That last bit distracted me pretty much for the rest of the day. The man knew how to get into a woman’s head.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Johanna

November 1891, Bussum, Netherlands

If life was a rolling river, friendship was the life raft. Alone, I would have drowned, gone under. But when I’d nearly given up on my country, new friends found me. I stayed in Bussum. I saved the promise of America for when my little son was older.

There had to be more I could do where I was, something I hadn’t thought of yet. And I was going to find it.

“I don’t know how you manage it all, Jo,” Jan Veth, Anna’s husband, said. “But well done.”

“Here, here.” The small group of Dutch intellectuals filling my living room and the attached kitchen raised their glasses—Jan, Anna, Piet, Max, Antoon, Jozef, Frederik, and Seb.

“When I first assumed the running of Villa Helma, I feared I would become a domestic machine.” I cut short a nervous laugh. “I thought I’d never have time to read or think of anything else but household matters again. I don’t think I’ve written more than twice in my diary.”

I stood and checked on the rather ambitious dinner I was preparing. I wanted my guests to like me and accept me as one of their own, despite my tenuous connection to their universe. I had no talent, nothing like they possessed. I felt an interloper in their circle. “But then I had a revelation.”

Seb pulled his pipe out of his mouth. “And what was that?”

“If I am to become a machine, I would become the most efficient machine possible. Household chores are done twice as fast if I think of them as a dance. Remember the dances at school?” I asked Anna, who’d left her new baby daughter, Alida, with the neighbor for the first time, so she could come along with her husband.

“School dances?” A crash upstairs had Anna glancing at the ceiling. Saskia was up there with Wil, playing with the kittens in the hallway. “Heavens, they seem a million years ago. Have we ever been such silly chits? What I do remember is that those dances were a great deal more fun than any housework I’ve ever done. I can’t see how you draw a connection between the two.”

I moved to demonstrate. “Stir the soup. One, two, three steps to the dishcloth so I can take the apple cake out of the oven. Turn. One, two, three, four.” Bend to take a lump of coal that had fallen from the pail and I had accidentally kicked into the middle of the kitchen. “Rinse my hands. Check on the soup. Needs salt. Back to the table. One, two, three.”