Free Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland Page B

testifying it as a van Mieris, he offered me only twenty-four guilders. Barely enough for a hired coach and inns to Paris. I accepted, and cried all the way home in the carriage.
    Grâce à Dieu, Gerard was at the ministry. I had time for only a quick note to Charlotte: "I am es caping to France. Prepare Father. Let's spend the rest of the summer in Provence."
    When my trunks were loaded and I was helped into the coach, what I felt was not a weeping, but a longing to weep that I mastered all too easily. Ger ard would survive, and thrive. If there was anything to weep for, it wasn't Gerard, or Monsieur le C—, or even me. It was the painting, for now it would go forth through the years without its certification, an illegitimate child, and all illegitimacy, whether of paintings or of children or of love, ought to be a source of truer tears than any I could muster at parting.
    Love as I knew it was foolish anyway, all that business about blood boiling and hearts palpitating, all that noticing of eyeballs. Think realistically, my dear. Who wants to peer into a quivering nostril anyway? If, indeed, that was love, it wasn't enough. I came to see that knowing what love isn't might be just as valuable, though infinitely less satisfying, as knowing what it is. Looking out the coach window at men and women bending over flat potato fields, I determined I would be just as content as my lost girl gazing out her own sunlit window. A great deal can be said for just sitting and thinking. Life is not, nor has been, a fantaisie, but one can still amuse one self, no? And as for Monsieur le C—, though his face eludes me, I still say an ave for him every Pas sion Sunday at the Church of the Madeleine, as a way of thanking him from the strings of my heart for my resurrection.

Morningshine
    Saskia opened the back shutters and looked out the upstairs south window early the second morning after the flood. Their farmhouse was an is land apart from the world. Vapors of varying gray made the neighboring four farmhouses indistinct, yet there was a shine on the water like the polished pewter of her mother's kitchen back home. Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so, she thought. But it wasn't so. And the cow would have to stay upstairs with them until it was so, however long that was, stay upstairs messing the floor and taking up half the room.
    She leaned on the sill and peered across the wa ter to the bare elm tree, so small and new it was only a few twigs above the water, to see if their chickens were in it. Maybe Stijn would find them today. She felt the loss of Pookje the most. She was the beauty, with those chestnut feathers soft as baby's hair under her throat. And how she always rose so dainty-like and proud to show the perfect egg she produced. Then Saskia felt ashamed. Oth ers had lost more than a few hens.
    She and Stijn had hardly lost anything. The day of the flood she'd made dozens of trips upstairs car rying furniture and food, while the cow's big brown eyes followed her each trip. She tried to make a game of it for the children, and even went down into the cold water to feel around and rescue a few more things after the flood came. By the end of the day her legs ached and her arms hung limp as rags. She had thought Stijn would be pleased that she had gotten so much upstairs, but when he came in through the window after working on the Dam sterdiep Dike for two days straight, he took one look at the clutter, and her grandmother's spinning wheel atop hurriedly stacked peat blocks, and said, "Do we need all this?"
    She'd forgiven him. He was exhausted and pre occupied.
    Now, out the south window, she noticed some thing dark floating on the water a long way away, turning as if by its own will, first one way and then another.
    "Stijn," she said. "Would you look at that, now?" She felt his warm hand on her shoulder as he looked out with her. She had of late—and she knew