The Rembrandt Secret (46 page)

No one had known … It was a secret, the gunpowder storage hidden behind trees and under bushes, under greenery which never shed its leaves in winter, just kept its knowledge to itself. It was a storage bunker that no one could reach by foot. So no one knew of it. Not behind the bushes and the trees … They say it was a building on the grounds where the Clarisse convent once stood, near to where the schutterij – the civic guard – once trained… They say you could hear the explosion in the far north.

When the gunpowder went up the town went with it, a crater in the earth left like an empty basin, ready to catch the rain. Trees were mutilated, left as stumps … Many hundreds of buildings were destroyed, including the Oude Doelen. Many people were injured.

But only Carel was killed.

Sssh, there is movement outside the window and the guards
look in, watch me. Wonder why I don’t move anymore. Not these last days anyway … I heard them talking about self murder. Would I do that? they ask themselves. They can’t afford to let me die. If I did, there would be no more money coming from van Rijn.

Watch her, they say, watch her. Watch the mad whore.

Friends brought me news of the explosion in Delft. They reported the death of Carel Fabritius because they thought it might interest me, not because they knew my past. Not because he was a blood link, a dead child …

Wasn’t he apprenticed to Rembrandt? they asked me. Sad he died, and all his works with him …

All his works in his studio, his paintings, gone into nothingness. All his drawings, his oils and pigments, his skill and the paintings he created for himself – as Carel Fabritius, not Rembrandt’s monkey.

They told me that nothing was left. That the artist was blown into fragments, spun through the air, scattered with his paints and brushes across Holland.

His family lived …

Alone, I cried for him. I cried, with the bag of coins pressing against my stomach, where my womb had once held him. And I knew that Rembrandt would have heard the news too, in his house, with his mistress, with the portrait of Saskia watching from the wall … He would grieve for his pupil, his accomplice. But for his child? I doubt that. Grieve for his income, his partner, his faker. But for his bastard? …

If I bought my freedom, bribed my way out of here, where would I go? What town would want me? What person hire me?
What future invite me? Where is there on earth that would welcome me? So I shall stay here. And keep writing, hiding the letters, adding to the letters, keeping my testament. Stay behind the locked door, where the damp rises in the late months and the privy brings flies come May. The winter will eat at my soul, and the ice will freeze under the canals, and more oxen, showing the whites of their eyes in terror, will fall to the knife. In the distance, the church bells will glower into the sky and shake the crows from their nests. And I will be still be here …

The explosion took away my last hold on Rembrandt van Rijn. It took my child, my son, my helpmate … It blew a hole in my heart.

And the door in the wall slammed closed on me.

Two weeks after the Rembrandt revelations, Rufus Ariel sold his business for a loss and Leon Williams tried to commit suicide. Faced with the wreck of his business, Williams had found himself confronted by usurers who wanted their loans repaid. And there was no money to satisfy them, nor was there likely to be enough until the market recovered. And no one knew how long that would be.

Worldwide, every Rembrandt was questioned. The most famous Old Master on earth was enjoying his second celebrity as, in every gallery, museum, and private collection, the paintings were checked against the damning list. Despite a hundred legal arguments to delay decisions, the letters and the list were proved, twice more, to be authentic. Despite the conflicting views of handwriting experts and art historians, no one could discredit the Rembrandt letters. Within the first month, thirty-seven paintings previously believed to be by Rembrandt were reattributed to Carel Fabritius. In the second month, another fourteen were found to be fakes.

The market plunged.

Already suspicious, collectors drew back from the cultural blood bath. With the fall of Rembrandt came the scrabble for revaluations. After all, the dealers argued, the list might not be extensive. Geertje Dircx was not always present at Rembrandt’s studio and had relied on her son’s record – she could be wrong. Perhaps some of the discredited Rembrandts were real, after all. Perhaps others, not listed, were fake? The argument might have been persuasive in another, more buoyant, climate. But in the worst recession since the 1930s, it was seen as just another manoeuvre. Another artistic sleight of hand.

