The Dutch Girl (13 page)

The cakes suddenly lost all their appeal.

Outside the stairs creaked. Someone—or
something
—was coming.

Anna wished she had kept Gerrit's pistol. Or that she still had her knife. Or that the Van Harens had left something useful behind like a weighty iron candlestick or fireplace poker, or even an empty water jug. All she had currently on her person was an exhausted kitten in a greasy basket. She spied a candle sitting in the window and grabbed it, only to discover that it had no holder, just a chipped plate.

And the top was still
warm
. Someone
had
been here.

Now they were back. And she had trapped herself in a room with no exit. She heard feet crunching over the dirt in the front hall and she turned to the parlor door and called out, “Who is there?”

No answer. Just more steps in the dark.

“This is the patroon's house,” she said, trying keep
the quaver out of her voice. “You have no right to be here.”

Another step and a figure filled the doorway: tall, lean, and male. For a second Anna thought that it was Gerrit, come to track her down, and like a fool her heart surged at the thought, but then the figure crossed the threshold, and she saw that this was someone else entirely: a man dressed for riding in high boots and a short coat, his hair guinea gold in the moonlight. His face, though, remained obscured by shadow.

“You don't look much like the patroon yourself,” he said. The accent was cultivated, and someone had worked hard to take the Dutch out of it. But she could still hear the vestiges of his first language in the flatness of his vowels, because that was what had long tripped her up too.

“How would you know?”

“Because every morning I stare at his face in the mirror.”

“You are the patroon?” Anna tried to conjure a portrait of Andries in her mind, but all she could recall of him was his height, his coldness, and his golden hair. And his gold-tressed sister. They had been so like each other, so like all the gilded Van Harens, and so different from Gerrit.

“I am,” he said, as though speaking to a simple child. “Who, may I ask, are you?”

She could hear the ill-concealed impatience in his voice, so similar to his father's. Cornelis had always disliked dealing with tenants. She'd once overheard him
complaining of the garrulity of the lower classes.
They talk and talk when they have nothing to say, and it is impossible to get them to come to the point.

“My name,” she said, coming to the point, “is Anna Winters. I'm the teacher you hired for your nieces.”

He advanced a few steps farther into the room and scrutinized her. She could only imagine what she looked like. She'd lost her cap, and her hair was wild and full of leaves. Her fichu was currently inside a basket containing fish, turkey, and a kitten, and it was very likely that the fish was beginning to smell. Her stockings were in shreds, and she doubted her gown was much better.

“How did you come to be here, Miss Winters? And in such a state?”

Your brother.
But it felt disloyal to say it, because the truth was that Gerrit was not responsible for her current state of dishevelment. If she hadn't tried to warn him about André, she would most likely be sitting snug by the fire at the Halve Maen feeding Scrappy tidbits and waiting for the patroon's chariot to pick her up. Gerrit had promised to release her, and he was a man of his word. He had only reneged when she had put him—to his mind anyway—in an impossible situation. She did not know how she could have done things differently—or at least lived well with herself thereafter—but that didn't change the fact that she had only herself to blame.

“There was trouble on the road,” she said at last. “We were held up by a highwayman. I believe Mr. Ten Broeck and your driver are to be released at dawn.” The patroon's expression was unreadable in the half-lit room.
“I escaped,” she added. And then, because it would be strange if she did not say it: “The bandits were led by your brother.”

He took another step forward. His face was still shrouded in shadow, but a band of light had fallen across his pale blue eyes and she saw them turn very, very cold.

“You were supposed to have an escort,” he said.

“We did. They left us at the gates to Harenwyck.”
And they sold you out.

She was supposed to be at Harenwyck on behalf of the Americans. Kate Grey had wanted her to bring Andries decisively into the Rebel fold. There was probably no better way to accomplish this end than to tell him his older brother was plotting against him with the British.

She said nothing.

