I was far too dirty to be allowed into the parlor, and the time it would take to bathe meant that the singing master had to depart without administering my hated lesson. I heard Katrina apologizing to him as I trudged up the stairs in my bare feet, my boots and socks having been deemed far too filthy for a civilized house and whisked away to be cleaned.
Katrina’s chastising had left my face red, but I still felt slightly smug that I’d managed to squirm out of my hour with the singing master. It was especially well done as I had completely forgotten that it was Tuesday and therefore hadn’t planned this escape at all.
The tub was carried up the stairs by two of the scullery maids, both of whom did not seem pleased at the extra work generated by the need to go down again and fetch water simply because I could not be troubled to behave like a proper female. I ignored their filthy looks. No one was ever going to make me be a female, not even Katrina. Once I was old enough I was going to cut my hair and run away and be a man in some place where no one had ever heard of me.
Katrina came up to my room while I was soaking in the hot water. I sank down so my face was half hidden and all she could see were my eyes.
“You can keep your tart looks to yourself, Bente,” Katrina said, pulling one of the chairs to the edge of the tub. She gave me that special look that she reserved just for me, the one that said she was at the end of her rope. “I know that you don’t like it, but you’re far too old to run around and act like a wild thing. All the other girls your age know how to sew and sing and comport themselves with decorum in public.”
I lifted my head so my mouth was above the water. “I don’t want to sew or sing. I want to ride and hunt and learn how to be a farmer, like Opa.”
“You can’t be a farmer, Bente, but you might be a farmer’s wife, like me. Is that really so bad?”
Trapped in the house. Organizing the servants and the shopping, planning parties and sewing circles and good works. Always squeezed by stays that were tied too tight, always suffocated by the parlor air, never to see the sun unless I was on the arm of a man escorting me to church.
“Yes,” I said, shuddering. “It sounds terrible.”
I saw a flash of hurt in Katrina’s eyes, and I was immediately sorry, but then a moment later she spoke, and any regret that I had disappeared.
“It’s too bad that you find it terrible because you are stuck with it. You’re a girl, about to become a woman, and you will by God learn how to behave like one.”
“No, I won’t, because I’m not a girl,” I muttered, and ducked my head under the water so I couldn’t hear what she said in response. That didn’t work out so well for me because a moment later Katrina fished me out by my braid.
“Ow!” I cried. She wasn’t tugging all that hard but I wanted her to feel bad about it all the same.
She roughly unbound my hair, muttering in Dutch all the while. She often did this, resorting to her father’s language when her temper peaked. She poured water over my head using the cup next to the tub.
“Your hair is dirtier than any of the animals’ hair,” she muttered as she soaped my scalp. “The pigs are cleaner than you, Bente.”
My hair was long and thick and curly and always got in my way so I never combed or washed it properly, only wrapped it in a braid and stuck it under a cap in hopes that people would accept me as a boy. This would have worked anywhere except the Hollow, where everyone knew me and I knew everyone else. There was no hiding yourself in a crowd in Sleepy Hollow. We were a small and insular people—which was, very likely, the reason why Katrina was always so angered by my behavior. Everyone in the village knew her grandchild was unruly and unwomanly.
Then again, things had a strange way of coming true in the Hollow. If I stayed a boy long enough then everyone else might believe it.
My mother, Fenna, had apparently been the very vision of feminine beauty—fair and blue-eyed and always comporting herself perfectly, much like Katrina. My grandmother had quite admired her daughter-in-law, and always reminded me that I did not measure up.
I’d never met my mother. She and my father, Bendix, had died when I was very young. I had no memory of them at all, though sometimes I stared at the portrait of them in the hall downstairs and imagined I remembered their faces, smiling as they bent down to me.
I sulked while Katrina scrubbed my hair and face and fingernails. The condition of my hands was almost worse than my hair—there was mud embedded beneath the nails and half of them were torn and ragged from climbing trees. I suffered in silence as Katrina supervised the washing of the rest of me, and when I was through, she dumped a bucket of water over me to rinse. It was so cold that my teeth chattered and I glared at her as she rubbed me all over with a wool cloth to dry. The wool was rough, not finely spun like the thread for clothes, and by the time she was finished all my skin was as red as a summer tomato.
