Gryphus laughed when the prisoner asked him what it meant, and replied, “That’s what happens to those that write secret letters to the enemies of the Prince of Orange.”

A terrible despair fell on Van Baerle, but he refused to escape when Rosa, the gaoler’s beautiful daughter, suggested it to him.  He was brought to trial, and though he denied all knowledge of the correspondence, his goods were confiscated, and he was condemned to death.  He bequeathed his three tulip bulbs to Rosa, explained how she must get a certain soil from Dordrecht, and went out calmly to die.  On the scaffold Van Baerle was reprieved and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, for the Prince of Orange shrank from further bloodshed.

One spectator in the crowd was bitterly disappointed.  This was Boxtel, who had bribed the headsman to let him have Van Baerle’s clothes, believing that he would thus obtain the priceless bulbs.

Van Baerle was sent to the prison of Loewenstein, and in February 1673, when he was thinking his tulips lost for ever, he heard Rosa’s voice.  Gryphus had applied for the gaolership of Loewenstein, and had been appointed.

Nothing could persuade him that if Van Baerle was not a traitor he was certainly in league with the devil, like all learned men, and he did all he could to mortify and annoy his prisoner.  But Rosa would come every night when her father, stupefied by gin, was asleep, and talk to Cornelius through the barred grating of his cell door.

He taught her to read, and together they planned how the tulip bulbs should be brought to flower.  One bulb Rosa was to plant, the second Van Baerle would cultivate in his cell with soil placed in an old water jug, and the third was to be kept in reserve.

Once more hope revived in Baerle’s mind, but Rosa often suffered vexation because Cornelius thought more of his black tulip than of her.

In the meantime Boxtel, under the assumed name of Jacob Gisels, had made his way to Loewenstein in pursuit of the bulbs, and had ingratiated himself with Gryphus, offering to marry his daughter.  Rosa’s tulip had to be guarded from Gisels, who was always spying on her movements.  She kept it in her room for safety, but Boxtel had a key made, and the day the tulip flowered, and arose a spotless black, he resolved to take it at once, and rush to Haarlem and claim the prize.

The day came.  Rosa described to Cornelius the wonderful black tulip, and they drew up a letter to the president of the Horticultural Society at Haarlem, begging him to come and fetch the wonderful flower.

That very night while Cornelius and Rosa rejoiced as lovers—­for now even Rosa was convinced of the prisoner’s love for her—­over the happiness of the flowering tulip, Boxtel crept into her room, and carried off the black tulip to Haarlem.

As for Van Baerle, he was beside himself with the rage of desperation when Rosa told him that the black tulip had been stolen.  Rosa, bent on recovering the tulip, and certain in her own mind as to the thief, hastened away from Loewenstein the next day without a word, Gryphus was mad when he learnt his daughter was nowhere to be found, and put down the mysterious disappearance of Jacob Gisels and Rosa to the work of the devil, and was convinced that Van Baerle was the devil’s agent.