“Come,” he said. “We must get you to the manor and organize a party to search for Mr. Ten Broeck. Do you feel well enough to ride? I could send for the chaise, but I dislike the idea of leaving you here alone.”

She did not much fancy the idea of sharing a mount with the patroon of Harenwyck—he was as cold and aloof as she remembered and possibly as much a snob as his father—but neither did she want to spend another minute in that house alone. “I will ride.”

She moved to smooth her skirts and realized that the warm candle was still in her hand. She set it down beside the
doed koecks
. That's when it occurred to her that these were his father's funerary keepsakes.

Good manners demanded some acknowledgment of
that. In this case good manners demanded a bold-faced lie. “I am very sorry for your loss,” she said.

He seemed to notice the cakes for the first time. “A quaint custom,” he said. “But the cook should not have baked them. I have never seen so many left over after a funeral. My predecessor was not much loved on the estate, and it seems that not even his hungriest tenants were willing to eat free bread in his memory.”

Neither was Anna. She was ravenous now. Dawn could not be far off and she had not eaten anything since breakfast—but she was certain she would not have been able to choke down even one of the patroon's cakes.

She followed Andries Van Haren out of the desolate house and down the porch. He did not bother to lock the door behind him. Anna wondered if that was because there was nothing of value to him in the house—or because he knew that no Harenwyck tenant would dare vandalize the patroon's property.

At the bottom of the steps he had a fine brown mare tied to the post. She had been so engrossed in exploring the house she had not heard the approach of hooves. Andries gave Anna a leg up and as soon as she settled into the saddle exhaustion struck her. The chaise sounded like heaven, but she would not have remained in that house by herself for all the carriages in the world.

Andries slung himself into the saddle behind her, leaving as much distance between their bodies as was possible on a shared mount. She tried to recall if she had ever seen his father as much as shake hands with a tenant. She did not think so. Evidently Andries had inherited
the old patroon's distaste for the people who worked his lands and put food on his table.

They set off up the road that used to lead from the house to the old castle and the church, and Anna could see that it was even more overgrown than the way she had come. The wheel tracks were full of wildflowers. No cart or carriage had come this way for years. That made the patroon's presence in such an abandoned place in the middle of the night very odd indeed. The strangeness of it bothered her. He had not been out looking for her. He had not even been aware his carriage had been stolen. And he had approached the house so quietly that she had not heard him until he was inside. He must have had some other purpose in the woods.

“What were you doing here so late, my lord?”

“My father styled himself lord of the manor, but it is not a tradition I wish to maintain. ‘Mr. Van Haren' will do.”

“What were you doing here, Mr. Van Haren?”

“I was coming home late and saw your light.”

“I did not have a light.” But someone had. Someone who had been sitting at that table with the
doed koecks
.

“Then it must have been a trick of the moon.”

“It wasn't.”

“Trespassers, then.”

He did not seem particularly concerned or even interested in the fact that someone else had been in his house.

“Your brother told me there was a witch in the
woods.” She felt like a fool as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

“There is a cunning woman who lives in the woods, but she is no harm to anyone.”

“Not her. The English witch in the velvet gown. The one who murdered the regicides.”

“Good God.
Gerrit
. Our nurse told us all that one when we were children, and my sister would not sleep for a week. I haven't thought of it in years. Do not, I pray you, share
that
story with my nieces.”

Her hackles rose. “I would never frighten my students like that.”

The patroon sighed. “You have not met Grietje and Jannetje. They do not frighten easily. More likely, if you told them there was a witch in the woods, they would set out to bag her, and soon we would have old ladies caught in snares from here to Rensselaer's place. I do hope that Mr. Ten Broeck was candid with you about the girls. They are hardly delicate young misses. Nothing like their mother, either of them. They do not even have her coloring. My nieces are true Van Harens: their father's daughters.”

It took her a moment to grasp his meaning.
Their father's daughters.
Kate Grey had told her that they were the children of Elizabeth Van Haren, Andries' runaway sister, but if their mother was not a Van Haren . . .

