The Witching Hour

  And Roemer said: "Petyr, you have done such penance between here and Scotland that surely you deserve an increase in your allowance, and perhaps a better room within the house."

  More laughter greeted these words. I had to smile to myself, for I was drenched in fantasies of Deborah's beauty even then, but soon the good spirits had left me and I was again in pain.

  Deborah would answer no questions put to her. But when the wife of Roemer, who lived with us all her life, went to Deborah and put the needle and the embroidery in her hands, Deborah did, with some skill, begin to sew.

  By the end of week, Roemer's wife and the other wives had taught her through example to make lace, and she was hard at work at it by the hour, acknowledging nothing said to her, but staring at those around her whenever she looked up and then returning to her work without a word.

  To the female members, those who were not wives, but were scholars and had powers of their own, she seemed to possess an obvious aversion. To me she would say nothing, but she had stopped giving me hateful glances, and when I asked her to walk out with me, she accepted and was soon dazzled by the city, and allowed me to buy her a drink in the tavern, though the spectacle of respectable women drinking and eating there seemed to amaze her, as it amazes other foreigners who have traveled far more widely than she.

  All the while I described our city to her, I told of its history and its tolerance, of how Jews had come here to escape persecution in Spain, and how Catholics even lived here in peace among the Protestants, and there were no more executions for such things as witchcraft here, and I took her to see the printers and the booksellers. And to the house of Rembrandt van Rijn we went for a brief visit, as he was always so very pleasant to visit, and there were always pupils about.

  His beloved Hendrickje, of whom I was always fond, had been gone two years, but Titus, his son, was still living, and with him. And I for one preferred the paintings which he did at this time of his life, for their curious melancholy, to those he did earlier when he was all the fashion. We drank a glass of wine with the young painters who were always gathered there to study with the master and this is when Rembrandt first caught sight of Deborah, though it was later that he painted her.

  All the while, my intention was to amuse her, and divert her out of her hellish thoughts, and show to her the wide world of which she could now be a part.

  She kept her silence, but I could see that the painters delighted her, and the portraits of Rembrandt in particular drew her, and so did this kindly and genial man himself. We went on to other studios and spoke to other artists--to see Emmanuel de Witte and others who were then painting in our city, some friends of ours then as they are today. And she appeared to warm to this, and to come alive as it were, her face at moments most gentle and sweet.

  But it was when we passed the shops of the jewelers that she begged me with a light touch of her white fingers on my arm to stop. White fingers. I write this because I remember it so well--her delicate hand shining like a lady's hand as she touched me, and the weak desire for her I felt at this touch.

  She showed a great fascination with those who were cutting and polishing diamonds and with the comings and goings of the merchants and the rich patrons who had come from all over Europe, nay the world, to buy their fine jewels. I wished that I had the money to buy something pretty for her, and of course the merchants being much taken with her beauty, and her fine clothes--for Roemer's wife had turned her out beautifully--began to play to her, and ask would she like to see their wares.

  A fine Brazilian emerald set in gold was being shown to a rich Englishman, and this caught her eye. When the Englishman forswore it on account of the expense, she sat down at the table to look at it, as if she could well purchase it or I might for her, and it seemed she fell into a spell staring at this rectangular gem, fixed in its filigree of old gold. And then in English, she asked the price of it, and did not bat an eye when told.

  I assured the merchant we would take it under consideration most deeply, as obviously the lady wanted it, and with a smile, I helped her to the street. Then I fell into sadness that I could not buy it for her.

  And as we walked along the quay together back to the house, she said to me, "Do not be sad. For who expects such things of you?" and for the very first time she smiled at me, and pressed my hand. My heart leapt at this, but she lapsed again into her coldness and her silence and would say nothing more.

  I confessed all this to Roemer, who advised me that we had not taken vows of chastity but that I was behaving most honorably, which was as he expected, and that I should study my English books now, as my writing in English was still dreadful, and thereby occupy my mind.

