Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Read online

  My mother remained impassive. She did not speak her mind often. When she did her words were worth gold.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Working for them has turned your head,” she interrupted. “It’s made you forget who you are and where you come from. We’re a decent Protestant family whose needs are not ruled by riches or fashions.”

  I looked down, stung by her words. They were a mother’s words, words I would say to my own daughter if I were concerned for her. Although I resented her speaking them, as I resented her questioning the value of his painting, I knew they held truth.

  Pieter did not spend so long with me in the alley that Sunday.

  The next morning it was painful to look at the painting. The blocks of false colors had been painted, and he had built up her eyes, and the high dome of her forehead, and part of the folds of the mantle sleeve. The rich yellow in particular filled me with the guilty pleasure that my mother’s words had condemned. I tried instead to picture the finished painting hanging at Pieter the father’s stall, for sale for ten guilders, a simple picture of a woman writing a letter.

  I could not do it.

  He was in a good mood that afternoon, or else I would not have asked him. I had learned to gauge his mood, not from the little he said or the expression on his face—he did not show much—but from the way he moved about the studio and attic. When he was happy, when he was working well, he strode purposefully back and forth, no hesitation in his stride, no movement wasted. If he had been a musical man, he would have been humming or singing or whistling under his breath. When things did not go well, he stopped, stared out the window, shifted abruptly, started up the attic ladder only to climb back down before he was halfway up.

  “Sir,” I began when he came up to the attic to mix linseed oil into the white lead I had finished grinding. He was working on the fur of the sleeve. She had not come that day, but I had discovered he was able to paint parts of her without her being there.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, Griet?”

  He and Maertge were the only people in the house who always called me by my name.

  “Are your paintings Catholic paintings?”

  He paused, the bottle of linseed oil poised over the shell that held the white lead. “Catholic paintings,” he repeated. He lowered his hand, tapping the bottle against the table top. “What do you mean by a Catholic painting?”

  I had spoken before thinking. Now I did not know what to say. I tried a different question. “Why are there paintings in Catholic churches?”

  “Have you ever been inside a Catholic church, Griet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then you have not seen paintings in a church, or statues or stained glass?”

  “No.”

  “You have seen paintings only in houses, or shops, or inns?”

  “And at the market.”

  “Yes, at the market. Do you like looking at paintings?”

  “I do, sir.” I began to think he would not answer me, that he would simply ask me endless questions.

  “What do you see when you look at one?”

  “Why, what the painter has painted, sir.”

  Although he nodded, I felt I had not answered as he wished.

  “So when you look at the painting down in the studio, what do you see?”

  “I do not see the Virgin Mary, that is certain.” I said this more in defiance of my mother than in answer to him.

  He gazed at me in surprise. “Did you expect to see the Virgin Mary?”

  “Oh no, sir,” I replied, flustered.

  “Do you think the painting is Catholic?”

  “I don’t know, sir. My mother said—”

  “Your mother has not seen the painting, has she?”

  “No.”

  “Then she cannot tell you what it is that you see or do not see.”

  “No.” Although he was right, I did not like him to be critical of my mother.

  “It’s not the painting that is Catholic or Protestant,” he said, “but the people who look at it, and what they expect to see. A painting in a church is like a candle in a dark room—we use it to see better. It is the bridge between ourselves and God. But it is not a Protestant candle or a Catholic candle. It is simply a candle.”

  “We do not need such things to help us to see God,” I countered. “We have His Word, and that is enough.”

  He smiled. “Did you know, Griet, that I was brought up as a Protestant? I converted when I married. So you do not need to preach to me. I have heard such words before.”

  I stared at him. I had never known anyone to decide no longer to be a Protestant. I did not believe you really could switch. And yet he had.

  He seemed to be waiting for me to speak.

  “Though I have never been inside a Catholic church,” I began slowly, “I think that if I saw a painting there, it would be like yours. Even though they are not scenes from the Bible, or the Virgin and Child, or the Crucifixion.” I shivered, thinking of the painting that had hung over my bed in the cellar.

  He picked up the bottle again and carefully poured a few drops of oil into the shell. With his palette knife he began to mix the oil and white lead together until the paint was like butter that has been left out in a warm kitchen. I was bewitched by the movement of the silvery knife in the creamy white paint.

  “There is a difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to painting,” he explained as he worked, “but it is not necessarily as great as you may think. Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things—tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids—are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?”

  I wished my mother could hear him. He would have made even her understand.

  Catharina did not like to have her jewelry box left in the studio, where she could not get to it. She was suspicious of me, in part because she did not like me, but also because she was influenced by the stories we had all heard of maids stealing silver spoons from their mistresses. Stealing and tempting the master of the house—that was what mistresses were always looking for in maids.

  As I had discovered with van Ruijven, however, it was more often the man pursuing the maid than the other way around. To him a maid came free.

