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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780618485369 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2004 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
I
The mechanisms of our bodies are composed of strings, threads, beams,
levers, cloth, flowing fluids, cisterns, ducts, filters, sieves, and other similar
mechanisms. Through studying these parts with the help of Anatomy,
Philosophy and Mechanics, man has discovered their structure and
function . . . With this and the help of discourse, he apprehends the way
nature acts and he lays the foundation of Physiology, Pathology, and
eventually the art of Medicine.
Marcello Malpighi, De Polypo Cordis (1666)
February 1662
'And now we come to the heart of the mystery, gentlemen. Come forward a
little, it is a sight you will seldom have an opportunity to see.' Delicately he
traced the swollen, ripening curve with his forceps, as they all obediently
craned their necks. 'About three months gravid, I should say. She should
have pleaded her belly, poor wretch. But perhaps she did not know the signs.'
Putting down the forceps which he had been using as a pointer
since laying aside the mass of the intestines, he picked up a scalpel, and
began to cut. The thin, cold winter sun lanced down on the table, which was
positioned to catch the best possible light. The room was completely silent,
except for the precise, tearing sound of the blade sawing through tough
muscle.
Balthasar leaned forward with the others, sweating with sickly
fascination, breathing shallowly through his mouth. The meaty stink exhaling
from the opened body was an almost solid thing, though the girl had been
dead only forty-eight hours. Even though he was avoiding breathing through
his nose, it seemed to havecoated his whole mouth and throat with a layer of
impalpable foulness. Incense burned in the room, but the delicate, musky
sweetness only intensified the horror of the stench.
The sight before him was profoundly disturbing for a young man
who had never before in his life seen a naked woman. The neck was of
course damaged by the garotte, but since they were clustered about the
lower part of the cadaver and the head was turned away from them it was not
visible; he could only see the line of the cheekbone. The upper part of her
body was pretty. She was very slight, bluish-white and waxen in death, with
pale, maidenly nubbins of breasts that suggested extreme youth; if he had
met her, perhaps carrying a pile of linen or a basket of eggs, he would have
flirted with her, sought a glimpse of those little breasts now so pitilessly bare
to his gaze. Yet the moment his eye strayed below the waist, he could no
longer even think of the body as human, it was something worse than
butcher's meat. The abdomen gaped open, omentum and bowels laid to one
side to display the womb, like a terrible red egg in the nest of the pelvis. Both
legs had been sawn away just below the point where they met the torso. The
ends were dry and shiny like mahogany, with gleaming rings of paler fat and
ivory bone, and between the great dark-red meaty ovals, her shameful parts
were obscenely exposed in all their meagreness, adorned with a little tuft of
blonde hair. He kept looking at her sex and away again, revolted and excited,
and knew that his fellow students were doing the same. It was impossible for
him to associate the dry and abject tags of flesh that he could see with what
he had touched in his occasional fumblings beneath the skirts of whores,
which had seemed, at the time, a slippery pit fit to swallow the world. Is this
how all women are made? he wondered sickly, but was distracted from this
train of thought by Professor van Horne.
Pinning back the two halves of the womb, now completely
sectioned, he reached into it with the forceps, and brought forth a pale
homunculus attached to a long, bluish cord. 'A male, I believe,' he
announced, squinting at the tiny object expertly. 'Well, perhaps the law has
spared him much suffering. He would not have amounted to much, with such
a beginning.' Carefully, he laid the fetus down on a piece of white
linen. 'Observe him well, gentlemen, so that his existence will not be
absolutely in vain. The head is well developed, though the eyes are not open,
and the heart is formed, as are the spine and the liver. We now know that his
heart would already have been beating, and it may be that this little creature
lived for some time after his mother met her end. He was not independent, as
the cord which tethers him to the matrix bears witness, but neither was he
wholly part of this wretched girl, any more than he was party to her sins. For
all we know, he was already dreaming when death came quietly into his
small world. So do we all begin.'
Turning to the anatomical atlas which lay open on a lectern beside
the table, Professor van Horne began an exposition on the anatomy of the
uterus. Balthasar and his fellow students took notes conscientiously; he was
perhaps not the only one so disturbed by what he saw that he wrote
mechanically and followed little of what the professor said.
At last, the lesson came to an end. Professor van Horne threw a
sheet over the ruin of the girl and her child, while the students pocketed their
notebooks and prepared to leave. Feet clattering, they trooped up the wooden
stairs of the anatomy theatre, a precipitous, funnel-like oval of benches
designed to give students the best possible view of the dissection table at its
centre. Around the outermost set of seats articulated skeletons were placed,
a horse and its rider, a cow; their delicate white bones arrested by an
armature of wires and struts in postures which imitated their natural
movements in life. There were also human skeletons carrying banners, the
gonfaliere of Death: 'pulvis et umbra sumus', 'nosce teipsum', 'memento
mori'.
