Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Page 2

  One point, however, we had never followed. I had never gone to Papists’ Corner, where the Catholics lived. The house where I was to work was just ten minutes from home, the time it took a pot of water to boil, but I had never passed by it.

  I knew no Catholics. There were not so many in Delft, and none in our street or in the shops we used. It was not that we avoided them, but they kept to themselves. They were tolerated in Delft, but were expected not to parade their faith openly. They held their services privately, in modest places that did not look like churches from the outside.

  My father had worked with Catholics and told me they were no different from us. If anything they were less solemn. They liked to eat and drink and sing and game. He said this almost as if he envied them.

  I followed that point of the star now, walking across the square more slowly than everyone else, for I was reluctant to leave its familiarity. I crossed the bridge over the canal and turned left up the Oude Langendijck. On my left the canal ran parallel to the street, separating it from Market Square.

  At the intersection with the Molenpoort, four girls were sitting on a bench beside an open door of a house. They were arranged in order of size, from the oldest, who looked to be about Agnes’ age, to the youngest, who was probably about four. One of the middle girls held a baby in her lap—a large baby, who was probably already crawling and would soon be ready to walk.

  Five children, I thought. And another expected.

  The oldest was blowing bubbles through a scallop shell fixed to the end of a hollowed stick, very like one my father had made for us. The others were jumping up and popping the bubbles as they appeared. The girl with the baby in her lap could not move much, catching few bubbles although she was seated next to the bubble blower. The youngest at the end was the furthest away and the smallest, and had no chance to reach the bubbles. The second youngest was the quickest, darting after the bubbles and clapping her hands around them. She had the brightest hair of the four, red like the dry brick wall behind her. The youngest and the girl with the baby both had curly blond hair like their mother’s, while the eldest’s was the same dark red as her father’s.

  I watched the girl with the bright hair swat at the bubbles, popping them just before they broke on the damp grey and white tiles set diagonally in rows before the house. She will be a handful, I thought. “You’d best pop them before they reach the ground,” I said. “Else those tiles will have to be scrubbed again.”

  The eldest girl lowered the pipe. Four sets of eyes stared at me with the same gaze that left no doubt they were sisters. I could see various features of their parents in them—grey eyes here, light brown eyes there, angular faces, impatient movements.

  “Are you the new maid?” the eldest asked.

  “We were told to watch out for you,” the bright redhead interrupted before I could reply.

  “Cornelia, go and get Tanneke,” the eldest said to her.

  “You go, Aleydis,” Cornelia in turn ordered the youngest, who gazed at me with wide grey eyes but did not move.

  “I’ll go.” The eldest must have decided my arrival was important after all.

  “No, I’ll go.” Cornelia jumped up and ran ahead of her older sister, leaving me alone with the two quieter girls.

  I looked at the squirming baby in the girl’s lap. “Is that your brother or your sister?”

  “Brother,” the girl replied in a soft voice like a feather pillow. “His name is Johannes. Never call him Jan.” She said the last words as if they were a familiar refrain.

  “I see. And your name?”

  “Lisbeth. And this is Aleydis.” The youngest smiled at me. They were both dressed neatly in brown dresses with white aprons and caps.

  “And your older sister?”

  “Maertge. Never call her Maria. Our grandmother’s name is Maria. Maria Thins. This is her house.”

  The baby began to whimper. Lisbeth joggled him up and down on her knee.

  I looked up at the house. It was certainly grander than ours, but not as grand as I had feared. It had two stories, plus an attic, whereas ours had only the one, with a tiny attic. It was an end house, with the Molenpoort running down one side, so that it was a little wider than the other houses in the street. It felt less pressed in than many of the houses in Delft, which were packed together in narrow rows of brick along the canals, their chimneys and stepped roofs reflected in the green canal water. The ground-floor windows of this house were very high, and on the first floor there were three windows set close together rather than the two of other houses along the street.

