The Dutch Girl

by Donna Thorland

  The two children sprinkling sugar over the doughnuts and rolling them in paper were about the same age as Grietje and Jannetje. They wore cheerful matching kerchiefs and aprons that were powdered with sugar. Anna was pleased to see the twins ask politely if they could take a turn at the job.

  The mevrouw at the pot cast a worried look at the patroon. She did not want to put a foot wrong, to displease him. Old Cornelis would probably have had her whipped if she’d allowed his children to labor like peasants.

  “So long as you work more than you eat,” said the patroon, “I do not think there could be any objection.” Grietje and Jannetje jumped up and down with excitement and set to learning their tasks. They sugared a doughnut for Anna, and then one for their uncle, who stood there and coughed theatrically until they sugared a second for him.

  As they stood eating their doughnuts Anna saw a familiar figure separate herself from the crowd. It was difficult to miss Mevrouw Zabriskie in her brightly colored mismatched silks. She was selling posies of dried flowers, and when she came close Anna could detect the scents of lavender and jasmine even over the sweet perfume of the olykoecken.

  The patroon bought three posies, one each for Anna and the girls. Mevrouw Zabriskie selected a bright purple one for Anna and pressed it into her hand. She took the opportunity to turn Anna’s palm over and made a show of great interest in what she thought to see there.

  “Where is your husband, joung frau?” asked Mevrouw Zabriskie.

  “I don’t have one,” said Anna, tugging her hand back gently.

  Mevrouw Zabriskie’s grip tightened, and she tracked a tickling finger over Anna’s palm. “But you have changed your name. I can see it here, in your broken life line. The end of one woman, the beginning of another.”

  Anna snatched her hand away rather too quickly. The posy dropped in the mud. “I am sorry,” said Anna, “but you are quite mistaken. I have never been married.”

  Mevrouw Zabriskie looked into her eyes as though seeing her for the first time, and nodded. “As you say, joung frau.”

  But Anna knew that the cunning woman didn’t believe her. Mevrouw Zabriskie clucked and bent to pick up Anna’s dropped posy, her pale blond braids touching the ground. She pocketed the dusty bouquet thoughtfully and handed Anna instead a fresh posy from her bag.

  Anna took it and smiled for Andries’ benefit, but she did not like the way the old woman had scrutinized that dropped bouquet. She had looked as though she was putting it away for later, and Anna found the thought unsettling.

  She put the cunning woman from her mind and followed the patroon on his circuit of the entertainment. Part of her wished she had been able to come here on her own as she had planned, anonymously, to hover on the edges of the crowd and relive privately her memories of this place, but it was impossible to be invisible at the side of Andries Van Haren. It was unfortunate that she could not refuse his invitation without inviting unwanted questions, arousing dangerous suspicions. If Gerrit was right and Jan had heard him call her Annatje, if Jan was plotting with his relatives, if they wanted a look at her, this girl who might be Annatje Hoppe, they would be able to look their fill tonight, and there was nothing she could do about it without attracting unwanted attention to herself. The patroon was squiring her around like she was a lady, and his sweetheart.

  She suspected that the irony would be lost on the Dijkstras. Vim had not been an imaginative man, even in his cruelty. His clan’s bullying had always been the opportunistic sort, licensed, even encouraged by the old patroon. His son was another matter. Anna was glad to see that men did not make way for Andries, obediently or sullenly, like they had his father, or for that matter, like the dragoons had for Banastre Tarleton at the Halve Maen.

  The patroon led her into the barn—hulking and ancient—where the great press was ready to begin turning. There was a horse standing by to do the work later when the men became tired, Anna was glad to see, but it was not hitched to the gate yet. She remembered that it was something of an honor to start the press, reserved for the strongest or the most respected, or sometimes just the handsomest, men on the estate. For many years her father had been all three.

