The Rembrandt Secret

by Alex Connor

  Frowning, he stepped back, trying to remember what Owen had ever told him about the Rembrandt letters. He knew they weren’t in the safe. They had been once, but not lately. No, lately Owen had intimated that the letters had been moved, hidden somewhere else on the premises. But where? he thought, with frustration. It would take days to search the gallery thoroughly, and even though he had managed to look around the main display rooms, he had not had a chance to hunt properly. And after today, how likely was it that he would get another opportunity? The gallery would soon be closed, the staff laid off, with none of them having access to the crime scene. Within hours the premises would be sealed off for God knows how long. Suddenly the front door of the gallery slammed violently. The vibration sounded in the basement, the anger behind the action obvious.

  Silence fell again, but he could sense a nervous change in the atmosphere and, wary, flicked off his torch. Hardly breathing, he shrunk into the space under the basement steps, watching the back entrance as the police tape started to flutter manically in the draft from the opening door.

  House of Corrections,

  Gouda, 1651

  It’s long past one in the morning. I heard the clock chiming and counted the footsteps of the guard as he passed from the cells to the outer door. He will wait for one of the kitchen staff – I don’t know her name – only recognise the mewling, cawing sounds she makes as he fumbles with her, her wooden heels rapping against the wall by the outside pump.

  We had a pump in the walled garden of Rembrandt’s house, under the window with the stained-glass picture of a sailing ship. Like the one my husband went to sea in. As a carpenter and – in his spare time – the ship’s trumpeter. He tried to impress me with that when we met, saying he’d bought the trumpet off a man who’d died in Germany. I remember asking him what the man had died of, because I’d hoped it was nothing catching, and he’d looked at the trumpet and then at me, laughing, as though I’d made a joke. He’d seemed like an honest enough man back then, and my brother knew him. But then again, my brother seemed to know everyone. It would cost me that. My brother’s friendliness.

  Sssh … the guard’s moving off again now and I can keep writing. He’ll go for his pipe and lean against the wall and puff rusty, grey smoke up to the moon like he was a burgomaster with the whole of Amsterdam to answer to him.

  Amsterdam, even writing the name takes me back there. I remember the mute cold of Rembrandt’s house in the winter. How the main staircase whistled with the wind, and how the smell of the canal came in sour in the summer. Boys used to pee in the still water, aiming for the ducks, their urine making quick citrine rainbows against the Amsterdam sky. Rembrandt always scolded the boys, although he would often piss in a pot in the studio. Once he even urinated in a pail of gesso. The smell lingered, sour and acrid, even more than the stink of raw umber and charcoal. But no one complained.

  Certainly I never did. Even though his hands made paint smears on my petticoats and sometimes his hair was matted with grease. I would fill a bath for him by the fire – it would take a long time, half an afternoon – and once I ducked him under the water, washing his hair with the same soap the whores use. But I didn’t tell him that. When I rubbed his hair dry it crackled like kindling. He trusted me. Even trusted me to shave him, the blade against his neck, the skin pock-marked in the creases, the razor slipping like an ice skate over his chin.

  After I had been with him for over a year he caught me looking at his books. He was never a reader, not like some of the academics that sat to him. Rembrandt collected books as he collected armour and metal ware, for their beauty, not for their content. Yet although I would rub the silver trays with lemon and salt to clean off the tarnish; although I would check my smile in their reflections – keeping my mouth closed for my teeth were not good – I was not fascinated by silver.

  But I loved the books and wanted to read. All the time that I was growing up, working in a tavern where they think you a whore for being there, I wanted to read so he taught me. Sometimes he was patient, mostly quick to anger, shouting out the words as though I should have mastered them as he said them. But I was a ready learner and that pleased Rembrandt. And when I had shown such promise, he said he would teach me to write. It took over a year, because he was busy, not because I was slow to learn.

  He would push the writing slate over to me, nodding at the letters I had made, making me write a name over and over again. Not my name, his. I think of those days as I write. I think that he would regret teaching me if he knew what my letters would finally say. If he knew how I would use those syllables and vowels against him.

  I was never stupid.

  I wanted to write I love you, but never got the chance.

  In the daytime I was always turned away. Whilst he worked I pushed Titus in his wooden walking stool, or held him up to the window to see the canal below. When the boy slept, I emptied the fire grates or went to the market and bought fish, because I could cook herrings better than anyone. Or so he said. Sometimes I would hear Rembrandt’s voice coming from the floor above, irritably squabbling with his students. I would smile, because later I would rub his back in bed and feel his thick legs under me and take the bear out of him. He would tell me about the country, and Amsterdam. About how there was a headstone in one of the city churches that people were warned about.

  ‘You must never stare at it for too long,’ he told me.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if you stare too long you’ll see the date of your own death.’

  I never told him that, years later, as a broken, lonely woman, I went to that gravestone and I stared and I stared at it. But it told me nothing. Not my death. Or his.

