A week of snow follows a storm from the north. The meadows and tree branches are glazed with ice. Just before dusk, Tomas and Sara watch the whitening from behind the chill windows of their stone cottage in back of the main house. When Van Schooten finally retired and went to live with his ailing sister in Utrecht, Tomas was promoted to estate manager. Shortly after, he and Sara married—in the spring of 1638—and moved into the cottage. Cornelis, now in his seventies, has never liked the fussiness of titles (head butler, scullery maid, footman…) so he still calls Tomas the stableboy and Sara the visiting painter. She tutors some of the wealthy children during the summer retreats from Amsterdam and Haarlem, teaches them the principles of perspective, how to paint flowers and barns. In the winter, she helps out Mrs. Streek, who finds the stairs a painful bother. She stocks the pantries and cleans the upstairs rooms, brings Cornelis his meals when he’s in a funk of melancholia and sulking by the fire in his tearoom. Although she occasionally sketches, the truth is that she hasn’t completed a canvas in years. Somehow that practice was swallowed up in the new workaday, domestic routine. She’s happy—she would be the first to claim that state or emotion—but she misses the tension of an unfinished work, the sidling glances of a world looking back at her.
They spend much of the spring and summer out of doors. Tomas is fond of expeditions to collect mushrooms and mosses, to pick wildflowers or catch trout upriver. The foraging is a pastime he learned from Cornelis and Sara suspects he’s trying to keep the collecting flame alive now that the old man is housebound. One season Tomas spent every waking moment hauling lumber out to a secret location on the estate under Cornelis’s direction. Their employer had asked him to build an observation hut to keep watch on the eastern border of the estate—the neighbors were threatening a boundary skirmish—but then Cornelis forgot all about it. So in June of that year Tomas laid claim to the tiny outpost and announced to Sara that he’d built them a zomerhuis overlooking the coastal dunes. Whenever it’s warm and the mood strikes, they trundle out to the one-room cabin, a painted wooden jewel box on the seaward side of a bluff. Sara prefers the stone cottage and the comfort of her own bed, but she indulges Tomas’s frontier spirit. They cook fish on open coals, swim in the river, sleep on wadded cotton and sheepskin. He erects neat piles of heather and the webcap mushrooms that Sara uses for dying yarn. These earnest little offerings remind her of Kathrijn. As he ages, Tomas is forever turning seven again.
Sometimes she spends a few hours with her sketchpad, looking down toward the North Sea. It’s been years since a subject seized her by the nape of the neck. After the funeral procession there were other works of ambition, a handful of grapplings, but then the hunger died off in the easy contentment of daily life. She wonders about it sometimes while she sketches, feathering a gossamer cloud or blurring the amorphous line of the dunes against the blanched sky. She’s surprised that it doesn’t weigh on her more, this carefree quality of her days. But she sleeps easily and deeply, the sleep of a farm hound who’s spent all day outside. She looks forward to the darkness, when everything is hushed and Tomas tells stories of boyhood escapades and seafaring uncles and cruel spinsters. A little flourish in the design of the zomerhuis is that there’s a removable panel in the slanted roof. Tomas likes to make a show of opening up the room to the night sky above their makeshift bed, to present his wife with this rectangle of stars and planets. Here, he seems to be saying, I have assembled all this for you. But she suspects that he never quite finished shingling the roof. She lets him exaggerate his stories and talk her through the five constellations that he knows before they drift toward sleep. This seems like the truest kind of love to her.
She’s thinking about the impossibility of warmer days while she stares out at the brittle world from the cottage window, at the pendants of ice hardening along the barren fruit trees, the vapor of hoarfrost against the fence palings. Tomas interrupts her daydreaming—she’s staring into and through the fogged windowpane. He kisses her cheek and tells her there’s a break in the weather. Ice-skating at night, when he says it, sounds like an invitation to wonder.
