Girl with a Pearl Earring

1664

My mother did not tell me they were coming. Afterwards she said she did not want me to appear nervous. I was surprised, for I thought she knew me well. Strangers would think I was calm. I did not cry as a baby. Only my mother would note the tightness along my jaw, the widening of my already wide eyes.

I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen when I heard voices outside our front door—a woman’s, bright as polished brass, and a man’s, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house. I could hear rich carpets in their voices, books and pearls and fur.

I was glad that earlier I had scrubbed the front steps so hard.

My mother’s voice—a cooking pot, a flagon—approached from the front room. They were coming to the kitchen. I pushed the leeks I had been chopping into place, then set the knife on the table, wiped my hands on my apron and pressed my lips together to smooth them.

My mother appeared in the doorway, her eyes two warnings. Behind her the woman had to duck her head because she was so tall, taller than the man following her.

All of our family, even my father and brother, were small.

The woman looked as if she had been blown about by the wind, although it was a calm day. Her cap was askew so that tiny blond curls escaped and hung about her forehead like bees which she swatted at impatiently several times. Her collar needed straightening and was not as crisp as it could be. She pushed her gray mantle back from her shoulders, and I saw then that under her dark blue dress a baby was growing. It would arrive by the year’s end, or before.

The woman’s face was like an oval serving plate, flashing at times, dull at others. Her eyes were two light brown buttons, a color I had rarely seen coupled with blond hair. She made a show of watching me hard, but could not fix her attention on me, her eyes darting about the room.

“This is the girl, then,” she said abruptly.

“This is my daughter, Griet,” my mother replied. I nodded respectfully to the man and woman.

“Well. She’s not very big. Is she strong enough?” As the woman turned to look at the man, a fold of her mantle caught the handle of the knife I had been using, knocking it off the table so that it spun across the floor.

The woman cried out.

“Catharina,” the man said calmly. He spoke her name as if he held cinnamon in his mouth. The woman stopped, making an effort to quiet herself.

I stepped over and picked up the knife, polishing the blade on my apron before placing it back on the table. The knife had brushed against the vegetables. I set a piece of carrot back in its place.

The man was watching me, his eyes grey like the sea. He had a long, angular face, and his expression was steady, in contrast to his wife’s, which flickered like a candle. He had no beard or moustache, and I was glad, for it gave him a clean appearance. He wore a black cloak over his shoulders, a white shirt, and a fine lace collar. His hat pressed into hair the red of brick washed by rain.

“What have you been doing here, Griet?” he asked.

I was surprised by the question but knew enough to hide it. “Chopping vegetables, sir. For the soup.”

I always laid vegetables out in a circle, each with its own section like a slice of pie. There were five slices: red cabbage, onions, leeks, carrots, and turnips. I had used a knife edge to shape each slice, and placed a carrot disc in the center.

The man tapped his finger on the table. “Are they laid out in the order in which they will go into the soup?” he suggested, studying the circle.

“No, sir.” I hesitated. I could not say why I had laid out the vegetables as I did. I simply set them as I felt they should be, but I was too frightened to say so to a gentleman.

“I see you have separated the whites,” he said, indicating the turnips and onions. “And then the orange and the purple, they do not sit together. Why is that?” He picked up a shred of cabbage and a piece of carrot and shook them like dice in his hand.

I looked at my mother, who nodded slightly.

“The colors fight when they are side by side, sir.”

He arched his eyebrows, as if he had not expected such a response. “And do you spend much time setting out the vegetables before you make the soup?”

“Oh no, sir,” I replied, confused. I did not want him to think I was idle.

From the corner of my eye I saw a movement. My sister, Agnes, was peering round the doorpost and had shaken her head at my response. I did not often lie. I looked down.

The man turned his head slightly and Agnes disappeared. He dropped the pieces of carrot and cabbage into their slices. The cabbage shred fell partly into the onions. I wanted to reach over and tease it into place. I did not, but he knew that I wanted to. He was testing me.

“That’s enough prattle,” the woman declared. Though she was annoyed with his attention to me, it was me she frowned at. “Tomorrow, then?” She looked at the man before sweeping out of the room, my mother behind her. The man glanced once more at what was to be the soup, then nodded at me and followed the women.

When my mother returned I was sitting by the vegetable wheel. I waited for her to speak. She was hunching her shoulders as if against a winter chill, though it was summer and the kitchen was hot.

“You are to start tomorrow as their maid. If you do well, you will be paid eight stuivers a day. You will live with them.”

I pressed my lips together.

“Don’t look at me like that, Griet,” my mother said. “We have to, now your father has lost his trade.”

“Where do they live?”

“On the Oude Langendijck, where it intersects with the Molenpoort.”

“Papists’ corner? They’re Catholic?”

“You can come home Sundays. They have agreed to that.” My mother cupped her hands around the turnips, scooped them up along with some of the cabbage and onions and dropped them into the pot of water waiting on the fire. The pie slices I had made so carefully were ruined.

I climbed the stairs to see my father. He was sitting at the front of the attic by the window, where the light touched his face. It was the closest he came now to seeing.

Father had been a tile painter, his fingers still stained blue from painting cupids, maids, soldiers, ships, children, fish, flowers, animals onto white tiles, glazing them, firing them, selling them. One day the kiln exploded, taking his eyes and his trade. He was the lucky one—two other men died.

I sat next to him and held his hand.

“I heard,” he said before I could speak. “I heard everything.” His hearing had taken the strength from his missing eyes.

I could not think of anything to say that would not sound reproachful.

“I’m sorry, Griet. I would like to have done better for you.” The place where his eyes had been, where the doctor had sewn shut the skin, looked sorrowful. “But he is a good gentleman, and fair. He will treat you well.” He said nothing about the woman.

“How can you be sure of this, Father? Do you know him?”

“Don’t you know who he is?”

“No.”

“Do you remember the painting we saw in the Town Hall a few years ago, which van Ruijven was displaying after he bought it? It was a view of Delft, from the Rotterdam and Schiedam Gates. With the sky that took up so much of the painting, and the sunlight on some of the buildings.”

“And the paint had sand in it to make the brickwork and the roofs look rough,” I added. “And there were long shadows in the water, and tiny people on the shore nearest us.”

“That’s the one.” Father’s sockets widened as if he still had eyes and was looking at the painting again.

I remembered it well, remembered thinking that I had stood at the very spot many times and never seen Delft the way the painter had.

“That man was van Ruijven?”

“The patron?” Father chuckled. “No, no, child, not him. That was the painter, Vermeer. That was Johannes Vermeer and his wife. You’re to clean his studio.”

To the few things I was taking with me my mother added another cap, collar and apron so that each day I could wash one and wear the other, and would always look clean. She also gave me an ornamental tortoiseshell comb, shaped like a shell, that had been my grandmother’s and was too fine for a maid to wear, and a prayer book I could read when I needed to escape the Catholicism around me.

As we gathered my things she explained why I was to work for the Vermeers. “You know that your new master is headman of the Guild of St. Luke, and was when your father had his accident last year?”

I nodded, still shocked that I was to work for such an artist.

“The Guild looks after its own, as best it can. Remember the box your father gave money to every week for years? That money goes to masters in need, as we are now. But it goes only so far, you see, especially now with Frans in his apprenticeship and no money coming in. We have no choice. We won’t take public charity, not if we can manage without. Then your father heard that your new master was looking for a maid who could clean his studio without moving anything, and he put forward your name, thinking that as headman, and knowing our circumstances, Vermeer would be likely to try to help.”

I sifted through what she had said. “How do you clean a room without moving anything?”

“Of course you must move things, but you must find a way to put them back exactly so it looks as if nothing has been disturbed. As you do for your father now that he cannot see.”

After my father’s accident we had learned to place things where he always knew to find them. It was one thing to do this for a blind man, though. Quite another for a man with a painter’s eyes.

Agnes said nothing to me after the visit. When I got into bed next to her that night she remained silent, though she did not turn her back to me. She lay gazing at the ceiling. Once I had blown out the candle it was so dark I could see nothing. I turned towards her.

“You know I don’t want to leave. I have to.”

Silence.

“We need the money. We have nothing now that Father can’t work.”

“Eight stuivers a day isn’t such a lot of money.” Agnes had a hoarse voice, as if her throat were covered with cobwebs.

“It will keep the family in bread. And a bit of cheese. That’s not so little.”

“I’ll be all alone. You’re leaving me all alone. First Frans, then you.”

Of all of us Agnes had been the most upset when Frans left the previous year. He and she had always fought like cats but she sulked for days once he was gone. At ten she was the youngest of us three children, and had never before known a time when Frans and I were not there.

“Mother and Father will still be here. And I’ll visit on Sundays. Besides, it was no surprise when Frans went.” We had known for years that our brother would start his apprenticeship when he turned thirteen. Our father had saved hard to pay the apprentice fee, and talked endlessly of how Frans would learn another aspect of the trade, then come back and they would set up a tile factory together.

