Work Text:
"Something has to be done about Crane," Brom said that autumn, a week or so after most of the harvest was brought in.
There were murmurs of agreement from the other young men, some sycophantic, some resigned, some eager. Brom couldn't have told one from the other but, as the leader of the young men of Sleepy Hollow, he'd never had to. He was supremely ignorant of most human emotion, and dominated the other boys so completely that he had no use for nuance.
The table, pitted by knives and pipe embers and stained with beer, was the largest in the only tavern in Sleepy Hollow. Generally the farmers of the little glen simply drank on each others' porches, but this meeting called for secrecy. The tavern, on the high road from the hollow to Tarrytown, served mostly travelers. Brom was confident they wouldn't be overheard by anyone who might scotch their plans.
"What'd you have in mind, Brom?" one of his comrades asked. It was a good question, one Brom had considered before calling this meeting. He'd come to no solid conclusion, and so was seeking thoughts on the matter of Ichabod Crane.
Crane had the good opinion of several of the elder farmers, including Brom's father and the fathers of other Sleepy Hollow Boys. It had been hard enough to lure a schoolmaster in, with low pay and not much society to be had. Crane had the best qualifications of any of the sparse applicants, and had come cheap.
They knew why, now.
But Crane had also deftly avoided direct confrontation with Brom, ignoring his pranks and teasings. A frontal assault wasn't possible, and subtlety (at least by Brom's standards) hadn't worked. If he could have driven the schoolmaster out of Sleepy Hollow on his own, he would have already. Crane was intelligent, charming, and popular; the only weakness Brom could see was a penchant for fairy tales and the odd superstition, and he saw no way at present to use those to his advantage.
"I have an idea," offered one of the younger men -- still in Crane's school, in fact, and smarting from a public chastisement he'd had the previous day.
Nearby, the only other occupant of the tavern, a traveler in a long dark cloak, listened in idle amusement as the Sleepy Hollow Boys began to plan.
Ichabod Crane had arrived in Sleepy Hollow the previous spring in clothes of an unimpeachable Pilgrim simplicity: black breeches and green hose, hard-wearing black shoes, a battered olive morning coat over a plain linen shirt, and no wig, merely a tricorn Quaker hat over sleek brown hair in a neat queue tied with a velvet bow. From a distance, or in the dim light of dusk, Crane was unimpeachable. It wasn't until one drew close and saw the heart-shaped face and delicate mouth, or heard the feminine timber to her husky, low voice, that one realized what Crane was.
She came from Connecticut, where they must have strange ideas of women. When the village clerk, not having met her except by correspondence, still believed her to be a man, he had sent instructions that she should turn off the road to Tarrytown at the sign for Sleepy Hollow, go five miles in, and find the distinctive yellow roof of the house of Beverwijk, a respectable farmer with a wife and three sons.
Presenting herself on Beverwijk's doorstep as Ichabod Crane, she was bustled inside, as night was falling and there was a chill in the air. It wasn't until she was settled at the kitchen table with a meal of meat pie and ale that it occurred to the good Beverwijk she was either an impostor or a madwoman.
"I could have been felled with a feather, I swear," he would tell people later, though he never gave particulars of the meeting. "All I thought was that I'd best send the boys out to sleep in the barn!"
There were generally hearty laughs over this, especially if Crane was around to hear him retell it, smiling her broad, shameless smile into her ale, luminous green eyes revealing nothing.
The Sleepy Hollow schoolmaster, as part of an otherwise very low salary, billeted each week with a different family from the farms around the schoolhouse, carrying her worldly goods with her in a carpet bag, a riding crop thrust through the handles. This posed an obvious issue to the farmers of Sleepy Hollow, though Crane herself seemed not to see the problem. There were very few farms where the patriarch hadn't offered to send his sons out of the house; all of them had been given a brusque, cheerful reply that she was sure the men were bred better than that in Sleepy Hollow, and any who weren't could see if they fancied a beating with a crop. It was such a sensible answer that it appealed to the stolid Dutch farmers, who prized sense above decency and a cheap schoolmaster even above that.
This was what had frustrated Brom so much about Ichabod Crane: that everyone liked her, even though she was an affront to both her own gender and the dignity of men.