  From the front of the house the New Church tower was visible just across the canal. A strange view for a Catholic family, I thought. A church they will never even go inside.

  “So you’re the maid, are you?” I heard behind me.

  The woman standing in the doorway had a broad face, pockmarked from an earlier illness. Her nose was bulbous and irregular, and her thick lips were pushed together to form a small mouth. Her eyes were light blue, as if she had caught the sky in them. She wore a grey-brown dress with a white chemise, a cap tied tight around her head, and an apron that was not as clean as mine. She stood blocking the doorway, so that Maertge and Cornelia had to push their way out round her, and looked at me with crossed arms as if waiting for a challenge.

  Already she feels threatened by me, I thought. She will bully me if I let her.

  “My name is Griet,” I said, gazing at her levelly. “I am the new maid.”

  The woman shifted from one hip to the other. “You’d best come in, then,” she said after a moment. She moved back into the shadowy interior so that the doorway was clear.

  I stepped across the threshold.

  What I always remembered about being in the front hall for the first time were the paintings. I stopped inside the door, clutching my bundle, and stared. I had seen paintings before, but never so many in one room. I counted eleven. The largest painting was of two men, almost naked, wrestling each other. I did not recognize it as a story from the Bible, and wondered if it was a Catholic subject. Other paintings were of more familiar things—piles of fruit, landscapes, ships on the sea, portraits. They seemed to be by several painters. I wondered which of them were my new master’s. None was what I had expected of him.

  Later I discovered they were all by other painters—he rarely kept his own finished paintings in the house. He was an art dealer as well as an artist, and paintings hung in almost every room, even where I slept. There were more than fifty in all, though the number varied over time as he traded and sold them.

  “Come now, no need to idle and gape.” The woman hurried down a lengthy hallway, which ran along one side of the house all the way to the back. I followed as she turned abruptly into a room on the left. On the wall directly opposite hung a painting that was larger than me. It was of Christ on the cross, surrounded by the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and St. John. I tried not to stare but I was amazed by its size and subject. “Catholics are not so different from us,” my father had said. But we did not have such pictures in our houses, or our churches, or anywhere. Now I would see this painting every day.

  I was always to think of that room as the Crucifixion room. I was never comfortable in it.

  The painting surprised me so much that I did not notice the woman in the corner until she spoke. “Well, girl,” she said, “that is something new for you to see.” She sat in a comfortable chair, smoking a pipe. Her teeth gripping the stem had gone brown, and her fingers were stained with ink. The rest of her was spotless—her black dress, lace collar, stiff white cap. Though her lined face was stern her light brown eyes seemed amused.

  She was the kind of old woman who looked as if she would outlive everyone.

  She is Catharina’s mother, I thought suddenly. It was not just the color of her eyes and the wisp of grey curl that escaped her cap in the same way as her daughter’s. She had the manner of someone used to looking after those less able than she—of looking after Catharin
a. I understood now why I had been brought to her rather than her daughter.

  Though she seemed to look at me casually, her gaze was watchful. When she narrowed her eyes I realized she knew everything I was thinking. I turned my head so that my cap hid my face.

  Maria Thins puffed on her pipe and chuckled. “That’s right, girl. You keep your thoughts to yourself here. So, you’re to work for my daughter. She’s out now, at the shops. Tanneke here will show you round and explain your duties.”

  I nodded. “Yes, madam.”

  Tanneke, who had been standing at the old woman’s side, pushed past me. I followed, Maria Thins’ eyes branding my back. I heard her chuckling again.

  Tanneke took me first to the back of the house, where there were cooking and washing kitchens and two storage rooms. The washing kitchen led out to a tiny courtyard full of drying white laundry.

  “This needs ironing, for a start,” Tanneke said. I said nothing, though it looked as if the laundry had not yet been bleached properly by the midday sun.

  She led me back inside and pointed to a hole in the floor of one of the storage rooms, a ladder leading down into it. “You’re to sleep there,” she announced. “Drop your things there now and you can sort yourself out later.”