Now our father sat by the window and never spoke of the future.

After the accident Frans had come home for two days. He had not visited since. The last time I saw him I had gone to the factory across town where he was apprenticed. He looked exhausted and had burns up and down his arms from pulling tiles from the kiln. He told me he worked from dawn until so late that at times he was too tired even to eat. “Father never told me it would be this bad,” he muttered resentfully. “He always said his apprenticeship was the making of him.”

“Perhaps it was,” I replied. “It made him what he is now.”

When I was ready to leave the next morning my father shuffled out to the front step, feeling his way along the wall. I hugged my mother and Agnes. “Sunday will come in no time,” my mother said.

My father handed me something wrapped in a handkerchief. “To remind you of home,” he said. “Of us.”

It was my favorite tile of his. Most of his tiles we had at home were faulty in some way—chipped or cut crookedly, or the picture was blurred because the kiln had been too hot. This one, though, my father kept specially for us. It was a simple picture of two small figures, a boy and an older girl. They were not playing as children usually did in tiles. They were simply walking along, and were like Frans and me whenever we walked together—clearly our father had thought of us as he painted it. The boy was a little ahead of the girl but had turned back to say something. His face was mischievous, his hair messy. The girl wore her cap as I wore mine, not as most other girls did, with the ends tied under their chins or behind their necks. I favored a white cap that folded in a wide brim around my face, covering my hair completely and hanging down in points on each side of my face so that from the side my expression was hidden. I kept the cap stiff by boiling it with potato peelings.

I walked away from our house, carrying my things tied up in an apron. It was still early—our neighbors were throwing buckets of water onto their steps and the street in front of their houses, and scrubbing them clean. Agnes would do that now, as well as many of my other tasks. She would have less time to play in the street and along the canals. Her life was changing too.

People nodded at me and watched curiously as I passed. No one asked where I was going or called out kind words. They did not need to—they knew what happened to families when a man lost his trade. It would be something to discuss later—young Griet become a maid, her father brought the family low. They would not gloat, however. The same thing could easily happen to them.

I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home. When I reached the end and turned out of sight of my family, though, it became a little easier to walk steadily and look around me. The morning was still cool, the sky a flat grey-white pulled close over Delft like a sheet, the summer sun not yet high enough to burn it away. The canal I walked along was a mirror of white light tinged with green. As the sun grew brighter the canal would darken to the color of moss.

Frans, Agnes, and I used to sit along that canal and throw things in—pebbles, sticks, once a broken tile—and imagine what they might touch on the bottom—not fish, but creatures from our imagination, with many eyes, scales, hands and fins. Frans thought up the most interesting monsters. Agnes was the most frightened. I always stopped the game, too inclined to see things as they were to be able to think up things that were not.

There were a few boats on the canal, moving towards Market Square. It was not market day, however, when the canal was so full you couldn’t see the water. One boat was carrying river fish for the stalls at Jeronymous Bridge. Another sat low on the water, loaded with bricks. The man poling the boat called out a greeting to me. I merely nodded and lowered my head so that the edge of my cap hid my face.

I crossed a bridge over the canal and turned into the open space of Market Square, even then busy with people crisscrossing it on their way to some task—buying meat at the Meat Hall, or bread at the baker’s, taking wood to be weighed at the Weigh House. Children ran errands for their parents, apprentices for their masters, maids for their households. Horses and carts clattered across the stones. To my right was the Town Hall, with its gilded front and white marble faces gazing down from the keystones above the windows. To my left was the New Church, where I had been baptized sixteen years before. Its tall, narrow tower made me think of a stone birdcage. Father had taken us up it once. I would never forget the sight of Delft spread below us, each narrow brick house and steep red roof and green waterway and city gate marked forever in my mind, tiny and yet distinct. I asked my father then if every Dutch city looked like that, but he did not know. He had never visited any other city, not even The Hague, two hours away on foot.

I walked to the center of the square. There the stones had been laid to form an eight-pointed star set inside a circle. Each point aimed towards a different part of Delft. I thought of it as the very center of the town, and as the center of my life. Frans and Agnes and I had played in that star since we were old enough to run to the market. In our favorite game, one of us chose a point and one of us named a thing—a stork, a church, a wheelbarrow, a flower—and we ran in that direction looking for that thing. We had explored most of Delft that way.

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 Catharina. 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 higher. 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.

She looked as if she needed to sit quietly for a moment by the canal, where the sight of the water might calm and cool her.

I was not sure how I should be with her—I had never been a maid, nor had we ever had one in our house. There were no servants on our street. No one could afford one. I placed the laundry I was folding in a basket, then nodded at her. “Good morning, madam.”

She frowned and I realized I should have let her speak first. I would have to take more care with her.

“Tanneke has taken you round the house?” she said.

“Yes, madam.”

“Well, then, you will know what to do and you will do it.” She hesitated, as if at a loss for words, and it came to me that she knew little more about being my mistress than I did about being her maid. Tanneke had probably been trained by Maria Thins and still followed her orders, whatever Catharina said to her.

I would have to help her without seeming to.

“Tanneke has explained that besides the laundry you want me to go for the meat and fish, madam,” I suggested gently.

Catharina brightened. “Yes. She will take you when you finish with the washing here. After that you will go every day yourself. And on other errands as I need you,” she added.

“Yes, madam.” Iwaited. When she said nothing else I reached up to pull a man’s linen shirt from the line.

Catharina stared at the shirt. “Tomorrow,” she announced as I was folding it, “I will show you upstairs where you are to clean. Early—first thing in the morning.” Before I could reply she disappeared inside.

After I brought in the laundry I found the iron, cleaned it, and set it in the fire to heat. I had just begun ironing when Tanneke came and handed me a shopping pail. “We’re going to the butcher’s now,” she said. “I’ll need the meat soon.” I had heard her clattering in the cooking kitchen and had smelled parsnips roasting.

Out in front Catharina sat on the bench, with Lisbeth on a stool by her feet and Johannes asleep in a cradle. She was combing Lisbeth’s hair and searching for lice. Next to her Cornelia and Aleydis were sewing. “No, Aleydis,” Catharina was saying, “pull the thread tight, that’s too loose. You show her, Cornelia.”

I had not thought they could all be so calm together.

Maertge ran over from the canal. “Are you going to the butcher’s? May I go too, Mama?”

“Only if you stay with Tanneke and mind her.”

I was glad that Maertge came with us. Tanneke was still wary of me, but Maertge was merry and quick and that made it easier for us to be friendly.

I asked Tanneke how long she had worked for Maria Thins.

“Oh, many years,” she said. “A few before master and young mistress were married and came to live here. I started when I was no older than you. How old are you, then?”

“Sixteen.”

“I began when I was fourteen,” Tanneke countered triumphantly. “Half my life I’ve worked here.”

I would not have said such a thing with pride. Her work had worn her so that she looked older than her twenty-eight years.

The Meat Hall was just behind the Town Hall, south and to the west of Market Square. Inside were thirty-two stalls—there had been thirty-two butchers in Delft for generations. It was busy with housewives and maids choosing, bartering and buying for their families, and men carrying carcasses back and forth. Sawdust on the floor soaked up blood and clung to shoes and hems of dresses. There was a tang of blood in the air that always made me shiver, though at one time I had gone there every week and ought to have grown used to the smell. Still, I was pleased to be in a familiar place. As we passed between the stalls the butcher we used to buy our meat from before my father’s accident called out to me. I smiled at him, relieved to see a face I knew. It was the first time I had smiled all day.

It was strange to meet so many new people and see so many new things in one morning, and to do so apart from all the familiar things that made up my life. Before, if I met someone new I was always surrounded by family and neighbors. If I went to a new place I was with Frans or my mother or father and felt no threat. The new was woven in with the old, like the darning in a sock.

Frans told me not long after he began his apprenticeship that he had almost run away, not from the hard work, but because he could not face the strangeness day after day. What kept him there was knowing that our father had spent all his savings on the apprentice fee, and would have sent him right back if he had come home. Besides, he would find much more strangeness out in the world if he went elsewhere.

“I will come and see you,” I whispered to the butcher, “when I am alone.” Then I hurried to catch up with Tanneke and Maertge.

They had stopped at a stall farther along. The butcher there was a handsome man, with graying blond curls and bright blue eyes.

“Pieter, this is Griet,” Tanneke said. “She will be fetching the meat for us now. You’re to add it to our account as usual.”

I tried to keep my eyes on his face, but I could not help glancing down at his blood-splattered apron. Our butcher always wore a clean apron when he was selling, changing it whenever he got blood on it.

“Ah.” Pieter looked me over as if I were a plump chicken he was considering roasting. “What would you like today, Griet?”

