Let me be frank with you. I was a jealous man, with a competitive streak. Yes, sometimes I was envious of other people’s triumph, but I never took anything that wasn’t my own. I never stole another person’s victory, or their work. I didn’t have to, my name spoke for itself. All my life I had willingly shared my knowledge with others; opened my home and my heart to people as passionate as myself. As eager to learn and share. But your father could not share. When he inherited the Rembrandt letters he hugged them to himself. I knew from the first he would never let the world enjoy them.
Again, I asked to see them and, finally, he lent them to me. The Rembrandt letters, which were so damning – as you found out. But your father didn’t give me all of them to read, he kept back one back, and the list of fakes. I’d written them. I knew the letters made no sense without the last one. But Owen smiled his clubhouse smile and thought he’d fooled me. I was an old man, after all, easy to cheat. And he couldn’t risk my having all the information. If I had the list I would know as much as he did – and Owen couldn’t bear the thought of that. He had to be the only person on earth who had read all the Rembrandt letters. And owned them.
The day was very hot when he came to see me. We chatted in the garden and I watched this surrogate son of mine – for whom I had cared so deeply and of whom I had been so proud – lie to me. You see, I thought he would relent and share the letters with me. But he didn’t. And my affection for him turned into hatred.
Like his father before him, Owen hugged his treasure to himself. I imagine he would have died with the Rembrandt letters still a secret if it hadn’t been for the sudden, corrosive downturn in his finances. Your father had been too confident and had gambled in a failing market.
Over the years he had often mentioned his Rembrandt theory, but never suggested that he might have the proof to back it up. When the art world realised Owen Zeigler had the potential to wreak havoc, his fate was determined. Ironically it was the blow Tobar Manners dealt him which was the catalyst. When Manners cheated your father with the Rembrandt sale, Owen realised just how ruthless the business was. He had no real allies, no true friends, all he had were the letters.
But they turned out to be his death sentence, not his salvation.
I must tell you that I didn’t believe – not for one moment – that your father’s punishment would be so great. I never thought there would be deaths, and my cowardice kept me silent. They say that the man the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Well, I have been in my own madness of guilt for some time. The joke had festered over the years and turned into a canker which would destroy us all.
Of course you want proof, don’t you, Marshall? I mean, I can say I faked the Rembrandt letters, but anyone could say that. So I’ll tell you how I did it. I used paper from antique books I had collected, written around the same period as Rembrandt, and made the ink myself. I studied the calligraphy and struggled to emulate the Dutch language, making many copies because sometimes my hands shook. But I told myself that it didn’t matter if the writing was uncertain at times. Geertje Dircx had been ill educated, and she was recording her history under extreme circumstances.
The paper I used had come from the flyleaves of books, and was perfectly faded. Indeed, sometimes I looked at what I had written and believed it myself.
For a long time, I had known about Geertje Dircx. It wasn’t difficult putting myself into the role of someone who felt betrayed and mistrusted. So I took her story, the court records, the rumours of pupils faking Rembrandt’s paintings, and I meshed them into a compelling theory. It was to be a tale Neville would readily have believed. Little did I know when I first wrote them that they would become your father’s obsession. One he never doubted. His arrogance did the rest. How could he be wrong?
I was going to tell him the truth, that it was only an elaborate joke I had wanted to play on his father. But this time I was the one who stayed quiet. When I saw my protégé swagger around with those documents, I said nothing. I hinted often, but Owen would never hear a word against the letters. Once I even asked him outright if he believed they were real, and he gave me a slow look before answering. He didn’t know I had faked them, but at the back of his mind, the thought had occurred to him that they might not be real, but it didn’t matter anymore.
He was such a vain man.
I tell you again I only stayed silent to teach your father a lesson. Show him that his old mentor was wiser and craftier than he was. That I could still teach him a trick or two. But, like his father before him, Owen drew back from me, and his rejection hurt. I heard that he began to gamble more with his sales, take stupid risks.
I suppose having the letters made him feel invincible; that he could always pull this Dutch rabbit out of the hat and save himself.
And so, Marshall, now you know the truth. It is your decision what you do. You can reveal the hoax, and try to undo the devastation the letters have caused. Or keep quiet, and never tell the world your father was duped. Then again
,
you can expose me and let my reputation burn to ash. Show me for the petty, jealous coward that I was. You always hated the art world, why would it matter to you that the business got its come-uppance? That the likes of Tobar Manners were ruined? In an enclosed world of secrets, what does one more really matter?
I wonder which option you will choose. To give Rembrandt van Rijn back his reputation, or allow Owen Zeigler, your father, to keep his?
Yours
,
Samuel Hemmings
51
In the months which followed, Georgia’s marriage broke down and Harry left the house in Clapham. Marshall phoned and commiserated from a distance, but did not tell her that Samuel Hemmings had confessed to faking the Rembrandt letters. Instead, he travelled, restless, and unable to make a decision. His journeys took him around Europe, but his mind constantly replayed events; the memory of his father intermixed with the memory of him destroying the Rembrandt painting in New York – which, if he believed Samuel Hemmings, wasn’t a fake, after all. Marshall could recall effortlessly his many interviews with the media, and his feelings of pride when the Rembrandt letters were finally exhibited in the Rijksmuseum. Notoriously, Marshall had been excommunicated from the artistic Holy See – but that had only served to reassure him that he had taken the right course of action.
Then he would remember Samuel Hemmings’ letter and feel the ground shift under his feet. According to the old historian’s version of events, Marshall had slashed a masterpiece worth millions.
