The Golden Tulip (3 page)

Francesca sensed, almost without being aware of it, that a great deal of what had been said had referred to her own parents’ relationship as much as to what lay in store for Janetje. “May I go up and see her?”

Anna nodded. “She asked that you should go to her as soon as you came home.”

As Francesca darted away upstairs, Anna went through the archway that led from the stair hall. When she entered the studio she was met by a strong odor of resin and animal glue with which, combined with ochre, Hendrick was preparing a canvas. He was whistling in high spirits, for after he had given his permission for Janetje to marry the Florentine a most generous offer had been forthcoming.

“My future wife’s only reservation about leaving her homeland,” Giovanni had said in his limited Dutch, “is her concern for her sister and nieces through your present financial straits. I want her to be happy and for her sake I am willing to give you a fresh start and settle all your debts from whatever source if you care to present me with the figures.”

“I’m overwhelmed!” Hendrick had exclaimed.

“Do not thank me. I am doing it solely for Janetje’s peace of mind and on the condition that you will never approach either her or myself for any financial help in the future.”

“You have my word!” Hendrick had declared.

Anna, crossing the studio toward him, was grateful for Giovanni’s generosity, but she had no hope of Hendrick being able to keep out of debt for long, even though he was to be given a clean slate. She linked her arms around his neck and rested her head on his shoulder. With the jar of gluey mixture and the brush still in his hands, he folded his arms about her, knowing that the forthcoming break with her sister was already causing her enormous anguish.

“I love you,” he said softly, putting his lips to her temple.

She nodded. Had she not known that to be the truth she could never have borne the trials and tribulations that marriage to him had brought her. Slowly she turned her face up to his and immediately his hot, passionate mouth met its response in hers.

Chapter 2

A
NNA SAVED EVERY ONE OF
J
ANETJE’S LETTERS AND WROTE
twice a year herself. With various wars raging around Holland’s peaceful borders the passage of mail was precarious and it was best to entrust it to a merchant or traveler known to be going to Florence. Heer Korver had contacts there and he always sent word to Anna when he knew of someone prepared to collect and deliver a letter. The marriage between her sister and Giovanni was proving to be a good one. Janetje, although assailed at times by homesickness, was content in her new life, much absorbed by her sons, one having arrived nine months after the wedding and the second a year later.

Anna always had plenty of news to tell her sister, mostly domestic but including snippets about friends and neighbors that she knew would be of interest. Inevitably there were times when there were sad tidings to impart, and she shed tears that blotted the ink on the paper when she wrote that once again tragedy had struck Rembrandt in the death of Hendrickje Stoffels. He had aged noticeably afterward, but work still flowed from him and recently he had been commissioned to paint the likenesses of a mutual acquaintance and his betrothed after their marriage. It was not to be a pair of bridal portraits, which was usual and had been expected. Instead he intended to paint them side by side. When Anna called on him one day, bringing him one of her cakes and a basket of plums from the tree in the courtyard, he explained his reason when answering her inquiry as to whether he would be attending the wedding.

“No, I’ll not be there,” he replied, biting into one of the juicy plums. “I don’t go anywhere socially these days. Work is my heartbeat. It’s my eating and my sleeping, my going out and my coming in. I’m an old man now, you know.”

She was facing him on the bench by the open parlor window, where they sat in the sun, and she exclaimed in protest, for to her he seemed ageless. “No, Rembrandt, no! Nobody would ever think of you as an old man!”

He smiled wryly. “That’s kind of you, but nowadays I often feel at least a hundred years old!”

“You could come to the wedding with us. We’ll all be going.”

“No, Anna. It’s thoughtful of you, just as it was to bring me cake and fruit today. But I don’t want to see the bridal couple on the wedding day. They’ll both be nervous and under strain. I want to create my first impression of them in their happiness when they have tasted the tender joys and sweet passion of love.” He looked toward the door with his eyes narrowed as if visualizing their entrance into his house. “Why should they be separated on individual canvases when their lives together are in first bloom. There are too many partings of lovers in this life. I’ll take no hand in that, even in paint.”

She knew that Saskia and Hendrickje were in his thoughts. Two women quite different in character and from opposite backgrounds, but each had loved him and been loved, Saskia dying at thirty and Hendrickje only eight years older. She shivered as if a shadow had fallen across her path. He had noticed.