It maddened him to be forced to call her Crane, since she claimed Ichabod as her Christian name, would reveal no feminine name, and insisted on "Master Crane" from the students and simply "Crane" from anyone else. It appalled him that nobody (including him) could offer strong argument as to why she should be Miss or, at least, Mistress. She herself pointed out that she had been hired as schoolmaster, and insisted upon the term.
It galled him that he could see her knees in her breeches, or at least the outline of them, and the circuit preacher refused to condemn or shame her for it, since she had engaged him in the only interesting spiritual debate he'd had in several years and he was fond of her. It depressed Brom that despite his broad build and good stature she always seemed to wear a morning coat better than he did, and that on a Sunday the girls who had formerly trailed him at a distance, whispering and giggling over him, now flocked fearlessly around Crane like delighted geese.
It was the sense that she was not only besting him at manhood, but that she was getting away with it. The only thing he could come up with that he did better than her was riding, and then only because he was big enough to control a half-broken horse better than she.
But all of this he could have tolerated, and had. All spring and summer he'd taunted her, tripped her at dances, trained his dog to howl when she gave singing lessons, refused to acknowledge her during the agonizing week she was billeted on their farm, and committed a thousand other little satisfying sins to remind her of her low stature and essential femininity. That had been enough for him for a while, and if she ignored him then he at least saw a brief flash of anger and resignation when he entered a room she happened to be in.
What drove him to desperation was the dawning realization that she had begun paying attention unevenly to the women who sought her company -- that she had cut one goose from the flock for particular favors. And, Brom greatly suspected, the eventual metaphorical axe.
Katrina Van Tassel, daughter of the prosperous Balt Van Tassel, was a very pretty eighteen: pleasantly plump, blue-eyed and golden-skinned, with a cheerful mouth and snub Dutch nose. She wore the finest dresses in the Hollow and her petticoats slightly shorter than was proper. Her pale gold hair was always plaited around her head, though rumor said it reached her thighs when unbound. Brom didn't like other men remarking on that, so it was a quiet rumor.
And attached to Katrina's gentle smile, aristocratic bearing, and delicate laugh were also generous acres of wheat and rye, buckwheat and corn, fruit orchards, flocks of chickens and geese, wild partridges for shooting, and the ham and bacon and sausages of numerous pigs. The man who married Katrina Van Tassel would inherit the wealth of her father's farm, and Brom had intended it to be him. Not without reason -- he had not believed Katrina indifferent.
Now, however, when he rode up to her father's ample estate, often as not she had already gone walking in the orchard to show Crane how the fruit was coming on. Other times, he would enter the parlor to find Katrina embroidering a church altar-cloth while Crane read to her from a book of love poetry. Even when Crane was not at her side, it seemed as though the schoolmaster's spirit hung about her, and a certain coldness no woman had ever turned on Brom in his life infused Katrina's conversations with him. If Crane had been a man, he would have been a rival. As a woman, all Brom could think was that she was a poison.
Crane was twenty-two and earned a wage, making her a practical spinster. What man would marry a woman in breeches, in any case? And now, Brom had an idea that she intended Katrina for spinsterhood as well, for unfathomable reasons of her own. Or perhaps she was acting as an agent, steering Katrina to some other man of the Hollow, or some magistrate or merchant in Tarrytown, and he would not be bested by an anonymous old lecher who was bribing the schoolmaster of Sleepy Hollow into pressing his suit to the lovely Katrina.
It could not be borne. And so, once the harvest was in, Brom began to speculate and wonder, and to rally his troops for some form of war.
Ichabod Crane, as she styled herself (and who better to do so), was not unaware of Brom's antics, or of his increasing suspicion that her friendship with Katrina was not good for his own prospects with the young woman. She knew, however, that in his wildest dreams and darkest fantasies he would not have happened upon the truth, so for now she let him stew.
Katrina was unaware of Brom's suspicions, blithely so. She wasn't stupid, Ichabod's pretty Dutch heiress, but she had lived a life untroubled by serious care. Sweetly, rather than becoming a spoiled, self-obsessed creature, she simply thought the best of everyone. Ichabod, who had opened Katrina's eyes to many mysteries by now, had left this one alone so far. Telling her Brom was a bully wouldn't help, and might put Ichabod in a worse position than before.
