The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  The painting expedition to the village of Groenstede, the abandoned settlement out along the river, has been delayed for weeks. They wait for Cornelis to recover so he can lead the excursion, but Sara suspects he’s in no hurry, that he enjoys the latitudes of illness more than health. They give him something to philosophize about, some tension in the pull of daily rope. Eventually, after a month of napping and complaining in the tearoom, he rebounds with the weather. When midsummer arrives with a morning of clear skies, Cornelis rallies in the dining room in a pair of rhinegraves and a tunic, a pair of garden shears tucked into his belt like a rapier. Tomas is instructed to ready the horses and the wagon. Mrs. Streek is given very precise dietary instructions. Sara is told to gather her supplies.

  They head out of the grounds toward the back country in an open wagon, Tomas on the box seat and Cornelis and Sara in the rear. The wooden pavilion with the domed roof, the arbor where Cornelis reads poetry on sunny afternoons, the raspberries ripening along the painted fences, all this cultivation is left behind but also bundled along in the wicker baskets Mrs. Streek has prepared. Bread rolls, Leiden cheese studded with cumin seeds, strawberries with sour cream, marzipan, and wine spiced with cinnamon and cloves. Sara thinks back to meals she shared with Barent, the bean flour bread and the turnips served with fried onions. Poverty appeared first in their meals, then in their shoes, and finally in their thoughts and prayers. Still, she would trade all her newfound appetites for a single day back at the old house before things came untethered. Kathrijn floating a sabot on a canal; Barent sitting on the stoop after a day of painting, reading the gazettes and chatting with the neighbors while she made a hearty stew in the brightly lit kitchen. The past is so clear to her that she could paint it. It burns through every dream and waking hour.

  As the wagon passes into a countryside of wooded dunes and bogs, Cornelis speaks about the women he might have married, about the golden mean of feminine charms. The ideal woman, he tells Sara, combines a face from Amsterdam, a gait from Delft, a bearing from Leiden, a singing voice from Gouda, a stature from Dordrecht, and a complexion from Haarlem. Although he says all this authoritatively and reasonably, Cornelis’s verbal dissection of a woman makes Sara think of corpses and rigor mortis. She can’t help thinking back to the stoniness of the surgeons’ guild and the prospect of a cadaver being laid out on a table. Happily, he changes the subject and begins to tell her about the topsoil he imports from Haarlem for its supernatural vitality in yielding perfect flowers—narcissi, crocuses, aconite, delphiniums … He says each flower name so tenderly they could be the names of daughters or lovers.

  As they come around a bend in the river, Sara sees that the village lies in ruins.

  Cornelis says, “The fire was deliberately set by a mob from the vicinity. Sent by burgomasters who thought we were running a lazaretto for the plague-stricken. A Dutchman cannot abide a swath of cursed ground, especially beside a river.”

  Sara sees the remains of a clock tower, the kind built for a chamber of rhetoric or the inspector of weights and measures. This was a town with civic aspirations, she thinks. She traces its ambition in the low brick walls that are tarred against the elements and in the neat, unroofed houses. A column of drowsy smoke comes from one of the remaining chimneys and Sara supposes this is where the hermit lives, buttressed in the flanks of the crumbling old church. She thinks about how desolate the ruins will look from one of the nearby hillsides, how she’ll extend the vanishing point beyond the river to the expanse of dunes. She probes the possibilities in her mind, feels the gratifying tension of new work. It may be Barent’s debt she’s repaying, but the painting will be her own.

  Cornelis says, “We’ll lunch first and then you can begin your explorations. A painted commemoration will seal this era nicely, tie a knot from the loose ends.”

  They unpack the baskets and eat on a blanket. Tomas eats his cheese and bread on the box seat, preferring the company of the horses to his employer’s meandering speeches about the fleetingness of time. He and Sara exchange a few knowing glances during one of Groen’s monologues. When they’re done eating, Tomas hands Sara her sketching kit and tells her that he’ll follow a few roods behind. Cornelis removes the small shears from his waistline and goes off in search of mushrooms and edible berries. “The hermit is quite harmless,” he tells Sara. “Muddled with grief and stubborn as a mule, but friendly to anyone who isn’t trying to evict her.”

  Sara walks along the overgrown riverbank with Tomas trailing behind her, the reeds and thistle up to their waists. Her sketchpad and charcoals are wrapped in a cloth sack, slung over one shoulder. She tells Tomas she will go ahead alone, and he falls back, dashing stones into the sluggish river. She sees further evidence of the village’s ambition to become a town—a network of ditches dug around the low walls, a cemetery hemmed in by evenly spaced birch trees, a gateway with rusting hinges still bolted to a thick stone wall. Honeysuckle grows wild along sills and ledges. She passes into the main square—spanning little more than a dozen houses—and walks over the flagstone toward the tendril of smoke. She can make out the remains of a stable and a barn and some mud-walled huts. The woman, when she appears in the crumbling doorway, is much younger than Sara expected. Cornelis made her sound like an old hag. In reality, she isn’t more than a few years older than Sara, though her face has been roughened by solitude and weather. She holds a steaming ladle in front of her face, peering at Sara while blowing to cool whatever’s intended for her mouth.