“Is there a draft? Are you cold?” He would have closed the window, but she stayed him.

“No! Please leave it. Somebody must have stepped on my grave.” Then she regretted her use of the old saying in a house that death had visited again only a while ago. He saw her dismay and leaned forward to put his hand over hers and give it a friendly reassuring shake.

“Whoever it was will have to wait a long time for that chance!” His tone was deliberately cheerful, gaining a little smile from her, even if her eyes did not quite echo it. He tried a change of subject. “How are your daughters progressing with their art? Is their father pleased with them?”

Before replying she glanced out of the window to where Aletta and Sybylla were playing with Cornelia. Francesca was not with them, for she had left school on her twelfth birthday in January, the age when girls were expected to receive increased instruction at home in the field of domestic arts in preparation for marriage. Today Francesca was being entrusted with the planning and cooking of the noonday meal for the family and the dinner in the evening, something she had done with success a good number of times before. Anna returned her gaze to Rembrandt, unable to keep a note of maternal pride from her voice.

“Hendrick continues to be astounded by Francesca’s artistic ability at her age. Aletta is also far better than average.” She gave a wry half smile as she took a different tone. “As for Sybylla, she likes to play at being a painter sometimes, but that’s the end of it, I fear. Unfortunately Hendrick doesn’t like to be beaten at anything he undertakes and continues to teach her with the two older girls, hoping to coax some minor gift for art out of her. It would be far better if he didn’t.” She was thinking of the tempestuous scenes that resulted. Normally she could take such uproars in her stride, but since she had become pregnant again her nerves were constantly on edge. Maybe when her violent attacks of morning sickness passed she would regain the strength that was now drained from her at the start of every day.

“I assume that Hendrick has indentured the two older girls to himself?”

She was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Only that if he judges them to be as good as you say, it’s high time he accepted them as his apprentices in preparation for when each will be ready to apply for a mastership of the Guild of Amsterdam. Nobody gets that honor without serving the obligatory six years under a master. Naturally neither may develop to that standard, but each should have her chance.”

She remained doubtful. “I’m not sure that Hendrick would do as you suggest. He is happy enough to give the girls instruction when it suits him, but he hates to be tied down to anything not quite of his choosing. By making Francesca and Aletta his pupils officially he might feel himself to be under an obligation to teach them on a regular basis and that could be calamitous. As you know, it’s the reason why the few apprentices he has had in the past never stayed with him. I wish he had been more successful as a teacher. It must have given you great pleasure and satisfaction to see your pupils become splendid artists in their own right.”

“That is true, Anna.”

She recalled Hendrick’s fit of wild jealousy when he had thrown out one hapless youth, who had been misguided enough to fall in love with her, and trouble had resulted over the refunding of the tuition fees, Hendrick being in financial difficulties at the time. Four or five other pupils had left of their own free will at various intervals, protesting to their parents that Hendrick had no interest in whether they progressed or not, a legitimate complaint that permitted the dissolution of their indentures. As a result, he had gained the reputation of being a poor teacher and the fees that supplemented the income of other artists never came his way.

“Nevertheless,” Rembrandt continued, “I do advise you not to let the young years of your two older girls slip by without indenture papers.”

She saw the wisdom of what he advised, but to confront Hendrick with an outright request for them would have the outcome she had mentioned.

Then there came an interruption as the faces of Aletta and Sybylla appeared at the window, both girls requesting that Cornelia return home with them for the noon meal and asking if afterward they could continue the games they were playing.

“Yes, of course!” she replied willingly.

Her daughters exclaimed with delight and parted to let Cornelia through to the window. Her bright face, much like her mother’s, beamed at Anna. “I thank you, Vrouw Visser.” Then to her father, she added, “Am I allowed, Father?”

“Yes. You go and enjoy yourself.”

“We’ll see her home about six,” Anna promised, rising to her feet. The streets were safe enough by daylight, but after dusk there were the same dangers in Amsterdam as in any other capital. The city militia patrolled the streets by night, but they could not be everywhere.

Rembrandt rose from the bench too. “There’s no need. Titus will be in your area about that time and he can collect her.”

