coming from her heaving bosom, and as her cheeks flamed, she became a woman, hard and cold inside and bitter from the honors she had seen. Where was the child in her, I thought frantically, and then she turned and glared at me, and again at Roemer, who was intimidated if I ever saw him, but he worked fast to overcome it and he spoke again.
“We are an order of scholars, and it is our purpose to study those with singular powers, powers such as your mother had, which were said wrongly to have come from the devil, and powers which you yourself may possess as well. Was it not true that your mother could heal? Child, such a power does not come from the devil. Do you see these books around you? They are full of stories of such persons, called in one place sorcerer, and in another witch, but what has the devil to do with such things? If you have such powers, place your trust in us that we may teach you what they can and cannot do.”
Roemer spoke further to her of how we had helped witches to escape their persecutors and to come here, and to be safe with us. And he spoke even to her about two of the women with us who were both powerful seers of spirits, and of Geertruid, who could make the very glass rattle in the windows with her mind, if she chose.
The child’s eyes grew large but her face was hard. Her hands tightened on the arms of the chair, and she cocked her head to the left as she fixed Roemer and looked him up and down.
I saw the look of hate come back into her face, and Roemer whispered: “She is reading our thoughts, Petyr, and she can hide her own thoughts from us.”
This gave her a start. But still she said nothing.
“Child,” Roemer said, “what you have witnessed is terrible, but surely you did not believe the accusations made against your mother. Tell us, please, to whom did you speak the night in the inn when Petyr heard you? If you can see spirits, tell these things to us. No harm will ever come to you.”
No answer.
“Child, let me show you my own power. It does not come from Satan, and no evocation of him is required for its use. Child, I do not believe in Satan. Now, behold the clocks around you-the tall case clock there, and the pendulum clock to the left of you, and the clock on the mantelshelf, and that clock there on the far desk.”
She looked at all these, which greatly relieved us for at least she understood, and then she stared in consternation as Roemer, without moving a particle of his physical being, made them all come abruptly to a stop. The endless ticking was gone from the room and had left a great silence after it, which seemed strong enough in its emptiness to hush even the sounds from the canal below.
“Child, trust in us, for we share these powers,” said Roemer, and then pointing to me, he told me to start the clocks again by the power of my mind. I shut my eyes and said to the clocks: “Start,” and the clocks did as they were told and the room was full of ticking once more.
The face of Deborah was transformed from cold suspicion to sudden contempt, as she looked from me to Roemer. She sprang from the chair. Backwards against the books she crept, fixing me and then Roemer with her malevolent gaze.
“Ah, witches!” she cried. “Why did you not tell me? You are all witches! You are an order of Satan.” And then as the tears poured down her face, she sobbed. “It is true, true, true!”
She wrapped her arms around her to cover her breasts and she spit at us in her rage. Nothing we could say would quiet her.
“We are all damned! And you hide here in this city of witches where they can’t burn you!” she cried. “Oh, clever, clever witches in the devil’s house!”
“No, child,” cried Roemer. “We know nothing of the devil! We seek to understand what others condemn.”
“Deborah,” I cried out, “forget the lies they taught you. There is no one in the city of Amsterdam who would burn you! Think of your mother. What did she say of what she did, before they tortured her and made her sing their songs?”
Ah, but these were the wrong words! I could not know it, Stefan. I could not know it. Only as her face was stricken, as she put her hands over her ears, did I realize my error. Her mother had believed she was evil!
And then from Deborah’s trembling mouth came more denunciations. “Wicked, are you? Witches, are you? Stoppers of clocks! Well, I shall show you what the devil can do in the hands of this witch!”
She moved into the very center of the room and looking up and out the window, it seemed, to the blue sky, she cried:
“Come now, my Lasher, show these poor witches the power of a great witch and her devil. Break the clocks one and all!”
And at once a great dark shadow appeared in the window, as if the spirit upon whom she had called had condensed himself to become small and strong within the room.
The thin glass aver the faces of the clocks was shattered, the fine glued seams of their wooden cases sprung open, the very springs breaking out of them, and the clocks tumbled off the mantelshelf and the desk, and the tall case clock crashed to the floor.
Roemer was alarmed for seldom had he seen a spirit of such power, and we could all but feel the thing in our midst, brushing our garments, as it swept past us and shot out its invisible tentacles, as it were, to obey the witch’s commands.
“Damn you into hell, witches. I shall not be your witch!” Deborah cried, and as the books began to fall around us, she fled once more from us, and the door slammed shut after her and we could not pry it open, try as we might.
But the spirit was gone. We had nothing more to fear from the thing. And after a long silence, the door was made to open again, and we wandered out, bewildered to discover that Deborah had long since left the house.
Now, you know, Stefan, by that time, Amsterdam was one of the very great cities of all Europe, and she held perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand persons, or more. And into this great city Deborah had vanished. And no inquiry we made of her in the brothels or the taverns bore fruit. Even to the Duchess Anna, the richest whore in Amsterdam, we went, for that is where with certainty a beautiful girl like Deborah might find refuge, and though the Duchess was as always glad to see us and talk with us, and serve us good wine, she knew nothing of the mysterious child.
I was now in such abject misery that I did nothing but lie in my bed, with my face on my arms, and weep, though all told me this was foolish, and Geertruid swore that she would find “the girl.”
Roemer told me that I must write down what had happened with this young woman as part of my scholarly work, but I can tell you, Stefan, that what I wrote was most pitiful and brief and that is why I have not asked that you consult these old records. When I return to Amsterdam, God willing, I shall replace my old entries with this more vivid chronicle.
But to continue with what little more there is to say, it was a fortnight later that a young student of Rembrandt lately from Utrecht came to me and said that the girl for whom I had been searching was now living with the old portraitist Roelant, who was known by that name only, who had studied many years in Italy in his youth and still had many flocking to him for his work, though he was exceedingly ill and infirm, and could scarce pay his debts anymore.
You may not remember Roelant, Stefan, but let me tell you now he was a fine painter, whose portraits always evinced the happiness of Caravaggio, and had it not been for the malady which struck his bones and crippled him before his time, he might have been better regarded than he was.
At this time, he was a widower with three sons, and a kindly man.
At once I went to see Roelant, who was known to me and had always been genial, but now I found the door shut in my face. He had no time for visiting with us “mad scholars” as he called us, and warned me in heated terms that even in Amsterdam those as strange as we might be driven out.
Roemer said that I was to leave it alone for a while, and you know, we survive, Stefan, because we avoid notice, and so we kept our council. But in the days that followed we saw that Roelant paid all his back debts, which were many, and that he and his children by his first wife now dressed in fine clothes, which could only be called exceedingly rich.
It was said that Deborah, a Scottish girl of great beauty, taken in by him to purse his children, had prepared an unguent for his crippled fingers, which had heated them as it were and loosened them and he could hold the brush again. Rumor had it he was being well paid for his new portraits, but he would have had to paint three and four a day, Stefan, to make the money to pay for the furnishings and clothes that now went into that house.