  “Goedemiddag,” Sara says.

  The woman stops blowing. “I told him already, I’ll die here properly with my feet facing east. Buried up on the hill with the others, my children among them.” Her cheeks are windblown and Frisian. She wears a long smock filthy with ash and grease, a pair of leather mules on her feet.

  Sara says, “We haven’t come to chase you away.”

  “No point in that, as I say.”

  The woman squints into the distances beyond the river, waiting for Sara to come to it.

  “I was hoping to sketch the town. I’m a painter by trade and I’ve been asked to put something down.”

  The woman considers this as she cools the contents of the ladle. “Didn’t know women could be painters.”

  Sara smiles, pulling her bonnet down to keep the sun out of her eyes. “There are a few of us in Amsterdam and Haarlem.”

  “The cities are smitten with vice. I had a son, Joost, the eldest, who wanted to go off to Leiden. I told him that cards, tankards, and petticoats have ruined more than one young man. Do you know the proverb?”

  “I do.”

  The woman sips from the ladle, one hand cupped beneath it. “It’s not much, but I have rabbit stew to spare. You can sit a spell.”

  Sara thanks the woman and enters into the dark cool of the ruins, into the jagged memory of old rooms. These quarters must have once belonged to a priest and his family, a rectory built into the brick hind of the church. A rent of blue sky dominates the ceiling and the walls are mossed a delicate green. An overhang of slate surrounds the tarred hearth, a pair of cauldrons smoking above a low set fire. A few wooden bowls, a gruel cup, a pelt of rabbit furs laid out as a rug, a low milking stool with three legs. The only suggestion of civil society is a single cushion covered with moquette and mildewed velvet, the fabric attached with copper nails.

  The woman plunks the ladle down into one of the cauldrons. “You place some tender greens down in a cellar with the trapdoor open. You remove the ladder. They can’t help themselves. The rabbits jump down to investigate and you close the door on them. Wintertime is harder because there’s nothing green to lure them to their own demise. The estate people used to come hunting out here with their carriages and dogs. A bounty of dune birds and thrushes and wild geese. I can barely trap a partridge these days.”

  The woman insists that Sara take the stool. She fills two wooden bowls with the stew, hands one to Sara, and sits on the rabbit pelts. There appears to be only one spoon—pewter and eng
raved with the estate seal—so the woman hands it to Sara and takes the big wooden spoon from the cauldron.

  “You’re very kind,” Sara says.

  “My grandmother had an entire set of silverware given to us by Cornelis’s father, all of it engraved. This one spoon is all that remains.”

  “They must have held your family in high regard.”

  “My grandmother was in the room when Cornelis was born. Swaddled him and brought his mother ewe’s milk to help her recover.”

  Sara takes a tentative mouthful of stew, which tastes bitter and woody. “You’ve seen everything change.”

  “Before the sickness this was a spotless concern. We mangled laundry for the summer estates and the men worked in the Heemstede mill. We had a schoolhouse with a crippled teacher from the north … for some reason the cripples always fared better than the sure-footed ones. She taught the boys catechism and the girls embroidered and milked the sheep and cows.” She looks into the embers over the rim of her wooden bowl. “Harvest was always a happy time. The children playing quoits and knucklebones, the young couples dancing raise-the-foot.”

  Sara can hear the woman’s grief behind her wistful recollection, hears it tightening her voice. For an instant, she appears lost to it, her face dumbfounded and coming back to the room from a great depth. But then she brims with the Frisian sense of forbearance again, some kind of rectitude and resolve that develops on the wind-battered islands of the North Sea. Sara sees how easily she could avoid the woman’s burdens. She could ask to be shown the remnants of the town and repair to the hillsides to begin sketching. There’s no reason to linger at the hem of this ragged wood.

  But then she’s asking, “How many people died here?”

  The woman’s lips purse. “Near a hundred. The rest left, went to settle elsewhere.”

  “God in Heaven,” Sara says. “I will pray for them.”

  “I gave birth to nine children. Every one of them is now up on that hill and their souls dispatched to heaven. Their father is at the head of the table, closest to the stone fence. I still see him saying grace with his clay pipe sticking out of his pocket.”

  Sara pictures the children buried below the hillside of lilies, then, unbidden, there’s a vision of Kathrijn baking in the kitchen, her hair pulled back, a cheek dusted in flour. A good helper at mealtime, Sara recalls, knew how to drop griddle cakes onto the smoking skillet without burning herself.

  The woman says, “Not one of them was given a proper funeral and burial. Near the end, there were bodies racked by the plague, piles of clothes that had the fever burned out of them. The sound of an entire village overcome with it, the coughing like a flock of keening wild birds.” She physically holds back a sob with one clenched hand against her chest.

  Sara says, “I lost a daughter to the same fever. I cannot imagine multiplying that grief by nine or ten.”

  The woman steadies her eyes and brings her face up from the fire. “What was her name?”

  “Kathrijn.”

  “And she passed quickly?”