'D'you know who she was?' Balthasar asked his friends as they
emerged, shivering a little, into the raw air of February, hands deep in their
pockets.
'I've no idea,' said Jan. 'Willem, you went to the execution, didn't
you? Did anyone say?'
'Yes. Well, what she was, anyway. She was a country girl, she
came to the city for work, and didn't find it. She scrounged and starved for a
bit, maybe earned the odd stuiver on her back, the landlady got tired of
waiting and tried to take her clothes. They had a fight, she pushed the old
woman down the stairs and broke her neck, and the other lodgers caught her
before she got to the end of the street. Lucky for us, really. It's my tenth
dissection, and only the first woman. It's wonderful she was pregnant, I never
thought I'd get to see that.'
'Luck indeed,' said Jan, with passion. 'Van Horne was right,
calling it a miracle. It was beautiful. I've wanted to see inside a womb for a
long time. He should've thrown the book away, sows and bitches are no
guide at all. Hardly anything he told us was supported by what we saw. I was
nearer than you, and I could see there wasn't the slightest trace of two
chambers. The standard account needs complete revision, based on
observation alone.'
'Was she pretty?' asked Balthasar suddenly.
The others looked at him, surprised. 'Who?' said Willem. 'Oh,
yes. Pretty enough. Pale as a cheese, but she was on the gallows, wasn't
she? She might've looked all right, smiling. It was just an ordinary face.'
Balthasar swallowed. Jan was incandescent with technical
enthusiasm, but he could not help thinking of the girl. His mind was bumping
around the unpalatable effort of imagining what it could be like to be so poor
that one could die in defending two or three guilders' worth of old clothes. At
the same time, he was uncomfortably aware that if his own ventures failed,
there was nothing to keep him from such an end. The thought of her stirred in
the pit of his stomach, and filled him with a strange nervous excitement.
Jan shook himself, as if shaking off a thought. 'Let's go for a
borrel, jonges. That was wonderful, but I want to get the stink out of my
throat. Anyone got a clove or anything?'
Balthasar had a paper of aniseed comfits, and passed them
round. Chewing their sweets, the three students headed for a nearby inn, 't
Zwarte Zwaan, their usual place of resort. It was not much of a place, but it
was fairly cheap, and the landlord kept a good fire and the news.
'Oh, good,' said Balthasar as they pushed open the door, 'this
week's Courant. I'd better take a look. I want to see if Thibault's been up to
anything, back home.'
'You've had a lot of trouble down in Zeeland this last year,'
observed Jan sympathetically. 'It's a long way away, when there's property to
think about. Have you got family down there – maybe your mother's people?'
'No,' said Balthasar hastily. 'I've got no relatives. There's just a
couple of old servants.'
'Tough luck, Blackie. Something more to worry about. What're
you drinking?'
'Brantwijn, please.' They sat down together, Balthasar taking the
seat nearest the window, the better to see the dirty, poorly printed pages. All
three immediately began filling their pipes, and Willem began to tell Jan one
of his long, rambling dirty stories, leaving Balthasar in peace to scan the
paper. While his fingers filled and tamped the pipe with automatic skill, his
eye, running down the columns, was alert for a few specific
words, 'Middelburg', 'Zeeland', 'Thibault'. Thus, when his gaze passed over
the words 'konigin van Bohemen', he did not at first register them; only a
strange double-thump of his heart. He looked again, and this time, saw what
was said. 'The queen of Bohemia is dead in London.' A strange, cold
sensation began in his stomach and diffused through his body. His mother
was dead, and he was completely numb.
'So, what d'you think of that, then, Blackie?' Willem's voice broke
into his paralysis.
'Sorry?'
'You didn't hear a word, did you? Is there trouble at home? You're
a funny colour – you look as if you'd have gone pale, if you could.'
'Oh, it's nothing.' Balthasar forced a smile. 'I'm tired, I think, I was
working late last night.' He put the pipe down unlit, reached for his brandy,
and gulped half of it in one swig. 'God. This is terrible stuff. What d'you think
he puts in it?' As he had hoped, that turned the conversation.
Later, walking alone to his lodgings, he wondered what to do. The
obvious answer was to stay where he was and get on with his degree, but he
had an appallingly strong impulse to run for home which he knew to be futile:
his father, the only person he could possibly have talked to, had been dead
for five years. But he had brought none of his mother's letters with him, since
he did not care to risk them outside the house, and he wanted very much to
reread them.