It was late autumn, with most of the crops in, and tomorrow Balt Van Tassel would oversee the beginning of the apple harvest. Ichabod had promised to come harvest with the men. Already she had helped the farmers she boarded with repair fences and drive the cows in for milking. She liked to offer to help with little chores that might earn her extra goodwill, and she'd take all she could get in terms of goodwill from the Van Tassels. Katrina's mother didn't like her, and Balt Van Tassel was a self-obsessed creature, except when it came to his roving eye. He wouldn't care about his daughter's feelings if he felt he had to banish her friend the schoolmaster, so it was important that he didn't dislike her.
At any rate Ichabod had a surplus of goodwill from others, and a little surplus of coin saved up as well, which gave her some options. So this afternoon, in the golden sidelong light, she and Katrina had gone to walk among the trees before they were stripped of their fruit on the morrow.
Now they were lying beneath one of the biggest apple trees, Ichabod propped on one elbow and eating a windfall apple, both of their clothing rumpled and a little damp from the ground. Ichabod had given Katrina her tricorn hat, since the fine silk bonnet did little against the cold, and now Katrina lay next to her wrapped in a shawl, the hat tipped over her face, giggling.
"Why do you laugh so?" Ichabod asked fondly.
"Oh, I don't know," Katrina said, lifting the hat and resting it over her heart. "That apple might well be the one the snake gave Eve."
"I never thought that was such an awful thing, to be honest," Ichabod remarked, and Katrina looked scandalized. "We shouldn't be here if nobody ate the apple. I couldn't abide living witlessly in a garden for all eternity and I don't think Eve cared for it either. And I don't say my prayers before bed," she added wickedly, and Katrina let out a startled laugh. "But what do you mean, my own?"
"I hardly have the words to explain," Katrina said, sitting up. Ichabod admired the flyaway hairs at the base of her neck, the upward curve of the braids crowning her head. "But Sleepy Hollow is a bit like a garden, isn't it? And so many of us do live witlessly."
"Not as much as some I've met, but it is a quiet place," Ichabod allowed.
"I don't know that I would be satisfied with a quiet place any longer. I like the farm, I suppose, but I don't want to be a farmer's wife."
"Even a wife like your own mother? Commanding a household staff, and no work to do herself but what pleases her?"
"Unless what would please her was a man's job," Katrina said darkly. "Or something her husband disliked. And to put up with a husband's...behavior....I would prefer -- no, I won't say," she finished abruptly.
Ichabod sat up, pitching the core of the apple off into the long shadows the orchard cast. She rested her chin on Katrina's shoulder, then kissed her jaw.
"What would you really prefer? I wouldn't deny you anything," she told her.
"Why, this, of course. Your company. The company of women."
"Even such a strange woman as I?"
"Particularly such a strange woman as you. I love your strangeness. I covet it. Imagine a harvest dance where all the pretty young farmer's daughters wore their very best, and only women in dashing waistcoats and breeches and nice hose were there to pay them compliments."
Ichabod thought of the back room of a certain tavern in Connecticut, and of the wealth of them that were purportedly available in New York.
"Imagine," she agreed.
"But I suppose it isn't to be. You'll move on to somewhere more interesting, and I shall stay here and marry Brom. Or someone richer if I can catch him. I don't imagine it matters much."
Ichabod tipped her chin around to kiss her on the mouth, and Katrina twined an arm around her waist, giving her leverage enough to pull Katrina onto her lap.
"I wouldn't deny you anything," Ichabod repeated.
"Not more of the fine poetry you read me?"
"Absolutely not."
"Not nice compliments on my dress or my sewing?"
"I would give them daily, as I do now."
"Not a joke to make me laugh when I'm sad?" Katrina asked, eyes sparkling.
"I should stay up nights composing jests just for yourself."
"Oh, no, you must keep me warm at nights."
"I'll bring a candle," Ichabod promised, "and write in bed, and get ink all over the quilts."
"You wouldn't deny me a penny for a baker's cake?"
"Indeed, not even my last."
"Or your hand in marriage?" Katrina asked, then caught her breath, as if she knew she had gone too far. Ichabod only shook her head.
