Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [17]
Cornelisz was far from well established. His pharmacy was still new, and he himself was young and freshly qualified. Many Haarlemmers must have preferred to do business with his older rivals even before the scandalous death of his son set tongues wagging in the Grote Houtstraat. Consequently, by the middle of 1628 Jeronimus was in serious financial difficulties. He had accumulated debts, which were mounting, and creditors, who had grown impatient. One man in particular, a merchant named Loth Vogel, was insisting that Cornelisz repay the money he owed. The apothecary lacked the necessary funds to do this. He therefore faced the looming prospect of bankruptcy, which—in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century—was a mortal sin.
Throughout the claustrophobic summer of 1628, the merchant Vogel pursued the apothecary while the apothecary pursued his wet nurse. Jeronimus knew by now that his only chance of restoring his damaged reputation—and, perhaps, of salvaging his business—lay in proving that his child had contracted syphilis from Heyltgen Jansdr. His actions that June, July, and August suggest a man preparing for a court case. Leaving Belijtgen to mind his failing business in the Grote Houtstraat, Cornelisz vanished into the maze of narrow alleyways off the St. Jansstraat, searching for those who knew the wet nurse. He listened to their stories and persuaded them to set down their misgivings about the woman in sworn statements.
Cornelisz found no fewer than nine of his own acquaintances to testify that Belijtgen was unmarked by syphilitic sores and ulcers, and six others, from north Haarlem, who confirmed that the wet nurse had been seriously ill for at least two years. It was alleged that Heyltgen had left the apothecary’s son wailing and uncared for while she went out carousing of an evening; several of the nurse’s neighbors remarked on the extraordinarily foul odor that hung over her bed whenever she fell ill; and one, Elsken Adamsdr, made a sworn statement in which she described how she had refused to change Heyltgen’s sheets for fear of catching a disease. A number of the nurse’s neighbors also testified that she was an unfaithful wife and had slept on several occasions with a local widower named Aert Dircxsz, whose nickname was “Velvet Trousers” and who may himself have been syphilitic. Their evidence was hardly conclusive, but, taken together, the statements that Jeronimus collected were certainly enough to suggest that the boy’s bereaved parents had right on their side.
Heyltgen Jansdr responded violently to Cornelisz’s campaign. She publicly alleged that Belijtgen was so riddled with venereal disease that all her hair had fallen out and her scalp was festooned with ulcers. She twisted the scanty evidence she had collected in her own defense to make it appear stronger than it was. She even appeared again in the Grote Houtstraat, where she gathered a crowd outside Jeronimus’s shop by cursing, beating her fists together, and screaming that Belijtgen was a whore, whose eyeballs she would rip out if she could.
Despite this ongoing personal horror, in the end it was not Heyltgen’s lies but Loth Vogel and his demands for reparation that sealed Cornelisz’s fate. Trade had continued to decline and the apothecary’s financial situation had deteriorated