As soon as they reached the dining hall Francesca recognized it instantly from the setting of the studio painting. There was the colonnaded fireplace, the handsome wall covering of gilded leather and the seascape hanging above the chair where Catharina had sat. During the noon meal Catharina told her that originally it had been arranged, in agreement with Willem de Hartog, that Francesca should stay next door with some good neighbors during her apprenticeship.
“It would have been so convenient for you, Francesca,” she continued, “being so near. It was such a surprise and disappointment to us yesterday when Vrouw Wolff arrived to inform us she had been given sole responsibility for you.”
Jan supported her words from the head of the table. “At least we must be thankful you are not farther away.”
Catharina nodded encouragingly at Francesca. “We hope that you’ll spend time with us after working hours whenever it is convenient.”
Francesca smiled appreciatively. “I should like that very much. It’s good to know that I have friends in this house.”
That afternoon Francesca started work, deciding she would paint the market square within the frame of the window. Jan provided a small wooden platform for her to stand on to improve her view and stayed to discuss what she was doing. It was time for her to go back to Geetruyd’s house almost before she realized it.
Jan showed her out through the drawing room, which had been hidden from her view by closed double doors when she had arrived at the house that morning. Now, coming into it by another door, she saw it could have been called a music room. At one end of the long room was a clavichord, a particularly large and graceful instrument with a shaped lid that was raised when the keys were being played. Beside it was a viola da gamba and on the wall hung a lute. At the opposite end of the room were two virginals set apart and a guitar lay on one of them. She looked at Jan with delight.
“I can see this is a house of music as well as art!”
“It is. Do you play?”
“The virginal.”
“Then you must join in our family concerts.”
“I should enjoy that so much.” She had paused to look at another painting of Catharina. Again there was the theme of a letter, but the atmosphere was entirely different. It showed her in the last months of pregnancy, dignified and beautiful, wearing a blue silk jacket that swelled out over her extended figure and was tied with ribbons. She was standing in front of the studio table with the light streaming over her while the tranquillity and tenderness that prevailed were almost palpable.
“You see,” Jan said at Francesca’s side, “even when my good wife is pregnant she poses for me.”
“She told me about that.”
“The title is simply
A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
”
Francesca was studying it keenly. “I know exactly what is portrayed here. This is a woman who has just received a letter from her husband, who is far away. Perhaps he is at sea and has sent it from a foreign port. Or else he’s on business in a distant Dutch town. Either way he is concerned about her bearing their first child. She’s very alone and aware of it. Even that chair in the foreground on the right creates a barrier between her and us. Yet she is full of love because it is a married love letter that he has sent her.”
There was a pause before he spoke. “What can I say? That is what I aimed for and you have voiced it all. When I told Catharina what I wanted to bring out in this painting she took all the love letters I had written to her during our courtship and reread a different one every day.”
She felt her heart contract on some emptiness within herself. Her voice came quietly. “It sounds as if you and Catharina exchanged many letters.”
“We did. They were of extreme importance to us when it seemed as if we were never to be allowed to marry. Both our families were strongly against the match. I was twenty-one, only recently finished with my apprenticeship, a brand-new member of the Guild with no money and little prospect of ever having any. Since Catharina was Catholic and came from a well-to-do background while I was the Calvinist son of a tavernkeeper who didn’t want me to take on the responsibility of marriage so soon, I suppose it was not a surprising impasse.”
“How did you win through?”
“My parents finally gave in when they realized how resolved I was to have Catharina, and her mother relented when my former master made an appeal on my behalf.”
“No wonder you showed such understanding of my simpler problem over a friendship.”
“There is nothing new under the sun, is there?”
She returned his smile. “I suppose not.”
Outside the double doors, which would be opened for social occasions, Francesca found Clara patiently waiting for her, seated on one of the sapphire-blue, lion-headed chairs. She was eager for talk and questioned Francesca all the way home.
That evening after dinner, Francesca sat down in her own room to write another letter to Pieter. This time she explained the situation in full. She wrote a different letter to Hendrick and her sisters. After telling them about the Vermeer family and her first day she added a description of Fabritius’s painting of the chained bird. She knew it would hold a message for her father, aware that she was using the symbolism of it in her letter much as it might have been used in a work of art. Hendrick would associate her with the captive bird and himself as the one who had fashioned the chain. It would touch his sensibilities far more than any written plea would have done.
Catharina had also been writing letters to invite family and friends to come to Beatrix’s fifth birthday party in July. When the last invitation had been written she arose from the table at which she had been sitting in the upstairs room where Jan dealt with all business matters. Picking up the branched candlestick that had illumined her task, she left the room, crossed the landing and went into every bedchamber where her children lay sleeping. All was well.
This was the time of day that was important to her, when she could feel free to spend a little time on her own with Jan. The candlelight showed the way for her as she set off downstairs, knowing where her husband was to be found, for the resonant notes of the viola de gamba came from the drawing room, sounding much like the hum of a particularly melodious bee.
When she hastened across the hall her new silk petticoat, a gift from her generous mother, rustled about her ankles. Catharina thought it was a measure of Jan’s tolerance that he never showed resentment over his mother-in-law’s generosity or the children receiving gifts, which were often ill timed. They frequently came when he was going through a lean period with a lack of sales in his art dealing and debts began mounting up again. Yet he knew that nothing his wife received from any other source could compare with the gift of large pearl earbobs that he gave her as a marriage-morning gift after their first night together.
Their marriage was satisfying in every way. Jan with his kind heart was both her lover and her friend, which made the essential qualities in a good husband. Kindness in a man covered everything from shared pleasure in bed to concern for everything else important in family and everyday life. If anything, she loved him more now than in those first halcyon days of their passionate union. She was also proud of him for being held in such high regard in Delft. It was to him that the local authorities turned for advice on works of art, and he who had to approve paintings offered for public auction in the town.