  She felt memory threaten to overwhelm her, and she turned away from the sight of the press to watch Andries pop the last of his olykoecken into his mouth and wipe his lips on his sleeve. He crumpled the oily paper into his pocket and shrugged off his velvet coat.

  “Would you mind holding this?” he asked. He pressed the silk-lined velvet, still warm from his body, into her hands, and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  “You are going to take a turn at the press?” It was a tenant tradition—a peasant tradition—and it was unheard of, as far as she knew, for a patroon to take part.

  He smiled warmly now. “Give me a lever and a place to stand, Miss Winters, and I will move the earth.”

  There were two burly men already waiting at the stile, one running to fat with the massy forearms and jolly red face of a blacksmith, and the other a muscular young man built along more classical lines. They made way for the patroon, but not like underlings. They slapped his back and offered him joking encouragement in Dutch. She noted how Andries called the older man by name—“Oosthuizen”—and he in turn addressed the patroon simply as “Mr. Van Haren.”

  It was then Anna knew Andries wasn’t just going to join these other men in this traditional rite. He was going to start the press himself.

  He was an exceedingly well-shaped man, but considerably lighter of build than either of the two tenants who had apparently been chosen for the honor, and he was going to have to get the great stone, weighing nearly three-quarters of a ton, moving.

  She did not want him to fail.

  She ought to find the twins. She ought to talk to them of Archimedes and simple machines and the workings of force, and balance and friction, but her heart was in her throat for the patroon of Harenwyck.

  Her father would be turning in his grave.

  Andries Van Haren stepped up to the stile and placed his palms on the wood, smooth with age, where her father’s hands had once rested. A cheer went up, and the patroon laughed, and she felt as she had when Miss Demarest had taken her to the horse races. Anna had placed no bets that day, but Miss Demarest had. Somehow Anna had found herself caught up in the tension of the race, standing on tiptoe, craning her neck to see the course.

  The patroon pushed. The stile did not budge. He pushed again. Nothing. He took a step toward the end of the stile to reposition himself, and Anna should have been explaining the law of the lever, the equation that translated force, distance, and fulcrum into work, but instead she was focused entirely on the man applying it.

  Andries pushed. The wood creaked, rocked, and then began to move.

  Andries Van Haren threw himself into that backbreaking labor. Through the fine lawn of his shirt she could see his muscles ripple. Through the silk of his stockings she watched his calves flex. The stone turned. A cloud of fruity mist exploded into the air and another, louder cheer went up. The two tenants who had been standing by now took their posts at the stile, and together the three men pushed until momentum lent them a welcome fourth hand.

  The musicians struck up, fiddles and flutes soaring with Anna’s spirits, and the dancing began in earnest. She watched as Andries and the other men circuited the great stone and the perfume of apples intensified. The fresh cider would be thick and cloudy, cool and refreshing. She could remember her father giving her a taste from his brimming glass when she was a girl. But most of it would go into barrels and ferment and come out in the first weeks of winter dry, clear, and crisp.

  Anna’s eyes returned to Andries at the stile. She knew on some level that his presence here was a calculated gesture. Indeed, she wondered whether more of this was orchestrated than met the eye. The two men he had joined at the press seemed happy and prosperous—favored tenants? Paid militiamen? But theater or not, the pat
roon’s participation was effective. There was nothing he could do about the shortages at the store or the ravages of the Skinners and Cowboys, but symbolically he could say: I am here; I am one of you; we are all in this together. He was as canny a political mover, as skilled a showman as her father had been—and perhaps just as sincere.

  But it was not enough, because he would never give them the one thing they truly wanted: land of their own. They had rioted for just the promise of it in ’65, staked their lives on slips of paper written by an Indian sachem, and on the rhetoric of Bram Hoppe.

  Most of the tenants might like this patroon, but the people of Boston had liked the King too. That did not mean they wanted to be ruled by him. Anna could see the eddies in the crowd, the ripples where men were passing beakers of fortified beer—and messages. These were the types of gatherings that men like her father had always used to recruit like-minded followers. In the dark corners of the barn men clustered and talked in low tones. Anna could guess what—or who—they were discussing. Gerrit would be here somewhere tonight, in this throng of thousands, trying to find his two hundred men.