Once he was in the privacy of his own room and his mind was
working once more, he realised there was one thing he could usefully do, and
that was to write to Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen, who, since his father's
death, had been his only link with his mother. The old German had been a
court painter in England under both James I and Charles I, but had fled in the
early years of the Civil War, when Balthasar himself had been only a baby,
and settled in Middelburg. Pelagius, Balthasar's father, always interested in
English exiles, had become acquainted with him, and had secured him
Elizabeth's patronage. The portrait he had painted of her, which Pelagius
displayed in their small house in Middelburg, had launched him on a second,
modestly successful, career among Zeeland burghers and their wives, and
Jonson had been duly grateful.
It was Jonson's image of a strong-featured, middle-aged woman
with hazel eyes, fabulous pearls and a low-cut dress, holding a white rose,
which was, to Balthasar, practically all that he knew by the name of mother.
When she had come to Middelburg for a week of sittings, he had been only
six, and he had not known anything of their relationship; try as he would, he
could remember nothing she had said to him, and his memory of how she
had looked was overlaid by the portrait itself. All he was sure of was the
lustrous, rustling folds of her silken skirts, and the scent of amber and orris
which they gave off; she had been exotic and awe-inspiring. His only real link
with her was the letters, which had begun only after his father had told him
who he was.
Due to the extreme secrecy of his birth and bringing-up, a
discretion that his father had imposed upon him so strongly that it felt like a
physical lock upon his tongue, when she wrote to him, as she occasionally
did after Pelagius's death, the letters were sent under cover of notes to Mr
Jonson, and his replies, brief as they were, went the same way. In the course
of writing his letter to Jonson, he made up his mind. He would stay where he
was; he had neither money nor time to spare.
September 1663
The packet-boat Dordrecht was making its way up the with the sun lying low
on the horizon and making them all squint as they looked towards their first
sight of the town. Balthasar, at last, was going home. Chilled from the long,
cold journey threading through the islands of Zeeland, and uncertain in his
mind, he looked from Walcheren Canal towards Middelburg on the last leg of
its journey, up as the familiar defences of the Oostpoort came into view. He
longed for home, and yet the thought of it appalled him. In the depths of the
hold, roped and corded, were all his books and clothes from Leiden, together
with his certificates of graduation as a doctor of medicine. His life as a
student was now a thing of the past, before him was a house, and the two
servants who had brought him up, Narcissus and Anna. All the security he
had ever known. He longed to see them, and memories crowded in his head,
Anna's warm lap, riding on Narcissus's shoulders, the alarms and
excitements of childhood, how strong, wise and potent they had once
seemed to him, especially Narcissus. Now, their dependence terrified him.
He must succeed as a doctor to keep food in their mouths, coal in the cellar,
linen in the press. The death of his mother, so far away, had removed his last
point of resort beyond his own abilities, and she had left him nothing. The
servants were his to command, but also his to care for, and he was infuriated
by the assumption of helplessness in their confiding, painfully written letters.
If he failed, he thought grimly, they would all three beg on the streets.
Narcissus and Anna could, and would, do nothing to help him, or themselves.
The thought stayed with him through the protracted business of
tying up at the Oostpunt, hiring a handcart and porter for his luggage, and the
short walk home down the Spanjardstraat. When he came within sight of the
small, rosy-brick house called De Derde Koninck, the sound of the porter's
cart rattling on the cobbles alerted the household, and Narcissus looked out.
In the slanting evening light, the round, dark head peering round the jamb of
the door seemed strangely creased and distorted; the familiar keloid scars of
ancient burns on Narcissus's cheek and neck, traces of an accident which
had happened long before Balthasar was even born, seemed to pull his face
into grotesque lopsidedness; for a moment, he looked like a monster. The
next second, he recognised his master, and his face split in a wide, white
grin of delight: he flung wide the door, and hurried out to kiss Balthasar's
hand.
Having exchanged the formal embrace of welcome, he did not
relinquish his grasp, but peered up at his tall foster-son with anxious affection.
'You are well, dearest child? You look very well. You have eaten
well, and been cared for?'
'Very well indeed. And how are things at home?'
Before Narcissus could reply, Anna emerged to make her curtsey,
Balthasar remembered the porter, leaning patiently on his handcart, and
between them, they got Balthasar's possessions off the cart and into the
house.
Once over the threshold, the sense of familiarity was
overwhelming.
