"So you ruined the night"s rest of two old people and mine just for that? Your selfishness has no bounds!"
"I"ll wake all three of you night after night from now on if you don"t take off that cap."
She flushed. "You have no right to ask me. Please stop!"
"Isn"t anyone ever going to see your locks?"
"My husband, in the unlikely event that I should marry."
"I"ll marry you."
The color faded from her face, which took on a paleness that was almost ashen, her eyes sparkling with fury. "How dare you!"
"Wait!" he thundered wrathfully as she stalked for the door. "Do you think I couldn"t husband you just because I have no legs?"
She paused, shaking with anger from head to foot. "I haven"t the least doubt about your manhood, but I will not be made the b.u.t.t of your mockery anymore!"
"I"ve asked you to be my wife! What"s wrong with that?"
"Everything! If you were now as you were before the accident you"d have the choice of any number of beautiful women and you"d never give a glance in my direction. I will not be asked because you think I"m the only woman available or ever likely to be! You can"t even remember where we first met and it wasn"t in this house!"
She rushed from the apartment and her heels went tapping away at speed down the stairs. He lay back helpless in his chair, raging at his fate that prevented him from going after her. What had she meant about a meeting prior to her coming here? He searched his memory, but all he recalled was the faint impression that he had seen her before when she had first come into his room.
She did not return to turn down his bed as she always did, Sara arriving instead. Suddenly he was scared that Aletta had packed and left. If she had he would send Josephus after her.
"Where"s Aletta?" he demanded as Sara smoothed the sheet into place.
"Indisposed, master," Sara replied.
The relief that Aletta had not taken flight overwhelmed him. At present she was angry with him as she had been on many previous occasions when he had clashed with her, but she never sulked. She would come to wish him good night as usual. Not once had she missed doing that since her first night here. He waited optimistically, watching the clock, but when the hour grew close on midnight, he knew she was not going to appear. Glumly he prepared for bed. He read for a while, but his thoughts kept drifting from the pages to Aletta until he realized he was taking nothing in from the book and closed it abruptly.
It was when he had snuffed the last candle that he saw the same sequins of light in the far trees that he had seen before. The old panic rose in him. His friends had decided that the Feast of St. Nicholaes was a suitable time to renew their efforts to see him! He reached for the bellpull hanging conveniently by his bed and jerked it hard while at the same time he shouted at the top of his voice. At night the bell rang in Josephus"s accommodation over the stables as well as on the landing outside the bedchambers where Aletta and Sara slept. But n.o.body came. He snarled with rage. Aletta had played her old trick of disconnecting the bells, as she had done during the early days of her being in the house. Well, he had pistols handy, which he could fire over the heads of those oncoming friends of his. That should stop them in their tracks. But as he leaned over to pull out the drawer at the side of his bed he saw the lights had gone out again. He pa.s.sed a hand across his eyes. Was it due to his imagination playing tricks with him after times of stress? There was a drive that pa.s.sed through the woodland where the light appeared, but it was within the walls of his estate and none had access to the old gates there. Nevertheless, he would send Josephus to investigate in the morning. Anger against Aletta renewed itself. How dare she prevent those bells ringing! Now sleep was far from him. There was only one way of keeping at bay the melancholia that came in the small hours and that was to be found in a bottle of brandy.
At the other end of the house and one floor higher, Aletta lay awake on her pillows. She had heard the persistent clicking of the disconnected bell outside her door. She had also removed the kitchen connection with the stable to ensure that Josephus was not disturbed, for she had been sure that Constantijn would repeat his perverse prank that night when she had failed to see him again that evening.
Her fury with him had sprung from the hurt he had inflicted. That he should suggest marriage in that blunt, cool manner had been impossible to bear. She had put up with his tempers, his ugly moods, his melancholia and his apathy all because she knew she had patience with him when anybody else would have walked out long ago. But recently she had come to a new understanding of her motives. It was that she loved him. The realization had not come overnight, as could happen when someone fell in love, because there had been nothing romantic in their a.s.sociation. Instead it had been a slow dawning and never once had she looked for any reciprocation from him and never would she. This evening his unwitting cruelty had nearly killed her with anguish and it would be many days before she could face him again.