"I would bribe a priest to marry us and a clerk to enter our names into the village registry," she declared.
"We never could," Katrina whispered.
"Do you know why I believe in ghosts?" Ichabod asked. "Why I throw salt over my shoulder when I spill it and always touch the horseshoe over your father's door?"
Katrina shook her head.
"Because if you believe in a world of spirits and angels, anything is possible," Ichabod said. "If I am indeed the serpent, then I'm wily enough to fool God Himself; give me time and I will lead you out of this wretched false garden, if you want it, my love."
Katrina nodded, resting her forehead against Ichabod's. Shortly they rose to walk back to the house, as the shadows grew longer and longer and the apples awaited the following day's harvest.
The apple harvest heralded the beginning of winter, and as such required many merry parties. Ichabod attended most of them, but everyone noted a certain abstractness to her character in those days, as though her thoughts were always slightly outside of wherever she actually was. She didn't discourage it; let Brom think she was distracted or even that she had fallen out with Katrina. Ichabod made sure to dance with many young women each time the music struck up, not just Katrina, and to charm and compliment the older women on their baking. Certainly everyone dined well on cake, that season.
The climax of all was to be Balt Van Tassel's Quilting Frolic, which would last all afternoon and well into the evening, with the best of everything: musicians brought in from Tarrytown, the finest smoked meats and sausages from the slaughter, the best cakes with the purest flour, the biggest roast, the fattest goose.
Ichabod gave the children a half-holiday from school the day before the Frolic, so that she herself could leave the schoolhouse early. Weighted down with little treats sent by the mothers of her students and with her carpet-bag in hand, she mounted an old borrowed dray by the name of Gunpowder and rode out to the Van Tassel farm, arriving to a warm welcome from the housekeeper. She had the usual chilly shoulder from the mistress of the house; Mrs. Van Tassel was of Brom's mind about the preacher's duty to shame a woman who wore breeches.
"Why, bless you, dear," the housekeeper said, when Mrs. Van Tassel had swept out of the room. The housekeeper surveyed the sweets and little pastries Ichabod presented to her. "We'll have a right feast of these tonight and no mistake."
"I thought you might be worn out with preparing for the Frolic," Ichabod said earnestly.
"Worn out! Even Lotte is run off her feet, and very glad you volunteered to take a burden off her," the housekeeper said, as the girl who normally helped Katrina with her toilette ran past with her arms full of decorations for the great hall.
"Happy to lend my hand, of course," Ichabod said with her best charming smile. "Where might I find Miss Van Tassel?"
"She's in her bedroom, likely. There'll be no supper tonight, but we'll have cold meat and bread and good cheese in the kitchen, and all these lovely things you've brought; you young misses come and help yourself at any time."
Ichabod nodded and hurried away down the hallway towards Katrina's bedroom, rapping lightly at the door. "It's Crane," she called.
"Come in!" Katrina's voice drifted out, and Ichabod pushed the door open.
"Well met! I've just brought your housekeeper some sweets and she says -- " she began, and then fell silent.
Katrina had invited her, with Balt Van Tassel's absentminded permission, to attend her the night before the Frolic, primarily to help wash and re-plait her hair, since Lotte would be needed elsewhere. Ichabod had spent innumerable hours considering Katrina's hair, and even imagined what it might look like unbound, but the reality struck her dumb.
Katrina sat on a linen-covered stool at her toilette, wearing only her white undershift with its simple trim of embroidered gray doves. Her hair, unbraided and brushed, fell over her shoulders, around her face, and down across her arms and breasts, pooling like silk on her white-clad thighs. It was like a halo or a field of wheat, like the dunes of a beach at sunset.
Ichabod knew she was staring, but she could have stared forever, damn the Van Tassel farm and Brom and Sleepy Hollow itself. Katrina set her brush down, looking worried.
"I always think it's very untidy, all down like this," she said, picking at the ends of the long gold strands, undoing one last tangle. "Braids are so much prettier."
"There is nothing prettier than this," Ichabod managed. Katrina blushed. "No one must ever see this but me."
"Well, I wouldn't object, but..." Katrina spread a hand haplessly. "Brom intends to propose, Ichabod. The day after tomorrow, after church. His father told my father."
