Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Praise
Acknowledgments
1 - Sophia
2 - Maria
3 - Sophia
4 - Maria
5 - Cornelis
6 - Maria
7 - Cornelis
8 - The Painting
9 - Sophia
10 - Jan
11 - Maria
12 - The Letter
13 - Jan
14 - Maria
15 - Sophia
16 - Jan
17 - Sophia
18 - Willem
19 - Sophia
20 - Willem
21 - Sophia
22 - Willem
23 - Jan
24 - Sophia
25 - Cornelis
26 - Sophia
27 - Cornelis
28 - Sophia
29 - The Painting
30 - Cornelis
31 - Sophia
32 - The Tulip Grower
33 - Sophia
34 - Jan
35 - Autumn
36 - Sophia
37 - Jacob
38 - Maria
39 - Sophia
40 - Mrs. Molenaer
41 - Cornelis
42 - Jan
43 - Cornelis
44 - Jan
45 - Cornelis
46 - After the Storm
47 - Jan
48 - Cornelis
49 - Gerrit
50 - Cornelis
51 - Gerrit
52 - Sophia
53 - Gerrit
54 - Jan
55 - Gerrit
56 - Sophia
57 - Jan
58 - Sophia
59 - Jan
60 - Sophia
61 - Willem
62 - Jan
63 - Cornelis
64 - Jacob
65 - Cornelis
66 - Jan
67 - Maria
68 - Jan
About the Author
Copyright Page
It is the people who live on top, restfully and staidly; underneath it is their shadows which move . . . I should not wonder if the surface of the grachts still reflected the shadows of people from bygone centuries, men in broad ruffs and women in mob caps . . . The towns appear to be standing, not on the earth, but on their own reflections; these highly respectable streets appear to emerge from bottomless depths of dreams . . .
KAREL APEK,
Letters from Holland, 1933
Yes, I knew well the world of poverty and ugliness, but I painted the skin, the glittering surface, the appearance of things: the silky ladies, and gentlemen in irreproachable black. I admired how fiercely they fought for a life slightly longer than the one for which they were destined. They protected themselves with fashion, tailors’ accessories, a fancy ruffle, ingenious cuffs . . . any detail that would allow them to last a little longer before they—and we as well—are engulfed by the black background.
Z. HERBERT,
Still Life with a Bridle
Our task is not to solve enigmas, but to be aware of them, to bow our heads before them and also to prepare the eyes for never-ending delight and wonder. If you absolutely require discoveries, however, I will tell you that I am proud to have succeeded in combining a certain particularly intensive cobalt with a luminous lemon like yellow, as well as recording the reflection of southern light that strikes through thick glass on to a grey wall . . . Allow us to continue our archaic procedure, to tell the world words of reconciliation and to speak of joy from recovered harmony, of the eternal desire for reciprocated love.
LETTER ATTRIBUTED TO
JAN VERMEER
Tulip Fever
“The plot is as neatly and intricately constructed as a timepiece . . . this well-designed novel speaks poignantly of the uncertainties, losses and sorrows that menace even the best-ordered lives.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Mesmerizing . . . Moggach builds suspense, leaving the reader dreading the outcome yet unable to put it down.”
—The Denver Post
“No one reading this book will ever look at a painting by Vermeer or Rembrandt in quite the same way. What secrets hide behind those respectable facades.”
—Library Journal
“Elegantly absorbing . . . the sensuality that permeates the book—its vivid, fleshy detail—grounds the fable in experience. At the same time, its elaborate philosophical ruminations transform a tale of an ordinary doomed triangle in just the way that the Dutch painters elevated bald reality into something transcendent.”
—New York Newsday
“Moggach has really done her historical homework—and her depiction of 17th-century Holland is enthralling.”
—New York Post
“A gorgeous novel: both funny and tragic, full of sharply drawn characters and equally sharp insight into the transforming power of love—which can be as destructive as it is addictive.”
—Daily Mail (London)
“Artfully styled with the delicacy of a Vermeer.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Moggach’s lush and sensuously written novel will appeal to romantics as well as fans of historical novels.”
—Booklist
“Beautifully written, a verbal kaleidoscope that flicks rapidly through vivid sensual experience.”
—The Independent on Sunday
“This is popular fiction created at a high pitch of craft and rapid readability.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Spirited and ingenious . . . Clever, spry, and sad in equal measure.”
—The Telegraph
“Moggach reproduces the coded language of 17th-century Dutch art with subtle artfulness. At the same time, she tells a truly thrilling love story.”
—The Financial Times (London)
“Moggach’s writing is as vivid as a splash of Vermeer’s lemon yellow.”
—The Times (London)
Acknowledgments
For their comments and help, my thanks to Manouk van der Meulen, Russell Hoban, Wolfgang Ansorge, Judy Cooke, Geraldine Cooke, Patricia Brent, Periwinkle Unwin, Victoria Salmon, Jacques Giele, Lee Langley, Sarah Garland, Alex Hough, Anne Rothenstein, Judy Taylor, Charlotte Ackroyd, Geraldine Willson-Fraser, Lottie Moggach, Tom Moggach, and Csaba Pasztor. The many books I found useful and illuminating included Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches, Paul Zumthor’s Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland, Mariet Westerman’s A Worldly Art, Wayne E. Franit’s Paragons of Virtue, Bob Haak’s The Golden Age, R. H. Fuchs’s Dutch Painting, Michael North’s Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, Paul Taylor’s Dutch Flower Painting 1600–1750 and Z. Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle.