On the way home, with the girls chattering together at her side, Anna pondered over the advice Rembrandt had given her. That afternoon a downpour of rain, forcing the girls indoors, gave her an unexpected opportunity to do something about it. She sat the children down at the kitchen table, getting Francesca to join them, and introduced some word games on paper. When Hendrick, who had been out, came back home, Anna sent Sybylla to fetch him to add his name to each girl’s fresh sheet of paper, which she had just handed out. Hendrick obliged, but did not stay while Anna collected all four sheets and improvised some guessing game about them.

Titus arrived at six o’clock. Anna met him, for the kitchen had been left to Francesca again and the other three girls had gone upstairs. “I trust I find you well, Vrouw Visser,” he said cheerily.

“Yes, indeed,” she replied.

“I’ve been delivering one of Father’s etchings to a buyer,” he explained, setting aside on a chair the leather folder that had held Rembrandt’s work. Titus possessed no exceptional artistic talent himself but, unlike his father, was businesslike and practical. Those who were able to remember Rembrandt in his youth always said that his son looked as like him at the same age as another pea from the same pod, being of average height and broadly built with a roundish, smiling face and a shock of brown curls. “Is my sister ready to leave?”

Like all children when interrupted at play, Cornelia was not. Anna gained the girl another enjoyable half an hour by sitting to chat with Titus herself in the family parlor. She had a maternal fondness for him, having seen him grow up, and was pleased that recently he had begun courting a pretty girl, Magdelena van Lon, whose parents she knew well. As they talked he happened to glance up at the painting of himself as a boy on the wall.

“I’m still in a place of honor, I see,” he joked.

“Only just!” she replied on a little laugh. “Francesca asked recently for your portrait to be hung on a bare peg in the studio, where she can have a friendly face to look at when she’s on the rostrum with her gaze in that direction. She made the same request some long time ago, but Hendrick hung a landscape for her instead.”

“I’m flattered that she should want to look at me! Does she pose often for Master Visser?”

“Not now. She is too busy with her own artwork.”

He glanced at the painting again. “I remember that I was puzzling over some mathematical problems in my homework from school when Father first took up his brushes for that painting. As you know, he takes a great deal of time over all his works and in the end, when the problems were long since solved, I sat there daydreaming. But then I suppose that was what Father had been aiming for in the first place.”

Anna looked up at the painting too. Much of the impasto had still been wet when it had come into Hendrick’s hands. He had happened to meet Rembrandt in the street one day when the artist was desperate for cash, having been refused further credit by every supplier of art materials in Amsterdam. He had offered to sell Hendrick the painting of Titus for whatever he could pay. Hendrick had on him a purse that held the amount he had received from the Amsterdam art dealer, Willem de Hartog, for the sale of two paintings of his own. Promptly he had pulled the purse from his pocket and placed it in Rembrandt’s hands. Anna had come to appreciate the painting since then, but for a long time afterward it had reminded her of how she had fainted away at discovering her husband had come home penniless when every stiver in his purse had been urgently needed. It was Janetje who had kept the food on their table during the hard weeks that had followed until Hendrick sold half a dozen etchings and their fortunes took a turn for the better.

Titus remembered the hour and sprang up from his chair. “I really must take Cornelia home. She’s almost as much at your house as she is at ours.”

“Your sister is always welcome here.”

When he and Cornelia had left, Sybylla came to ask for the papers from the word game. Anna gave her all except those bearing Hendrick’s signature, which the girls had also signed. On her own again, Anna threw away Cornelia’s paper before she went to an upper room. After turning the key in the lock, she began searching in a cupboard for a certain parchment document she knew to be stored there. Finding it, she took it across to a writing table where there was pen and ink, and sat down to copy the wording of Hendrick’s indentures to the late Frans Hals of Haarlem onto the sheet of paper bearing his signature and that of Francesca, incorporating them in the right places. She then did the same with Aletta’s and Sybylla’s. It was unlikely that Sybylla would develop into an artist at a later date, but it was not right to leave her out.

When all was done, the ink dry and the document returned to its drawer, Anna rolled up the three improvised indentures, tied them with a ribbon, took them into her bedchamber and placed them in her Oriental lacquered box, which held Janetje’s correspondence and other items of importance to her. It was the only time in her life she had carried out a deception against Hendrick, but one day she would explain to him it had been for his good and that of their daughters. She smoothed the lace of her cuffs and brushed her hands down her skirt as if some evidence of what she had done might be clinging to her. Then, quite composed, she went downstairs.