* * *
Ellie drives down from Leiden in a rental car. The Netherlands in August is a vision of symmetry and Calvinist restraint, the greening fields perfectly square and run through with sluices and irrigation canals, not a rise anywhere to bend the sightlines. The Dutch love to repair to the countryside in the summer, take up residence in caravan parks and jerry-rigged dwellings no bigger than a sunroom. They ferry across to the wind-ravaged island of Texel or the dunes of Zeeland to spend a month reading barefoot in a tent. Or they drive into Germany and France with their pull-behind trailers and an end-of-days supply of toilet paper and tinned soup, afraid of what they might find outside their own province of watery domestication. Have they ever recovered from their intrepid seventeenth-century preoccupation with slaying everything wild? And yet they long to be free, barefoot, outspoken, immersed in nature, can’t wait to make this annual pilgrimage to camp under the stars. She wants to share these observations with her Dutch passenger, but she knows he would take offense. Instead, she looks out at the gentleness of the countryside and considers how much has happened within forty-eight hours, how her life has been reshaped. She left Sydney just as a winter southerly buster was lashing the coast and now she’s driving a rented Peugeot with Hendrik at her side and her own forgery in the trunk.
* * *
The storm clears just after nightfall and a full moon emerges from behind a cloth of weather. Tomas sharpens their skate blades with a file he uses for shoeing horses, makes them sharp enough to slice an apple. Sara packs along some walnuts and dried fruit and a kidskin bag of spiced wine. They bundle up in their woolen caps and mittens and scarves, their skates looped by the laces across one shoulder, and walk out into the cold, their breath like smoke. The freeze has settled deep into the landscape, sent splintered ropes of ice out along the leafless arbor vines, stiffened the hinges on the metal gate. They head for a western branch of the river, a spot where it widens a few miles from the village ruins. It’s a favorite summertime fishing spot for Tomas, a deep pool of rocks and eddies where the trout like to congregate. The snow is halfway up their calves as they walk along through the woods. The moonlight comes through the treetops in flickers and starts. Sara stares up as she tramps through the snow, glimpses the moon and a few stars dulled by its milky aura. It makes her realize that she hasn’t seen a cloudless sky in months.
They come down to the frozen riverbank, the ice thick and almost translucent where the snow has blown clear. There are patches of such clarity that she can see warped reflections of the night sky. The reeds are empty husks, gone the color of driftwood; they rattle and clack in the light wind. The couple stands together, his arm around her shoulder. She looks down into a window of clarified ice and thinks of the sluggish fish moping at the bottom, drifting in the slurries that run cold along the mud, of the way she and Tomas might appear to them as a two-headed beast through the frozen lens of the river. Tomas throws a big rock out into the center to test the hardness of the ice. It makes a satisfying thunk. There are Dutchmen who categorize the tenor of that sound and classify it against degrees of hardness. There are men who, during epic freezes, skate from Leiden to Amsterdam in a matter of hours. They sit on the cold stones to put on their skates and each take a sip of spiced wine to warm themselves through. Sara is the first to get to her feet and glide out onto the ice. She keeps her hands behind her back and kicks off with one leg, heading upriver. Tomas is forced to follow, calling after her as he copies the lines of her blades. She turns to face him, skating backward, her face flushed with wild good cheer. “Come on, you old mule,” she yells, “I’m going to skate all the way to the sea.”
* * *
Hendrik navigates them toward Heemstede with a tattered road atlas. He tells her that this district was once filled with old estates and summering aristocrats from the cities. “Now it’s filled with tired old bed-and-breakfasts and villas where nouveau riche German tourists can bunk down with their entire brood.” She looks over and sees that he’s still clutching the piece of fax paper he’d been holding when she first arrived. He’s an odd accomplice for this errand, but she feels herself softening toward him.
When she arrived at the private gallery in Leiden, he’d stood in the threshold, the fax paper clenched like a winning lottery ticket. Given their interactions in Sydney, she was expecting him to be aloof, even a little hostile, but he was in thrall to something that made him seem boyish and friendly. He explained that an anonymous buyer from America had offered twice what they’d paid for At the Edge of a Wood. The wire transfer of funds had gone through just hours before, after Hendrik had tracked down the owner of the collection by phone in Switzerland. “When I got your e-mail that you were coming here to return the painting I was very confused,” he said. “But now it all makes perfect sense. The buyer has instructed you as his private courier. You have come to tender the paperwork and receive original signatures before you deliver the painting to America. My employer returns tonight.” The halting, World War II spy diction was still there, and so was the patchy goatee and the four earrings in his left ear, but on his own turf, he no longer seemed especially stiff and dogmatic. Perhaps he now had nothing to prove. She came inside the three-story brick canal house, too flustered to take much notice of the chandeliers and hanging artwork. Only in Holland does an archivist answer the door to an opulent brownstone dressed like an anarchist. She asked him whether the painting would be safe in the trunk of her rental car. “We’ll watch your vehicle from the front window. My bicycle is chained right in front of it. Shall I make us some tea?”