Most of all, my thanks to the Dutch artists themselves, through whose paintings we step into a lost world, and find ourselves at home.
1
Sophia
Trust not to appearances.
—JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632
We are eating dinner, my husband and I. A shred of leek is caught in his beard. I watch it move up and down as he chews; it is like an insect caught in the grass. I watch it idly, for I am a young woman and live simply, in the present. I have not yet died and been reborn. I have not yet died a second time—for in the eyes of the world this will be considered a second death. In my end is my beginning; the eel curls round and swallows its own tail. And in the beginning I am still alive, and young, though my husband is old. We lift our wine flutes and drink. Words are etched on my glass: Mankind’s hopes are fragile glass and life is therefore also short, a scratched homily through the sinking liquid.
Cornelis tears off a piece of bread and dips it into his soup. He chews for
a moment. “My dear, I have something to discuss.” He wipes his lips with his napkin. “In this transitory life do we not all crave immortality?”
I freeze, knowing what is coming. I gaze at my roll, lying on the tablecloth. It has split, during baking, and parted like lips. For three years we have been married and I have not produced a child. This is not through lack of trying. My husband is still a vigorous man in this respect. At night he mounts me; he spreads my legs and I lie there like an upturned beetle pressed down by a shoe. With all his heart he longs for a son—an heir to skip across these marble floors and give a future to this large, echoing house on the Herengracht.
So far I have failed him. I submit to his embraces, of course, for I am a dutiful wife and shall always be grateful to him. The world is treacherous and he reclaimed me, as we reclaimed our country from the sea, draining her and ringing her with dykes to keep her safe, to keep her from going under. I love him for this.
And then he surprises me. “To this effect I have engaged the services of a painter. His name is Jan van Loos and he is one of the most promising artists in Amsterdam—still lifes, landscapes, but most especially portraiture. He comes on the recommendation of Hendrick Uylenburgh, who as you know is a discerning dealer—Rembrandt van Rijn, newly arrived from Leiden, is one of his protégés.”
My husband lectures me like this. He tells me more than I want to know but tonight his words land noiselessly around me.
Our portrait is going to be painted! “He is thirty-six, the same age as our brave new century.” Cornelis drains his glass and pours another. He is drunk with the vision of ourselves, immortalized on canvas. Drinking beer sends him to sleep, but drinking wine makes him patriotic. “Ourselves, living in the greatest city, home to the greatest nation on the globe.” It is only me sitting opposite him but he addresses a larger audience. Above his yellowed beard his cheeks are flushed. “For doesn’t Vondel describe Amsterdam thus? What waters are not shadowed by her sails? On which mart does she not sell her wares? What peoples does she not see lit by the moon, she who herself sets the laws of the whole ocean?”
He does not expect an answer for I am just a young wife, with little life beyond these walls. Around my waist hang keys to nothing but our linen chests, for I have yet to unlock anything of more significance. In fact, I am wondering what clothes I shall wear for my portrait. That is the size of my world so far. Forget oceans and empires.
Maria brings in a plate of herrings and retreats, sniffing. Fog rolls in off the sea and she has been coughing all day. This hasn’t dampened her spirits. I am sure she has a secret lover; she hums in the kitchen and sometimes I catch her standing in front of a mirror rearranging her hair under her cap. I shall find out. We are confidantes, or as much confidantes as our circumstances allow. Since I left my sisters she is the only one I have.
Next week the painter will arrive. My husband is a connoisseur of paintings; our house is filled with them. Behind him, on the wall, hangs a canvas of Susannah and the Elders. The old men peer at the naked girl as she bathes. By daylight I can see their greedy faces, but now, in the candlelight, they have retreated back into the shadows; all I can see is her plump, pale flesh above my husband’s head. He lifts a fish onto his plate. He is a collector of beautiful things.
I see us as a painting. Cornelis, his white lace collar against black, his beard moving as he eats. The herring lying on my plate, its glistening, scored skin split open to reveal the flesh within; the parted lips of my roll. Grapes, plump and opaque in the candlelight; the pewter goblet glowing dully.
I see us there, sitting at our dining table, motionless— our own frozen moment before everything changes.
After dinner he reads to me from the Bible. “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field; the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it; surely the people is grass . . .”
But I am already hanging on the wall, watching us.
2
Maria
She must have a diligent eye to the behaviour of her servants, what meetings and greetings, what ticklings and toyings, and what words and countenances there be betweene men and maides, lest such matters being neglected, there follow wantonness, yea folly, within their houses, which is a great blemish to the governours.