The Queen, his mother, gazed down serenely from over the
fireplace. The room was more cluttered than it had been in his father's day,
when Elizabeth's portrait had been its only decoration. A picture of himself as
a baby which he had found hidden in a cupboard now hung over the linen
press, and there was a Venetian mirror bought in an auction the year after his
father's death. Blue-and-white Chinese vases were symmetrically placed on
the top of the press, and a small but good carpet adorned the table by the
window where the big Bible lay in its place of honour. There were brass wall-
sconces with small mirrors behind them to double the light they shed, and
Anna had kept everything clean and polished like new. The room was full of
reflections, points of light winking from gleaming metal and shining wood.
It filled him with ambivalent satisfaction. His father Pelagius had
set his face absolutely against extravagance and superfluity; apart from
books, he had bought nothing which was not strictly necessary. Balthasar,
as he reached an age to notice such things, had longed for the tokens of an
established, burgerlijk household, a desire which, tentatively voiced, had
earned him the old man's devastating scorn.
'Balthasar my son, you are the descendant of kings, and a child
marked by fate. I will not tell you more until you are older, but understand this
for now. You are something far beyond these provincial bourgeois, and you
have no need whatsoever to live by their lights. Let it pass.' The black eyes
had flashed dangerously, and he had not dared to say more; his father's hand
was a heavy one, and he required obedient respect from his son. All the
same, he could still remember the suffocating frustration and resentment
which rose in him at his father's wilful refusal to understand, even while he
lowered his eyes like a good child and waited to be dismissed. It was all very
well to talk of mighty destinies, but the world he lived in was a small one. He
attended the Middelburg Latin school, like the sons of the other professional
men in the town, and he was forced to see himself through the eyes of his
schoolfellows. It was bad enough being black, with all the teasing and jeering
it brought him, but the poverty and eccentricity of his home was a gratuitous
extra source of torment, which rubbed him raw on a daily basis.
Then, when he was seventeen, he found himself the master of the
house, and all that was in it, which included a gratifying quantity of gold. He
had to be careful, and justify all his expenses to a trio of carefully selected
guardians until he came of age, but it was with a mixture of pleasure and
defiance that he had almost immediately set out to equip his home like the
houses of his friends.
Narcissus and Anna had prepared his old room for him, of course.
But in the morning, waking to the familiar sounds of the servants moving
about, and the sounds of the street, the clip-clop of the first farmers driving in
with milk, cart-wheels, voices and church bells, he wondered, as he lay in
bed, whether he should signal his changed relationship to the household by
moving to his father's quarters upstairs. He was now the master, after all.
Once he was up and dressed, rather than going straight down to
breakfast, he mounted the steep stairs to the attic, with an automatic
fluttering of the stomach which dated from the time his father was alive. His
own books and papers from Leiden were piled in the middle of the floor. The
rest of the room, from the plain bedstead at one end to the desk by the
window at the other, was redolent of the presence of his father, austere,
authoritative and demanding. The walls were lined with bookshelves; the
theology Pelagius had read for choice, and a collection of works relating to
his practice as a doctor and herbalist, all, from Balthasar's professional point
of view, rather out of date. From the height of his own hard-won knowledge,
Balthasar felt that he was entitled to begin to see his father in perspective.
For all his success as a practitioner, the old man had been no more than an
empiric, a quack of talent.
Also in the room, he knew, probably under the bed, was a large
wooden box. Pelagius had always worn the key of that box on a chain round
his neck. Balthasar vividly remembered his sense of transgression as he had
finally slipped the chain over his father's dead and heavy head, gently, as if
this last indignity might somehow waken him. At the time, he had not felt
able to deal with the old man's private life: confused and frightened by his
own freedom, he had shut the door to the attic, and hidden the key, chain
and all, at the bottom of his own cabinet.
More than four years had passed since then. He had been away
to University, and graduated as a fully trained doctor, something his father
had never been. It was time to take possession, to replace the plain serge
bed with the good red brocade hangings he had chosen for himself, the old
rush chair with his new velvet-seated one, which was a little big for the room
he now had, but would be perfect up here in the attic if they could get it up
the stairs. He could make himself comfortable; perhaps use the first-floor
room which had been his since his babyhood as a closet, or even a
consulting room.
The decisions made, he turned and went down to the kitchen.
Anna had made the milk-porridge with currants that had marked special
occasions for as long as he could remember, and there was gingerbread, and
buttermilk. He sat down at the kitchen table to be served, watching his
erstwhile nurse as she bustled about. He had called her Nantje when he was
little, he remembered suddenly; it was a long time since he had thought of
her by that name. She could not be all that old, he perceived suddenly, she
was perhaps in her mid-forties. But she could never have been good-looking,
and now in her middle years, her pale, protuberant eyes, beaky nose and
receding chin reminded him of an anxious little hen. Her movements were
also hen-like, jerky and indecisive. She had always been a worrier:
throughout his childhood, whenever he had run home in tears with a black
eye, a bloody nose or bruised from a fall on the ice, he had always gone by
preference to Narcissus – Sisi, as he had called him then. While Nantje
wrung her hands and wailed, loving and ineffectual, Sisi would wipe his nose,
cherish him in strong arms of unquestioning love, and tell him a story or sing
him a song until the tears had dried.
