Wings over Delft (16 page)

‘If we could get in there,’ she urged, ‘perhaps we could catch him inside.’ The guardroom door had been left open by the departing revellers. They crept forward and listened. Resonant snores came from the room to the right of the door where the duty watchman was sleeping off his Sunday roast and a bellyful of ale. Carrying their Sunday shoes, they slipped in. Ahead of them rose a flight of stone stairs. They mounted, looking for a door that might open into the room
above the archway. When they found it, it didn’t look much used, but when Louise raised the latch and pushed, it opened easily enough. Light from a high dusty window
filtered
down on to them. There was no sign of Mr Midas but Louise thought she heard a tiny movement behind the crude shutters that had been propped up to block the
portals
, presumably to prevent jackdaws coming in to nest. She put down her shoes, crossed the room, and eased back the shutter. There below her was Mr Midas, head cocked, looking up at her with a single bright eye. Hardly daring to move, she trickled some seed down the slope, and then retreated, leaving, grain by grain, a trail of seed leading into the room. She beckoned Pieter in, signalling that he should close the door so that Mr Midas would not escape. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Henk Blut, gatekeeper at the Oosterport, woke with a start to the sound of bird-song. At first he thought that the sound was inside his head, a notion that was painfully dispelled when he shook it. Pain stabbed upwards from his neck and spread into his forehead. The song, however, persisted. Avoiding any further violent movement, he took up his musket and went to the door under the arch and peered up and down the road. No bird, and no song. When he turned back into the gatehouse, he distinctly heard the singing again. It appeared to be coming from upstairs. Still in his stockinged feet, he climbed the stone steps. That was strange, the singing seemed to come from the room over
the archway. He raised the latch slowly and inched the door open. A nearly horizontal beam of sunlight shone in from the west, projecting a golden square onto the stone wall. There, perched on a rusty spike, was a goldfinch, head back, singing its heart out. A short length of chain hung from its leg. Henk, a keen sportsman, raised his musket. Then the thought of an explosion in that enclosed space made him wince, and he lowered the weapon. The chain intrigued him; perhaps the bird was worth money. He was broke, as usual. He peered into the dim room, looking for an owner. It was at that moment that he saw the young couple, locked in embrace, totally oblivious of him and of everything else in the world. He struggled valiantly with a weak sense of civic duty and with an even weaker puritanical heart. Another half-hour of sleep would see him right, he thought. He backed out of the room and pulled the door after him, sighing for his lost youth. Perhaps they, and the bird, would be gone when he woke up.

They walked home together in the darkening streets with Mr Midas perched contentedly on Pieter’s finger. They said good night to Willy Claes outside the powder store. Louise remembered the time that she and Pieter had walked back past the powder store after their first visit to the town walls. Everything was all right now, even his illicit smoking seemed a harmless occupation.

As they approached Mr Fabritius’s house Louise was
having
second thoughts about Mr Midas. It seemed a shame to
return him to captivity. Also, for reasons she didn’t want to have to explain to Pieter, she did not really want to knock on the Fabritius door. They decided to set him free where he could fly home if he wished. Pieter undid the chain in case it caught on something, and Mr Midas disappeared up into one of the great trees near the house.

The lapis, that Pieter had eventually ordered, had arrived. He weighed the packet in his hand. It felt light; it had better be good quality, otherwise there would not be enough, and the Master would have yet another excuse for delay. Only a single panel of Louise’s dress remained to be painted. The Master had already been growling, at once hating to finish it and yet wanting it to be done. Pieter cut the stitching on the cloth-bound packet and eased the inner wrappings apart. He sucked his breath through his teeth in appreciation. Surely this was gem quality material. He eased out a particularly beautiful flake and turned it in the light. He smiled in recollection; he had been grinding lapis that day when Louise had walked into their lives. What was it the Master had said all that time ago?
One day, Pieter, someone will walk into my studio who is without conceit
. He hadn’t been defeated though; this was his finest work ever.

Pieter had visited Louise’s house twice in the week
following
the riot, both times at Mr Eeden’s invitation. The first time had been to report on the progress of Louise’s portrait. He had started to apologise about the awaited lapis but Mr Eeden had just laughed and had begun questioning him
about how they compounded their colours. Soon Pieter’s stutter had vanished, and his hands did what they were told; he forgot that he was speaking to a Master of the Guild, and didn’t notice Louise quietly smiling to herself.

At Pieter’s suggestion, the congregation at the hidden church made no formal complaint about the riot or the damage that had been done to the church. An anonymous donation, however, more than compensated for the damage done. News soon reached the town that young Reynier DeVries was extending his studies abroad for an indefinite period; clearly the rumours about Miss Eeden’s betrothal had been unfounded. If it caused mild surprise that the merger of the two potteries appeared to be going ahead without Miss Eeden’s betrothal, the fact that the merger made business sense on its own was an adequate explanation.

