All through the night, Aletta wrestled for the life of her son. She had neither eaten nor slept since the heatte had grabbed him. Hovering over the sickbed of her firstborn in flickering lamplight, she bathed his feverish brow and administered every herb she knew to apply to the heavy humors in his little chest. She spoke sweet soft words in his ears, even when his eyes were fast shut. She smiled through her tears whenever his eyes fluttered open and his hot fingers squeezed her hand ever so slightly.
Almost from the moment she discovered his heatte, she struggled against the persistent voice of her mother-in-law ringing through an unwelcome memory, “God will always win! God will always win!” On and on it went, the relentless accusations of an inescapable curse.
Halfway between sundown and sunrise, Aletta sat suckling Kaatje. Even here she was tormented. Kaatje, indeed! Her imagination conjured up pictures of Moeder Kaatje scolding her. “You disregarded my warnings, then thought you could sidestep the consequences by giving this child my name. Is it your intention to give her up one day to fulfill my vows as a Beguine sister?”
“Great God,” Aletta cried out as Kaatje ceased to suckle and fell into a calm and quiet slumber. “I once promised to keep the vow myself, so Pieter-Lucas could be free to marry. Instead, I am indeed married to the man, and I love him with all my heart. I’ve borne his children, and he tells me that the memory of my arms and my heart sustain him in the duty he is forced to do. What, then, can I do?”
“God will always win!” The sole answer droned on, an increasingly sharp finger pointed at her breast, where the sleeping child no longer caused its milk to flow.
“God, I cannot go to the Beguinage with its lifeless Christ and accusing sisters. Whatever would happen to Pieter-Lucas? Do you not care that I would break his heart? And my children?”
A host of tragic thoughts burst upon her, one after the other. She saw Pieter-Lucas lying facedown and unbreathing in the snow with blood pouring from his head. She saw little Lucas’ still cold body being buried in the ground. She imagined she saw Kaatje struggling to walk, never succeeding—and weeping, weeping, weeping, while a flock of Beguines gathered round and screamed at her to walk!
She clasped the baby in tight arms and wept, rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed, chasing the pictures from her brain and crying softly, “Great God, be merciful, be merciful! Ask me not to go from this room—or to desert my husband.”
Lost in her anguish, she was only faintly aware that Mieke had come and sat beside her perfectly still, as if awaiting orders. Aletta felt herself drowsing into a half sleep when Lucas broke into a fit of coughing.
In an instant she rushed to the boy’s side, handing the baby to Mieke to put in her cradle. The cough went on, growing steadily more deep and heavy, and in no time the phlegm he spit up turned to a dark color.
“Blood!” Mieke gasped.
“Wrap Kaatje,” Aletta ordered. Already she was wrapping Lucas in his feather bag, then wrapping her cape around her own shoulders.
“Where we goin’ in th’ middle o’ this freezin’ cold night?” Mieke asked.
“The Beguinage, where the sisters can give us help.”
“What kin they do what ye kin’t?”
“Mieke,” Aletta said sharply, “this is no time to dispute with me. Just wrap that baby and come.”
At the head of the stairs, she paused long enough to look back on their temporary home. “God, You have won! If You will save my son’s life—and if You insist—I shall not return to this place,” she mumbled into the coughing bundle in her arms. “Please take care of Pieter-Lucas for me.”
Blinded by hot smarting tears, she made her way uncertainly down the stairs and out into the freezing night.
****
The dungeon in the fort at Lammen was warmed only by the crush of more bodies than the cell could comfortably hold. A single pitch torch burned low on a rack on the wall.
Pieter-Lucas sat in his allotted space and hugged his knees and leaned against the cluster of bony backs that warmed and held each other up with what little strength remained after the long weeks of the prisoners’ ordeal. He closed his eyes and longed for sleep.
Deep down inside he sensed a surging flood of unexpected gratitude. In a place like this? One after another, reasons suggested themselves. For at least three days now, he had been freed from the solitary cell where he could neither lie down nor curl into a ball. In that cursed place, his whole body had ached from the daily beatings. Often he went without bread or water or the sound of another human voice. Some days he’d even welcomed the company of his interrogators as a break in the maddening solitude.
Once more restored to this larger cell where captured soldiers crowded up against one another’s squatting spots, he never lacked for company, though he often wished for a different sort. Loud explosions of bravado and anger, wails of self-pity, endless hours of senseless chatter, occasional philosophical arguments—all robbed him of any silence, especially in the deep of night. Even then there were moans and snores.
