She’s supposed to be painting tulips. But when Barent leaves each morning after breakfast, Sara climbs the stairs to her attic workroom and removes the other painting from a recess in the wall. This is the same room where Kathrijn took her final breath, where her fingertips turned black and the light ebbed then vanished from her eyes. It took a mere four days for her small body to become a husk wrapped in linen. The entire bed, Kathrijn’s body secured to it with ropes, was lowered from the hoist beam and taken away on the back of a covered wagon. That was almost a year ago, but Sara still can’t walk into the attic without her throat swelling with grief. For half an hour, before the composition of a painting steadies her thoughts, she feels unmoored—a woman pacing under the eaves, her hands clenched behind her back, furious with God.
Then she wills herself to the work at hand. Today, she places the stretched canvas on an easel by the window, flanked by a flower study. She sits on a stool with her back to the big double window, running her gaze across the frozen landscape. The icy river and the sky seem too pallid to her. In both, she wants the inflection of a deeper tone and color, something pushing behind all that white. During the dead-coloring phase, she’d underpainted the entire canvas with raw umber and black, but now she fears she used too little. The lead white in the snow seems uniformly cold and flat. She studies the area around the girl at the birch. She wonders sometimes if she isn’t painting an allegory of her daughter’s transit between the living and the dead, a girl trudging forever through the snow. It seems maudlin, even to her, but she lies awake each night, listening to the old wooden house tick and moan, retracing her own brushstrokes like the tenets of some delicate and inscrutable Eastern philosophy. The enigma of the brushwork and the passages of light startle her. But it also seems to wick away some of the ungodly anguish. For days at a time, she can think of nothing else but the painting.
Through the windowpane she can feel the cold at her back. She gets off the stool and prepares her palette for the day, mixing the pigments and oils in bowls and stone mortars. White lead, smalt, yellow ocher, a touch of azurite. The diffusely lit clouds—the sun like a candle at the end of a dim hallway—form a dome over the entire scene. This morning she had planned to retouch the sky and snow, getting the colors just right, but it’s the girl’s face that keeps drawing her attention. There is a semblance of Kathrijn—the high cheeks and forehead and green eyes—but it’s different enough that Sara worries she will forget what her daughter really looked like. How is it possible that there are no portraits of her, that there’s just a single charcoal sketch that captures nothing of her essence? She has painted countless still lifes, even tried her hand at austere wedding portraits back in her apprenticeship days, but she never once turned her gaze and her brush to Kathrijn. She never thought to commission a friend to work up a portrait of her daughter. She swallows, standing before the canvas, and closes her eyes for a long moment. She sees Kathrijn’s face at age five or six, that look of earnest concentration whenever she floated a sabot on the canal, or the doting smile when she put a doll to bed. She’s terrified such memories will dwindle and fade, that one day she’ll wake up and remember nothing but the smell of Kathrijn’s damp, salty hair at the seaside.
For hours, she experiments with the eyes on separate pieces of stretched canvas. A friend of her father’s, a portrait master, used to say the problem of the illuminated eyelid kept him awake at night. Now she knows why. But it’s the suggestion of light being reflected into the eye socket and the root of the nose that seems infinitely more difficult than painting the catchlight on the eyeball itself. There are moments when Sara feels as if everything she has lost is contained in those green eyes, as if she’s painting Kathrijn’s fleeting tenure on earth in that miniature, ocular world.
* * *
Barent wants to get them out of debt on the spoils of tulipomania, the craze that’s sweeping the provinces like some blue-lipped fever. He wants Sara to paint three identical compositions—a vase brimming with tulips in mottled light—so they can sell them in the spring, just as the first bloom of yellow crowns begins to spike through the sod. After spending months on his leviathan painting and then failing to find a buyer, he began selling quickly painted, unsigned landscapes in the taverns. When word of the illegal sales got back to the guild they were both fined, then suspended from its ranks for failure to pay. The scandal spread like poison, making it difficult for either of them to attract paying students. In desperation, Barent took a job with a bookbinder and strains by candlelight to paint at night. He comes home each day with new schemes, smelling of glue and paper. At dinner, when he tells stories of tulip speculators coming into their wild fortunes, Sara notices a new tone settling in, the hawking voice of a peddler. He recounts legends of tulip bulbs changing hands ten times a day, the man who traded twelve acres of land and four oxen for a single Semper Augustus bulb wrapped in muslin. Or the whore in Flanders who took her payments in bulbs, seeds, and crowns. The United Provinces are now shipping more tulips than ever before, he says, outranked only by gin, herring, and cheese. Then there are the tales of East India traders and Haarlem bleach-girls who’ve made it big in the flower market and retired to stone mansions on the coast.
At the end of these stories, he asks Sara for an update on her tulip paintings and she exaggerates their progress. She understands the gravity of their situation, but the truth is she has no feeling anymore for flowers. Besides, she resents the fact that every shipwright and chimneysweep in the Low Countries now wants to trade tulips and buy paintings. The flowers will make them rich; the paintings will tell their guests that they know beauty when they see it. For the most part they buy the paintings like so many tables and chairs. Only a few, the burghers from Delft and the foreign diplomats, have any eye for the work itself.
One night, Barent takes out an envelope at dinner and hands her a colored sketch of Semper Augustus. “Since they won’t be blooming for months, I wrote away to a botanist in Leiden. A professor at the university.”
Sara studies it in the halo of the lantern while Barent reads the professor’s letter.
“Can you work from this?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“He says the flame-like streaks are called rectification.”
She says, “They dream up ways to make it sound holy and important.” She sets the picture down and returns to her bean soup.
“He says that he can send us some grafted bulbs for a price. The daughter offsets bloom within a few years instead of the usual seven or so for a seed to catch.”
She says, “Apparently he’s also trying to get rich with tulips,” but the phrase daughter offsets tugs at her mind. She sees Kathrijn in her attic bed, her lips murmuring and white. Bringing herself back to the room, she watches Barent rereading the letter in the light under the chimney canopy. He sits wrapped in his dressing gown, his face gaunt in the speckled firelight of the peat-box. All winter the house has been insufferably cold. She jokes that he wears seven waistcoats and nine pairs of trousers to bed, that she can’t remember what his natural silhouette looks like.
After he finishes the letter, he presses it inside the pages of a leather-clad ledger. Whenever they sell a painting, he brings out the ledger and makes an entry. Each time, he reminds her that she is never to sign or initial her work. The paintings are stored in the attic until the spring markets or private sales that happen when the days turn warmer. Dutchmen don’t buy paintings when they’re cold is one of his axioms. All these paintings will be sold anonymously—ships tossed in a storm, a field at dusk, her tulips—each canvas wrapped in felt or wool blankets and sold from a stall or tavern. As Sara sits with her feet on a box-warmer, she wonders how many hurried, unsigned paintings they will have to sell before they can finally break free. She suspects there are dozens of debtor names at the back of Barent’s ledger and another dozen that have never been written down.