She tossed restlessly, unable to sleep. Suppose Constantijn hadn"t rung the bell as a prank? If he were lying there ill he would not be attended to until Josephus made a first call in the morning. She turned again in her bed. No, Constantijn would have gone on ringing if he was ill. Unless he had fallen from the bed and was unable to move!
Deciding there would be no sleep for her until she had rea.s.sured herself, she put on a robe and tied up her hair in the length of silk, even at this hour tucking in any stray tendrils. A candle sconce was always kept burning over the main staircase, being near the door of Constantijn"s apartment, and she knew her way well enough from her room not to need any light until she was there.
She had almost reached the landing that ran in a gallery to Constantijn"s apartment when she heard a faint sound in the dark well of the hall below. She listened intently, telling herself that all old houses were full of strange noises at night. Then she heard the distinct tap of a heel on the marble floor. It could not be Sara, because there had been snoring from her room, and Josephus would never be roaming about the house at this hour. Her heart began to pound. The tap came again. Somebody was creeping slowly across the hall. There was an intruder! Then she heard the bottom tread creak. He was coming upstairs!
There was nothing near at hand that she could seize as a weapon, but Constantijn kept a pistol in a drawer by his bed. If she could slip along there before the intruder saw her she could get the pistol. She hoped desperately there was nothing seriously wrong with Constantijn, or else the knowledge of an intruder in the house would distress him even more.
She stepped out of her slippers and on bare feet began to creep along by the wall. Then she came to a halt in complete astonishment at the sight of the man on the stairs, revealed to her by the sconce"s glow.
It was Constantijn himself who was hauling himself up the flight, hand over hand along the handrail, the muscles rippling in his shoulders and back, for he was naked except for a belt around his waist into which he had tucked two bottles of brandy. Three keys dangled from a ring looped to the belt, one of which she thought might well be a duplicate of the key she had to the cellar door. It had been the tap of the keys against the gla.s.s bottles, and not a heel on marble, that she had heard.
As yet he had not seen her, being on the far side of the stairs. His speed and agility were those of an athlete. She knew now how he had been able to indulge in those drinking bouts and it was no wonder he had mocked her searching for a hidden store in his apartment. If he had worn a nightshirt or any other garment, dust from the cellar would have clung to the fabric and eventually given him away. Frowning, she advanced silently to the head of the stairs. He had almost reached the top when she spoke.
"I"ll take charge of that brandy. You don"t need it at this hour of the night."
He looked over his shoulder with a violent start. Then he let his head dip between his upstretched arms as he began to laugh, his whole body shaking with mirth. Letting go of the rail, he moved into a sitting position and rested an elbow on a higher stair as he flung back his head in a roar of uninhibited laughter. It was the first time she had ever heard him laugh without bitterness or cynicism and she began to smile. Tension between them melted away. She left him only to fetch his dressing robe and when she returned she saw he had set the two bottles on the top stair, but not the keys.
He grinned at her as he pulled on the robe and tied it. "As master of the house I have retained the keys to my own cellar."
She sat down beside the bottles. "If you had handed them over I would have given them back to you for the same reason."
"Yet you"ve always been strict over my consumption of grog."
"Only because I didn"t want you to keep drinking until you couldn"t stop. Now that danger has pa.s.sed."
"Why are you so sure?"
"Because I realize now you could have helped yourself from the cellar every night if that had been your true inclination after I first stepped in to prevent Sara supplying you with whatever you wanted to drink."
"What made you suspect I"ve been helping myself from the cellar?"
"I didn"t. I never noticed any bottles were missing."
"That"s because one of those doors in the cellar leads to a smaller wine cellar and I took my supplies from there. So why were you on the gallery?"
