The Dutch Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

fled.
    â€œAnd what do you expect me to
do
at Harenwyck itself?”
    â€œWhatever it takes to bring Andries Van Haren to our side.”
    A picture of Gerrit’s chilly younger brother, glittering, blond, handsome, and decidedly aloof, swam into her mind. “Just because I understand the patroonship doesn’t mean I have any insight into the mind of the patroon. I am only a tenant farmer’s daughter.”
    â€œYou are surely more than that, but your adversaries are as well. Beware of John André. He is charming, accomplished, clever, and quite deadly.”
    â€œAm I expected to seduce him too?” asked Anna, sourly.
    â€œExpectations are dangerous where someone like Captain André is concerned, except perhaps that feminine wiles will leave him unmoved. He is ruthless and all too willing to sacrifice his pawns. If you encounter him, be on your guard. Use your instincts. The Widow thought you were a sound judge of character.”
    â€œI cannot imagine why.”
    â€œPerhaps because you never trusted her.”
    Anna stood in the door and watched her visitor disappear into the traffic on the street. She did it very well, this Kate Grey, walking with her head tilted so the brim of her hat obscured her face, elbows held close to her body so she took up hardly any room at all. The dun-colored gown blended into the dusty cobbled street, and then she rounded a corner and was gone.
    Kate Grey was right about the Widow. If she had been alive, she would have expected Anna to go to Harenwyck. But Kate Grey was wrong about Anna’s life in New York. It was not lonely. It was full of companionship and sometimes even gossip and drama, usually the harmless kind that young women relished and which Anna enjoyed vicariously through them.
    Only today’s gossip was not harmless. Anna knew as much from the few words she caught as she approached the parlor, terms that did not belong in the vocabulary of gently reared young maidens. When the boards in the hall creaked beneath her feet, the voices inside fell silent.
    She entered the room to discover the scene she had expected. All six of her students were stitching with extraordinary concentration.
    Anna marched straight up to Becky Putnam and put out her hand. “I’ll take the letter, Rebecca.”
    Becky looked up from her embroidery loom, all wide-eyed innocence. “What letter, miss?”
    â€œWhy, the one you were just reading aloud. From a gentleman, I gather.”
    â€œBut I don’t know what you mean, Miss Winters. We were only trading recipes for blackberry preserves.”
    Anna weighed her choices. She knew exactly where the letter was now, because every schoolgirl ever born thought she had invented that particular hiding place. Knowing where girls hid things could be useful. If she showed her hand, none of those present would ever use such a hiding place again. They would have to become cleverer about their indiscretions—which might be inconvenient for Anna. But then, if Anna allowed Becky to get away with her deception, the girl might become an incorrigible liar.
    Anna decided that the benefits of this particular lesson outweighed the costs. She placed her hand on the top of Becky’s embroidery loom. It was a pretty thing, a slender frame of polished tiger maple on brass casters, easy to move about the room as the sun changed position, the perfect height for a seated needlewoman to stitch away the afternoon. It was hinged at the top and could be tilted this way and that, or flipped entirely in case any stitches needed to be picked out. It was finer than the other frames in the room, finer than what the other girls had, and maybe because of that, because wealth and position made her bold, Becky gripped the bottom hard and held it fast.
    Anna raised both her eyebrows. Becky withered beneath her stare, and released the frame. Anna flipped it over. She was unsurprised to find an elaborately foldedletter tacked to