Pieter turned the lapis in his hand and shook his head. He was reluctant to stop daydreaming. The stone was
perfect
, no crust of limestone to be laboriously chipped and scraped away. All he had to do was to drop it onto his grindstone and begin reducing it – carefully this time – to the precise grain size. As he began the laborious process he thought about a suggestion that Mr Eeden had made on his last visit. He had been invited to see the moons on Jupiter. It was long after curfew when he got ready to leave, so the only thing to do was to wait so that he could walk home with the watch. They were standing in the starlit doorway when Mr Eeden put his hand on Pieter’s sleeve. Pieter
remembered
how he had so nearly drawn it away,
embarrassed at how coarse the cheap cloth must feel to the gentleman.

‘You know, Pieter. When the time comes, your
subscription
to the Guild of St Luke need not be a problem. A patron can help a young lad along, it is quite in order.’ Before Pieter could mumble out his thanks he found that he was being pushed down the steps. ‘Look, here’s the watch. Off with you now. Goodnight.’ It was typical. Mr Eeden had timed his offer for the arrival of the watch. All Pieter could do was mouth his thanks to the closing door.

Pieter looked up and blinked. The light in the studio had changed suddenly. The change had come and gone faster than any lightning flash. He looked at the window, and what he saw there was unbelievable. The leaded panes were curved into the room, as if a gigantic wind was blowing in on them from outside. Each square was haloed by a fine spray of coloured glass, where the panes were crackling along their edges. At the moment when it seemed that the windows must inevitably burst inwards, they were instantly sucked out and were gone. All this happened in perfect silence. Then, as the ceiling lifted above him, a roar, as of some demented animal, rose through the floor and slammed into him from every side. The clamour went on and on, and Pieter, who had instinctively thrown himself over his precious grinding, found that he was yelling at the top of his voice at the sheer outrage of it all.

When the din stopped, he gazed dumbly out through the
eyeless windows. Debris of every kind was plummeting out of the sky, screened by a curtain of falling tiles that slipped from the roof above. He looked about the studio foolishly; surely there was something he should be doing. Louise’s portrait had been knocked skew-wise on its easel. He crossed the studio to right her and gazed in disbelief at the sprinkle of fine glass on the canvas. He began to blow it off.

Suddenly a dreadful constriction gripped his throat. The phenomenon, whatever it was, had happened so quickly, and so violently that he had no time to rationalise it. It had seemed meaningless. Now, as reason returned, it took on a meaning that was too dreadful even to contemplate. Pieter’s body reacted instinctively, without any conscious instruction from his brain.

He half ran, half fell, down the stairs and rushed through the bar, where stunned customers still clutched their beer jugs. Outside he dodged the rain of debris by the Nieuwe Kerk, where the black slates skimmed like scimitars from the roof. He turned towards the Doelen, towards where Louise Eeden’s house stood, and entered a nightmare out of hell. He was seeing light where no light should be. There was a rampart of debris ahead; he climbed it without
realising
what he was doing. He stood on its crest, trying to
comprehend
where he was. The town walls had been toppled. His eyes tracked down, drawn as if to the vanishing point of a picture. At the point of focus, in place of the powder house, a vast cavity reeked. It was fully fifteen feet deep.

Pieter was the first to see the shattered stumps of the great trees that had stood about the Doelen where Louise’s
thrush had sung. And he was the first to look out over the tormented sea of rubble where her home had been. Now his mind registered what his body had known since his
precipitate
flight down the stairs. Louise Eeden was dead.

A sympathetic member of the watch delivered a distraught Pieter back to Kathenka before returning to his grisly task.

Dirck van Vliet looked out over the new red tiles adorning the houses about the Markt. At last the town was beginning to look like itself again. His left hand made rhythmic sweeps over the untouched page before him. He was trying to think himself back to that day, thirteen years before, when eighty thousand pounds of gunpowder, held in the town’s gunpowder magazine, had exploded, no one knew why. He had been Officer in Charge of the watch that day, and the time and date were engraved on his mind: half past ten in the morning, October 12th 1654. His ears, deaf before their time, still hissed from the blast he had received that day. How could he write about something so preposterous? But if he didn’t, who would? And perhaps the words would ease his inner pain. He dipped his quill, and watched the wet ink follow the sweeping strokes of the pen across the page.

He crossed that out and began the sentence again…

Tears slid unexpectedly down his cheeks; his eye was drawn yet again to the list of casualties that he and his colleagues had
compiled
when their gruesome work in the ruins was done. So many friends – so much talent. His finger searched down the column, then stopped. Here was one: Master Painter Carel Fabritius, his wife and servants. He looked up at the painting hanging above his desk. The little goldfinch looked down on him from the canvas, as fresh as the day it was painted. He smiled, remembering how the little bird had sung on the day when he had bought the painting. He turned back to the list with a sigh. There, a little higher up, was another well-known name: Master Potter Andraes Eeden, his wife, daughter, nursemaid, and servant.

He closed his eyes, trying to recall Andraes’s face, but another image came unbidden to his mind. He and the watch had just emerged from the shooting range when they met Andraes’s girl, Louise, walking home with that lad from Haitink’s studio. The watch were a merry bunch in those days, and they had all
accompanied
the girl to her door. He remembered her as she had turned
on the steps of the house to say goodnight; that was all. Strange that her face, caught in that moment, should stay etched in his mind over all these years.

He picked up his pen.