The Dutch Girl (23 page)

With Gerrit she had always felt so clever. She did not feel so clever now, standing in the wreckage of the home she had kept so faithfully for the past six months, with her father gone and no idea how to do as he had asked.

It had taken her the morning to dismantle the cottage. She had taken everything in the house apart in a panicked frenzy. It took her the whole afternoon to put it back together, and her sleepless night began to tell on her long before she was done. She felt as though she were floating, every movement dreamlike and slow. She wished she
were
dreaming, that she could lay her head down on her pillow and wake up to find her father home.

Evening fell and she had only the shelves left to restore to order. She had moved their contents to the table to examine every box, every bottle, every paper package. Now she was putting everything back in place. The sugar, the sugar tongs, the box of tallow-dipped rushes, the chipped earthenware plates, the Widow's bottle of whiskey.

It came to her in a flash of insight. Her father had bought the backwoods whiskey for Angela Ferrers because he knew she liked it. There was only one place on the patroonship to get home-brewed whiskey, only
one place that the Widow could have acquired a taste for the local mash and distillation: from Mevrouw Zabriskie, who brewed gin and other ardent spirits at her cottage in the woods.

Annatje needed to write her letter and deliver it now. Her father had already spent one night and one day in jail. Without money or friends he might be held in the sort of conditions that would eventually make a trial unnecessary. And now she could not find the paper or remember where she had put it after her wild search of the house. She found the ink, homemade stuff that streaked and ran, but it would have to do. The paper turned out to be on the shelves. She wrote as quickly as she could, then folded and tied the letter closed with string. They had no wax candles, only rush lights.

She put on her cloak and her
klompen
and took up the pistol that the sachem had loaded for her, because nothing must stop her from delivering the letter tucked flat inside her stays. She was ready to go, on the brink of departure, when she heard the horses approach.

It was Vim Dijkstra and another
schout
, one of those who had taken her father. Annatje watched them through the cracks in the shutters as they dismounted and approached the door. Dijkstra rapped sharply on the warped boards and shouted, “Annatje Hoppe! Come out!” A big, hectoring voice for a big, bullying man.

She froze, afraid to move a muscle lest they hear her. She willed them to go away.

“Go check the barn.” Dijkstra's voice. He was circling the cottage, searching for some sign of occupancy.
Annatje could hear him pass by each window through the weathered shutters. She heard his heavy boots crunch into the pebbles outside the door, and then it burst open without warning beneath the impact of his shoulder. The sorry old repaired bolt snapped off and clattered to the ground, and Vim Dijkstra filled the doorway.

There was hardly any light in the cottage, but the moon outlined his tall, heavy silhouette. “Come out!” he barked again.

Annatje did not move. “You cannot arrest me. I've done nothing,” she said.

“You're not arrested. You are evicted. But if you don't come now, then I
will
arrest you.”

“Come where?”

“The patroon has ordered me to load you on the ferry. We don't want to see you again on Harenwyck. Now, you can ride with me, girl, or I can drag you behind my horse the whole way.”

“No, thank you. I can find my own way off the estate.” And she could not leave until she had delivered her letter into the hands of the Widow's contact. Her father was relying on her. She was all he had. He was all
she
had.

“No, thank you,”
he mocked, flutingly. “Always putting on airs, thinking you're better than the other tenants just because the patroon's boy diddles you silly behind the church.”

He reached for her, and Annatje dodged and tried to get around him to the door. His big fist shot out,
connecting with her stomach with terrible force. Pain exploded inside her. All the air rushed out of her lungs. She crumpled to the floor, unable to scream, unable even to breathe.

“Looks like you need taking down a peg or two,” sighed Vim Dijkstra, “just like your bastard father.” He kicked her, and she curled into a ball, and he kicked her again.

“The patroon said it would be a fine thing all around if his boy Gerrit didn't have your pretty face to moon over when he comes home.”