Looking at Anna now as she moved about the kitchen, he
assessed her in the light of his new knowledge of the body. The
exophthalmia was perhaps goitrous, but probably no cause for anxiety. She
showed some symptoms of arthritis: it was clear whenever she got to her feet
that her knees were stiff. But she was thin and spare; all in all, there might
be twenty or thirty years of useful life in her. It struck him as he sat idly
watching her work and eating the porridge she had cooked to welcome him,
that his medical knowledge was a sort of magic glass. One could no longer
simply see the surface of a person, what she looked like, let alone what she
hoped to show to the world. There was no escaping his cruel knowledge of
the body beneath the clothes, all that people tried to keep secret, and
beyond that, the things which were secret even from them: the workings of
their inner organs, the track-marks of disease and future suffering. It was so
easy to know more of people than they knew of themselves, it was saddening.
Narcissus came in with bread from the baker's and a basket of
herrings and cabbage. Once he had set down his burden, Balthasar
explained what he wanted. Together, they began to work out how it might be
achieved. It took the rest of the morning to sort out the attic to his
satisfaction, but when they had finished, it was all but unrecognisable. The
books had been completely rearranged, and those which were of no use to
him stored in a chest: he might even sell them. Once he was alone, he got
his father's box out from under the newly rehung bed, and took it over to the
table by the window. Sitting in his velvet-seated chair, he unlocked it, and
raised the lid. It seemed to be half-full of small, rather dirty-looking packets,
folded in eight, frayed and dirty at the seams from being long carried about.
It was with an odd reluctance that he unfolded the first of his
mother's letters. It felt somehow as if he were uncovering her, exposing
something which should remain hidden. The familiar, bold script gave him a
pang which was in some shameful way sexual, but when he began to read, a
flat sense of disappointment crept over him.
My dear Pelagius,
I am glad to hear so well of your ventures. There is no good news
to be had here: my children have formed the habit of treating me as a fool.
Timon continues to frown, and to tear the house down about my ears. I can
easily believe he would prefer to have me at Heidelberg, but I cannot resolve
upon it, his humour and mine being so diverse. When he was here I could not
persuade him to anything, and now much less so – La Grecque takes his
part in all things. I hope for your sake the bantling grows more dutiful than
these froward children. I will be infinitely obliged if you can return to The
Hague by May. Mr Mason will be in England, and I will have need of you.
Your most constant affectionate friend to command in love –
Candace
The names did not puzzle him. He knew very well whom they
referred to, but it was strange to read over old quarrels, and stranger still to
know she had thought of him. In 1652, when this letter was written, he had
been just beginning at the town Latin school, a little boy with a satchel on his
back, paying the price of his obvious strangeness in daily persecution,
unaware even that he had a living mother. Slowly, he laid the letter down
beside the open box, and took out another. It did not take him very long to
read them all. He had not uncovered his mother's nakedness, far from it. He
could sense a communication between his parents, but it did not lie in the
simple words before him, but rather in the spaces between, where he could
not see it.
There were no more letters in the box, but it was not yet empty.
There were a couple of books in it, and some oddments. His questing fingers
met a little washleather package, and he unrolled it, to find a most peculiar
object. A carved crystal, set in gold, and surmounted by a golden bird. A
strange thing for his father to have owned, and he could not think what it was,
though it was obviously rare and curious: for a moment, he wondered if it
might be African, it seemed so unaccountable. Dismissing it as an insoluble
problem, he rolled it up again, and laid it on top of the letters. He opened the
first of the books, and found some pages of notes on Indian plants: he was
briefly puzzled, until he realised that there was also writing at the other end.
Turning it round, he found that two-thirds of the pages were filled with a Latin
text in his father's hand, called 'The African Sibyl'. The old man must have
had a reason for writing it out, but it meant nothing to him. He set it aside,
and looked at the other volume. This was also in Latin, and turned out to be a
private journal written by his father. It seemed, from its opening, that it must
have dated from some time in the last years of his life.
Fascinated, he began to read. It was obviously an entirely private
document which Pelagius had written in order to clarify his mind. It told him
far more of his father's spiritual life than of the events which had shaped him:
rather than expanding on the thing Balthasar most wanted to know, which
was how on earth his parents had come to love one another and why he had
been born, he had written a dissertation on earthly and heavenly love, in
which he castigated himself for being a slave to his natural affections. The
book also revealed, more fully than ever before, his uncomfortable belief that
his son had somehow been born to set the world to rights.
