Kage Baker - Standing in His Light
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2024-11-18
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The country was so flat its inhabitants had four different words for horizon. Its sunlight was watery, full
of tumbling clouds. Canals cut across a vast wet chaos of tidal mud, connecting tidy red-brick towns with
straight streets, secure and well-ordered behind walls. The houses were all alike behind their stepped
facades, high windows set in pairs letting through pale light on rooms scrubbed and spotless. The people
who lived in the rooms were industrious, pious, and preoccupied with money.
A fantasist might decide that they were therefore dull, smug and inherently unromantic, the sort of people
among whom the Hero might be born, but against whom he would certainly rebel, and from whom he
would ultimately escape to follow his dreams.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The people who lived in the houses above the placid
mud flats had fought like demons against their oppressors, and were now in the midst of a philosophical
and artistic flowering of such magnificence that their names would be written in gold in all the arts.
Still, they had to make a living. And making a living is a hard, dirty and desperate business.
The weaver's son and the draper's son sat at a small table. They had been passing back and forth a pipe of
tobacco slightly adulterated with hemp, and, now that it was smoked out, were attempting to keep the
buzz going with two pots of beer. It wasn't proving successful. The weaver's son, thin and threadbare,
was nervously eyeing his guest and trying to summon the courage to make a business proposition. The
draper's son, reasonably well-fed and dressed, seemed in a complacent mood.
"So you learned a thing or two about lenses in Amsterdam, eh?" said the weaver's son.
"I'd have gone blind if I hadn't," replied the draper's son, belching gently. "Counting threads on brocade?
You can't do it without a magnifying glass."
"I had this idea," said the weaver's son. "Involving lenses, see. Have you looked at de Hooch's paintings
lately? He's using a camera obscura for his interiors. They're the greatest thing—"
"You know my Latin's no good," said the draper's son. "What's a camera obscura, anyway?"
"All the words mean is dark room," explained the weaver's son. "It's a trick device, a box with two lenses
and a focusing tube. The Italians invented it. Solves all problems of perspective drawing! You don't have
to do any math, no calculations to get correct angles of view. It captures an image and throws a little
picture of it on your canvas, and all you have to do is trace over it. It's like magic!"
"And you want me to loan you the money for one?" asked the draper's son, looking severe.
"No! I just thought, er, if you knew about lenses, you might want to help me make one," said the
weaver's son, flushing. "And then I'd cut you in for a share of the paintings I sell afterward."
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"But your stuff doesn't sell," said the draper's son.
"But it would sell, if I had a camera obscura! See, that's my problem, getting perspective right," argued
the weaver's son. "That was the problem with my Procuress. I'm no good with math."
"That's certainly true."
"But the device would solve all that. I've got a whole new line of work planned: no more Bible scenes.
I'm going to do ladies and soldiers in rooms, like de Hooch and Metsu are doing. The emblem stuff with
hidden meanings, that people can puzzle over. That's what everyone wants, and it's selling like crazy
now," said the weaver's son.
The draper's son sighed and drained his beer.
"Look, Jan," he said. "Your father died broke. He made good silk cloth, he ran a pretty decent inn; if he'd
stayed out of the art business he'd have done all right for himself. Our fathers were friends, so I'm giving
you advice for nothing: you won't make a living by painting. I know it's what you've always wanted to
do, and I'm not saying you're not good—but the others are better, and there are a lot of them. And you're
not very original, you know."
The weaver's son scowled. He was on the point of telling the draper's son to go to Hell when a shadow
fell across their table.
"I'm very sorry to interrupt, Mynheeren," said the woman. They looked up at her. The weaver's son
stared, struck by the image she presented, the way the light from the window fell on her white coif,
glittered along the line of brass beads on her sleeve, the way the layered shadows modeled her serene
face.
"What do you want?" asked the draper's son. She didn't look like a whore; she looked like any one of the
thousand respectable young matrons who were even now peeling apples in a thousand kitchens. What,
then, was she doing in the common-room of a shabby inn on the market square?
"Well, I couldn't help but overhear that you two young gentlemen were talking about making a camera
obscura. And, you know, I said to myself, isn't that the strangest coincidence! Really, when a
coincidence this remarkable occurs it's got to be the work of God or the holy angels, at least that was
what my mother used to say, so then I said to myself, whether it's quite polite or not, I'll just have to go
over there and introduce myself! Elisabeth van Drouten, gentlemen, how do you do?"
And she drew up a three-legged stool, and sat, and thumped her covered basket down on the table.
Looking from one to the other of the men, she whisked off the cover. There, nestled in a linen kerchief,
were a handful of objects that shone like big water-drops, crystal-clear, domed, gleaming.