He told her to keep an eye on the street and went to make the tea. She stared out the window, letting everything settle over her. Surely he thought it was odd that they were returning the painting a few days after the exhibition had opened. Ten minutes later, he was pacing in front of the window, cup and saucer in hand. “Mr. van Foort is prowling through old Swiss attics,” he said, blowing across the rim of his teacup, “like an old hungry tiger looking for an easy kill.” After a few moments of such talk, something occurred to him and he got up and returned with another piece of fuzzy gray fax paper. “This one came through in the middle of the night, marked for your attention.” Hendrik handed it to her facedown, as if to suggest he hadn’t already read its message.
I trust you will know what to do with the painting, Ellie, now that all the claims against it are settled.
Very truly yours, MdG
She could tell that Hendrik had no clue as to its cryptic meaning and he knew better than to ask who MdG was. The art world honored anonymity, upheld it like a rank of purity. Hendrik said, “The buyer from America must want the picture very badly if he wouldn’t let it hang for the exhibition.” He smiled to himself. “Perhaps he doesn’t want the public to see his private jewel.” Hadn’t van Foort questioned the logic of the return? Or was he possessive enough with his own acquisitions that he could relate perfectly to this zealous American buyer? She sipped her tea and waited for the words of confession to come out of her mouth. She waited for the moment when she would produce the fifty-page material analysis report by Helen Birch, the head material scientist at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, that proved beyond all question that the painting in Ellie’s rental car was a fake created in the twentieth century. On the long-haul flight she’d imagined what she would say to Hendrik and his employer. She would apologize and take full responsibility. She would ask them how much they wanted as compensation, to take the liability off their hands. She might even repeat a line from one of her sealed but still unsent resignation letters—Eventually, I was undone by time and circumstance and lead-tin yellow. In the northern light of the plush sitting room, this explanation seemed melodramatic and false to her. The truer statement was that she’d used the de Vos canvas as a testing ground for her own thwarted talents, that she was reckless and lonely and angry with the world, that she craved a kind of communion, to find a layer beneath the glazes and scumbles and lead white where Sara herself still trudged through the fog of antique varnish, racked by grief but somehow dispensing painterly wisdom. For a thousand hours, I wanted to think with Sara’s mind and hands and shut everything else out. These confessions were much closer to the truth, she thought. But there was no audience in her life—least of all Hendrik—for this brand of self-examination. Who besides her actually cared why she did it? It was certainly no longer Hendrik’s problem. He and his employer had been neatly removed from the equation.
She suddenly wanted to be alone in her hotel room where she could take in the enormity of what Marty had just done. With three lines of smudged fax ink he’d not only taken the fake off the books but also given her permission to get on with her life. She felt a moment of fearlessness but also anger that she was getting off so easily. Instead of confessing, she found herself asking questions about the provenance of Winter with a Child’s Funeral Procession.
Hendrik looked out the window and said, “My employer keeps all those records in his office. All I know is that it came from a widow in Heemstede who was selling off the family inheritance one oil painting at a time. She couldn’t keep up with the maintenance of an old house or something.”
Ellie watched him pacing at the window and wondered how deeply his ambitions ran. She said, “Perhaps we could partner together on something related to de Vos. While I’m here I’m going to do some additional research, see if I can connect a few more dots.”
He turned to her. “Don’t you have to get the picture to America?”
“I have a few days. I’ll put it in secure storage.”
He looked back out the window. “Partner how?”
She said, “What if we could set the record straight about what really happened to her? We know she continued painting after Amsterdam and there must be more to find out. Perhaps we could coauthor a paper on Sara de Vos? On her final chapter.”