“They are Gerrit's daughters?”

“You are on a first-name basis with my brother. What an exciting evening you must have had. You wouldn't happen to recall where he was when you saw him last?”

“I'm not certain,” she lied. “I don't really know the area.”

“Then you were remarkably lucky to find your way to the old manor.”

“Yes. Very lucky,” she said.

For years she had wondered if those afternoons behind the church had meant the same thing to Gerrit that they had meant to her. She had known how unlikely that was. She had convinced herself that it did not matter, that it was only natural that what they had shared should mean more to her. He was the heir to a fortune—destined to lead a richer life than hers. But some part of her, inherited from her dreamer of a father, had held on to a secret hope that she had not been one among many—that she had been special. Earlier, in the carriage, when he had flirted with her, she had hoped the same thing: that it was more than the expression of a physical attraction, that some part of him recognized her. She was such a fool.

Gerrit was married.

•   •   •

Gerrit was bone tired by the time he reached the old blockhouse. They were straggling in, his little band of sheep rustlers, some leading their horses and carrying
recalcitrant lambs over their shoulders. Dawn was not far off and everything was wet with dew, including the hundred sheep they had just herded up the hill. Even better, he could smell rain in the air. It smelled nicer than damp sheep.

The blockhouse would be warm and dry. He wished he could stay. Gerrit had found the abandoned defense work when he was a boy and used to wander the woods for hours on his own. His father hadn't known it was up there, nor, when Gerrit had told him about the place, had the old man cared. The Indians had long since stopped attacking Harenwyck with war cries and tomahawks. They preferred now to battle the patroons in court, suing to get their land back, even crossing the ocean to petition King George.

Long ago all this land had belonged to others, and once its theft was fresh. And once upon a time the blockhouse on the hill had been all that stood between the tenants and the just retribution of the dispossessed. The tower had been built in the Dutch manner out of local stone with a tiled roof—all but impossible to burn—and entirely forgotten by the time Gerrit was a boy. The terrain surrounding it was too rocky and steep to plant, and the trees that some early tenants had cleared to create a defensible line around the tower were beginning to grow back, but there was enough room for Edwaert's sheep to graze for a little while.

Gerrit led his horse inside the blockhouse, where
most of the men were already rubbing down their mounts. Pieter came to take his saddle.

“Please tell me we have my brother's wine upstairs,” said Gerrit.

“The whole case,” said Pieter. “Along with the almonds. There was a box on top of the carriage. And there's a cask of little green things. Like raisins, but salty.” He made a wry face.

“Those would be capers,” said Gerrit. He doubted they would prove very popular in the blockhouse. “All I want is a bottle of the wine and an empty basket. I'll be back before noon.”

“You've been up for twenty-four hours,
baas
. A man goes too long without sleep, he gets careless, and you can't afford to be that now. Your brother can see you hang for what we did tonight.”

“Unfortunately this errand can't wait.”

Pieter looked skeptical but kept his peace, disappearing up the hatch to the room above where the men were already settling in to dicker over their spoils. There would likely be nothing left
except
the capers by the time Gerrit got back, but he realized then that there was nothing he truly wanted from the carriage in any case—
except
Annatje Hoppe.

Gerrit had promised her that he would go back and find the kitten's mother. He had promised her other things too, lying in the hayloft, and out behind the church staring up at the stars. She had not believed him then, and perhaps youth excused such oaths, but he did not excuse himself. Not with all that had come after.
He'd nearly forgotten about her in Leiden, just as she had told him he would, and when he came back there was another family living in the Hoppe cottage. Bram Hoppe was dead, and his runaway daughter was wanted for murder and believed to have killed herself.

Pieter, of course, was right about the men. Gerrit risked losing them—he risked losing Harenwyck itself—if his band of displaced, evicted men found out he'd recognized and concealed her. But he risked losing respect for himself if he failed her now as he had failed her when he was seventeen.