Wings over Delft

by Aubrey Flegg

  ‘But I didn’t sing, all I did was argue,’ Louise pointed out. She thought for a moment. ‘Does this ever happen to you? That you can see but not get it down? I can’t imagine you as a bear.’

  ‘Yes …’ he said, surprising himself.

  ‘Oh, do tell me.’

  ‘But it’s a silly example.’

  ‘Go on, please,’ she asked eagerly. Pieter paused to gather his thoughts.

  ‘It was the first time that the Master had let me work on a live canvas. It was a routine portrait of a town councillor, and the Master had got bored with both the man and the painting. “I need some colour here, Pieter. Run down to Kathenka and get me a glass of red wine.” I started down the stairs. “In one of the plain Venetian glasses,” he called after me. I returned, carrying the wine carefully up the stairs. He placed it in the composition. “On second thoughts, Pieter,” he said, “you will paint it.” Now this was a real honour for me. He showed me where to place the glass in the canvas. “There, we will paint it just beyond the old scoundrel’s reach.” Then he chuckled and shuffled off, for the taproom, I suspect.’

  ‘How did you get on?’ Louise asked.

  ‘Oh it was good! The glass appeared flat on the table, which is always a good start, but it was the wine that pleased me most. I had built it up in layers and had remembered from the beginning to leave one point uncovered so that when it took a final coat there was just a small ruby of red light glowing in its heart. When the Master came back I couldn’t restrain myself. “Look, Master. Have you ever seen a finer glass? No need for you to go to the taproom; you could just reach out –” Thump!’ Pieter laughed ruefully at the recollection. ‘And I was lying on the floor looking up. It was the jibe about the taproom that did it. He is strong. He put a foot on my chest to keep me there. He took up the glass of wine, which had been my model, and drank it down in three gulps. Then he stood, polishing that glass with his cravat – his foot still on my chest – till the glass shone. When it was polished to his satisfaction he put it down on the table, tucked in his cravat, took his foot off my chest, and said, “Draw that!”’

  ‘Were you hurt?’ she asked.

  ‘Mistress, I was not hurt, but I was hopping mad. Ten minutes before, you see, I had thought that I was a rival to the great Rubens himself, now I was being buffeted around like a first-year apprentice, and being asked to draw an empty glass … of all things! Well, I drew in the outline of the glass, checked that it was true – I didn’t want another buffet – and called out, “Master, it’s done.” He waddled over. You should have heard what he said.’ Pieter shook his head. ‘Dear God, how I came to hate that glass, Louise. How he harassed me! I tried it again and again.

  ‘“It’s not one of your damned saints, you nincompoop!” he said at last. “Look … look … look … what’s that?” He was jabbing at my page. “It looks like a bloody halo?”

  ‘But master, that’s the rim!’ I said it through clenched teeth. ‘See – it’s there!

  ‘“No, it is not there!’ This time his thump set my ears ringing. “Look with your eyes. How do you really see that rim?” I blinked and squinted because my eyes were watering from the blow; I was near to tears. And you know, Louise, at that instant I saw what he meant! The glass, the rim, it wasn’t bound by lines at all, but by tiny unattached fragments and facets of light. The imagined glass that my mind had been trying to force on to the page had dissolved. Now I was seeing the glass with an artist’s eye, albeit a watering one.’ Pieter paused. He had been getting carried away, his hands, obeying him for once, were drawing the glass for her in the air between them. She urged him, with a gesture, to go on.

  ‘It was as if I had made this great discovery all on my own. I said, “I see it, Master! Look, no rim … just two slender moons of light where the rim should be. You are right!”

  ‘“Well, draw them!” he growled.

  ‘For another hour I drew, while he lumbered up and down the studio like a bear shaking its chain. My sketchbook filled with these tiny meaningless fragments and shards of light. They floated over the page like forgotten dreams. Then, just as the light was going, the glass appeared. Oh, Louise, joy!