I turned to Tanneke. “Four pounds of chops and a pound of tongue,” she ordered.

Pieter smiled. “And what do you think of that, miss?” he addressed Maertge. “Don’t I sell the best tongue in Delft?”

Maertge nodded and giggled as she gazed at the display of joints, chops, tongue, pigs’ feet, sausages.

“You’ll find, Griet, that I have the best meat and the most honest scales in the hall,” Pieter remarked as he weighed the tongue. “You’ll have no complaints about me.”

I stared at his apron and swallowed. Pieter put the chops and tongue into the pail I carried, winked at me and turned to serve the next customer.

We went next to the fish stalls, just beside the Meat Hall. Seagulls hovered above the stalls, waiting for the fishheads and innards the fishmongers threw into the canal. Tanneke introduced me to their fishmonger—also different from ours. I was to alternate each day between meat and fish.

When we left I did not want to go back to the house, to Catharina and the children on the bench. I wanted to walk home. I wanted to step into my mother’s kitchen and hand her the pailful of chops. We had not eaten meat in months.

Catharina was combing through Cornelia’s hair when we returned. They paid no attention to me. I helped Tanneke with dinner, turning the meat on the grill, fetching things for the table in the great hall, cutting the bread.

When the meal was ready the girls came in, Maertge joining Tanneke in the cooking kitchen while the others sat down in the great hall. I had just placed the tongue in the meat barrel in one of the storage rooms—Tanneke had left it out and the cat had almost got to it—when he appeared from outside, standing in the doorway at the end of the long hall, wearing his hat and cloak. I stood still and he paused, the light behind him so that I could not see his face. I did not know if he was looking down the hallway at me. After a moment he disappeared into the great hall.

Tanneke and Maertge served while I looked after the baby in the Crucifixion room. When Tanneke was done she joined me and we ate and drank what the family did—chops, parsnips, bread, and mugs of beer. Although Pieter’s meat was no better than our family butcher’s, it was a welcome taste after going so long without. The bread was rye rather than the cheaper brown bread we had been eating, and the beer was not so watery either.

I did not wait on the family at that dinner and so I did not see him. Occasionally I heard his voice, usually along with Maria Thins’. From their tones it was clear they got on well.

After dinner Tanneke and I cleared up, then mopped the floors of the kitchens and storage rooms. The walls of each kitchen were tiled in white, and the fireplace in blue and white Delft tiles painted with birds in one section, ships in another, and soldiers in another. I studied them carefully, but none had been painted by my father.

I spent most of the rest of the day ironing in the washing kitchen, occasionally stopping to build up the fire, fetch wood, or step into the courtyard to escape the heat. The girls played in and out of the house, sometimes coming in to watch me and poke at the fire, another time to tease Tanneke when they found her asleep next door in the cooking kitchen, Johannes crawling around her feet. They were a little uneasy with me—perhaps they thought I might slap them. Cornelia scowled at me and did not stay long in the room, but Maertge and Lisbeth took the clothes I had ironed and put them away for me in the cupboard in the great hall. Their mother was asleep there. “The last month before the baby comes she’ll stay in bed much of the day,” Tanneke confided, “propped up with pillows all around her.”

Maria Thins had gone to her upstairs rooms after dinner. Once, though, I heard her in the hallway and when I looked up she was standing in the doorway, watching me. She said nothing, so I turned back to my ironing and pretended she wasn’t there. After a moment out of the corner of my eye I saw her nod and shuffle off.

He had a guest upstairs—I heard two male voices as they climbed up. Later when I heard them coming down I peeked around the door to watch them go out. The man with him was plump and wore a long white feather in his hat.

When it got dark we lit candles, and Tanneke and I had bread and cheese and beer with the children in the Crucifixion room while the others ate tongue in the great hall. I was careful to sit with my back to the Crucifixion scene. I was so exhausted I could hardly think. At home I had worked just as hard but it was never so tiring as in a strange house where everything was new and I was always tense and serious. At home I had been able to laugh with my mother or Agnes or Frans. Here there was no one to laugh with.

I had not yet been down to the cellar where I was to sleep. I took a candle with me but was too tired to look around beyond finding a bed, pillow and blanket. Leaving the trap door of the cellar open so that cool, fresh air could reach me, I took off my shoes, cap, apron and dress, prayed briefly, and lay down. I was about to blow out the candle when I noticed the painting hanging at the foot of my bed. I sat up, wide awake now. It was another picture of Christ on the Cross, smaller than the one upstairs but even more disturbing. Christ had thrown his head back in pain, and Mary Magdalene’s eyes were rolling. I Iay back gingerly, unable to take my eyes off it. I could not imagine sleeping in the room with the painting. I wanted to take it down but did not dare. Finally I blew out the candle—I could not afford to waste candles on my first day in the new house. I lay back again, my eyes fixed to the place where I knew the painting hung.

I slept badly that night, tired as I was. I woke often and looked for the painting. Though I could see nothing on the wall, every detail was fixed in my mind. Finally, when it was beginning to grow light, the painting appeared again and I was sure the Virgin Mary was looking down at me.

When I got up in the morning I tried not to look at the painting, instead studying the contents of the cellar in the dim light that fell through the window in the storage room above me. There was not much to see—several tapestry-covered chairs piled up, a few other broken chairs, a mirror, and two more paintings, both still lifes, leaning against the wall. Would anyone notice if I replaced the Crucifixion with a still life?

Cornelia would. And she would tell her mother.

I did not know what Catharina—or any of them—thought of my being Protestant. It was a curious feeling, having to be aware of it myself. I had never before been outnumbered.

I turned my back on the painting and climbed the ladder. Catharina’s keys were clinking at the front of the house and I went to find her. She moved slowly, as if she were half asleep, but she made an effort to draw herself up when she saw me. She led me up the stairs, climbing slowly, holding tightly to the rail to pull her bulk up.

At the studio she searched among the keys, then unlocked and pushed open the door. The room was dark, the shutters closed—I could make out only a little from the cracks of light streaming in between them. The room gave off a clean, sharp odor of linseed oil that reminded me of my father’s clothes when he had returned from the tile factory at night. It smelled like wood and fresh-cut hay mixed together.

Catharina remained on the threshold. I did not dare enter before her. After an awkward moment she ordered, “Open the shutters, then. Not the window on the left. Just the middle and far windows. And only the lower part of the middle window.”

I crossed the room, edging around an easel and chair to the middle window. I pulled open the lower window, then opened out the shutters. I did not look at the painting on the easel, not while Catharina was watching me from the doorway.

A table had been pushed up against the window on the right, with a chair set in the corner. The chair’s back and seat were of leather tooled with yellow flowers and leaves.

“Don’t move anything over there,” Catharina reminded me. “That is what he is painting.”

Even if I stood on my toes I was too small to reach the upper window and shutters. I would have to stand on the chair, but did not want to do so in front of her. She made me nervous, waiting in the doorway for me to make a mistake.

I considered what to do.

It was the baby who saved me—he began wailing downstairs. Catharina shifted from one hip to the other. As I hesitated she grew impatient and finally left to tend to Johannes.

I quickly climbed up and stood carefully on the wooden frame of the chair, pulled open the upper window, leaned out and pushed the shutters open. Peeking down at the street below, I spied Tanneke scrubbing the tiles in front of the house. She did not see me, but a cat padding across the wet tiles behind her paused and looked up.

I opened the lower window and shutters and got down from the chair. Something moved in front of me and I froze. The movement stopped. It was me, reflected in a mirror that hung on the wall between the two windows. I gazed at myself. Although I had an anxious, guilty expression, my face was also bathed in light, making my skin glow. I stared, surprised, then stepped away.

Now that I had a moment I surveyed the room. It was a large, square space, not as long as the great hall downstairs. With the windows open it was bright and airy, with white-washed walls, and grey and white marble tiles on the floor, the darker tiles set in a pattern of square crosses. A row of Delft tiles painted with cupids lined the bottom of the walls to protect the whitewash from our mops. They were not my father’s.

Though it was a big room, it held little furniture. There was the easel and chair set in front of the middle window, and the table placed in front of the window in the right corner. Besides the chair I had stood on there was another by the table, of plain leather nailed on with brass studs and two lion heads carved into the tops of the posts. Against the far wall, behind the chair and easel, was a small cupboard, its drawers closed, several brushes and a knife with a diamond-shaped blade arranged on top next to clean palettes. Beside the cupboard was a desk on which were papers and books and prints. Two more lion-head chairs had been set against the wall near the doorway.

It was an orderly room, empty of the clutter of everyday life. It felt different from the rest of the house, almost as if it were in another house altogether. When the door was closed it would be difficult to hear the shouts of the children, the jangle of Catharina’s keys, the sweeping of our brooms.

