Breda
Middle of Grass Month (April), 1567
Morning’s early brush strokes had already streaked the sky with pale tints of rose, lavender, and gold when Pieter-Lucas emerged from the Kasteel. He made his way at last to Annastraat. Unbidden, his steps slowed as he passed the corner bookshop where cobwebs hung like curtains in the shutters over the windows. From somewhere behind the bolted door, he imagined he heard the spirit of his beloved calling to him with muffled voice. Empty-hearted, apprehensive, he continued on to the overgrown weeds and cold hearth of home.
For the next three days and nights, he worked in a frenzy and slept but little. Propelled by a strange mixture of curiosity, anger, and loneliness, he sifted through a lifetime of memories and possessions in search of valuable treasures to carry with him into the new life that Prince Willem van Oranje had opened up to his wondering imagination.
Above all, he searched for answers and looked at all the familiar objects with newly awakened eyes and a host of questions. Whose house was this, after all—Hendrick’s, as he’d always supposed and now found to be the most despicable of ideas, or Kees’ before him, in which case Hendrick was doubly villainous? Did this old felt hat really belong to Hendrick—or to Vader Kees before him?
“Kees!” The name sent the blood rushing through Pieter-Lucas’ veins. He said it over and over and let the joy explode. Through his imagination ran the constant search for Kees van den Garde—stableboy, friend of Willem van Oranje, loving husband of Moeder Kaatje, and…Vader. Strange, how overnight this familiar old word had become warm and comforting and sustaining.
The process also brought forward in his mind a series of unsettling pictures and draped them with a mysterious haze. There was Moeder Kaatje in tears over a pot of summer vegetables on the hearth. And that feeling of Hendrick’s anger smoldering behind a held tongue while Opa taught Pieter-Lucas how to mix the colors on a palette to create a wash of light across a fine landscape. And Hendrick’s shrill railings when Moeder dared to protest his orders that they accompany him to the secret meetings in Backeler’s house at the end of Boschstraat.
If God was really there—the God Opa used to tell him about—why did He take his real vader away and leave him and Moeder with such a cruel, fiendish imposter? The more he questioned and searched for answers, the more anxious Pieter-Lucas grew to lock the door and run away from this place with all it held of disappointed promises and terror.
He spent every moment possible at the stables in the center of an enormous whir of activity. With eagerness, he took part in all the action—preparing the horses, watching the parade of strangers coming and going with last-minute messages, loading wagons and coaches. And in every corner and familiar furnishing, sound, and smell, he imagined Kees. He now felt a part of this special place more than ever and reveled in the happy wonder it gave to him.
On the afternoon when he learned that they would be departing the next day, he hurried home and stuffed his knapsack till it bulged and strained at the seams and spilled out around the flaps. Each chosen item represented a piece of the old life he could not quite bear to leave behind—two changes of clothes, his woodcarving knife, the metal cup his moeder always filled for him, a brightly enameled vase Aletta admired, Moeder Kaatje’s favorite shawl, and her worn leather-bound prayer book which he’d found hidden beneath a stack of bed linens in the old carved chest.
For reasons which he could not fully reconcile with his current anger with God, he held the little book tenderly before he packed it. It felt almost as if it were too holy an object for his fingers to touch, whatever that might mean. One by one, he leafed through the pages, looking, wondering, not able to read the Latin words inscribed there. About midway, the pages came open more easily, and wedged between them he found a miniature canvas with an oil-painted portrait of a young man probably about his own age.
“Hendrick van den Garde!” he said with unbridled disgust. Did Moeder Kaatje really love him enough to preserve his portrait among her treasures? Yanking the picture from the book, he walked to the fireplace and flung it onto the tiny group of embers dying there. Perhaps a fire built with his own hand might silence the unwelcome inner monster that had been his increasingly frequent companion for all these months since his supposed vader had so nearly finished him off in the Great Church.
His heart beat rapidly with a peculiar sense of tortured delight as he watched a thin tongue of reborn flame begin to curl around his vengeful offering. But, all unexpectedly, the eyes in the portrait seemed to reach up to him, pleading as if for mercy. He tried to look away, but they held him. Just as the flames entwined themselves around the border of the picture, Pieter-Lucas thought he saw the lips move and heard an agonizing cry, “How do you know I am not Kees, your real vader?”
Without an eyeblink of hesitation, he reached into the flames and pulled the portrait free. He pressed it to his chest and beat at the flames until they died. Fine, warm, crumbling ashes powdered off around the edges. He smoothed them in his fingers and stared hard at the rescued portrait. “These are not the eyes of Hendrick van den Garde,” he mumbled. “How could I have been so mistaken?”