  ‘“Master!” I shouted, and I looked down at my book in case it had flown away. But it was still there, a floating, translucent glass, captured on the page. I couldn’t believe it! I sat back with a groan of sheer exhaustion. He stood over me, growling. I wanted to hug him then, but all he did was grunt: “Kathenka has opened a new cask, it has been calling to me this last hour. Come on, let’s celebrate.”’

  Pieter stopped, dazed by his own eloquence. He was staring at the girl, seeing her with a painter’s eye, much as he had looked at that glass. Not binding her with lines, but catching her essence as tiny unattached fragments and facets of colour and texture and light. He shrugged, and his hands flapped loosely.

  Louise turned for a last look over the town walls. She must go home now. The rebelliousness that had brought her up here was being overtaken by a feeling of regret, she wasn’t sure for what. She felt Pieter’s eyes on her, but they weren’t intrusive, they were soothing, like when the Master had patted and straightened her clothes ready for her sitting. The boy was an artist, and she was learning that artists looked at things differently to other people. She had watched him, seeing how he changed when he talked about his art, how his hands suddenly found co-ordination and became storytellers. For some reason she found his vision both disturbing and exciting; it was like being offered a forbidden fruit. Up till now she had believed passionately in science. Father described science as being like a new sun, burning away the mists of superstition and folly. Newer and more wonderful things were being discovered daily, not by mystics with woolly visions, but by mathematicians, and astronomers, and alchemists. If something could be measured, it could be believed. Now Pieter was offering her something different; it was new, and it was a little exciting, and a little shocking, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

  She was looking forward to Father coming back from Amsterdam tomorrow. Since she had been little, whenever Father returned from one of his trips – Amsterdam, The Hague, even abroad – he would come up to her room when she went to bed in the evening, and tell her of all the wonderful people he had met and the things he had seen. ‘One day,’ he would say, ‘you will come with me.’ Then they would plan exotic trips in which they met philosophers in gowns, and alchemists in pointed hats bent over bubbling retorts in search of gold and the philosopher’s stone. She’d stay awake for hours after these sessions, her mind and pulse racing.

  Then there was their telescope; the barrel was ready, beautifully crafted by the cooper from the pottery. All it needed were the lenses that Father had ordered from a lens grinder in Amsterdam. Then they would be able to see the moons on Jupiter … and perhaps even see the arms on Saturn. She wondered if Pieter would be excited by things like this. At one time she had thought that Reynier would be interested. He was, and she was delighted, but in the end she realised it was just so that he could create a new illusion: Reynier, the man of science.

  And now there was this boy who spoke to her about art in a language she could understand, of ‘fragments and facets of light’. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could be friends? But she closed her mind; she was learning to shut some thoughts out. It looked as if her mind had been made up for her by society, and that she had somehow walked herself into her own destiny. She watched a heron flap heavily up the canal below them, its snake neck tucked tight between its shoulders. She watched its neck uncoil and its legs reach out, clawing at the water as it landed in the shallows. It was time to go. She turned to Pieter with a smile and held out her hand.

  ‘Pieter, you have been very patient, but I would like a hand down the steps, I am trussed like one of those poor chickens in the Markt.’

  He took her right hand in his and descended backwards, enabling her to hold up her cloak and skirt in the other. For someone so naturally awkward he managed well; she only had to stop him fallin
g once. They paused to laugh. Suddenly the thought that had been teasing her swept through her mind like the flight of a swallow.

  ‘Pieter,’ she said, trying to keep hold of the thought.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘When you drew your empty glass, you drew it as you knew it was, as your reason told you, and it looked all wrong?’ Pieter nodded. ‘So it was only when you forgot about reason and drew what your senses told you was there, that the glass appeared?’

  ‘Yes, I hadn’t been using my eyes.’

  ‘But Pieter, that is not allowed. Our philosophers tell us that what we grasp with reason is more real than what we grasp with our senses.’

  ‘Oh, dear. Does that mean that I got a clip over my ear for nothing?’