Balthasar sat on, reading, while the sun went down the sky. The
book brought his father so close to hand it was as if the old man were
standing in the room with him. He did not even rouse himself when the bell of
the nearby Oostkerk sounded for evening prayers, but stayed where he was,
stirring only to light a candle, until he came to the final words: 'and thus I
humbly resign myself to the dispositions of almighty God'. He got stiffly to
his feet, cramped with long sitting, and noticed that the box was still not
quite empty. At the very bottom, there was a sheet of paper folded in half,
which turned out to be the certificate of his parents' marriage, another slip,
which recorded his own baptism, and a small purse of Genoa velvet which
looked as if it might contain jewels, though when he lifted it hopefully, it was
far too light. When he opened the strings, it turned out to hold nothing but a
handful of ancient hazelnuts, darkened by time and handling, the shrivelled
kernels rattling loosely in the shells.
He looked at the sheet of paper before him which recorded his
mother's marriage to his father, and a kind of terror overcame him. He
crossed the room, and opened his doctor's bag to find a scalpel. His father's
diary, which he had called Notatitunculae, was bound in ordinary vellum.
Folding the papers in half again to make them smaller, he slit the binding
carefully along the top of the front board, and slid the pages inside. Once he
had made some glue and sealed up the slit, no one would be any the wiser.
The smell of food was coming up the stairs, and he could hear the clattering
of delftware. Time for supper; the glue could wait. He piled everything back
into the box, locked it, and went downstairs.
It took him a long time to get to sleep that night. The strangeness
of his quarters oppressed him and made him restless. Opening his eyes in
the grey half-light before dawn, he saw someone sitting in the chair by the
window, on the far side of the room. Heart thumping, he slid cautiously out of
bed, and approached soft-footed. The chair-legs scraped on the floor as the
intruder turned to look at him. It was Pelagius, his dark face set in bitter lines
of judgement, his eyes blazing with terrible, familiar anger.
'You're not here,' Balthasar shouted. 'Go away. I'm dreaming you.'
'Miserable child,' growled his father, the deep, well-remembered
voice harsh with rejection. 'I am not your dream. You are mine.'
Balthasar lunged forwards, with what motive he did not know; he
felt a sickening jolt, and found that he was sitting up in bed. It was indeed
dawn, and the room of course was empty. Sweat was running down his
chest, and his nightshirt was clammy and unpleasant against his skin.
The next morning, heavy-eyed and unrested, he walked into the town with
Narcissus, who had errands to run, intending to visit Cornelis Jonson. Before
they went their separate ways, they turned together into the Groote Kerk. On
a modest slab by the west door was the memorial Balthasar had
commissioned for his father. It was simple enough, the name and the date of
death with a flourished cartouche around the letters; plain as it was, he
remembered grimly, it had cost him a little over eighty guilders.
Narcissus startled him out of his thoughts. 'It was hard for him to
be buried here,' he said softly.
'How do you know?' Balthasar demanded.
'He told me when he was very weak. Your father's people believe
it is a hard fate to die in another country. And of course, those of the royal
house of Oyo who are not buried in the Bara, which is the royal graveyard,
are not remembered in the king-list, so their names are not kept alive. It
disturbed his peace, at the last.'
'But he must have spent almost his whole life out of Africa,'
objected Balthasar. 'I am surprised he still remembered such things. And
they should not matter to a man who has found God.'
Narcissus smiled rather sadly. 'You are young, little master.
When you are older, you will realise that the life you are brought up in will
never truly leave you, no matter where you chance to go. And your father
should have died a king. That is no small matter.'
'Do you think he would have gone back to Africa, if he had not
been caring for me?'
Narcissus shook his head. 'No. Make yourself easy, my dear
child. He could not have gone back, there was no place there for him. But it
grieved him, all the same.'
Once they had parted, Balthasar went in search of Cornelis
Jonson van Ceulen. He found the old painter at work, sitting at an easel and
wearing a hempen smock over his shirt and breeches. A lustrous black
brocade dress was seated on the model's dais, cunningly propped with an
armature of wire and pillows, and an elegant, wire-stiffened lace ruff was
pinned to the high chair-back so that it rose fanlike behind the empty neck of
the dress.
Jonson was setting a highlight along the arm, with slithering,
expert scribbles of a small brush, but he turned, hearing footsteps, to see
Balthasar make his bow. He bowed in return, still seated, brush and palette
in hand.
'Ah. Mynheer van Overmeer. I am very glad to see you.'
