The Rainbow Bridge (6 page)

‘Oh God …’ he groaned.

‘I’m sorry… would you like me to go?’

‘Oh no, please stay. It’s just that … I thought I had woken, but I must still be dreaming. The General did tell me that I couldn’t wake up until I had written my story.’

‘That sounds interesting,’ the girl said, leaning forward. ‘Tell me about your dream.’

Gaston explained, as best he could, about the General and the examination he had to undergo. Rather to his surprise, she laughed. ‘My father told me about a philosopher once who said that perhaps we are all part of someone else’s dream. But I don’t think you can be expected to write your own story. We do that by living. Maybe someone else is trying to write your story and is waiting for you to decide who you really are. In any event, I think you can consider yourself awake now.’

Gaston thought about this; then he smiled ruefully. ‘But if I’m awake you’ll have to go, won’t you – and I may never see you again?’

‘You’ll have my picture. Anyway, you may not want me around; I may just be part of your fevered imagination. Close your eyes … I’ll stay here, but only if you want me.’ Gaston closed his eyes. It was all too much for him, but somehow he felt happier than he had in ages and soon slipped into a deep and restorative sleep.

As Louise watched the young man sleeping, she wondered about her presence here. She thought back to the only time, since the explosion in Delft, when she had really ‘lived’ in someone else’s mind. After the catastrophe, Master Haitink,
the artist who had painted her portrait, had gone into a decline. But while his body failed, his mind remained strong; Louise’s image grew to be so vivid in his memory that he began to see her as if in life. During that year – as the town of Delft froze in grief – Louise came and sat with the old man, just as she was sitting now with this young French officer, trying to be a comfort and a real presence for him. When eventually the Master passed away, she was by his side.

It was Pieter, the Master’s apprentice, who had finished Louise’s portrait after Master Haitink’s death, but because he had no indentures and no master, he could neither teach nor sell his own paintings. It had been a dreadful time. Time and again, racked with grief, Pieter had tried, in his own way, to do what the Master had done: recreate Louise in his mind as he worked, but their love had been too real to allow regeneration, their time together too precious. The pain of another parting would destroy Pieter. So she held back, and as time passed, she saw the possibility of a new love emerging for him. After the Master’s death Pieter had stayed on as a watchman and helper in the public house. Tongues began to wag at his continued presence in the house of the young widow. Mistress Kathenka was not yet forty when she and Pieter married. Though initially a marriage of convenience, it soon matured to love, and Louise was glad for Pieter. It was only when he picked up his brushes to work on her portrait for the last time, however, and painted her name on the plinth of the urn, that the pain of her death finally left him, and the magic and wonder of their lives together burst in on him. There was nothing more Louise could do for him now, so she, who had never longed for heaven, settled for oblivion.

And that was how it was. Once Pieter was gone, her
picture, without the Master’s signature, was not valued. She was passed from hand to hand, an object to hang on the wall; people liked the green of her dress. No one else had the eyes to see beyond the surface of the painting and engage with the girl the Master had painted. The silence that she had chosen seemed to be without end or echo, except for one small occasional noise, which intrigued her. It was a sound not unlike the whisper of a pen on paper.

Now Louise turned to look at the face of the young man who had rescued her from the canal. He wasn’t much older than Pieter. As he slept she could see health and vigour returning to his face. Was her presence here just an accident born out of his fever? Would he want her around once he had recovered or would she once again be consigned to her portrait? She remembered what the Master had predicted about his painting of the Beggar at the Beginhof Gate – a flea-ridden old man with a beautiful singing voice: ‘There will be those far down the river of time perhaps, who will bring the old boy back to life for us. Who knows but that someone may even hear him sing.’

Suddenly Louise was filled with hope.

The cheering spread ahead of Adjutant Krayenhoff as he rode in triumph into the village of Maarssen. The Stadtholder had fled and Amsterdam was in the hands of the Pro-Patriots. Even while the adjutant was reporting the success of his mission to General Daendels, Cadet Colbert was pounding up the stairs to Gaston’s room, quite ignoring Raoul’s protests.
‘Nonsense, Raoul, of course he will want to know!’ He burst into the room with a clash of spur and sabre. ‘Sir, Krayenhoff’s back, the Pro-Patriots have taken over. Vive la France!’ He waved his hat, but the ceiling was low and he was rewarded with a shower of loose plaster. ‘But wouldn’t it make you sick, sir!’