  Louise laughed out loud, and the laugh echoed between the high wall and the gables of the town. She listened to the echo; it was an unexpectedly happy sound. ‘No, the opposite, just wait till I tell Father. Pieter Kunst has just proved that our greatest philosopher is wrong.’

  ‘Oops.’ Pieter wobbled; she steadied him.

  ‘It would be a terrible waste if you fell off, you know. You must be preserved; you are my forbidden fruit. Brace one hand on the wall as I did coming up.’ They arrived, still laughing, at the bottom. Louise took Pieter’s arm and they walked along in the shadow of the wall and she told him about her father and the telescope that they were building. Then she told him about the philosopher her father had met years ago.

  ‘He lives … no, lived … in The Hague,’ she said. ‘Father was a bit in awe of him I think,’ she smiled. ‘He said just what I said to you there on the steps: what we grasp with reason is more real than what we grasp with our senses.’ Louise looked up, a pale daytime moon was hurrying apologetically from cloud to cloud as if it had been caught out late. ‘He said our senses pretend to us that there is a moon up there, and we believe that it is real, like the wall here, but we don’t know. Perhaps it is really is a cheese, like we saw in the Markt, or perhaps we are seeing it in a dream and later we will wake up and it won’t be there. The only way we can be certain that something is real is by reason.’

  ‘Well, it didn’t work for me. Reason told me that the glass I was trying to draw consisted of two ellipses, joined top to bottom by a number of curves, but when I drew it that way it looked like a tipsy saint with a halo.’

  ‘But would it have worked if you were to measure everything? You see, Father says that that is how science works.’

  ‘There is a method we have, using lenses and mirrors, that throws an image of what we want to paint on to the canvas. We use it, but not a lot. The Master says it is like the plan of a building before the house is built. It has no soul; that is something that has to be added.’

  ‘Soul …’ Louise echoed. ‘Perhaps that’s the trouble with science, perhaps it has no soul.’

  ‘But you love science, don’t you? I can hear it in your voice when you talk about it.’

  ‘Yes, oh yes, Pieter! To understand the universe as it really is. Maybe soon we will be able to discover the very keys of life, and we will be able to put right all the things that have been done in ignorance or in folly!’ She paused. ‘But I think there is something missing, Pieter. You called it soul. Somehow I’m not sure that there is room for “soul” in science.’

  The Watch

  Chapter 6

  They walked side by side until they could see the Huijbrechtstoren, a rampart tower, standing over the wall to their right. Then they turned left towards the Doelen, the town shooting range, and passed the gunpowder store. It was a peaceful part of town, overhung by massive trees. Orchards and allotments stretched out to the curve of the town walls and the Schiekanaal. It was here that Louise’s father had bought one of the new houses, attracted by the peace and quiet away from the busy town centre. There was grass beside the road so their approach to the gate of the powder magazine was quiet. A sudden movement caused Louise to grip Pieter’s arm. It was Claes, watchman at the powder store, hastily putting something in his pocket. He smiled, but it was a shifty smile. Louise felt uneasy. She shivered and drew Pieter closer.

  ‘That smelled like tobacco,’ Pieter said, sniffing. ‘I hope he doesn’t smoke inside.’

  ‘Oh, it would be forbidden. They even have to wear cloth shoes in case of sparks.’ Louise reassured him. ‘He’ll be careful enough, he’d be the first to be blown up.’ She looked ahead. ‘Oh, look. They’re coming out of the firing range now, let’s walk quickly.’

  A door had opened in the wall ahead of them and, in a clatter of armour and equipment, officers of the watch, who had been at practice, were spilling out on to the road. Louise held Pieter’s arm firmly and lowered her head. She rather wished she had put on her head-cloth. There was a time, not long ago, when she would have joked and teased with the men. They were usually in good spirits, talking loudly from temporary deafness, faces scorched and black from having expended quantities of gunpowder on targets, or sweating from crossing swords in practice. One or two of them called greetings. She recognised Dirck van Vliet, the new captain of the watch.

