The Dutch Girl by Donna Thorland Page B

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    She explained her problem.
    â€œWe’ll wait until we reach the inn, then,” said Gerrit.
    She wanted to ask him which inn he meant. She wanted to get her bearings. She had thought she would remember more about Harenwyck, but the gates had been strange to her, and they’d traveled some ways from there by now. Anna knew she must take the first opportunity to escape, but that would be easier if she had any idea where she was.
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    Gerrit was enjoying himself. Things could have gone very, very wrong on the road, but they hadn’t. He had possession of Andries’ carriage. That was good. No one had gotten hurt. That was better. And the girl made him feel alive and excited, like the world was full of opportunity again. He could not remember the last time he had felt that way.
    He probably shouldn’t have thrown her loom out the door. It was amazing how the sight of that coat of arms set him off, how anything to do with Andries and his family could set him off. He
knew
there was a world beyond Harenwyck. His
raison d’être
was to dismantle the damned place, for God’s sake. But as long as the patroonship stood unchanged, it would cast its shadow over his life.
    Talking with the pretty teacher was like a glimpse of that wider world.
    He’d been so smitten that he’d gone and spun her a story, the kind his father had hated, but that the pretty girl with the sunny
klompen
had always loved. Annatje had done more than listen to his tales, though. She had joined her invention to his. When she didn’t like the ending of a story, she changed it.
The heroine
, she used to say,
ought to get to win once in a while, and live happily ever after
. Annatje had not lived happily ever after, but she had convinced him that endings could be changed, that just because something always had been didn’t mean it always had to be.
    He’d said something to that effect to his father, and the old man had shipped him off to Leiden.
    Gerrit had tried to explain to his father that his mind had always worked that way, that people and places and things suggested stories. He’d explained to his father that he knew it was just an amusement, something to entertain ladies—that at least was something the old goat, who had chased everything in petticoats on the estate for decades, would understand—but his father had seen the deeper truth: Gerrit would never look at a tenant and see just numbers in a ledger. He saw families, histories, whole lives and lines being subordinated to someone else’s—all because Gerrit’s great-great-great-grandfather had made a few sharp trades in cut diamonds, and known whose palm to grease in Amsterdam.
    He probably shouldn’t have threatened to keep Miss Winters, as if she were a case of wine or a crate of olives.He was not Cornelis. People’s lives were not his to play with. But he had thought—just for a moment—that she might feel the same thrilling attraction that he did, and want only for an excuse to act on it.
    Of course it was possible that she did feel it but knew better than to act on it. And she was right. No matter how far he fell, he would always be the heir to Harenwyck, a patroon’s son. That was why this meeting was taking place at all. Howe’s officers would not be courting the son of a tenant farmer, no matter how successful his raids. It was Gerrit’s claim to the patroonship they were after, the ability to deliver two hundred thousand acres and two thousand able-bodied men to their side. He would always be able to trade on that, no matter what his situation.
    Whereas Miss Winters had nothing to trade upon but her reputation.
    Her caution was probably well-founded. He liked what he knew of her, and he most definitely wanted her—in a way that made him feel like a whole man again after Sophia’s betrayal had burned away all his