‘Sick, Marcel?’

‘Pierre and me were planning on some action, sir. We reckoned we could slice up these Dutch burghers like sausages.’

‘Don’t you believe it. They didn’t create an empire by sitting on their backsides. Anyway, General Daendels is Dutch, as apparently is Mademoiselle Louise here. So be careful who you plan to slice.’

‘Oh, indeed, sir,’ said Marcel, unabashed and happy to put his patriotism to one side. ‘Glad you’re better, sir.’ He turned to the portrait. ‘Could we take her, sir, Pierre and
me? We thought we could get the carpenter to make a case for her, with oiled cloth inside, so she doesn’t get wet.’

‘So you think I should keep her, then?’

‘Of course!’ said the boy, horrified. ‘We … well, I mean you, rescued her, sir.’ He blushed to his ears. ‘Pierre and me’s really sorry sir, we didn’t mean …’ Gaston managed to glare at him.

‘I’ll consider your behaviour later. In the meantime, yes you may take her; it will give me an opportunity to get dressed.’

‘What …?’ Marcel looked puzzled.

‘Oh go on … go!’ Gaston snapped. ‘I just need to get my legs under me, that’s all.’

‘Raoul, no … no… don’t let go. I’m a sick man, remember.’ Gaston, somewhat dishevelled, in his dress uniform, stood swaying in the doorway of his bedroom. General Daendels’s celebratory dinner was over; tomorrow Gaston’s hussars would head south as escort to the officer delegated to bring the good news to Paris.

‘Pissed out of your mind, you are sir, and that’s the truth,’ Raoul responded, unimpressed. His campaign against Gaston’s ego was single-minded but private. Woe betide anyone, of any rank from general down, who said a word against his lieutenant.

‘Nonsense. Look, I can stand,’ said Gaston. ‘But I am the one constant point in a world gone mad. Are we in an earthquake?’

‘No, sir.’ Raoul detached Gaston’s hand and put it against the wall.

‘Swan. Have you ever tasted swan, Raoul? Krayenhoff’s men found two swans frozen into a canal on their way back
from Amsterdam. Served them dressed up in their own skins, feathers and all. Set them sailing down the table in majesty. Tough as old boots, actually. Must have been starving, the poor creatures. So, Amsterdam has fallen and I never even unsheathed my sword!’

‘Just as well, if you ask me,’ Raoul commented dryly, stepping back to see if Gaston could be left unsupported.

‘Ha! You’re right, the devils wouldn’t have had a chance,’ Gaston chuckled as Raoul made himself busy at the bed. ‘Remember the engagement at the Pont de Chasse, Raoul, and that black-visaged Royalist I downed?’

‘I remember you falling off your horse, sir.’

‘Nonsense, I threw myself on the man.’ Gaston started some complicated manoeuvres with his sheathed sabre, bracing it against the floor so that it acted as a third leg. ‘Look … steady as a rock now. I learned this from Commandant Pêche – the old soak.’ Gaston gazed about the room and then noticed, for the first time, that the boys had returned the portrait of the Dutch girl. It was standing at the end of his bed; they had had a travelling case made for it, which, when opened up, stood on three legs like an easel. Gaston blinked, the girl’s face was curiously animated by the moonlight breaking through the uneven glass of the window. He bowed to her, feeling embarrassed and a little ashamed at his condition.

He said to himself: ‘Now, how am I to get undressed?’ Unfortunately Raoul heard him; he threw down the pillow he had been straightening and turned on him in irritation. Nursing his officer was one thing, but he was damned if he was going to start undressing him.

‘On your own, sir!’ he flared. ‘Anything else?’

‘A little punch?’ Gaston asked hopefully as Raoul brushed past and clattered dismissively down the stairs.