Ichabod drifted closer, looking to Katrina for permission before touching her hair, close to the scalp, sifting the weight of it in her fingers.
"You wanted help to wash it," she said.
"There's a bath in the other room, with water heating on the fire. I asked Father and he said you could sleep here tonight if you pleased, so you wouldn't be required to ride home in the dark, and could help me put it back up in braids tomorrow morning."
"Very considerate," Ichabod said. "Come into the other room, and I promise all will be well."
It took a great deal of time to wash Katrina's hair, to wring all the water possible out of it and spread it at just the right distance from the fire to dry the rest of the way, while Ichabod fetched cold supper from the kitchen and read to her from a novel that was all the rage overseas, by a woman Ichabod rather approved of named Wollstonecraft.
That night the still faintly-damp hair was wrapped in layers of cloth and coiled on Katrina's head; in the morning, they braided it together, Ichabod somewhat more clumsily but at least well enough that her work did Katrina no shame. By the time she had fixed the last of the long bent hair pins into Katrina's hair and helped her into new finery special-bought for the occasion, Sleepy Hollow had begun to descend on the Van Tassel farm for quilting and dancing from mid-morning to evening, and other revelry thereafter.
Ichabod settled herself amongst the quilters and complimented their work, their daughters, and their cooking, leaving them all very satisfied with the young schoolmaster.
Brom put his plan into motion the evening of the Frolic, when most people were tired of dancing and prepared for other, more sedentary entertainments. Even he knew that inviting Crane to come and sit with them would earn him nothing but suspicion, so instead he waited until she had taken up a position on a bench near the fire, and slowly drifted over with a crowd of others likewise prepared to pass a friendly hour or two in talk.
At this time of year the conversation very naturally turned to ghosts, the proliferation of them in the region and the few specific to Sleepy Hollow. Brom let the elders speak first, recounting old murder and misadventure from before the Revolution, which few liked to discuss. They preferred either the far past or the now; the birth pangs of a nation, seven years ago, had been deep and bloody in the area around the Hollow. Brom had been eleven when the treaty was signed. The blood in the fields hadn't bothered him, so long as he pretended to himself it was just pigs and sheep that had been slaughtered there. So long as you ignored the odd bone.
But old woman Van Cleef eventually doddered through the story of the ghostly cow that had turned out to be simply a white ass that had got loose from a neighboring county's farm, and she ended it with, "That was the winter of '77, when the fighting was very bad."
"And of course there are ghosts from the war," Brom said, carefully not looking at Crane.
"Ah, who wants to talk about the war?" one of the old men asked, and Brom wanted to murder him.
"Just the one, old uncle," he protested. "Can't let a good tale-telling go by without telling the story of the Headless Horseman."
"He was a Hessian!" another old man snapped, and Brom almost grinned. "Don't forget to say that! He was a filthy paid mercenary Hessian and deserved what he got! If I ever saw him on the road at night I'd give him a kick so hard he might actually find his head!"
"A headless Hessian?" Crane asked, eyes going wide.
Brom settled in to spin his tale, not just of the Hessian's death, dismemberment, and subsequent walking of the earth in spirit form in search of his head, but an embroidered account of the time he himself had met the horseman. He'd told it many times before, but he made sure to describe him in detail, and add in the horrible stench of the battlefield when he told the story of the bet they'd made.
"If he won he wanted my head, which I suppose makes sense," Brom announced.
"And what did you bet him?" old woman Van Cleef prompted, enjoying herself thoroughly though she'd heard the story many times before.
"A bowl of good punch," Brom announced.
"Your head against a bowl of punch?" Katrina asked, voice as sweet as ever.
"I suppose you won," Crane added gravely. "Your head's still on your shoulders. How was the punch?"
"Never got it," Brom said. Crane was hanging on his words just like Katrina, fascinated, and he preened. "When it was obvious I'd beat him to the bridge, he bolted in a flash of fire. It's the running water, you see. He can't pass it."
"If you even approach the bridge he may vanish; if you cross it, it's sure he can't follow," one of the old men cackled.
"Though that signifies little; once he has the knowledge of you, he might well come again," Brom added.
