Arent flung the canvas he had been holding onto the bed. “Of course. Wan mom-ent, please.” He left the room, yelled something to Dieneke, and came back in, beaming.
The two men stood facing each other awkwardly for a few moments.
“Zo! You like our liddle country, de Younited Provincies?” asked the painter, still smiling professionally from ear to ear.
“Very much,” said John politely. He coughed. “The streets are so clean,” he added.
“Yes, yes, ower ladies, dey don’t like de durt,” Arent chuckled.
The door was pushed open, revealing Dieneke’s broad hip. She backed into the room dragging a large canvas in a heavy frame.
“Dis is de kind of sing you are looking for,” stated Arent.
“Yes indeed,” breathed John.
Another Virgin. Another woodenly drawn baby. Another gentle, attentive Lucinda.
“He is ferry good, yes. But he is already sold. He is for Antonijn Verkoop, you have hurd of him maybe? But you must have hurd of him! He is a very big man, an important man you know, his business is cloth and lace! He is a very good customer of mine. But of course it is no problem, Monseigneur. I make anoder wan, very quick.”
“Using the same model?” John ventured.
“De model?” said Arent. “You mean de Maria. Yes of course, I use de same wan.” He smiled broadly. “Dat’s my vrouwtje. My liddle wife.”
49
BEAUTY ASLEEP
Picture a room in some remote tower. There is a bed, and on that bed lies a woman. Her hair is spread out on the pillow like the points of the zodiac. Her eyes are closed; she shows no sign of life. She seems entranced; in modern parlance, comatose.
Be not deceived: this sleeping beauty is not a woman under the influence. There is not a bottle, not a needle, not a spinning wheel in sight.
She is merely the victim of one of life’s more insidious jokes.
Just a short time ago—oh, but it seems like a hundred years!—she was a fair maiden, vain, heartless and carefree. Everybody called her darling. A few princes even fought over her. She felt like a million doubloons.
So what happened?
It’s only that it’s all over now. It’s only that somebody finally won her hand, and she is now a wife and mother. And she is exhausted all the time, her waist has grown flabby, no one pays any attention to her anymore, and she believes she has become invisible.
No wonder she finds it hard to get up in the morning.
“You must understand that I am married now. I am his wife,” said Lucinda severely. She would not look at him. The painting had not lied: there was something different about her. This Lucinda was torpid, remote. Her look of utter shock upon seeing John had given way to sullen aloofness. Arent, seeing her fierce blush, had immediately realized they knew each other. He’d backed out of the room and shut the door softly behind him.
“I know, but…”
“You know nothing!” snapped Lucinda. “Nothing!”
“No, but…” he began disconsolately.
The infant in her lap had started making impatient noises, and she now reached down and began unlacing the chemise under her fur-trimmed vest. John watched in horrified fascination as she reached in and drew out an engorged breast webbed with blue. Deftly pinching the darkened nipple between her third and fourth finger, she guided it into the child’s mouth.
“What makes you think you can come here making demands of me?” she continued spitefully. She refused to look at him. “After what you did! And after…after all this time!”
“But…”
“I am a mother now. I have two children—” She broke off suddenly, still gazing intently at the baby’s bonneted head.
He saw a breach in her defenses.
“Lucinda! Please!! I realized immediately I shouldn’t have let you go…I tried to… I wanted to find you… but I thought you were dead!”
“Ha!” she exclaimed, tossing her head. The gesture reminded him of the old Lucinda.
He stood up. “Listen to me, Lucinda. I know what happened to Bessie and the rest of the baggage train. I was there. I went back to look for you. I came too late. I saw—with my own eyes. I could not find you in the rubble, so I thought…”
Her voice was almost a growl. “If you had truly tried to find me, if what you say is true…”
“It is true! “
“Really!” she said derisively.
“I’ll prove it to you!” He strode towards the door, furious now.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To fetch my proof!” he stormed.
“Oh, but…” she began, but he had already slammed the door behind him.
An hour later he was back, with Noé.
“What’s this?” said Lucinda.
“My proof,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” said Lucinda.
“This is Zéfine’s child. I found him in her arms. I have been raising him as my own,” he said shortly.
For the first time Lucinda seemed at a loss for words, and he saw an opening at last, a chance to slash his way through the forest of thorns she had built up around herself. “You were there, weren’t you?” he burst out reproachfully. “Why didn’t you find him? Noé? He was still alive.”
She looked at him openmouthed, and spread her hands on her lap nervously. “I didn’t know…I had no idea!” she faltered. “I assumed—I supposed he was dead too.”
John suddenly felt foolish. Her face was ashen. Her fingers were tightly woven around her handkerchief.
“Of course,” he said quickly. “It was wrong to reproach you. It must have been—you must have been terrified…”
She made an impatient gesture with her hand. “I had wandered off somewhere, before the attack came. I heard the screams. I hid in a ditch. Then, when—they—had left, I went back, but when I saw…”
“Please!” John interrupted her. “You needn’t…”
She kicked something out from under her skirts. It was a copper-lined box glowing with embers, a foot-warmer. She snapped open her fan, and started fanning herself. “I must have assumed the baby was dead too. It never crossed my mind. I don’t remember exactly what I did. I ran, I just kept running. A peasant found me lying in his field, and must have carried me to his cottage. His wife was kind, but the man made me leave. I begged my way to Amsterdam. I even…They don’t allow beggars here, you know. They put me in a home for indigent women. I was put to work. Then, because I…” Suddenly she stopped.