Gaston turned to the portrait. ‘Mademoiselle Louise, your servant. I’m sorry you find me … shall we say … incapacitated. I will recover my dignity in due–’ He was bending to deliver one of his specially deep bows when he heard a laugh, a girl’s laugh, somewhere in the room. He whipped about, trying to place the sound. Perhaps one of the street women had followed him up the stairs. But that was no whore’s cackle; it was a clear liquid laugh that made him want to smile.

‘Oh, but I like you without your dignity!’

And there she was – the girl from the picture – sitting on the chair beside his bed, just as she had been when he was sick. For an instant Gaston saw, as others had seen before, a flash of beauty as transitory and as intense as a jewel tossed in the air. He gasped, his sword slipped, and he lost his balance. He struggled to recover. She must be a hallucination; perhaps it was the effects of the swan. He wanted to look again … but yet he dared not. He scrabbled blindly towards the door.

‘Raoul!’ he bellowed down the stairs, then covered his mouth. What if Raoul came up? A door was snatched open below and Raoul’s voice rasped up the stairs.

‘Holy mother of God! What is it now?’

‘Er … forget about the punch,’ he called weakly, and winced as the door slammed below. He turned and peered cautiously back into his room. She hadn’t gone; she was still there, looking about her. Gaston found refuge in his innate good manners. He addressed her from the door: ‘Mademoiselle, I believe it was you who came and sat with me when I was sick?’ She turned with a smile.

‘Yes, you asked me to, if you remember.’

‘Did I? … I was so grateful for your company.’ He moved back into the room tentatively, as if his rights there were
now uncertain. He had a soldier’s ability to sober up in a crisis and he was beginning to think clearly now, even if everything appeared a little bit brighter, a little bit sharper than usual. ‘May I close the door?’ Perhaps she would think it improper to be alone with a man. There was a chair near the window. He crossed to it and sat down. ‘Forgive me, Mademoiselle. You see, I thought you were a dream. I had many dreams during my fever.’

‘Yes, I know,’ the girl said. Gaston looked at her warily.

‘You had that strange dream about your examination,’ she went on, ‘how you had to invent yourself by writing your own story?’

‘Ah, that dream,’ he felt relieved. ‘Did I really tell you about that …? It was silly.’

‘Oh no, it told me a lot about you. I think we should listen to our dreams … What were the noyades?’ The room reeled and darkened for Gaston.

‘No!’ he said, sharply. ‘Don’t talk of such things!’ He saw her wince but couldn’t stop. ‘It is none of your business!’ He thrust his hands between his knees and clamped them there as the black clouds of depression boiled up inside him. After a while he raised his eyes. The girl was staring at the threadbare carpet, stricken, her eyes brimming. He wanted to reach out and take her hand; she seemed so real. Then something else occurred to him. ‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle, you are Dutch, I believe? How are you able to understand me, then, when I am speaking French?’ A frown crossed the girl’s face and he thought she looked, if anything, more beautiful when she was serious.

‘I don’t know. I learned some Latin from my father, but not French. And you are right – I am Dutch – Louise Eeden from Delft. But please call me Louise. Maybe I can understand you because it is your mind that is recreating
me from my portrait. It feels to me as if you are giving me the means to communicate with you. However, you don’t seem to have taken my free will.’ A mischievous smile flickered across her face. ‘You may live to regret that! But seriously, however you are doing it, I am truly grateful to you, both for the gift of life and the gift of language.’

Sober, Gaston might have questioned her explanation, but another practicality had just occurred to him. Here she was, a vulnerable girl alone in the room of a soldier about whom she knew absolutely nothing.

‘But, Mademoiselle Louise, isn’t it a terrible risk for you? If I can recreate you, couldn’t any old scoundrel do the same, and then … how shall I say… impose himself on you?’ To his surprise, she laughed.

‘Monsieur Gaston, I assure you, after the silence of a century I would be happy to be recreated in a robber’s den. And I have a feeling that Master Haitink, who painted me, may have taken care of that situation …’

Her voice trailed off. Gaston looked up; she was staring into the distance, as if looking back down the tunnel of time. When she spoke again her voice was softer, a little sad, but full of affection. ‘The old man who painted my portrait loved me, Monsieur Gaston, and I him, even though we were like Greek warriors prepared for a fight at the smallest slight. And he painted me as I was – not as I, nor even as he – would have liked me to be. I am beginning to believe that in order for anyone to give me life, they must want to do so. And who would want a plain, argumentative little Dutch girl?’ The girl smiled to herself, ‘Thanks to the Master, I suspect I am quite safe, really.’