  On the seventh day of Deborah's time in the Motherhouse, one of our members of whom you have heard and studied much, though she is dead these many years, came home from Haarlem where she had been visiting her brother, a rather ordinary sort of man. But she was no ordinary woman, and it is of the great witch, Geertruid van Stolk, that I speak. She was at that time the most powerful of all our members, be they men or women; and at once the story of Deborah was told to her, and she was asked to speak to the child and see if she could read Deborah's thoughts.

  "She will not tell us whether she can read or write," said Roemer, "in fact, she will tell us nothing, and we cannot divine what she reads from our minds or of our intentions, and we do not know how to proceed. We feel in our hearts that she has powers, but we are not sure of it; she has locked her mind to us."

  At once Geertruid went to her, but Deborah, on merely hearing this woman approach, rose from her stool, overturning it, and threw down her sewing and backed up against the wall. There she stared at Geertruid with a look of pure hatred on her face, and then sought to get out of the room, clawing at the walls as if to go through them, and at last finding the door and rushing down the passage towards the street.

  Roemer and I restrained her, begging her to be calm, and telling her that no one meant to hurt her, and at last Roemer said, "We must break the silence of this child." Meantime Geertruid gave to me a note, hastily scratched on paper, which said in Latin, "The child is a powerful witch," and this I passed on to Roemer without a word.

  We implored Deborah to come with us into Roemer's study, a large and commodious room as you well know as you inherited it, but in his time it was filled with clocks, for he loved them, and these have since been distributed about the house.

  Roemer always kept the windows over the canal open, and all the healthy noises of the city flowed, it seemed, into this room. It had about it a cheerful aspect. And as he brought Deborah now into the sunlight, and bid her sit down and calm herself, she seemed quieted and comforted, and then sat back and with a weary, pained manner looked up into his eyes.

  Pained. I saw such pain in this instant as to nearly bring the tears to my own eyes. For the mask of blankness had utterly melted, and her very lips were trembling, and she said in English:

  "Who are you men and women here? What in the name of God do you want with me!"

  "Deborah," he said, speaking soothingly to her. "Listen to my words, child, and I shall tell you plainly. All this while we have sought to know how much you could understand."

  "And what is there," she demanded hatefully, "that I should understand!" It seemed a woman's vibrant voice coming from her heaving bosom, and as her cheeks flamed, she became a woman, hard and cold inside and bitter from the honors she had seen. Where was the child in her, I thought frantically, and then she turned and glared at me, and again at Roemer, who was intimidated if I ever saw him, but he worked fast to overcome it and he spoke again.

  "We are an order of scholars, and it is our purpose to study those with singular powers, powers such as your mother had, which were said wrongly to have come from the devil, and powers which you yourself may possess as well. Was it not true that your mother could heal? Child, such a power does not come from the devil. Do you see these books around you? They are full of stories of such persons, called in one pla
ce sorcerer, and in another witch, but what has the devil to do with such things? If you have such powers, place your trust in us that we may teach you what they can and cannot do."

  Roemer spoke further to her of how we had helped witches to escape their persecutors and to come here, and to be safe with us. And he spoke even to her about two of the women with us who were both powerful seers of spirits, and of Geertruid, who could make the very glass rattle in the windows with her mind, if she chose.

  The child's eyes grew large but her face was hard. Her hands tightened on the arms of the chair, and she cocked her head to the left as she fixed Roemer and looked him up and down.

  I saw the look of hate come back into her face, and Roemer whispered: "She is reading our thoughts, Petyr, and she can hide her own thoughts from us."

  This gave her a start. But still she said nothing.

  "Child," Roemer said, "what you have witnessed is terrible, but surely you did not believe the accusations made against your mother. Tell us, please, to whom did you speak the night in the inn when Petyr heard you? If you can see spirits, tell these things to us. No harm will ever come to you."

  No answer.

