The Dutch Girl (6 page)

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Anna blinked in the lantern light, blinded by the brightness after so many hours in the dark.

“Get out, Mr. Ten Broeck,” said Gerrit Van Haren.

The cultured voice was the same one that had beguiled her with ghost stories and fairy tales in the woods behind the church, but as her eyes adjusted to the light she could see that his had changed. They were colder—harder—than she remembered. She searched his face for some trace of the boy he had been. His thick brown hair still had an unruly curl to it, but the softness of youth had been carved away—as if by a sculptor—to reveal high cheekbones, a wide mouth, and a firm jaw. A handsome villain, and if the pistol steady in his hand and the battered sword hanging at his hip were anything to judge by, a ruthless one.

“Get out,” he repeated, this time with an impatient edge in his tone.

Anna lifted her foot over the box on the carriage floor.

“Not you.”

She hesitated and looked at Mr. Ten Broeck.

“This is madness, Gerrit,” said Ten Broeck. “Your brother will overlook a little petty thievery, a box of sweetmeats or a case of wine, but not this. Not robbery on the King's Highway.”

“There is no robbery taking place, Mr. Broeck. And
we are not on the King's Highway. This is Harenwyck land.
My
land. Your driver will reach home tomorrow, after a night at our expense in suitable accommodation, with the contents of his purse intact. And so will you. As for the contents of the coach . . . well, everything my brother claims to own is mine by right. Andries has stolen the estate from me by lies and judicial legerdemain, as I'll prove, eventually. For now, though, I'll be taking the Harenwyck gold into custody for safekeeping, along with all the other luxuries my brother imports from New York.”

His eyes swept over Anna in a frank appraisal and she suddenly realized the truth: he
didn't
recognize her.

She should have felt relief. Instead, she felt something very much like jealousy. She had never been jealous of her students, never resented them for being born with more than she had worked to have. But those afternoons with Gerrit behind the church had been the closest she had come to romance in all her thirty-two years.

And he had forgotten her. And, like Tarleton, he assumed she was for sale.

“I think you mistake the nature of my business with your brother,” she said.

He looked as though he was surprised that she could speak. “Do I?” he asked, one dark eyebrow subtly lifted. “Then pray tell me, what does bring you to Harenwyck, milady?”

His mock courtesy galled her. She wanted to wipe the superior expression off his face. She wanted to tell
him that he'd once been better than his father and his brother. She wanted to tell him the truth: that his wretched family had cast a pall over her life that stretched as far as New York—but telling him that would only get her hanged, so she said, “Your brother has hired me as a tutor.”

“For private instruction and from a very fine
academy
, I have no doubt.”

She should have kept the pistol with her in the carriage, or at the very least made her knives more accessible. One of the slim blades might do quite nicely. Gerrit Van Haren had not only grown up, but had inflated into a bladder much in need of a sharp poke.

“I do
not
run a cavaulting school. It is a finishing academy for young ladies.”

“I will take your word that it is a proper nunnery,” replied Gerrit, easily. “And I do look forward to enjoying the tuition that Andries has paid for, but just at this moment, I'm rather preoccupied. Mr. Ten Broeck, you may step down, and join Edwaert and Dirck and your driver for a lovely evening walk to the old mill, or you can be dragged out of the carriage and frog-marched cross-country barefoot. The choice is yours.”

Gerrit stepped aside. Mr. Broeck shot a worried look at Anna and then climbed down. Before she could follow, Gerrit vaulted into the compartment and blocked her escape. Without ceremony he snatched up her stockinged ankles and lifted them back onto the bench. Instinct, honed under the tutelage of the Widow, took over, and she twisted and dove for the opposite door.

In the enclosed space his superior size was a decided advantage. He reached around her and seized the door handle before she could touch it, then held it fast. “You're very lithe for a schoolteacher,” he said pleasantly. “But I confess I am wounded. Was Mr. Ten Broeck such better company?”

He didn't wait for an answer before settling comfortably on the bench opposite. Then, quite coldly, he added, “Don't try it again, or I'll tie you to the roof with the other baggage.”

She knew that he meant it. She might have mistaken his
immediate
intentions, but no matter what kind of boy Gerrit Van Haren had been, he was clearly a different man now, and a dangerous one.

She tucked her feet up under her on the bench. The carriage seemed far smaller than when it had been occupied by just her and Broeck, especially with Gerrit leaning over the boxes on the floor. He produced a knife from his pocket and cut the leather strapping that held her possessions together atop the patroon's strongbox.

