The Dutch Girl (12 page)

Pieter looked him square in the eyes and said, “If Annatje Hoppe was my girl,
baas
, I'd get her the hell away from Harenwyck. And make damned sure she never came back.”

•   •   •

Anna had begun the day warm and dry in the patroon's carriage. Now she was cold and damp, with miles to go
to the patroon's manor. As she penetrated deeper into the woods a feeling crept over her: she was being followed. There were no sounds of pursuit. There were no footfalls or broken branches, just a deep and unsettling sense of a presence
behind her
.

It was nonsense, of course, but the feeling became so acute that she finally gave in to it and turned around.

Of course there was no one there. She kept going.

And yet the feeling persisted. The back of her neck tingled. Her shoulder blades twitched. She found she was often holding her breath, listening for a broken twig or skipped pebble. She looked over her shoulder again, but the shadows were so deep beneath the trees that all she saw were pools of deeper darkness, and if she stared into them too long, they seemed to move, black surging upon deeper black.

That was no good at all, so she forced herself forward, but now all she could hear was the raggedness of her breathing. Until the twig snapped. It sounded like a mighty crack of thunder in the forest, and she whirled around to see a pale figure standing in the moonlight.

The witch in the velvet dress.

Anna screamed. No sound came out, just a dry croak. She turned and ran, heart pounding, dread coursing through her, terrified to look again. The path went on and on with no end in sight. Surely she had to reach the road soon. But by now she had lost all sense of how far she had come. And
something
was behind her.

It had been a woman in a pale gown.

Or at least light-colored petticoats and a jacket.

With white hair. Or at least blond.

Had the witch in the story been blond? She could not recall. And the woman on the path had been wearing some rich fabric that shone in the moonlight. It could have been velvet. Or not. Anna had only a vague impression of the woman's pallid face. Maiden, mother, crone—or milkmaid, for that matter—she could not have said.

Reason reasserted itself. She did not know
what
she had seen. Anna stopped running. When she turned to look behind her, there was no one. She had imagined it, or the moon had played tricks on her or some
jonge vrouw
had been slipping home from a late-night assignation. If that was the case, the girl in question had probably been just as terrified of Anna as Anna had been of her.

No living woman could be so pale . . .

Anna cursed herself for a fool. If she had started at every shadow like that when she had been seventeen and fleeing the bailiffs, she would not be alive today. And she would never have tolerated such flights of fancy from her students. She lived in an age of reason. When Anstiss Ward had told all the girls at the academy that a ghost was scratching at her walls at night, Anna had switched bedrooms with her to get to the bottom of the matter. It had turned out to be one of Mary Phillips' more ardent suitors scrabbling up the drainpipe.

There were no such things as ghosts.

She must find the manor house. Once she was safely under the patroon's roof, it would not matter what some outlaw claimed. She was Anna Winters of New York, mistress of a respected academy, property owner. And
Gerrit's credit in the courts was, by his own admission, rather poor.

She had expected the trees to thin as they so often did at the edge of cultivated land, but she emerged onto the manor road with no warning and found herself standing in the middle of a broad, empty lane. For a moment she thought that she had stumbled upon the wrong road. This stretch did not look familiar. There had always been beeches flanking the road to the patroon's house: tall, stately, clipped to shade, but not obstruct, the lane.

Anna saw no sign of them, but then it occurred to her that she had never seen them at night. She had always come this way with her father to pay their tithe or bring their complaints before the patroon, but that had invariably been by day. Perhaps the beeches would look different at night.

She went a little way farther in the direction she believed the house lay, and then she saw them at last, their waxy leaves shining in the moonlight. They were not shaped as she had thought. In her memory they were tall and narrow, an honor guard for the patroon's parade of carriage, horses, and carts. Now, they were wild and overgrown, heavy branches hanging out over the road and almost touching the ground in places. She did not know how a coach could have driven up this road without damaging the limbs, or itself.

Whether they looked as they had when she was a child or not, they indicated that she was very close to the manor—and safety. Anna slowed and finally looked back
down the path. The dark tunnel she had emerged from was utterly empty.

Perhaps she had imagined the woman in the velvet gown.

But she did not think she had.

And she did not really believe that any sane young woman would have come that way by herself at night. Anna did
not
like to leave that darkling tunnel at her back, but she must look away and plod on to the house. She had told Gerrit that she would like meeting the witch in the velvet gown, because she had felt a kinship with the woman. They had both found themselves on the street at a tender age. Barbara Fenton's story was like something from the theater—only unlike a heroine from the stage, she hadn't waited for the hero to avenge her; she'd done it herself. Anna tried to convince herself that if she met the witch of the Harenwyck woods, that lady would harbor no resentment against her. Then again, if Anna herself had suffered so, she might very well be angry at the world.

Anna forced herself onward down the drive. Gerrit had never told her the story of the witch when they were young. Perhaps he had only just made it up. That was a comforting thought but an altogether unlikely one. The story was too neatly shaped to be a spur-of-the-moment invention, and more likely was an old, familiar one that young Gerrit had simply deemed too disturbing, too lurid, to share with a sixteen-year-old girl.

Anna came upon the lawn without realizing it. She had expected a neatly shaved carpet of green velvet.
Instead she discovered knee-high grass gone to seed. Perhaps the new patroon did not much care for lawns. Or beeches.

It struck her then. Far too late. She had become fixed on the idea of escaping to the manor house after Gerrit had waylaid the carriage, but they had never been going to the old manor house. Both Tarleton and Mr. Ten Broeck had spoken of a newer, more modern mansion, completed by the current patroon.

Surely the new manor house had been built on the site of the old. Or at least hard by.

A quarter mile farther on, and she saw the distinctive sloped roof, bigger than any she had seen until she went to New York. Tip tilted in the Dutch style so the steep slope ran down over the attic and then curved gently up to shade the wide wraparound porch.
Familiar.

