Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Page 5

  I laughed and would not answer any of her questions until I had hugged my mother and greeted my father. Although it was not very much, I felt proud to hand over to my mother the few coins in my hand. This was, after all, why I was working.

  My father came to sit outside with us and hear about my new life. I gave my hands to him to guide him over the front stoop. As he sat down on the bench he rubbed my palms with his thumb. “Your hands are chapped,” he said. “So rough and worn. Already you have the scars of hard work.”

  “Don’t worry,” I answered lightly. “There was so much laundry waiting for me because they didn’t have enough help before. It will get easier soon.”

  My mother studied my hands. “I’ll soak some bergamot in oil,” she said. “That will keep your hands soft. Agnes and I will go into the country to pick some.”

  “Tell us!” Agnes cried. “Tell us about them.”

  I told them. Only a few things I didn’t mention—how tired I was at night; how the Crucifixion scene hung at the foot of my bed; how I had slapped Cornelia; how Maertge and Agnes were the same age. Otherwise I told them everything.

  I passed on the message from our butcher to my mother. “That is kind of him,” she said, “but he knows we have no money for meat and will not take such charity.”

  “I don’t think he meant it as charity,” I explained. “I think he meant it out of friendship.”

  She did not answer, but I knew she would not go back to the butcher.

  When I mentioned the new butchers, Pieter the father and son, she raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

  Afterwards we went to services at our church, where I was surrounded by familiar faces and familiar words. Sitting between Agnes and my mother, I felt my back relaxing into the pew, and my face softening from the mask I had worn all week. I thought I might cry.

  Mother and Agnes would not let me help them with dinner when we came back home. I sat with my father on the bench in the sun. He held his face up to the warmth and kept his head cocked that way all the time we talked.

  “Now, Griet,” he said, “tell me about your new master. You hardly said a word about him.”

  “I haven’t seen much of him,” I replied truthfully. “He is either in his studio, where no one is to disturb him, or he is out.”

  “Taking care of Guild business, I expect. But you have been in his studio—you told us about the cleaning and the measurements, but nothing about the painting he is working on. Describe it to me.”

  “I don’t know if I can in such a way that you will be able to see it.”

  “Try. I have little to think of now except for memories. It will give me pleasure to imagine a painting by a master, even if my mind creates only a poor imitation.”

  So I tried to describe the woman tying pearls around her neck, her hands suspended, gazing at herself in the mirror, the light from the window bathing her face and her yellow mantle, the dark foreground that separated her from us.

  My father listened intently, but his own face was not illuminated until I said, “The light on the back wall is so warm that looking at it feels the way the sun feels on your face.”

  He nodded and smiled, pleased now that he understood.

  “This is what you like best about your new life,” he said presently. “Being in the studio.”

  The only thing, I thought, but did not say.

  When we ate dinner I tried not to compare it with that in the house at Papists’ Corner, but already I had become accustomed to meat and good rye bread. Although my mother was a better cook than Tanneke, the brown bread was dry, the vegetable stew tasteless with no fat to flavor it. The room, too, was different—no marble tiles, no thick silk curtains, no tooled leather chairs. Everything was simple and clean, without ornamentation. I loved it because I knew it, but I was aware now of its dullness.

  At the end of the day it was hard saying good-bye to my parents—harder than when I had first left, because this time I knew what I was going back to. Agnes walked with me as far as Market Square. When we were alone, I asked her how she was.

  “Lonely,” she replied, a sad word from a young girl. She had been lively all day but had now grown subdued.

  “I’ll come every Sunday,” I promised. “And perhaps during the week I can come quickly to say hello after I’ve gone for the meat or fish.”

  “Or I can come to see you when you are out buying things,” she suggested, brightening.

  We did manage to meet in the Meat Hall several times. I was always glad to see her—as long as I was alone.

  I began to find my place at the house on the Oude Langendijck. Catharina, Tanneke and Cornelia were all difficult at times, but usually I was left alone to my work. This may have been Maria Thins’ influence. She had decided, for her own reasons, that I was a useful addition, and the others, even the children, followed her example.

  Perhaps she felt the clothes were cleaner and better bleached now that I had taken on the laundry. Or that the meat was more tender now that I chose it. Or that he was happier with a clean studio. These first two things were true. The last, I did not know. When he and I finally spoke it was not about my cleaning.

  I was careful to deflect any praise for better housekeeping from myself. I did not want to make enemies. If Maria Thins liked the meat, I suggested it was Tanneke’s cooking that made it so. If Maertge said her apron was whiter than before, I said it was because the summer sun was particularly strong now.

  I avoided Catharina when I could. It had been clear from the moment she’d seen me chopping vegetables in my mother’s kitchen that she disliked me. Her mood was not improved by the baby she carried, which made her ungainly and nothing like the graceful lady of the house she felt herself to be. It was a hot summer too, and the baby was especially active. It began to kick whenever she walked, or so she said. As she grew bigger she went about the house with a tired, pained look. She took to staying in bed later and later, so that Maria Thins took over her keys and unlocked the studio door for me in the morning. Tanneke and I began to do more and more of her work—looking after the girls, buying things for the house, changing the baby.