  "Child, let me show you my own power. It does not come from Satan, and no evocation of him is required for its use. Child, I do not believe in Satan. Now, behold the clocks around you--the tall case clock there, and the pendulum clock to the left of you, and the clock on the mantelshelf, and that clock there on the far desk."

  She looked at all these, which greatly relieved us for at least she understood, and then she stared in consternation as Roemer, without moving a particle of his physical being, made them all come abruptly to a stop. The endless ticking was gone from the room and had left a great silence after it, which seemed strong enough in its emptiness to hush even the sounds from the canal below.

  "Child, trust in us, for we share these powers," said Roemer, and then pointing to me, he told me to start the clocks again by the power of my mind. I shut my eyes and said to the clocks: "Start," and the clocks did as they were told and the room was full of ticking once more.

  The face of Deborah was transformed from cold suspicion to sudden contempt, as she looked from me to Roemer. She sprang from the chair. Backwards against the books she crept, fixing me and then Roemer with her malevolent gaze.

  "Ah, witches!" she cried. "Why did you not tell me? You are all witches! You are an order of Satan." And then as the tears poured down her face, she sobbed. "It is true, true, true!"

  She wrapped her arms around her to cover her breasts and she spit at us in her rage. Nothing we could say would quiet her.

  "We are all damned! And you hide here in this city of witches where they can't burn you!" she cried. "Oh, clever, clever witches in the devil's house!"

  "No, child," cried Roemer. "We know nothing of the devil! We seek to understand what others condemn."

  "Deborah," I cried out, "forget the lies they taught you. There is no one in the city of Amsterdam who would burn you! Think of your mother. What did she say of what she did, before they tortured her and made her sing their songs?"

  Ah, but these were the wrong words! I could not know it, Stefan. I could not know it. Only as her face was stricken, as she put her hands over her ears, did I realize my error. Her mother had believed she was evil!

  And then from Deborah's trembling mouth came more denunciations. "Wicked, are you? Witches, are you? Stoppers of clocks! Well, I shall show you what the devil can do in the hands of this witch!"

  She moved into the very center of the room and looking up and out the window, it seemed, to the blue sky, she cried:

  "Come now, my Lasher, show these poor witches the power of a great witch and her devil. Break the clocks one and all!"

  And at once a great dark shadow appeared in the window, as if the spirit upon whom she had called had condensed himself to become small and strong within the room.

  The thin glass aver the faces of the clocks was shattered, the fine glued seams of their wooden cases sprung open, the very springs breaking out of them, and the clocks tumbled off the mantelshelf and the desk, and the tall case clock crashed to the floor.

  Roemer was alarmed for seldom had he seen a spirit of such power, and we could all but feel the thing in our midst, brushing our garments, as it swept past us and shot out its invisible tentacles, as it were, to obey the witch's commands.

  "Damn you into hell, witches. I shall not be your witch!" Deborah cried, and as the books began to fall around us, she fled once more from us, and the door slammed shut after her and we could not pry it open, try as we might.

  But the spirit was gone. We had nothing more to fear from the thing. And after a long silence, the door was made to open again, and we wandered out, bewildered to discover that Deborah had long since left the house.

  Now, you know, Stefan, by that time, Amsterdam was one of the very great cities of all Europe, and she held perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand persons, or more. And into this great city Deborah had vanished. And no inquiry we made of her in the brothels or the taverns bore fruit. Even to the Duchess Anna, the richest whore in Amsterdam, we went, for that is where with certainty a beautiful girl like Deborah might find refuge, and though the Duchess was as always glad to see us and talk with us, and serve us good wine, she knew nothing of the mysterious child.

  I was now in such abject misery that I did nothing but lie in my bed, with my face on my arms, and weep, though all told me this was foolish, and Geertruid swore that she would find "the girl."

  Roemer told me that I must write down what had happened with this young woman as part of my scholarly work, but I can tell you, Stefan, that what I wrote was most pitiful and brief and that is why I have not asked that you consult these old records. When I return to Amsterdam, God willing, I shall replace my old entries with this more vivid chronicle.