  And he would end up just like her father if she did not do something about it.

  A cheer went up as the patroon relinquished his place at the stile to another man. There was a mug of beer waiting for Andries, dark and foaming. He drank it off and received the congratulations and back claps of his tenants, who seemed genuinely pleased to have him there. But even as they praised him and offered him doughnuts and skewers of meat, and a swig of something stronger from a jug—his eyes were searching the crowd.

  They settled on Anna.

  He set his empty tankard on a bench and threaded his way through the crowd to her. She held out his jacket. He slipped into the silk-lined garment and took her by the hands. “Let’s dance.”

  He pulled her into the whirl. She knew how it was done, of course. The Widow had found discreet tutors to teach her all of the things that Anna Winters was supposed to know, including how to dance. She had practiced carriage and rhythm, the steps of formal and country dances, how to follow, and how—if needed—to lead while appearing to follow. And of course Anna employed an exceedingly good dancing master at her school, one who often prevailed upon her to join in during classes to make up the numbers.

  She had danced with men before, but it had been nothing like this. She had never been so aware of the warmth of the hands that grasped hers or the pressure of a palm at the small of her back as he led her down, down, down the line and around to the end once more. Her heart beat in time with the music and her feet felt light as air even as they met the packed ground over and over, and she did not want it to end.

  This was what dancing was for.

  It struck her all at once that she had been living vicariously, observing life secondhand, ever since the night she fled Harenwyck. She liked teaching; she took pride in the academy and enjoyed the company of Mrs. Peterson and Miss Demarest, but she had hidden behind the school like a shield. Spinster teachers did not flirt or gossip or dance. Not like this. So many mornings she had stood outside the parlor door listening to the girls breathily recounting their adventures from the night before: the public dances, the private kisses, the letters and love tokens exchanged.

  She had consoled herself that theirs were the pleasures of youth, that it was natural that girls should live so vibrantly at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and fitting that she should live so quietly, passions subdued and suppressed, at thirty-two.

  It did not feel fitting now. Age, it came to her in a flash, was not the difference between Anna and her students. The difference was desire. For too long Anna had been afraid to want anything. Something had changed when she had entered the gates of Harenwyck. Something long dormant had woken in her. She would not lie to herself and pretend that it was only her reunion with Gerrit. Or that Andries Van Haren’s thinly veiled desire did not move her. It did. More than she cared to admit.

  The dance ended and the musicians broke to drink their beer and eat their olykoecken, and the patroon led Anna out of the barn into the cool night air.

  Her hand rested on the velvet sleeve of his jacket. She could feel the warmth of him and inhale the sandalwood scent of his skin. In the light of the bonfire she could see that his eyes were ablaze with the same excitement she felt. He led her past the fire, past the tables where the tenants were eating, drinking, and singing, and into the enclosure where the herbs were grown for the house. It was fenced on all four sides, and there was a trellised arbor at one end with a seat where the maids picked and spun wool on hot days. Andries brushed the bench clean and drew her down to it.

  “There is nothing like dancing to stimulate the appetite,” he said. His eyes were in shadow, but she could feel the intensity of his gaze like the warmth of a fire. His hands came to rest on her shoulders, traveled up her neck, framed her face, and tilted her head back like a chalice. His mouth covered hers with practiced—and all too effective—artistry. Warm and wet. Gentle and teasing. Heady and rich.

  This was nothing like her childhood explorations with Gerrit, clumsy, thrilling, sweet. This was seduction, the skillful application of hands and lips and tongue—and when he lifted her suddenly to straddle him, of adult passions, honestly acknowledged. He ached where she ached, at least bodily, and he knew how to soothe them both. He gathered great handfuls of her skirts.