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"Lenses!" cried Mevrouw van Drouten triumphantly. "What do you think of that?"
The two gentlemen blinked at them like owls, and the draper's son reached into the basket and held one
up to the light.
"Nice lenses," he admitted. "Are you selling them?"
"Not exactly," said Mevrouw van Drouten. "It's a long story. There's a friend of my family's in
Amsterdam, actually that's where I'm from, you could probably tell from my accent, yes? Well, anyway,
he grinds lenses, this friend of mine. And because he got in trouble with his family—and then later on the
Jews kicked him out of their synagogue for something, I'm not sure what it was all about, but anyway,
bang, there went poor Spinoza's inheritance. So we were trying to help him out by selling some of his
lenses, you see?
"So last time I was here in Delft visiting my auntie, which was, let's see, I guess it was five years ago
now, I brought some lenses to see if I could sell them, which I did when I was at my cousin's tavern to
this nice man who was maybe a little drunk at the time, and I understood him to say he was a painter and
wanted them for optical effects. Fabritius, that was his name!"
The two men grunted. In a gesture that had become involuntary for citizens of their town, they both
turned to the northeast and raised their beers in salute. The woman watched them, her brows knitted.
"He died in the explosion," the weaver's son explained.
"Yes, the 'Delft Thunderclap', we called it," said Mevrouw van Drouten, nodding her head. "When your
city powder magazine went blooie! Awful tragedy. And that's what my cousin said, when I went back to
her tavern yesterday. That poor Fabritius had been so drunk that he left the packet of lenses on the table,
and he never came back to get them because the explosion happened the next day. So she kept them until
she saw me again. And I said, 'What am I supposed to do with them now? He paid for them, so I don't
feel right keeping them,' and she said, 'Well, Elisabeth, why don't you find some other painters to give
them to?' And I said, 'Where would I find some other painters?' and she said, 'Try that inn over in the
Market Square,' so I came straight over, and here you are, fellow artists I guess, eh? Maybe you knew
Fabritius?"
"I did," said the weaver's son. "He was a genius."
"Well then! I'm sure he'd want you to have these, wouldn't he?"
The weaver's son reached into the basket and the lenses rattled, clicked softly as he drew one out. He
peered at the tiny rainbowed point of light it threw. It magnified wildly the lines of his palm, the yellow
hairs on the back of his hand. He held it up to the window and saw his thumbprint become a vast swirl
etched in silver. The draper's son held his lens up beside it.
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"Ooh!" Mevrouw van Drouten clasped her hands in pleasure. "I wish I could capture this moment,
somehow. Can't help thinking it's portentous, in a way I can't explain. Fabritius's ghost is probably
smiling down from heaven at you two fine young fellows. Now you can build your camera obscura, eh?
And maybe find one or two other uses for the lenses."
"Are you sure you want to give them away?" said the draper's son, a little vaguely because he was still
entranced by the play of rainbows across crystal. The buzz from the hemp hadn't quite vanished.
"Quite sure," said Mevrouw van Drouten cheerfully. She spilled the remaining lenses out on the table and
stood, tucking her empty basket under her arm. "There. Much as I'd love to stay and chat, I've got a boat
to catch. Mynheer van Leeuwenhoek, Mynheer Vermeer, may God keep you both."
Then she was gone, as suddenly and inexplicably as she'd arrived. The weaver's son tore his gaze away
from the liquid contours of the piled lenses and looked around. The light still streamed in, clear and soft,
but the room was empty save for a drunk snoring on a bench in the corner.
· · · · ·
In the twenty-fourth century, it was unanimously conceded by art authorities that Jan Vermeer was the
greatest painter who had ever lived.
The other Dutch masters had long since been dismissed from popular taste. Rembrandt didn't suit
because his work was too muddy, too dark, too full of soldiers and too big, and who wanted to look at
Bible pictures anyway in an enlightened age? To say nothing of the fact that his brush strokes were
sloppy. Franz Hals painted too many dirty-looking, grimacing people, and his brush strokes were even
sloppier. The whole range of still life paintings of food were out: too many animal or fish corpses, too
many bottles of alcohol. Then too, a preoccupation with food might lead the viewer to obesity, which
was immoral, after all!
Had they known of their demotion, the old gentlemen of Amsterdam and Utrecht might not have felt too
badly; for by the twenty-fourth century, the whole of Medieval art had been condemned for its religious
content, as had the works of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. The French Impressionists were
considered incoherent and sleazy, the Spanish morbid, the Germans degenerate, and the Americans
frivolous. Almost nothing from the twentieth or twenty-first centuries was acceptable. Primitive art was
grudgingly accepted as politically correct, as long as it didn't deal in objectionable subjects like sex,
religion, war, or animal abuse, but the sad fact was that it generally did, so there wasn't a lot of it on
view.