  ‘Miss Louise …’ the “Miss” was new; Louise did not reply, and then regretted it. She hadn’t meant to be snooty. One of them called out to Pieter that he was parched, and was there anyone left at home who could give him a drink? Pieter made some reply that Louise didn’t hear, because she was listening to another voice, unconsciously loud from the shooting range.

  ‘… DeVries, you know.’ Reynier’s surname fell on her ear like a ball of lead. Her face flushed; she had to force herself not to walk faster. So, she thought, it really is all around town. Even the town guard are linking our names. How, how, how had she let it happen? She was gripping Pieter’s arm cruelly, but a gap seemed to be widening between them already. Pieter – the humble apprentice – where did he stand in a community which seemed to be working itself up for the marriage of the decade. Her marriage! She couldn’t believe it. She began to walk faster, but a group from the watch fell in with them. When she arrived at her house she almost grabbed her house shoes from Pieter. The jovial company stood in the road admiring the new house while Louise knocked on the door. She remembered Pieter and turned to thank him, but he had disappeared. The door opened behind her and the men in the road doffed their plumed hats. She turned and came face to face with Annie, who stood there, a look as black as a bible on her face. One glance was enough for Louise; she could not face Annie in a mood of righteous anger. She stepped quickly out of her clogs on to the cool of the marble floor. She had expected Annie to move to one side to close the door behind her, then she would make a dash for the stairs. But Annie knew her Louise. Instead of closing the door, she abandoned it and backed down the hall, blocking her way. Louise could still hear the loud voices of the watch outside. She turned, closed the door, and stood at bay.

  ‘And who are those monkeys you have acquired? And where have you been? Flaunting yourself about the town?’ Annie hissed.

  ‘You know them as well as I do, Annie; they are the officers of the watch. Not monkeys, but gentlemen.’

  ‘Shame on you, you hussy. Don’t you realise that gentlemen are the last people you should be consorting with in your condition!’

  ‘Annie! I’m not pregnant!’ Louise exploded, half-laughing in frustration. ‘And I’m not –’ But Annie was not to be laughed at. She changed direction.

  ‘How dare you sneak away without telling me!’

  ‘I’m not in any special condition, Annie,’ Louise persisted.

  ‘Stop saying “I’m not”. You are. What I want to know is how you sneaked out without my knowing.’

  ‘You were talking to Mistress Kathenka,’ Louise answered, dodging a lie like a skater skirting rough ice.

  ‘Why didn’t you call to me then?’

  ‘There was no need; you were enjoying yourself.’ At last Louise had got a shot home. For all Annie’s puritanical zeal she did have one weakness, and that was a penchant for a ‘little glass’. Some of her own c
arefully guarded cordials, though innocent to look at, were surprisingly potent. Louise had noticed a slender glass beside Annie’s hand on Kathenka’s table; Louise capitalised on this. ‘Also Annie, I had an escort home: Mr Kunst.’

  ‘Mr Kunst!’ Annie snorted. ‘An apprentice!’

  ‘That’s right Annie – at least he wasn’t a gentleman.’ It was time to go. You didn’t score two shots against Annie and wait to see the effect. Louise slipped past her and ran lightly up the stairs. She felt a surge of relief, joy even. Tomorrow Father would return from Amsterdam. Tomorrow she would tell him everything. Her mind was clear and her answers simple.

  No, she did not want to be Reynier’s wife. A business deal was a business deal and Father would never want her to marry someone she wasn’t sure about. Everything had changed for her today. In the Master’s studio she had found something new and exciting, something that Reynier could never begin to understand. She had thought of him as a protector, but now she could see his protection turning into bars for her prison cell. Perhaps she should feel guilty for having led him along, but how could she be involved with someone who would never understand people like the Master, Mistress Kathenka, the apprentice? People who stretched one’s mind like India rubber. No, she would not marry Reynier DeVries.