He cut his eyes at her through the sitting room, the halo of a sunlit canal behind his head. “That is a record that you largely created,” he said. “Your career is built on hers.” He said it a little testily, but she also understood from imagining his days toiling for an absentee employer, from his rusting bicycle chained to the metal spikes of the front fence, that he was at loose ends, underutilized and waiting to break into the major leagues of public museums. A joint paper could be his ticket out of this enormous, unvisited brownstone.
“That’s true,” she said. “But now I want to set it right.” She felt emboldened, like she could say anything. She was twenty-six again, at the beginning and full of ambition. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Do you want to keep curating paintings that no one ever gets to see?”
He emptied his teacup and looked out the big window.
She said, “Your career passes in a flash. Take it from me.”
From behind, she saw him take in a big breath and let it out slowly.
When he turned, she saw a different person looking back at her. He was trying to hold back a big grin.
“Follow me, please,” he said, leading her toward the stairs with a set of keys in one hand and his cup and saucer in the other. They went upstairs to the owner’s kantoor and he unlocked the door. “He documents everything,” he said, “right down to the name of an art collector’s cat.”
Now in the rental car, she looks over at him as the Spaarne comes into view, the riverbank dotted with linden trees and wooden boathouses painted bottle green and sky blue. He navigates with his outdated road atlas, tells her that the driveway to the bed-and-breakfast should be “appearing before us in approximately three hundred meters.”
* * *
The cold air burns her cheeks as she skates along, pushing into long glides, her hands behind her back, the sound of her skate blades like the sharpening of a knife on a whetstone. She wants to skate for miles, to fall until midnight into this bracing pleasure. The bare trees glitter with ice along the riverbank, a complement to the winking stars. The night feels unpeeled, as if she’s burrowed into its flesh. Here is the bone and armature, the trees holding up the sky like the ribs of a ship, the ice hardening the river into a mirror too dull to see the sky’s full reflection. Everything flits by except the sky and her thoughts, both of which seem to widen and gyre in a loose, clockwise procession. She thinks of paintings and meals and Kathrijn, one somehow leading to the other, then Barent and Tomas, then her mother knitting by the fire, then a bowl full of oranges in winter light. Everything is strung together on the line of her skates, swooping curves and perfect delineations of her wistful thinking. She is light upon the ice, a weightless passenger.
Tomas skates many yards behind her, no longer calling out, but occasionally letting out a howl of laughter or exhaustion. She has half a mind to skate all the way to the village ruins and sing at the top of her lungs until Griet comes out of her hermitage to see what all the commotion is about. She forgets for a whirring moment that Griet is dead, her bones bleaching in the frozen earth beside her children and husband and neighbors. Toward the end they brought her to the house and Sara nursed her during the final weeks. A slow winnowing, so unlike the outward rush of Kathrijn’s death. She would come into the guestroom to find Griet vanished from the feather bed and sleeping on her animal pelts by the open window. She died as she lived, like a Spartan or a mendicant. Sara misses their conversations, the stories of the old village. She turns around to ensure Tomas is still within eyeshot and sees him coming around a bend in the river, both arms up, waving like a goose trying to take flight. She laughs, skating backward, her breath smoking in front of her face. There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.
For an instant she doesn’t know that she’s fallen through. The river, under all that ice, is a burning flood. The moonlit sky replaced by a dome of shattered white glass. A searing underworld of distorted shape and sound. It’s only when she tries to take a breath that she knows she’s been swallowed up. Her hands rake above her head, as if she’s trying to climb a ladder. Everything dims away as she sinks toward the cold sludge of the riverbed.
Her feet are two leaden weights, her pockets full of stones. She kicks her feet but can’t feel anything below her. She can hear Tomas’s skates cutting and scraping along the ice above. And then she hears her own voice—not a garbled scream but someone moaning in her sleep from a dark room at the bottom of the river. The sound terrifies her. She sees her own panic rise in the stream of bubbles and understands that everything she wants is up above, through that jagged rent in the ice. The glimmering night has been wrenched cruelly from her grasp. It seems so impossibly far away. Her vision blurs; a dead tree limb looms through the murk. She coughs and feels the river burning inside her chest. Then everything slows. She can see elegant spirals of current passing above her, bearing fish and flotsam downriver. She can see stars embedded in the ice, a second muted sky with its own constellations. Tomas is there, lowering a long tree branch into the water, plunging his face into the icy water, his voice vibrating as he moves between realms.
