The Dutch Girl (16 page)

By then it was time for bed. Jannetje marched upstairs with the atlas tucked under one elbow and Grietje following, clamoring for another look at the book. Mrs. Buys watched them go with obvious amusement.

“That was a very nice day's work,” said Mrs. Buys, with approval.

“I doubt table manners and hair brushing will go as well,” said Anna. There were few other subjects they would be able to tackle until Mr. Broeck replaced her school equipment. That was the problem with teaching girls in a finishing school. The things that excited them were not the things their parents and society cared most about. The things that excited them were the same things that excited boys: history and politics and art and science. The things that excited parents were the accomplishments that could be displayed publicly—the singing and dancing and needlework—not the products of their engaged minds.

“Best to fortify yourself, then,” advised Mrs. Buys. “Take the
koekjes
up to bed with you.”

They were exactly the sort of cookies she had been longing for in New York: rich with fresh butter and cardamom and scented with orange water—and just the tiniest bit sandy from the cornmeal. They had been Gerrit's favorites, the ones he brought to her after
church, until the day her mother had beaten her and forbidden any further meetings.

“I couldn't eat them all.” The plate was heaped. Grietje and Jannetje had done yeomen's work eating them with their hot chocolate, but Mrs. Buys served everything in farm portions.

“Go on and take them, just in case you're hungry later,” said Mrs. Buys.

Anna took the cookies.

She picked her way up the front stairs in the dark, hem in one hand, plate in the other, under the painted eyes of the patroons and their ladies. It struck her then, as she was climbing their stairs into the heart of their domain, that this family had done its best to destroy her.
And I survived.

At the top of the stairs Anna could hear the girls behind their door still poring over the atlas. That made her smile. She felt her way down the dim hall to her room. There was a light burning, visible beneath the door, and though she still longed for her own bed in New York, the small army of servants that made up the fires and boiled water and aired linens at Harenwyck certainly made life here exceedingly comfortable. It would be far too easy to become accustomed to it.

She opened the door and set the cookies on her bedside table. She'd expected Tryntje to be waiting for her—good maids didn't leave fires burning and sconces lit in empty rooms—but the girl was not there, so Anna began unpinning the front of her gown. It would be a relief to be out of her stays.

She plucked the pins free, sticking them in a tidy row on the bed-curtains as the Widow had taught her.
At times you will not be forewarned, so remain forearmed.
Always have something sharp near to hand.

Her advice proved prophetic when a voice came out of the darkness between the windows.

“I don't suppose you'd like some help with that.”

A form detached itself from the shadows, familiar and unfamiliar, longed for and dreaded:
Gerrit.

If she had been just an object to be taken, only a prize to be won, he would have watched until she was naked in her shift, but Annatje Hoppe had never been that to him. He could vividly remember how close they had come to consummating their love in the barn, all those years ago, lying in the hay, clothes loosened, full of breathless anticipation.

He had stopped because he was not his father; even if she had wanted him as badly as he had wanted her, all the risk, all the consequences were hers to bear. Like the maids who—once their bellies swelled enough to show—were never seen again at the manor house. He had not wanted that for her. Never that.

Annatje was special. He had known that even then. And, young fool that he had been, he had said as much to his father.

“What are you doing here?” She did not look pleased to see him. Not displeased, necessarily, but the unpinning had come to a decided halt. She stood frozen with one hand in the air like one of those statues of classical goddesses, all sublime grace and arrested motion.

“I could ask you the same question. This, after all, is my house, while you—
you
, Annatje Hoppe, are supposed to be dead.” He took a step closer, and she did not move away. That seemed a good sign.

“My death was a necessary fiction. Yours is an all too likely reality. Gerrit, your brother has the militia out hunting for you as we speak. If you are caught, you could hang.”

“You tried to warn me at the Halve Maen, and I dismissed you. I'm sorry for that. I thought you were insulting my intelligence. You weren't. There are few women who know the consequences of the hand I'm playing better than Bram Hoppe's daughter.”

“Please tell me that you didn't come here just to apologize.”

She was the most sensible woman in the world and somehow also the most foolish. “Annatje, this is me, and this is you. That is why I'm here.”

He closed the space between them. She didn't move, and that seemed a
very
good sign, but now he was at a loss. Because he was afraid that if he touched her she would evaporate like the mist. He had already touched her last night, of course, but he had not known then she was Annatje. They had ridden for miles together. He
knew
that she was real—yet he was still somehow afraid to believe it.

She was not a phantom, not mist. She came lightly into his arms as though she had never left them, had
always been there
, and in some ways she had. He had known other women and even married one, but none had ever seemed as real to him. He and Annatje fit together, then and now, like puzzle pieces. She tilted her head back, and he kissed her, soft and warm and startlingly erotic and wet.