“Yes?” he asked.
“When they saw I was with child, a lady, one of the regentesses of the home, took me in as her servant. Arent was painting her portrait. He asked me to sit for him. As his model. Before I had the child…”
She stopped again, and glanced toward the door.
“Before you had the child—”
“He—he offered to take me in. To marry me. I was very grateful. Am very grateful to him, I mean.”
“I see,” said John.
“He is a good husband.” She said it defensively.
“I am sure that he is,” said John.
“And he is letting me paint, too. I am learning quite a bit, in fact.”
“That’s very nice for you. I am happy for you both.”
Lucinda gave a short, bitter laugh. John said nothing more. He put all his energy into willing her to look up, to acknowledge the agony in his eyes, to relieve the leaden ache in his groin.
From a nearby clock tower came the sound of a simple little tune played on crystal-clear chimes. It sliced through the dreadful silence like a hacksaw. “I never thought,” she said, “that I’d ever see you again.”
“I have never stopped thinking about you,” he brought out woodenly.
“No?” she asked.
“No.” He cleared his throat. “I have prayed to heaven that you might forgive me for—for my crime. Against your mother, against your father. Against you.”
“Ah. That,” she said flatly. �
�I don’t think of it as a crime, now.”
“No?” he said.
“I think of it more as…fate.”
“Fate?”
“Things just never turn out right for me,” she said. She was looking squarely at him at last. “It wasn’t meant to be.”
John hung his head.
“I am sorry. You have come all this way. But I hope you will understand that I cannot…”
He did not want to hear her say it. “Actually,” he said, and fumbled in his pocket. “I really just wanted to return this.”
Out of his pocket he drew the glass-beaded slipper.
“My slipper!” she exclaimed. “Where did you get it?”
He took a few steps forward, and placed it cautiously in her lap. “I found it among—er, the remains,” he said. He stepped back. Suddenly he did not know what to do with his curiously hovering hands. He clasped them sternly behind his back. “It’s what made me think you were dead.”
“I see,” she said. For a long moment she stared at the slipper, her head bowed. Then, abruptly, she threw it back at him. He just managed to catch it. “I don’t want it,” she said tightly. “What in Heaven’s name made you think I would have any use for it?”
“Right, then,” he said. He crumpled the slipper up in an aching fist. He inclined his head, and started backing toward the door.
She remained immobile in her chair. But she raised her hand just as he was about to disappear.
“The boy—you may leave him here. I will take care of him.”
“Thank you. But he stays with me. I will not be parted from him. As I told you, I am raising him as my son.”
Outside, on the landing, Noé was playing with a curly-headed little girl. He refused to leave, and in the end John was forced to pick him up and carry him down the stairs kicking and screaming.
She was seething, seething! She wanted to kick something. She wanted to smash the water jug on the floor, but restrained herself, because she did not want to have to explain it to Arent.
How dare that man come here and confront her like that? How could he! He had no idea what she had been through, no idea at all! From where she was sitting, she was not doing badly at all. To have pulled herself out of the mire, painfully, inch by inch, into a perfectly respectable life, only to have this specter from her past march unscathed into her parlor, acting all judgmental about the choices she had been forced to make…The injustice of it! He didn’t know what it was like to be pregnant and penniless. To have that weight in your belly demanding to be fed, and no means of feeding it! To be forced to beg, to steal, to agree to sell your body, even, to some lecherous low-life, for a crust of bread! Hell, he had no idea how much she had suffered. And then the indignity of being taken in by a bunch of self-righteous matrons in the charitable home, who took delight in scrubbing, de-lousing and lecturing her, and then being put to work cleaning out fireplaces and stove chambers (wasn’t that her lot in life—to wind up as a cindersweep wherever she went?) under the supervision of a gaggle of loud, bossy Dutchwomen with standards twice as exacting as Aunt Arabella’s! Good God! What did he want? What did he expect? That she would wait for him to show up—three years too late? Ha!
“Lu-sinneke?” Arent stuck his head around the door.
She started, guiltily. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there. It was already getting dark, and she was supposed to be preparing the fish stew.
“Sorry, Arent,” she said. “I must have forgotten the time…”
“No matter, no matter!” he said jovially. “My little Sinneke, you made us a good sale today. You deserve a kiss!”
Hovering over her, he nuzzled her ear with his fleshy lips. She recoiled a bit from the sour, tobacco-and-gin smell.
“I knew him, from before…” she confessed.
“I could tell!” he said heartily. He winked at her. “I charged him thirty-five florins for the Madonna! In advance! I knew whatever I asked, he’d pay!” he crowed.
She stared at him stonily.
“Ah, come, wifey! Don’t give me that look! I’m sorry! But I know what I married, don’t I! About your, uh—past, which we don’t talk about. So, then!”
