“She can’t do all that in one afternoon!”
“I don’t believe either of them expects to cover everything in a short time. I assume they will be spending time together for the week that he plans to be here. Now take your place. The food is on the table and your father is now waiting to say grace.”
Stunned by this unexpected news of the romance developing so fast, Francesca stood behind her chair. Next to her was Maria, wrinkled, stiff-jointed through aches and pains and amply built, with impish-faced Sybylla at her left hand. Facing them on the opposite side of the table was Aletta, always quiet and reserved, her hair pale as moonshine, and also good-natured Griet, it being customary for a maidservant to eat with the family, except on formal occasions, if she was well liked and fitted in domestically. Anna, slender and full-bosomed, stood at the end of the table, looking toward Hendrick at the head. He bowed his thick mane of ginger hair and sent his deep voice booming over the table.
“Bless these victuals to our use, good Lord, and us to Thy service.”
There was a clatter of chairs being pulled out across the floor’s black and white tiles and everyone sat down to tuck into fried herrings, salad and vegetables and crusty white bread. Francesca, although she ate well, was far from the table in her thoughts, following her aunt and the Florentine on their tour of the city. She did not think he would register any of Amsterdam’s grand landmarks if he did not stop gazing at Janetje as he had done that morning.
When the meal was over Hendrick asked Aletta if she would like to accompany Francesca and him on their walk to Master Rembrandt’s house. She shook her head and looked up at him with her huge, serious gray-green eyes that were much like his own
“No, Papa. I thank you, but I’m going back to play with Esther Korver again this afternoon. I promised her.” She did not like going out with him when her mother was not there too. He had a way of drawing attention to himself all the time and thus, she felt, to her. Similarly, although she was like Francesca in loving to draw and paint, she dreaded his teaching sessions in the studio.
“Naturally you must go there,” he said jovially. Then with complete disregard for his own lax ways, he added, “Promises must be kept.”
There was a sudden shout from Sybylla as she rushed across the room, her corn-colored curls abob, and clasped her father’s legs. “Take me with you! I want to go too!”
Bending down, Hendrick loosened her hands and picked her up in his arms. “No, Sybylla. Not today.” He did not like to deny her anything, always ready to indulge her, but he did not feel he could inflict her exuberant ways on Rembrandt at the present time. “If you are a good girl and make no fuss, I will bring you back some sweetmeats in my pocket.”
Immediately she was all smiles again, and Maria, impatient with such bribery, drew her away. “Don’t you bother your papa anymore. You can help me fold linen this afternoon.”
Sybylla scowled and stamped a foot in protest at the irksome chore, but the promise of the sweetmeats kept her from a tantrum.
Hendrick and Francesca left the house by the main door, stepping straight from the reception hall into the street, which was the style of all city houses, even those of the wealthy. She held the book under her arm, for it would have been beneath his dignity to carry it. He had no false pride toward his fellow human beings, whatever their station in life, but he had a huge personal conceit and among his idiosyncrasies was a delight in strutting along, swinging a cane that was fashionably shoulder-high with a red tassel dancing on it, and never burdening himself with anything. Even in dire straits, he would find a small coin somewhere in the recesses of his purse or pockets, often having to search for it, to give an urchin to carry for him a portfolio of drawings or a roll of canvas.
It was a gloriously warm and sunny afternoon. The iris-blue sky seemed to sparkle about the variegated gabled rooftops as if it had garnered the iridescence of the city’s waterways. Linden trees, bright with vigorous green foliage, gave pleasing shade. With a tax imposed on width frontage, all the houses were tall and narrow, rising up through four, five and sometimes six floors to an attic, but each ran back a considerable length to a walled courtyard and occasionally a garden. A flagged passageway, incorporated into the side of many houses, gave access to these rear regions. Built usually of redbrick that was soon mellowed by time and with sandstone ornamentation, each house had above its top window a hoist jutting out like a claw, for with awkward corners and narrow staircases within there was no other means of getting furniture to the upper floors except by rope.