He could also be grateful that since that first night of his arrest, he was no longer chained to the wall. Further, the Spaniards had not tortured him on the dreaded rack—and he had not broken down and given them what they wanted.
Most important of all, he was still alive—more than could be said for some of the men who had been imprisoned in this place. Besides, his captors had left him yet with one golden curl. He reached up and fingered it, imagining that once again his head was covered with the curls, that Aletta was combing them with her fingers….
From somewhere in that haze-filled land between self-induced dreams and real ones, Pieter-Lucas was jarred back to reality with the sound of an enormous racket clanking down the stairs and ending with a loud grunt and a solid thud against the cell door. The cellmate they called Gerard nudged Pieter-Lucas from his position behind his left shoulder and mumbled, “Did you hear that?”
Pieter-Lucas shook himself and stared at the door. “What was it?”
“We’ll soon know,” Gerard answered.
By now a key was turning in the lock and the door creaked open. The ominous forms of a handful of men burst into the cell, carrying torches and shouting, “On your feet and follow us—NOW! We’ve taken the fortress from the Spaniards. Hurry! Flee for your lives! Hold your peace! Not a word!”
“Freebooters!” Pieter-Lucas muttered as he struggled to his feet. What mischief would this end in? These men never played by Willem’s rules—or the burgemeesters’. They swaggered about Leyden boasting of their great value, then planned wild forays that could not be executed or else ended in dismal failure and danger to the well-thought-out strategies of reasonable men.
The whole cell turned into a gigantic commotion. The dumbfounded men grunted and shoved and tripped over one another, squeezing through the door and up the stairs. Along with many others, Pieter-Lucas stumbled, aching and unsteady on his feet after so many days of cramped confinement and continued beatings. Further, the shoes he wore had been salvaged from a dead cellmate, and they were far too large for his feet.
At the top of the stairs, each man was handed a weapon of some sort, ordered once more to keep silent, and herded out into the frosty night air. Pieter-Lucas stared at the long spear in his hand and heard his heart crying out, Great God, You know how many times I’ve vowed never to bear arms in battle. Ask me not to use this spear in this foolhardy mission that was sanctioned neither by Willem nor by the burgemeesters. Everything about it tells me it is doomed to failure. But for the love of Aletta and for my part in Willem’s cause—and the lives of my cellmates—bring it to success.
Pieter-Lucas struggled to walk in his borrowed shoes through the pitch black night, across the icy roadway. He kept to the center of the throng, where shoulders jostled and feet slipped on the ice, and weakened soldiers held one another up. Fortunately the way was short to the city, and the freebooters did indeed keep the way mostly clear.
Not until they’d reached nearly to the Koe Poort did they begin to hear Spaniards shouting at them, shots ringing in the night, arrows whizzing toward them, mostly falling short of their targets. The patriot soldiers who guarded the gate unlocked it and ushered them quickly through to safety. When the last man was through, they followed and bolted the gate.
“Freebooters dressed in Spanish uniforms, God’s angel guards?” Pieter-Lucas mumbled.
Outside the wall, Spaniards screamed at one another, while inside, the liberated captives raised their fists in triumph, then made their way to beds and waiting families.
Pieter-Lucas approached a freebooter and handed him his spear.
“Keep it for your next duty,” the burly man said.
“I am no soldier,” Pieter-Lucas protested. Then without listening for an answer, he crept through the streets toward home.
When at last he reached the old warehouse, he stood before it for a long moment and pondered. Never had even the kasteel at Dillenburg looked so inviting. In moments he’d be creeping into bed with his precious Aletta.
“Pieter-Lucas, God brought you home!” He could already hear her voice, like music from heaven.
“And gave me one more chance to tell you how terribly much I love you,” he’d answer as he entangled his fingers in her silky hair and kissed her and dared to hope she would not notice how bearded he had grown, nor that his curls were missing, his face smudged, his doublet ripped. Come morning, when the whole world could see, she would have questions and he must give answers.
It was not morning yet. One thing he could do this night before he went to her. Hurriedly he knelt beside the doorstoop. With both hands he scooped up the snow and smeared it over his face. He yanked the old tam from his head, then gathered up more snow and rubbed it into his fresh growth of hair. He ran stiff fingers through the stubbly promise of new curls and replaced his cap, mumbling, “That’s enough for tonight!”