Dijkstra plucked a dull knife off the rack on the wall. “Thing is, he might run off in search of it, knowing that one. So, as I see it, I wouldn't really be doing my job if I let you leave here with
both
those pretty gray eyes.”

She could still barely breathe. Her father's pistol, loaded and primed, remained tucked inside her jacket. Vim Dijkstra crouched beside her. The knife rose in the moonlight. He tangled a fist in her hair, wrenched her face violently to one side, and touched the cold nicked blade to her scalp.

She clutched the pistol in her numb hands and aimed, as best she could, dead center at the shadow looming over her . . . and fired.

The report was loud in her ears, but muffled by Dijkstra's bulk. His body jerked grotesquely, then collapsed atop her, and she struggled to get out from under it. Wet warmth slicked her hands. Blood. The gory hole in his back told her plainly that he was dead. The shout
from the barn told her plainly that she must go, and go now.

She had killed a man.

She bolted out the door.

A dark shape on the path was hurtling toward her. She darted around the corner of the house and ran for the road. A few seconds later she heard Dijkstra's companion shouting,
“Moord!”
Murder.

From the road she heard other riders approaching. Their shouts soon joined his like the homing cries of birds, and a dozen mounted men converged on the house.

Annatje fled into the forest. She could not deliver her father's message to the Widow's associate now. The house and the
schouts
were between her, and her objective, and the only direction she could run . . . was away.

There was just one option now. She must reach the Widow herself at her house on Pearl Street in New York.

Numb, cold, all sounds distant and muffled to her ears, Annatje stumbled through the forest all night, her second without sleep. She could not manage a third. At dawn she collapsed in the shadow of a stone wall that marked the edge of some forgotten leasehold. When she woke it was nearly evening again—she had slept away the whole day—and a woman was standing over her. The
mevrouw
wore a red kerchief on her head and a flour sack apron, and she said, “The
schouts
are out searching for you.”

She was the wife of one of the rioters. Her husband had been taken too. She told Annatje what had happened
during the day and the night that she had been frantically searching her cottage for some link to the Widow.

Word had spread of Bram Hoppe's arrest and there had been a full-scale uprising. A thousand tenants, men and women, had marched on the patroon's house and demanded his release. It had not been like the peaceful delegation her father had led, and Annatje had marched with, the previous year. This had been an angry mob—some armed, some bearing torches—and they had threatened to burn the patroon out.

The
schouts
proved more organized, and ruthless, than the leaderless tenants. The patroon's men had dispersed the mob, driven them back into the woods or to their homes; and now the army was on the estate, rounding up the rioters and evicting people from their leaseholds. The
mevrouw
in the red kerchief gave her a loaf of bread and a purse full of pennies.

“The
schouts
will not wait for the law. They mean to hang you for killing Vim Dijkstra, and you can be sure they have the patroon's blessing to do it. Keep off the roads, girl. Go across the country. Travel only at night. And run as far and as fast as you can.”

Annatje did. She walked for days. South and farther south, stopping to wash and drink from little brooks and streams because they would be looking for her near the river. She navigated by the stars Gerrit had taught her, and when the bread ran out she ate wild grapes because she must save her coins for the ferry.

There would be soldiers at the landing. She knew that. And they might be on the lookout for a fugitive
Dutch girl. She had left home wearing two petticoats. She untied the worn one on top and climbed the wall of an orchard in the dead of night to gather a bushel of dropped apples. When she paid her fare and boarded the ferry, she wore a smile she did not feel and carried a sack over her shoulder, and so became a farm girl intent on selling fruit for some extra coin in the city.

When she knocked upon the Widow's door on Pearl Street, she had not eaten anything
but
fruit in three days. The woman who answered was not the Widow, but she was about the same age as that lady, something indeterminate between thirty and forty. She was tall and rail thin, with bony hands.

She did not want to let Annatje in.

“The Widow,” Annatje began, using the only name she was sure her father's ally answered to, “said that her door would always be open to me. I must get her a message. Urgently.”