But who could find fault with the paintings of Jan Vermeer?
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It was true he'd done a couple of religious paintings in his youth, before his style had become established,
and the subject matter of his Procuress was forbidden, but it too was atypical of the larger body of his
work. And his Diana and her Companions was enthusiastically accepted by the Ephesian Church as
proof that Vermeer had been a secret initiate of the Goddess, and since the Ephesians were about the only
faith left with political power or indeed much of a following, the painting was allowed to remain in
catalogs.
There was, of course, the glaring problem of the Servant Pouring Milk. But, since Vermeer's original
canvases hadn't been seen in years due to their advanced state of deterioration, it was no more than the
work of a few keystrokes to delete the mousetrap from the painting's background and, more important,
alter the stream of proscribed dairy product so it was no longer white, in order that the painting might
henceforth be referred to as Girl Pouring Water. This would avoid any reference to the vicious
exploitation of cows.
Those objections having been put aside, Vermeer was universally loved.
He glorified science—look at his Astronomer and Surveyor! He was obviously in favor of feminism, or
why would he have depicted so many quiet, dignified women engaged in reading and writing letters?
There were, to be sure, a couple of paintings of women drinking with cavaliers, but everyone was
decorously clad and upright, and anyway the titles had been changed to things like Girl with Glass of
Apple Juice or Couple Drinking Lemonade. He valued humble domestic virtues, it was clear, but
refrained from cluttering up his paintings with children, as his contemporary de Hoogh had done. All in
all his morality, as perceived by his post-postmodern admirers, suited the twenty-fourth century
perfectly.
They liked the fact that his paintings looked real, too. The near-photographic treatment of a subject was
now considered the ultimate in good taste. An orange should look like an orange! The eventual backlash
against Modern Art had been so extreme as to relegate Picasso and Pollock to museum basements.
Maxfield Parrish and the brothers Hildebrandt might have been popular, had they not unfortunately
specialized in fantasy (read demonic) themes, and David painted too many naked dead people. So, with
the exception of a few landscape painters and the flower paintings of DeLongpre, Vermeer was pretty
much the undisputed ruler of popular art.
Having been dead nearly seven centuries, however, it is unlikely he cared.
· · · · ·
THE ROOM UPSTAIRS, 1661
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The camera obscura had worked, after a fashion. The image hadn't been especially bright, muzzily like a
stained-glass window out of focus, but Jan had been able to sharpen it up by sealing all the gaps in the
cabinet with pieces of black felt. All he had to do then was set up the picture: so he tried a variation on a
popular piece by Maes, The Lazy Maid.
Catharina obligingly posed at the table, pretending to sleep. Above her, Jan hung the old painting of
Cupid from the stock his father had been unable to sell. Beside her was the view through to the room
where the dog posed with simpleton Willem, both of them apparently fascinated by circling flies. Jan had
laid their one Turkey carpet on the table, and carefully set out the symbolic objects that would give the
painting its disguised meaning, to be deciphered by the viewer: the jug and wineglass to imply
drunkenness, the bowl of fruit to suggest the sin of Eve, the egg to symbolize lust.
"Why don't these things ever have anything good to say about ladies?" Catharina complained.
"Damned if I know," Jan told her, adjusting her right arm so she was resting her head on her hand. "But
it's what the customers want. Hold it like that, see? That symbolizes sloth."
"Oh, yes, I know all about sloth," she retorted, without opening her eyes. "I'm a real woman of leisure,
aren't I?"
"Mama, the baby's awake," little Maria informed them cautiously, edging into the room.
"See if you can rock her back to sleep, then."
"But she's really awake," Maria insisted, wringing her hands.
"Then give her a toy or something! Just don't let her cry."
"All right." Maria left the room. Catharina opened one eye and glared at Jan.
"If she starts crying, I'll run like a fountain, and that'll ruin this gown, and it's my best one! Unless you
can get me a pair of sponges in a hurry," she said.
"I'll be as fast as I can." Jan retreated into the black cabinet with his palette.
Working quickly, despite the panicky realization that he'd installed the cabinet too far away from the
light of the window, he roughed out everything he could see in a few wide swipes of the brush, applying
the pale paint thinly. The main thing here was to get the perspective nailed down. Afterward there would
be plenty of time to lavish on color and detail …
A thin wailing floated into the room. He saw the reflected image of Catharina sit upright, saw her eyes
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snap open, saw her clutch at her bodice.