He hurried up the stairs and went for the bed as fast as his stiff and weary legs would allow. But in the faint light of a low-burning lamp, he could see that Aletta was not here. Shock turned to disbelief.
“She must be here!” He rummaged through the entire bed with trembling hands. He pulled back the unrumpled covers and found everything lying in precise order—flat, smooth, cold.
Lucas’ bed and the cradle also stood empty! Like his head and his heart. He went to the table where he found, beside the lamp, a piece of rough paper with four lines of words inscribed:
Moeder Kaatje said, “God will always win.”
God has won.
I shall love you always.
Aletta
He grabbed the note in his hands, then sank into a chair. He stared at it until his eyes grew too bleary to read it again. What did it mean? Where had she gone? Why?
He pounded on the table with a tight-knuckled fist and cried out, “What have you done to her, God, while I was out doing your bidding? Running messages across a snowy countryside infested with speken was never my idea, as you right well know. Where is she, God? Ach! Ach! Ach! I must have her back….”
For a long moment he stared into the emptiness of what had become a world laid waste. Too numb for pain, too shocked for thought, all his mind would give him was a clear warm image of her face. It tantalized him until he thought he would go mad. With a sudden burst of energy, he stood to his feet, jabbing at the air behind him with fierce elbows and knocking the chair clattering to the floor.
“Aletta, my Aletta,” he wailed, as if pleading with her to come to him out of the shadows. “I cannot live without you.”
Finally he threw himself on the bed, buried his face in the feather bag, clenched his teeth and fists, and howled, “Where did you take her, God? Where? Where?”
“Try the Beguinage” came a clear masculine voice from above him. God was talking to him? He froze to his spot and waited for another word. Instead, he felt the bed move and turned to see Vader Dirck sitting beside him. He shoved himself up onto his elbows.
“When did she leave?” he asked.
“Four nights ago.”
“Why?”
“Lucas has been very ill again.”
“Nay, not my Lucas too!”
Dirck sighed. “That night he coughed worse than ever. We heard the coughing, but by the time my vrouw had come out to help, they were all gone—Aletta, Mieke, and both children.”
“And you didn’t go to bring them back?” A tightness was growing in his chest.
“I tried,” Dirck insisted, “but the sisters refused to let me in. I sent Joris’ daughters, but they refused them too. At sunset today, Mieke came back.”
“What did she say? How is Lucas?” Pieter-Lucas felt trapped again, the way he’d felt in the solitary cell in the dungeon.
“Mieke said he’s better today. The heatte is nearly gone and he’s no longer coughing so violently. She left a note for you on the table but told us that Aletta won’t talk to anybody—not even to her. When she’s not hovering over Lucas, she’s off by herself praying in the chapel.”
Pieter-Lucas sat up. “I must go to her.”
“Be not surprised if they don’t let you in.”
Pieter-Lucas felt a rising indignation. “She’s my vrouw, and they’re my children—they cannot deny me entrance.”
“Wait at least till daylight,” Dirck urged.
“And lie here in this cold abandoned bed with smashed dreams and ghosts that offer the thing I seek, then sprint devilishly out of reach?”
Dirck shrugged and said, “I pray you Godspeed.”
Pieter-Lucas headed for the streets.
****
The Beguinage lay utterly still and shrouded in darkness as Aletta made her way around the courtyard toward the chapel. Both children were sleeping again, and Mieke kept watch so she could slip away to pray. She had so much to learn about begging forgiveness, deepening penitence, and seeking a way to atone for the breaking of Moeder Kaatje’s vow. The sight of the lifeless Christ at the altar brought despair to her heart, but in time she trusted the load would lighten. Her Anabaptist years, filled with images of the resurrected Christ, had made her nearly forget the need for sacrifice, the value of self-denial and examination, and that dreaded word, penance.
She was not more than halfway to the chapel when the bell at the gate began to ring. Something in the urgent pace and volume told her that the person who rang it, at this unlikely hour, was desperate to be admitted.
“Pieter-Lucas!” Her heart beat so hard it nearly leapt into her throat, and she rushed on to the chapel. She dared not to look into his face to see the hurt mixed with love in his eyes, to hear the passion in his voice, to let him touch her. She could not be his vrouw anymore. This exercise in Beguine sisterhood was difficult enough without the tug and pull of the man she loved more dearly than her own life. At least Lucas was healing at last. This must be the right thing to do, no matter how it pained!