Katrina stood watch as I dressed, making sure I put on my shift and dress and stockings, and then she combed out my hair and tied it at my neck with a ribbon. My hair felt heavy and itchy, the strands curling loosely all around my face and neck.
“There,” she said finally, surveying her handiwork. “You look like a proper girl now. Go downstairs and practice your reading.”
“I haven’t had my midday meal yet,” I said. My insides were twisted up with hunger. I’d been out and about for most of the day, and now that I was still, my body reminded me that it had been some time since breakfast.
For just a moment there was a flash before my eyes, the sight of Cristoffel’s dead body on the trail. But I put it away in the place in my brain where I kept upsetting things. I wasn’t supposed to know about Cristoffel, so I couldn’t speak of it with Katrina. Better not to think about it in any case. Better to argue with my grandmother about food and lessons.
“You missed it because you were out in the woods where you don’t belong, so you can just go without until supper,” Katrina said. “And no sneaking into the larder, either.”
I stomped out of the room so she’d know how angry I was, just in case she hadn’t already divined that information from my glare. Practice reading? Go without dinner?
It was unfair, horribly unfair, and she’d never think of doing it if she didn’t consider me a girl. If I was a boy then I would be petted and indulged and allowed to do whatever I wished and to eat all the food I wanted, because boys must grow big and strong. Girls were to be lithe and slender like willows, with delicate white hands and tiny feet. Katrina constantly cut off my food at meals, because she said I ate far too much for one of my sex, and that if I kept eating I’d be an oak tree.
I did not see that it mattered how much I ate, because nothing on this earth was going to make me any smaller. I did not have delicate hands, or tiny feet. I was rather built on the same scale as my grandfather—taller than all of the girls my age in the village, taller than most of the boys, too. My hands were big and rough and my feet seemed to grow every three months, my toes pushing through the leather of my boots. I had none of the soft fat in my cheeks that other girls did. My chin jutted forward like Brom’s, with just a hint of a dimple. My torso was straight, my legs long as a colt’s. I would never look like the girls in the village, and part of my resentment toward Katrina came from her stubborn belief that if I only changed my ways, I would.
“You don’t make enough of yourself, Bente,” she would say, eyeing me up and down in that way that made me feel like a pig for sale.
And that’s just what you are, a pig to be trussed and sold to the highest bidder when the time comes—some whey-faced boy with good prospects and no spirit, someone who will expect you to be quiet and biddable.
“Never,” I said to myself as I went into the parlor and threw myself into one of the chairs. “I’ll never bend for any man.”
There were some tedious books of poetry stacked on the table beside the chair. I picked one at random and opened it, but my mind soon drifted back to what Sander and I had seen in the woods. Who had taken Cristoffel’s head and hands? Why would a person do such a cruel thing? What purpose could it serve?
I heard the door from the kitchens open and close, and then a great voice boomed through the house. “Katrina! I’ve returned.”
“Opa,” I said, and dropped the very boring poetry to one side, running into the hall.
There he was, standing at the foot of the stairs, so huge and alive that he seemed to suck all the air out of the room. He turned when he heard me, and his great wide smile broke across his face and he opened his arms wide for me.
I hurled myself into them, because even though I was big, my opa was much, much bigger and he could still hold me like a child if he wanted. He squeezed me tight and I realized then that the sight of Cristoffel’s sad little body had bothered me much more than I wanted to admit.
“And how’s my Ben today?” he asked, putting me down and looking me in the eye. This was one of the things I loved best about him, that he always asked me questions and seemed interested in my answers, and that he gave me the same attention he would give any adult. “What’s the matter, Ben?”
Brom always knew when something was bothering me. I didn’t want the one and only Brom Bones thinking I was weak, especially since I wanted to talk to him about Cristoffel. It would take some fast talking for me to convince him that I deserved the information in the first place, because as soon as Katrina found out what happened, the topic would be forbidden. Katrina always forbade anything interesting from being discussed around me.