She broke away just when he wanted to pull her closer, and he worried for a moment that he had transgressed, but when he looked into her eyes he found them just as wide and full of wonder as his own must be.

“Gerrit,” she said, “you cannot be here.” He thrilled to note a flicker of irresolution behind such sensible words. “Your brother—”

“My brother will be halfway to Albany by now, chasing shadows.” And the bed was tantalizingly close.

“But the sheep—”

“Are grazing in contentment in the shadow of the old blockhouse. Rumor is a powerful tool. I learned that from your father.” He reached for her.

And she danced away. “Then take his final lesson to heart, Gerrit. Give up this madness. Your brother holds Harenwyck. You never wanted it anyway. Even if you had it, you could not dissolve it the way you dream. My father may have been a man of vision, but he was willfully blind to some realities. There are other forces
holding the estates together than just the naked will of the patroons.”

“Annatje, this war is likely to bring a king, a parliament, a great nation to its knees. Surely a patroon or two can be toppled as well.”

“Not if the people who are busy toppling kings and humbling nations want to keep that patroon in power. I want independence, Gerrit. I do. I have no love for the British, but I have no illusions about the men in Congress either.”

“And yet you are working for them, aren't you? If you were in British pay you would not have tried to warn me away from André. But you didn't tell my brother where we were last night, or the Halve Maen would have been crawling with militia this morning. You are playing a deep game, Annatje Hoppe.”

“It's Anna now,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Since it became impossible to be Annatje.”

“You are still my Annatje to me.”

She pursed her lips and said, “I cannot be
your
Annatje if you are married.”

“Annatje, my wife is dead.”

“I am sorry.”

He did not know how to explain Sophia to Annatje, so instead he kept silent. It had been a terrible marriage, but that did not excuse his part in it. “Did you never marry?”

“I
am
the spinster schoolteacher I appear to be.”

“You are more than that, even judging solely by the contents of your luggage.”

“You mean the remnants of it that you did not toss from a moving carriage?”

“I mean the knives, the muff pistol, and the codebook.”

“I don't suppose you brought any of my baggage with you? I'm not sure how many days' lessons I can improvise out of Harenwyck's library and the rules of feminine deportment.”

“I didn't bring your baggage because you won't be needing it. I'm taking you back to New York tonight.”

She shook her head. “I can't leave Harenwyck, Gerrit.”

“Why not?”

“There is a woman in New York who knows my real name, who I really am. If I do not secure Harenwyck for the Americans, she will expose me, and there is absolutely nothing you or I can do to stop her.”

•   •   •

Anna wanted him to stay. She wanted to invite him to climb into the high feather bed with her and shut the curtains and pretend that they were back in the barn. She wanted him to tell her stories. Not about witches or adventurers but about himself. Of where he had been, what he had done, when and why he had married. About all the years of his life she had missed.

She wanted him to stay, but she needed him to leave because every minute he spent here was perilous.

“Annatje,” he said. “You must leave Harenwyck. Too many people heard me call out your name last night. Vim Dijkstra's family will not have forgotten you, and they will not trouble themselves an instant with the letter of the law if they discover you are here.”

“And what will they do to you, Gerrit, when they find out you recognized me? Or worse, that you helped me get away?”

“I can handle myself. Two years with the Continentals—commanding surly, sometimes mutinous New Englanders—taught me a good deal about how to avoid a knife in the back.”

“I have heard that discipline is very poor among the Continentals,” said Anna.

“Even drilled and disciplined, I doubt the New Englanders I was given charge of would like me any better. They are the same men who think Harenwyck belongs to Massachusetts. Ten years ago we were fighting against them. General Washington had hoped that we would all see the British as our common enemy, but they did not prove so inclined.”

“Can you blame the man? Washington knows he was chosen to bring the southern states into the Rebel fold. No doubt he welcomed the son of a Dutch patroon to try to win over the valley and the highlands. It sounds an excellent strategy, but even excellent strategies fail.”

“You possess an impressive amount of military acumen for a schoolteacher.”

“Said by a man with little experience of adolescent
girls.” With so much left unsaid, unknown, she tried to keep reproach from her tone.

“I would change that if I could,” he replied, “but the girls are better off here than with me. There are some very rough customers among my men. Vim Dijkstra's nephew is perhaps the least of them.”

She had feared the bailiffs, because they had always been on the side of the patroons, and it was the law, after all, that had killed her father. She had not feared private justice, because “right,” and the mob, had always been on the side of Bram Hoppe, but now she feared that she must.

“Do you really think Dijkstra's family will still be out for vengeance,” she asked, “after all these years?”

“If they are even half certain it is you, they will drag you to the nearest tree and hang you.”

