Tulip Fever

by Deborah Moggach

  “I want you to deliver a woman of a child. The woman’s safety is of the utmost importance—”

  “You think I’m incompetent?”

  “No!” How touchy this man is! “No—but there are some unusual circumstances about the case. Secrecy, for a start.” Jan pauses. He has to take this man into his confidence; he has to tell him the whole story, otherwise their plan won’t work. He swallows a mouthful of beer and begins. Telling a stranger like this, hearing his own voice telling it, unsettles Jan. The whole enterprise sounds insane.

  There is a silence. Doctor Sorgh gazes into his beer. Jan looks at the physician’s hands: long, white fingers. They stroke the side of the tankard. Jan tries not to think where those fingers have been.

  “The risks,” says the doctor at last. “The risks are enormous.”

  “We have to take them. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Risks to the maidservant, risks to your friend.” Doctor Sorgh looks at him. “You must love this woman very deeply.”

  Jan nods.

  Unexpectedly, the physician sighs. “You are a lucky man.”

  There is a silence. The doctor strokes the tankard with his slender, fastidious fingers. It is early afternoon. The tavern is empty except for three young sailors—comely young men who sit at a table playing cards.

  Doctor Sorgh looks at them. “I once loved someone,” he says. “But cowardice . . . I succumbed to cowardice. I could not face the world’s condemnation . . . losing my livelihood . . . Too much was at stake. I’ve regretted it all my life.” He lifts the tankard; his hand is trembling, however, and he puts it down. “To be courageous . . .”

  His voice trails off. Jan gazes at the floor. On it lies a broken pipe stem and an empty oyster shell. They resemble the prints in a book of emblems. Jan thinks: if this were a painting I would understand what he is trying to tell me.

  “That’s why I try to help people out,” says the doctor. “All life is a risk—I’m a physician, I’m only too well aware of that. But some people sail closer to the wind and they are the ones after my own heart. I admire them for that, you see, because I have been incapable of doing it myself.”

  Jan is moved by this. He is starting to like this prickly, emotional man. Then he looks at Sorgh’s trembling hands and wonders: is he fit for this?

  Maybe the doctor senses this. He says: “She will be in safe hands.”

  “Which she?”

  “Both of them.” He rallies. “Now, the question of money.”

  He tells Jan his terms. A sum in advance for himself and the services of a midwife—he will supply a midwife, a woman he trusts implicitly.

  Jan counts out the money. He does this with a careless shrug. It is only money; it is just a few bulbs. Underneath his insouciance, however, he is profoundly excited. Tulipomania has claimed him too, and what a mistress she is! She flirts with other men; she leads them on. In the end, however, just when he thinks he might lose her, she surrenders to him. She gives herself up gladly to his arms, and a spasm of pleasure floods his body. For a while he is sated. Then the hunger rises again; the hunger is unslakable. That is the sort of mistress she is. Who could resist her?

  A month ago, back in July, he was an innocent, a virgin. Speculators were kappisten; he thought they were mad. Now he has joined them and already he has tripled his investment. His Admirals led him into battle, and what booty he brought home. For their price has rocketed and now he has enough to pay this doctor today and invest in new bulbs. He hardly has time to paint. Each day he returns to the taverns where his new friends, the equally smitten, buy and sell in a feverish fog of tobacco smoke.

  “And then I need your bond for the final settlement,” says the physician.

  He tells Jan the amount. Jan’s jaw drops.

  “You must consider the risks,” says Sorgh. “To me.”

  Just for a moment, thinks Jan, I thought this man was sentimental. He gets out a piece of paper. I, Jan van Loos, do promise thee . . . He writes down the sum in his big, clumsy writing. So many noughts! He draws the O’s with professional pride; they are perfectly round. His master trained in Rome, where Renaissance instruction taught him such things. They are as round as a full moon in a Seascape at Night. They are as round as bubbles blown by a child in a painting by Hals, to tell us of the futility and brevity of life.

  Doctor Sorgh folds up the note and puts it into his pocket. Jan shakes his hand. All life is a gamble. After all, it is a gamble that he was born at all. His parents’ lovemaking, the night before or the night after, would have produced another child. It is a gamble that he met Sophia, the love of his life.