"I started to worry you might be ill and that was why you had rung the bell. Why did you ring?"
"I thought for a few moments I"d seen lanterns again in the distance. So it was concern for me that brought you from your bed?" He levered himself up onto the top step beside her and moved away the bottles of brandy that stood between them. "I"ve remembered where I"ve seen you before. You used to look across at my window from Mechelin Huis every night when I was in Delft. You told me during your first day or two here that you had cared for the Vermeer children, but then afterward I thought no more about it. But I"m right, am I not?"
"Yes, you are," she said, smiling. "Since you"ve remembered that much I"ll tell you more. I was in the anteroom of the Amsterdam Exchange one day when you caught me looking through the window into the courtyard and you did the same before a crowd of your friends came to fetch you away."
He grinned. "I do remember now. How could I have not seen you then as I do now?"
She was not entirely sure what he meant by that. "There was a lovely girl among your friends. Was she Isabella?"
"Yes. But all that is finished."
"You won"t be able to judge for sure until you"re out into the world again."
"Maybe that"s not such an impossibility as it once seemed to me. It"s what you"ve wanted for me from the start, isn"t it?"
She nodded, full of hope. The moment had come to tell him of the wooden legs that would enable him to stand again. But even as she would have spoken, he seized her in his arms and was kissing her pa.s.sionately. She was lost to all else until she felt him tugging the silk turban from her head. Total panic seized her. She began to fight like a tigress to free herself from his embrace.
He withdrew his mouth from hers, but did not release his hold as he stared at her. Her hair was the most beautiful he had ever seen, pale as moonlight, luxuriant and yet soft as spiders" webs. He said what he had long wanted to say. "I love you, Aletta."
She did not hear him, for she had begun to scream as if she were being raped. Abruptly he let her go, horrified by her reaction to his amorousness. She leapt to her feet and ran from him, her hair flying like a lovely cloud behind her.
In the morning when she entered his apartment it was in many ways as if what had happened in the night had never been. She was again soberly dressed, her hair out of sight under the plainest of her caps, her expression withdrawn. He reacted with cold hostility. They spoke with excruciating politeness to each other, their relationship having reached a curious impa.s.se.
Josephus, as instructed, examined the old double gates to see if they had been tampered with, but they were securely padlocked as they had always been. He had some difficulty in getting through to them, for heavy snow had fallen just before dawn and once again the cloak of winter lay white and silver over the land.
PIETER HAD NOT been in Delft that day, but on his next visit the whip maker informed him that the green cart had been found empty and abandoned in a snowdrift. The carter and his companion, if there had been another man on this second occasion, had taken the horses from the shafts and made their departure.
"The whip went with them," the whip maker said. "So keep your eyes peeled for it."
Pieter went to the place where the cart had been s...o...b..und. The hard s...o...b..nk still showed traces of the cart"s removal in a need to clear the road when traffic had begun to flow again after the snowstorm. It was on the curve of a narrow lane just past the crossroads where previously he had lost sight of it. He followed the lane and discovered it ran alongside the west wall of Constantijn de Veere"s estate to peter out by a pair of wide padlocked gates. It seemed scarcely possible that the carter had driven through them, but if the man had had a key or an accomplice within the grounds, it would explain how quickly the cart had disappeared from view at the time when he had been following it. He recalled Francesca telling him of Constantijn"s consternation at seeing distant lights in the park not long after Aletta went to work there.
A tree was growing conveniently near the wall. He climbed it high enough to be able to see what lay on the other side. Woodland hid the large formal garden that Francesca had said lay to the rear of the house, which was also out of sight. No snow had fallen since the night the cart had become stuck, but there were the softened indentations made by a man, probably a gardener checking the gates had not been damaged in the storm. By the way the snow lay it was possible to discern that he had followed a narrow drive that might well lead to the stables and outbuildings.