"Jan, I've got to go," she said, and fled from the sight of the lens.
Six weeks later, he sat at the easel and contemplated his Girl Asleep sadly.
It hadn't worked. The perspective was correct, certainly, the camera obscura had done its job there; but
left to himself he hadn't been able to nail down the direction from which the light ought to be coming.
Was it strong sunset light coming through a nonexistent window? Firelight? Was it in front of the table or
to one side? What was lighting the room beyond, where he'd finally settled for painting out Willem and
the dog?
Growling to himself, he took a bit of lead-tin yellow on his brush and picked out a pattern of brass
tackheads on the back of the chair. Halfway through the job he stopped and considered it. No, because if
the light was falling on the table—
"Papa?" Maria came up to him.
"You're standing in my light, baby," he told her, gently nudging her to one side.
"I'm sorry, Papa. There's a lady to see you."
He came instantly alert, started to sweat. "Is it about a bill?"
"No, Papa, I asked." Maria raised her little pinched face to his. "Because then I would have said you were
out. But she wants to buy something. That would be a good thing, wouldn't it? So I told her she could
come up."
"But—" Jan looked up in panic as Mevrouw van Drouten swept into the room, basket over her arm.
"Good-day, Mynheer!" she cried gaily. "I see you remember me. So this is where you work, eh? And
there's the camera obscura! Yes, that's a nice big one, but are you sure you don't want to move it closer
to the windows?" She came straight to his shoulder and bent to look at the painting. "Yes, you definitely
want to move it over. The light didn't work out at all in this one, did it? Nice painting, though."
"Thank you—but—" He rose clumsily, wiping his brush with a rag. "If you've come to buy, I'm afraid
this one is already sold. I've got to deliver it to the baker. I have a lot of other fine paintings by other
artists, though, and they're for sale! Would you perhaps like to see—?"
"No, no." Mevrouw van Drouten held up her hand. "I had a commission in mind, if you want to know."
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"Certainly, Mevrouw," Jan exclaimed. "Can I offer you—" he halted, mortified to realize he was unable
to offer her anything but bread and butter.
"That's all right," she told him. "I didn't come here to eat." She reached into her basket—it was an
immense basket this time—and brought out a small paper parcel. Turning with a smile, she offered it to
Maria. "There you go: spekulaas with almonds! Baked this morning. You run along and share them with
the little brothers and sisters, yes? Papa and I have to talk in quiet."
"Thank you," said Maria, wide-eyed. She exited and, with some effort as she clutched the parcel, pulled
the door shut after her. If the big lady wanted privacy, Maria would make sure she had it, so long as she
bought something. A painting sold meant Mama and Papa not shouting at each other, and no dirty looks
from the grocer.
Mevrouw van Drouten pulled up a chair. She paused a moment to smile at the little carved lion heads on
its back rest. Seating herself, she crossed her arms and leaned forward.
"This commission of mine is a bit unusual, dear sir. My late husband was an alchemist—well, actually,
he kept a lodging-house, but alchemy was his hobby, you see? Always fussing with stinky stuff in a back
room, blowing off his eyebrows with small explosions now and then, breaking pots and bottles every
time. Geraert, I told him, you'll put an eye out one of these days! And of course he never made any gold.
About all he ever came up with was a kind of invisible ink, except that it's no good as ink, because it's
too thick. Well, he poisoned himself at last, wasn't trying to commit suicide so far as we could tell but he
was still just as dead, there you are, and left me with nothing but the house and a book full of cryptic
scribbling and that one formula for invisible ink, only it's more of an invisible paste, and what good's that
to a spy, I said to myself?"
"I'm so sorry, Mevrouw," said Jan, feeling his head spin at her relentless flow of words.
"Oh, that's all right. I'm containing my grief. The thing is, I figured out a use for the invisible stuff." She
leaned back and, from under the cloth, drew out another parcel. This one was a flat rectangle, about the
size of a thin account book. It was tightly wrapped in black felt and fastened with string. Holding it up
for Jan to see, she said: "This is a little canvas that's been coated in it."
She set it on the table and reached into the basket again, drawing out a small covered pot and a brush.
"This is the reagent. If the ink was worth a damn as ink, this would make hidden messages appear when
you brushed it on. I think we can do something better, though."
"What are you talking about?" Jan asked, wondering if she were a little crazy. "And what has this got to
do with me?"
"You've got a camera obscura, that's what it's got to do with you, and you're a painter, besides. You've
got flint but no steel. I've got steel but no flint. If the two of us got together over some tinder, though, I'll
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