A large cupboard was being hoisted to a fourth floor at one house as Hendrick and Francesca crossed a bridge. She paused briefly to watch it swinging suspended in the air before she darted forward to catch up with her father again. As she had expected, their progress was erratic. He could not pass any acquaintance without some conversation. If those persons were on the other side of the canal he would thunder his greetings across to them, making other people turn their heads to stare.
Before long they came to a street corner where an old seaman with a crutch and a peg leg stood propped against a wall as he played a flute. His cap was on the ground and Hendrick threw a stiver into it.
“Play us your merriest tune!”
As the seaman obliged, Hendrick turned to Francesca and took her by the hand to lead her into a lively jig to the music of the flute, she followed the quite intricate steps he had taught her himself last St. Nicholaes’s Eve. Round and round on the cobbles they danced. A small crowd gathered. A few other people joined in and the seaman’s cap became agleam with coins. There was applause as Hendrick led Francesca away. She smiled at him joyously. Nobody else had a father who could turn the most ordinary outing into an occasion of drama and entertainment.
They crossed a bridge over another canal and came into Breed-straat. Rembrandt’s home was an imposing residence topped by a steep gable, the double windows of the attic having once given light to the pupils’ studio, his being on the floor below. Hendrick, hammering on the door, supposed that this visit would be the last to this particular house, for Rembrandt was shortly to leave it, forced to by unhappy circumstances. Four years earlier, in desperate financial straits, Rembrandt had made an appeal for the liquidation of his property, thus saving himself in the nick of time from being declared a bankrupt. Legal procedures had enabled him to continue living in the house even after it was sold with all its contents by auction, but now time had run out and he was shortly to remove to a small and humbler dwelling.
Hendrick knew it must be admitted that much of Rembrandt’s ill luck, apart from deep personal tragedies, was due to his extravagance and his failure to keep abreast with popular taste in painting. Hendrick was aware of being guilty himself on both counts, but a man could not change his nature. Although there was a warning in what had happened to a fellow artist, Hendrick was not unduly worried by it. He trusted to the generosity of Fate, which all through his life had rallied to him whenever a financial situation was particularly bleak. The natural optimism with which he was born had never yet deserted him.
The door had opened, but Francesca, who had paused on the lowest step of the entrance flight, had her gaze riveted at the Veldhuis family home farther down the street, where both her mother and her aunt were born. They could remember Rembrandt’s late wife, Saskia, their ages twelve and ten respectively at the time of her death. But that thought was not in Francesca’s mind now. She had seen, although her father had failed to notice, that Aunt Janetje and the Florentine gentleman had just alighted from a coach and were entering the house together.
“Who is this daydreaming on the steps?”
With a start Francesca looked up at the door, where Juffrouw Stoffels, who kept house for Rembrandt and lived with him as his wife, was smiling at her in welcome, capable peasant hands clasped together.
“It’s only me,” Francesca answered self-consciously. At any other time she would have responded more quickly to the little joke, but she had seen her aunt’s romance set still further on the course of marriage. Janetje would never have asked any ordinary stranger into her home for tea and those delicious little cakes that she made.
“Come in, dear child. Why are you still standing out there when your papa is already indoors?” Round-faced with handsome dark eyes, warm-spirited, loving and maternal, Hendrickje Stoffels flung out her arms to the child. Francesca sprang up the steps into her embrace.
“How are you today, ma’am?” Francesca inquired, remembering her manners as the door was shut after her. Her mother had explained that Rembrandt and Hendrickje would have married long ago if it had not meant that by some condition in Saskia’s will he would have forfeited a small allowance that at times had provided food for their table when otherwise there would have been none.
“I’m very well, Francesca, even though moving from here means that there’s a lot to do.”
Francesca had seen at once that the house was even more empty than the last time she had been here. The reception hall was completely bare, although the black and white marble tiles were as spotless as ever. She could see through the open door of the drawing room that everything was gone from there as well and she supposed it to be the same in the rest of the house. Yet she had been told that in his heyday Rembrandt had had over a hundred paintings on his walls, half of them by himself and many by his now well-known pupils.
Rembrandt’s voice and her father’s echoed hollowly from the studio upstairs, magnified as sounds always are when a house ceases to be a home. Hendrickje, taking Francesca by the hand, led her up there.
“Look who’s come to see you, Rembrandt.”
