The Rembrandt Secret (12 page)

Would they come for him? If they had come for Owen Zeigler they would come for anyone else who knew about the Rembrandt letters … He thought back, to a summer day, hot with flowers and bees humming manically around the high trees.

‘Let Stefan van der Helde look at the letters,’ he had said to Owen. ‘He’s caught out every forgery in the last twenty years.’

Owen had been very serious that day. Well dressed as ever, he had sat with Samuel in the garden, under the arch of bay trees. Waving aside a wasp with one manicured hand, he replied, ‘He’s seen them.’

Samuel had paused, surprised. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. He says they’re genuine.’

And how the sky had seemed to change in that instant. The bay trees cast a darker shadow, the sun listless behind the summer house, the birds watching from the tops of leafy trees. For an instant Samuel had been jealous, wanting to be young again. In the running. Wanting to share the uproar which would follow the exposure of the letters. Envy had inclined him to spitefulness. ‘Is Van der Helde sure they’re authentic?’ he asked, in a tone that implied disagreement.

‘One hundred per cent.’

‘Then you must take good care of them, Owen.’

Owen had nodded, obviously thoughtful. ‘I will. I always have.’

Taking a long, slow breath, Samuel’s mind went further back. To the first time he had ever heard about the
Rembrandt letters. It had been in the summer of 1973, not long after the death of Neville Zeigler, when an excited Owen had come down to Sussex in a great hurry. He brought a package, which he put down and unwrapped on the table in the study. It turned out to be a sturdy medium sized casket, set with brass decoration, standing defiant in the sunlight.

‘What is it?’ Samuel had asked, almost amused. ‘It doesn’t look worth much.’

‘The casket isn’t valuable. It’s what’s inside,’ Owen had replied. ‘When my father was alive he used to tease me about knowing something which could “bugger up the art world good and proper”. I asked him what it was, but he’d never tell me. Then a few years ago, he started to elaborate. He said there was a scandal about Rembrandt, some sordid secret – and he had
proof
.’ Owen shrugged his shoulders. ‘I still thought it was a joke. Then his so-licitor gave me this.’

Both men had looked at the box, Samuel frowning. ‘Go on.’

‘With the casket was a letter from my father. After the war, being Jewish, he settled in the East End of London, where he married and started a business. As you know, he dealt in bric-a-brac, all sorts, but he had a good eye and sometimes he bought well.’

Owen had paused, apparently still in some form of shock, then said, ‘Not long after the war, in 1953, there was a sale in Amsterdam of Jewish religious artefacts and my father went over to have a look. There had been a fire
at a synagogue and they were selling off anything which could raise money for the repairs. My father saw the casket, and although it was blackened, burnt at one corner and he couldn’t open the lock, he bought it. Thought he could clean it up and sell it on as a jewellery box.’ Owen ran his finger along the casket lid. ‘He said in his letter that it took him a long time to restore it, and when he had, he realised it was rather well made. Not worth a fortune, but very old. Naturally, he then began to wonder if there was anything inside it worth having.’

‘Was there?’

‘My father writes that it took him four hours to finally wheedle open the lock without damaging the casket. When he did, he found a lot of old bills, receipts and letters …’

Samuel could sense the muted excitement in his protégé’s voice. ‘Were they dated?’

‘Yes, from the seventeenth century.’

Samuel’s eyebrows rose. ‘Any signatures?’

‘Yes, on the invoices and on some legal papers. The names Titus and Rembrandt van Rijn.’

Raising his eyes Heavenwards, Samuel smiled. ‘You don’t believe—’

Owen had cut him off immediately. ‘The papers hadn’t been disturbed for a long time. Just put away, forgotten, the documents of Rembrandt’s bankruptcy and overdue loans, and Titus’s agreement to take over the running of his father’s art business.’

‘But if it was genuine why would this casket have ended up in a
synagogue
?’

Sighing, Owen had faced his mentor. ‘Rembrandt was close to the Dutch Jews, he painted them many, many times. He was also friendly with the rabbi of that particular synagogue. Titus actually explains what happened in a note he pinned to some contract. There was an agreement between him and the rabbi that the latter would keep the casket hidden in the synagogue in return for one of Rembrandt’s paintings.’