The carriage swayed on its springs. A long gaunt face framed by poker-straight white blond hair appeared in the open carriage door. The man standing on the running board looked sharply up at Gerrit. “Any almonds, then?” he asked in Dutch.

Gerrit lifted Anna's prized book of engravings by one corner and held it carelessly up to the lantern light. “Does this look like almonds to you, Pieter?” Gerrit replied.

“That,” said Anna, “is Domenico de' Rossi's
Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne
.”

The loose pages, the ones too often copied by the girls, where the binding had grown weak and failed after endless hours lying open in the sun of the school's third-floor studio, slipped out in a papery rush and fluttered down like leaves in a gale. Anna snatched the Laocoön and Apollo Belvedere plates from the air as they fell.

Gerrit stared at her and suddenly she could not recall if he had asked about the book in English or in Dutch. To cover her mistake she said, “Please be careful with that. It's old and delicate and very valuable.”

Gerrit set the book down on the bench beside him. “In New York, maybe, but up here, if you can't eat it, plant it, ride it, or kill someone with it, it won't fetch much.”

The man named Pieter sighed. “No olives either, I suppose,” he said in Dutch.

“No olives either,” confirmed Gerrit in the same language. He was still looking at her, she realized, studying her face.
“Spreek je Nederlands, juf?”
he asked.

Do you speak Dutch, miss?
He had asked the question informally, as he would a child or a servant or a woman of low status, but addressed her—with a tinge of sarcasm—as one might a school mistress. It took an act of will not to reply in the same language, in the fine accents she'd practiced with him when he'd corrected her speech as a child. Of course, that was why he had spoken as he did: to see her reaction.

I know you,
she wanted to say,
and you are not this man.

But fifteen years was a long time, and she was not Annatje Hoppe anymore. She gave him the blank look she had perfected in New York and said, “It's very rude to speak another language in front of a person who doesn't understand it.”

That, apparently, was schoolmarmish enough to satisfy her captor. “What use, I wonder,” he asked, “does a pretty girl have for such a book?”

“I told you. I've been hired to tutor the Van Haren girls.”

He nodded at the engraving of Laocoön in her lap. “Is that really a suitable area of study for young ladies?”

Anna stopped smoothing the page with her hands and set it on the seat beside her. “Drawing is thought to be an essential element of a polite education.”

“I meant the subject matter.”

“For some obscure reason the ancients are always considered respectable, no matter their state of dress.”

His eyebrows rose at that. “You're not my brother's usual type.”

“Does your brother have a usual type in schoolteachers?”

“My brother has a usual type in
women
. The quiet, biddable sort. And he prefers it when they belong to someone else.”

She had never heard him speak with bitterness before. Not even about his father. But they had been children when they had known each other and experience had obviously changed them both.

Gerrit tapped on the roof, just as Mr. Ten Broeck had, and the carriage lurched forward.

“Where are we going?” she asked, as the vehicle began to turn around.

“Your night won't be as rustic as Mr. Ten Broeck's. We're bound for an inn.”

A look of alarm must have crossed her face.

“Don't worry. I'm not always bent on debauchery. In fact, I have a meeting there with some associates.”

“In a stolen coach?” Which was now picking up speed at an alarming rate. Anna braced her arms on the walls. “With a fortune in stolen gold?”

“The coach is mine,” said Gerrit, settling back comfortably onto his bench. Anna envied him. He was a head taller than her and his shoulders were too broad to be buffeted by the jostling of the coach, while she could barely keep her seat. “The courts only found in favor of Andries and his pack of lies because they are controlled by the Rebels, and the Rebels want Harenwyck whole.”

“I thought that your father disinherited you.”

Gerrit sighed. “He did. Perhaps. Once upon a time, he said as much, in his study, with my brother at his elbow. Or perhaps it was more of his bluff and bullying. Of one thing I am sure: he never made a will to formalize it. If he had, be certain Andries would have presented it in probate. He did not.

“Without a will, under Dutch rules of inheritance, Harenwyck passes to me. So my brother of necessity concocted a story, plausible enough, that Cornelis Van Haren
had
made a last will and testament naming him as
sole heir. Then I came home, shortly after my father's death, refused to accept its terms—and burned it. In truth, I came home to find that Andries had already declared himself patroon and hired a militia to keep me out. I never even got near the house.