‘Well, I can tell you that my two boys are stricken with you.’

‘Pierre and Marcel? They’re sweet. Pierre reminds me of
someone I knew – Pieter – not in looks, but in character.’ Almost to herself, she added: ‘I must be careful.’

‘Was Pieter a friend of yours?’

‘Oh yes. Pieter was the Master’s apprentice. We were…’ but Louise wasn’t able to finish, and the statement hung between them like an unresolved chord.

‘It was not to be … this friendship?’ Gaston asked. Louise shook her head and smiled sadly:

‘No, it was not to be,’ she sighed.

If Gaston had been completely sober he probably would not have pursued the matter, but then neither would she have answered him so freely. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ he asked sympathetically.

‘I was killed,’ Louise said.

She hadn’t meant to shock, but she heard Gaston’s sharp intake of breath. ‘It was a gunpowder explosion … an accident, I believe.’

‘But that’s terrible!’ He seemed genuinely upset. ‘Did you suffer?’

‘No …’ Louise replied. ‘In a strange way I think I was too interested in what had happened to feel anything for myself.’ She beckoned Gaston closer and he drew his chair nearer the bed, listening in silence as she told him about the immediate aftermath of the explosion. She described how her soul had lingered, floating high over the shattered town of Delft.

‘You see, Gaston,’ she said, ‘It was all so sudden. One minute I was carrying a hot drink in to my sick mother, and the next I was looking down on the wreckage of the town as a bird might see it. I was amazed and fascinated. My first impulse was to show it to my father. He was a master potter, but he was also a man of science; he would have been so interested and would have pointed out all sorts of
things.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘As I looked down I could see that the pall of smoke and dust over the town was thinning. Something terrible had happened down there, but yet I was detached from it; people were running, but in no particular direction. I recognised the market place where the Master had his studio. The houses there were still standing but slates kept falling from the roof of the nearby Church, the Nieuwe Kerk, in noisy cascades. It was strange, this seemed to be the only sound: the rattle and clatter of falling slates and tiles. Then I recognised another, softer sound,’ Louise shook her head in wonder as she remembered. ‘It was the sound of sweeping. It was the huisvrouwen of Delft: unable to comprehend the enormity of the disaster that surrounded them, they were finding escape in the familiar and in what they did best by sweeping up the glass and the twisted lead from their broken windows.’

‘I had to know what had happened. There must be some explanation for the incredible devastation below. There is a river that runs around three sides of Delft: the Vliet or Schiekanaal. I could see the sweep of it, looking for all the world like an embracing arm supporting the poor, crippled town. Timbers and horrible things were bobbing on its surface. But where was the gunpowder magazine and the firing range that I used to look into from my bedroom? Where were the magnificent trees that had shaded them? There was an old thrush that used to sing to me in those trees … gone! Where, oh where, was my home?’ Louise dropped her voice. ‘You know, I couldn’t even tell where our house had stood. All I could see was a mighty pit where the gunpowder magazine had been. Gradually it came to me what had happened. The magazine had blown up.’

Gaston was leaning forward, hands on the hilt of his
sabre, willing her to go on.

‘I could hear a distant clock chiming. I counted – was that eleven? Then I waited for the carillon on the Nieuwe Kerk, but no chime came; the bells must have been knocked off their pivots. What was I doing up here? Should I be going somewhere? I looked up at the arched dome of the sky. Was heaven up there? Was that hell below? Then I realised that there were other presences up there with me – other victims of the blast. Some seemed to know where they were going, as if fulfilled by their own concepts of heaven. Others, like me, were drifting. Just then I felt a stronger presence rising towards me; here was a soul with purpose. My heart gave a lurch, there was only one person it could be, my old nurse, Annie. No one but she could keep her identity intact at a moment like this.