The Rembrandt Secret (7 page)

‘Your father wasn’t like that.’

‘You didn’t see him at the end, Samuel. He wasn’t like himself, he was panicked. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think he knew he was in trouble. Real trouble. Not just money trouble. I spoke to Nicolai Kapinski earlier.

Samuel thought of the dapper little man who had been Owen’s business ally.

‘And?’

‘Nicolai told me that only yesterday – only hours before he was killed – my father had been ringing everyone for help. No one gave him the time of day. The bank wouldn’t even let him remortgage the gallery. He’d been a blameless customer for decades, and the first time he really needed help, they closed ranks.’ Marshall paused. ‘Nicolai said that my father had exhausted every possibility of help. No one came to his aid—’

‘I would have done.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ Marshall replied, wary. ‘So
why
didn’t he go to you? You were his mentor, his trusted adviser. You’d known each other for years. So why
didn’t
he turn to you, Samuel? I’ve been thinking about that a lot, why didn’t he?’

‘You told me yourself, he was ashamed.’

‘Ashamed? Yes.’ Marshall stared at his hands for a long moment. ‘But if you were so close, would shame have been enough to prevent his asking you for help?’

‘Are you intimating something?’ Samuel asked, hoarse with outrage. ‘Because if you are, come out with it, Marshall. I’m too old for games.’

‘I don’t think you’ll ever be too old for games. I think they keep you alive,’ Marshall replied curtly. ‘My father was desperate. He had nowhere to turn. There was only one route left open to him – to reveal the Rembrandt letters. The letters many people would want destroyed. And others would want to own.’

‘Or steal.’

‘Yes, or steal. That was the risk, wasn’t it? That instead of leverage, the letters became a death sentence.’

‘
If
they exist,’ Samuel said, steadily.

‘I wasn’t sure they did. Until now. Now I know for certain that those letters are still around. No one would destroy them, because then there would be no proof, no concrete evidence of Rembrandt’s bastard. The letters
have
to be preserved so that someone can use them. That someone might have been my father – only he was beaten to it.’

Uneasy, Samuel stared at the younger man. He felt very tired, his astute brain stalling, letting him down. He wondered if it was because Tobar Manners’ aggression had unsettled him, or if he was still shocked by Owen’s death.

Wearily, he looked at Marshall. ‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Find them.’

‘
Find them?
You think they’re still here?’

‘The pathologist said that my father held out for hours under torture. They said that finally he was lowered onto the floor and they stamped on his ribs, punctured his lungs, and then his chest was cut open. The pathologist said he was kicked and beaten with such savagery it could only be pure hatred and uncontrollable rage.’ Marshall held the old man’s gaze. ‘Now, you tell me something. If his killers had got what they wanted, why would they be that angry?’

9

As he touched the outside railing leading to the basement, he felt the cold iron through his glove and winced. He had to be quick; the gathering of mourners outside the Zeigler Gallery would disperse soon and people would start coming back indoors. Gordon Hendrix and Lester Fox might try and get down into the basement, even though it was cordoned off with police tape, and at any moment someone could want to take a furtive, curious look at the murder scene. Ducking under the tape, he moved towards the back door, unlocking it, and moving into the porch which separated the outside from the basement.

Through the glass top half of the door he could see the darkening blood stains on the floor, the surfaces dotted with malign Easter Bunny markings of fingerprints powder. Above him, he could hear talking and paused, recognising the voices of Marshall Zeigler and Samuel Hemmings. Noiselessly opening the inner door, he passed into the basement, skirting the blood stains and made his way towards the shelved area by the stairs. He could hear loud footsteps above, but they faded as the person went upstairs.

Time was short, he knew that, as he moved along the shelves where the paintings were racked up, sandwiched between stored frames and unexhibited canvases. He gazed carefully over the storage. Where were they? Owen had never been obvious in his actions, so he was hardly likely to have chosen an obvious hiding place. Breathing quickly, the man tensed as he heard the voices above suddenly raised. A moment later, they dropped and he relaxed a little, his heart beating less violently in his chest.