  Rembrandt loved me back then. Painted me, once. He gave me the picture, but when I ran out of money I sold it. Someone said they had seen it hanging in a baker’s shop in The Hague, invoices clipped to the frame. Yes, I sold it, along with his late wife’s ring. Saskia’s ring. The one Rembrandt gave me as a betrothal ring. But later he denied it. Denied it when he fell from love and turned away, letting them lock the door on me … The clock is striking the quarter hour, in another moment the guard will knock out his pipe and start to walk the passage of cells. He will look in and listen, hoping to hear crying, hoping – if is he lucky – for some woman to offer him relief for a guilder.

  I keep these letters hidden, somewhere no one will ever find them. Until one day they’re read and people will know my story… When I came to Rembrandt’s house in Amsterdam that day, that very first day, he looked at me and nodded. I would do. He did not recognise me … We had been very young, I know that, but progress had pushed us further apart than any years could do. He told me that I was being hired as a dry nurse for his son. He had no remembrance of my younger self; that shadow of the lover who had carried another, earlier child.

  The boy who became Rembrandt’s monkey.

  BOOK TWO

  10

  Amsterdam.

  Wrung out from travelling, Marshall walked into his flat, flung his suitcase on the floor, and turned on the light. The faint drift of dampness reminded him that he had left the heating off. A stack of mail lay on the rush mat. Picking it up, he recognised – with a shift to his heart – his father’s writing. Locking the door and bolting it, he moved into his main room and sat down with the letter on the coffee table in front of him.

  Marshall knew at once what the envelope contained. The Rembrandt letters. Just as he knew that once he opened the package and read them he would be committed to his father’s cause. And, more importantly, closer to the reason for his father’s death. Marshall leaned back in the leather chair, his gaze fixed on the package. These were the letters for which Owen Zeigler had been killed. The letters for which his murderers had tortured him.

  His thoughts turned to his last conversation with Samuel Hemmings. He had been wary of the old man, mistrustful, probing.

  ‘… people would pay a lot to own these letters.’

  ‘Or steal the
m.’

  ‘Or steal them,’ Marshall agreed. ‘That was the risk, wasn’t it? That instead of leverage, they became a death sentence.’

  ‘If they exist,’ Samuel said steadily.

  Oh yes, they existed. Marshall stared at the large brown envelope, in which his father had sent them to him for safekeeping. Possibly Owen had panicked, had wanted the letters out of London, away from his circle, the people he knew. But which people? Who was his father afraid of? Strangers? Or someone close, intimate? He considered who had been close to his father – close enough to be a confidante, close enough to learn of the letters. Samuel Hemmings … Nicolai Kapinski … Teddy Jack … Marshall kept staring ahead, wondering how people he had liked and trusted had so quickly become suspects.

  Again he thought of Samuel Hemmings. How could he be wary of the man who had been such a part of his childhood? His father’s mentor? But then again, Samuel Hemmings was very ambitious – and old. Perhaps he wanted to die with a flourish, and exposing the Rembrandt letters would certainly do that. What better epitaph for a mischievous iconoclast than evidence which would undermine one of the world’s greatest painters? How much pleasure would Hemmings have got from seeing attributions overturned and reputations publicly sabotaged? What better revenge would there be than to ridicule the art world, to reveal the truth about Rembrandt’s bastard, the monkey in the works who had made apes of them all.

  But despite his ambition, or the temptation, would Samuel Hemmings really have hurt his father? Marshall kept on staring at the brown package, thinking of the accountant, Nicolai Kapinski. A gentle little man, sweet natured – except for those sinister lapses. Perhaps Nicolai had sat too long up in the eaves, seen too much of the money Owen Zeigler had earned. Perhaps jealousy had brooded, curdling with the sound of the cooing pigeons until, one day, the dark imp inside the Pole struck out.

  Of course there was also Teddy Jack, a man he had met only once. The man Marshall knew least about, except that his father trusted him implicitly. Had that been wise? Had he perhaps confided too much in the Northerner? Perhaps Teddy Jack had learnt of the letters and found a buyer … Or maybe he had just killed Owen for them, for him to use? Tobar Manners’ face flashed in front of Marshall. For all his denials, people knew that Manners’ gallery was struggling as the recession bit deeper. The Rembrandt letters would have been catastrophic for his business, which relied on Dutch art sales. If Manners’ attributions were discredited, his reputation would be obliterated. As soon as the letters came to light and the art world started questioning every Rembrandt painting, Manners would stand to lose a fortune.

  Remembering what his father had told him, Marshall realised that if the letters were exposed it would not be the first time Rembrandt’s work had been reassessed. In 1969 the Rembrandt Research Project had been set up in the Netherlands to look at every available painting and, using the most sophisticated methods, determine once and for all which were painted by Rembrandt and which by his pupils. As a result, a number of previously authentic works had been demoted and the number of authentic Rembrandts swelled – if not in number, certainly in value. Then, in 2004, four oil paintings which had previously been attributed to Rembrandt’s pupils, were declared to have been painted by the Master. Three were in private American collections, the last was owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Other rediscoveries of Rembrandts included a self-portrait, estimated to be worth £34,000,000, which was recovered by the Danish police nearly five years after its theft from Sweden’s National Museum. And, in addition, several of the Rembrandts which were reattributed in 1969 had been promoted again.

