This was their erstwhile escort to Harenwyck. Their bearskin helmets were stacked on benches against the wall, and they were drinking and dicing and playing at cards. The aroma of hot meat braised in wine with onions filled the air. While Anna and Mr. Ten Broeck had traveled into danger, the green dragoons had been dining on fresh crusty bread and stewed rabbit at the King’s Arms. There were, as she had expected, no women present, save the landlord’s wife and daughter, busy serving tables, and an old woman sitting beside the cage bar, reflexively holding out her cup for a refill anytime one of the family members came by. Anna remembered her. Like the other fixtures—creaky rush-seat chairs, plank tables, tarnished tavern lamps—Mevrouw Zabriskie had changed little. Perhaps her straw yellow hair was whiter, but the old woman who lived in the woods and told fortunes for beer at the Halve Maen looked much as she had more than a decade ago. She wore her pale mane long and loose down her back like a young girl, and dressed in brightly colored castoffs, tonight a striped pink silk jacket and lampas petticoat in clashing ochre with a pair of riotous bargello shoes.