“I’m just a little hungry and my eyes were watering,” I said. This was ridiculous and I think Brom knew it, but he was also wise enough to know that my excuse meant I didn’t really want to talk about what was troubling me at the moment.
“Go and ask Lotte for some bread and butter,” Brom said. “She had some for me when I came in and there’s still a bit of the loaf left from yesterday.”
“She’s not to go begging Lotte for a snack,” Katrina said, coming down the stairs. “Bente isn’t allowed anything until dinner.”
Brom’s face had broken out in his usual grin at the sight of Katrina, but that grin faltered as she spoke. He looked from her to me and back again.
“What’s all this, Katrina? Surely Ben can have a piece of bread. We aren’t so poor as that.”
Katrina halted a few steps above Brom, just out of reach. I had the feeling that this was calculated, because Brom had a tendency to grab her and snuggle her until she saw his way. They were quite disgustingly romantic for old people. Stopping where she did meant that she wasn’t going to allow herself to be distracted by him.
“Bente missed her lesson with the singing master,” Katrina said.
Brom winked at me, but made sure his head was turned so Katrina didn’t see. “Come now, my love, I was never one to enjoy music lessons myself. You can’t blame Ben for not wanting to be stuffed in the parlor when there’s only a few good days of autumn left before winter.”
This was why I loved my opa more than anyone in the world. He understood. But Katrina—she didn’t even try to understand me. She only wanted me to fit into her idea of the world.
“She’s supposed to be learning how to act like a lady, Brom! It’s her duty to learn music and comportment, not to run in the woods like a wild animal. She’s too old for that.”
“In the woods?” Brom asked, his gaze sharpening. “Where were you playing in the woods, Ben?”
It occurred to me that I ought to prevaricate, because if Katrina found out that I’d followed the men through the woods I’d be in even more trouble than I already was. Katrina cut in fast so I didn’t have to lie.
“It doesn’t matter where in the woods,” Katrina said. “She’s not supposed to be there at all! Didn’t you hear a word I said?”
“Ben, go in the kitchen and ask Lotte for some bread and butter,” Brom said.
He gave Katrina a meaningful look, the one he always gave when he wanted to talk to her alone. She didn’t catch his meaning, though, because she was too angry to see it. All she saw was Brom contradicting her instructions.
I caught his look, though, and knew what it meant—that he wanted to talk to Katrina alone about what he and the other men had found in the woods that morning.
“I just said she wasn’t to—” Katrina began.
“Thanks, Opa!” I cut in brightly, and ran to the kitchen before Katrina could finish. If I stayed quiet and stood right by the kitchen door, I might be able to hear what they said.
There was a little passage that connected the main foyer to the kitchen, and it ran at an angle so that if someone came through the foyer door they could stand unseen by anyone in the main room of the kitchen. I heard Lotte talking idly with one of the kitchen maids, their voices soft and punctuated by the occasional trill of laughter. Good smells drifted toward me—meat simmering in herbs, freshly baked bread—and my stomach rumbled. I ignored it. It was far more important to hear what Katrina and Brom had to say than to bother about food at the moment. I pressed the door open just a crack—it swung easily in both directions so the servants could push it open when they were carrying tea trays to and from the parlor—and listened, holding my breath. “. . . thank you not to undermine my authority with the girl, Brom,” Katrina was saying. “Half the reason she’s an undisciplined savage is because she knows you’ll always let her have her way.”
“Yes, yes,” Brom said in a low voice.
I couldn’t see them but I imagined him rubbing his hands up and down her shoulders, like he always did when she got in a temper. It occurred to me that Brom often treated Katrina like a recalcitrant horse that just needed to be soothed down with strokes and sugar lumps.
“I can’t help it. She reminds me so much of her father,” Brom said.
“Yes, and look at the end he came to,” Katrina said. “If he’d been more cautious and less wild . . .”
She trailed off. I frowned. What was Katrina talking about? My father, Bendix—I was named for him, so that Brom could call us both “Ben”—and my mother, Fenna, had died of the fever that had swept through Sleepy Hollow when I was just a toddler. What did my father’s lack of caution have to do with it? Nobody could help catching a fever. That was in the hands of God, or so the preacher always said.