I took up my broom, bucket of water, and dustcloth and began to clean. I started in the corner where the scene of the painting had been set up, where I knew I must not move a thing. I kneeled on the chair to dust the window I had struggled to open, and the yellow curtain that hung to one side of it in the corner, touching it lightly so that I would not disturb its folds. The panes of glass were dirty and needed scrubbing with warm water, but I was not sure if he wanted them clean. I would have to ask Catharina.

I dusted the chairs, polishing the brass studs and lion heads. The table had not been cleaned properly in some time. Someone had wiped around the objects placed there—a powder-brush, a pewter bowl, a letter, a black ceramic pot, blue cloth heaped to one side and hanging over the edge—but they had to be moved for the table really to be cleaned. As my mother had said, I would have to find a way to move things yet put them back exactly as if they had not been touched.

The letter lay close to the corner of the table. If I placed my thumb along one edge of the paper, my second finger along another, and anchored my hand with my smallest finger hooked to the table edge, I should be able to move the letter, dust there, and replace it where my hand indicated.

I laid my fingers against the edges and drew in my breath, then removed the letter, dusted, and replaced it all in one quick movement. I was not sure why I felt I had to do it quickly. I stood back from the table. The letter seemed to be in the right place, though only he would really know.

Still, if this was to be my test, I had best get it done.

From the letter I measured with my hand to the powder-brush, then placed my fingers at various points around one side of the brush. I removed it, dusted, replaced it, and measured the space between it and the letter. I did the same with the bowl.

This was how I cleaned without seeming to move anything. I measured each thing in relation to the objects around it and the space between them. The small things on the table were easy, the furniture harder—I used my feet, my knees, sometimes my shoulders and chin with the chairs.

I did not know what to do with the blue cloth heaped messily on the table. I would not be able to get the folds exact if I moved the cloth. For now I left it alone, hoping that for a day or two he would not notice until I had found a way to clean it.

With the rest of the room I could be less careful. I dusted and swept and mopped—the floor, the walls, the windows, the furniture—with the satisfaction of tackling a room in need of a good cleaning. In the far corner, opposite the table and window, a door led to a storeroom, filled with paintings and canvases, chairs, chests, dishes, bedpans, a coat rack and a row of books. I cleaned in there too, tidying the things away so that there was more order to the room.

All the while I had avoided cleaning around the easel. I did not know why, but I was nervous about seeing the painting that sat on it. At last, though, there was nothing left to do. I dusted the chair in front of the easel, then began to dust the easel itself, trying not to look at the painting.

When I glimpsed the yellow satin, however, I had to stop.

I was still staring at the painting when Maria Thins spoke.

“Not a common sight, now, is it?”

I had not heard her come in. She stood inside the doorway, slightly stooped, wearing a fine black dress and lace collar.

I did not know what to say, and I couldn’t help it—I turned back to the painting.

Maria Thins laughed. “You’re not the only one to forget your manners in front of one of his paintings, girl.” She came over to stand beside me. “Yes, he’s managed this one well. That’s van Ruijven’s wife.” I recognized the name as the patron my father had mentioned. “She’s not beautiful but he makes her so,” she added. “It will fetch a good price.”

Because it was the first painting of his I was to see, I always remembered it better than the others, even those I saw grow from the first layer of underpaint to the final highlights.

A woman stood in front of a table, turned towards a mirror on the wall so that she was in profile. She wore a mantle of rich yellow satin trimmed with white ermine, and a fashionable five-pointed red ribbon in her hair. A window lit her from the left, falling across her face and tracing the delicate curve of her forehead and nose. She was tying a string of pearls around her neck, holding the ribbons up, her hands suspended in the air. Entranced with herself in the mirror, she did not seem to be aware that anyone was looking at her. Behind her on a bright white wall was an old map, in the dark foreground the table with the letter on it, the powder-brush and the other things I had dusted around.

I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.

I thought of me looking at my reflection in the mirror earlier and was ashamed.

Maria Thins seemed content to stand with me and contemplate the painting. It was odd to look at it with the setting just behind it. Already from my dusting I knew all of the objects on the table, and their relation to one another—the letter by the corner, the powder-brush lying casually next to the pewter bowl, the blue cloth bunched around the dark pot. Everything seemed to be exactly the same, except cleaner and purer. It made a mockery of my own cleaning.

Then I saw a difference. I drew in my breath.

“What is it, girl?”

“In the painting there are no lion heads on the chair next to the woman,” I said.

“No. There was once a lute sitting on that chair as well. He makes plenty of changes. He doesn’t paint just what he sees, but what will suit. Tell me, girl, do you think this painting is done?”

I stared at her. Her question must be a trick but I could not imagine any change that would make it better.

“Isn’t it?” I faltered.

Maria Thins snorted. “He’s been working on it for three months. I expect he’ll do so for two more months. He will change things. You’ll see.” She looked around. “Done your cleaning, have you? Well, then, go on, girl—go to your other tasks. He’ll come soon to see how you’ve done.”

I looked at the painting one last time, but by studying it so hard I felt something slip away. It was like looking at a star in the night sky—if I looked at one directly I could barely see it, but if I looked from the corner of my eye it became much brighter.

I gathered my broom and bucket and cloth. When I left the room, Maria Thins was still standing in front of the painting.

I filled the pots from the canal and set them on the fire, then went to find Tanneke. She was in the room where the girls slept, helping Cornelia to dress while Maertge helped Aleydis and Lisbeth helped herself. Tanneke was not in good spirits, glancing at me only to ignore me as I tried to speak to her. Finally I stood directly in front of her so that she had to look at me. “Tanneke, I’ll go to the fish stalls now. What would you like today?”

“Going so early? We always go later in the day.” Tanneke still did not look at me. She was tying white ribbons into five-pointed stars in Cornelia’s hair.

“I’m free while the water is heating and thought I would go now,” I replied simply. I did not add that the best cuts were to be had early, even if the butcher or fishmonger promised to set aside things for the family. She should know that. “What would you like?”

“Don’t fancy fish today. Go to the butcher’s for a mutton joint.” Tanneke finished with the ribbons and Cornelia jumped up and pushed past me. Tanneke turned away and opened a chest to search for something. I watched her broad back for a moment, the greyish brown dress pulled tight across it.

She was jealous of me. I had cleaned the studio, where she was not allowed, where no one, it seemed, could go except me and Maria Thins.

When Tanneke straightened, a bonnet in her hand, she said, “The master painted me once, you know. Painted me pouring milk. Everyone said it was his best painting.”

“I’d like to see it,” I responded. “Is it still here?”

“Oh no, van Ruijven bought it.”

I thought for a moment. “So one of Delft’s wealthiest men takes pleasure in looking at you each day.”

Tanneke grinned, her pocked face growing even wider. The right words changed her mood in a moment. It was simply up to me to find the words.

I turned to go before her mood could sour. “May I come with you?” Maertge asked.

“And me?” Lisbeth added.

“Not today,” I said firmly. “You have something to eat and help Tanneke.” I did not want it to become habit for the girls to accompany me. I would use it as a reward for minding me.

I was also longing to walk in familiar streets on my own, not to have a constant reminder of my new life chattering at my side. As I stepped into Market Square, leaving Papists’ Corner behind, I breathed in deeply. I had not realized that I had been holding myself in tight all the time I was with the family.

Before going to Pieter’s stall I stopped at the butcher I knew, who beamed when he saw me. “At last you decide to say hello! What, yesterday you were too grand for the likes of me?” he teased.

I started to explain my new situation but he interrupted me. “Of course I know. Everyone is talking—Jan the tiler’s daughter has gone to work for the painter Vermeer. And then I see after one day she is already too proud to speak to old friends!”

“I have nothing to be so proud of, becoming a maid. My father is ashamed.”

“Your father was simply unlucky. No one is blaming him. There is no need for you to be ashamed, my dear. Except of course that you are not buying your meat from me.”

“I have no choice, I’m afraid. That’s for my mistress to decide.”

“Oh, it is, is it? So your buying from Pieter has nothing to do with his handsome son?”

I frowned. “I have not seen his son.”

The butcher laughed. “You will, you will. Off you go. When you see your mother next tell her to come and see me. I will set aside something for her.”

I thanked him and passed along the stalls to Pieter’s. He seemed surprised to see me. “Here already, are you? Couldn’t wait to get here for more of that tongue?”

“I’d like a joint of mutton today, please.”

“Now tell me, Griet, was that not the best tongue you have had?”

I refused to give him the compliment he craved. “The master and mistress ate it. They did not remark on it.”

Behind Pieter a young man turned round—he had been cutting into a side of beef at a table behind the stall. He must have been the son, for though he was taller than his father, he had the same bright blue eyes. His blond hair was long and thick with curls, framing a face that made me think of apricots. Only his bloody apron was displeasing to the eye.

