The Golden Tulip Read Online Free PDF Page A

and introduced some word games on paper. When Hendrick, who had been out, came back home, Anna sent Sybylla to fetch him to add his name to each girl’s fresh sheet of paper, which she had just handed out. Hendrick obliged, but did not stay while Anna collected all four sheets and improvised some guessing game about them.
    Titus arrived at six o’clock. Anna met him, for the kitchen had been left to Francesca again and the other three girls had gone upstairs. “I trust I find you well, Vrouw Visser,” he said cheerily.
    “Yes, indeed,” she replied.
    “I’ve been delivering one of Father’s etchings to a buyer,” he explained, setting aside on a chair the leather folder that had held Rembrandt’s work. Titus possessed no exceptional artistic talent himself but, unlike his father, was businesslike and practical. Those who were able to remember Rembrandt in his youth always said that his son looked as like him at the same age as another pea from the same pod, being of average height and broadly built with a roundish, smiling face and a shock of brown curls. “Is my sister ready to leave?”
    Like all children when interrupted at play, Cornelia was not. Anna gained the girl another enjoyable half an hour by sitting to chat with Titus herself in the family parlor. She had a maternal fondness for him, having seen him grow up, and was pleased that recently he had begun courting a pretty girl, Magdelena van Lon, whose parents she knew well. As they talked he happened to glance up at the painting of himself as a boy on the wall.
    “I’m still in a place of honor, I see,” he joked.
    “Only just!” she replied on a little laugh. “Francesca asked recently for your portrait to be hung on a bare peg in the studio, where she can have a friendly face to look at when she’s on the rostrum with her gaze in that direction. She made the same request some long time ago, but Hendrick hung a landscape for her instead.”
    “I’m flattered that she should want to look at me! Does she pose often for Master Visser?”
    “Not now. She is too busy with her own artwork.”
    He glanced at the painting again. “I remember that I was puzzling over some mathematical problems in my homework from school when Father first took up his brushes for that painting. As you know, he takes a great deal of time over all his works and in the end, when the problems were long since solved, I sat there daydreaming. But then I suppose that was what Father had been aiming for in the first place.”
    Anna looked up at the painting too. Much of the impasto had still been wet when it had come into Hendrick’s hands. He had happened to meet Rembrandt in the street one day when the artist was desperate for cash, having been refused further credit by every supplier of art materials in Amsterdam. He had offered to sell Hendrick the painting of Titus for whatever he could pay. Hendrick had on him a purse that held the amount he had received from the Amsterdam art dealer, Willem de Hartog, for the sale of two paintings of his own. Promptly he had pulled the purse from his pocket and placed it in Rembrandt’s hands. Anna had come to appreciate the painting since then, but for a long time afterward it had reminded her of how she had fainted away at discovering her husband had come home penniless when every stiver in his purse had been urgently needed. It was Janetje who had kept the food on their table during the hard weeks that had followed until Hendrick sold half a dozen etchings and their fortunes took a turn for the better.
    Titus remembered the hour and sprang up from his chair. “I really must take Cornelia home. She’s almost as much at your house as she is at ours.”
    “Your sister is always welcome here.”
    When he and Cornelia had left, Sybylla came to ask for the papers from the word game. Anna gave her all except those bearing Hendrick’s signature, which the girls had also signed. On her own again, Anna threw away Cornelia’s paper before