“Katrina,” Brom said, and there was a chiding tone now. “How can you speak so of your own son?”
She sighed, and it was a tired and sorrowful sigh—the same sort that she always gave me.
“In any case,” Brom said, before Katrina could speak, “what you mention is important to what I want to tell you. Justus Smit discovered a body in the woods this morning.”
Ah, that explains it. I’d wondered why the person who’d discovered Cristoffel in the woods hadn’t simply taken the body back to the Hollow. Justus Smit was about my age, and I expect that when he saw the body he’d panicked and run straight back home. He might not have even discovered Cristoffel. Since they were friends there was a good chance Justus had been with Cristoffel when . . . well, when whatever happened had happened. And we didn’t know what that was.
Again I felt a tickling in the back of my brain, a sense that I was forgetting something important. But then Katrina spoke again and all of my attention focused on the conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear.
“What was he doing out in the woods instead of helping his father?” Katrina asked. “I thought he was acting as Diederick’s apprentice?”
“I don’t know why the boy wasn’t at the shop,” Brom said impatiently. “I don’t keep everyone’s business in my head like you do, Katrina. I just know that I was coming out of the notary’s when Justus sped past with a face white as a cloud, and there was blood on his hands.”
“So naturally you followed him and got yourself involved. You always have to be in the middle of everything, Brom.”
“I do not.”
“You do, but continue.”
“Well, I grasped the boy by his shoulder and asked if he was all right, and he told me that he’d come upon the body of another boy in the woods, but he wasn’t certain who it was because the head was missing. I suspect he knew but was scared to say.”
Katrina gasped. “The head was missing?”
“Yes. And his hands.”
There was a clapping sound, and then Katrina’s voice came out muffled. She must have covered her face with her hand. “Like Bendix.”
I went rigid. Like Bendix? Like my father? What was all this? How could a man who’d died of a fever lose his head and his hands?
“It was Cristoffel van den Berg, Katrina,” Brom said.
Katrina began to weep, and I heard the rustle of clothing that meant Brom had taken her in his arms. “Oh, his poor mother. His poor, poor mother,” she said, over and over.
I felt a little sorry then that I’d been so mean to her earlier. I knew it was hard for Katrina. Every time she looked at me she saw the son she’d lost, and her failure to mold me into the young lady she thought I should be. I ought to be nicer to her, but it was hard when what she wanted for me and what I wanted for myself were so different.
I gently eased the door back into place so Katrina and Brom wouldn’t notice, and tiptoed around the passage. Lotte, the cook, and Eliza, one of the kitchen maids, were at the long work table peeling potatoes for supper. There were two golden rounds of bread cooling nearby. Lotte looked up when I entered.
“Ah, Master Ben! What can I do for you?” Lotte said. Lotte treated me like a boy because I’d asked her to, and because she was my friend.
“Opa sent me to have some bread and butter—he said there was some of yesterday’s loaf left.”
“Well, Eliza and I just finished off that bit,” Lotte said, “but you can have a slice of tonight’s if you like. It’s still warm from the oven.”
“Yes, please,” I said. Even if Lotte and Eliza hadn’t finished yesterday’s bread Lotte would have given me some from the fresh loaf. As I’ve said, Lotte was my friend and confidant, and she fussed over me like I was her little duckling.
“Keep on with those potatoes, Eliza,” Lotte said, as she stood to fetch the knife and butter.
Eliza flashed me a sour look. I was not Eliza’s friend and confidant. In fact, Eliza, like most of the servants, quite resented me. They generally saw me as someone who created more work for them—like the scullery maids having to drag water upstairs for my bath in the middle of the day—and at the moment it seemed Eliza was going to get stuck finishing off the potatoes by herself while Lotte tended to me.
This prediction came true, as Lotte spent the next quarter of an hour buttering my bread and making a cup of tea for me and then sitting and chatting instead of peeling root vegetables. Eliza tried her best to burn holes in me with her glare but I was impervious. Anyway, Lotte was the head cook and she wasn’t obligated to peel potatoes if she didn’t want. She was perfectly within her rights to delegate the task to an underservant.