His eyes came to rest on me like a butterfly on a flower and I could not keep from blushing. I repeated my request for mutton, keeping my eyes on his father. Pieter rummaged through his meat and pulled out a joint for me, laying it on the counter. Two sets of eyes watched me.

The joint was grey at the edges. I sniffed the meat. “This is not fresh,” I said bluntly. “Mistress will be none too pleased that you expect her family to eat meat such as this.” My tone was haughtier than I had intended. Perhaps it needed to be.

Father and son stared at me. I held the gaze of the father, trying to ignore the son.

At last Pieter turned to his son. “Pieter, get me that joint set aside on the cart.”

“But that’s meant for—” Pieter the son stopped. He disappeared, returning with another joint, which I could immediately see was superior. I nodded. “That’s better.”

Pieter the son wrapped the joint and placed it in my pail. I thanked him. As I turned to go I caught the glance that passed between father and son. Even then I knew somehow what it meant, and what it would mean for me.

Catharina was sitting on the bench when I got back, feeding Johannes. I showed her the joint and she nodded. As I was about to go in she said in a low voice, “My husband has inspected the studio and found the cleaning suited him.” She did not look at me.

“Thank you, madam.” I stepped inside, glanced at a still life of fruits and a lobster, and thought, So, I really am to stay.

The rest of the day passed much as the first had, and as the days to follow would. Once I had cleaned the studio and gone to the fish stalls or the Meat Hall I began again on the laundry, one day sorting, soaking and working on stains, another day scrubbing, rinsing, boiling and wringing before hanging things to dry and be bleached in the noon sun, another day ironing and mending and folding. At some point I always stopped to help Tanneke with the midday meal. Afterwards we cleaned up, and then I had a little time free to rest and sew on the bench out front, or back in the courtyard. After that I finished whatever I had been doing in the morning, then helped Tanneke with the late meal. The last thing we did was to mop the floors once more so that they would be fresh and clean for the morning.

At night I covered the Crucifixion hanging at the foot of my bed with the apron I had worn that day. I slept better then. The next day I added the apron to the day’s wash.

While Catharina was unlocking the studio door on the second morning I asked her if I should clean the windows.

“Why not?” she answered sharply. “You do not need to ask me such petty things.”

“Because of the light, madam,” I explained. “It might change the painting if I clean them. You see?”

She did not see. She would not or could not come into the room to look at the painting. It seemed she never entered the studio. When Tanneke was in the right mood I would have to ask her why. Catharina went downstairs to ask him and called up to me to leave the windows.

When I cleaned the studio I saw nothing to indicate that he had been there at all. Nothing had been moved, the palettes were clean, the painting itself appeared no different. But I could feel that he had been there.

I had seen very little of him the first two days I was in the house on the Oude Langendijck. I heard him sometimes, on the stairs, in the hallway, chuckling with his children, talking softly to Catharina. Hearing his voice made me feel as if I were walking along the edge of a canal and unsure of my steps. I did not know how he would treat me in his own house, whether or not he would pay attention to the vegetables I chopped in his kitchen.

No gentleman had ever taken such an interest in me before.

I came face to face with him my third day in the house. Just before dinner I went to find a plate that Lisbeth had left outside and almost ran into him as he carried Aleydis in his arms down the hallway.

I stepped back. He and Aleydis regarded me with the same grey eyes. He neither smiled nor did not smile at me. It was hard to meet his eyes. I thought of the woman looking at herself in the painting upstairs, of wearing pearls and yellow satin. She would have no trouble meeting the gaze of a gentleman. When I managed to lift my eyes to his he was no longer looking at me.

The next day I saw the woman herself. On my way back from the butcher a man and woman walked ahead of me on the Oude Langendijck. At our door he turned to her and bowed, then walked on. There was a long white feather in his hat—he must have been the visitor from a few days earlier. From the brief glimpse I caught of his profile I saw that he had a moustache, and a plump face to match his body. He smiled as if he were about to pay a flattering but false compliment. The woman turned into the house before I could see her face but I did see the five-pointed red ribbon in her hair. I held back, waiting by the doorway until I heard her go up the stairs.

Later I was putting away some clothes in the cupboard in the great hall when she came back down. I stood up as she entered. She was carrying the yellow mantle in her arms. The ribbon was still in her hair.

“Oh!” she said. “Where is Catharina?”

“She’s gone with her mother to the Town Hall, madam. Family business.”

“I see. Never mind, I’ll see her another day. I’ll leave this here for her.” She draped the mantle across the bed and dropped the pearl necklace on top of it.

“Yes, madam.”

I could not take my eyes off her. I felt as if I were seeing her and yet not seeing her. It was a strange sensation. She was, as Maria Thins had said, not as beautiful as when the light struck her in the painting. Yet she was beautiful, if only because I was remembering her so. She gazed at me with a puzzled look on her face, as if she ought to know me since I was staring at her with such familiarity. I managed to lower my eyes. “I will tell her you called, madam.”

She nodded but looked troubled. She glanced at the pearls she had laid on top of the mantle. “I think I shall leave these up in the studio with him,” she announced, picking up the necklace. She did not look at me, but I knew she was thinking that maids were not to be trusted with pearls. After she had gone her face lingered like perfume.

On Saturday Catharina and Maria Thins took Tanneke and Maertge with them to the market in the square, where they would buy vegetables to last the week, staples and other things for the house. I longed to go with them, thinking I might see my mother and sister, but I was told to stay at the house with the younger girls and the baby. It was difficult to keep them from running off to the market. I would have taken them there myself but I did not dare leave the house unattended. Instead we watched the boats go up and down the canal, full on their way to the market with cabbages, pigs, flowers, wood, flour, strawberries, horseshoes. They were empty on the way back, the boatmen counting money or drinking. I taught the girls games I had played with Agnes and Frans, and they taught me games they had made up. They blew bubbles, played with their dolls, ran with their hoops while I sat on the bench with Johannes in my lap.

Cornelia seemed to have forgotten about the slap. She was cheerful and friendly, helpful with Johannes, obedient to me. “Will you help me?” she asked me as she tried to climb onto a barrel the neighbors had left out in the street. Her light brown eyes were wide and innocent. I found myself warming to her sweetness, yet knowing I could not trust her. She could be the most interesting of the girls, but also the most changeable—the best and the worst at the same time.

They were sorting through a collection of shells they had brought outside, dividing them into piles of different colors, when he came out of the house. I squeezed the baby round his middle, feeling his ribs under my hands. He squealed and I buried my nose in his ear to hide my face.

“Papa, can I go with you?” Cornelia cried, jumping up and grabbing his hand. I could not see the expression on his face—the tilt of his head and the brim of his hat hid it.

Lisbeth and Aleydis abandoned their shells. “I want to go too!” they shouted in unison, grabbing his other hand.

He shook his head and then I could see his bemused expression. “Not today—I’m going to the apothecary’s.”

“Will you buy paint things, Papa?” Cornelia asked, still holding on to his hand.

“Among other things.”

Baby Johannes began to cry and he glanced down at me. I bounced the baby, feeling awkward.

He looked as if he would say something, but instead he shook off the girls and strode down the Oude Langendijck.

He had not said a word to me since we discussed the color and shape of vegetables.

I woke very early on Sunday, for I was excited to go home. I had to wait for Catharina to unlock the front door, but when I heard it swing open I came out to find Maria Thins with the key.

“My daughter is tired today,” she said as she stood aside to let me out. “She will rest for a few days. Can you manage without her?”

“Of course, madam,” I replied, then added, “and I may always ask you if I have questions.”

Maria Thins chuckled. “Ah, you’re a cunning one, girl. You know whose pot to spoon from. Never mind, we can do with a bit of cleverness around here.” She handed me some coins, my wages for the days I had worked. “Off you go now, to tell your mother all about us, I suspect.”

I slipped away before she could say more, crossed Market Square, past those going to early services at the New Church, and hurried up the streets and canals that led me home. When I turned into my street I thought how different it felt already after less than a week away. The light seemed brighter and flatter, the canal wider. The plane trees lining the canal stood perfectly still, like sentries waiting for me.

Agnes was sitting on the bench in front of the house. When she saw me she called inside, “She’s here!” then ran to me and took my arm. “How is it?” she asked, not even saying hello. “Are they nice? Do you work hard? Are there any girls there? Is the house very grand? Where do you sleep? Do you eat off fine plates?”

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 patience 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.

He stood up at last and pulled the robe from his head, his hair ruffled. “There, Griet, it is ready. Now you look.” He stepped away from the box and gestured me towards it. I stood rooted to my place.

“Sir—”

“Place the robe over your head as I did. Then the image will be stronger. And look at it from this angle so it will not be upside down.”

I did not know what to do. The thought of me covered with his robe, unable to see, and him looking at me all the while, made me feel faint.

But he was my master. I was meant to do as he said.

I pressed my lips together, then stepped up to the box, to the end where the lid had been lifted. I bent over and looked in at the square of milky glass fixed inside. There was a faint drawing of something on it.

