The Golden Tulip

by Rosalind Laker

  It was a shimmering cloud of silver and white, the deep neckline studded with pink pearls, as was the wide band that gave weight to the hemline. Francesca declared she had never seen a lovelier garment. At her request Sybylla put on the wedding headdress of silver and pink silk flowers, which suited her porcelain complexion, and, still wearing it, she began opening velvet-lined boxes and caskets to display a parure of sapphires and other jewels. Almost before Francesca had time to look properly at anything, Sybylla was throwing open the door of a great closet where gowns, looped on pegs or draped on wicker stands, vied with one another in elegance, the rainbow hues enhanced by delicate lace, rich braids, bunches of ribbons or embroidery so intricate that only hundreds of hours of eye-straining work could have produced it. Francesca saw that her sister had become more herself again as if reassured by these new possessions massed around her. It was the same when they went along to the house on Heerengracht where Sybylla and Adriaen were to live. It was ready for habitation and merely receiving the final touches. A thin man in an orange-colored periwig was using a fashionably beribboned cane almost as tall as himself to point out things he wanted done to his assistants, who were hanging drapes and curtains, arranging furniture and rolling out rugs. Some chairs were being carried upstairs.

  “Good day, mejuffrouw,” he greeted Sybylla, his deep bow a cover for his dislike of her. She had interfered all too much with the colors and furnishings he had wanted for her domain. To his relief she had not come to make any more of her maddening objections to this or that, but only to show her sister over the house.

  “This shall be your room whenever you can come to stay with me, Francesca!” Sybylla swept ahead into a charmingly furnished bedchamber with walls paneled in azure Lyonese silk. She crossed to a window. “You’ll have a view of the garden. At my suggestion Adriaen asked Pieter to redesign it and he has submitted some splendid plans.”

  Francesca went to her sister’s side and looked out with her at the snow-covered garden, wondering how many years would have to pass before she could enjoy that privilege and see it in bloom. She was tempted to confide in Sybylla about her proposed escape to Italy with their father, but she decided against it. The prospect of such a break in the family would cast a shadow over the wedding day for Sybylla and that must not happen. Time enough when she had the support of a loving husband, because even Maria had admitted Adriaen was clearly devoted to his future bride.

  “I’m sure you’ll find that Pieter includes flowers in every color,” Francesca said, “especially tulips, symbolizing faithful and passionate love, which will be most appropriate in the garden of a newly married couple.”

  “I suppose he will,” Sybylla remarked vaguely. “Today I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on anything not linked to my marriage tomorrow.” She turned to Francesca imploringly. “You will come early to the van Jansz house, won’t you? I want you to be with me right up to the moment when it’s time to leave for the church.”

  “I will,” Francesca promised.

  Again Sybylla clung to her. “I wish Aletta were here too.”

  “As I told you, she sends her love. I know that if it had been possible she would have been with you.”

  In the afternoon, after Francesca had left, Sybylla received more instruction from Vrouw van Jansz. It was how to deal with tradesmen impudent enough to present a bill too soon, how to conduct herself in shops, how to order goods to be brought to the house and other such matters.

  “You will supervise the household accounts,” the woman said, “but with any other bills to be settled Adriaen will deal with everything. By that I mean you may always have anything you wish to the figure of your personal allowance, but you will never handle money.”

  “But I like to pay for things myself,” Sybylla protested, thinking of the cash she would want for Ludolf.

  “What you like and what is decreed for your own good by your husband can be poles apart. Adriaen knows you are too inexperienced in matters of wealth to be allowed to handle funds yourself. Don’t look so bleak, Sybylla! His decision was made at the time of the betrothal on his father’s advice. Adriaen would never go back on it.” Vrouw van Jansz smoothed her hands together as if wiping them clean. “That concludes all the instruction I’ve felt bound to give you. There will be no guests coming here this evening. You will dine quietly with my husband and me.”

