I visited the Jansen house as early as decently possible, having asked Nancy to watch Anneke while Brom slept off the drink. Mevrouw Jansen answered my knock. “Katrina! So early,” she said, surprised. “Is everything all right? Are you and baby Anneke well?”
“Yes, we are well, although there is a … matter I need to consult with Charlotte about,” I said. “I am sorry to call so early, it’s just that…”
Mevrouw Jansen wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “I understand completely,” she said ushering my inside, Again I wondered how much she knew about my life, and Charlotte’s, and the things we sought to learn together. “Charlotte is in back with a patient right now, but I will send her out as soon as she is through.”
“Oh, I … I don’t mean to impose. I can go home until she is done.”
“Nonsense. Wait here, and I’ll bring you a cup of tea. It is easier for you and Charlotte to speak here, I am sure.”
I was nearly faint with gratitude as I sat on the daybed. “Is there anything I can help you with, while I’m here?” I asked as she brought me a cup of steaming tea—no doubt the kettle had been hot.
“You can mind the kitchen fire, if you like. I’m going out into the garden to pick some herbs and need the fire to stay hot. I’ve some concoctions to brew.”
I did as she said, adding a small log to the fire and turning the wood over with the iron poker to keep the blaze high. I kept my eyes averted from the flames, though, afraid of some terrifying vision that I could not explain finding me once more. Still, it was hot work in the summer, even in the relative cool of the morning. By the time Mevrouw Jansen returned, beads of sweat were dripping down my face.
She smiled upon seeing me. “Why, now you’ll need to bathe when you return home!” she said. “I’m sorry. It is a rather sweaty task, but necessary, I’m afraid. Go sit, and I’ll send Charlotte out to you.”
A few minutes later, Charlotte appeared. “Katrina! What is it? Has something happened?”
“Well … it … yes,” I said. “But … how is your patient?”
“Oh.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “Well enough. A farmhand. He is resting for a time, before I send him home. He was hit in the head with a shovel and got quite a gash. I fixed him up, but he is still a bit incoherent.” She sat on the daybed with me. “What has happened, Katrina?”
Everything poured out of me, starting with my vision in the candle flame and ending with the lit pumpkin in the woods. I spoke rapidly, trying to get the words out as quickly as I could so that I did not need to live alone with them for any longer. That Charlotte could hear them, and help me.
She listened in silence until I had finished. “Dear God,” she murmured. “Someone is trying to tell you something, it seems.”
“Or … or means me harm,” I suggested.
“Well, the pumpkin … I do not know what to make of that,” she said. “But the vision and the dream … those mean something, Katrina. You know that, don’t you? They must.”
“Or it is just my overwrought mind,” I said. I let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “Perhaps I imagined the pumpkin and light altogether, anxious as I was.” It was a possibility I had considered many times, simply because nothing else made sense.
But I had seen it. I knew I had. It had been there.
Charlotte shook her head. “Believe me, I understand the urge to want such visions to be meaningless fits of fancy. It would make everything so much easier. But you cannot explain them away as such. I of anyone would know. And it may well be they hold the answers that you seek.”
“But I … I cannot make sense of them,” I protested. “They are flashes and shadows and a few frightening images, but no new information. Nothing has been revealed. And what proof do I have that there is any truth to them at all? That they are not simply coming from my own mind?”
“Such visions do not come out of nowhere, not even our own minds, not unless you are ill and hallucinating,” she said. “It could be that you do not yet realize what it is that you are seeing. I can help you, Katrina. I can help you interpret them.”
I met her eyes. “I … suppose that is why I am here. And perhaps…” I swallowed down the lump of fear in my throat and lowered my voice. “Perhaps you could consult the cards again? To see if there is anything further we might learn?”
Charlotte glanced at the closed door to the stillroom, where her mother was. “Yes,” she said quietly. “But not tonight. Come back tomorrow night; I believe my mother will be out checking on one of our regular patients.”
“Very well.” I paused. “But … the pumpkin.”
“Yes.” Charlotte frowned, a trace of fear in her eyes. “Maybe it was someone playing a prank of some kind? It sounds like something Brom and his gang would get up to, honestly.”