“Ach me! I must never see him again,” she whispered to herself. She hurried into the suffocating sanctuary and shut the door, trying to block out the continuing sound of the bell.
She fled all the way to the altar at the front of the room, fell to her knees on the kneeling rail, and held both hands tightly over her ears.
“Great and merciful God,” she prayed. No sooner had she begun than the tears began to flow. “Teach me all Thy ways of penitence and self-resignation that the lives of my children and my husband may indeed be spared, that they may one day know the smile of Thy face warming their bodies, their steps, and their hearts.” She forced out the words—maybe not the proper words to express the thoughts she must learn as a Beguine. For now, they were all the words she knew.
“Give to my husband a holy happiness and a release from pain and anguish.” She burst into such a torrent of tearful anguish of her own that she could go no further. For a long while she leaned against the mourner’s rail and wept. Not the way it was supposed to be, but she could do no other. If only she had never married Pieter-Lucas in the first place, it would have been so much easier. For marriage to a good and honorable man with a passionate and single-minded love cannot be so quickly tossed into the sea of life’s turmoils and religion’s demands.
“Dear God, give me time to learn, and chastise me not overmuch for my tears and the passion of my married heart. In time I shall learn to give all the passion to Thee, that I might make atonement for the ones I love, but for now…” She gave herself to the sobbing and tried not to think, falling finally into a sound sleep.
****
Pieter-Lucas rang the bell at the Beguinage with the urgency of a dying man. He couldn’t let anyone keep his vrouw imprisoned outside of his aching arms. He rang, then paced back and forth across the uneven cobbled street. He rang again, then paced and rang and paced and rang until at last the weathered wooden gate creaked partly open and the sleepy countenance of a Beguine sister frowned out at him.
“Have you no regard for the peace and quiet of this holy place? May God bring you to holy shame for such rude disturbance.”
“I need to see my vrouw,” he demanded, shoving against the door. She held him back.
“Vrouw? We are not married women in this sisterhood,” she said with ice in her voice.
“My vrouw is here. She came while I was away, bringing our son who has been deathly ill. I must see them both.”
“Your vrouw is performing penance and will not speak with anyone.”
“Penance? Not my vrouw! She has nothing to pay penance for. You have deceived her into believing so. And my son, what penance does he perform that he is not allowed to see his own vader?” He knew his voice was rising in volume; he could feel it in the tightness of his knuckles, the pressure on his temples.
“You will go on your way and not come back until your vrouw calls for you,” the Beguine said firmly and slammed the door in his face. He reached up to tug on the bell cord once more, only to discover it had been pulled inside, beyond his reach.
He swung his foot back and landed a solid kick on the door. He’d forgotten about the oversized shoes he wore, and as he kicked, they cut into the shin still sensitive from the soldier’s kicks in the prison. Prison? It seemed so far away, and yet his body screamed out in every joint to tell him that he had only left it a few hours ago. Weary, aching, and feeling a bit of dizziness in the head, he began to wander aimlessly through the streets. The borrowed shoes slipped on icy cobblestones and turned his ankles.
Daybreak found him sleepily staggering past a row of red brick stepped-gable houses with the clumsiness of a drunken freebooter. He yearned for a bed, but the one bed in this city that was his to claim was too full of ghosts to let him rest. In fact, he doubted that he could ever rest again, anywhere, without Aletta. The toe of his oversized shoe tripped on a protruding cobblestone and sent him sprawling to the ground. He lay there, facedown in the ice, for a long moment before he gathered strength to push himself to a sitting position. He slumped his back and head against the door of the building behind him, then felt his eyelids close and was soon drifting off into a light and unsettled sleep.
The next thing he knew, he awoke with the strong feeling that someone was looking at him. Kneeling in front of him, tapping him on the shoulder, was Mieke. He snapped to life.
“Is my vrouw indeed in the Beguinage?” he asked.
“That she is.”
“And is it true that she does penance and will not talk with anyone?” He searched her eyes for the least flicker of shiftiness.
Mieke shook her head and sighed. “I fear ’tis true, an’ I kin’t git her to tell me what th’ difficulty is. She’s not a-talkin’ to th’ sisters, not even to me. She watches Lucas, feeds Kaatje, an’ prays. One o’ the sisters found her a-sleepin’ in th’ chapel this mornin’ already, her beautiful head a-lyin’ on th’ mourner’s rail an’ her hair soaked with tears.”
“She hasn’t said anything at all about why she ran away or when she’ll be back?”