  “It happened in fits and starts and then all at once. I remember the very first cough. She slept up in the attic room and I lay in bed listening to the sounds of the house. It was a thin, raspy little cough, as if she were coughing into a pillow, afraid that I would hear. When she was hours away from death I sat up there and asked God to let me be the one. She was so feverish that she fell into these fits of tiny laughter, her face burning up with the sickness and shame, as if she had brought this on herself, had caught it from walking barefoot.” Sara hears her voice quiver and takes a breath. “She was always going barefoot around the house, a drafty old place with stone floors. She was seven years old, almost eight, and the only child I could ever have.”

  The woman places her calloused hand on Sara’s.

  “Forgive me,” Sara says. “I have no right to burden you.”

  “It’s not a question of rights, meisje.”

  They continue eating their stew in silence. “How many girls did you have?” Sara asks.

  “Three, including the eldest. She was sixteen and being courted by the local boys. My husband was forever finding ribbons tied to the fencepost as a sign of some secret love promise.”

  “We never had to contend with that, thank goodness,” Sara says. She thinks of Kathrijn, part tomboy, part scrubwoman, bustling around the house in her apron and scolding Barent if he left his boots by the fire. Her nightmares kept her a child when it was dark out. She wonders how Kathrijn would have softened or hardened into womanhood, about the kinds of young men who might have come to tie ribbons on the stoop in the middle of the night. But these kinds of speculations always end in a wave of sadness and recrimination, as if Kathrijn had been abandoned to a fate worse than death. The vision always ends in their Amsterdam house, the windows dark and the fires unlit, the overwhelming smell of cinders, and Kathrijn living out eternity as a young girl in the empty house, alone and waiting for everyone else to return.

  “Are you all right, my dear?” the woman asks.

  Sara brings her gaze back from the low fire beneath the cauldron. “Will it ever go away? The anguish.”

  “Not ever, far as I can tell. I just hope the dead feel better about it than we do.” She hefts herself up and goes back to the cauldron to give it a stir.

  Sara can tell the woman is worn out and wishing to be alone again. She takes a last mouthful of her stew and regains her composure. In her mind, she folds up the empty house and its seven-year-old tenant like a map. She stands and gives the woman her bowl back. “I’m sorry, I never asked your name.”

  “Griet.”

  “Thank you so much for your hospitality and stories. If it’s all right, I’d like to sketch the town for some paintings. I might come back once or twice. Perhaps you can give me a tour next time?”

  “I’d like that,” Griet says.

  They walk back through the ruined rooms, the heady smell of moss in the afternoon shadows. Sara says goodbye and walks down toward the fields. She sees Tomas waving at her from the riverbank, his fishing rod in the air.

  Manhattan

  OCTOBER 1958

  It doesn’t occur to Ellie that she’s being courted by Jake Alpert until she gives him the list of paintings. She has spent a week researching privately held works by Dutch and Flemish baroque women and whittled it down to just five. A Ruysch, a Leyster, a Clara Peeters, a Van Oosterwyck, and the de Vos. She wrote down At the Edge of a Wood and crossed it out at least a dozen times. She conjured visions of Gabriel in a damp raincoat with the stolen painting under his arm, meeting Jake under the clock at Grand Central—a scene lifted straight from one of Gabriel’s dime-store espionage novels. The painting can’t be sold at auction, so she assumes it’s destined for a transaction in the shadows. There’s a part of her that can imagine a widower being oddly comforted by the depiction—a girl at the edge of a frozen river, the world suspended and amplified by the cold. She is unreachable and bereft but also, it seems to Ellie, forever waiting, a passive witness to the living. She leaves the painting on the list that she brings to their lunch meeting on a Friday afternoon, her fingers rubbing the edges of the paper on the subway. She always has the sensation of being swallowed by the roaring dark of the first tunnel, her ears popping and the sudden appearance of her reflection on the blackened windowpane like some hangdog daguerreotype from another century. She wonders whether she normally looks so startled and uneasy, or whether she’s nervous about seeing Jake. Has she dressed for a date or a restoration client meeting? The plaid skirt suggests the latter but her blouse is a bit breezy, she thinks, short sleeves and an open neckline. She buttons up her cardigan and tries to brighten her face in the reflection without attracting attention.

  They meet at a Midtown Spanish restaurant where the waiters are old men with silver comb-overs and pressed white aprons. As always, Jake is impeccably dressed, wearing a three-piece suit with a burgundy tie and carrying a tan leather briefcase. When he greets her he leans
in to kiss her on the cheek and she notices he smells like vintage luggage and hand soap. It’s an odd gesture, she thinks, this first peck on the cheek, at once intimate and formal. She thinks of her severe face on the train and sparks up a smile. They sit and make small talk for a few minutes, about the weather and travels in Spain, before he orders for both of them.

  In a low, considered voice, he says to the waiter, “Gazpacho para dos, followed by the seafood paella to share. Could we also get some rioja?”

  Ellie thinks he’s showing off with a few words of Spanish but likes the fact that he’s trying to impress her. The waiter brings some rioja in a glass flask that looks vaguely institutional—a conical beaker with a clear handle—and pours them wine.

  “Do you always order for the table?” Ellie asks.