Then the market realised that if one of the biggest names in art could take such a beating, other painters might well suffer from a knock-on effect. Rumours, unsubstantiated and reckless, began to circulate. Were there really secret documents about Titian? Was he going to be the next casualty? The innuendos were absurd, but they put a match to the bonfire of panic. And the dealers looked for a scapegoat.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t Timothy Parker-Ross. In the end he had managed to achieve what he always longed for – acceptance. The art market might loathe him for his crimes, but he was one of them as Marshall Zeigler had never been. Immediately after Parker-Ross’s arrest, his legal team asked for him to be tried in London, but the plea was rejected and he was kept in New York. His behaviour in prison deteriorated rapidly; he began to hallucinate, became violent and attacked a guard. Put on medication,
Parker-Ross was diagnosed as being a paranoid schizophrenic and transferred to a mental facility, where he was sedated to keep him from harming himself or anyone else. Although he talked endlessly about the letters, when his accomplice was finally caught in Marseilles, he couldn’t even recognise the man he had hired – and tutored in murder.

‘And you left me here for two weeks while all this happened?’ Marshall said bitterly, as Philip faced him across the prison table in the visitors’ room.

‘You weren’t safe. I had to know you were somewhere that no one could get to you.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Would you have agreed to it?’

‘No.’

‘That’s why I didn’t tell you,’ Philip replied wryly. ‘But you can leave today.’

Nodding, Marshall stared at the lawyer. He had thought, when Philip left so suddenly for London, that he had been double crossed. That Gorday would prove to have been involved all along. But Marshall had been wrong there. Instead of betraying him, Philip Gorday had promised his daughter that he would protect Marshall, and he had kept his word. Unsure of what would happen next, and unwilling to let his client leave custody until Parker-Ross’s accomplice was found, Philip had left New York for London. Once there he got in touch with Lillian Kauffman and, through her, he discovered the full damage caused by the letters.

Riding the cataclysm, Lillian had done what she had always done: tightened her Hermès belt a couple of notches and decided to brazen it out. Over coffee and half a pack of cigarettes, she listed the victims and told Philip that Tobar Manners had disappeared.

‘Disappeared?’ Marshall said when Philip passed on the news. ‘Where?’

‘Just upped and went. No one knows where.’

Disbelieving, Marshall stared at the lawyer. ‘He must have left a trace.’

‘He left with nothing. The guy’s finished. You got what you wanted.’

‘You think I wanted
this
?’ Marshall challenged. ‘You think all this pleases me?’

‘You wanted revenge—’

‘For my father’s death. I didn’t want the rest of it.’

‘They’re blaming you,’ Philip said evenly. ‘I have to make that clear, Marshall. You’re the scapegoat. You have to be, you’re not one of them.’

‘My father was.’

‘You’re not your father, and besides, the dealers know that your father wouldn’t have released the letters.’

‘Maybe he would have done if he’d not been murdered. My father was in real trouble, God knows, he might have been forced into it.’

Philip shrugged. ‘But he didn’t. You did.’

‘And he’s dead and I’m alive. Am I supposed to feel sorry for that?’ Marshall asked, his tone acid. ‘I had no choice but to expose the letters. Parker-Ross told me he
was going to go after Georgia. He’d already killed four people, why wouldn’t I believe him? And why, in God’s name, would I think that any bloody letters were worth another death? Especially not hers.’ He stared across the table at Philip Gorday. ‘Those letters are the truth – about Rembrandt and about his paintings. I didn’t want to bring down the art market—’

‘Well, you’ve made a good fist of it, nonetheless. Thing is, Marshall, you’re not going to be able to live like you did before.’

‘What?’

‘People know you, and what you did is all over the media. That stunt you pulled when you slashed the painting, that was Indiana Jones stuff. I’ve held the press and TV off for a while, but they want to talk to you. You’re a hero to them. Avenging your father’s death and taking on the art market single handed.’ He paused, almost amused. ‘The feminists love you.’

‘The
feminists
? Why?’

‘For revealing Geertje Dircx’s story. It’s made you very popular with women. Famous painter puts mistress in asylum makes a good headline in the seventeenth
and
the twenty-first centuries. I don’t doubt Oprah will want to interview you.’ He paused, looking Marshall full in the face. ‘I’m grateful to you. For finding out who killed my wife.’