  Although she rarely consulted him about household things, Catharina went to her husband to ask that something be done. I did not hear them talk of it myself—Maertge told me one morning. Maertge and I got on well at that time. She had grown older suddenly, losing interest in the other children, preferring to be with me in the mornings as I went about my work. From me she learned to sprinkle clothes with water to bleach them in the sun, to apply a mixture of salt and wine to grease stains to get them out, to scrub the flatiron with coarse salt so that it would not stick and scorch. Her hands were too fine to work in water, however—she could watch me but I would not let her wet her hands. My own were ruined by now—hard and red and cracked, despite my mother’s remedies to soften them. I had work hands and I was not yet eighteen.

  Maertge was a little like my sister, Agnes, had been—lively, questioning, quick to decide what she thought. But she was also the eldest, with the eldest’s seriousness of purpose. She had looked after her sisters, as I had looked after my brother and sister. That made a girl cautious and wary of change.

  “Mama wants her jewelry box back,” she announced as we passed around the star in Market Square on our way to the Meat Hall. “She has spoken to Papa about it.”

  “What did she say?” I tried to sound unconcerned as I eyed the points of the star. I had noticed recently that when Catharina unlocked the studio door for me each morning she peered into the room at the table where her jewels lay.

  Maertge hesitated. “Mama doesn’t like it that you are locked up with her jewelry at night,” she said at last. She did not add what Catharina was worried about—that I might p
ick up the pearls from the table, tuck the box under my arm, and climb from the window to the street, to escape to another city and another life.

  In her way Maertge was trying to warn me. “She wants you to sleep downstairs again,” she continued. “The nurse is leaving soon and there is no reason for you to remain in the attic. She said either you or the jewelry box must go.”

  “And what did your father say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. He will think about it.”

  My heart grew heavy like a stone in my chest. Catharina had asked him to choose between me and the jewelry box. He could not have both. But I knew he would not remove the box and pearls from the painting to keep me in the attic. He would remove me. I would no longer assist him.

  I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamberpots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of flat land where, a long way off, the sea is visible but can never be reached. If I could not work with the colors, if I could not be near him, I did not know how I could continue to work in that house.

  When we arrived at the butcher’s stall and Pieter the son was not there, my eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. I had not realized that I had wanted to see his kind, handsome face. Confused as I felt about him, he was my escape, my reminder that there was another world I could join. Perhaps I was not so different from my parents, who looked on him to save them, to put meat on their table.

  Pieter the father was delighted by my tears. “I will tell my son you wept to find him gone,” he declared, scrubbing his chopping board clean of blood.

  “You will do no such thing,” I muttered. “Maertge, what do we want today?”

  “Stewing beef,” she answered promptly. “Four pounds.”

  I wiped my eyes with a corner of my apron. “There’s a fly in my eye,” I said briskly. “Perhaps it is not so clean around here. The dirt attracts flies.”

  Pieter the father laughed heartily. “Fly in her eye, she says! Dirt here. Of course there are flies—they come for the blood, not the dirt. The best meat is the bloodiest and attracts the most flies. You’ll find out for yourself someday. No need to put on airs with us, madam.” He winked at Maertge. “What do you think, miss? Should young Griet condemn a place when she’ll be serving there herself in a few years?”

  Maertge tried not to look shocked, but she was clearly surprised by his suggestion that I might not be with her family for always. She had the sense not to answer him—instead she took a sudden interest in the baby a woman at the next stall was holding.

  “Please,” I said in a low voice to Pieter the father, “don’t say such things to her, or any of the family, even in jest. I am their maid. That is what I am. To suggest otherwise is to show them disrespect.”

  Pieter the father regarded me. His eyes changed color with every shift in the light. I did not think even my master could have captured them in paint. “Perhaps you’re right,” he conceded. “I can see I’ll have to be more careful when I tease you. But I’ll tell you one thing, my dear—you’d best get used to flies.”

  He did not remove the jewelry box, and he did not ask me to leave. Instead he brought the box and pearls and earrings to Catharina every evening, and she locked them away in the cupboard in the great hall where she kept the yellow mantle. In the morning when she unlocked the studio door to let me out she handed me the box and jewels. My first task in the studio became to place the box and pearls back on the table, and set out the earrings if van Ruijven’s wife was coming to model. Catharina watched from the doorway as I made the measurements with my arms and hands. My gestures would have looked odd to anyone, but she never asked what I was doing. She did not dare.

  Cornelia must have known about the problem with the jewelry box. Perhaps like Maertge she had overheard her parents discussing it. She may have seen Catharina bringing up the box in the morning and him carrying it down again at night, and guessed something was wrong. Whatever she saw or understood, she decided it was time to stir the pot once more.

  For no particular reason but a vague distrust, she did not like me. She was very like her mother in that way.

  She began it, as she had with the torn collar and the red paint on my apron, with a request. Catharina was dressing her hair one rainy morning, Cornelia idling at her side, watching. I was starching clothes in the washing kitchen so I did not hear them. But it was probably she who suggested that her mother wear tortoiseshell combs in her hair.