Pieter climbed down from the tree, remounted his horse and rode to the front gates of the house, where Josephus came with the guard dogs to ask his business. At Pieter"s request Aletta soon appeared wrapped in a warm cloak and hurrying to speak to him. His first question surprised her.
"You told Francesca once that all were Orangists in this house. Does that still apply?"
"Yes, it does," she replied.
"You have no doubt about Josephus?"
"None whatever. He is a good man, loyal to the Prince. Why?"
He took her into his confidence to the point of telling her that it was highly likely that the lights Constantijn had seen could be linked to some nefarious business being carried out in these very grounds, a suspicion increased by Aletta"s report that the most recent case of Constantijn seeing the lights had been on the night of the snowstorm. Sensibly she drew her own conclusions that something extremely important was at stake. There had been a query at the back of her mind ever since he had branched out in Delft, for it seemed foolhardy, in the light of Francesca"s vulnerability to punishment, that he should risk endangering her.
"You had better come into the house," she said, opening the gate for him. "This is something you should discuss with Constantijn. I take full responsibility for asking you in, although I warn you it"s unlikely you"ll be allowed into his apartment. I"ll probably have to stand by the door and convey his remarks down to you."
When she explained the matter to Constantijn he regarded her from his chair with a steely gaze, no lifting of his expression whenever she entered his quarters now. "So it appears those lights might not have been a trick of my imagination after all. They could be consistent with a single candle lamp showing through the woodlands before being extinguished. You may send Pieter van Doorne up here since the safety of my house may be at stake."
For a second or two she stared at him in disbelief. Had she really heard aright? Then she almost scampered to the door. "I"ll send him up at once!"
Pieter and Constantijn talked on their own for a considerable time while Aletta paced the hall, exulting in Constantijn having received his first visitor other than his parents, whom he had promised to see again on Christmas Day. Then Josephus was sent for and again she waited. When eventually Pieter and Josephus reappeared they both looked extremely serious. Josephus had one of Constantijn"s pistols; Pieter had drawn his own pistol from his belt and in his other hand was Constantijn"s ring of the three cellar keys.
"Where"s Sara?" Josephus asked grimly.
"She"s sorting linen on the top floor," Aletta replied.
"How long is she likely to be there?" Pieter wanted to know.
"Another three-quarters of an hour at least."
"That"s as well. We want her out of the way, because we can"t risk a careless word of gossip about an investigation we"re about to make."
"Then I"ll just check to make sure she wants nothing from down here." Aletta dashed up the flights to where she found Sara busily engaged, her task barely begun. Satisfied, Aletta went downstairs again and found the two men in the kitchen, where Josephus lit two lamps while Pieter explained the situation briefly to her.
"There"s just a chance that the drive from the old gates beyond the woodland may have been used by intruders and there"s only one place where they could have entered these premises unseen. Apparently there is a grating at the west end of the house, which, if removed, could give access to the locked cellars."
She remembered the grating, having pa.s.sed it countless times, although she had never examined it closely. The thick bull"s-eye gla.s.s behind the bars made it impossible to see within. "But n.o.body could get into the house that way, or any other, without the dogs barking. They are alert to any unusual sound."
Josephus interrupted, his voice thick with outrage at a possible intrusion under his very nose. "They"re friendly enough and quiet when they know the person concerned."
Pieter nodded. "I showed Constantijn the sketch of a stranger that Francesca made and gave me. He identified the likeness immediately as that of one of the servants whom he dismissed the night he returned here. As you know, the dogs were kept originally to guard against poachers and I"m told they knew all the servants well."
Josephus opened the door to the cellar steps. When Aletta would have followed, Pieter stopped her. "There may be danger. Wait here, Aletta."
She did not obey. As soon as they were down in the cellar she moved onto the steps and watched from there as Pieter inserted the key in the lock of the long-closed door as silently as possible. Then he stood back, giving a prearranged nod to Josephus, who turned the key and flung the door wide to let Pieter dash through with his pistol c.o.c.ked. Josephus rushed after him, but there was no sound of shots or voices. She almost leapt down the flight and rushed to the open door to see what was happening.