‘So you won’t be sending me a bill then?’

Philip smiled and stood up.

‘You and Georgia were made for each other.’ He put
out his hand, and he and Marshall shook. ‘Parker-Ross was insane. Unfortunately, he had the personality and the money to back up his obsession.’

‘Meaning?’

‘That from now on, you’ll always be
persona non grata
in the art world.’

Marshall nodded. ‘That’s fine. I’m going to sell the gallery anyway.’

‘Going back to translating?’

‘I don’t think so, I don’t think that would be enough anymore. I can’t see myself getting passionate about any more dead poets. Can’t see myself sitting day after day, staring at books.’ He glanced at Philip. ‘I can get up and walk through that door now. Just walk through it and I’m back into the world. Geertje Dircx couldn’t do that. She couldn’t escape, could only hear her life being chipped away, piece by piece, and do nothing about it.’

‘Everyone’s reading her letters, talking about them,’ Philip said. ‘The originals are now at the Rijksmuseum, as you requested.’

‘Good.’ Marshall meant it sincerely. ‘Geertje was Dutch, the letters should be in her country, read in her language.’

‘Will you translate them? Publish them in English?’

Shaking his head, Marshall put up his hands.

‘No, not me. That’s a job for someone else. For me her words will always be as she wrote them, in Dutch. I memorised every word of those letters and the list that went with them. Every word Geertje wrote, I remember. Every part of her life, her unhappiness, I will
always
remember.’
He tapped his forehead. ‘It went in, and stuck. I saw what she saw, felt what she felt. I don’t need to write any of it down.’

‘She got her revenge in the end, didn’t she?’ Philip said, walking to the door with Philip. ‘Got her own back on Rembrandt. And ruined his reputation in the process.’

‘You can’t ruin genius.’

‘Just taint it.’

‘You know who I wonder about?’ Marshall said, his tone curious. ‘Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt’s bastard, his monkey. And if I know the art world at all I think that after a while – when the dust’s settled – the dealers will look at Fabritius and decide that he was a very gifted painter, who was underestimated in his lifetime.’ Marshall smiled ruefully. ‘I doubt we’ll live long enough to see it, but with publicity, enough money, and the need to fill a leaky gap in the market, Carel Fabritius might supersede Rembrandt one day.
That
would be the best revenge.’

House of Corrections,
Gouda, 1556

The guard who watched me from the first day I was brought here died last night. They told me that later, when they brought a younger man along, with a beard like froth and a tooth missing at the front. His eyes were quick, and full of malice, and when he passed by later he hissed through the door hatch and jiggled his keys to taunt me.

The flesh fell from me when Carel died. It fell from my arms and legs. And the muscles that had worked so hard, for so long, emptied into folds of dry skin … Weak, I itched from the bed bugs which bit around my private parts and the fleas which nest in the hair under my arms, smelling frailty. They say insects scent death …

I ate and threw back my food onto the sawdust and stared from under my eyelids that were often dry. I aged as I watched my hands, the veins rising blue, the liver spots making brown islands of colour against the livid skin … I tried to stop living, but in spring the cows began lowing as they bore their calves, and a rook, wings open to sunlight, made for the resting trees. Something about that day, that first bird, chimed like the church clock calling for prayer. And hope moved in my ribcage and fluttered under my slowing heart …

And then I remembered … I felt for the coins I had carried
against me for so long and counted them, and knew there were more than enough. When my friends came I told them to talk to the guard.

‘Go to the new man, he’s greedy …’

I knew greed, could sense it like heat on my skin.

‘Go to the guard and bribe him …’

I wanted to buy the door in the wall. Wanted to see that bird over my free head and walk towards my home town.

‘Go to the guard,’ I said again, and pressed half of the coins in their hands.

When the guard came to tell me he would report me for trying to bribe him, I slid my hand through the grill on the door and held out another coin to him. He paused, the church clock rang seven, my friends gone, over the fields, pitying the mad slut grown old in the asylum.