But that was the historian’s version. As time passed, Marshall began to adopt and expand on one of his family’s traits – suspicion. He thought back over what he knew about Samuel Hemmings, what he had been told and what he had seen for himself over decades. Despite his kindliness, Samuel had had a bitter edge; malicious enough to create the letters and then risk the ruin of his reputation by having Marshall expose him – albeit after his death. But then again,
would
exposure soil his image? For decades, Samuel Hemmings had been a hookworm in the art world’s gut. He had been provocative, argumentative, challenging – perhaps he would have
liked
to be remembered as the man who brought down the art world and toppled Rembrandt’s reputation. Perhaps that thought fed his ego, that enormous intellect and conceit which had driven so much of his work. Perhaps, dead and out of reach, Samuel Hemmings had wanted to pull off the biggest scam of his life.
But he had needed Marshall to do it. Needed the younger man’s anger, and desire to avenge his dead father.
In the previous months, Marshall Zeigler had learned much that had gone against his nature and assimilated character traits which had been necessary for his survival: how to keep hidden, how to be crafty, how to be suspicious of everyone. Owen Zeigler had never fully trusted his mentor, neither had his son …
When he first read the confession, Marshall’s impulse had been to expose Hemmings, thus risking his father’s good name in order to reveal a fraud which had, inadvertently, resulted in four deaths. But the more Marshall considered the confession the more he stayed his hand. Could he go to the Rijksmuseum and tell them the letters were fakes? And the list: all those masterpieces now demoted, deemed worthless by comparison to work undeniably by Rembrandt himself; those supposed fakes which had caused such ructions in the business. Could he really come forward and announce that his father, and others, died for the letters, believed in them, but that they – and Marshall himself – were all fooled? Could he really tell the world that not one word of those letters was true; that a bitter, jealous old man faked them to get his revenge?
Conflicted and undecided, Marshall kept travelling. In Italy he considered destroying Samuel Hemmings’ confession. In France, he felt a need to own up, to betray his father’s memory for the greater good. Weeks passed by; news came that Teddy Jack had been arrested for theft in Manchester. Lillian Kauffman had made an offer for the Zeigler Gallery, which Marshall rejected. In New York, Philip Gorday continued working as a lawyer and kept in intermittent touch with Marshall, passing on the news that Timothy Parker-Ross’s mental health had declined and his associate – the man who had actually committed the murders – had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
Soon after Parker-Ross was incarcerated Marshall visited him, but the journey had been a wasted one. He had driven for half a day to reach the mental facility and waited in a confined room for his childhood friend to be brought in. Having planned the meeting and dwelt obsessively on what he would say, Marshall had been shaken when a shuffling, over-sedated creature appeared and sat opposite him, without an iota of recognition. There had been nothing left of the young man he had once counted as a friend. Nothing. Instead there had just been a mental patient in hospital clothing that was too big for him, and with nothing left behind his eyes.
Chastened, Marshall resumed his travels. His contact with Georgia intensified and when she asked him to come back to London he was tempted, but knew he could never return home until the final decision was made. He kept travelling.
In Berlin, Marshall roamed the streets restlessly and then, on a whim, visited the Gemaldegalerie and stood before Rembrandt’s painting of
Susannah Surprised by the Elders.
The picture for which Geertje Dircx had been the model. Curious, Marshall looked at the painting, centuries old, depicting a woman long dead. Tormented by Samuel Hemmings’ confession, Marshall stood immobile before the picture and stared into the limpid face of Geertje Dircx.
And then, finally, he made his decision.
He would never know – nor would anyone else – if the Rembrandt letters were real or a forgery, but it no longer mattered to him. His choice, he now understood, was not to protect his father’s reputation, or take revenge on Samuel Hemmings. Instead, Marshall realised, the person who most needed consideration was Geertje Dircx. She
had
been Rembrandt’s lover, she
had
been rejected and broken. Her freedom
had
been taken from her, her status, her little peck of power. The spite of her ex-lover, the betrayal of her family, her incarceration – all that was true, laid down in the records. When she was taken to the House of Corrections in Gouda she became little more than an animal. Abused and forgotten, she was meant to die in silence.
Relieved, Marshall stared into the unfathomable gaze of Geertje Dircx. He saw in her eyes his father’s eyes, Charlotte Gorday’s eyes, Nicolai Kapinski’s eyes. And he saw in her a history which deserved to be told. Her face was every woman’s face; every human’s face who had ever had a history to tell. If the chronicle was, in part, wrong, it was also, in part, right.
Marshall turned to go home. He would destroy Samuel Hemmings’ confession and let the Rembrandt letters stand – as a final and lasting testimony to Geertje Dircx.
AFTERWORD
Geertje Dircx was Rembrandt’s lover and the dry nurse to his son, Titus. Rembrandt loved her enough to give her some of his late wife’s jewellery, but she fell out of favour with the painter. It seems very probable that she was ousted by his next mistress, Hendrickje Stoffels. Taking Rembrandt to court, Geertje sued the artist for breach of promise, saying that he had asked her to marry him and given her a ring.
A long battle commenced. Rembrandt denied promising to marry Geertje and offered her a sum of money to remove herself from his house and life. Geertje did not agree and caused a scene in court. Troublesome and difficult, she became irksome to Rembrandt. In a premeditated and vindictive act, he convinced her brother, nephew, and neighbours to give evidence against her, to prove that she was a promiscuous troublemaker.
Their damning testimony resulted in Geertje Dircx being sentenced to twelve years’ hard labour and incarcerated at the House of Corrections – a prison/madhouse – in Gouda.
These are true and documented facts on which this novel is based; the rest is open to interpretation.