  Slowly Sybylla went with dragging feet up to her room. She felt weighed down by the disappointment she had received. To think of all the great wealth in the van Jansz family and yet she had been rendered powerless to release her sister as well as her father from their bonds. Again nothing was going right. Had anything really gone according to her wishes since Hans had come disturbingly into her life?

  When Sybylla appeared at dinner Vrouw van Jansz saw how subdued and dejected she was and supposed she was suffering from eve-of-marriage nerves. Brides in their innocence were subject to last-minute fears of those yet unknown marital duties. Vrouw van Jansz remembered her own trepidation and showed more toleration than usual by pretending not to notice that Sybylla hardly ate anything.

  When the night came Sybylla could not sleep. She left her bed to huddle with a shawl about her shoulders by the fire in her room. Her thoughts were no longer dwelling on anything except that it was fast approaching midnight and still she had not solved the puzzle of where the little mouse was in the great painting. She gazed into the flames as if she might find the solution there, despairing that all she truly wanted was slipping from her grasp.

  A log crumbled in a shower of sparks, one of which landed on her bare foot, causing her to jerk away. Yet it was a moment of revelation. She threw up her head with a gasp. She knew where the mouse was! Not on a hat or peeping from a pocket or winking an eye under the arch of a shoe, but in a place so apparent to her now that she could not understand why she had not located it before.

  Springing up, she threw off her shawl and ran to snatch garments from drawers and closet to dress with haste. Thrusting her feet into shoes and taking her darkest cloak, she opened the bedroom door and listened. The house was still. Carefully she crept down to the basement hall of the servants’ quarters, where lanterns were kept in a cupboard. She dared not be arrested by the Night Watch for failing to carry a light. Silently she drew back the bolt of the door that the domestic staff used and slipped out by the minor exit under the main steps of the entrance into the street.

  With the beam of her lantern dancing ahead of her she ran swiftly over a bridge, having quite a way to cover before she reached the militia headquarters. By rights she should have been terrified of being on her own by night, the snowy streets menacing in the darkness, but she had only one fear and it sped her feet. She was desperately afraid that Hans would not be waiting any longer at the only place where she could hope to find him. He had given up his lodgings, because his new commission was taking him away from Amsterdam, and he had not told her his destination. It was now well into her wedding day and far past the time he had set for the solving of the puzzle.

  At last the militia building came into sight. There were plenty of lights glowing in the windows, for the Night Watch would be on duty in the city and here the guards changed regularly. Breathless and tired from the pace she had set herself, she reached the steps and stumbled up them into the hallway, where a guard was on duty and another sat at a desk. Both were immediately on the alert, supposing she had come to report some outbreak of trouble, which was not unusual.

  “Your business, mejuffrouw?” the sergeant at the desk demanded.

  “I’m Sybylla, daughter of the artist Hendrick Visser, who painted the new group portrait. Is anybody with it now?”

  “No. The banqueting hall is not in use tonight. Did you wish to see one of the officers?”

  “No! A young man named Hans Roemer, my father’s assistant on the work. Is he here in the building?”

  The sergeant looked down at an entry of names. “He was here today, but visitors to the painting have to
leave by six o’clock and nobody is allowed to view after that.”

  She swayed with disappointment. He had gone! She had missed him! For once in her life she was beyond tears, overwhelmed by the intensity of her despair at having come too late. The sergeant was saying something to her about sitting down and she supposed he thought she was about to faint, but in reality she was being crushed by heartbreak as she had never known it before.

  Then the icy air of the snowy outdoors suddenly swept into the warm hall and Hans had seized her by the arms to turn her to him. His face was stark, whether from the cold or from some pitch of emotion she did not know, but the snow on his hat and shoulders showed how long he had been waiting somewhere in the street nearby. She gave a sob of thankfulness and grabbed at his collar to hold herself to him.

  “I’ve solved the puzzle!” she cried out.