  One day when Tanneke was in a good mood, I asked her why they did not take on more servants to make things easier. “With a big house like this, and your mistress’s wealth, and the master’s paintings,” I added, “could they not afford another maid? Or a cook?”

  “Huh,” Tanneke snorted. “They can barely manage to pay you.”

  I was surprised—the coins amounted to so little in my hand each week. It would take me years of work to be able to buy something as fine as the yellow mantle that Catharina kept so carelessly folded in her cupboard. It did not seem possible that they could be short of money.

  “Of course they’ll find a way to pay for a nurse for a few months when the baby comes,” Tanneke added. She sounded disapproving.

  “Why?”

  “So she can feed the baby.”

  “The mistress won’t feed her own baby?” I asked stupidly.

  “She couldn’t have so many children if she fed her own. It stops you having them, you know, if you feed your own.”

  “Oh.” I felt very ignorant of such things. “Does she want more children?”

  Tanneke chuckled. “Sometimes I think she’s filling the house with children because she can’t fill it with servants as she’d like.” She lowered her voice. “The master doesn’t paint enough to make the money for servants, you see. Three paintings a year he does, usually. Sometimes only two. You don’t get rich from that.”

  “Can he not paint faster?” I knew even as I said it that he would not. He would always paint at his own pace.

  “Mistress and young mistress disagree sometimes. Young mistress wants him to paint more, but my mistress says speed would ruin him.”

  “Maria Thins is very wise.” I had learned that I could voice opinions in front of Tanneke as long as Maria Thins was in some way praised. Tanneke was fiercely loyal to her mistress. She had little pati
ence with Catharina, however, and when she was in the right mood she advised me on how to handle her. “Take no notice of what she says,” she counseled. “Keep your face empty when she speaks, then do things your own way, or how my mistress or I tell you to do them. She never checks, she never notices. She just orders us about because she feels she has to. But we know who our real mistress is, and so does she.”

  Although Tanneke was often bad tempered with me, I learned not to take it to heart, as she never remained so for long. She was fickle in her moods, perhaps from being caught between Catharina and Maria Thins for so many years. Despite her confident words about ignoring what Catharina said, Tanneke did not follow her own advice. Catharina’s harsh tone upset her. And Maria Thins, for all her fairness, did not defend Tanneke from Catharina. I never once heard Maria Thins berate her daughter for anything, though Catharina needed it at times.

  There was also the matter of Tanneke’s housekeeping. Perhaps her loyalty made up for her sloppiness about the house—corners unmopped, meat burned on the outside and raw on the inside, pots not scrubbed thoroughly. I could not imagine what she had done to his studio when she tried to clean it. Though Maria Thins rarely scolded Tanneke, they both knew she ought to, and this kept Tanneke uncertain and quick to defend herself.

  It became clear to me that in spite of her shrewd ways, Maria Thins was soft on the people closest to her. Her judgment was not as sound as it appeared.

  Of the four girls, Cornelia was, as she had shown the first morning, the most unpredictable. Both Lisbeth and Aleydis were good, quiet girls, and Maertge was old enough to begin learning the ways of the house, which steadied her—though occasionally she would have a fit of temper and shout at me much like her mother. Cornelia did not shout, but she was at times ungovernable. Even the threat of Maria Thins’ anger that I had used on the first day did not always work. She could be funny and playful one moment, then turn the next, like a purring cat who bites the hand stroking it. While loyal to her sisters, she did not hesitate to make them cry by pinching them hard. I was wary of Cornelia, and could not be fond of her in the way I came to be of the others.

  I escaped from them all when I cleaned the studio. Maria Thins unlocked the door for me and sometimes stayed a few minutes to check on the painting, as if it were a sick child she was nursing. Once she left, though, I had the room to myself. I looked around to see if anything had changed. At first it seemed to remain the same, day after day, but after my eyes grew accustomed to the details of the room I began to notice small things—the brushes rearranged on the top of the cupboard, one of the cupboard’s drawers left ajar, the palette knife balanced on the easel’s ledge, a chair moved a little from its place by the door.

  Nothing, however, changed in the corner he was painting. I was careful not to displace any of it, quickly adjusting to my way of measuring so that I was able to clean that area almost as quickly and confidently as the rest of the room. And after experimenting on other bits of cloth, I began to clean the dark blue cloth and yellow curtain with a damp rag, pressing it carefully so that it picked up dust without disturbing the folds.

  There seemed to be no changes to the painting, as hard as I looked for them. At last one day I discovered that another pearl had been added to the woman’s necklace. Another day the shadow of the yellow curtain had grown bigger. I thought too that some of the fingers on her right hand had been moved.

  The satin mantle began to look so real I wanted to reach out and touch it.

  I had almost touched the real one the day van Ruijven’s wife left it on the bed. I had just been reaching over to stroke the fur collar when I had looked up to see Cornelia in the doorway, watching me. One of the other girls would have asked me what I was doing, but Cornelia had just watched. That was worse than any questions. I had dropped my hand and she’d smiled.