I frowned. I had not considered this, and it was plausible, at the very least. “Brom was in bed beside me when I awoke from my nightmare,” I said. “But it could have been one of his friends, I suppose. But, Charlotte, pumpkins are not even in season. It is far too early. Where would they have gotten it?”
“Perhaps that part you imagined, then, just coming out of a nightmare as you were,” she suggested.
Perhaps.
* * *
I returned home and tried as best I could to go about my day. Brom finally awoke and dragged himself onto his horse to ride to his father’s house to help him with checking on the crops.
Late that night, when Brom and Anneke were long since fast asleep, I tried to read in the parlor, afraid to close my eyes for fear of the nightmares I might have, and of the mischief that might be wreaked as I slept. Nox rested his head on my feet, as if sensing my disquiet.
As I listlessly turned the pages of my book, Nancy came quietly into the room. Nox thumped his tail against the floor at the sight of her, his favorite giver of scraps. “Miss Katrina,” she said. “Can’t you sleep?”
I smiled wearily up at her. “No, Nancy, I am afraid I cannot. And you?”
“Sleep comes harder at my age,” she confessed, and lowered herself into the chair beside mine. She was quiet a moment longer, then spoke again. “You remember when you were in labor, and you wanted to know the story of my daughter?”
I nodded, sitting up a bit straighter. “Yes. I’d still like to hear it, if you’re willing to tell it.”
She smiled sadly. “I would. I think I must, in truth. I’ve never told the full tale to anyone, and it gets heavier the longer I carry it.”
“Then please,” I said, “tell me.”
After a deep breath, she began. “As you know, I was born into slavery on a tobacco plantation in Virginia,” she said. “Nothing special about that; most black folks in this country are. My mother was a lot like Mistress Jansen; she knew about herbs and midwifery and helped deliver the mistress’s babies. She also helped the people in the big house when they were sick, as well as the slaves. When there was no one needed tending to, she helped in the kitchen. I grew up learning many of her skills.
“Anyway, when I turned eighteen, I caught the eye of a man, a fellow slave, name of John. He caught my eye, too, and much as my mama tried to keep a weather eye on me, he and I managed to sneak around together.” She gave me a pointed smile. “As young girls will do.”
I blushed slightly.
“Soon I was pregnant, and John and I married. The master was delighted—he encouraged us all to marry and make babies. The more babies, the more slaves, and profit for him, of course.”
I blanched at this cold view of marriage and children, though I knew that was the reality among slaveholders. Still, knowing it and hearing it from someone who had lived it was another matter entirely.
“And my daughter was born. She was the most beautiful little girl. I named her Sarah, after my mother. And I nursed her and took care of her in between my work. When I was needed to assist my mother working in the kitchen, I left her with the women who were too old to work. No matter how exhausted I was at the end of each day, Sarah always made me smile.
“When Sarah was just three, the master’s sister and brother-in-law came down from New York City for a visit. They were in the market for a new cook, they said, and hadn’t found one trained up enough in the slave markets of New York. Would he know of anyone? The master had several slaves working in his kitchen, so he decided he could part with me.”
Her eyes grew wet with tears. “So he sold me to his sister and her husband. But not Sarah. And not John.”
“Oh, Nancy,” I breathed, a hitch in my voice.
“I begged him to let Sarah come with me, but he refused. She was his property, and she’d grow up to replace me in the kitchens, he said. He could find John another woman easy enough. And I hadn’t conceived since Sarah was born, so I wasn’t as valuable to him anymore.” She nearly spat the words. “I then begged my new master and mistress to buy Sarah as well, but they had no use for a child in their small household and did not wish to spend the money, especially as my old master was of no mind to let her go.” She shook her head. “So they brought me north, and my baby girl stayed in Virginia.”
“Oh, Nancy,” I said again, taking her hand. “I … I don’t know what to say.”
She smiled at me, but there was something hard in her eyes. “Don’t know as there’s anything you can say, Katrina. You live in a world where no one will ever take your baby girl from you. And that’s the way it should be for us all, but reality ain’t about ‘should be.’”