  I reluctantly let my bundle drop into the dim hole, thinking of the stones Agnes and Frans and I had thrown into the canal to seek out the monsters. My things thudded onto the dirt floor. I felt like an apple tree losing its fruit.

  I followed Tanneke back along the hallway, which all the rooms opened off—many more rooms than in our house. Next to the Crucifixion room where Maria Thins sat, towards the front of the house, was a smaller room with children’s beds, chamberpots, small chairs and a table, on it various earthenware, candlesticks, snuffers, and clothing, all in a jumble.

  “The girls sleep here,” Tanneke mumbled, perhaps embarrassed by the mess.

  She turned up the hallway again and opened a door into a large room, where light streamed in from the front windows and across the red and grey tiled floor. “The great hall,” she muttered. “Master and mistress sleep here.”

  Their bed was hung with green silk curtains. There was other furniture in the room—a large cupboard inlaid with ebony, a whitewood table pushed up to the windows with several Spanish leather chairs arranged around it. But again it was the paintings that struck me. More hung in this room than anywhere else. I counted to nineteen silently. Most were portraits—they appeared to be members of both families. There was also a painting of the Virgin Mary, and one of the three kings worshipping the Christ Child. I gazed at both uneasily.

  “Now, upstairs.” Tanneke went first up the steep stairs, then put a finger to her lips. I climbed as quietly as I could. At the top I looked around and saw the closed door. Behind it was a silence that I knew was him.

  I stood, my eyes fixed on the door, not daring to move in case it opened and he came out.

  Tanneke leaned towards me and whispered, “You’ll be cleaning in there, which the young mistress will explain to you later. And these rooms”—she pointed to the doors towards the back of the house—”are my mistress’s rooms. Only I go in there to clean.”

  We crept downstairs again. When we were back in the washing kitchen Tanneke said, “You’re to take on the laundry for the house.” She pointed to a great mound of clothes—they had fallen far behind with their washing. I would struggle to catch up. “There’s a cistern in the cooking kitchen but you’d best get your water for washing from the canal—it’s clean enough in this part of town.”

  “Tanneke,” I said in a low voice, “have you been doing all this yourself? The cooking and cleaning and washing for the house?”

  I had chosen the right words. “And some of the shopping.” Tanneke puffed up with pride at her own industry. “Young mistress does most of it, of course, but she goes off raw meat and fish when she’s carrying a child. And that’s often,” she added in a whisper. “You’re to go to the Meat Hall and the fish stalls too. That will be another of your duties.”

  With that she left me to the laundry. Including me, there were ten of us now in the house, one a baby who would dirty more clothes than the rest. I would be laundering every day, my hands chapped and cracked from the soap and water, my face red from standing over the steam, my back aching from lifting wet cloth, my arms burned by the iron. But I was new and I was young—it was to be expected I would have the hardest tasks.

  The laundry needed to soak for a day before I could wash it. In the storage room that led down to the cellar I found two pewter waterpots and a copper kettle. I took the pots with me and walked up the long hallway to the front door.

  The girls were sitting on the bench. Now Lisbeth had the bubble blower while Maertge fed baby Johannes bread softened with milk. Cornelia and Aleydis were chasing bubbles. When I appeared they all stopped what they were doing and looked at me expectantly.

  “You’re the new maid,” the girl with the bright red hair declared.

  “Yes, Cornelia.”

  Cornelia picked up a pebble and threw it across the road into the canal. There were long scratches up and down her arm—she must have been bothering the house cat.

  “Where will you sleep?” Maertge asked, wiping mushy fingers on her apron.

  “In the cellar.”

  “We like it down there,” Cornelia said. “Let’s go and play there now!”

  She darted inside but did not go far. When no one followed her she came back out, her face cross.

  “Aleydis,” I said, extending my hand to the youngest girl, “will you show me where to get water from the canal?”