I did my best to stay bright and cheerful for Lotte, but underneath my mind was churning. Katrina had said my father died the same way Cristoffel had. Quite obviously that meant my father had not died of a fever at all, but why had no one ever told me of this? It was well-nigh impossible to keep a secret of any kind in the Hollow. And if my father had died that way—more than ten years ago—then why had it happened again? Did that mean they hadn’t caught the culprit last time?
Of course they didn’t, fool. If they had then everyone in town would know about it, and instead of talking about the Horseman when they saw Cristoffel, they’d be talking about my father and whoever hurt him. Unless it really was the Horseman.
After a bit Lotte got up and bustled around the kitchen, attending to the evening meal, and I grabbed an apple from the larder (still ignoring Eliza’s burning resentment) and slipped out the back door.
The kitchen garden was only a few steps away, the summer vegetables mostly gone. The branches of still-green herbs nodded at me as I passed.
Beyond the garden were the great fields of the Van Tassel—now Van Brunt—land. Most of the summer wheat had been harvested, the golden blanket turned into rough stalks with no heads. Soon the hay would be collected, too, and sold to those with farm animals to be used as feed over the winter.
Beyond the wheat fields was a large green plot for the sheep. Brom had decided a few years ago that he wanted to be a sheep farmer, too. Katrina had thought him absurd but Brom had prevailed and they obtained a small flock.
Brom babied those sheep. Katrina accused him of treating the sheep better than he did most people. Brom said his method would result in superior sheep, and in the end Brom was victorious—as he often was. The wool from his sheep was exceptional, and so was the meat. He soon drove every other sheep farmer in the area out of the market—no one wanted their stringy mutton any longer.
This was the sort of behavior that generally led to muttering and resentment, but Brom was so good-natured that soon all was forgiven. He helped the few other sheep farmers into other professions, lending them the money to start new ventures. Of course, all money lent was returned with interest, and so the Van Brunt coffers grew fatter and fatter. People didn’t give Brom enough credit for being smart. A fair number of folk in the Hollow dismissed Brom as an oaf who’d just gotten lucky in marriage, but Brom was as shrewd as they came.
I walked toward the sheep paddock, turning the apple I held over and over in my hand. I’d been troubled enough about Cristoffel. Then Katrina had said that he was “like Bendix,” opening up several troubling possibilities. I felt like my brain was running in six different directions at once.
Katrina and Brom had always told me my parents died of fever. If that wasn’t true, if Bendix had been killed like Cristoffel, then what about my mother? Had she actually died of a fever? And did anyone else know about what really happened to my father, or was it a secret that only Katrina and Brom knew?
Bendix had died more than a decade before. Did that mean that the Headless Horseman had taken his head and hands, and Cristoffel’s, too? Or did it mean that there was a killer hiding among the people of the Hollow, a killer who greeted his neighbors and traded vegetables with them and sat shoulder to shoulder with them in the tavern?
I walked and thought, not really paying attention to my surroundings. I was nearly upon the sheep paddock when I noticed that the sheep were crowded close to the fence, huddled together. When I approached they didn’t move away, or bleat. They were in a great trembling mass, pressed together.
Is there a wolf nearby, or a fox? The sun was setting—more time had passed since I’d come home than I’d realized—and the glare made it difficult to see. I thought there was a silhouette at the far end of the field, though, close to the ground and near the scattering of trees that separated the Van Brunt land from the next farm.
I squinted in that direction, uncertain whether I actually saw an animal there or if there was just a glare.
The dark silhouette seemed to unfold—no, unfurl, sinuous and soft—and I thought how can an animal stand like a man?
My breath seized inside my lungs because just for an instant I thought I saw eyes looking back at me, eyes that could not be there because no human was there, no human could possibly have eyes like that—eyes that glowed, eyes that pulled, eyes that seemed to be tugging on my soul, drawing it out through my mouth.
I turned away, gasping and choking, and the apple fell from frozen fingers. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and whispered over and over, “There’s nothing there. It’s just your imagination. There’s nothing there. It’s just your imagination.”