* * *
The widow—Mrs. Edith Zeller—runs the bed-and-breakfast without any flair for hospitality. Wealthy Germans and Amsterdammers show up, materialize out of her guest register, and she sets them loose on her overdecorated, cold rooms. If the plumbing goes south in the winter, or there’s a dip in reservations, she sells off a painting or an antique desk. It’s been that way for years. Antiquity pays for maintenance; tourists pay for the utilities and the petrol in her car. A cash-poor widow sitting on millions in accumulated wealth. Ellie sees all this in the way she signs them in, sees it on the wallpaper blanched with the ghosts of sold-off paintings, in her instructions and laminated signs for brief showers and turning off the water while brushing teeth. The widow somehow carries the burden of inherited wealth. They are shown to their ground-floor rooms. Ellie’s is narrow and a little threadbare, makes her think of convalescence and bedpans—a washbasin on the bureau, an embroidered hand towel, a view of the summer garden gone to seed.
At dinner they broach the subject of the funeral painting, gently interrogate the widow about how she came by it, how long it had been in her family, et cetera. Mrs. Zeller has warmed them up a stew of root vegetables and smoked sausage for dinner and Ellie wonders whether they’ll be charged for these days-old leftovers. They eat in one of two disheveled kitchens, the dining room closed off to guests long ago. The widow recounts the stages of household decline as if they were acts of God—the plague of ruin and dustcovers when her father died, the eternal cold and damp of the upper rooms when she and her mother couldn’t afford kerosene or firewood, the dwindling of the spirit as she lost her own husband and her children moved away. A banker in England; a concierge in Paris.
“Where did your picture collection come from?” Ellie asks.
“Some came from a distant uncle on my father’s side and others were bought by my father himself. During the second war there was looting and German soldiers all around here. The old families tried to hoard their treasures with neighbors and in old barns, to keep their heirlooms hidden from view. A lot of the paintings disappeared.”
“The painting we bought years back,” says Hendrik in Dutch, “the child’s funeral scene. Do you have others by Sara de Vos?”
Mrs. Zeller chews and thinks. “I’m afraid I’ve never heard that name.”
Ellie feels a wave of sudden fatigue, a burst of jet lag. “Do you mind if we look through your collection?”
The widow looks up from her bowl of stew. “It’s spread all over. Some in the attic, some in the sitting rooms, some who knows where. My lawyer in Heemstede township makes up the papers when I make a sale. I think he took an inventory at one point.”
They finish their dinner and speak no more of paintings. Later, when the plates have been cleared and half the lights in the house have been extinguished, Mrs. Zeller brings some extra towels down to their rooms. The towels are stiff and rough and smell like lemons. Ellie thanks her, stands out in the hallway to chat with her before bed. Out of nowhere, Mrs. Zeller asks her whether they’ll be going out to see the ruins tomorrow. “Out by the old settlement. A nice spot for a picnic,” she says. “In the Netherlands we have many ruins but very few castles. The Dutch do not like lords and ladies.” Ellie wants to bring up the Dutch adoration of Queen Beatrix but instead she confirms what she’s just heard. “What ruins are those?”
“The old village,” the widow says.
“From the painting?”
She nods but then appears suddenly wary and frightened. Ellie wonders, not for the first time, whether she has dementia.
Hendrik has come out of his room to listen in. In Dutch, he says, “Mijn vrouw, are these the ruins of the village in the painting? The picture of the funeral procession.”
The widow says, “The whole town was buried out there. I will make you cheese sandwiches for a picnic lunch.” She says good night and walks down the long hallway.
* * *
Sara wakes in the thin blue hours of the night, the big house dark and bloated all around her. She’s marooned in firelight, in a narrow feather bed in the tearoom. She knows this is the place where Cornelis tends his melancholy and imbibes the Orient one cup at a time. She’s burning up beneath a mountain of blankets, her hair drenched with sweat under a cotton bonnet. She tries to sit up and throw the bedspread off, but she falls back with exhaustion. A fire is ablaze in the hearth and she sees Barent slumped in a chair, the folded pages of a gazette across his lap. It takes her a moment to realize that it’s Tomas sitting there, that this is a different time, a different life. She has been dreaming of Barent, of following Kathrijn through the woods and into a cave. There are afterimages when she closes her eyes. Black tulips and gleaming ribs of ice. She sits up in bed again and looks out the window at the snowdrifts. She’s very thirsty, but she doesn’t want to wake Tomas. She sees them swimming together across a placid lake, then they are fording a river beside a field of running horses. She wakes again from another dream.