“Forgive me, Vader,” he whispered, then tucked the portrait into the folds of his doublet next to the note Aletta had left for him in the shutters of the printshop in Antwerp.
Quickly now, he put Moeder Kaatje’s prayer book into his knapsack. He left a pair of dying embers in the hearth and a few crusts of dried bread on the table, along with a burned-out candle beside a Calvinist pamphlet he’d found hidden in an empty box among Hendrick’s tools. That should leave no doubt in Alva’s mind that Hendrick van den Garde was an image-breaking Calvinist. He chuckled with a peculiar vengeful delight. How could he feel both guilty and so intensely satisfied?
“It is the only way to treat a fiend like Hendrick,” he told himself.
Without a backward glance, he shouldered his knapsack, closed the door, and paused at the doorstoop for an instant to savor the memory of Aletta that would always hover there. Then he made his way out the gate and down the street, heading for the edge of town. He had to make one last visit before he could leave this place, perhaps forever.
How long it had been since he’d walked these cobblestones past the Guesthouse Gate and beyond the city wall! Only once had he done it since the death of his anointing. He’d gone to check it all out before he met Aletta in the birch wood and left town in search of Vader Hendrick.
At the Y in the road, he followed to the right on that old familiar path so little traveled that the weeds had nearly hidden the cobblestones. The pathway leading off into the oak trees was only visible because he knew precisely where it ran. A haunting wind sighed through the barely budding branches of the giant trees. The hedge that obscured Opa’s secret place grew so wild he never would have found the doorway. In fact, he almost missed it now, but something was not in order.
It stood wide open, held firmly by a profusion of new growth, revealing a gaping hole. Pieter-Lucas shuddered at the nakedness of the sight. Then, with a strange blend of eagerness, caution, and anxiety, he stooped to pass through the doorway and enter the tunnel. He narrowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then picked his way with care along the passage, now infested with weeds and filled with mud-oozy puddles of frozen snow and spring rains.
“Who has been here since I last locked you up?” he asked, as if expecting the slimy walls to reverberate with the echoes of the culprit’s voice. Instead, they dripped water into the puddles, mocked his fears, and closed in around him.
At the end of the passageway, he dashed up the stairs and stared at what he remembered as Opa’s warm, beautiful studio. Where once it had been filled with artistic, nurturing disarray, now the whole scene lay in ruins. Disbelieving, speechless, numb, Pieter-Lucas surveyed the ugly sacrilege.
Smashed paint pots and varnish flasks lay in solid pools of dried, cracked paint. They turned the whole floor into a disorderly palette, sparkling with slivers of glass and broken pottery. Canvases and paintings had been sliced to ribbons and strewn about the room. Remains of paintbrushes had been thrown to the four corners in a shower of splintered handles and plucked-out bristles. Not a pane of the rosette window remained whole, but each served as a jagged pipe for the winds to blow through, creating a mournful symphony of destruction. A layer of cobwebs, dried oak leaves, bird droppings, and dust lay over everything.
The young artist wandered through the debris, still too stunned for words or tears, picking up ribbons and shards of Opa’s marvelous life, then casting them down again. He pressed at the pools of paint with his fingers in hopes of finding a few moist drops of soft, colored fluid still capable of bringing life to some canvas.
At last he stood over what had once been the three-legged stool where Opa spent so many happy hours creating the living pictures that had since met with an assassin’s sword. The old wooden easel Opa built with his own hands was smashed beyond recognition. Propped up against what remained of the table that once held his paints was a medium-sized canvas.
The wooden frame was broken in several places, leaving the canvas sagging. Across its surface had been scrawled a message in uneven black charcoal letters. A large hole in the center showed that it had been pierced with a knife.
Pieter-Lucas stooped down and read the words: “Opa’s paint is spilled out with his blood! Renounce his foolishness and be a man.”
“Hendrick van den Garde!” Pieter-Lucas shouted. “Despicable, cruel thief, madman, coward! You came here when you knew no one would challenge your savagery! May your body be consumed slowly, painfully by worms, and may your soul burn in a never-ending hell!”
He spat on the canvas, then snatched it up and drew his own dagger. “If I could not burn Hendrick’s memory in his portrait, I shall slice his words to bits!” he snarled.
He inserted his dagger into the hole and cut the insulting message in two pieces. With a combination of rage and smoldering glee, he began to wrench the splintered frame apart at its breaks. He tore it through at the top, then held it at arm’s length and searched for the weakest spot in the bottom of the frame. A shaft of late afternoon sun struck the canvas and brought his angry actions to a sudden halt.