“They will have to get past Andries' militia first.”

“You mean like I did tonight?”

“You had help, I suspect.” She held out the plate of
koekjes
. “Mrs. Buys baked these for you, didn't she?”

“I am not the only one with friends at the manor house,” he observed, taking a cookie. “If I can get in here, so can the Dijkstras.”

“It's a pity, then, you did not bring my pistol.”

“That pistol of yours is a very unusual weapon. Finely made. Hard to come by. Where did you get it?”

“From the woman who threw the
schouts
off my trail and helped me to become Anna.”

“She sounds like a formidable ally.”

“She was that. She could also be a very dangerous
enemy.” Anna would never forget the day the Widow had returned to New York, the efficient, calculated way in which she had dealt with those who had failed her.

“Tell me about this woman, about what happened between you and Dijkstra—and how you escaped,” asked Gerrit, climbing onto the bed with the plate of cookies.

“It is not exactly a bedtime story.” And she had never told anyone all of it, not even the Widow.

“I didn't think it was. I want to know what happened to you, how you survived and made your way back here.”

“Barbara Fenton's Dutchman probably said the same thing.”

“Now I'm sorry I told you that one.”

“I was too, last night. I ran nearly three miles through those woods—all the way to the old manor house—because I was half convinced I was being chased by Barbara Fenton's ghost.”

“Did you see her?” asked Gerrit with a twinkle in his eye.

“Yes.”

He sobered then. “What did she look like?”

“I'm not sure. I'm not really even certain I saw anything. A pale figure—that is all I am certain of. Now you must go, Gerrit. Your brother does not strike me as a stupid man. He will realize, at some point quite soon, that he is being led on a wild-goose chase, and then he will come back here with his
schouts
and his militiamen.”

“I'm not leaving until you tell me what happened that night, and what became of you afterward.”

“And I won't tell you—later—unless you go
now
.”

He sighed and popped the last morsel of cookie into his mouth. When he was done with it he said, “If we'd had a few more officers with your resolve in the Continentals we might have kept New York. And unlike General Washington I recognize an impossible position when I'm in it. I'll go, on the condition that you promise to meet me next week, and tell me everything. And then we will figure out what to do,
together
.”

He was not going to leave unless she promised, and if he did not leave soon he was very likely to get himself killed. So she promised.

Gerrit came around the bed into the firelight and he kissed her again, and this time she could not resist pressing closer to him, mapping the changes that time had wrought in his body with hers. He had been tall at seventeen, and wiry, but now he was fleshed with lean, sculpted muscle. He had washed and changed his clothes, and he smelled of soap and fresh linen. His dark coat was weather-beaten homespun, soft from many launderings, and his breeches were the silky deerskin the Wappinger tanned. He tasted like sugar and cardamom, and his heart was beating fast in his chest, echoing Anna's.

Everything she had missed. Everything she had been cheated of. Everything she had told herself she could live without because no man could ever be trusted with the secrets she lived with.

She pushed him away with regret. Looking up into his face was like looking up into the sun. She had always felt more alive under his gaze.

She buttoned his coat against the night air. From afar he would be able to pass as a tenant. Up close an observant man—or woman—would know he was not. His bearing was all wrong, even near exhaustion; his fingernails were too clean, and while his hands were callused they were not convincingly weather-beaten. She saw other things as well. “When did you last sleep?”

“The night before last,” he said.

She could see as much in the dark circles beneath his eyes, the fine lines at the corners. “What was so important that you could not rest your head for a few hours?”

“You.”

Something inside her broke then, like a cord stretched too tight, or a dam holding back too much water, and she was caught fast in the flood. The rising tide threatened to overwhelm her. “Leave now,” she said, backing away from him, “before you can't leave at all.”
And before I drown.

“Meet me after the cider pressing next week,” he said.

“Where?”

“You'll know where, my
klompen
girl. And for God's sake, Annatje, until then, be careful. Stay near the house. And away from the old manor.”

“And its ghosts?” she asked teasingly.

“And its ghosts,” he said, with a seriousness that prickled the hairs on her neck. “Yours are not the only secrets on Harenwyck.”

“Kindly bring my pistol. And my knives,” she said as he slipped out the window.

He paused there on the sill for a moment. “I am sorry about your things, but I have left you something downstairs in the kitchen that might go a little ways toward making up for them.”

Then he was gone. For a moment she allowed herself to be carried high by the thrill of their meeting. Then she had to fight back the floodwaters again because it was just as impossible now as it had been then, only now she had the bitter experience to know it. Finally, she took refuge in the practical. She dusted the crumbs Gerrit had left on the coverlet and picked up the cookie plate. That was another skill the Widow had taught her.
When passions threaten to overwhelm, focus on the details. And go forward. Always forward.