  She took my hand and looked up at me. Her eyes were like two shiny grey coins. We crossed the street, Cornelia and Lisbeth following. Aleydis led me to stairs that descended to the water. As we peeked over I tightened my grip on her hand, as I had done years before with Frans and Agnes whenever we stood next to water.

  “You stand back from the edge,” I ordered. Aleydis obediently took a step back. But Cornelia followed close behind me as I carried the pots down the steps.

  “Cornelia, are you going to help me carry the water? If not, go back up to your sisters.”

  She looked at me, and then she did the worst thing. If she had sulked or shouted, I would know I had mastered her. Instead she laughed.

  I reached over and slapped her. Her face turned red, but she did not cry. She ran back up the steps. Aleydis and Lisbeth peered down at me solemnly.

  I had a feeling then. This is how it will be with her mother, I thought, except that I will not be able to slap her.

  I filled the pots and carried them to the top of the steps. Cornelia had disappeared. Maertge was still sitting with Johannes. I took one of the pots inside and back to the cooking kitchen, where I built up the fire, filled the copper kettle, and put it on to heat.

  When I came back Cornelia was outside again, her face still flushed. The girls were playing with tops on the grey and white tiles. None of them looked up at me.

  The pot I had left was missing. I looked into the canal and saw it floating, upside down, just out of reach of the stairs.

  “Yes, you will be a handful,” I murmured. I looked around for a stick to fish it out with but could find none. I filled the other pot again and carried it inside, turning my head so that the girls could not see my face. I set the pot next to the kettle on the fire. Then I went outside again, this time with a broom.

  Cornelia was throwing stones at the pot, probably hoping to sink it.

  “I’ll slap you again if you don’t stop.”

  “I’ll tell our mother. Maids don’t slap us.” Cornelia threw another stone.

  “Shall I tell your grandmother what you’ve done?”

  A fearful look crossed Cornelia’s face. She dropped the stones she held.

  A boat was moving along the canal from the direction of the Town Hall. I recognized the man poling from earlier that day—he had delivered his load of bricks and the boat was riding much high
er. He grinned when he saw me.

  I blushed. “Please, sir,” I began, “can you help me get that pot?”

  “Oh, you’re looking at me now that you want something from me, are you? There’s a change!”

  Cornelia was watching me curiously.

  I swallowed. “I can’t reach the pot from here. Perhaps you could—”

  The man leaned over, fished out the pot, dumped the water from it, and held it out to me. I ran down the steps and took it from him. “Thank you. I’m most grateful.”

  He did not let go of the pot. “Is that all I get? No kiss?” He reached over and pulled my sleeve. I jerked my arm away and wrestled the pot from him.

  “Not this time,” I said as lightly as I could. I was never good at that sort of talk.

  He laughed. “I’ll be looking for pots every time I pass here now, won’t I, young miss?” He winked at Cornelia. “Pots and kisses.” He took up his pole and pushed off.

  As I climbed the steps back to the street I thought I saw a movement in the middle window on the first floor, the room where he was. I stared but could see nothing except the reflected sky.

  Catharina returned while I was taking down laundry in the courtyard. I first heard her keys jangling in the hallway. They hung in a great bunch just below her waist, bouncing against her hip. Although they looked uncomfortable to me, she wore them with great pride. I then heard her in the cooking kitchen, giving orders to Tanneke and the boy who had carried things from the shops for her. She spoke harshly to both.

  I continued to pull down and fold bedsheets, napkins, pillowcases, tablecloths, shirts, chemises, aprons, handkerchiefs, collars, caps. They had been hung carelessly, bunched in places so that patches of cloth were still damp. And they had not been shaken first, so there were creases everywhere. I would be ironing much of the day to make them presentable.

  Catharina appeared at the door, looking hot and tired, though the sun was not yet at its highest. Her chemise puffed out messily from the top of her blue dress, and the green housecoat she wore over it was already crumpled. Her blond hair was frizzier than ever, especially as she wore no cap to smooth it. The curls fought against the combs that held them in a bun.