Read Girl in Hyacinth Blue for Free Online Page B

his daughter lean, unnecessarily, on the young man's arm.
    The autumn air blew crisply and Digna drew close her cape. Laurens usually found wind invigor ating, but this afternoon it made him feel as though a wall of gray sea were thundering toward him against which he had to brace himself. The breeze was crisp, the fallen leaves were crisp, everything was crisp. Johanna's voice was crisp earlier that day when she told him, "Papa, Fritz asked me to marry him, and I told him yes." Just like that. No prel ude. No delicacy. Not even a nod to tradition. As if fathers needn't even be asked anymore to give up their daughters to someone else's love. Was this the way Amsterdammers did things? A herald of how life would be in the new century?
    "We should give them a fine gift," Digna said, taking Laurens's arm just like Johanna had done with Fritz. "Something of ours she's always loved and will always keep."
    "Does that mean you're agreeing to this?"
    "He's a good fellow. And handsome." He caught her playful smile. "Erasmus says if you must be hanged let it be on a fair gallows."
    "Gallows weren't intended for the young and innocent."
    Up ahead their dog, Dirk, trotted right in Jo hanna's way so that she almost stumbled, and then Fritz said something that made her laugh. Laurens watched her press herself against this man and kiss him lightly on his ear. Dirk barked what Laurens knew was an admonition. Laurens found a perverse pleasure in noting that Dirk did not take too keenly to the attentions Johanna was paying to this odd smelling interloper in leather shoes instead of good, solid klompen, clearly not a resident of Vreeland. He was amused when Dirk, trembling with suspi cion, had growled something obviously insulting at Fritz when he arrived by coach at noon.
    "Look at her, Laurens. Radiant."
    Instead, he glanced sideways at his wife. The happiness had traveled: His daughter's wild, dewy bliss had freshened every pore in Digna's familiar face.
    "What could we give them?" she asked, a pleas ant urgency in her voice.
    "A broom and a butter churn?"
    "We could give them the Digna Louise."
    "No. Fritz has an old smack boat. He told me he took it out last week to the Zuider Zee and nearly froze. No one in his right mind, outside fish ermen, would go sailing there after September."
    Their neighbors' skiffs were lined up stem to stern where the canal joined Loodrechtsche Plassen. Laurens remembered how as a young girl Johanna called them wishbone boats, for the graceful shape of their prows. He wondered if she told Fritz that just now as they passed the skiffs along the bank.
    Johanna and Fritz turned at Ruyter's mustard mill to walk the lakeshore wagon road, and looked back for Laurens and Digna to follow. Something of their expectancy, the feeling that they were sail ing forth into an adventure in an untried craft, awakened in Laurens a vaguely competitive warmth, and he slipped his arm around his wife's supple waist. "You cold?" he asked, half hoping that she was.
    "I could give her my mother's opal ring, but that's not very much. And it should be something from both of us. For both of them."
    To Laurens, everything about the couple ahead bore the conspicuous marks of euphoria. Too soon blooming, he thought, too soon coming in to seed. They had not suffered long winter evenings of soulful contemplation, but were careening ahead as if it were already tulip time.
    So now she would go. She would leave Vree land where she knew every pathway, every plank of every bridge, every family's horse and wagon, where he'd taught her to skate right here on Lood rechtse Plassen, where he'd watched her play every summer under the willows at their canal edge, hap pily pouring buckets of canal water into a cracked and chipped Delftware tea set that had been his mother's. She would leave the town of her birth and ancestry, and go to Amsterdam, nearly half a day's carriage ride over the dike roads.
    Laurens was amused that Dirk made such a show of his