“To settle matters, Andries produced men who claimed to have witnessed this will, and recalled its basic terms. As far as the courts are concerned—the New York Court of Chancery in particular, where my brother applied all his considerable influence—Harenwyck is now the lawful inheritance of Andries, just as my father wished it. You see, at equity, a rogue like me cannot be permitted to unjustly profit from his misdeed. By destroying my dear father's will I sought to pull his estate back into intestacy, where the common law would make me heir. The will, and fair play, must be upheld! Never mind the damned thing never existed, and Andries and his ‘witnesses' were perjurers. Such is the course of justice, as twisted by my brother and his Hudson peers.”

“But the New York courts are controlled by the Rebels,” she said. And Kate Grey's allies. And Kate Grey had said nothing of any of this. It was possible that she had not known. And equally possible that she had known and decided against sharing all the facts with Anna.
“Surely it must count for something that you fought for them with the Continentals.”

“It appears the teacher has done her homework on the Van Haren family.”

Anna knew she had made another mistake. She must be more careful. She was supposed to be a stranger to Harenwyck. “It seemed only sensible to find out as much about the patroon as possible, before accepting his offer.”

“How much is he paying you?”

“Enough,” she said.

“I'll double it.”

“You would like to brush up your English grammar and improve your needlework?”

“Just now, I would
like
to reach my chest of gold, but find it buried beneath a heap of female impedimenta.”

He set her book down and resumed rummaging through the baggage. He plucked Anna's sewing box out of the jumbled mess on the floor and examined it in bafflement, unfastening the clasp and flipping it upside down.

The lid swung open with the motion of the coach and Anna's silks spilled out like tumbled jewels. Glinting among them were streaks of shining silver. Her lockpicks clattered over the mahogany paint case and the maple strongbox to land ringing upon the floorboards and dislimn Anna's painstakingly crafted identity as Miss Winters, headmistress of Miss Winters' Academy.

Anna held her breath as Gerrit raised an eyebrow and fished a steel pick out of the tangled heap. He held it up to the light and it glinted. She kept them polished because that made them easier to work with in the dark. With a sinking heart she knew that he knew what it was.

“Is burglary among the normal subjects for a finishing school?”

“Adolescent girls are much given to drama,” said Anna. It was, after all, true. “They have a tendency to lock themselves in rooms when romance disappoints.” Also true, if not the exact reason she had brought the lockpicks.

“And how often is that?”

“Most Tuesdays,” said Anna. “That is when the post arrives.”

“Now you sound like a schoolteacher,” he said. “But I find it difficult to believe you are only that.”

“Because I own a set of lockpicks?”

“Because you're too pretty not to make more profitable use of your looks.”

“You have a very low opinion of the female character, sir.”

“Not uninformed by experience,” he replied, continuing his investigation of the contents of the coach. “My strongbox had better be at the bottom somewhere.”

“It is beneath my loom and paint case.”

He tossed the loom aside and lifted her case of paints onto the seat beside him. Anna could hear the brushes rattling with the motion of the coach from inside the box. When Gerrit leaned forward again, something mewed. “Blast it,” he said. He shifted and dug in his coat pocket and produced a small ball of wriggling gray fur.

“By your logic I should now conclude that you are a ratcatcher,” she said.

“It's not a rat; it's a very small cat.” He plucked up her empty silk basket and deposited the creature inside.

“Why do you keep a kitten in your pocket?”

He snorted, seemed amused in spite of himself. “I don't, as a rule. In this case, it's expediency: the little beast was about to be run over by your carriage.”

Anna took the basket out of his lap. That brought her into closer proximity with her captor and the surprising scent of bay rum. He'd worn it at seventeen when they had kissed behind the church and ever since she had associated the fragrance with the thrill of intimacy. It
mingled now with the woodsy scent of the pine needles that still clung to his coat.

Up close she could see that he was not dressed like an
ordinary
gentleman of the road. His suit was fine chocolate wool, the cuffs worn and frayed but the cloth unmistakably soft and rich. His shirt and stockings were cream silk, his shoes brocade with silver buckles. Everything he wore had once been of the highest quality and remained scrupulously clean, if not tirelessly mended.

“What was such a tiny kitten doing in the middle of the road?” she asked.

“His mother was crossing, and he wriggled free of her jaws just as your carriage thundered into view.”

“She abandoned him,” said Anna, heartsick.

“She would have been run over otherwise. She was
not
a small cat. I thought her a tom at first. The carriage would have struck her for certain, but the kitten was little enough that the coach and team might have missed or passed right over him.”

Anna peaked inside the basket. The kitten was mottled gray with giant yellow eyes—perhaps not long opened on the world—and a decidedly stocky build. And it was trembling like a leaf.