  A few minutes later Catharina came to the doorway separating the washing and cooking kitchens and announced, “One of my combs is missing. Has either of you seen it?” Although she was speaking to both Tanneke and me, she was staring hard at me.

  “No, madam,” Tanneke replied solemnly, coming from the cooking kitchen to stand in the doorway as well so she could look at me.

  “No, madam,” I echoed. When I saw Cornelia peeking in from the hallway, with the mischievous look so natural to her, I knew she had begun something that would once again lead to me.

  She will do this until she drives me away, I thought.

  “Someone must know where it is,” Catharina said.

  “Shall I help you search the cupboard again, madam?” Tanneke asked. “Or shall we look elsewhere?” she added pointedly.

  “Perhaps it is in your jewelry box,” I suggested.

  “Perhaps.”

  Catharina passed into the hallway. Cornelia turned and followed her.

  I thought she would pay no attention to my suggestion, since it came from me. When I heard her on the stairs, however, I realized she was heading to the studio, and hurried to join her—she would need me. She was waiting, furious, in the studio doorway, Cornelia lingering behind her.

  “Bring the box to me,” Catharina ordered quietly, the humiliation of not being able to enter the room tingeing her words with an edge I had not heard before. She had often spoken sharply and loudly. The quiet control of her tone this time was much more frightening.

  I could hear him in the attic. I knew what he was doing—he was grinding lapis for paint for the tablecloth.

  I picked up the box and brought it to Catharina, leaving the pearls on the table. Without a word she carried it downstairs, Cornelia once again trailing behind her like a cat thinking it is about to be fed. She would go to the great hall and sort through all her jewels, to see if anything else was missing. Perhaps other things were—it was hard to guess what a seven-year-old determined to make mischief might do.

  She would not find the comb in her box. I knew exactly where it was.

  I did not follow her, but climbed up to the attic.

  He looked at me in surprise, his hand holding the muller suspended above the bowl, but he did not ask me why I had come upstairs. He began grinding again.

  I opened the chest where I kept my things and unwrapped the comb from its handkerchief. I rarely looked at the comb—in that house I had no reason to wear it or even to admire it. It reminded me too much of the kind of life I could never have as a maid. Now that I knew to look at it closely, I could see it was not my grandmother’s, though very similar. The scallop shape at the end of it was longer and more curved, and there were tiny serrated marks on each panel of the scallop. It was finer than my grandmother’s, though not so much finer.

  I wonder if I will ever see my grandmother’s comb again, I thought.

  I sat for so long on the bed, the comb in my lap, that he stopped grinding again.

  “What is wrong, Griet?”

  His tone was gentle. That made it easier to say what I had no choice but to say.

  “Sir,” I declared at last, “I need your help.”

  I remained in my attic room, sitting on my bed, hands in my lap, while he spoke to Catharina and Maria Thins, while they searched Cornelia, then searched among the girls’ things for my grandmother’s comb. Maertge finally found it, hidden in the large shell the baker had given them when he came to see his painting. That was p
robably when Cornelia had switched the combs, climbing down from the attic while the children were all playing in the storeroom and hiding my comb inside the first thing she could find.

  It was Maria Thins who had to beat Cornelia—he made it clear it was not his duty, and Catharina refused to, even when she knew that Cornelia should be punished. Maertge told me later that Cornelia did not cry, but sneered throughout the beating.

  It was Maria Thins too who came to see me in the attic. “Well, girl,” she said, leaning against the grinding table, “you have set the cat loose in the poultry house now.”

  “I did nothing,” I protested.

  “No, but you have managed to make a few enemies. Why is that? We’ve never had so much trouble with other help.” She chuckled, but behind her laugh she was sober. “But he has backed you, in his way,” she continued, “and that is more powerful than anything Catharina or Cornelia or Tanneke or even I may say against you.”

  She tossed my grandmother’s comb in my lap. I wrapped it in a handkerchief and replaced it in the chest. Then I turned to Maria Thins. If I did not ask her now, I would never know. This might be the only time she would be willing to answer me. “Please, madam, what did he say? About me?”

  Maria Thins gave me a knowing look. “Don’t flatter yourself, girl. He said very little about you. But it was clear enough. That he came downstairs at all and concerned himself—my daughter knew then that he was taking your side. No, he charged her with failing to raise her children properly. Much cleverer, you see, to criticize her than to praise you.”

  “Did he explain that I was—assisting him?”

  “No.”

  I tried not to let my face show what I felt, but the very question must have made my feelings clear.

  “But I told her, once he had gone,” Maria Thins added. “It’s nonsense, you sneaking around, keeping secrets from her in her own house.” She sounded as if she were blaming me, but then she muttered, “I would have thought better of him.” She stopped, looking as if she wished she hadn’t revealed so much of her own mind.