Chapter 34

Vader is sponging Titus’s brow when I return to the House of the Gilded Scales. Though it has been but an hour or two, it seems as if time has stopped. Perhaps it has, between Vader and me. I stare at him as he tenderly ministers to Titus, touching his son’s brow as if it could break, and wait for him to shout me out of the house.

Vader frowns when he sees me watching. “You’re back,” he says in his guttural growl.

I go to my brother, expecting Vader’s protests. I can feel Titus’s heat when I lean over him. He does not open his eyes.

I swallow back the burning coal that chokes me. “Where is the physician?” I whisper hoarsely to Vader.

“Gone.” Vader looks down at his son, then lovingly touches his cheek. “He sleeps now like a baby.”

My chest is painfully tight. “Where is Magdalena?”

“She and her moeder have left for relatives in St. Anna-parochie.”

How like Magdalena to think only of herself when her husband is in such danger! “How can she leave him like this?” I cry, expecting Vader to rebuke both Magdalena and me.

Vader shakes his head. “Do not judge her ill. She is with child. It was the right thing to do.”

“Right thing.” I kick my heel against the floor. So he does not throw me out. Yet. Maybe I wish he would.

Vader turns to look at me, then draws in a breath. “What is the matter, Cornelia?”

I break free from his gaze and glance at Titus. “Not now, not with Titus—”

“He’s exhausted. He will sleep.” Vader sinks wearily onto a stool, the sponge still in his hand. “So out with it. You have the look of a cat ready to pounce.”

I straighten myself. All these years he let me live a lie. I try to swallow but my mouth has gone dry. “I know who my real vader is.”

He inhales sharply, then slowly lets it out. “So you talked to Bruyningh.”

“Yes.”

He sighs heavily. “Did he tell you everything?”

“Yes.”

“Then you shall hear everything from me as well.” He dumps the sponge on the table next to him. “I wonder how well our stories will match.”

“Go ahead,” I say grimly.

He rakes his fingers through his sparse hair, leaving it sticking up. “I don’t know where to start.”

“What about the picture?” I demand.

“What picture?”

“The one in our attic. Of Moeder in her …nakedness.”

“Oh. That one.” He touches Titus’s cheek.

“Why did you make Moeder model naked for it?” I whisper harshly. “She didn’t model before then. He said so.”

Vader sits up sharply. “Nicolaes Bruyningh” he snarls, pronouncing the name as if it were poison, “does not know everything that goes on around here. But yes, he is right. She did not model naked for me before then. Nor did she after.”

“So why did you make her? Did you not know that if anyone ever saw the picture she would be reviled?”

“I never intended for anyone to see it.”

“Then why would you paint it?”

“It was an act of love.”

“An act of love!”

“Yes, if you can believe that.”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

He smiles bitterly. “You have no idea how much I loved your mother.”

“You had some fine way of showing it.”

“I ask you to listen.”

I fold my arms and wait.

He shakes his head. “You don’t know. From the moment she stepped foot in the house as a sixteen-year-old, I was drawn to her.”

“You were an old man!”

“Don’t you think I knew that? A ridiculous old widower. I kept my distance from her. Still, I couldn’t keep my mind from her. Just being in the same room with her made me giddy. When I wasn’t painting, when I was painting, she was all I could think about.”

I think of my yearnings for Carel, how such an attraction can drive all sense from one’s head. But this is not about Carel and me. “Why did you not just marry her, then? It was because she was your maid, wasn’t it?”

“That did not help matters, but no, it wasn’t because she was my maid. I was still getting over my loss of Saskia, and Hendrickje was twenty years my junior—I felt repulsive to her. So I kept my distance. I hardly spoke to the girl.”

This rings true. Nicolas Bruyningh had said there had been no improprieties.

“Then why didn’t you just let Nicolaes Bruyningh have her?” I demand. “He was more her age. He was rich, too.”

“Bruyningh. I didn’t like him chasing after Hendrickje, but I let him have his chance. Looked the other way for three whole years. Gad, the boy was slow.”

Titus stirs. I take up the sponge and wipe his face with it. “Titus?” I whisper.

He does not open his eyes. I lay my hand on his burning cheek.

“Bruyningh was not so slow, however,” Vader says, his lips curled with disgust, “that he did not eventually get her with child.”

I glare at Vader as I sponge Titus. “You knew this when you painted her?” I whisper angrily. “How could you have taken advantage of her like that?”

“Just listen, would you? I’d seen her crying. So I asked what was wrong. When she told me the cad had left her in a state, I told her I would take care of her.” A young man’s fire smolders in Vader’s watery eyes. “I wanted to kill him.”