He draped his robe gently over my head so that it blocked out all light. It was still warm from him, and smelled of the way brick feels when it has been baked by the sun. I placed my hands on the table to steady myself and closed my eyes for a moment. I felt as if I had drunk my evening beer too quickly.

“What do you see?” I heard him say.

I opened my eyes and saw the painting, without the woman in it.

“Oh!” I stood up so suddenly that the robe dropped from my head to the floor. I stepped back from the box, treading on the cloth.

I moved my foot. “I’m sorry, sir. I will wash the robe this morning.”

“Never mind about the robe, Griet. What did you see?”

I swallowed. I was terribly confused, and a little frightened. What was in the box was a trick of the devil, or something Catholic I did not understand. “I saw the painting, sir. Except that the woman wasn’t in it, and it was smaller. And things were—switched around.”

“Yes, the image is projected upside down, and left and right are reversed. There are mirrors that can fix that.”

I did not understand what he was saying.

“But—”

“What is it?”

“I don’t understand, sir. How did it get there?”

He picked up the robe and brushed it off. He was smiling. When he smiled his face was like an open window.

“Do you see this?” He pointed to the round object at the end of the smaller box. “This is called a lens. It is made of a piece of glass cut in a certain way. When light from that scene”—he pointed to the corner—“goes through it and into the box it projects the image so that we can see it here.” He tapped the cloudy glass.

I was staring at him so hard, trying to understand, that my eyes began to water.

“What is an image, sir? It is not a word I know.”

Something changed in his face, as if he had been looking over my shoulder but now was looking at me. “It is a picture, like a painting.”

I nodded. More than anything I wanted him to think I could follow what he said.

“Your eyes are very wide,” he said then.

I blushed. “So I have been told, sir.”

“Do you want to look again?”

I did not, but I knew I could not say so. I thought for a moment. “I will look again, sir, but only if I am left alone.”

He looked surprised, then amused. “All right,” he said. He handed me his robe. “I’ll return in a few minutes, and tap on the door before I enter.”

He left, closing the door behind him. I grasped his robe, my hands shaking.

For a moment I thought of simply pretending to look, and saying that I had. But he would know I was lying.

And I was curious. It became easier to consider it without him watching me. I took a deep breath and gazed down into the box. I could see on the glass a faint trace of the scene in the corner. As I brought the robe over my head the image, as he called it, became clearer and clearer—the table, the chairs, the yellow curtain in the corner, the back wall with the map hanging on it, the ceramic pot gleaming on the table, the pewter basin, the powder-brush, the letter. They were all there, assembled before my eyes on a flat surface, a painting that was not a painting. I cautiously touched the glass—it was smooth and cold, with no traces of paint on it. I removed the robe and the image went faint again, though it was still there. I put the robe over me once more, closing out the light, and watched the jeweled colors appear again. They seemed to be even brighter and more colorful on the glass than they were in the corner.

It became as hard to stop looking into the box as it had been to take my eyes from the painting of the woman with the pearl necklace the first time I’d seen it. When I heard the tap on the door I just had time to straighten up and let the robe drop to my shoulders before he walked in.

“Have you looked again, Griet? Have you looked properly?”

“I have looked, sir, but I am not at all sure of what I have seen.” I smoothed my cap.

“It is surprising, isn’t it? I was as amazed as you the first time my friend showed it to me.”

“But why do you look at it, sir, when you can look at your own painting?”

“You do not understand.” He tapped the box. “This is a tool. I use it to help me see, so that I am able to make the painting.”

“But—you use your eyes to see.”

“True, but my eyes do not always see everything.”

My eyes darted to the corner, as if they would discover something unexpected that had been hidden from me before, behind the powder-brush, emerging from the shadows of the blue cloth.

“Tell me, Griet,” he continued, “do you think I simply paint what is there in that corner?”

I glanced at the painting, unable to answer. I felt as if I were being tricked. Whatever I answered would be wrong.

“The camera obscura helps me to see in a different way,” he explained. “To see more of what is there.”

When he saw the baffled expression on my face he must have regretted saying so much to someone like me. He turned and snapped the box shut. I slipped off his robe and held it out to him.

“Sir—”

“Thank you, Griet,” he said as he took it from me. “Have you finished with the cleaning here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You may go, then.”

“Thank you, sir.” I quickly gathered my cleaning things and left, the door clicking shut behind me.

I thought about what he had said, about how the box helped him to see more. Although I did not understand why, I knew he was right because I could see it in his painting of the woman, and also what I remembered of the painting of Delft. He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

The day after I looked in the box I went to the studio and it was gone. The easel was back in its place. I glanced at the painting. Previously I had found only tiny changes in it. Now there was one easily seen—the map hanging on the wall behind the woman had been removed from both the painting and the scene itself. The wall was now bare. The painting looked the better for it—simpler, the lines of the woman clearer now against the brownish-white background of the wall. But the change upset me—it was so sudden. I would not have expected it of him.

I felt uneasy after I left the studio, and as I walked to the Meat Hall I did not look about me as I usually did. Though I waved hello to the old butcher I did not stop, even when he called out to me.

Pieter the son was minding the stall alone. I had seen him a few times since that first day, but always in the presence of his father, standing in the background while Pieter the father took charge. Now he said, “Hello, Griet. I’ve wondered when you would come.”

I thought that a silly thing to say, as I had been buying meat at the same time each day.

His eyes did not meet mine.

I decided not to remark on his words. “Three pounds of stewing beef, please. And do you have more of those sausages your father sold me the other day? The girls liked them.”

“There are none left, I’m afraid.”

A woman came to stand behind me, waiting her turn. Pieter the son glanced at her. “Can you wait for a moment?” he said to me in a low voice.

“Wait?”

“I want to ask you something.”

I stood aside so that he could serve the woman. I did not like doing so when I was feeling so unsettled, but I had little choice.

When he was done and we were alone again he asked, “Where does your family live?”

“The Oude Langendijck, at Papists’ Corner.”

“No, no, your family.”

I flushed at my mistake. “Off the Rietveld Canal, not far from the Koe Gate. Why do you ask?”

His eyes fully met mine at last. “There have been reports of the plague in that quarter.”

I took a step back, my eyes widening. “Has a quarantine been set?”

“Not yet. They expect to today.”

Afterwards I realized he must have been asking others about me. If he hadn’t already known where my family lived, he would never have known to tell me about the plague.

I do not remember getting back from there. Pieter the son must have placed the meat in my pail but all I knew was that I arrived at the house, dropped the pail at Tanneke’s feet and said, “I must see the mistress.”

Tanneke rummaged through the pail. “No sausages, and nothing to take their place! What’s the matter with you? Go straight back to the Meat Hall.”

“I must see the mistress,” I repeated.

“What is it?” Tanneke grew suspicious. “Have you done something wrong?”

“My family may be quarantined. I must go to them.”

“Oh.” Tanneke shifted uncertainly. “I wouldn’t know about that. You’ll have to ask. She’s in with my mistress.”

Catharina and Maria Thins were in the Crucifixion room. Maria Thins was smoking her pipe. They stopped talking when I entered.

“What is it, girl?” Maria Thins grunted.

“Please, madam,” I addressed Catharina, “I have heard that my family’s street may be quarantined. I would like to go and see them.”

“What, and bring the plague back with you?” she snapped. “Certainly not. Are you mad?”

I looked at Maria Thins, which made Catharina angrier. “I have said no,” she announced. “It is I who decide what you can and cannot do. Have you forgotten that?”

“No, madam.” I lowered my eyes.

“You won’t be going home Sundays until it’s safe. Now go, we have things to discuss without you hanging about.”

I took the washing to the courtyard and sat outside with my back to the door so that I would not have to see anyone. I wept as I scrubbed one of Maertge’s dresses. When I smelled Maria Thins’ pipe I wiped my eyes but did not turn round.

“Don’t be silly, girl,” Maria Thins said quietly to my back. “You can’t do anything for them and you have to save yourself. You’re a clever girl, you can work that out.”

I did not answer. After a while I could no longer smell her pipe.

The next morning he came in while I was sweeping the studio.

“Griet, I am sorry to hear of your family’s misfortune,” he said.

I looked up from my broom. There was kindness in his eyes, and I felt I could ask him. “Will you tell me, sir, if the quarantine has been set?”

“It was, yesterday morning.”

“Thank you for telling me, sir.”

He nodded, and was about to leave when I said, “May I ask you something else, sir? About the painting.”

He stopped in the doorway. “What is it?”

“When you looked in the box, did it tell you to remove the map from the painting?”

“Yes, it did.” His face became intent like a stork’s when it sees a fish it can catch. “Does it please you that the map is gone?”

“It is a better painting now.” I did not think I would have dared to say such a thing at another time, but the danger to my family had made me reckless.

