He picked up a brocade-covered box from the table at which he was sitting and handed it to her. “Pray accept my St. Nicholaes gift.”
“I thank you.”
As she put out a hand to take it, while at the same time offering hers to him, he noticed the gold bracelet on her wrist. His brows clamped into a frown and he seized her fingers in a viselike grip. “Where did you get this geegaw?”
“It came from Florence.”
“I can see where it was made,” he retorted, thin-lipped. “A lover’s token! Name the man who gave it to you for this St. Nicholaes’s Day!”
She sighed with exasperation. “Don’t start imagining that marriage is going to take me away from here. My aunt Janetje sent it to my home in Amsterdam and Francesca delivered it to me in the spring.”
“Why haven’t you worn it before?” He was still suspicious.
“It’s not suitable for daily duties. Today is an exception.”
He simmered down, releasing her hand, and let her take the brocaded box from him.
“I spoke hastily,” he said, which was the nearest he had ever come to an apology.
“At my home we always opened gifts together. Please take the one I have here for you.”
With a bow of his head he accepted the linen-wrapped gift tied with a ribbon, and thanked her courteously. While he unwrapped a book on great voyages she lifted the lid of the brocaded box to find a silver-topped crystal flask of the most costly perfume, which he could only have ordered through Josephus, and she appreciated the element of surprise he had planned for her. When they had both expressed their genuine pleasure in their respective gifts, she had dinner served to him.
Unexpectedly Constantijn did not appear to enjoy very much Sara’s carefully prepared meal and he drank the wine as if he did not recognize the vintage in the glass, his mood singularly odd. Aletta was relieved when he had finished eating and everything could be cleared away. All that remained was to fetch him a glass of brandy. Had he not been in such an unpredictable frame of mind she might have brought him the bottle on this special day, trusting in his restraint, but instinct warned her against it.
“Would you like a game of backgammon?” she asked him when she had put the brandy in front of him, it being the hour they usually settled to playing some game of chance.
“No. I want to be entertained in another way.”
She thought he meant music. “What pieces would you like this evening on the clavichord?”
“Forget about music. Pray stand in front of me where I can see you well.”
She obeyed uncertainly. “Do you wish to sketch me?”
“Not at the moment.” He was looking at her under his brows. “I only wish to admire you. It’s a long time since I’ve been in the presence of a well-dressed and comely young woman.”
A faint blush ran along her cheekbones. After she’d been standing before him for a minute she became increasingly uneasy. “May I go now?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. Take your cap off.”
If he had asked her to strip she could not have been more deeply shocked. “Indeed I will not!”
“Why? Caps are for wives and old women—not for a fine-looking girl. You should be wearing flowers or ribbons instead. I can’t believe you sleep in that turban in which you appeared in the middle of the night after I’d seen those lights in the distance.”
She regarded him suspiciously. She had wound up her tresses in a length of silk each time he had roused her and Sara and Josephus from their beds. “Did you play that trick just to make me come here with my hair down?”
“Not the first or second time.” He grinned savagely. “And not that night two or three weeks ago, but maybe the rest of those summonses.”
“So you ruined the night’s rest of two old people and mine just for that? Your selfishness has no bounds!”
“I’ll wake all three of you night after night from now on if you don’t take off that cap.”
She flushed. “You have no right to ask me. Please stop!”
“Isn’t anyone ever going to see your locks?”
“My husband, in the unlikely event that I should marry.”
“I’ll marry you.”
The color faded from her face, which took on a paleness that was almost ashen, her eyes sparkling with fury. “How dare you!”
“Wait!” he thundered wrathfully as she stalked for the door. “Do you think I couldn’t husband you just because I have no legs?”
She paused, shaking with anger from head to foot. “I haven’t the least doubt about your manhood, but I will not be made the butt of your mockery anymore!”
“I’ve asked you to be my wife! What’s wrong with that?”