  Could the art world shoulder another attributions scandal about Rembrandt? Could museums, collections, galleries and private buyers accommodate such a catastrophic hit? Marshall knew that one of the only areas which was fireproof was the Old Masters, especially Rembrandt. They alone could hold their value, because of their rarity and the esteem they had built up over centuries of trading. A Rembrandt could always command respect and a huge sale. But a demoted Rembrandt was another matter. A Rembrandt which had been painted by a pupil was an auction also-ran. Even if that pupil happened to be Rembrandt’s bastard …

  Marshall picked up the package and weighed it in his hand, turning it over and scrutinising the envelope. Everyone in the art world be desperate to get hold of its contents, to use them to destabilise the market, or to make certain that they were destroyed in order to protect their interests. And he, Marshall Zeigler, had them in his hands… After another slight hesitation, Marshall opened the envelope and shook out the contents onto the table in front of him. The sheets of paper were of differing sizes and yellowing with age, the writing on them clumsy but not uneducated. The ink had faded in parts, but the script was still decipherable and, for Marshall, who was fluent in Dutch, easily readable.

  Yet before he began to read, he looked back into the package, hoping to find a note from his father. But there was nothing there, and he felt oddly cheated. He had longed for a communication, something to blunt the horror of Owen’s murder, but the package had obviously been sent in haste.

  Carefully Marshall laid out the pages on the table in front of him, trying to work out their order. The letters were in a square hand, careful, but in places uncertain, as though written in difficult circumstances. The slant of the writing varied too. Sometimes it was even on the page, sometimes it sloped to one side, the words veering off towards the edge of the paper. At last he began to read, and he knew instinctively that the letters were genuine. He realised that he was bearing witness to a crime from centuries earlier.

  Gradually, as he read on, the long dead Geertje Dircx was present in his flat, talking to him, her world coming alive as Marshall read about her incarceration. He could imagine the dread of being thrown out by her lover, the shock at being deceived by her own family, giving evidence against her. And her horror at having to face a twelve-year sentence in the Gouda House of Corrections – a sentence which could well mean dying in prison. From being Rembrandt’s mistress, Geertje had become his ex-lover, labelled as an aggressive hysteric and locked away, silenced.

  Turning to the next page, Marshall found the first mention of Rembrandt’s monkey, and then paused, unnerved, as he noticed a piece of recent, clean paper clipped to the top. The note was written in a hurried, urgent hand:

  I have had these letters checked out thoroughly, Owen.

  They are genuine. The paper and ink are from the right

  period, the watermark accurate. The ageing is also in line

  with what you believe. The tests were redone three times.

  To the best of my knowledge, and that of another leading

  expert, these letters were written by Geertje Dircx in 17th-

  century Holland. They stand witness to a moral crime

  and an artistic deception, the fallout from which – I don’t

  have to tell you – could be disastrous.

  Be careful with these letters, old friend. They could be

  lethal in the wrong hands. They are certainly dangerous

  and I advise caution.

  The note was signed Stefan van der Helde.

  The light was fading. Marshall went over to the window and pulled down the blind, flicking on a lamp to illuminate the chilly room. Pouring himself a drink, he returned to the notes. The name Stefan van der Helde echoed dimly in his head for a minute or two, then fell, like a Bagatelle ball, into the forefront of Marshall’s memory: Stefan van der Helde. Murdered in Amsterdam the previous year. Sodomised and tortured, forced to ingest stones – a macabre detail which had made the unsolved case even more memorable … Marshall felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Stefan van der Helde had read, and authenticated, the Rembrandt letters.

  And – like Owen Zeigler – he had been murdered.

  Hearing a door slam closed below him, Marshall gathered the letters together, and the note from Van der Helde, and put them back into the envelope. He would have to hide them but, where? He
wondered suddenly why his father would have endangered him deliberately, then realised that Owen probably had had no choice. He had had to get rid of the letters, and sending them out of the country, to his translator son, must have seemed the only alternative.

  But two men had already been killed for them and Marshall fought panic as he remembered his last conversation with Samuel Hemmings:

  ‘I was your father’s closest friend—’

  ‘Which puts you in danger, doesn’t it? Because whoever’s after the letters might think you had them.’

  ‘Or you, Marshall. After all, you’re his son.’

  ‘Christ,’ Marshall said out loud, snatching up his coat and making for the door. He would go to his bank and put the package into a security box, then hide the key. Tucking it into the inside pocket of his coat, he ran down the two flights of stairs towards the entrance, but as he reached the main door it opened and a woman walking in blocked his exit.

  ‘Marshall? Marshall Zeigler?’

  He paused, then nodded. ‘Yes. Who are you?’

  Without answering, she moved past him into the entrance hall. She was a woman around fifty, elegantly dressed, her hair just brushing her shoulders, her hands fiddling, agitated, with her car keys.

  ‘I need to talk to you—’

  ‘Who are you?’ Marshall asked again.

  He could feel the package pressing against his rib cage, could almost sense the words burrowing under his skin, wriggling into his bloodstream. Perhaps the woman had been sent to identify him. To point him out …