Crane looked thoughtful and fearful, and Brom clasped his hands between his knees to contain his excitement.
The following day would be the Sabbath and it was a matter of some political importance that the schoolmaster always be seen escorting the family she lodged with to church; to fail to be seen with the family Van Ripper, this week, might be considered a snub. This was Ichabod's reasoning, at any rate, for leaving on the old dray Gunpowder after the Frolic, and not simply staying another night with the Van Tassels.
She was to leave in a party with several other people, but lingered behind to bid a last farewell to Katrina and missed their departure. By the time she started out through the gloomy woods for her bed, some miles distant, she was quite alone.
It was not, however, the serene solitude she could have wished for. To any observer, she would seem intent and anxious, green eyes sweeping the woods constantly, jerking her head around to look over her shoulder at any little snap of twigs or rustle of feathers. The night seemed to grow darker and darker as she approached an old tulip-tree, well-known to any inhabitant of Sleepy Hollow and a sort of landmark in itself. Several of the night's ghost stories had either ended or begun at the tulip tree, and it was a favored haunt of the Hessian.
She breathed a soft sigh of relief when she passed the tree without incident, but it seemed to her the sigh was echoed in the wind. She tried whistling a little, and that too seemed to drift back to her from somewhere ominous, out in the forest. She searched vainly for the glimmer of moonlight on water that would indicate the approach of the old church bridge, a point of safety in an increasingly uncertain night.
A shadow to her left seemed to move, but when she turned to look it stilled. Further along another shadow appeared to shift, but perhaps it was just a tree in the wind.
Then there were soft sounds, as of hooves on turf stiffened from a long frost, and Ichabod nearly stood in her stirrups, head twisting this way and that. She could not locate the direction of the sound --
There. There was a rider coming up behind, on the right, and she closed her eyes and whispered a little prayer to herself, steeling her nerves, before turning at just the moment the light broke over the road.
The rider behind her was massive, broadly built and tall, and not easy to see even with the light of a saddle-lantern bouncing at his side. She squinted in the darkness, then turned back before the dim light could show she was interested in her new traveling companion. His horse was moving only a little faster than Gunpowder, but he reached her before another quarter of a mile and then slowed. She tapped her heels to Gunpowder's sides, and the horseman sped up to match her; when she reined him in, the horseman slowed as well.
"Who are you?" she asked, her breath coming in quick short pants, still staring resolutely ahead. No answer. "I demand to know who you are!"
Silence, except for the creak of tack and the dull thud of hooves on the road.
She inhaled, intending to sing a little tune, perhaps a hymn, but suddenly her nerve broke. She turned to regard her companion, and saw with a jolt that he had no head. An empty collar with a cape tied round it sat where his neck and head should be -- and a dark, round shadow lay in the hollow between his thighs and the saddle.
She shrieked. Gunpowder bolted; she must at least have had surprise on her side, since it was a moment before she heard the ghostly hooves behind her leap into a gallop.
Gunpowder, who was old and half-blind and had spent most of his life hauling a plow, proved to have hidden depths. He laid on speed and screamed a high whinny of panic, weaving unevenly down the road and barely contained by her desperate guidance with the reins.
Ichabod risked a glance over one shoulder and saw the Hessian gaining; abruptly she threw her entire weight to the right, pulling Gunpowder's head around and driving him off the road, through a thin swath of underbrush. The road would curve soon enough but it always curved back, and this shortcut would save precious time, especially if the Hessian lost her in the darkness.
No such luck. He wasn't gaining, his horse apparently balking at the roadless path she was making, but he wasn't falling behind either, and she knew he could hear Gunpowder's hooves.
Now came the tricky part. Her whole being was focused on cutting the shortest possible path to the church bridge. Even if he could cross the bridge, there was possible safety at the church. The rectory might hear her if she screamed. If he was intent on more than simply a horse-race...
No time to consider. The road was back in sight now, and she urged Gunpowder on, not that he needed it. Once back on the road, it was a nearly straight shot all the way to the bridge.