“Lucas was awful sick. The heatte done sapped all th’ life out o’ him, an’ she said we had to git help fer him. I telled her I thought she could do anythin’ fer him at home what th’ sisters could do. She snapped at me then, an’ b’fore I knowed what was a-happenin’, we was off and gone.”
“She said nothing more?”
Mieke furrowed her brow and thought. “Ja…one thing she keeps a-sayin’ over an’ over like as if she’s off in a trance.”
“What is it?” Pieter-Lucas grabbed her by the arm.
“‘God will win!’” A perplexed look spread over the woman’s face. “I’se never heared her talk like that b’fore. Kind o’ mournful ’tis…. I jus’ figured it was b’cause she hadn’t gone to bed fer a good sleep ever since Lucas’ heatte comed back—an’ that horrible awful cough! Ah me! When folks doesn’t sleep, all sorts o’ fanciful things comes out o’ their mouths, ye know.”
“How long ago was that?”
Mieke shrugged. “Th’ night after Christmas, ’twas. She’d been jus’ a-hoverin’ over that jongen day an’ night an’ wept an’ rubbed him an’ gave us all orders about fixin’ herbs. Later she was a-sittin’ on th’ bed a-rockin’ Kaatje an’ a-moanin’ an’ a-mumblin’ to herself, mostly words too soft to figure out, except ‘God will always win!’ She looked so sad. I never seed her so sad lookin’ b’fore.”
God will win! Pieter-Lucas turned the phrase over and over in his mind. That was what his moeder said to her when she told her about her vow to be a Beguine and how she’d broken it and wanted him to keep it for her by being a priest.
A great horrible shudder flashed through his whole body from head to toe. Surely she couldn’t be thinking she had to fulfill his moeder’s Beguine vow in order to save Lucas’ life!
“Mieke!” He grabbed both of her arms now and pulled her face up to where she could not but look him straight in the eye. She struggled, but he held her tight. “Mieke, you have to get her out of that place and bring her to me.”
“How?”
“Nobody needs to tell you how. That’s the sort of thing you do best. Listen, if you don’t get her out of the Beguinage now, she’ll never come out again. Do you hear me? Never again, and neither will she—nor any of the sisters—let my children out.”
Tugging hard against his grasp, the little woman trembled as much as Pieter-Lucas’ stomach and hands were trembling right now. “I do whatever Mieke can do. Jus’ r’member, not even Mieke kin make yer vrouw go where she sets her mind not to go.”
“Nor can anybody stop Mieke from doing anything she puts her mind to do,” Pieter-Lucas said. Then gripping her more firmly yet, he said, “You bring her to me—or show me a way into the church where I can find her when she prays. If I do not see her and the children, I shall not live to see the siege lifted from this place. For without Aletta, I’ve no reason to live. Now be on your way!”
He let her go and felt the last of his strength drain from him. Exhausted, he rested back against the door again. Newborn hope trembled at the pit of his stomach and sent little flutterings all through his belly. Surely once he could get Aletta to look him in the eye and let him hold her in his arms, she would follow him home. But would she meet him? Or would he have to invade the Beguinage and take her by force?
He stared straight ahead, not seeing, for a long while. Then, as if a bolt of lightning had illuminated the scene before him, on the doorway directly across the street from where he sat, he saw a sign carved into the lintel: St. Jan’s Hospitaal.
“The poorhouse where Christoffel told me Lucas van Leyden’s painting is,” he mumbled. “How long I’ve waited to find it, to look on it, to study it.” He stared hard at the building. “‘The Last Judgment,’” he mused. “Nay, not now! I’ve all I can do to handle God’s present judgment without thinking about the future.” The words sent wild dreams into his head. He shook them away. He unfolded his aching body and stood to his feet, finishing, “Besides, Christoffel said they would not show it to me.”
In a deep fog he stumbled up one street and down another, shivering all over. “Great God,” he pleaded, “must you always win? And when you do, can you ask no other victor’s prize than my vrouw and my children? Nay, God, nay! I will not give them up to any Beguinage!”
How long he wandered, he had no idea. The heavens were draped with a dreary gray gauze of fog clouds, and he couldn’t even tell where the sun was. Not until he found himself at the bottom of the citadel hill did he even notice where he was.