“It's too young to be on its own, poor thing,” she said.

For the first time all night Gerrit had the good grace to look ashamed. “I will go back in the morning and find his mother. We could hardly do it tonight. The militia patrols the estate.”

“How do you know it's a he?” Anna asked.

“He's too scrappy to be a girl. He squirmed out of his mother's grasp in the middle of the road.”

Anna lifted the kitten out of the basket and turned it over. “Be that as it may,
he's
a
she
.” The kitten scrabbled madly up onto her shoulder and began chewing her hair. “Scrappy, though, is certainly an apt name for her.”

“She thinks you're her mother,” said Gerrit, clearly amused.

Scrappy began kneading Anna's shoulder with determination, eyes screwed shut and paws flexing. “She wants milk.”

“She shall have cream when we get to the inn. And a fish, if they have any.”

He liked cats. She remembered that. Gerrit reached across the carriage to stroke the kitten's head. The back of his hand brushed Anna's cheek. His touch was warm and electric, just like it had been in the woods behind the church.

For years she had told herself that what they shared as children had been the thrill of infatuation, the fleeting passion of youth, a fairy kingdom impossible to revisit as an adult.

She had been wrong.

The truth was that she had met too young—and across an impossible divide of wealth and station—the one man above all others for her. And the circumstances, God knew, were just as impossible now.

She disentangled the purring kitten from her hair and passed the warm, furry body to Gerrit just as they hurtled over a bump in the road. He put out his hands to
steady her and the contact was illicitly thrilling. If only he knew it was her. But he could not. Ever. She deposited the kitten in his lap and drew back. “What sort of inn gives refuge to highwaymen?”

The kitten rolled over in his lap. Gerrit rubbed its soft white belly, and she felt a flash of affection, saw in this strange man a glimpse of the boy who'd touched her heart. Loud purring filled the carriage.

“I prefer to think of myself as a land-going privateer.”

“I thought you said that the Rebels had sided with your brother over your inheritance.”

“They have. Which leaves me with no choice but to turn to the British.”

“So the British Army is licensing brigands as well as pirates now.”

“In a sense. The Skinners and Cowboys are authorized to forage. How foraging differs from robbery and cattle thieving is difficult to say. Still, the British do not issue letters of marque for foraging. I've never understood why robbery on the King's Highway can only get you hanged while robbery on the high seas, under the right circumstances, will get you knighted, but then that's probably because I'm not a naval man.”

“And how, exactly, does stealing your brother's gold endear you to the British?”

“It's not his. And, unlikely as this may sound, I don't want the gold for myself.”

“Am I supposed to believe that you're a latter-day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor?”

“I'll answer to Robin Hood, if that makes you my Maid Marian.”

He flashed her a roguish smile and she glimpsed again the boy who had charmed her in the woods behind the church. She remembered what it had been like to while away long afternoons in his company. With him, Annatje Hoppe, the farm girl with no fortune and no prospects, who wore homespun and
klompen
, had always felt clever and beautiful. This was Gerrit's gift: a natural ability to bring out the best in others. A half-remembered ballad came bubbling to her lips.

“Alas,” she said, “I'm not a bonny fine maid of noble degree.”

“I thought all schoolteachers were disappointed gentlewomen.”

“Gentlewomen, not noblewomen.”

“A degree without a difference.”

“That is easy to say if you are already standing on the high ground.”

“Or have no further to fall.”

“Even dressed in rags, you will always be the son of a patroon. If you are disgraced, you do not fall. You are cast
out
, not
down
. It is only those of us in the middle who must cling to each slippery rung of the ladder for dear life.”

“Unless you jump. Leap off the ladder into the unknown.” His voice was almost wistful.

“In a man that would be called boldness. In a woman, it is called something else.”

“That is a surprising point of view for a bold woman.”

“What makes you think I'm bold?” she asked.

“For one thing, you are arguing with a highwayman, a notorious
struikrover
, and for another, you
are
a veritable Marian, ranging
the wood to find Robin Hood, the bravest of men in that age.”

He knew the ballad too. Of course he did. She'd found it in one of the books he'd brought her. And they were back to flirting. She wished she did not like it so much. She wished that fragments of that ballad were not percolating to the surface of her memory, waking up part of her that had been asleep too long, like black coffee in the morning. “Marian,” she said earnestly, “searched for Robin dressed as a boy.”