Observing the police tape wafting slightly in a winter breeze from the half opened door, he wondered again why Owen hadn’t told him exactly where he’d hidden the letters. Why? Suddenly angry, his hands sweated in the gloves. Or maybe Owen had been
about
to tell him. After all, they had been supposed to meet that night, but he hadn’t kept the appointment. Owen Zeigler had been killed at the same time that
he
was sitting in a bar across London, waiting for him … Another sound overhead made him jump. Was the inner basement door locked? Jesus, if it wasn’t and someone walked in they would catch him redhanded.

Quickly, he made for the stairs, thinking he would slide the bolt on the door and lock it from the inside to give himself more time to search. But just as he reached half way, a scuffle of footsteps sounded outside the door and he hurtled down the steps again and hid under the stairs. Breathing laboriously, he heard the door open and then saw a pair of feet descending the stairs. Was it the police? The feet stopped moving. He could hear his own breathing and was sure the stranger would hear it too, but after another moment the feet retraced their steps upwards and the basement door was closed again. And locked.

Then the light was turned off.
Surprised, the man tried to remember where the light switch was in the basement and felt his way towards it. He was just about to flick it on, when he paused. Was someone waiting for him to do just that? Would someone see the light from outside? Or coming from under the door? His hand dropped from the switch as he took a torch from his pocket. Turning it on, he ran its subdued beam along the rows of shelving. Owen had been talking about a painting he had just sold – a small Pieter de Hoogh – and the torchlight fell on the second shelf, half way along, where the painting had been stored. But the space was empty. Hurriedly, the man felt around in the emptiness, but there was nothing. No painting, no letters, only dust.

Frowning, he stepped back, trying to remember what Owen had ever told him about the Rembrandt letters. He knew they weren’t in the safe. They had been once, but not lately. No, lately Owen had intimated that the letters had been moved, hidden somewhere else on the premises.
But where?
he thought, with frustration. It would take days to search the gallery thoroughly, and even though he had managed to look around the main display rooms, he had not had a chance to hunt properly. And after today, how likely was it that he would get another opportunity? The gallery would soon be closed, the staff laid off, with none of them having access to the crime scene. Within hours the premises would be sealed off for God knows how long. Suddenly the front door of the gallery slammed violently. The vibration sounded in the basement, the anger behind the action obvious.

Silence fell again, but he could sense a nervous change in the atmosphere and, wary, flicked off his torch. Hardly breathing, he shrunk into the space under the basement steps, watching the back entrance as the police tape started to flutter manically in the draft from the opening door.

House of Corrections,
Gouda, 1651

It’s long past one in the morning. I heard the clock chiming and counted the footsteps of the guard as he passed from the cells to the outer door. He will wait for one of the kitchen staff – I don’t know her name – only recognise the mewling, cawing sounds she makes as he fumbles with her, her wooden heels rapping against the wall by the outside pump.

We had a pump in the walled garden of Rembrandt’s house, under the window with the stained-glass picture of a sailing ship. Like the one my husband went to sea in. As a carpenter and – in his spare time – the ship’s trumpeter. He tried to impress me with that when we met, saying he’d bought the trumpet off a man who’d died in Germany. I remember asking him what the man had died of, because I’d hoped it was nothing catching, and he’d looked at the trumpet and then at me, laughing, as though I’d made a joke. He’d seemed like an honest enough man back then, and my brother knew him. But then again, my brother seemed to know everyone. It would cost me that. My brother’s friendliness.

Sssh … the guard’s moving off again now and I can keep writing. He’ll go for his pipe and lean against the wall and puff rusty, grey smoke up to the moon like he was a burgomaster with the whole of Amsterdam to answer to him.