  “I can’t,” she said. She wanted to, of course, because he knew exactly how to touch her.

  “Shush. Let me do this for you. I expect nothing in return.”

  His hands were beneath her petticoats, drifting up her thighs. She arrested them through the layers of silk. “No.”

  “With my mouth, then. You’ll like that,” he promised.

  “Oh God.” She was certain she would. His nimble fingers had found the thatch of curls between her thighs. It was so tempting to allow this clever, beautiful man to minister to her body, but her soul belonged to his brother, and always would.

  “I am sorry,” she said, “but I cannot do this.”

  His knuckles brushed her slickness and she shivered with the pleasure of it. “But you want to,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  There was a fierceness in his voice that was more than lust. She looked into his eyes and her heart broke for him. He was the patroon of Harenwyck, lord of two hundred thousand acres, but he was just like her. He had not wanted anything—not in the ways that mattered—for a very long time, and then it had been a woman forbidden to him by the laws of God and man.

  “The girls—” she began, but he forestalled her.

  “Are safe with Mrs. Buys. She will take them for the night. If you will not let me make love to you amidst rose petals and mint, we could go back to the house. Alone. The servants will not return until morning.”

  He had tried to strike a casual tone, as though the answer did not matter greatly to him—as though it would be the same if they stayed another hour and danced and ate olykoecken and he took another turn at the stile—but she caught the hopeful tension in his voice that told her it meant more to him than that.

  If she had not met Gerrit again on the road to Harenwyck, she would have gone with him. Certainly the Widow would have. Probably Angela Ferrers would have maneuvered him into bed sooner.

  I wonder whether I’m meant to seduce you, or you’re meant to reform me. Anna did not know what Kate Grey had intended when she compelled her to Harenwyck. Perhaps Kate Grey had not known herself. What Anna knew was that she liked Andries, even if she did not wholly embrace his vision for the estate. She liked him enough that she could not bring herself to play the Widow’s games. And she did not want to hurt him, this man who had everything and nothing at the same time.

  She pushed his hands away, and he made no effort to stop her as she slid from his lap and smoothed her petticoats. “I think I will stay a little while longer, Mr. Van Haren,” she said, “and have a pair of
klompen made. They will make a wonderful souvenir of my adventures in the highlands when I return to New York.”

  He did nothing to hide his disappointment but bore it manfully and well, and that made her like him even more. He stood up and bowed to her—the patroon of Harenwyck bowing to Bram Hoppe’s daughter—and said, “I’ll take my leave, then, and have a bath and a glass of brandy in peace for once.”

  Then he kissed her hand, and she knew that she would have gone with him, elated from the dance, were she still not in love, after all this time, with his brother.

  She watched Andries Van Haren go, threading his way carefully through the crowd with a word for each man he knew. Nothing could set him further apart from his father than what she had just witnessed, nor convince her more that his feud with Gerrit was not entirely about the estate. Neither Van Haren wanted to hold the patroonship in the tyrannical grip that old Cornelis had exercised.

  Both brothers wanted reform—and they were both willing to hold the lives of Harenwyck’s tenants hostage to gain possession of the whole estate. A fractured patroonship was of no use to the British, or to Kate Grey and the Rebels. Andries was right in some ways. Harenwyck did not need a Robin Hood, but better schools and better roads would not change the injustice on which the estate had been founded. Between them, Gerrit and Andries were going to tear the patroonship apart and lay waste to countless lives in the process.

  Only compromise could avert that outcome, because a peaceful division of the land could render the estate far less appetizing to the armies hungrily circling it. The Americans and British each wanted a strong ally, beholden to them, at Harenwyck, authorizing and supporting a military garrison at Harenhoeck. If Gerrit and Andries were to reconcile, were to strike a bargain, neither would welcome soldiers onto the estate, and forcing the issue by arms—whether Rebel or government—would not only threaten unrest, but risk the enmity of all the patroons in the valley.