of the house in his coat one winter morning and hidden it in the barn for their afternoon meeting.

  He’d been late that day—delayed by his father after church—and she had found the book herself, buried in the hay. She’d been disappointed at first. Usually he brought her plays or poems or novels or, very occasionally, books of engravings. Anna had not known what to do with maps. They were just so many lines on paper—until Gerrit showed her how to read them. He had lain down with her in the hay and explained the points on the compass, latitude and longitude, the prime meridian, and the use of the key—and they’d adventured together through that ocean of pages like Henry Hudson on the Halve Maen. She’d lost track of time that afternoon, so that the sun had set while she was still in the barn with Gerrit and she was forced to run all the way home to get there before supper.