“She has not been here for two years,” said the woman, in an incongruously small, high-pitched voice. “I have no idea when she will be back again. Maybe never.” She said this last with a tight smile that made it plain she resented the anxiety and uncertainty of keeping house for a woman who did not regularly reside there.

“But you
can
get her a message,” insisted Annatje.

“I can, but there's no telling how long it will be before she replies—if she wishes, or is able, to reply at all.”

“I'll wait.” And she stepped across the threshold of the open door.

The woman's name was Mrs. Duvel, and she grudgingly served Annatje a meal of stale bread that was clearly meant for crumbs. When Annatje expressed a desire to sleep she led her up a back staircase to a third-floor chamber with nothing but a straw pallet on the floor. Annatje knew it was a slight, but she did not care. She had not slept indoors for a week, perhaps more. She no longer knew what day she had left Harenwyck.

When Annatje stepped past Mrs. Duvel into the pool of light from the landing window the housekeeper stopped her. She gripped her chin with a gnarled hand and turned her face this way and that, examining it like a cracked egg.

“Not this room after all, I think,” she said, turning around and beckoning Annatje to follow her back down the stairs.

The first room had been at the front of the house, on the third floor, facing the street, with all the attendant dirt and noise that entailed. This new room was on the second floor, at the back and much quieter. It held a hired man's bed and the ghost of some musky perfume. There was no other furniture in the room.

Annatje did not know why Mrs. Duvel changed her mind, and she did not much care. She wanted to crawl into the bed in her travel-worn clothes and sleep for days, but Mrs. Duvel insisted she bathe and change. She brought her water and a chemise and stood by while Annatje washed the dirt of the road from her skin and
hair. Then Mrs. Duvel took away her dirty clothes and battered clogs to clean them.

Annatje slept. She woke several times that afternoon, despite her exhaustion, shaken from sleep by the clap of the front door slamming closed or the crack of the back door swinging shut. They were distinctive sounds, and they marked the housekeeper's comings and goings. Annatje wondered if she bothered to close doors more softly when her employer, the Widow, was in residence.

It was evening before she woke fully. Mrs. Duvel had not returned with her clothes. The air in the room had grown stale. Annatje attempted to open one of the windows, but they were all stuck. She tried the door and found it locked.

It might be a sensible precaution for a woman who lived alone and found herself saddled with an unwanted visitor—if that visitor had been a man or a physically imposing woman, but Annatje was neither. Dread crept upon her in stages. The Widow had told her to come here, but that had been months ago, and according to Mrs. Duvel, Angela Ferrers had not been here for two years.

It was morning by the time a key turned in the lock, and Mrs. Duvel appeared. She had a man with her. He was dressed something like Mr. Lindsey, the lawyer, in a suit of finely woven wool: not the kind you loomed at home but the sort you bought at the castle, dyed a deep dark blue. The buckles on his shoes were pinchbeck, and he wore fine silk stockings and a gold ring. His hair
was the color of old straw and tucked up under a wig that even Annatje recognized as very old-fashioned and out-of-date.

He looked Annatje up and down the way the estate manager looked at cattle. He pursed his lips and announced, “A guinea. No more, though,” and Mrs. Duvel asked him to wait in the hall. She closed the door behind her and spoke in her high-pitched voice.

“My employer does not even pay me enough to keep up this house and manage all of her affairs here, let alone to feed an extra mouth.”

Annatje stood up. “I did not mean to impose,” she said stiffly. “If you will give me my clothing back, I shall leave.”

“And go
where
? You are the Dutch girl the bailiffs from the valley are searching for, aren't you?”

Annatje said nothing and Mrs. Duvel smiled her thin-lipped smile. “You owe me for your meal and the shift, girl, for the use of this room, and for my silence.”

“The Widow will pay you anything I owe.”

“
The Widow
isn't coming back. Most likely she is dead. You can continue to take advantage of my kindness and do as I say by way of recompense, or I will fetch the law and let them know that there is a murderess sheltering under my roof.”