  “Not here!” he said warningly, putting an arm around her to bundle her swiftly out of the headquarters and the hearing of the two guards. In the street he pulled her with him into a doorway. “Now tell me. Where is the mouse?”

  “There and yet not there! What I thought originally to be a shadow where the standard-bearer’s cloak touches the floor is, in reality, a mousehole. And one of those threadlike gleams of light is the mouse’s tail as it escapes out of sight! Just as I have escaped!”

  He gripped her by the arm. “Do you mean that?” he demanded.

  “With all my heart! Don’t make me go back to the van Jansz house! Let me come away with you!”

  “Do you realize what you are saying?”

  “I do!”

  “You’d be leaving your family and everything you’ve ever wanted.”

  “Stop treating me as if I hadn’t discovered that I love you above all else in the world!” she cried shamelessly.

  His voice grew warm and tender. “That’s what I’ve wanted to hear you say for so long. I love you so much.”

  They kissed, locked together, and snowflakes began drifting around them. After he had picked up her lantern, which she had dropped onto the snow for their embrace, he handed it back to her and collected a bundle of his belongings from where he had left it, slinging the strap that bound it over his shoulder. With his arm around her, he hurried her away with him through the falling snow as if pursuit were already on their trail.

  FRANCESCA, KEEPING HER promise to go early to the van Jansz house, was waiting in the reception hall of her home for the sleigh, which Sybylla had said would come for her at nine o’clock. Francesca was in her finery for the day, her gown of tawny velvet and her hat dove gray with a golden plume. She was adjusting the brim in front of the Venetian mirror when she heard the sleigh draw up outside and a great hammering came on the door. She opened it and a wave of anxiety swept over her as she saw a stark-faced Adriaen, and not a van Jansz servant, at the stoop.

  “What’s happened?” she gasped, pressing a hand against her chest.

  “I must see Sybylla!” he demanded, striding in. “I didn’t realize how much it meant to her to be married from her childhood home!”

  “Sybylla isn’t here.”

  “She must be. Her bed in my parents’ house has been slept in and so she could only have returned here at dawn.”

  “I’ll go up to her room!” Francesca turned for the stairs, hoping that she would not find the bedchamber door locked and Sybylla too upset to open it. Yesterday her mood had been very strange, almost on the knife edge of hysteria, but she had become calmer by the time they had parted. Had something happened in the afternoon to cause her some unexpected distress?

  To Francesca’s relief the door gave at her touch, not even being closed. Then she stared in dismay at the state of the room. Clothes had been tumbled from drawers and chests. A stocking trailed across the floor and a glove dangled from a chair. Propped against the opened trinket box was a folded piece of paper. She saw it was addressed to herself. Full of dread, she read it.

  I am running away with the man I really love. Break the news as gently as you can to Adriaen and say I regret hurting him. The same applies to Father. Tell him there was nothing I could do after all to save you from Ludolf. It will be up to Pieter now. Do not worry about me. I am happier than I have ever been in my life before. Your loving sister, Sybylla.

  Francesca read it through a second time. At some hour in the night Sybylla, even if she had first slept for a while in her bed at the van Jansz house, must have crept in here, knowing where a spare key was always hidden, collected a few belongings and left again as stealthily as she had come. Who had been waiting for her? With a heavy sigh, Francesca folded the note and concealed it in the palm of her hand. The reference to Pieter could not be disclosed to anyone other than Hendrick.

  When she came downstairs again Hendrick was talking solemnly with Adriaen and they both looked at her anxiously, her serious expression telling them instantly that something was very wrong.

  “There will be no marriage today, Adriaen,” she said with compassion.

  He stepped forward. “Why? Is she ill?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “But to whom else would she have gone?” He was bewildered, but irritated too.

  Francesca moved to her father’s side. Already his eyes showed fear, as if he knew that what she was about to say would strike him to the heart. “Sybylla left a note for me. She has gone away. I don’t know with whom. You are both better able to answer that question than I, who have been away from Amsterdam since the spring.” Her sympathetic gaze settled on the jilted young man. “Sybylla is deeply sorry to cause you unhappiness, Adriaen, but she wrote that she is with the man she really loves.”