She had barely gained the road again when the Horseman appeared from nowhere, from in front of her, his horse rearing up like damnation. Fate or luck, however, had him approaching from the right, Gunpowder's blind side, and the dray shot straight under the Horseman's waving front hooves. Before she thought about it, before she could even weigh the risks of such a thing, she had twisted in her saddle and whipped her arm out with the riding crop, dealing the Hessian a sharp stinging blow, with all her strength, across his chest. She thought she heard a grunt of pain as they sped past.
A quarter of a mile to the bridge now, and the Hessian had not followed; closer and closer, and Ichabod risked one last twist around to see.
There was the red light of the lantern and the looming shadow in the darkness. There was the lump of his pumpkin-head on the horn of his saddle, there was the fire-eyed horse. She swallowed, bent low against Gunpowder's neck, and cropped him to a full bolt.
Gunpowder's hooves echoed on the worn wooden boards of the bridge. She smelled the stream and the sharp rot of frost-dead plants at its edge. They were halfway across, then three-quarters --
She stood in her stirrups and turned. The Hessian, behind her, drew up at the edge of the bridge.
And then, from the other side, from the side of safety and the church, was a crash of glass and the soft fwoom of flame as a lantern was thrown at her.
Ah, thought Crane, through a haze of terror and relief and satisfaction. Yes, this will do nicely.
The Van Rippers were most put out that Crane had not returned from the Frolic to escort them to church. They said as much as they walked down the road to the old church bridge, having waited almost a quarter of an hour after they should have to be sure she wouldn't appear.
"I swore I saw Crane leave the Van Tassels, though," Brom said, cocking his head in wonder when they told him. "Perhaps she threw a shoe and was obliged to stop somewhere."
"She could have borrowed another horse," Van Ripper grumbled.
"I'm sure she'll be along shortly," Brom said, and smiled reassuringly.
"I'll be sworn I saw her as well," one of the Sleepy Hollow Boys added, having just joined them from the lane of his father's house -- his father and mother were already herding the younger boys up ahead. He had on a high collar, and spoke in a hoarse voice; perhaps he had caught a chill going home after the Frolic, although Brom could see a hint of bruising under his jaw. "Last night, riding like the devil was after her."
"Oh?" Brom asked innocently.
"Just so," the boy replied, equally as innocently.
"Are you sure, on the old dray?"
"Who else could it have been with that old white-eyed nag? She looked like she was racing a ghost. I thought maybe there was some wild creature needed shooting but I didn't see anything."
"Mysterious," Brom said, then lifted his head as they approached a large crowd, gathering at the road where it met the stream. "What's going on up there at the bridge?"
Or rather, he saw, where the bridge had been. Half of it was still standing, if teetering rather badly on its props. It ended in charred stumps before it reached their side; on the far side of the river was a similar mass of burnt wood. Beyond was a trampled saddle, and --
Gunpowder, the old dray, could be seen grazing calmly in the church graveyard.
"It was the Hessian!" someone shrieked. "The Hessian burned down the bridge with his hellfire!"
Brom couldn't have bought such a priceless reaction for all his money or the Van Tassels'.
"Isn't that Gunpowder?" he asked, pointing. "Good lord, do you suppose -- "
"Suppose what?" Van Ripper demanded.
"The schoolmaster's gone missing," Brom announced loudly. "Do you suppose the Hessian came for her?"
As one, the farmers of Sleepy Hollow turned to the trodden-down saddle in the dust on the far side of the stream.
"Lord preserve us," several wives murmured.
Brom basked in his triumph, though he was careful to look as worried as the rest, which took some effort. Crane was vanquished, likely dead -- perhaps she'd been thrown into the stream and drowned. He would comfort Katrina, and offer to help her across the stream to church, and after church --
"Make way! Make way I say, I must get to Tarrytown at once!" a voice called from behind them, and the glorious tableau of the disappearance of Ichabod Crane was interrupted by Baltus Van Tassel himself on horseback, galloping towards the bridge. He had to slow when he reached the crowd, and then pulled up sharply when he saw the burnt-out ruin.
"There's Satan abroad in Sleepy Hollow," he said, his voice terrified.
"What is it?" Brom asked.
"Katrina is gone," Van Tassel said. "I'm bound for Tarrytown to summon the militia."
"Gone?" Brom demanded.
"Wasn't in her bed this morning, hadn't been slept in last night! She's been taken by some ruffian and my cash box robbed too! Katrina and all the money. Dollars and gold, not Continentals or bonds!"
