Tulip Fever Read Free Page B

apart, because that would indicate boldness and a general lack of shame, while legs closed together indicate the fear of disgrace.
    —LEONARDO DA VINCI, Notebooks
    “Fish again?” Cornelis looks at the plate. “All this week we have eaten fish. Last week too, if I remember rightly. Soon we will be sprouting fins.” He chuckles at his own joke. “Much of our country once lay underwater—are you returning us to that element?”
    “Sir,” says the maid, “I thought you liked fish. This is bream, your favorite.” She indicates Sophia. “She’s prepared it with prunes, the way you prefer it.”
    He turns to his wife. “How about a nice piece of pork? Visit the butcher tomorrow, my love, before we are all transformed into the scaly denizens of the deep.”
    Maria snorts—with laughter or contempt, he cannot tell—and goes back to the kitchen. The impertinence! Since Karel, the manservant, left, standards have been slipping; Cornelis must talk to his wife about it.
    Sophia does not eat. She looks at her wineglass and says: “I don’t want that painter back in the house.”
    “What did you say?”
    “I don’t want him here. I don’t want us to have our portrait painted.”
    He stares at her. “But why not?”
    “Please!”
    “But why?”
    “It’s dangerous,” she says.
    “Dangerous?”
    She pauses. “We are just—pandering to our own vanity.”
    “So what are you pandering to, my love, when the dressmaker visits?”
    “That’s not the same—”
    “How many hours do you spend on fittings, twisting this way and that in front of the mirror?” He leans across the table and strokes her wrist. “I am glad you do, my sweetheart, for it fills my old heart with joy to see your beauty. That is the reason I want to preserve that bloom on canvas—do you understand?”
    She fiddles with the hem of the tablecloth. “It’s too expensive. Eighty florins!”
    “Cannot I spend my money how I choose?”
    “Eighty florins is many months’ wages for—say—a carpenter. . . .” She falters. “A sailor.”
    “Why is this suddenly a concern of yours?”
    There is another silence. Then she says: “I don’t like him.”
    “He seems a pleasant enough fellow.”
    She looks up, her face pink. “I don’t like him—he’s impudent.”
    “If you truly dislike the man—why, I’ll pay him off and find another.” Cornelis wants to please her. “There’s Nicholaes Eliasz or Thomas de Keyser. They have many commissions; we might have to bear with a delay. I could even approach Rembrandt van Rijn, though the prices he charges might stretch even my means.” He smiles at her. “Anything to make you happy, my dearest heart.”
    Relieved, he eats. So that was all it was. Women are strange creatures with such funny little ways. How tricky they are, compared with men. They are like a puzzle box— you have to twist a dial here, turn a key there, and only then will you unlock their secrets.
    Cornelis loves his wife to distraction. Sometimes, caught in the candlelight, her beauty stops his heart. She is his hope, his joy, the spring in his step. She is a miracle, for she has brought him back to life when he had given up hope. She rescued him, just as he himself, in another way entirely, rescued her.
    After dinner Cornelis puts another slab of peat on the fire, sits down and lights his pipe. A man’s greatest comfort is a happy home, where he can enjoy the attentions of a loving wife . Sophia, however, is absent. Her footsteps creak across the ceiling. Then there is silence. She said she had a headache and retired early. Usually she sits with him and sews; sometimes they play cards together. Tonight she has been restless, as jumpy as a mare sensing a thunderstorm. That outburst about the painter was most uncharacteristic.
    Cornelis worries that she is falling ill; she looked pale this evening. Maybe she is missing her family. She has few friends here in Amsterdam, and the wives of his own acquaintances are a great deal