The Dutch Girl Read Online Free

invested everything in someone else’s land—and to lose your lease was to lose all.
    The following week Gerrit brought enough cookies for Anna and himself; buttery treats, tasting of cardamom and orange water. They infused the pockets of his velvet coat with their perfume, and the scent blended sweetly with the bay rum he wore.
    When it turned cold they met in the old barn where the wheat was threshed and the flax was carded in summer. Their meetings continued for a year, until Anna’s mother found out about them, and beat her. She told Anna that there was only one thing that the patroon’s son could want from a tenant’s daughter.
    The lecture had made her skin crawl. She had felt the way Gerrit must have done that day on the lawn, when he had become suddenly aware of the gulf thatseparated him from most of the people on the estate. Only this wasn’t just the gulf that separated the rich from the poor, the powerful from the weak. This was the chasm that separated men and women, and according to her mother, it could not be bridged by friendship or affection.
    After that Anna’s mother kept her home from church for a month. And sometime during that month, Gerrit left for school in Leiden, and she never saw him again.
    â€œHe will recognize me. I knew Gerrit when we were children.” More than knew him. Even now she could remember the bay rum and cardamom scent of him, the lazy hours spent together in the woods or up in the hayloft.
    Miss Ashcroft shook her head. “Gerrit is not patroon. He ran away to join the Rebels in ’seventy-five and Cornelis disinherited him. It is Andries, the younger brother, who is lord of the manor now.”
    Andries. She remembered him too. A tall blond boy. “There were three children,” said Anna. “Gerrit, Andries, and a younger sister.”
    â€œYes,” said Miss Ashcroft. “Elizabeth. Information about what goes on among the more remote patroon families is hard to come by. As you know, New York’s gossips and broadsheets waste little time on the Hudson aristocracy in general—despite their wealth—
because
they are of little interest to young women, and the parents of young women, of marriageable age: they’ve long sought spouses, and been content to socialize, almost exclusively among their own. For the most part, familieslike the Van Harens keep themselves to themselves, and their tenants are reluctant to share ‘intelligence’ for fear of reprisal. But by all accounts Elizabeth eloped to get away from her father. It is presumably her children—twin girls—that Andries is raising. Cornelis Van Haren was not well liked, either by his tenants or his family. Andries, it seems, is doing his best to make amends.”
    As a boy Andries had possessed a quick wit and a cold demeanor. He and Anna had never spoken, but she had overheard him cutting one of the
schouts
, the private bailiffs who answered to no law but the patroon’s, down to size. He had been aloof like his father. He would not know her from Eve.
    â€œAndries Van Haren,” continued the woman who called herself Ashcroft, “controls two hundred thousand strategic acres on the Hudson, including Harenhoeck.”
    Anna could picture it now, that narrow point on the Hudson. On a clear day you could make out what a man was wearing on the other side. It had been considered a great feat to swim it when she was a child.
    â€œThe current there,” said Miss Ashcroft, “is such that a chain can be stretched across the river without breaking. Van Haren is ready to declare for the Americans, to give us Harenhoeck, but he wants something. Washington needs to discover what.”
    â€œI know a little of revolutions.” Anna had been there in ’65 when the tenants had risen. She could still close her eyes and see the mob. She could remember the light in their eyes, her father’s ringing voice and rousing words. And what