The Dutch Girl by Donna Thorland

and resort to an ax with the box.”
    â€œYou gave your word. And
ignis aurum probat, miseria fortes viros
,” she prompted.
    He sighed. “Fire tests gold, but adversity tests men.” He bent to move the paint box and the loom, and at last the strongbox lay revealed on the floor between them.
    â€œMy tools, please,” she prompted.
    He searched the seats, the skirts of his coat, and the floor until he had five of her lockpicks, but not the one most likely to be of use. “Keep looking.”
    â€œYes, ma’am. If I had any doubts that you truly were a schoolteacher, you have dispelled them. Ah.” He plucked one of her picks out of a corner of her embroidery loom where it had gotten stuck between the canvas and the frame. “Good God, what is this thing?” he asked.
    He held up the stretched canvas, which he had discarded earlier that night, and in the lantern light filtering through the window the pattern was unmistakable.
    â€œThat is your family’s coat of arms, as you well know. I thought it would encourage the girls, especially if their skills are rudimentary, to work on something familiar.”
    â€œLet them embroider something else.” He opened the door of the moving carriage. Trees rushed by. The night air raced in, cool and bracing. Without warning, Gerrit threw the frame out into the night. Anna heard it strike something—a tree most likely—with a sharp crack, and then clatter to the ground, gone forever. She had been quite fond of that particular loom.
    â€œDo you object to heraldry in general or just your family’s in particular?” She did not bother to hide her irritation.
    â€œBoth, actually,” he said, latching the door. “Whatdo seven-year-old girls want with slaughtered lambs and ravening wolves?”
    â€œArmorial subjects are very popular,” said Anna. “Almost obligatory, if your family claims a coat of arms.”
    â€œDid you make one yourself?” he asked.
    â€œHardly. Mine was not that kind of family.”
    â€œThat’s right. Teachers come from gentle, but not noble birth.” She couldn’t tell whether he was mocking her or not. “What sort of embroidery did you make? A devotional sampler?”
    â€œDo I look like I arrived with the Puritans on the Mayflower?”
    â€œDecidedly not. If biblical platitudes are out of fashion, then what is the current vogue?”
    â€œFishing lady scenes remain very popular.”
    â€œBut you’re not fond of them,” he surmised.
    â€œThey are copied from prints. Invention is always superior to mimicry. A truly accomplished needlewoman is also an accomplished draftswoman. She can draw her own scene, and paint it in with thread.”
    â€œAnd what was your invention?”
    Her invention was just that: the story she had fabricated for herself, made up out of whole cloth with the Widow’s guidance, memorialized in the silkwork picture that hung in the school’s parlor and attracted students from as far away as Albany.
    â€œI stitched a portrait of my family’s home,” she said. “Before we lost it, of course.” She
had
lost her home, but it hadn’t been the redbrick manse in her embroidered picture. “And the trees and the pond. There is even afishing lady, but she is my own, not copied from an engraving.”
    Gerrit clasped his hands together and leaned forward. She recalled the pose from their youth. It meant he was about to embark on a story. “I picture your father as a learned man. A lawyer or a divine. No, scratch that. A doctor. He taught you Latin and instilled in you a love of science. You read Pliny instead of Catullus, and sketched ducklings and carpenter ants with equal ardor. You lived in one of those severe New England houses with the steep roofs and tiny windows, the kind the Puritans built and everyone slaps a coat of yellow paint and a portico on and tries to pretend are