“Everything! If you were now as you were before the accident you’d have the choice of any number of beautiful women and you’d never give a glance in my direction. I will not be asked because you think I’m the only woman available or ever likely to be! You can’t even remember where we first met and it wasn’t in this house!”
She rushed from the apartment and her heels went tapping away at speed down the stairs. He lay back helpless in his chair, raging at his fate that prevented him from going after her. What had she meant about a meeting prior to her coming here? He searched his memory, but all he recalled was the faint impression that he had seen her before when she had first come into his room.
She did not return to turn down his bed as she always did, Sara arriving instead. Suddenly he was scared that Aletta had packed and left. If she had he would send Josephus after her.
“Where’s Aletta?” he demanded as Sara smoothed the sheet into place.
“Indisposed, master,” Sara replied.
The relief that Aletta had not taken flight overwhelmed him. At present she was angry with him as she had been on many previous occasions when he had clashed with her, but she never sulked. She would come to wish him good night as usual. Not once had she missed doing that since her first night here. He waited optimistically, watching the clock, but when the hour grew close on midnight, he knew she was not going to appear. Glumly he prepared for bed. He read for a while, but his thoughts kept drifting from the pages to Aletta until he realized he was taking nothing in from the book and closed it abruptly.
It was when he had snuffed the last candle that he saw the same sequins of light in the far trees that he had seen before. The old panic rose in him. His friends had decided that the Feast of St. Nicholaes was a suitable time to renew their efforts to see him! He reached for the bellpull hanging conveniently by his bed and jerked it hard while at the same time he shouted at the top of his voice. At night the bell rang in Josephus’s accommodation over the stables as well as on the landing outside the bedchambers where Aletta and Sara slept. But nobody came. He snarled with rage. Aletta had played her old trick of disconnecting the bells, as she had done during the early days of her being in the house. Well, he had pistols handy, which he could fire over the heads of those oncoming friends of his. That should stop them in their tracks. But as he leaned over to pull out the drawer at the side of his bed he saw the lights had gone out again. He passed a hand across his eyes. Was it due to his imagination playing tricks with him after times of stress? There was a drive that passed through the woodland where the light appeared, but it was within the walls of his estate and none had access to the old gates there. Nevertheless, he would send Josephus to investigate in the morning. Anger against Aletta renewed itself. How dare she prevent those bells ringing! Now sleep was far from him. There was only one way of keeping at bay the melancholia that came in the small hours and that was to be found in a bottle of brandy.
At the other end of the house and one floor higher, Aletta lay awake on her pillows. She had heard the persistent clicking of the disconnected bell outside her door. She had also removed the kitchen connection with the stable to ensure that Josephus was not disturbed, for she had been sure that Constantijn would repeat his perverse prank that night when she had failed to see him again that evening.
Her fury with him had sprung from the hurt he had inflicted. That he should suggest marriage in that blunt, cool manner had been impossible to bear. She had put up with his tempers, his ugly moods, his melancholia and his apathy all because she knew she had patience with him when anybody else would have walked out long ago. But recently she had come to a new understanding of her motives. It was that she loved him. The realization had not come overnight, as could happen when someone fell in love, because there had been nothing romantic in their association. Instead it had been a slow dawning and never once had she looked for any reciprocation from him and never would she. This evening his unwitting cruelty had nearly killed her with anguish and it would be many days before she could face him again.
She tossed restlessly, unable to sleep. Suppose Constantijn hadn’t rung the bell as a prank? If he were lying there ill he would not be attended to until Josephus made a first call in the morning. She turned again in her bed. No, Constantijn would have gone on ringing if he was ill. Unless he had fallen from the bed and was unable to move!
Deciding there would be no sleep for her until she had reassured herself, she put on a robe and tied up her hair in the length of silk, even at this hour tucking in any stray tendrils. A candle sconce was always kept burning over the main staircase, being near the door of Constantijn’s apartment, and she knew her way well enough from her room not to need any light until she was there.