He stared and swallowed hard. For beneath the ugly black letters, he now made out a pale, uneventful painting with only hints of color here and there. No work of Hendrick, this.
“How did I not see it sooner?” he muttered. Carefully, tenderly, he brought the two halves back together. His hands trembled.
The moment held a strange air of anticipation. Between the letters of Hendrick’s destructive message, Pieter-Lucas examined the dry, desolate dunes and craggy outcroppings of rock covering a sandy-hued canvas. Even the sky hung washed-out and pale yellow. At the far left of the picture stood a lone sun-bleached snag of a tree, without limbs or leaves. Here he scratched at the villainous letters obscuring the topmost branches and found a black, demonic-looking vulture perched.
Wind swept the desertscape in huge sand-laden circles that wound inward, ending in the center, just above the gash Hendrick had made in the canvas. Once more scratching away at the letters, he discovered under the shade of a scrubby grayish green shrub a man in a dirty-white robe kneeling beside a boulder. His brown hair hung in matted strings across his back and around his face, which was covered with his hands.
Pieter-Lucas stared at the painting, a shiver of desolation running along his backbone. Across the top of the canvas, in large, grayish letters, he read, “The Wilderness.” What was it Prince Willem had said to him three nights ago about his wilderness? But surely, there was no connection.
Fascinated, he studied the contours of the dunes, the angles of the crags, the hook on the vulture’s beak, the swirling of the winds, until his eyes followed the movement to the figure of the man in the center of the dizzying vortex. An arc of tiny, uneven letters outlined the bowed head. Pieter-Lucas rubbed at the ugly black charcoal, smudging it, continuing on till it paled, giving the painting underneath a grayish cast. In the process, he made out three faintly inscribed words: “The Anointed One.”
Those hands. Weren’t they the same hands that rested on the head of the little lame girl in “The Healing”? So this was Opa’s Healer in a wilderness? Pieter-Lucas tore his eyes away from the Christ in the wilderness and searched the borders of the painting for some clues. At the bottom of the canvas, painted in exquisite calligraphed letters now distorted by the torn canvas and broken frame, he made out the words:
He whom God anoints to paint His masterpieces
Must first be wounded,
Then driven, limping, into life’s bleak Wilderness.
“Take heart,” He cries through healing touch
Of transparent angel wings,
And sends him forth at last,
With brushes tied by pierced hands,
To spread fresh healing colors on the canvases
Of other men’s desert lives.
Scrawled in the corner at the end of the last line, the startled boy read in a well-known handwriting, “By Lucas van den Garde, for grandson, Pieter-Lucas, 1566.”
Anointing and wilderness and healing—what did it all mean? And where were the angels? Blinking as if to clear away the swirling sand, he searched the desolate picture and moved it toward a bright patch where sunlight could shine full on its pale, bleak beigeness.
“They have to be here somewhere,” he murmured, “near the Christ.”
Straining his eyes, he spotted them, partially obscured by Hendrick’s letters—filmy, colorless, transparent, with wings like lace covering their bodies. The two ethereal beings hovered near the kneeling Christ. From a tiny shimmering vial in his hand, one poured out drops of oil on Christ’s bowed head. Desperate to uncover it all, Pieter-Lucas rubbed at the charcoal again and again, wetting it at times with a dab of spittle and swiping it as clean as possible. Eventually, a simple hand-held harp emerged, being strummed by the second angel.
For a long while, he stood admiring the picture. A stream of tears slid unbidden down his cheeks. Might some angel indeed be hovering near to him in this place made sacred by Opa’s presence?
Then softly, insistently, from the far corner high up in the rafters came the cooing of a pair of doves. The spell was broken. Opa had said doves were for anointing, but the anointing had given way to a desert. The presence of doves in this studio but made a mockery of the whole business.
“Fantasy and nonsense,” he reprimanded himself. “Out with all this sentimental preoccupation with paintings and angels and anointing doves.”
Hurriedly, Pieter-Lucas removed the busted frame from the strange painting, then folded and shoved it into his knapsack along with a single broken-handled paintbrush he had found with bristles still intact. A billowy wind whipped through the shattered rosette windowpanes and blended with the cooing of the doves.
As if spurred on to haste, he rushed past the chaos and through the tunnel, mumbling, “Life is real and cold and hard, and I will make my own way out of the wilderness and into a painter’s paradise, with neither anointing nor angels.”
He stepped across the threshold, then turned, stooped down again, and shouted toward the studio, “Opa lives on, do you hear me, Hendrick van den Garde? With his paint coursing through my blood, I am more of a man than you will ever think to be!”