In the studio, devoid of everything now except a large easel and a table with the usual conglomeration of artists’ materials, Rembrandt turned where he stood with her father. Clad in an old blue painting smock, a length of cloth wound into a flat turban about his head, his white hair as curly in his fifties as it had been in his youth, he smiled at the piquant beauty of the child holding out a book to him.
“I thank you, Francesca,” he said, taking it from her.
She in her turn thought that, in spite of the parting of his lips that lifted upward the ends of his narrow mustache, his whole life-ridden face was full of sadness. Perhaps he was remembering all the happy times he had had in this house that would never come again.
“You may keep the book as long as you wish,” she said swiftly, wanting to cheer him. “Papa won’t mind.”
“That’s most generous,” he replied appreciatively in his deep voice. “I may have to take my time over it, as I’m about to embark on a commissioned work.”
“Shall you paint it here?”
“No.” He cleared a space on the table and put the book down. “It’s far too large for me to paint in this studio or at my new abode. I’ve always been permitted to set up my large canvases in the Zuider Church and I shall paint there once again.”
Hendrickje put a hand on Francesca’s shoulder. “Come down to the kitchen with me now and let the menfolk continue their talk.”
Francesca accompanied her. “Is Cornelia here?” she asked hopefully. Hendrickje and Rembrandt’s daughter was only a year younger than she and they always enjoyed meeting.
“No, she’s gone with Titus to the other house in Rozengracht, where we’re going to live. He’s putting up some shelves and getting a few things ready. He and I are business partners now, you know.”
Titus, who was now nineteen, was the fourth and only surviving son of Rembrandt’s late wife, another boy and two girls not having lived more than a few weeks after their birth. Francesca liked him and thought of him almost as a brother, because one of his father’s portraits of him as a boy hung in the parlor of her home and she saw it every day.
“Are you going to have a shop there?” she questioned with interest.
Hendrickje laughed. “Oh no! But together we are employing Rembrandt and paying him a wage. By that means he does not have to surrender his paintings to the Court of Insolvency. Now you shall try some of the pancakes I’ve been making and I’m sure your father would like a glass of my apple wine.”
Francesca was reminded of two other people taking refreshment together. On the way home again she saw the coach was still waiting outside the Veldhuis house.
F
OR TEN DAYS
nothing more was seen of Janetje. Then Francesca and Aletta arrived home from school in Maria’s care at the usual hour of noon to discover an air of excitement prevailing in the house. Anna, full of smiles, met them with the news.
“Giovanni de Leone was here! As your father is Janetje’s most senior male relative, albeit by marriage, the Florentine asked him formally for her hand. The wedding is already arranged for next week.” She read the question in her eldest daughter’s deep green eyes. “I know it has all happened very quickly, but he is due to return home in a matter of days.”
Aletta spoke up. “Where is Aunt Janetje now?”
“Upstairs in the sewing room with a seamstress. Her betrothed has given her some beautiful Lyonese silk that he bought in Paris, not knowing then it would be for his bride’s wedding raiment.” Anna became aware that Francesca had neither moved nor spoken. She cupped her hand against the child’s pale face. “I believe you knew of this match before any of us. Papa told me you spoke of it on the very day they met. It won’t be any easier for Janetje to leave us than it will be for us to see her go. We must smooth the way for her.”
Neither of them noticed that Maria, thinking that Anna and Francesca should be on their own together at this moment, had shepherded Aletta away with her. Francesca swallowed hard.
“Will she be happy forever and ever with Signor de Leone?”
Anna drew her daughter to a cushioned bench by the wall. “Love isn’t just being happy, Francesca. It’s more than that. It is the willing commitment of one’s whole heart to one person. That brings joy and ecstasy beyond measure and far ahead of your present understanding, but it can also bring pain and sorrow and the agony of being torn apart, not only by outside events but through the actions of the very two who care most for each other. Janetje will have special problems to face in going to a new country where another language is spoken, amid strangers and far from home.” Fondly she smoothed back an unruly curl from her daughter’s brow. “But true love can maintain its strength no matter what is hurled against it. I believe Janetje and Giovanni have found that kind of love for each other or else I would do everything in my power to prevent the marriage.”