“I grant that you would not make a very convincing boy, but I doubt Marian did either. Or most of Shakespeare's heroines, for that matter. And you won't hear me complaining. That's a very pretty gown.”

It was the best thing she owned, her very proper schoolmistress gown, bought secondhand and altered to fit her by Mrs. Peterson, with Miss Demarest's help. And, just now, Anna had never felt so pretty in anything in her life. She struggled to ignore the feeling. “Nor am I
armed with quiver and bow, sword, buckler, and all
.”

“But I could still draw out my sword,” he suggested, his meaning clear, “and to cutting we could go.”

It was the same proposition Tarleton had made earlier that day, based in large part on the same assumptions, that as a woman in commerce among the goods and services she traded would be those of her body. With Tarleton the idea had repelled her. With this man, she
had to admit, it thrilled her. It was truly the world turned upside down. Tarleton was a respected member of the gentry, a rising star in the army. Gerrit was a disgraced aristocrat turned highwayman. And she had never felt safer with anyone in her life, even though he held, all unwittingly, power of life and death over her.

There was nothing and no one to stop her climbing across the heap of boxes and into the arms of the only man she had ever wanted. Except that it wouldn't be real, because he didn't know it was her. And, outlaw of sorts though he was, he was still so honest and so good—he'd nearly gotten himself run down to save a kitten—he would be honor bound to turn her over to justice if he found out the truth: that she was Annatje Hoppe, the fugitive Dutch girl, the one who had killed a
schout
and fled Harenwyck for her life all those years ago.

The thought stole all the joy from their banter. “I seem to remember that Marian got the better of Robin in that version.
The blood ran apace from bold Robin's face
, didn't it?”

“Ah, but when she realized it was Robin,” said Gerrit, still delighting in their wordplay, still hopeful it would lead somewhere, when she knew it was a door already closed,
“with kisses sweet she did him greet, like to a most loyal lover.”

“That is because Robin and Marian were reunited sweethearts,” said Anna. “We are not.” Of all the lies she had told across the years, this was the first she regretted. “And I will not call you Robin unless you distribute your
largesse, flinging coins like a Roman emperor or a Venetian doge, when we get to this inn.”

He appeared to consider it. “I suppose Pieter could hold the reins while I toss coins from the running board, but it wouldn't do my brother's tenants any good. The only thing they want is the land they're working, and he won't sell it to them.”

“And you would?” She couldn't keep the surprise out of her voice. It was too pronounced for the woman she pretended to be—a stranger to the patroonship—but he was too caught up in their exchange to notice.

“Yes. I would sell to them. America has no future without land. A republic can't be built out of plantations and patroonships. It needs freeholders with a stake in the government.”

“That is a very revolutionary sentiment for a man on his way to the King's Arms.”

“I believe in independence. It is the Continental Congress that does not believe in me. I fought for them for three years, but when my father died, Andries told them that I planned to break up the estate, to sell Harenwyck to the tenants. He claimed that my father had disinherited me—even though he could produce no proof and the will has conveniently disappeared. The courts sided with Andries because the courts are controlled by Rebels, and the gentlemen running this revolution don't trust all of Harenwyck's tenants to side with them: don't trust them with the rights to vote, or without a master to move them. Propertied men in New England are one thing; poor Dutchmen, apparently, are another.”

She felt something tighten in her chest and realized it was grief. This was the idealistic boy she remembered, the one who stole books from his father's library and brought them to her all summer long. The one who championed underdogs—like her father. Like her. A decent man who knew right from wrong. And that was why she could not reveal herself to him, because she ought to have hanged fourteen years ago for killing that bailiff. She had lived a decade on borrowed time. These moments were borrowed too. She knew that. And still, she could not resist matching minds with him.

“So you are more like one of the Gracchi than Robin Hood. A land reformer with republican ideals. Does that make you Tiberius the elder, or Gaius the younger?”

“That's like asking if I'd rather be clubbed to death or compelled to suicide.”

“And which would you rather?”

“Suicide,” he replied without hesitation.

“You are equally dead,” she replied, “but in that instance you've done your enemy's work for him.”

“There's a nobility in taking that away from your enemies. He can't kill you if you're already dead.”

“But
dum spiro spero
. Where there is breath, there is hope. How do you know that you mightn't have prevailed, in a fair fight?”

“Gaius knew it wasn't going to
be
a fair fight. He saw his older brother murdered in the forum by the senate. They would not even give him the honor of dying by the sword. They beat him to death with broken staves from the senate benches and cast his body into the Tiber.”