'A burgomeester's wife?' enquired Balthasar, smiling in
acknowledgement, and indicating the work in progress.
'A wedding portrait. One of the Schot daughters is marrying a
merchant of Vlissingen. All most appropriate. The bridegroom has
commissioned a pair of portraits in their wedding clothes. Juffrouw Schot is
exigeant, and fashionable. I trust her father has judged the depths of the
young man's pockets aright, or there will be storms to come.' As he spoke,
he was cleaning off his palette with a knife. The parsimonious, carefully
arranged blobs of pigment smeared and blurred as the blade scraped across
them: he finished the job with a turpentine-soaked rag and set the palette
fastidiously to one side. 'I was most sorry to hear of the Queen's death,
mynheer. I am sad to say that I do not have a message for you. I am sure
you were not forgotten, but she died very suddenly, after only two days'
illness.'
Balthasar was unsure how to reply. He had in truth never known
how much the old painter knew. As he hesitated, he felt his face grow warm:
Jonson was staring at him; his gaze dispassionate, measuring. His eyes
were still very blue. 'There is no one to overhear us, young sir,' he said
softly. 'I painted the late Queen of Bohemia, a good portrait, though I say so
myself. She chose to interest herself in a young man, the son of a
confidential servant, and when I came to meet the young man in question, I
found that although he was a blackamoor, her lovely eyes were set in his
young face. I deduce nothing, but I will not hide my own eyes from what I can
plainly see. Have no fear. I spent twenty years in the English court, and a
good many secrets have come my way in the course of my life. I do not
betray confidences.'
Balthasar, naked before his kind, searching gaze, could only bow
once more. He felt the blood mounting to his head, and knew his cheeks
must be flaming. He felt literally tongue-tied, and enraged by his own
ineptness.
'I had a great respect for your father,' remarked the old
painter. 'He saved my life on more than one occasion, I believe. Be
comforted. You will be alone with your knowledge soon enough, young sir.
Few enough can have known anything of this business, and all of them are
now old, if indeed they are still in life.'
'Did he tell you how it came about?' blurted Balthasar.
'Of course not. He told me nothing. As I said, I have eyes, and I
know how to use them. He was right to be secret – I will own, I would have
thought very ill of the matter if anyone had told me of it. But your father was
not a toy for any woman's lickerish fancy. I conversed with him on many
occasions, and he was a man of royal blood and royal nature. Whatever may
have possessed them, I will swear that they were in their sober senses, and
thought they acted for the best. But your father did say something to me
once, which I did not understand, because I had not then seen you. He told
me that you were the child of a dream.'
Again, Balthasar was at a loss for an answer. Cornelis Jonson
waited politely for a few moments, then picked up his palette. 'I must bid you
good morning, young sir. Morning light is not to be wasted at this time of
year. I have some more information about the Queen's last weeks in letters
from my friends in London, and I will be pleased to copy them for you. You
are welcome to call again, but come when the sun is going down the sky.'
It was nearly a fortnight before he took up the invitation. He told himself he
wished to allow Jonson time to make the promised copies, but in fact, he
needed to get over feeling an ill-mannered fool for not realising a morning call
would be unwelcome. When he finally brought himself to return, he was
surprised, as the servant opened the door for him, to hear voices. He entered
and made his bow, wondering what he might find. He was still more
surprised, straightening up, to find a lady, rising in a rustle of skirts to make
her curtsey. He approached, full of curiosity. He had never seen Cornelis
bargaining with a client – the obvious explanation for her presence, since the
painter had no relatives in the town – and he was most anxious to do so. The
dignified negotiation of payment was one of the essential skills of the
professional man, and he felt sure that Cornelis would have much to teach
him.
'Mynheer van Overmeer, may I present Mevrouw Behn? Mevrouw,
this is Mynheer Balthasar van Overmeer, a citizen of this town, and lately, a
doctor.'
'Honoured, mevrouw,' he said politely. Once they were seated
again, he looked at her with interest. She was a young woman of about his
own age, attractive, well-built, with plump cheeks, and moist, heavy-lidded,
protuberant eyes. He felt her glance darting all over his body in little stabs,
and unconsciously straightened his back.
'A portrait, perhaps, mevrouw?' he asked politely.
'Mevrouw Behn is not a client,' explained Cornelis. 'She has come
most kindly to bring me news out of England.' A little disappointed, he
considered the woman more carefully. Her name and her clothes were Dutch,
but once he looked again, he saw that there was much that was strange
about her. The dress was not silk, as he had first thought, but a much
cheaper camlet, a silk-and-wool mixture with the silk used for the weft so that
it would show to best advantage. The toe of her shoe, peeping beneath the
hem, was frayed. The linen collar was a little past its best, and not
expensive, and she wore no lace – all in all, he realised, he had been misled
by an un-Dutch showiness in her dress and mode of presenting herself. She
was a good deal less prosperous than she sought to appear.