‘Which one?’

‘I don’t know. It was probably destroyed in the fire.’

Gripped, Samuel had leaned towards Owen, his concentration intense.

‘But why did Titus go to such lengths to hide this casket?’ His clever eyes narrowed. ‘What else was in the box?’

‘A series of very personal letters.’

‘Whose letters?’

‘Geertje Dircx.’

‘Rembrandt’s
mistress
?’ Samuel had replied, awestruck. ‘Jesus, you have letters written by Geertje Dircx? What do they say?’

‘No one knows much about Geertje, do they? Just rumours about her and what happened to her.’ Owen paused, grabbed at a breath. ‘Well, these letters were written by her from the asylum to which Rembrandt had committed her. They are her testament to the violence she endured, of the treatment meted out to her by the world’s greatest painter. For loving Rembrandt she was given twelve years hard labour.’

Staggered, Samuel had leaned back in his seat. ‘I thought it was a rumour.’

‘The letters are the proof.’

‘Titus must have read them …’

Owen had nodded sadly. ‘Yes.’

‘So why didn’t he destroy them, I wonder …’

‘Titus loved his old nurse, Geertje. He would have felt some loyalty to her and wanted to preserve her testimony. At the same time he would have wanted to hide his father’s culpability.’

Sighing, Samuel had said, ‘You think
Geertje
gave Titus the letters?’

‘No … I think she turned to the church after she was released. After all, where else could she go? She had no home, no job. She couldn’t go back to her family who had betrayed her. In my opinion, I think Geertje gave the letters to a priest.’

‘So how did they end up with a
rabbi
?’ asked Samuel. It seemed obvious that Owen had given the matter considerable thought.

‘What if the priest, having read the letters, was scared and thought he should return them to the famous and powerful Rembrandt? Then the painter, relieved, would have put them away with his mass of other paperwork and his personal letters – history tells us he was a compulsive hoarder who seldom threw anything away. Then, over time, perhaps Rembrandt forgot all about them. He’d moved on, the court case was over, and Geertje was to all intents and purposes dead to him. Rembrandt presumably just got on with his life.’

‘Until?’

‘Until he was older and in real money trouble and hounded by his creditors. Only his son could get him out of it by having his father declared bankrupt and taking over the whole business. Titus would then have had to trawl through all the mountains of paperwork to do with his father’s work, and personal correspondence too. I believe
that
was when Titus found Geertje’s letters, and
that
was when he hid them. He knew how dangerous they were.’

‘And your father left the letters to you?’ Samuel said, hiding his unexpected, and unwelcome, envy. ‘What did Neville want you to do with them?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘No suggestions?’

Owen smiled. ‘My father writes that at first he thought of them as my inheritance; that I could sell them for a fortune one day. That as long as I had them, I would have a nest egg. Then, as the years passed, he realised I’d never sell them.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’ Slumping back in his chair, Owen had shaken his head, his expression incredulous. ‘Jesus, Samuel, I wake up in the middle of the night and think about what I’ve read. I see her, Geertje Dircx, in that House of Corrections. Incarcerated, forgotten, scribbling away at those notes, and praying that someone would read them one day and know what happened to her.’

He turned to Samuel and held his gaze. ‘She said that Rembrandt painted a portrait of her. I’ve been looking at
his pictures around that time, trying to work out which one it is.’

‘Any luck?’

‘Not yet,’ Owen had admitted. ‘But some people believe it’s her likeness in
Susannah and the Elders
. I look at the painting, look into her eyes and I think about her, Geertje. About her son, about the tragedy of it all. And I think about how the world would view Rembrandt if they knew her story.’

Samuel brought his thoughts back to the present. Subdued, he moved over to the nearest bookcase and took down a volume, searching out the reproduction of
Susannah and the Elders.
When he found it, he looked intently at the young woman, with a bland, oval face, staring out at him. She had been painted as Susannah at the moment she was about to bathe – suddenly surprised by the old men watching her and holding a cloth to hide her nakedness. Her eyes were darker than the water under her feet …

Samuel stared into those eyes. Was he looking at Geertje Dircx? Before she was ill, and abandoned. Before she was imprisoned. The Geertje Dircx who was painted while she yielded to her lover and cared for his son. The woman whose words from the grave could ruin a reputation and undermine an industry.

