The Rembrandt Secret

by Alex Connor

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  And Neville had a wish – one of the few he ever confided in me – that he wanted to be able to leave Owen an inheritance so that, whatever might happen in the future, his son would always be secure. He longed to find something valuable, some painting or art work. He wasn’t a fantasist, but I know he dreamed of this. Seeing Owen’s potential, I had always been keen to mentor him, and Neville was grateful, knowing my name would advance his son further. Owen and I became close, two people dissimilar in age, but identical in interest and ambition. And we talked about that favourite subject of the art world – the theory.

  Theories spring up like daisies in this business. Your father and I talked often of such things, and one day, after I had known him for a couple of years, Owen said that he believed Rembrandt had had a bastard son. He said that Geertje Dircx could have borne Rembrandt a child when they were both young. A child who was farmed out to another family – a child called Carel Fabritius. After all, your father went on, Dircx had certainly worked for Rembrandt, and been sent to an asylum. Wasn’t that too brutal a punishment for a woman he had simply fallen out of love with? Why would Rembrandt go to the trouble of having an ex-mistress committed?

  Unless she knew something so damaging she had to be locked away and silenced.

  You know the story, Marshall, you’ve read the Rembrandt letters, you listened to Geertje Dircx’s history. So what you’re wondering now is – what am I going to say next? Guess, Marshall, try and guess before you read the next lines. Or perhaps you want to throw this letter away, and never know the answer. You can choose. But be warned, if you read on, you’ll be given some information which will change you, and your life. Information which will demand action from you. Or inaction. But certainly a choice.

  I think we both know that you’ve changed. You can’t look away now, can you?

  It was only supposed to be a joke.

  In the 1960s, Neville had been to an auction in Amsterdam. There had been a fire in a synagogue, and the authorities were trying to raise funds for the repairs by selling off anything salvageable. As the items were religious Jewish artefacts, your grandfather was naturally interested. He bought a few items and then spotted a casket, badly scorched. Thinking he could repair it then sell it on as a jewellery box, he was disappointed to find that he couldn’t undo the lock. Fire damage and age had warped the casket, so he held onto it, unsold. He kept it in his office, where I spotted it one day and realised just how old it was.

  ‘Fifteenth century,’ I told him.

  ‘Worth much?’

  ‘Not if you can’t open it.’

  It was then the idea occurred to me. Asking if I could have a go at releasing the lock, I took the casket home. After some effort, I did open it and it was empty. But not for long. When I returned the casket to Neville, I lied; telling him that I hadn’t been able to open it, but he should keep trying. And then I waited. I knew that the next time Neville tried the lock, it would open and he would find the old papers I had secreted inside. The Rembrandt letters. Yes, Marshall, I hid those letters in Neville Zeigler’s box.

  You see, I wrote them.

  Marshall flinched, read the words again, hardly taking them in. Samuel Hemmings had written the letters? How could that be? No, it couldn’t be possible … His hand shaking, Marshall continued to read.

  But days passed and Neville said nothing. Weeks passed, then months, but not one word was uttered. All that changed was Neville’s attitude. He became withdrawn, cooler with me. He made excuses to be busy when I called at the shop and would only talk easily of Owen’s progress. In fact, he grew even more certain of his son’s success, almost jocular, as though he felt secure in a way that people do when they have backing. When they believe themselves rich.

  And then it struck me. Neville had found the letters, but he wasn’t going to share his discovery with me. After all, I knew nothing of his coup, did I? Neville didn’t know I had planted the letters there. I’d told him that I hadn’t been able to open the casket, so how would I know of any documents? For a while I wondered if I should confess, but Neville’s deliberate choice to keep quiet about his discovery rankled with me. How dare he? I thought. Weren’t we friends? Hadn’t I mentored his son for years? How deceitful of Neville Zeigler to banish me from his good fortune, from his release from the tyranny of his poverty. He had wanted a find, and I had given him one.

  Yes, I know what you’re thinking, Marshall, how did I dare to be angry with Neville? Oh, but I was. Time passed, and he never said one word about the letters. Perhaps he knew I’d planted them and was waiting for me to confess. Or he was turning the joke back on me, but I doubt that. I believe he thought he had found his gilded nest egg and when he hinted, now and again, about having some secret, I wanted to laugh, to tell him the truth. But as the years went on my revenge was watching Neville Zeigler believe he had outsmarted me. Samuel Hemmings, the respected, wealthy art historian, outflanked by an impoverished refugee. I told myself that when Neville died, and the Rembrandt letters had passed to his son – which they would, of course, hadn’t he always dreamt of leaving Owen an inheritance? – then would be the time to tell the truth. My protégé and I could laugh about it. Then.

  Or so I thought.

  In 1973, when Neville died, your father told me he had been left some letters concerning Rembrandt. I smiled over the phone and asked him to bring them to show me. But instead of wanting to share his moment of elation with his mentor, Owen hesitated. His mistrust injured me. For once, he was not his urbane self, and stammered an apology. He said he wasn’t being evasive, but that he had wanted to get the letters authenticated before he showed them to me. Me! Of all people. Me! The person who had taught him. Me! The friend and mentor. Me! The man who had trusted him with my knowledge and my affection.

  The discovery of the Rembrandt letters changed your father, or maybe his suspicious streak – inherited from Neville – grew until it engulfed his common sense. But, as ever, he took my help quickly enough. On my recommendation, he took the letters to Stefan van der Helde for authentication – yet when your father came back to London he was shifty, unlike himself. Well, Owen said, Van der Helde had authenticated them, but he should get another opinion.

  I offered him mine. It was rejected on the grounds that we were too close, I would be biased. That I would obviously want to please him by authenticating the discovery. How could he put me into such a difficult position? Owen asked. We were friends, very close friends, he would be asking me to put my reputation on the line. A reputation I had built up over years … The truth was, he didn’t trust me. Thought I would expose the letters myself, claim the victory as my own. You thought the same, Marshall. But you were both wrong.

  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 ha
d 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.