—J. DOD AND R. CLEAVER, A Godly Forme of Household Government, 1612
Maria the maid, dozy with love, polishes the copper warming pan. She is heavy with desire; she feels sluggish, as if she is moving around underwater. Her face, distorted by the curved metal, smiles back at herself. She is a big, ruddy country girl with a healthy appetite. Her conscience, too, is a healthily adaptable organ. When she takes Willem into her bed, deep in the wall behind the kitchen fire, she pulls the curtain to shut out God’s disapproval. Out of sight, out of mind. After all, she and Willem will someday be married.
She dreams about this. She dreams that the master and mistress have died—shipwrecked at sea—and that she and Willem live in this house with their six sweet children. When she is cleaning, she cleans for his homecoming. When her mistress is out she closes the bottom half of the window shutters so that she cannot be seen from the street. The parlor is thrown into shadow, as if she is walking on the seabed. She puts on her mistress’s blue velvet jacket, trimmed with fur collar and cuffs, and she walks around the house casually catching sight of herself in the mirrors. It is a simple dream; where is the harm in it?
Maria is in the parlor now, on her knees. She is scrubbing the blue-and-white tiles around the skirting. Each tile shows a child playing—one with a hoop, one with a ball. One, her favorite, rides a hobbyhorse. The room is lined with her imaginary children. She wipes them tenderly with a cloth.
Through the wall she hears the noises in the street— footsteps, voices. Bred in the country, she is still surprised by the bustle of the Herengracht, by how close the street presses in against her secret world indoors. The flower seller cries out, his voice as eerie as a peewit. The man from the pewter foundry rattles his tin, calling vessels out to be repaired as if he were summoning sinners. Somebody, startlingly close, hawks and spits.
And then she hears his bell. “Fish, fresh fish!” Willem sings tunelessly; he has a terrible voice. “Roach—bream— herrings—cod!” Then he rings his bell. She is as alert as a shepherdess to the ding-dong of her darling in the midst of the flock.
Maria jumps up. She wipes her nose on her apron, smooths down her skirt and pulls open the door. It is a foggy morning; she can barely see the canal beyond the pavement. Willem looms out of the mist. “Hello, my lovely.” His face splits into a smile.
“What’ve you got there?” she says. “Give us a look.”
“What do you want, Maria my duck?” He shifts the basket onto his hip.
“How about a nice fat eel?”
“How do you like it?”
“You know how I like it,” she chuckles.
“How about stewed with apricots and sweet vinegar?”
“Mm.” She sighs. Down the road she hears barrels being unloaded from a barge. They fall onto the street, thump-thump, the thump of her heart.
“How about a herring?” he asks. “How about a kiss?”
He moves up the step, closer to her. Thump-thump.
“Ssh!” She backs away. People are passing. Willem hangs his head dolefully. He is a plain man—long, lugubrious, rubbery face, the sort of face that causes merriment in others. She loves it when it breaks into a smile. He is a darling, innocent man and he makes her feel worldly-wise. Her! That is how innocent he is.
Willem cannot believe she loves him. “I came by yesterday. Why didn’t you open the door?”
“Oh, the vegetable man was showing me his carrots.”
“You teasing me?”
“I was at the market.” She smiles at him. “It’s you I love. I’m like a mussel, closed in my shell. It’s only you who can open me.”
She steps back and lets him into the house.
He dumps down his basket and flings his arms around her.
“Ugh! Your fingers!” She leads him through the voorhuis , along the passageway, down the steps into the kitchen. He pinches her bottom as they stumble across to the sink.
She yanks the lever. Water gushes out of the tap, onto his outstretched hands. He stands there, as obedient as a child with its mother. She rubs his fingers dry and then she sniffs them. He presses his body against hers; he presses his knee between her thighs—she nearly swoons—and kisses her.
“You can’t stay long,” she whispers. “They’re both at home.”
She pulls him with her, into her bed in the wall. They fall over the wooden rim and collapse, laughing, on the mattress. How warm it is in here; the warmest bed in the place. When they own the house they will still sleep down here because it is her burrow, the hub of her existence.
He breathes sweet words into her ear. She tickles him. He yelps. She shushes him. She takes his hand and pushes it up between her legs; they’ve no time to lose. They giggle like children, for they have both grown up sleeping squashed against their brothers and sisters, snuggling and squirming and knocking knees.
“Now, what’s down here?” she whispers. “Anything interesting?”
Far off there’s a rat-a-tat-tat on the front door.
Maria jerks upright. She pushes Willem off and struggles out of bed.
A moment later, flushed and breathless, she unlatches the front door.
A man stands there. He is short and dark—shiny black curls, blue eyes and a velvet beret on his head. “I have an appointment,” he says. “I have come to paint a portrait.”
3
Sophia
The ripe pear falls ready to the hand.
—JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632
“My hand should be here, on my hip?” Cornelis half turns toward the painter. His chest is thrust out and his other hand grasps his cane. He wears his brocade coat and black stovepipe hat; he has combed his beard and waxed his mustache into points. Today he wears a ruff—deep and snowy white. It detaches his head from his body, as if it is being served on a platter. He is trying to conceal his excitement.