She continued. “I missed John and especially Sarah every day. In New York, my new master and mistress would hire me out to other households in New York if they needed a cook for a big fancy event, and they let me keep some of the fee they got. It took me many years, but I eventually bought my freedom from them. They gave me my papers, and I was free.
“I had little money left after that and set about looking for work. As soon as I had some money, I wanted to find my daughter. Luckily, I met your mother and father, and your mother took a liking to me. They offered me a position for a fair wage if I was willing to move with them to their farm on the Hudson. Well, I wasn’t likely to find a better offer, so I accepted.
“Not long after I started working for them, I asked your father if there was any way he might find Sarah for me. I told him her name and the name of the plantation I’d been sold from in Virginia, and the name of the master there, and he obliged me and wrote a letter. The master’s son wrote back to say there were no slaves on the plantation named Sarah. It was clear that my daughter had been sold off, or was dead. And that was all we could do. I had nothing but her name, and it was a common enough one. To this day, I don’t know what happened to her, whether she’s alive or dead. Or if, maybe, she managed to get free.”
Tears were spilling down Nancy’s face. “There was nothing else I could do. And then you were born and I looked after you and loved you. I mean that, Katrina. But there was never an hour of the day when I didn’t remember you’re not my own, that my daughter is out there someplace only God knows where.”
I leaned over to embrace Nancy, my own tear-stained face resting against hers. We stayed like that for some time, my heart aching that there was nothing I could do, and that I, as heiress to a fortune whose daughter slept peacefully upstairs, could never truly understand. I could only listen, and let Nancy know that I had heard her.
“Well, now,” Nancy said, leaning back and wiping her eyes. “You wanted to know the story, and there it is. Not a happy one. But I do feel a bit better for the telling.”
“I’m glad I could do that much,” I said. “That I could listen.”
She smiled. “And now I think maybe you ought to tell me a story,” she said. “About your own baby.”
There were so many more questions I wanted to ask her, but it was clear she had told me everything she wanted to say. I would not press and ask for more. “Yes,” I said. I bit my lip. “I have been wanting to tell you the truth for some time. No doubt you already suspect, but…” I quickly glanced at the doorway to make sure Brom was not about to appear, before dropping my voice to a whisper. “Anneke is not Brom’s child. She is Ichabod Crane’s.”
Nancy nodded. “I figured as much.”
“But Ichabod disappeared—whether of his own will or not, I do not know—and I married Brom, so everyone would believe Anneke was his. It is not what I would have preferred, obviously, but it was the best choice for her.”
“I admit, I had put together that much, more or less,” Nancy said. “I had a suspicion you were sneaking out to see the schoolteacher, even at night, but I didn’t tell your parents. You’re a smart girl; I figured you knew what you were doing. And he seemed like the type to make an honest woman of you.”
Tears pricked my eyes again. “He tried. He asked my father for my hand; he knew I was with child. But my father refused, and that very night Ichabod simply … vanished.” I looked up at her. “I do not know if he abandoned me, or if … something befell him. But I mean to find out, however I can.”
“It may be that you are better off not knowing.”
Her words had given life to one of my worst fears. “Whatever the truth is, it must be better than this.”
“You be careful, Katrina,” Nancy said. “I don’t doubt Charlotte Jansen is helping you, and I don’t doubt that she has ways of knowing things most mortals do not. But there are some powers in this world that are not to be toyed with. There were any number of wise women and what all in New York I could have consulted to try to find my Sarah—and Lord knows I thought about it. But that was a line I never crossed. One cannot cross it without paying a terrible price.”
“Come, Nancy, surely that is only old superstition,” I said, trying to push my unease aside.
“Maybe so. I can only hope that Charlotte Jansen knows where that line is better than anyone.” She looked pointedly at me. “I assume she knows the truth about little Anneke?”
“Yes. You are the only one aside from her who knows.”
Nancy rose from her chair. “And never you fear, I’ll keep it that way.” She bent down and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you for trusting me with your secret.”
“And thank you for trusting me with your story.”
She left the room, and I could only hope she might find it easier to sleep now.