“It is not what you think at all!” she began vehemently.
“I’m not saying, am I? I’m not making accusations, treasuretrove. All’s forgiven and forgotten, and we don’t speak of it. Cuddlebunnikins. Come on! Wifeykins, my sweetiechild.”
She let herself be cajoled into a reluctant kiss.
50
AWAKENING
A purgatory of feelings, feelings that had been lulled to sleep for three years. Feelings buried in forty months of survival, of bad dreams, of obligations and gratitude, of focusing on her deliverers, of focusing on her babies. Suddenly, from one day to the next, she found herself awake, Sleeping Beauty rudely kissed by a new reality. She rubbed her eyes. Where was she? What had happened? What were these children, this husband, making demands, constantly making demands of her? Helping themselves to her body, her feelings, sucking her dry? How could she have been so proud, so in love with these little bundles of flesh? Suddenly she looked on them with loathing.
“Your milk will dry up,” said Dieneke sternly.
“You do it, then!” she snapped. “I’m not a cow!”
“I would if I could, you know I would,” said Dieneke mournfully, and carried the screaming baby out of the room.
For some reason this unsatisfactory exchange made Lucinda think of Bessie. And thinking of Bessie sparked even more anguish. She started shivering. It was cold in here, and her back ached. Arent was always so stingy with the firewood. And Dieneke wouldn’t listen to her, only to the master. She’d have to do it herself, as usual. She stormed downstairs and gathered a bundle in her apron. She started staggering up the stairs. Lord! Her legs felt like jelly! She had to sit down halfway up. The logs made an awful clatter as they rolled down to the bottom. From the kitchen came a cry of alarm from Dieneke, and a great howling from the children. Weakly, Lucinda started wailing too.
Her illness lasted over a month. At first she had been bled daily, but the barber refused to come back after she threw the bedpan at him. At last she was beginning to recover her strength.
“Come, Missus,” said Dieneke. “Shall I bring you your needlework? Some coal and paper? Busy hands make a light heart, you know.”
“I’m thinking, Dieneke,” Lucinda said. “Leave me alone.”
“Thinking!” scoffed Dieneke. “Thinking won’t mend a broken jug, Missus!”
Lucinda shrugged. What did Dieneke know. The only thoughts in Dieneke’s head were recipes for pancakes and floor polish. And Lucinda had been preoccupied with domestic matters for far too long as well. For the first time since she had made her home here, she was allowing herself to indulge in some serious reveries. About love, about being rescued.
She tried to revive the faceless heroes of her childhood fantasies. But it was impossible. John’s face and body were integral to this dream.
Which led her to reconsider her anger. Of course she was angry at John! She was furious with him. It was her duty to be so; he was her father’s murderer, after all. John was the culprit responsible for the calamity that was Lucinda’s life. Wasn’t he?
She closed the door on that thought, and opened another, tentatively. But…she argued in his defense. What if…her heart started beating faster; the door opened a little wider. What if John too had been wronged? He had been scorned by her mother, after all, and humiliated by her father. Any man would have been upset, in his place. And surely he had not intended to kill anyone! There had been a duel, and these things happened. John had lived to regret it. He rued the day he had found the runaways and allowed his anger to get the better of him. To atone for a deed he deemed unforgivable, he had given up rank and prestige. He had traded in his sword for a surgeon’s knife.
How could her mother have been so foolish, so unwise to reject John, anyway? How could she not have recognized how lucky she was
to have been promised to such a man?
Lucinda realized, with a start, that it wasn’t John she was angry at.
Her mother had abandoned her. She had selfishly only thought of her own happiness. Her mother had cast a spell over not one, but two men who wanted her. Her poor, dead mother, that misty, idealized, tragic creature she had always worshipped, was suddenly revealed to be something quite different. A rival!
As for her father, she suddenly found herself unable to muster any great sympathy for him, either. In stealing another man’s betrothed, he had really been no better than a thief. Of course she wished that her father had not been killed in that duel. Any daughter would. But what then? If John had not killed her father—oh God, better not to think of it, but really— the roles might have been reversed, and her father might have slain John! And where did that leave Lucinda?
Where in God’s name did that leave her?
She fussed over the children, deeply guilty about her lengthy withdrawal.
Liesbet, the eldest, had her arms in a stranglehold about Lucinda’s neck, making it hard for her mother to finish feeding Arentje. “Mama,” boomed Liesbet in her ear, “Mamaatje, why are you sad?”
“Sad?” she said, prying Liesbet’s hands off her throat. “No—sad? No, what makes you think that, treasure?”
Liesbet tried to push her little brother off Lucinda’s lap and drew a line above her mother’s eyebrows with a stubby finger. “Be happy!” she ordered.
“I am happy. You make me happy, child,” Lucinda clucked obediently. There was no doubt left in her mind who the child’s father was. She had a grave way about her, and had John’s habit of closing her eyes a moment before bringing out a thought. She hugged the little girl tightly, and buried her face in her neck.
“Hey! Lemme go!” Liesbet protested, wriggling free.
Dieneke walked in just in time to see the struggle. She folded her arms. “Too much oil snuffs the flame,” she said dryly.
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