His smile made me grip my broom tightly.

I was not able to work well then. I was worried about my family, not about how clean I could get the floors or how white the sheets. No one may have remarked on my good housekeeping before, but everyone noticed how careless I was now. Lisbeth complained of a spotted apron. Tanneke grumbled that my sweeping caused dust to settle on the dishes. Catharina shouted at me several times—for forgetting to iron the sleeves of her chemise, for buying cod when I was meant to get herring, for letting the fire go out.

Maria Thins muttered, “Steady yourself, girl,” as she passed me in the hallway.

Only in the studio was I able to clean as I had before, maintaining the precision he needed.

I did not know what to do that first Sunday I was not allowed to go home. I could not go to our church either, as it was in the quarantined area as well. I did not want to remain at the house, though—whatever Catholics did on Sundays, I did not want to be among them.

They left together to go to the Jesuit church around the corner in the Molenpoort, the girls wearing good dresses, even Tanneke changed into a yellowish brown wool dress, and carrying Johannes. Catharina walked slowly, holding on to her husband’s arm. Maria Thins locked the door behind her. I stood on the tiles in front of the house as they disappeared and considered what to do. The bells in the New Church tower in front of me began to sound the hour.

I was baptized there, I thought. Surely they will allow me inside for the service.

I crept into the vast place, feeling like a mouse hiding in a rich man’s house. It was cool and dim inside, the smooth round pillars reaching up, the ceiling so high above me it could almost be the sky. Behind the minister’s altar was the grand marble tomb of William of Orange.

I saw no one I knew, only people dressed in sober clothes much finer in their cloth and cut than any I would ever wear. I hid behind a pillar for the service, which I could hardly listen to, I was so nervous that someone would come along and ask me what I was doing there. At the end of the service I slipped out quickly before anyone approached me. I walked round the church and looked across the canal at the house. The door was still shut and locked. Catholic services must last longer than ours, I thought.

I walked as far as I could towards my family’s house, stopping only where a barrier manned by a soldier blocked the way. The streets looked very quiet beyond it.

“How is it,” I asked the soldier, “back there?”

He shrugged and did not reply. He looked hot in his cloak and hat, for though the sun was not out the air was warm and close.

“Is there a list? Of those who have died?” I could barely say the words.

“Not yet.”

I was not surprised—the lists were always delayed, and usually incomplete. Word of mouth was often more accurate. “Do you know—have you heard if Jan the tiler—”

“I know nothing of anyone in there. You’ll have to wait.” The soldier turned away as others approached him with similar queries.

I tried to speak to another soldier on a barrier at a different street. Though friendlier, he too could tell me nothing about my family. “I could ask around, but not for nothing,” he added, smiling and looking me up and down so I would know he didn’t mean money.

“Shame on you,” I snapped, “for seeking to take advantage of those in misery.”

But he did not seem ashamed. I had forgotten that soldiers think of just one thing when they see a young woman.

When I got back to the Oude Langendijck I was relieved to find the house open. I slipped inside and spent the afternoon hiding in the courtyard with my prayer book. In the evening I crept into bed without eating, telling Tanneke my stomach hurt.

At the butcher’s Pieter the son pulled me to one side while his father was busy with someone else. “Have you had news of your family?”

I shook my head. “No one could tell me anything.” I did not meet his gaze. His concern made me feel as if I had just stepped off a boat and the ground was wobbling under my feet.

“I will find out for you,” Pieter stated. From his tone it was clear that I was not to argue with him.

“Thank you,” I said after a long pause. I wondered what I would do if he did find out something. He was not demanding anything the way the soldier had, but I would be obliged to him. I did not want to be obliged to anyone.

“It may take a few days,” Pieter murmured before he turned to hand his father a cow’s liver. He wiped his hands on his apron. I nodded, my eyes on his hands. The creases between his nails and his fingers were filled with blood.

I expect I will have to get used to that sight, I thought.

I began to look forward to my daily errand even more than to cleaning the studio. I dreaded it too, though, especially the moment Pieter the son looked up from his work and saw me, and I searched his eyes for clues. I wanted to know, yet as long as I didn’t, it was possible to hope.

Several days passed when I bought meat from him, or passed by his stall after I had bought fish, and he simply shook his head. Then one day he looked up and looked away, and I knew what he would say. I just did not know who.

I had to wait until he finished with several customers. I felt so sick I wanted to sit down, but the floor was speckled with blood.

At last Pieter the son took off his apron and came over. “It is your sister, Agnes,” he said softly. “She is very ill.”

“And my parents?”

“They stay well, so far.”

I did not ask what risk he had gone to in order to find out for me. “Thank you, Pieter,” I whispered. It was the first time I had spoken his name.

I looked into his eyes and saw kindness there. I also saw what I had feared—expectation.

On Sunday I decided to visit my brother. I did not know how much he knew of the quarantine or of Agnes. I left the house early and walked to his factory, which was outside the city walls not far from the Rotterdam Gate. Frans was still asleep when I arrived. The woman who answered at the gate laughed when I asked for him. “He’ll be asleep for hours yet,” she said. “They sleep all day on Sundays, the apprentices. It’s their day off.”

I did not like her tone, nor what she said. “Please wake him and tell him his sister is here,” I demanded. I sounded a bit like Catharina.

The woman raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t know Frans came from a family so high on their throne you can see up their noses.” She disappeared and I wondered if she would bother to wake Frans. I sat on a low wall to wait. A family passed me on their way to church. The children, two girls and two boys, ran ahead of their parents, just as we had ours. I watched them until they passed from sight.

Frans appeared at last, rubbing sleep from his face. “Oh, Griet,” he said. “I didn’t know if it would be you or Agnes. I suppose Agnes wouldn’t come so far on her own.”

He didn’t know. I couldn’t keep it from him, not even to tell him gently.

“Agnes has been struck by the plague,” I blurted out. “God help her and our parents.”

Frans stopped rubbing his face. His eyes were red.

“Agnes?” he repeated in confusion. “How do you know this?”

“Someone found out for me.”

“You haven’t seen them?”

“There is a quarantine.”

“A quarantine? How long has there been one?”

“Ten days so far.”

Frans shook his head angrily. “I heard nothing of this! Stuck in this factory day after day, nothing but white tiles as far as I can see. I think I may go mad.”

“It’s Agnes you should be thinking of now.”

Frans hung his head unhappily. He had grown taller since I’d seen him months before. His voice had deepened as well.

“Frans, have you been going to church?”

He shrugged. I could not bring myself to question him further.

“I’m going now to pray for them all,” I said instead. “Will you come with me?”

He did not want to, but I managed to persuade him—I did not want to face a strange church alone again. We found one not far away, and although the service did not comfort me, I prayed hard for our family.

Afterwards Frans and I walked along the Schie River. We said little, but we each knew what the other was thinking—neither of us had heard of anyone recovering from the plague.

One morning when Maria Thins was unlocking the studio for me she said, “All right, girl. Clear that corner today.” She pointed to the area that he was painting. I did not understand what she meant. “All the things on the table should go into the chests in the storeroom,” she continued, “except the bowl and Catharina’s powder-brush. I’ll take them with me.” She crossed to the table and picked up two of the objects I had spent so many weeks setting carefully in their places.

When she saw my face Maria Thins laughed. “Don’t worry. He’s finished. He doesn’t need this now. When you’re done here make sure you dust all the chairs and set them out by the middle window. And open all the shutters.” She left, cradling the pewter bowl in her arms.

Without the bowl and brush the tabletop was transformed into a picture I did not recognize. The letter, the cloth, the ceramic pot lay without meaning, as if someone had simply dropped them onto the table. Still, I could not imagine moving them.

I put off doing so by going about my other duties. I opened all the shutters, which made the room very bright and strange, then dusted and mopped everywhere but the table. I looked at the painting for some time, trying to discover what was different about it that now made it complete. I had seen no changes in it over the past several days.

I was still pondering when he entered. “Griet, you’ve not yet cleared up. Be quick about it—I’ve come to help you move the table.”

“I’m sorry for being so slow, sir. It’s just—” He seemed surprised that I wanted to say something—“I’m so used to the objects where they are that I hate to move them.”

“I see. I will help you, then.” He plucked the blue cloth from the table and held it out. His hands were very clean. I took the cloth from him without touching them and brought it to the window to shake out. Then I folded it and placed it in a chest in the storeroom. When I came back he had gathered up the letter and the black ceramic pot and stored them away. We moved the table to the side of the room and I set up the chairs by the middle while he moved the easel and painting to the corner where the scene had been set.

It was odd to see the painting in the place of the setting. It all felt strange, this sudden movement and change after weeks of stillness and quiet. It was not like him. I did not ask him why. I wanted to look at him, to guess what he was thinking, but I kept my eyes on my broom, cleaning up the dust disturbed by the blue cloth.