  He will get the money. He knows how to gamble with mistress fortune; he has learned the game. And when it comes to the final, biggest gamble of all, he knows that he will win. For luck, so far, has been on his side.

  35

  Autumn

  While the dogs yelp, the hare flies to the wood.

  —JACOB CATS, Moral Emblems, 1632

  Autumn gales sweep across the land. Rain lashes the countryside. Trees are uprooted; rivers burst their dykes and flood the fields. Great stretches lie under water, returned to the element from which they emerged. Boats sink and their wreckage is tossed contemptuously onto the beaches, as if God were throwing away empty walnut shells. Cornelis’s ships return, but the largest vessel in the Archangel-Muscovy convoy, laden with a cargo of sable, ambergris, whale train oil and iron, goes down without a trace. Church bells toll for the souls of the drowned.

  In Amsterdam chimney pots topple into the street and washing is lifted from lines. A builder is blown off the scaffolding of a half-built mansion in the Keisergracht, a martyr to the hubris of wealth. Walking beside the canals is treacherous; people overbalance in the wind. Bodies are found floating in the water, casualties of drunken despair, for tulipomania has ruined many and they drown their sorrows for the final time.

  Then, in mid-October, the rain stops. Fog blankets the city. Noise is muffled; the buildings, invisible. People cannot tell where the streets end and the water begins. They stumble into the canals and drift undiscovered for days, until the fog lifts.

  Nights are eerily still. Fog rises off the water. Figures can slip through the alleys undetected, for the fog is so dense that a man can scarcely see his hand in front of his face. Amsterdam is a city of ghosts, of crimes that leave no trace, for those who commit them are swallowed up into the vaporous night.

  36

  Sophia

  A fool and his money are soon parted.

  —PROVERB ON TULIPOMANIA IN VISSCHER’S Sinnepoppen, 1614

  I offer up a prayer of thanks. This fog is God’s smoky breath, guarding us. I can slip through the streets unseen. Specters loom up, pass and are gone; they keep their heads down, watching their step. We are all muffled in cocoons.

  Jan and I have grown bolder. My bedchamber faces the street. Cornelis, in the other room, is a heavy sleeper. At night Jan throws a pebble at my window and I creep down to let him in. I cannot risk taking him into my bed. Besides, lovemaking nowadays is not the first thing on our minds. We are inflamed by a new lust and huddle on the settle, whispering.

  I have written down the sums. Jan takes the piece of paper; it shakes in his hand. Time and again we have gambled and won. Jan has joined the big league now. He is trading in the white, on tulip futures. He and I speak like experts. We have long ago lost sight of bulbs; they have become an abstraction. We are buying bulbs we have never seen and for which we have not yet paid, gambling on new varieties, that their price will rocket, trading onward and upward. Bulbs have been bought and sold ten times in one day without anyone laying eyes on them. We hunch over the paper and examine our sums, those dazzling pencil marks. I am so excited that I have another nosebleed and splash them with my blood.

  It is not just lovemaking that has been forgotten. Jan has long since stopped painting. Consumed by his fever, he spends the days in four different taverns, whispering the password to enter the rooms where
the trading takes place. I cannot go with him and risk being seen; the whole town seems to be in the taverns now. He bids Through the Plates. Wooden discs are circulated. Unit values are written on them in chalk. The men haggle; bids are added and wiped off and the deal celebrated with a glass of wine. Jan takes out loans from his friends to finance the next deal and repays them double their money within the week. It’s magic! God is smiling on us; He is on our side.

  I rub my blood off the paper, leaving a brownish smear.

  OVER THE PAST WEEKS Maria has changed. She has grown big, of course, fattening up like a bulb nourished by the finest compost. The other night, at dinner, Cornelis remarked: “Have you seen the size of her? She’s eating us out of house and home.”

  “She has always had a hearty appetite,” I replied.

  She moves differently too, swaying like a ship in full sail. Exertion makes her breathless. For months I have been performing her heavier duties, cleaning the house and washing the floors. She mustn’t lose this baby. Exertion makes me breathless too. I have never worked so hard in my life. Our reversal of roles—me into servant and she into mistress, restricting herself to the lightest tasks—extends beyond housework.