And thanks be to God there was a light burning.
Someone
was home in the old manor. There would be warm rooms, maybe even the heat of banked coals to soothe her aching legs and feet. A bed. It did not matter if it was a servant's room, a straw tick with no curtains. She would sleep on anything she could lay her head upon, although the unwelcome thought crept upon her that the patroon might see her as a servant, on the same level as his cook and his gardener. Scratch that. He had obviously discharged the gardener. But the cook at
Harenwyck had always slept on a pallet on the floor in the kitchen, and that she must refuse to do.

The grass was just as high in front of the house, creeping all the way to the beaten earth where the cooks used to set their trestles for drying fruit in the summer. Now that she was close, signs of habitation—besides the light—were nowhere in evidence. And the house seemed to loom over her, just as much as it had when she was a child.

Like the Halve Maen, the manor house was built on top of a ground floor devoted to cooking and housework. The thick walls were local fieldstone. The porch was half the depth of the house itself, reached by a broad double stair atop the entrance to the kitchens.

She had run so far to be there, but suddenly the house seemed just as dangerous as the woods. She did not want to climb those stairs, did not want to disturb the deep shadows of the porch. Which was nonsense. There was a light on. That meant that someone was home, even if the patroon did not live there anymore. Someone who was beholden to the lord of the manor for a roof over his or her head, and would send to the main house—wherever that might be now—and tell the patroon of her arrival.

And she could hardly spend the night standing in a field of overgrown grass.

She climbed the first riser. The wooden treads creaked. A wind picked up, rustling the piles of leaves that blanketed the packed earth in front of the house. Another step, another creak, this one louder. At least no
one could fault her for sneaking up on them in the middle of the night. She was making enough noise to wake the dead, which was an entirely unwelcome thought.

Anna reached the top and stepped onto the porch. Up here all was stillness, a pocket of utter quiet beneath the painted blue roof. The light was coming from a window at the far right. The other three along the front façade were shuttered.

A branch broke somewhere out in the woods and suddenly Anna felt exposed, standing there at the edge of the porch. She rushed to the door and rapped three times with the cast-iron knocker.

The light in the window went out.

Her heart skipped a beat. She did not believe in ghosts or witches. She might have grown up among country people steeped in superstition, with a Calvinist dread of the Devil and a firm belief in his material existence, but she was an educated woman, and she lived in an age of reason. There was a rational explanation for everything. Unfortunately she could not think of rational explanations that she liked for the light blinking out so suddenly.

She tried the door knocker once more. She could, of course, walk to the window that had been lit and peer in, but that idea did not appeal. The ends of the porch were shrouded in darkness. And whoever was inside had snuffed their light for a reason.

The silence stretched. At last she put her hand upon the latch. The door swung away from her and stale air rushed out.

She had never been inside the patroon's house. As the daughter of a poor tenant farmer, who was decidedly
not
one of the patroon's favorites, she had never been invited. She was not invited now. She crossed the threshold anyway.

No one lived here. Anna could tell that at once. The broad center hall that ran from the front to the back of the house had not been swept for some time. Leaves had blown in and dirt crunched beneath her feet. Cobwebs infested the dark corners and doorways. There was a dining room to her left, the tables and chairs relics of the previous century, great bulbous legs black with age and caned seats chewed through by mice. The paintings and sconces that had once brightened the chamber were gone, leaving only suggestive shadows on the wall.

It was the parlor to the right where Anna had seen the light burning. She turned and entered that room, finding it paler and brighter, the paneling painted a shade of seafoam green that made the most of the feeble moonlight that reached it.

She had readily understood why the patroon might leave the carved table and chairs in the dining room behind. They were worn and out of fashion. The parlor was another matter. Some of the furnishings had been removed. There was a shadow on the wall where a settee had once rested, its camelback like the memory of an ocean wave on the sea green paneling. Nail holes above the windows showed where draperies, most likely in matching silk, had also been taken down.

But clustered beside the window were three items that no sensible person would leave behind.

The first was a wing chair upholstered entirely in needlework with a tiny vignette on the back of—naturally—a fishing lady scene. It was good if not accomplished work, stiff, with the figures as ramrod straight as their fishing poles. Pushed against the wall was the stand and frame upon which it had most likely been made, lengths of dusty linen still lying ready for the needle. A basket much like Anna's own sat on the floor beside it.

The second was a fire screen bearing another silk picture, this one of a shepherdess. An earlier work by the same hand, Anna judged, if the lamb's wild-eyed expression was anything to go by. Faces were always difficult, animals' especially so. One aimed for Carracci, but so often ended up with Brueghel. The effect was not improved by the amateur mounting. Someone had failed to stretch the canvas properly over a stiff backing before framing it and fixing it to the pole. Skilled craftspeople, no doubt, were difficult to come by in the highlands.

The third item was a large table, decorated with by far the most advanced piece of needlework: a flip-top gaming surface adorned with flowers and cards and mother-of-pearl counters, stitched in an almost successful mix of wool and silk on a green baize ground. It had been properly mounted to the surface by a professional cabinetmaker and would not look out of place in a New York parlor.

What she could see of it anyway, because most of the surface was covered in
doed koecks
. Anna remembered
them from her childhood. “Dead cakes” were like English shortbreads spiced with caraway, cut into four-inch squares, and given away at funerals. They lasted for months, sometimes years, and she could vividly recall the taste of them: sweet, buttery, and lightly spiced. She was tempted to eat one now. Anna had never seen any left over after a funeral, but here were stacked dozens, some wrapped in black paper, some not, pressed with the letters
C
and
H
linked by a small
V
. The man who had destroyed her life: Cornelis Van Haren, the old patroon.