In the morning there is a doctor from Haarlem and Tomas at his side. The physician wears an apron with a tiny island of blood on the hem. Is it mine? she wonders. She wants to ask, but speaking requires formidable strength. She glimpses her frostbitten toes, the blackened nail beds. They are no more hers than the milky glass apothecary bottles on the mantel or the slurries of melted snow pooling in the orchard. She looks at her hands, overcome by a sense of relief—these bony pink fingers alone are mine. She points to a goose quill and a half-written letter on the writing desk, one of the sad epistles Cornelis writes to foreign correspondents. On the back of it she writes I want to be in my own cottage, in my own bed. The doctor says she cannot be moved. But there is the matter of the blood on his apron and the way it pulls crimson from the wintry light. It’s in the shape of a reared lion, just like the provincial flag. Emissaries have been sent for her; they will come bearing myrrh and tulip bulbs wrapped in muslin, the daughter offsets of Semper Augustus.
* * *
Ellie and Hendrik bicycled out to the ruins earlier in the day, dutifully packed along their cheese sandwiches and macintosh squares for a picnic. Now Ellie has returned alone, her forgery removed from the frame and stretcher, folded into triangles in her backpack like a flag she’s about to unfurl. Hendrik thinks the painting is back in Leiden in safe storage until she flies to America. For a fleeting moment she thought they would find the high perch where Sara stood to paint the funeral scene. Instead they found mounds of rubble and brickwork, the occasional base of a chimney, a lintel or casement, but nothing revealing. Still, this is hallowed ground, a place where Sara had passed through or lived. The broken headstones in the cemetery are mostly illegible, a few engraved dates and names blackened with age. This sense of ceremony—burning the canvas down by the river—is probably misplaced. She has always been an atheist and mistrusted the rituals of the believer. But there’s something about the idea of setting it alight as a kind of offering to Sara de Vos that appeals to her. From under the widow’s kitchen sink she has brought matches and lighter fluid. She spreads out the canvas on the riverbank and douses it with fluid. When she strikes the match there’s an after-burn of sulfur in the air. The corners of the canvas blacken and curl. She watches the layers of paint buckle, the image stripping away into striations of smoke. The canvas chars in the corners first, in the places where the paint is thinnest. When the bright yellows of the skaters’ scarves catch, she sees something flare like a tiny starburst or an incineration of glass. It’s beautiful to watch it kindle slowly against the grass of the riverbank. As it burns, she wonders if she will ever paint something of her own again.
* * *
On the third day of fever, she asks for a hand mirror and a hairbrush. She sits up in bed and brushes her long dark hair out, holding each length between her fingertips. The face in the oval frame belongs to a stranger. Cheeks ablaze, wind-chapped lips, a look of fatigue about the eyes. She hands the mirror back to Tomas in disgust and says, “Do you remember how to size and ground a canvas?” Her voice has recovered, but it remains low and hoarse, some damage to the throat is what the doctor says. He looks at her impatiently, arms folded. “It’s how I won you over. Of course I remember.” She holds her hands up to show him the size and requests a ground of warm, earthen tones. “Are you sure you’re well enough to paint?” he asks. “The doctor forbade any form of exertion.”
She sinks back down to the pillows and closes her eyes. “I’ll paint in bed just to keep you happy.”
A prepared canvas appears beside the bed that afternoon. It’s a foot square, mounted on a wooden strainer made from fence palings. The ground is a little darker than she’d like—more russet than warm clay—but it’s well made, pumiced smooth and even. On the bedside table are the ground pigments that make up her palette: white lead, smalt, yellow ocher, a touch of azurite. She can’t imagine how long she’s been asleep. Tomas is beside her again, bearing soup on a tray. “What are you going to paint?” he asks.
She shrugs and looks out the window. The bare elms are streaked with twilight up on the hill. “Nothing with snow or ice in it.”