  “Funny, isn’t it?” she says one day. “You dressed up as me and I used to dress up as you.” She tells me that she would clothe herself in my blue jacket, the one trimmed with fur, and parade in front of the mirror. We have even exchanged hands. Mine have become maid’s hands, cracked and dry. “Rub them with goose fat.” She chuckles. “Then you will be a lady.” Hers are as soft as a gentlewoman’s.

  The house has changed too. I have become familiar with it now—back-achingly familiar: the Delft tiles along the skirting, each playful child; the marble floors that seem to stretch for miles. Upstairs I polish and repolish the wide floorboards. Sleeves rolled up, I scrub and wipe and rise to my feet groaningly. The embossed walls of the Leather Room catch the dust; pain jabs my shoulders as I stand on a chair, wielding my broom. Down in the kitchen I rub the brick floor with a sodden cloth. Before, the house consisted of rooms in whose chairs I sat, whose floor I crossed and whose windows I opened when I gazed into the street. It was the painted background to my life. Now I am intimate with every chipped brick, every knot of wood. If only we could employ another servant. But that, of course, is impossible. We cannot risk a stranger among us during this crucial time and I have resisted my husband’s attempts to hire one.

  I am now in my final month and wear a bulky pillow strapped around my waist. Mrs. Molenaer, my next-door neighbor, has lent me several of her maternity gowns. Maria has simply sewn extra panels into her dresses. Bending down is difficult—how do pregnant women do it? I am tempted to pull out the pillow, but what happens if Cornelis returns unexpectedly? He has become increasingly solicitous, popping in during a working day to check that I have not suddenly gone into labor.

  Doctor Sorgh has visited. Upstairs he examined Maria and pronounced her in fine health. He washed his hands, came downstairs and told Cornelis I was as fit as a fiddle. He has a narrow face, like a greyhound; I have never trusted a man with ginger hair. I must admit, however, that he played the charade to perfection. When he left he whispered: “Your friend is right. You are a bold and singular woman.” Maria told me that his hands smelled of violets.

  Maria has changed in another way. Over the past weeks she has retreated into herself. She sits alone in front of a dead fire. She sits for hours at the front window, remaining there until the light fades, as if waiting for a visitor who never arrives. Worse than this, she has grown apart from me; our old sisterliness has vanished.

  “You and your sums!” she says one day. “All you think about is money. What about me?”

  “I’m doing this for you! You will benefit as much as me. Soon it will be over and we’ll both be free.”

  “It’s easy for you,” she snaps. “You’ve changed, Sophia.”

  She calls me Sophia now, not miss or madam. I do not mind. I know her anger is caused by fear. She is facing childbirth; she is about to embark on a voyage through the most perilous waters—a voyage she must take alone, for nobody can accompany her.

  YESTERDAY JAN MADE sixty-five florins profit. Sixty-five florins . The blacksmith who mended our linen cupboard pays that for a year’s rent; he grumbled about it.

  “Gamble on tulips,” I said. “It’s easy.”

  “Pride comes before a fall,” he replied. “Mark my words, they’re fools, the lot of them.” He was a miserable old soak.

  I meet Jan in our trysting place beside the water fountain. He has lost weight, his cheeks are sunken. His hair, so shiny and curly when he first came to my house, is matted. He doesn’t greet me; eyes glittering, he grabs my wrist.

  “Tell me we should do it! Do you have the nerve?” His grip tightens. “Luck’s been on our side, all these weeks. Tell me we should put all our eggs into one basket!”

  He means, of course, the risk beyond all risks: the most dangerous risk of all. The king of kings, the Semper Augustus. Claes van Hooghelande has one bulb left.

  It will take all our money, every stiver, and a great deal more. More huge loans. The price has been fluctuating wildly. It is all or nothing. But if we succeed we can wipe out all our debts, when the baby is born, and be set up for our new life.

  “I think we should do it,” I say.

  “My darling, my petal,” he replies.

  We sit there in silence, stunned by our decision. My petal is what Jan calls me, nowadays.

