The Dutch Girl Read Online Free Page A

had happened when the sheriffs hadcome for him. “Why do you think it will turn out differently this time?” Anna demanded.
    â€œBecause this is more than an uprising of tenants. Because men—and women—of every station are risking their lives and fortunes. Because the times are right to do now what your father tried to do then. There will be no lords and tenants in this new America. Only freemen and freeholders. The same vision your father swayed a multitude with.”
    His vision had ended in failure and Anna too had paid the price for the risks he had taken. She believed in the American cause because it was rooted in the same ideals of equality that her father had espoused, but she had already fought one revolution, and lost. It was for others to fight this one.
    â€œWhy me?” Anna asked. “Surely you can find someone else who speaks Dutch to listen at doors. There must be hundreds of families on the patroonship who are chafing under the Van Haren yoke and would gladly spy on that family.”
    â€œTrue enough. And we have allies already at Harenwyck, but none so well placed as you could be. Andries Van Haren has sent his man of business to New York to sell his wheat, his linen, his flax, and his beef, and to hire a teacher for his nieces. This is our opportunity to place an agent directly in his household, one he will speak freely in front of because he will not know that she is Dutch.”
    â€œAnd once I am there? I am not the Widow. I have no skill at espionage.”
    â€œShe would have disagreed. According to her notes, you ride, you shoot, and through her you acquired some skill with lockpicks and a certain . . . agility in difficult situations.”
    â€œA lifetime ago,” said Anna. When she had been young and scared and determined never to fall under another’s power again.
    â€œAnd you understand men.”
    Anna did not reply at once. She could see how a woman who was like the Widow—but not the Widow herself—might arrive at such a conclusion. It would suggest itself in the broad outline of Anna’s life, the events that had taken her from Harenwyck to New York, from Annatje to Anna.
    â€œI thought you wanted
eyes
and
ears
.”
    â€œWhat I want, what Washington needs, is Harenwyck. If the Widow were alive, she could deliver it to him. Did you know she was at Trenton? Or, more accurately, she was at Mount Holly with the Hessian commander when
he
should have been at Trenton, and by her wiles Washington snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.”
    â€œShe was a singular woman,” said Anna. The Widow had rescued her and given her a new identity and a new life. She could have been no older than forty when she was killed, and might have been a good deal younger—she had the sort of spare beauty that seemed ageless—but Anna had always sensed that the Widow had experience in excess of her years. “How did she die?”
    â€œShe was murdered,” said Miss Ashcroft, lookingAnna straight in the eye, “by the same British intelligence officer who has fixed his eyes on the narrows at Harenhoeck. A man named John André. He had her tortured, and then he stood by while someone else slit her throat.”
    Anna stilled the impulse to touch her own neck. She had known that the Widow had died violently. The lawyer had implied as much with his silence. But she had not been prepared for the visceral horror of it. Whatever else the Widow had been or done, the woman had saved her, helped her build a new life on the ashes of the old. The ashes of her and her father’s lives on Harenwyck.
    â€œI realize that I am asking you to give up the relative safety you enjoy now,” said Miss Ashcroft, “but the Widow thought highly of you. And I do not believe that a thinking woman with integrity can remain neutral in this fight— especially not one who has experienced injustice firsthand.”
    â€œWhy should I