The lamps that Pieter and Josephus were holding showed the enormous length of the main cellar, which was divided into sections by walls and archways. They had opened another door into a far cellar where some daylight filtered through the bars of the grating and the bull"s-eye gla.s.s. At first she could only see some old furniture wreathed in cobwebs, but when she drew level with the men she gasped at a huge cache of arms. Pikes and muskets were ranged against the walls, and a large number of stacked kegs, which Pieter said contained gunpowder, stood to one side. He threw open the lids of some scores of boxes to reveal lead bullets that surely numbered thousands in all.
"How did all this get here?" she exclaimed in bewilderment. "Even if the dogs were silent I know I would have heard a cart on the gravel in the silence of the night! Can you explain, Pieter?"
"The cache must have been brought here in several loads and most painstakingly unloaded. The cart was driven through the old gates, to which the servant obviously had a duplicate key. Once in the woodland the cart lamps would have been extinguished and then everything you see here was carried from there. Between them, two men would have handed everything through that cellar window when the grating had been removed."
"But why should they do such a thing?"
"To be in readiness for traitors to give support to French forces when the time comes. No doubt there are many other such secret caches of arms not far from the gates of our cities. Now I"ll report back to Constantijn."
"Shall you not bolt the window first?"
"No. Everything must be left exactly as it is. Our hope will be to catch the gunrunners next time they come, although it"s unlikely to be until the snow goes again in the spring, because they"ll not risk leaving tracks."
The doors were relocked and the lamps extinguished to be returned to a shelf. Pieter spent some more time with Constantijn and then left. When he had gone Aletta took the crutches and the wooden legs from the place where they had been kept until the time should be right. She had not the least doubt that it had come.
When Constantijn turned his head and saw what she had brought to him his eyes glittered with a kind of bitter mirth. "How is it that you so often read my thoughts?"
It was impossible to admit to him that being in love could give that extra empathy. "So you have made a decision to walk again?"
"From the moment I learned that an offense had been committed against my house. I intend to keep watch from now on and to defend it and my country by eliminating those traitors. Give those legs to me and tell me how long you"ve had them in the house." While she explained everything he examined the straps and the legs. "Most ingenious. I can see that with the crutches my parents have donated I"ll be able to develop a swinging movement, but at least I"ll be able to stand upright when I"m stationary. You"d better send Josephus to me. There"s no time like the present to make a start."
"He shall come immediately."
"Wait a moment!"
She had reached the door and paused to look over her shoulder at him. "Yes?"
"I thank you most sincerely." His voice was puzzled. "Why should you do so much for me?"
She met his gaze steadily. By his own will he had broken his bonds. He had renewed his contact with the outside world through Pieter and it was only a matter of time now before he left his apartment and afterward this house and then moved back to Delft in his recovered self-respect. Soon he would no longer have any need of her.
"My motive has never been entirely unselfish," she admitted, coming back into the room. "I gave up being an artist when I left Amsterdam. In that accident by the bridge I was in the stage wagon with which your coach collided. I can"t remember exactly how my resolve began, but after seeing you injured and out of your senses that day I became convinced that my own life would never come to rights again until you were restored to yours."
"So I have been holding you back?"
She smiled. "Not anymore. I believe we are both now on the mend."
"Sit down and tell me what happened in Amsterdam."
She obeyed and told him everything. When she had finished both were aware that the coldness between them had melted away again. "So now I may feel able to sketch a little sometimes."
"There"s still something else I want to know. Since I love you with all my heart, surely you can tell me why you are dedicated to wearing a cap?"
Her breath caught in her throat at his statement. His eyes were full of love and she trembled, dipping her head to avoid his intense gaze. Haltingly she explained the fear that had been on her for so long. "Now you know everything about me," she concluded in a whisper.
"So that night on the stairs you didn"t scream in revulsion of me personally?"