  THE BABY IS DUE ANY DAY. As luck would have it, Maria’s belly is small—a neat bulge carried low. To a casual observer she is simply a large girl, bulky under her layers of winter clothing. She seldom goes out now, and when we do walk to the market eyes are focused on me, a ship in full sail. Pregnant women soak up attention. Besides, Maria is a servant, and even in our enlightened country servants are on the periphery of our vision.

  When we are alone together, however, we can relax. Though this is hardly the word to describe our state of heightened tension. Maria’s womb has assumed enormous importance to us; its magnetism is more powerful than the moon pulling the tides. The old lighthearted days have long gone (Maria giggling to me: “Wouldn’t it be comical if you fell pregnant too!”). Now we have entered the last phase; we are in deadly earnest.

  My bedchamber has been prepared in readiness for the birth. Our neighbors have rallied round. A wooden linen warmer has been installed behind the fire screen. Our neighbor Mrs. Molenaer has lent us her wickerwork cradle, shaped like a boat. My husband has laid out the birthing robe in readiness. On the shelf sits a gruel cup and spoon, to help me through the labor, and a bowl for spiced wine to drink after the happy event. Another neighbor, who has a groom, has offered his services to fetch my mother when the labor pains begin, but I have told him that she is too frail to undertake the journey. In fact, I have lied to my family about the delivery date; they expect the baby to be born several weeks hence.

  The real delivery, of course, will not take place in this room. When Cornelis is at work I take Maria up to the attic. She huffs and puffs on the narrow stairs—they are scarcely more than a ladder—and stops halfway to catch her breath.

  It is a small, dark room, its ceiling crisscrossed with heavy black beams. Cornelis has not come up here for years; nobody comes up here. I have cleaned the room, swept away the cobwebs and strewn lavender on the floor. I have made up a birthing couch; it is a simple bed that must have been used by a servant long ago.

  In the corner leans my picture, The Love Letter. There is my painted self, alone with her dreams, poised at her own moment of decision. She looks so virginal, so untried. That decision has long been taken; I can hardly recognize that maidenly creature now.

  Maria sits down on the bed, groaning. Her back aches. I sit down next to her and rub it.

  “He’s a good doctor,” I tell her. “And she is a highly experienced midwife. Over a thousand successful deliveries, she says. You will be in safe hands.”


  Suddenly Maria bursts into tears. “I want my Willem,” she wails.

  “They will look after you, my darling.”

  “I want him with me.”

  “He’s not coming back.”

  “I want my Willem!” She’s sobbing uncontrollably now. Her face streams with tears and snot. “How could he leave me now?”

  “He doesn’t even know. You’ve got to forget him.” I wipe her nose with my handkerchief. “Soon you will have a lovely baby—”

  “I want him!”

  I try to cradle her in my arms. This is difficult, with two great bulges blocking the way. Unable to reach her, I stroke her instead—her hair, her belly.

  Beneath her apron I feel movement. The baby is kicking. He kicks with such force that my hand jolts. He is pushing against me fiercely.

  “Feel him,” I say. “He’s trying to get out. And when that happens, he will set us all free.”

  37

  Jacob

  I am sending you a human figure for your studies to become a painter . . . Use this figure, don’t allow it to stand idle as it was here but draw assiduously, especially those large, animated human groups for which Pieter Molijn liked your work so much. If you paint, paint contemporary things, scenes from life, they can be done the most quickly. Be tenacious so you complete the paintings you have started; you will be loved for them, with God’s help, just as you were loved in Haarlem and Amsterdam . . . Serve God above all, be modest and polite towards every man, in this way you will assure your success. I am enclosing also clothes, long brushes, paper, chalk, and all the beautiful paints . . .

  —LETTER TO GERARD TERBORCH FROM HIS FATHER, 1635

  Jacob is an ambitious young man. He knows that he is going to go far. Though he is only sixteen he has his life mapped out. By the age of twenty-five he plans to be an established painter, with his own studio. He will specialize in portraits, for here in Amsterdam there is an unlimited supply of potential clients who wish to see themselves immortalized on canvas. By the age of thirty he will have made his name with a major commission—a militia painting, a guild group, a Civic Guard banquet. Not only is one paid by the individual portrait—head-and-shoulders so much, full-length more—but the picture then hangs in a public place and ensures that one’s fame spreads abroad.