Closing the book, Samuel’s thoughts went back to that summer day in the garden. He had watched Owen carefully – then asked if he could see the letters.

‘Of course you can. I thought you’d want to, once they’d
been authenticated,’ Owen had answered, passing Samuel a package. ‘They’ll make you cry, I warn you.’

And they had. They had made Samuel cry, and excited him, and fascinated him. They had left him wrung out with emotion and – as he touched them – he had been aware that he was among the very few people on earth who had ever been privy to this secret part of Rembrandt’s life. The story was incredible, and yet unfinished … Samuel had wondered about that many times over the last year. It had seemed to him that the letters had ended abruptly, without a proper conclusion.

He had said as much to Owen, who had agreed. But something in the
way
he had said it made Samuel suspect that he had not been allowed to see all the letters. A possible last letter and the agreement between Titus van Rijn and the rabbi had perhaps been withheld from him. Perhaps Owen hadn’t wanted to keep everything together; perhaps he had divided the papers up and hidden them separately for security reasons. Either way, Samuel’s protégé was keeping something back. The thought had piqued Samuel at the time, since it seemed to indicate a lack of trust on Owen’s part, but he had duly returned the letters after he had read them.

Turning his rheumy eyes towards the corner of the room, Samuel stared at the dog’s bed. It was never moved, never disturbed, his housekeeper not daring to enter her employer’s room or touch anything. So the dog’s bed had stayed in the same place for years, long after the dog had gone. Dust had drifted underneath the bed, particles of
fluff had sidled into the dark space. But there was something else in that darkness, under the empty bed. An envelope taped to the underside of it. An envelope containing a copy of the Rembrandt letters.

A copy Samuel had taken without Owen Zeigler’s knowledge.

A copy which could well cost him his life.

Amsterdam

Walking to the back of the restaurant on Warmoesstraat, Charlotte Gorday took a seat at a table in a booth. Marshall sat down opposite her, facing a fly-spotted mirror through which he could see the premises behind him. The place was hushed; only a few customers sitting at the bar in that morose little period between the end of office hours and the evening rush. Without being obvious, Marshall scrutinised the woman as she rummaged in her bag.
His father’s mistress
… It had never occurred to Marshall that Owen Zeigler would have a lover. Hadn’t he seemed the resigned widower, content to live with the memory of his dead wife rather than the reality of a living woman? But here she was, his father’s mistress. Charlotte Gorday.

The name meant nothing to him, had just added to his confusion. It seemed that everything he had believed about his father had been a smokescreen, hiding the truth. What else didn’t he know? What else was there to find out about someone he had thought he knew? The shocks had come
one upon another, with no preparation, stripping away the respectable image of Owen Zeigler and revealing a completely different persona. And now this woman, sitting in front of him – his father’s lover.

She looked up, her eyes grey, freckled with hazel. Her steady gaze was contradicted by the shaking hand that held her coffee cup.

‘You didn’t know about me, did you?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry, but your father was a very private man.’

‘Even more than I thought,’ Marshall said cryptically. ‘As every day passes I’m finding out things I didn’t know.’

He paused. She wasn’t what he would have expected from the word ‘mistress’. Nothing vulgar or garish about her appearance; she was not overly young or overly blonde. Indeed, she had a faintly timid elegance, a refinement which reminded him unexpectedly of his mother and made her usurpation the greater blow.

‘Do you know why he was killed?’ she asked, her tone wavering.

‘Do you?’

‘No, why would I? I was just told it was a robbery that turned into a murder. At least, that’s what the police said when they talked to me, but I don’t believe it.’

Surprised, Marshall studied her. ‘Did you see the police in London?’

Charlotte nodded.

‘But you live in Amsterdam?’

‘No. I came over here to talk to you. I missed you in
London, so I came here. I called by your flat yesterday, but there was no reply. Someone – one of your neighbours – told me you were travelling, but that you were never away for too long, so I thought I’d just wait until you returned. I know the city well.’