Amsterdam, even writing the name takes me back there. I remember the mute cold of Rembrandt’s house in the winter. How the main staircase whistled with the wind, and how the smell of the canal came in sour in the summer. Boys used to pee in the still water, aiming for the ducks, their urine making quick citrine rainbows against the Amsterdam sky. Rembrandt always scolded the boys, although he would often piss in a pot in the studio. Once he even urinated in a pail of gesso. The smell lingered, sour and acrid, even more than the stink of raw umber and charcoal. But no one complained.

Certainly I never did. Even though his hands made paint smears on my petticoats and sometimes his hair was matted with grease. I would fill a bath for him by the fire – it would take a long time, half an afternoon – and once I ducked him under the water, washing his hair with the same soap the whores use. But I didn’t tell him that. When I rubbed his hair dry it crackled like kindling. He trusted me. Even trusted me to shave him, the blade against his neck, the skin pock-marked in the creases, the razor slipping like an ice skate over his chin.

After I had been with him for over a year he caught me looking at his books. He was never a reader, not like some of the academics that sat to him. Rembrandt collected books as he collected armour and metal ware, for their beauty, not for their content. Yet although I would rub the silver trays with lemon and salt to clean off the tarnish; although I would check my smile in their reflections – keeping my mouth closed for my teeth were not good – I was not fascinated by silver.

But I loved the books and wanted to read. All the time that I was growing up, working in a tavern where they think you a whore for being there, I wanted to read so he taught me. Sometimes he was patient, mostly quick to anger, shouting out the words as though I should have mastered them as he said them. But I was a ready learner and that pleased Rembrandt. And when I had shown such promise, he said he would teach me to write. It took over a year, because he was busy, not because I was slow to learn.

He would push the writing slate over to me, nodding at the letters I had made, making me write a name over and over again. Not my name, his. I think of those days as I write. I think that he would regret teaching me if he knew what my letters would finally say. If he knew how I would use those syllables and vowels against him.

I was never stupid.

I wanted to write I love you, but never got the chance.

In the daytime I was always turned away. Whilst he worked I pushed Titus in his wooden walking stool, or held him up to the window to see the canal below. When the boy slept, I emptied the fire grates or went to the market and bought fish, because I could cook herrings better than anyone. Or so he said. Sometimes I would hear Rembrandt’s voice coming from the floor above, irritably squabbling with his students. I would smile, because later I would rub his back in bed and feel his thick legs under me and take the bear out of him. He would tell me about the country, and Amsterdam. About how there was a headstone in one of the city churches that people were warned about.

‘You must never stare at it for too long,’ he told me.

‘
Why not?
’

‘
Because if you stare too long you’ll see the date of your own death.’

I never told him that, years later, as a broken, lonely woman, I went to that gravestone and I stared and I stared at it. But it told me nothing. Not my death. Or his.

Rembrandt loved me back then. Painted me, once. He gave me the picture, but when I ran out of money I sold it. Someone said they had seen it hanging in a baker’s shop in The Hague, invoices clipped to the frame. Yes, I sold it, along with his late wife’s ring. Saskia’s ring. The one Rembrandt gave me as a betrothal ring. But later he denied it. Denied it when he fell from love and turned away, letting them lock the door on me … The clock is striking the quarter hour, in another moment the guard will knock out his pipe and start to walk the passage of cells. He will look in and listen, hoping to hear crying, hoping – if is he lucky – for some woman to offer him relief for a guilder.

I keep these letters hidden, somewhere no one will ever find them. Until one day they’re read and people will know my story… When I came to Rembrandt’s house in Amsterdam that day, that very first day, he looked at me and nodded. I would do. He did not recognise me … We had been very young, I know that, but progress had pushed us further apart than any years could do. He told me that I was being hired as a dry nurse for his son. He had no remembrance of my younger self; that shadow of the lover who had carried another, earlier child.

The boy who became Rembrandt’s monkey.