'Are you English, mevrouw?' he enquired.
'Yes, mynheer. Do you speak English?' she said eagerly. Her
Dutch was fluent, but her accent was atrocious.
'I do, mevrouw. My father wished me to learn the language.'
'Oh, and why was that?' she asked, switching with obvious relief
into English, and favouring him with a charming smile.
He hesitated. 'My mother's connections were with that country,'
he said cautiously, 'and a teacher was to be had, an old Royalist exile in
need of employment. If I may ask a question in return, what brings you to
Middelburg?'
'I am married into Holland, Mynheer van Overmeer, and my
husband's family is here. I have been here only a little while, and my husband
is away. It is weakness, perhaps, but I found that I longed for the sound of an
English voice. When I heard Mynheer Cornelis was an old courtier, I came at
once to pay my respects.'
'Have you then connections with the court?'
'I am no courtier, sir, but I have some acquaintance with Whitehall
and St James's. My father was a gentleman of Kent, and loyal in the late
times, so he suffered for it like your late tutor, and we were bred in country
simplicity. But once the King was returned, he resolved to mend his fortunes
by taking office abroad, and was appointed Lieutenant-General of our
possessions in the West Indies. Alas, he died at sea on our voyage there, so
when opportunity allowed, I returned to England with my mother and brother.'
Her voice was pleasant to listen to; she rattled on, glib and
charmingly confiding. 'But how did that bring you to court, mevrouw?' he
asked.
'I was coming to that. When I was in Surinam, I met with some
Indians, not the usual sort who lived around the settlement, but taller, and
grim of aspect. They told me of a place in the mountains called Toomac-
Hoomack, deep within the continent, where gold-dust streams in little
channels, fetched down by the rains. I wished to acquaint his majesty
privately with this tale, so I went to St James's, and sought the favour of an
audience. He is a tall young man, very black and harsh-favoured, but most
winning and gracious in his speech. My husband has an office in London,
and when we lived there, we often walked in Pall Mall, or went to see his
majesty dine.'
'Did you ever see the Queen of Bohemia?' he could not resist
asking.
The lady's hands flew up, as if she had been asked to express the
inexpressible. 'The Queen of Bohemia! Yes, indeed. She lived long in
Holland, did she not, and came over when the King was crowned? I saw her
at the playhouse. She was the very pattern of antique beauty, I remember,
and most sweet and graceful in her mien. His majesty was very gallant to
her, it was clear she had won his heart. Have you some knowledge of this
lady?'
'I did not know her,' he explained stiffly, 'but my father did, I
believe.'
Mevrouw Behn continued to make conversation for ten minutes or
so, then smilingly made her curtsey, and took her leave.
Once the door was safely shut behind her, Jonson turned to
Balthasar. 'Well, Mynheer Balthasar, and what do you think of Mevrouw
Behn?'
'She seems to me a most witty and engaging lady, Mynheer
Cornelis.'
'Engaging she is, and smooth, but be wary, my young friend. She
is not a woman to be trusted. Observe. She speaks of her father, and of the
court, as if she was quite the gentlewoman, but if she is so, then why is she
the wife of a greasy Dutchman? I do not trust her tales of the Indies. I'll wager
she went to find some rich planter, but she failed of her venture, and returned
with nothing better than a Dutch cheeseworm. Mynheer Behn is not a man in
a great way of business, I can assure you, and his brother is a printer, a man
who works with his hands. We do not see such women in Middelburg, but
my friends tell me there are town-misses in London now who give themselves
out for gentlemen's daughters when they have nothing but their wits to
give 'em the title, and I suspect she is one of them. I have been a servant to
the Stuarts all my life, but I am glad I am not in England to see with my own
eyes what the new King is making of his realm, if women like Mevrouw Behn
are a sign of the times.
'Another thing. My London friends told me at the time that the
Queen of Bohemia had honoured the playhouse with her presence. She went
to D'Avenant's opera with the King, and I rejoiced in the news, because it told
me her health was improved. I was copying the passage out only the other
day – I will give you a budget of papers to take with you, when you leave. But
from what Mevrouw Behn was saying earlier, the visit took place when our fair
guest was in the Indies. Your mother's life in England was sadly brief, and
she was seldom very well, so I think she went only once to the playhouse. I
deduce that one of the lady's stories may be true, or the other, or neither, but
not both.'
Copyright © 2002 by Jane Stevenson. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.