He smiles, touches her shoulder, and leaves her to eat and work.
She knows this will be the last thing she ever paints. It briefly overwhelms her with the magnitude of choosing the right subject. Before that first line of pale chalk, before the underdrawing fleshes out into shapes and proportions, there is a stab of grief for all the things she didn’t get to paint. The finches wheeling in the rafters of the barn, Cornelis reading in the arbor, Tomas bent over his roses in the flower garden, apple blossoms, walnuts beside oysters, Kathrijn in the full bloom of her short life, Barent sleeping in a field of lilacs, the Gypsies in the market, the late-night revelers in the taverns … Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it’s really noonday sun.
Then she begins, banishing the feeling of remorse with gentle lines of pale chalk. Her hands are unsteady, so she first practices on the back of the canvas. She settles on a pose and a depiction before turning the canvas over. She paints a series of lines and textures for an entire afternoon, retooling her hand and her eye. There are bouts of exhaustion, hours where she sleeps with the canvas laid faceup, across her chest, one layer drying at a time. She wants to paint something she has never set down before, something true. Her fevered dreams are overrun with the berry-black eyes of the fish along the riverbed, the scraping of Tomas’s skates up above, the pallid moon through the window of ice. Her skin burns with the memory of it. Sometimes she wakes herself up with her own moaning. Opening her eyes is to come ashore again, to find the stone cottage abundantly solid and straight-edged. She paints another hour, then stares out the window for long stretches. One day, sometime near dusk, Tomas rides his horse up to the window and smiles at her from across the big mare’s white-diamond forehead. It’s called a star, she remembers, this marking on a horse’s head. She wants to remember the names. She wants to remember him looking back at her in the twilight.
* * *
Ellie takes a flashlight and a pair of gloves up to the attic rooms. As she climbs the narrow staircase, the smell of damp is a living thing. It catches in the back of her throat, a visceral reminder of Brooklyn. She fears the worst, that even if there are dozens of paintings up here—squirreled away from the Nazis, is the widow’s claim—that they’ll be damaged beyond repair. The rooms are littered with newspapers and desiccated insects, the walls blotted through with continents of mold. Boxes of mildewing books and clothes, a crate of wooden toys. No one has been up here for a very long time. She continues down the passageway toward a triptych of north-facing windows opaque with grime. Pigeons appear to be nesting in the roof because the floor is splattered with their droppings. Cut into one wall is a crawl space with a little wooden door. She opens it and shines her flashlight into the musty interior, but there’s nothing inside but exposed electrical wiring and cobwebs. She goes back out into the hallway, opening each door. In a tiny room she finds some mutilated luggage and begins to open tattered suitcases and trunks. There are yellowing black-and-white photographs from the 1920s, snapshots from family vacations and postcards from foreign hotels. Children brimming with smiles beside statues in parks and running along northern beaches. Inside a metal trunk, wrapped in a twill blanket, she finds eight canvases, each one rolled and coiled with a ribbon, the tiny puncture holes visible along the edges where they’ve been carefully removed from a stretcher. She cinches her gloves and spreads out the blanket. She unrolls each canvas and finds something to pin down its corners with. Before long she has a spread of Flemish, Dutch, and English paintings, a few from the nineteenth century but a few also from the 1600s. There’s one that feels familiar to her, something about the brushwork and the light. A young woman is sitting at an easel but turned toward the viewer. It’s an open, youthful face, her dark hair pulled beneath a bonnet and her chin set against a broad disc of lace collar. Despite the loose brushwork and the easiness of her pose—elbow propped on the chair, one hand holding a paintbrush like a quill—she’s dressed formally. A working artist would never wear a crimson velvet dress and a high church collar to paint in. She has dressed herself for something momentous. In her left hand she clutches the wooden palette, a dozen brushes, a piece of cloth. Beside her is a half-finished canvas resting against the easel—a young man on horseback framed by a leaded window, peering in, the angling northern sunshine like a corona around his head. He appears to float through space, to radiate off the canvas and into the artist’s workroom. She is still young, the painter, despite the date of 1649 in the lower left corner. She is twenty again and just starting out, turning to take us in as we come through the door, her lips parted as if she’s about to speak.