  His lids narrowed in disbelief and he drew in a long breath. Then he reacted with thin-lipped, blazing-eyed fury. “The little whore!”

  Hendrick gave a roar. “How dare you speak of my youngest daughter in such a manner!”

  Adriaen regarded him with wrathful contempt. “You penniless oaf! You seem to have forgotten to whom you are speaking. I thought Sybylla had eyes for me only, but I was wrong. I don’t know and neither do I care whom she has left me for. You may keep her whenever she should return. I want no more of her!”

  He slammed his way out of the house. In the dreadful silence that followed Hendrick turned to Francesca and rested his hands on her shoulders. “It must be Hans Roemer whom she’s gone away with. I can think of nobody else and he was leaving Amsterdam today. She was always talking about him and going over to the church to keep track of the painting’s progress.”

  “Oh, Father, you should have taken more care of her during the time of her betrothal!”

  “I just presumed she was anxious that the painting should be finished as soon as possible, so I might receive payment for it before her wedding day. I never supposed for one moment there was anything serious in it.”

  Francesca sighed deeply. “Well, there was, but at least she hasn’t gone thoughtlessly.” She revealed the note and gave it to him to read. “I’d like you to explain what Sybylla meant about not being able to help me after all.”

  He told her. She almost shook her head at the foolishness of her father and her sister in supposing that Ludolf would agree to being paid in installments, but there was no point in bringing that up now.

  “It was well meant,” he concluded.

  “I know it was and I appreciate her consideration. Have you any idea where Hans might be taking her?”

  “No. All he said was that he had gained a commission that would mean leaving the city.”

  Francesca felt slightly relieved. “At least he has work, which means they won’t starve. But we must try to find them!”

  “How? They left here before dawn and could be anywhere by now. Do you think I wouldn’t be out searching for them already if there was the slightest chance of discovering their whereabouts?”

  “I shall let Pieter know. I’ll ask him to watch out for them.”

  Hendrick shrugged as if he had no hope at all and he wandered over to the small portrait
of Anna, which had hung there for as long as Francesca could remember. “What would your mama have said, Francesca,” he said, weary with sadness, “if she had known I was to lose two of her daughters?”

  “Neither of them is lost! Your estrangement with Aletta can be healed and Sybylla will return one day.”

  He deliberately ignored her mention of Aletta. “I’m afraid for Sybylla. She is such a child in so many ways.”

  Francesca spoke musingly. “I don’t think she is any longer. I believe that in going away with Hans she made the first adult decision of her life.”

  It was not more than an hour later when the van Jansz lawyer called. Hendrick summoned Francesca into the room to hear what was said, for they had already discussed the possibility of a demand for financial compensation by Adriaen’s father for Sybylla’s breaking of the betrothal contract. Whether it should be high or low it could only add to the morass of Hendrick’s financial state.

  “Now, Master Visser,” the lawyer began, “whom have you told about this unfortunate affair?”

  “Nobody outside the household,” Hendrick replied sourly, resentful already of what he feared was to come.

  “Good. It will be to your advantage if you agree to keep it that way. Heer van Jansz is most anxious that his son’s name should not become subject to scandal and gossip through being jilted by your daughter. For that reason he is prepared to waive any claim to compensation if you will endorse his proposed announcement that the marriage previously arranged between the two young people has been dissolved by mutual consent.”

  Hendrick’s expression had cleared. No compensation! “I’m in agreement with that. I wish to protect my daughter’s good name as much as Heer van Jansz wishes to guard his son’s.”

  Francesca spoke up. “There is one condition that must be included.”

  “What is that?” the lawyer questioned.

  Hendrick also looked at her inquiringly. “Yes, what do you have in mind?”

  “It is that no retribution will be made against the man, who is presently nameless, with whom my sister has made her departure.”