Catharina passed a richly carved cupboard on her way to find Jan at his music. It was one of the items that had come with her as part of her dowry, together with some lavish furnishings, including the costly Turkish rug that draped a table in the drawing room.
But the house was not without its own grandeur, for Jan’s father had been in comfortable circumstances when he died and the house had been furnished accordingly. His widow had not been able to take everything she would have liked when moving from the Mechelin after a year of living under the same roof with her son’s wife—a year filled with domestic conflict. Digma Vermeer had left behind those items of furniture she knew Jan preferred, for he had been the apple of her eye, even if she had never approved his choice of a wife.
Catharina entered the drawing room. Jan was seated at the far end on one of the lion-headed chairs that his mother had bequeathed him. He had the large viola da gamba propped at a comfortable angle and supported by his spread knees on each side of it, the fingers of his left hand high on the strings, his right hand drawing the bow. She thought how, at that moment, he personified the close link between painting and music. He looked up and smiled as she came toward him, but did not interrupt his playing. She put down the branched candlestick and seated herself to listen quietly until the last note hummed into silence.
“I like that piece,” she said approvingly. “Are you going to play it on the evening of the party?”
“I thought I would.” He rose from the chair and carried the instrument across the room to prop it in its place near the clavichord. “Is everything quiet upstairs?”
“Yes, peace at last! How did you get on with your pupil today?” She patted the velvet cushion of the couch for him to join her there by the fire, for it had turned unseasonably cold that evening and Elizabeth had lit it for him at his music.
“I think Francesca will excel, given time and the chance to strengthen certain aspects of her work. My only anxiety is that she is already balking at the conditions laid down for her by Vrouw Wolff.” He gave his wife a full account of all Francesca had told him. “So I hope there is not going to be so much harassment as to interfere with her concentration.”
“You’ll have to put your foot down with Vrouw Wolff if it does.” Catharina made a little grimace. “Five minutes with that self-righteous woman was more than enough for me.” He had put an arm about her and she rested comfortably against him.
“In addition to everything else, it appears that Francesca has been forbidden to see or write to a young fellow of whom her father previously approved even to the extent of encouraging her to agreeing to courtship.”
“Who is the young man?” she asked.
“His name is Pieter van Doorne, a horticulturist of Haarlem. Did Vrouw Wolff mention him to you?”
“No. It was all the stupid nonsense that she spouted to you. She seemed to take it for granted that you would always accompany the girl and I didn’t disillusion her.”
“With this threat of incarceration in a house of correction hanging over her, Francesca had to write and let Vrouw Wolff read and approve a letter telling van Doorne not to visit Delft.”
“That’s despicable!” Catharina was outraged.
“I agree.” He leaned forward without taking his arm from her to boot a piece of burning peat, which was threatening to topple, deeper into the heart of the fire. When he sat back again his hand rested familiarly and caressingly on her breast. “I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Francesca told Vrouw Wolff, as she told me, that she and van Doorne should be able to meet as often as they wished since there is only friendship between them. The girl is really upset about it.”
Catharina half raised herself to look with mock surprise into his face. “You believe it’s only friendship, do you?”
“Francesca was quite definite about it.”
“It sounds to me as if she were trying to convince herself more than you.” She tapped his chest with a forefinger. “Women don’t go up in the air about friendship. There must be more to it than that.”
“You’ve missed the point. There is a principle at stake and I agree with her. If she’s responsible enough to be apprenticed like a man, then she should be equally capable of looking after the social side of her life without interference.”
“Agreed, but I’m sticking to my romantic theory.” Catharina raised herself higher and kissed him on the lips. His arms closed around her and he held her to him, lengthening and deepening their kiss.
“Let’s lock the doors,” he said softly.
She leaned her head back to regard him playfully. “We have a perfectly good bed upstairs.”
“Do as I say, sweeting.”
There was a velvet look in his eyes that in itself was a promise of all sorts of sweet treats for her. She slipped from his arms to cross to the double doors and then to another through which she had come into the room, turning the key in each. He was a man who needed the width of a bed for his lovemaking and there was no question of the narrow couch being used, although he had taken the cushions from it to toss them down in front of the fire. These were followed in a swirl by the Turkish rug, whose rich hues made an exotic spread for her. He pulled off his jacket and she released her ribbons. Within seconds of her petticoat being discarded he encircled her warm nakedness in his arms and drew her down to the rug with him. They surrendered to their mutual passion in the combined glow of the candles and the fire.
I
N THE MORNING
Francesca placed the letter to her father and sisters in a silver bowl in the hall. Geetruyd had told her it was for incoming and outgoing post. She knew it would reach her father swiftly, for Holland had an excellent postal service with sorting offices in all the main towns, which she had heard was without parallel in Europe, but it was expensive. Although her sisters had spoken of corresponding with her, she could be sure they would have to wait and send letters to her only when someone they knew personally could deliver them, Vrouw Wolff had mentioned what the postal rates were the previous evening and she put the necessary money on top of Hendrick’s letter.
As soon as Clara had left her at the Vermeers’ house, Francesca went to Catharina to ask if Elizabeth could take her letter to Pieter to the postal office. “I had to tell him the truth of this bizarre situation,” she explained after ensuring that Jan had told Catharina everything as he had promised he would.
“Of course Elizabeth shall post your letter for you,” Catharina said willingly. “Give it to her now and then it will be sent without delay. Afterward go along to the studio and forget your troubles. Things have a way of working out and I’m sure that eventually it will be like that for you.”