  But to continue with what little more there is to say, it was a fortnight later that a young student of Rembrandt lately from Utrecht came to me and said that the girl for whom I had been searching was now living with the old portraitist Roelant, who was known by that name only, who had studied many years in Italy in his youth and still had many flocking to him for his work, though he was exceedingly ill and infirm, and could scarce pay his debts anymore.

  You may not remember Roelant, Stefan, but let me tell you now he was a fine painter, whose portraits always evinced the happiness of Caravaggio, and had it not been for the malady which struck his bones and crippled him before his time, he might have been better regarded than he was.

  At this time, he was a widower with three sons, and a kindly man.

  At once I went to see Roelant, who was known to me and had always been genial, but now I found the door shut in my face. He had no time for visiting with us "mad scholars" as he called us, and warned me in heated terms that even in Amsterdam those as strange as we might be driven out.

  Roemer said that I was to leave it alone for a while, and you know, we survive, Stefan, because we avoid notice, and so we kept our council. But in the days that followed we saw that Roelant paid all his back debts, which were many, and that he and his children by his first wife now dressed in fine clothes, which could only be called exceedingly rich.

  It was said that Deborah, a Scottish girl of great beauty, taken in by him to purse his children, had prepared an unguent for his crippled fingers, which had heated them as it were and loosened them and he could hold the brush again. Rumor had it he was being well paid for his new portraits, but he would have had to paint three and four a day, Stefan, to make the money to pay for the furnishings and clothes that now went into that house.

  So the Scottish woman was rich, it was soon learned, the love child of a nobleman of that country, who though he could not acknowledge her, sent her money aplenty which she shared with the Roelants, who had been kind enough to take her in.

  And who might that be, I wondered? The nobleman in that great hulking Scottish castle which glowered like a pile of natural rock
over the valley from which I'd taken her, his merry-begot, barefoot and filthy and scarred to the bone from the lash, unable even to feed herself? Oh, what a pretty tale!

  Roemer and I watched all of these goings-on with trepidation, for you know as well as I the reason for our own rule that we shall never use our powers for gain. And how was this wealth being got, we wondered, if not through that spirit which had come crashing into Roemer's chamber to break the clocks as Deborah commanded him to do?

  But all was contentment now in the Roelant household and the old man married the young girl before the year was out. But two months before this wedding took place, Rembrandt, the master, had already painted her, and a month after the wedding the portrait was displayed in Roelant's parlor for all to see.

  And around her neck in this portrait was the very Brazilian emerald which Deborah had so coveted the day I had taken her out. She had long ago bought it from the jeweler, along with every bit of plate or jewelry that struck her fancy, and the paintings of Rembrandt and Hals and Judith Leister which she so admired.

  Finally I could stay away no longer. The house was open for the viewing of the portrait by Rembrandt, of which Roelant was justly proud. And as I crossed the threshold to see this picture, old Roelant made no move to bar my entrance, but rather hobbled up to me on his cane, and offered me with his own hand a glass of wine, and pointed out to me his beloved Deborah in the library of the house, learning with a tutor to read and write Latin and French, for this was her greatest wish. She learnt so fast, said Roelant, that it amazed him, and she had of late been reading the writing of Anna Maria van Schurman who held that women were indeed as open to learning as men.

  How brimming with joy he seemed.

  I doubted what I knew of her age when I saw her. Arrayed in jewels and green velvet, she looked to be a young woman of perhaps seventeen. Great sleeves she wore, and voluminous skirts, and a green ribbon with satin rosettes in her black hair. Her eyes too seemed green against the magnificent fabric that surrounded her. And it struck me that Roelant himself did not know of her youth. Not a word had passed my lips to expose any of the lies that circulated around her, and I stood stung by her beauty as if she had rained blows on my head and shoulders, and then the fatal blow to my heart was struck when she looked up and smiled.