“Ah, so,” he sighed and took the measure of the stairs with a weary eye. “At least a spot to rest,” he mused, putting one tired foot above the other, climbing as slowly as an old man. Once in the flat plein, with its oak tree beside a well, he paused, then climbed some more to the upper level where he could circle round and see all that lay below.
He looked out at the Zyl Poort and the Zyl River and the place where The Clever Fox Inn had so long stood. He gazed out at Lammen, where he saw a Spanish flag hanging limp in the damp unbreathing air.
“They’ve recaptured it,” he murmured. “Thank God I was set free when I was. Or maybe ’twould have been better had I perished there. Without Aletta waiting for me, caring…”
He moved quickly on around. The Beguinage lay just on the other side of the Pieterskerk. All he could see was the chapel steeple. “Dear God, does she kneel there at this moment and pray? What does she pray? If only she could see me and know how my heart is wounded beyond repair!”
A perpetual wind stirred about his ears and caught at the corners of his cape, tossing them back and forth. He stared across the vast expanse of buildings, walls, fortresses, and soggy pasturelands laced with waterways and dikes holding the waters back. So this was Leyden!
All his life he’d lived to come here. Opa had held it up to him as the great golden city of promise and the fulfillment of all his fondest dreams. Here he’d find a meester to teach him all the secrets that would make him as great a painter as Lucas van Leyden. Here he’d find safety and quiet and abundance and peace for Aletta and the large flock of strong and healthy children she would bear him.
If only it could have been so. Instead, Leyden had taken everything from him—the strength of his youth, all hope of finding a meester, the health of his children, safety from the ravages of war and famine, the love of his vrouw…. One thing remained. What the Spanish soldiers and wild mercenary soldiers in the dungeon had not destroyed of his painting supplies he had wrapped in their torn bag. His fingers, now chilled and stiff, moved uncertainly toward the bag hidden beneath his doublet, next to the miniature paintings and empty canvases he’d also recovered. He patted them protectively.
But of what value were these tools now that all else was gone? Long ago his opa had reminded him over and over, “This passion to paint is a monster in your blood. Without the hand of God and a good vrouw to check and soothe and prod and guide, it will consume your heart and mind and leave you with nothing but ashes on your palette.”
Once, these words had prodded him to paint a picture for his wedding. Today they mocked him and turned his innards cold and lifeless. In between he’d known years of running messages, fighting just to be allowed to spend one hour with his vrouw beside him, worrying constantly about her safety, watching her bear a dead child and care for two living, sickly children, watching painters slip elusively from his own grasp. The anguish of it all had cooled his passion for the paint that, until this moment, he’d always believed ran in his blood.
With difficulty and determination, he pulled the bag from his doublet and laid it out before him on the stone wall of the citadel. He untied the cord that held it shut, then lifted out the one remaining pot of paint, removed the stopper, and shook its contents into the winds. Flecks of bright red color flew away from him, like blood. Next he threw out his charcoals. Then he took the tiny piece of wood he used for a palette and flung it, skipping across the currents, like he’d often sent a flat pebble skipping across the river.
He felt in the bag. Only one piece left—Opa’s brush. Could he throw it to the winds as well? He stood a long while feeling the pain pounding in his chest. Then he lifted out the old worn brush. He turned it over in his hand, now sweating, even in the cold.
One other time he’d sweat in agony over this brush. That day his vrouw had made him promise never to give up the painting gift for anything. But she stood beside him then. For a long while he listened to his heart as it argued with his heart.
“Do it, jongen,” he prodded himself and raised his hand, prepared to aim it straight to the Beguinage.
Nay, he couldn’t! Even if he never painted another stroke, it was all he had left of Opa and the dream that old man had inspired. He might yet pass it on to his Lucas. He shoved it into the bag.
Reaching into his doublet, he felt the tiny canvases next to his heart. Slowly he lifted them out. The empty canvases he tossed into the air and watched them billow on the wind, a piece of his heart blowing away with them.
Finally, he smoothed the wrinkles from Lucas’ drawing of the lamb and the portrait of Aletta, defiled by the crude kisses of thirty men in a dirty prison cell.
“Nay, not these too! They must always lie next to my heart.”
A sense of horror gripped him as the wind tugged at the corners, begging to snatch his treasures away. He gathered them to his chest, then lowered his head and wept. The stiffening wind blew away his tears. “Take my tears, mixed with the paints and charcoal ashes and empty canvases, to the Beguinage,” he cried out.
Never had he felt so hollowed-out, scraped clean of every morsel of life, drained of every oozing drop of blood.