Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

Author:Susan Vreeland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780140296280
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1999-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

From The Personal Papers of Adriaan Kuypers

On the day Aletta Pieters was hanged, I came to recognize the tenacity of superstition, even in an enlightened age. And on the day after Aletta Pieters was hanged, in the St. Nicholas flood of 1717, I gave away the only things that mattered to me.

The first time I saw her, she was standing in the pillory of the narrow square in Delfzijl, flinging out curses in a raw voice and spitting at the village boys who were taunting her. None of the matrons glaring at her chastised the boys for their insults. Between two ivory fists, the girl’s long hair blew wildly, fine as spun silk the color of nothing, of wind, so light it was, making her seem a creature of exotic plummage caught in a snare. Her eyes, unshielded by any visible eyebrows, had a reckless look. A sly, superior spark leapt from them and fell on me, a stranger shouldering a knapsack and a strapful of books. Her hands relaxed and she teased me with a wanton smile that puckered a small x-shaped scar on her cheek and pushed out her lips across the space between us. I suppose I flushed, for the mark had been laid with precision across the pure beauty of her cheek. The rest of her, hidden by the pillory planks, I could only imagine.

“What did you do against the good people of Delfzijl that you deserve the stocks?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, now.”

The boys hooted a challenge.

“There’s more to life than what’s in books, Student,” she cried. “Come a mite closer and I’ll tell ye.”

Still with the scholars’ close-cropped haircut, I had just fled, disenchanted, from university in Groningen.

“You’d best avert your eyes, lad, if you want it to go well with ye in this town,” commanded a weighty matron. “Pack of baggage, she is.”

Such virulence did not rest well in this quiet northern village on the Eems Estuary where I had, that day, come to live with my aunt, but the peculiarity of the girl’s scar and her wild, colorless hair in brilliant disorder beguiled me. I stepped up to her. “No spitting,” I warned.

“Closer now, don’t be afraid. I’ll whisper it.”

When I bent to put my ear to her face, her hair blew against my cheek like the tingling of fine fresh mist and she stretched through the pillory hole toward me and licked my ear. “Let that be an omen to ye,” she cried.

The boys hooted again, and although I muttered, “Shameless wench,” I conceded to myself that my callowness deserved the trick.

The next day, I found her crying on the floor of my aunt’s countryhouse in a hump of gray skirt, all the defiance drained out of her. She looked up at a small painting of a young girl about her own age sitting at a window. The flesh of Aletta Pieters’ delicate throat had been scraped raw. I crouched beside her. “Is this the same fiery maid as was in the pillory yesterday?” I asked.

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