After a few minutes the cold fear was washed away by embarrassment. What if someone had seen me acting like that? What if Brom had caught me behaving like a silly little child imagining the boogeyman?
I straightened up and forced myself to look out into the field again. There was no silhouette.
Of course there’s no silhouette, you stupid little nit.
The sheep bleated and puffed, though none of them moved away from the fence. Something still had them spooked.
The sun dipped behind the trees, so the glare was gone but the shadows were longer. I climbed up on the fence and stared hard at the place where I thought I’d seen the shape of a person.
There was something on the ground there, something white.
One of the sheep died. That’s what set the rest of them off.
I considered running for Brom right away, but then I decided it would be better if I had absolutely correct information to give first. After all, I wasn’t afraid. I was perfectly capable of going into the field myself.
My legs trembled as I swung over the fence. I forgot for a moment that I was wearing a stupid and impractical dress and the hem got caught on a nail and ripped.
I cursed silently. Katrina would make me mend it myself, and I was terrible at sewing no matter how careful I tried to be. She didn’t believe I tried to be careful at it but I did, because if my stitches were sloppy she’d only make me tear them out and start all over again.
The sheep barely moved as I passed by. Even if the animals were disturbed by the dead one in their ranks, it was strange for them to act like that. Sheep are skittish by nature, and our sheep only liked Brom. They should have scattered the moment I stepped onto the field.
I crossed the grass, pretending my heart wasn’t pounding like mad. I was not going to turn around until I knew what had happened out by the copse of trees.
The wind picked up, blowing my torn skirt around my ankles, and bringing with it the dry scent of fallen leaves, mixed with the dying grass (heavily manured by the sheep) and something else. It was the ripe smell of something freshly dead, a smell like blood and waste and sadness.
I was a farm child. I’d seen plenty of dead animals in my time, animals slaughtered for dinner or that died of old age. I wasn’t afraid of dead things, but something in that wind made me pause.
“Stop being a damned baby, Ben,” I said, and forced my legs to move forward.
The dead sheep was very close to the trees, so close that it seemed their shadows covered the animal like a cloak. All I could make out was a white-gray blur in the grass until I was nearly on top of it.
And then I stared, and stared, because I couldn’t possibly be seeing what I thought I was seeing.
The sheep’s head was gone. And so were its hooves.
There was an empty cavity at the neck, a huge and gaping thing, and I could see right inside at all the pink and red slippery bits pressed together.
But the strangest thing by far was that there was hardly any blood.
There was some, of course, bits of it splashed here and there. But nothing like the amount I’d have expected to see. There should have been a pool of blood, blood that would have gushed from the neck the moment the head was removed.
And really, I thought, but my thoughts seemed like a faraway voice coming from someone else, it’s the same as Cristoffel. There was blood splashed here and there on the track near him, but the blood wasn’t anywhere near the amount it ought to be, not if his head and his hands were taken.
I couldn’t stop staring at the beheaded sheep. It was absurd, really, something funny. Why take a sheep’s hooves, never mind its head? I told myself it was a comedy but I didn’t feel like laughing.
This had to be some prank, or maybe a warning. I remembered the way Diederick Smit had argued with Brom in the woods, and also that it had been his son who’d found Cristoffel in the first place.
What does it mean?
I dragged my eyes from the sheep’s body to the copse of trees nearby. Was the person who’d done this still hiding there, watching and waiting to see what effect their actions had on us? Was Diederick Smit or his little brat of a son (he was a brat, really, a sniveling whining boy who’d run to an adult to tell if you tapped his shoulder and he didn’t like it, but would be happy to bully anyone he thought wouldn’t fight back) lurking out there?
I felt suddenly furious, and stalked closer to the trees. “Hey! Diederick Smit!” I shouted. “You won’t get away with this, you hear? You can’t frighten a Van Brunt!”
There was no response from the woods, no rustle of a person shifting uncomfortably, no responding call. But there was someone watching. I was certain of it. I felt the press of their gaze, of their interest, their . . .
Hunger?
The feeling was so strong, so absolute. There was something out there, and it was watching me, and it was hungry.
Then I heard a word drift to me, barely a whisper.
“Ben.”
I ran.