I cannot keep the bitterness from my voice. “So you take care of her by making her model naked.”

“You make it sound evil, but it was not. When she turned to me in her grief, I could no longer hide my feelings. I was ready to shout from every bridge in town of my love for Hendrickje Stoffels. I promised her I’d care for her …” He gazes at me with a tenderness that confuses me. “And you.”

“If you loved her so much, why did you not marry her then? Make me your legal child? Did you not think how much not doing so would hurt me?”

“I haven’t finished telling the story! I was going to marry her. We planned to publish our first banns that Sunday. I was so in love, Cornelia. I wanted to breathe your moeder in, meld her soul to mine—oh, she was a wondrous girl!” He closes his eyes, his old man’s face wreathed in a smile.

He opens his eyes. “It was her idea for me to paint her. Her gift to me, and mine to her. A sacred act. She knew how much I worshipped her, and she loved my painting. Back then, like you, she seemed to understand it. So that Saturday morning, a day I had no pupils, and after Titus left for his uncle’s, I shut the studio door behind us and bade her to sit. She placed herself upon a drape and, turning her head away, gave up her body to my artist’s brush.

“I had prepared the background in advance, so I was able to begin painting her figure at once. The work went quickly, spurred by both passion and the tenderness of her sacrifice. Do not judge me—I am speaking the truth about the woman I loved! The moment I laid brush to canvas I knew it would be a masterpiece, yet I planned to never show a soul. It was between her and me. All morning long I painted in our private ecstasy, until—he burst in.”

“Nicolaes Bruyningh.”

“I’m sick of that name! Yes. It was an ugly scene. He shouted at Hendrickje. She wrapped herself in a drape and cried. I threatened him with a paint trowel. He went away, but not before he shattered Hendrickje’s world with a threat.”

We stare at each other.

“What?” I ask.

“He said he was taking away his child because its mother was a whore. He said the courts would be on his side—the picture would be his proof.”

“He was taking me?”

“I told him I would destroy the painting. He said it did not matter, the Bruyninghs had the power to sway the judges, and mark his words, he would do it. He would take away his child. And then he left.”

“But he said he would take me?”

“Yes. But not your moeder. It would have killed her.”

“Why did you not marry her then, make your own claim and become my legal vader? It was Saskia’s will that stopped you, wasn’t it? You would have lost Saskia’s money if you married.”

He blew air between his lips. “I could have cared less about the money! I thought I could always make more of it painting. I’d been successful before; I thought the wheel would turn back for me. No, it was Hendrickje’s wish that we did not marry. She didn’t want to do anything to inflame Bruyningh into taking you.”

“She didn’t marry you … because of me?”

He shakes his head slowly. “She didn’t want to lose you, Cornelia. Neither of us did.”

I bow my head, unable to comprehend.

“What that woman had to endure,” Vader says. “She was called to the church court three times and made to confess her sin of living with me outside of marriage. My patrons treated her like dirt. ‘The painter’s whore,’ they called her. How they smirked. I lost all my wealthiest patrons, but I didn’t care. Not if they insulted her.”

“Why didn’t he—?”

“Take you? I don’t know. We saw him roaming by our house. The threat was always there. I think he was holding out hope that she would return to him.”

I open my mouth, then shut it. He wasn’t holding out hope. He would have never risked being cut off from his money. If he couldn’t be happy, he wanted to be certain my moeder wasn’t, either.

Vader rubs his forehead. “Later, much later, by memory, I finished her face in the picture. I painted the look of resignation she had worn the day he’d left. Her sadness burned itself on my soul. It haunts me still. I think, Cornelia, that she loved your vader more than me.”

I draw in a breath as if stung. My vader. Who is my vader? Bruyningh, the man who gave me life? Or Rembrandt, the one with whom I’d lived it?

There is a light knock on the door frame. Vader looks up.

Neel stands in the doorway, his hat in his hands. “How does he fare, mijnheer?”

I gaze at Neel’s face. His true concern for Titus, for our family, is writ all over it. All these months I have turned him away, ignoring his friendship, while pining for a boy who shut me out when he heard my brother was ill. How could I not see what a treasure Neel’s goodness and honesty have been? But it is too late for me to tell him this, to ask for his friendship. The best I can do is to lessen his chances of getting ill.

“Neel, please, you must go,” I say. “You will get the contagion.”

His face, always an open book, becomes a study of hurt and concern. “But I have been with him, same as you. If I have got the sickness, it is already upon me. Why will you not take my help when you so need it?”

Next to me, Vader gets up wearily, an old soldier rising to yet another battle. “Let him help, Cornelia. Don’t you know? God protects saints and madmen.” He smiles sadly. “Perhaps they are the same.”