Brom blinked at him, bewildered by this. The rest of Sleepy Hollow gathered around until Van Tassel's horse danced sideways uneasily.
"I must get to Tarrytown," Van Tassel said. "I cannot linger. The ruffian who took her can't have gone far. Let me pass, please!"
"The bridge is out," Brom said.
"And the schoolmaster gone too!" Van Ripper added, as though she'd died on purpose to annoy him.
"What do I care for a schoolmaster or a burned down bridge? My money and daughter are missing!" Van Tassel cried, urging his horse through the crowd until they broke and allowed him to trot down the bank of the stream, splashing through it. He made the far bank, the horse rising back to the road easily, and kicked it into a gallop once more.
The men and women of Sleepy Hollow were left standing bereft in front of a burned-down bridge, hapless. Eventually the pastor, seeing not a single congregant in pews for service, emerged into the bright morning light to come down to the water and stare at them from the other side.
Finally, seeing nothing else to be done, he stood on the edge of the road and opened his prayer book, announcing in a loud voice meant to carry, "Let us pray."
Brom did not fathom then what had happened, and he never would -- not when the militia found no trace of Katrina, nor when the new schoolmaster asked about his predecessor, nor when Brom died, decades later, on a farm not quite as prosperous as the Van Tassel farm, which had long since been sold to a neighbor.
On a Sunday morning before dawn, on the far side of the Tappan Zee of the Hudson from Sleepy Hollow, a little boat put up against an empty stretch of beach at Upper Nyack. A man in an olive morning-coat and Quaker tricorn hat splashed ashore, wetting his shoes and hose, and pulled the boat up far enough for a beautiful young woman with wisps of blond hair under a thick scarf to disembark. She was dressed in fine clothes for traveling, and she carried a carpetbag which she handed to the man.
"How long, do you suppose, before your father comes looking?" Ichabod asked, rummaging in the bag for the sack of gold and dollars Katrina had prised out of the cash box.
"He'll wake for church shortly," Katrina replied, looking around her cheerfully. "I suppose he'll see that his money's gone -- he always takes the cash for the offering-plate before he comes down to breakfast."
"We should make haste. There's a coaching inn nearby; I scouted it last week, after I left that tavern where Brom was making his plans to terrorize me out of town," Ichabod replied, pushing the boat back to drift into the current. Katrina giggled as they hurried up the beach.
"Where will we go?"
"At present, wherever the first coach is bound. I should put miles between myself and the Hollow, and you must not be recognized before we leave. Ah, there," Ichabod added, pointing to a mail coach lit with lanterns, preparing to depart. "I say sir! Hold your carriage!"
"Not for more than a breath!" the man replied. "Where are you bound, young sir?"
"That depends," Ichabod replied, flashing a month's worth of pay in her palm. "Where are you?"
"For that, anywhere you please, but first to Manhattoes, as I think you Dutch still call it," the man said, nodding at Katrina's Dutch-fashion dress.
"Manhattan," Ichabod breathed. "Our great luck and yours, sir, New York is where we're bound. Van Grebe at your service," she said, doffing her hat and pressing the gold into his hand. "My wife, Mrs. Van Grebe."
The man touched his forelock respectfully, giving her a little bow, and Ichabod handed Katrina into the coach. In a trice they were away.
"What will we do in New York?" Katrina asked, tucking her arm in Ichabod's and resting her head on her shoulder as the coach rattled southward.
"Lodgings first. I have friends I should find, if I can. It's a great dirty busy place, is New York, so they say," Ichabod replied. "Then to business."
"What will you do?"
"Teach if I can. Perhaps open a shop. Your inheritance will come in handy regardless."
"Oh, a little shop! What will you sell?"
"What would you care for? Pretty dresses for pretty girls?"
"No, I should be jealous. You must open a shop selling men's coats and hats," Katrina said decidedly. "You will be the dandy of New York and set all the fashions."
Ichabod grinned down at her. "Just as you like. At any rate, we're out of the garden and on our way. Bring on New York!" she cried.
From the driver's seat outside, the coachman laughed. Nothing quite like young love setting out on an adventure, to be sure.