She had almost reached the landing that ran in a gallery to Constantijn’s apartment when she heard a faint sound in the dark well of the hall below. She listened intently, telling herself that all old houses were full of strange noises at night. Then she heard the distinct tap of a heel on the marble floor. It could not be Sara, because there had been snoring from her room, and Josephus would never be roaming about the house at this hour. Her heart began to pound. The tap came again. Somebody was creeping slowly across the hall. There
was
an intruder! Then she heard the bottom tread creak. He was coming upstairs!
There was nothing near at hand that she could seize as a weapon, but Constantijn kept a pistol in a drawer by his bed. If she could slip along there before the intruder saw her she could get the pistol. She hoped desperately there was nothing seriously wrong with Constantijn, or else the knowledge of an intruder in the house would distress him even more.
She stepped out of her slippers and on bare feet began to creep along by the wall. Then she came to a halt in complete astonishment at the sight of the man on the stairs, revealed to her by the sconce’s glow.
It was Constantijn himself who was hauling himself up the flight, hand over hand along the handrail, the muscles rippling in his shoulders and back, for he was naked except for a belt around his waist into which he had tucked two bottles of brandy. Three keys dangled from a ring looped to the belt, one of which she thought might well be a duplicate of the key she had to the cellar door. It had been the tap of the keys against the glass bottles, and not a heel on marble, that she had heard.
As yet he had not seen her, being on the far side of the stairs. His speed and agility were those of an athlete. She knew now how he had been able to indulge in those drinking bouts and it was no wonder he had mocked her searching for a hidden store in his apartment. If he had worn a nightshirt or any other garment, dust from the cellar would have clung to the fabric and eventually given him away. Frowning, she advanced silently to the head of the stairs. He had almost reached the top when she spoke.
“I’ll take charge of that brandy. You don’t need it at this hour of the night.”
He looked over his shoulder with a violent start. Then he let his head dip between his upstretched arms as he began to laugh, his whole body shaking with mirth. Letting go of the rail, he moved into a sitting position and rested an elbow on a higher stair as he flung back his head in a roar of uninhibited laughter. It was the first time she had ever heard him laugh without bitterness or cynicism and she began to smile. Tension between them melted away. She left him only to fetch his dressing robe and when she returned she saw he had set the two bottles on the top stair, but not the keys.
He grinned at her as he pulled on the robe and tied it. “As master of the house I have retained the keys to my own cellar.”
She sat down beside the bottles. “If you had handed them over I would have given them back to you for the same reason.”
“Yet you’ve always been strict over my consumption of grog.”
“Only because I didn’t want you to keep drinking until you couldn’t stop. Now that danger has passed.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because I realize now you could have helped yourself from the cellar every night if that had been your true inclination after I first stepped in to prevent Sara supplying you with whatever you wanted to drink.”
“What made you suspect I’ve been helping myself from the cellar?”
“I didn’t. I never noticed any bottles were missing.”
“That’s because one of those doors in the cellar leads to a smaller wine cellar and I took my supplies from there. So why were you on the gallery?”
“I started to worry you might be ill and that was why you had rung the bell. Why did you ring?”
“I thought for a few moments I’d seen lanterns again in the distance. So it was concern for me that brought you from your bed?” He levered himself up onto the top step beside her and moved away the bottles of brandy that stood between them. “I’ve remembered where I’ve seen you before. You used to look across at my window from Mechelin Huis every night when I was in Delft. You told me during your first day or two here that you had cared for the Vermeer children, but then afterward I thought no more about it. But I’m right, am I not?”
“Yes, you are,” she said, smiling. “Since you’ve remembered that much I’ll tell you more. I was in the anteroom of the Amsterdam Exchange one day when you caught me looking through the window into the courtyard and you did the same before a crowd of your friends came to fetch you away.”
He grinned. “I do remember now. How could I have not seen you then as I do now?”