  Maertge insisted on coming with me to the fish stalls one morning several weeks after I had begun working at the house. She loved to run through Market Square, looking at things, petting the horses, joining other children in their games, sampling smoked fish from various stalls. She poked me in the ribs as I was buying herring and shouted, “Look, Griet, look at that kite!”

  The kite above our heads was shaped like a fish with a long tail, the wind making it look as if it were swimming through the air, with seagulls wheeling around it. As I smiled I saw Agnes hovering near us, her eyes fixed on Maertge. I still had not told Agnes there was a girl her age in the house—I thought it might upset her, that she would feel she was being replaced.

  Sometimes when I visited my family at home I felt awkward telling them anything. My new life was taking over the old.

  When Agnes looked at me I shook my head slightly so that Maertge would not see, and turned away to put the fish in my pail. I took my time—I could not bear to see the hurt look on her face. I did not know what Maertge would do if Agnes spoke to me.

  When I turned around Agnes had gone.

  I shall have to explain to her when I see her Sunday, I thought. I have two families now, and they must not mix.

  I was always ashamed afterwards that I had turned my back on my own sister.

  I was hanging out washing in the courtyard, shaking out each piece before hanging it taut from the line, when Catharina appeared, breathing heavily. She sat down on a chair by the door, closed her eyes and sighed. I continued what I was doing as if it were natural for her to sit with me, but my jaw tightened.

  “Are they gone yet?” she asked suddenly.

  “Who, madam?”

  “Them, you silly girl. My husband and— Go and see if they’ve gone upstairs yet.”

  I stepped cautiously into the hallway. Two sets of feet were climbing the stairs.

  “Can you manage it?” I heard him say.

  “Yes, yes, of course. You know it’s not very heavy,” another man replied, in a voice deep like a well. “Just a bit cumbersome.”

  They reached the top of the stairs and entered the studio. I heard the door close.

  “Have they gone?” Catharina hissed.

  “They are in the studio, madam,” I responded.

  “Good. Now help me up.” Catharina held out her hands and I pulled her to her feet. I did not think she could grow much bigger and still manage to walk. She moved down the hallway like a ship with its sails full, holding on to her bunch of keys so that they wouldn’t clink, and disappeared into the great hall.

  Later I asked Tanneke why Catharina had been hiding.

  “Oh, van Leeuwenhoek was here,” she answered, chuckling. “A friend of the master’s. She’s afraid of him.”

  “Why?”

  Tanneke laughed harder. “She broke his box! She was looking in it and knocked it over. You know how clumsy she is.”

  I thought of my mother’s knife spinning across the floor. “What box?”

  “He has a wooden box that you look in and—see things.”

  “What things?”

  “All sorts of things!” Tanneke replied impatiently. She clearly did not want to talk about the box. “Young mistress broke it, and van Leeuwenhoek won’t see her now. That’s why master won’t allow her in his room unless he’s there. Perhaps he thinks she’ll knock over a painting!”

  I discovered what the box was the next morning, the day he spoke to me about things that took me many months to understand.

  When I arrived to clean the studio, the easel and chair had been moved to one side. The desk was in their place, cleared of papers and prints. On it sat a wooden box about the size of a chest for storing clothes in. A smaller box was attached to one side, with a round object protruding from it.

  I did not understand what it was, but I did not dare touch it. I went about my cleaning, glancing over at it now and then as if its use would suddenly become clear to me. I cleaned the corner, then the rest of the room, dusting the box so that I hardly touched it with my cloth. I cleaned the storeroom and mopped the floor. When I was done I stood in front of the box, arms crossed, moving around to
study it.

  My back was to the door but I knew suddenly that he was standing there. I wasn’t sure whether to turn around or wait for him to speak.

  He must have made the door creak, for then I was able to turn and face him. He was leaning against the threshold, wearing a long black robe over his daily clothes. He was watching me curiously, but he did not seem anxious that I might damage his box.

  “Do you want to look in it?” he asked. It was the first time he had spoken directly to me since he asked about the vegetables many weeks before.

  “Yes, sir. I do,” I replied without knowing what I was agreeing to. “What is it?”

  “It is called a camera obscura.”

  The words meant nothing to me. I stood aside and watched him unhook a catch and lift up part of the box’s top, which had been divided in two and hinged together. He propped up the lid at an angle so that the box was partly open. There was a bit of glass underneath. He leaned over and peered into the space between the lid and box, then touched the round piece at the end of the smaller box. He seemed to be looking at something, though I didn’t think there could be much in the box to take such interest in.

  He stood up and gazed at the corner I had cleaned so carefully, then reached over and closed the middle window’s shutters, so that the room was lit only by the window in the corner.

  Then he took off his robe.

  I shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

  He removed his hat, placing it on the chair by the easel, and pulled the robe over his head as he leaned over the box again.

  I took a step back and glanced at the doorway behind me. Catharina had little will to climb the stairs these days, but I wondered what Maria Thins, or Cornelia, or anyone would think if they saw us. When I turned back I kept my eyes fixed on his shoes, which were gleaming from the polish I had given them the day before.