He left me and I finished up quickly, not wanting to linger in the studio. It was no longer comforting there.

That afternoon van Ruijven and his wife visited. Tanneke and I were sitting on the bench in front while she showed me how to mend some lace cuffs. The girls had gone over to Market Square and were flying a kite near the New Church where we could see them, Maertge holding the end of the string while Cornelia tugged the kite up into the sky.

I saw the van Ruijvens coming from a long way off. As they approached I recognized her from the painting and my brief meeting with her, and him as the moustached man with the white feather in his hat and the oily smile who had once escorted her to the door.

“Look, Tanneke,” I whispered, “it’s the gentleman who admires the painting of you every day.”

“Oh!” Tanneke blushed when she saw them. Straightening her cap and apron, she hissed, “Go and tell mistress they’re here!”

I ran inside and found Maria Thins and Catharina with the sleeping baby in the Crucifixion room. “The van Ruijvens have come,” I announced.

Catharina and Maria Thins removed their caps and smoothed their collars. Catharina held on to the table and pulled herself up. As they were leaving the room Maria Thins reached up and straightened one of Catharina’s tortoiseshell combs, which she only wore on special occasions.

They greeted their guests in the front hall while I hovered in the hallway. As they moved to the stairs van Ruijven caught sight of me and paused for a moment.

“Who’s this, then?”

Catharina frowned at me. “Just one of the maids. Tanneke, bring us up some wine, please.”

“Have the wide-eyed maid bring it to us,” van Ruijven commanded. “Come, my dear,” he said to his wife, who began climbing the stairs.

Tanneke and I stood side by side, she annoyed, me dismayed by his attention.

“Go on, then!” Catharina cried to me. “You heard what he said. Bring the wine.” She pulled herself heavily up the stairs after Maria Thins.

I went to the little room where the girls slept, found glasses stored there, polished five of them with my apron and set them on a tray. Then I searched the kitchen for wine. I did not know where it was kept, for they did not drink wine often. Tanneke had disappeared in a huff. I feared the wine was kept locked away in one of the cupboards, and that I would have to ask Catharina for the key in front of everyone.

Fortunately, Maria Thins must have anticipated this. In the Crucifixion room she left out a white jug with a pewter top, filled with wine. I set it on the tray and carried it up to the studio, first straightening my cap, collar and apron as the others had done.

When I entered they were standing by the painting. “A jewel once again,” van Ruijven was saying. “Are you happy with it, my dear?” he addressed his wife.

“Of course,” she answered. The light was shining through the windows onto her face and she looked almost beautiful.

As I set the tray down on the table my master and I had moved that morning Maria Thins came over. “I’ll take that,” she whispered. “Off you go. Quickly, now.”

I was on the stairs when I heard van Ruijven say, “Where’s that wide-eyed maid? Gone already? I wanted to have a proper look at her.”

“Now, now, she’s nothing!” Catharina cried gaily. “It’s the painting you want to look at.”

I went back to the front bench and took my seat next to Tanneke, who wouldn’t say a word to me. We sat in silence, working on the cuffs, listening to the voices floating out from the windows above.

When they came down again I slipped around the corner and waited, leaning against the warm bricks of a wall in the Molenpoort, until they were gone.

Later a man servant from their house came and disappeared up to the studio. I did not see him go, as the girls had come back and wanted me to build up the fire so they could bake apples in it.

The next morning the painting was gone. I had not had a chance to look at it one last time.

That morning as I arrived at the Meat Hall I heard a man ahead of me say the quarantine had been lifted. I hurried to Pieter’s stall. Father and son were both there, and several people were waiting to be served. I ignored them and went straight up to Pieter the son. “Can you serve me quickly?” I said. “I must go to my family’s house. Just three pounds of tongue and three of sausages.”

He stopped what he had been doing, ignoring the indignant sounds from the old woman he had been helping. “I suppose if I were young and smiled at you you’d do anything for me too,” she scolded as he handed the packages to me.

“She’s not smiling,” Pieter replied. He glanced at his father, then handed me a smaller package. “For your family,” he said in a low voice.

I did not even thank him—I snatched the package and ran.

Only thieves and children run.

I ran all the way home.

My parents were sitting side by side on the bench, heads bowed. When I reached them I took my father’s hand and raised it to my cheek. I sat next to them and said nothing.

There was nothing to be said.

There followed a time when everything was dull. The things that had meant something—the cleanness of the laundry, the daily walk on errands, the quiet studio—lost importance, though they were still there, like bruises on the body that fade to hard lumps under the skin.

It was at the end of the summer that my sister died. That autumn was rainy. I spent much of my time hanging laundry on racks indoors, shifting them closer to the fire, trying to dry the clothes before mildew took over but without scorching them.

Tanneke and Maria Thins treated me kindly enough when they found out about Agnes. Tanneke managed to check her irritation for several days, though soon she began again to scold and sulk, leaving it to me to placate her. Maria Thins said little but took to cutting off her daughter when Catharina became sharp with me.

Catharina herself seemed to know nothing of my sister, or did not show it. She was nearing her confinement, and as Tanneke had predicted she spent most of her time in bed, leaving the baby Johannes to Maertge’s charge. He was beginning to toddle about, and kept the girls busy.

The girls did not know I had a sister and so would not understand that I could lose one. Only Aleydis seemed to sense that something was wrong. She sometimes came to sit by me, pushing her body close to mine like a pup burrowing into its mother’s fur for warmth. She comforted me in a simple way that no one else could.

One day Cornelia came out to the courtyard where I was hanging up clothes. She held out an old doll to me. “We don’t play with this anymore,” she announced. “Not even Aleydis. Would you like to give it to your sister?” She made her eyes wide and innocent, and I knew she must have overheard someone mention Agnes’ death.

“No, thank you,” was all I could say, almost choking on the words.

She smiled and skipped away.

The studio remained empty. He did not start another painting. He spent much of his time away from the house, either at the Guild or at Mechelen, his mother’s inn across the square. I still cleaned the studio, but it became like any other task, just another room to mop and dust.

When I visited the Meat Hall I found it hard to meet Pieter the son’s eye. His kindness pained me. I should have returned it but did not. I should have been flattered but was not. I did not want his attention. I came to prefer being served by his father, who teased me but did not demand anything from me but to be critical of his meat. We ate fine meat that autumn.

On Sundays I sometimes went to Frans’ factory and urged him to come home with me. He did twice, cheering my parents a little. Until a year before they’d had three children at home. Now they had none. When Frans and I were both there we reminded them of better times. Once my mother even laughed, before stopping herself with a shake of her head. “God has punished us for taking for granted our good fortune,” she said. “We must not forget that.”

It was not easy visiting home. I found that after staying away those few Sundays during the quarantine, home had come to feel like a strange place. I was beginning to forget where my mother kept things, what kind of tiles lined the fireplace, how the sun shone in the rooms at different times of the day. After only a few months I could describe the house in Papists’ Corner better than my family’s.

Frans especially found it hard to visit. After long days and nights at the factory he wanted to smile and laugh and tease, or at least to sleep. I suppose I coaxed him there hoping to knit our family together again. It was impossible, though. Since my father’s accident we had become a different family.

When I came back one Sunday from my parents’, Catharina had begun her labor. I heard her groaning when I stepped inside the front door. I peeked into the great hall, which was darker than usual—the lower windows had been shuttered to give her privacy. Maria Thins was there with Tanneke and the midwife. When Maria Thins saw me she said, “Go look for the girls—I’ve sent them out to play. It won’t be long now. Come back in an hour.”

I was glad to leave. Catharina was making a great deal of noise, and it did not seem right to listen to her in that state. I knew too that she would not want me there.

I looked for the girls in their favorite place, the Beast Market round the corner from us, where livestock was sold. When I found them they were playing marbles and chasing one another. Baby Johannes tumbled after them—unsteady on his feet, he half walked, half crawled. It was not the kind of play we would have been allowed on a Sunday, but Catholics held different views.

When Aleydis grew tired she came to sit with me. “Will Mama have the baby soon?” she asked.

“Your grandmother said she would. We’ll go back in a bit and see them.”

“Will Papa be pleased?”

“I should think so.”

“Will he paint more quickly now there’s another baby?”

I did not answer. Catharina’s words were coming from a little girl’s mouth. I did not want to hear more.

When we returned he was standing in the doorway. “Papa, your cap!” cried Cornelia. The girls ran up to him and tried to snatch off the quilted paternity cap he wore, its ribbons dangling below his ears. He looked both proud and embarrassed. I was surprised—he had become a father five times before, and I thought he would be used to it. There was no reason for him to be embarrassed.

It is Catharina who wants many children, I thought then. He would rather be alone in his studio.

But that could not be quite right. I knew how babies were made. He had his part to play, and he must have played it willingly. And as difficult as Catharina could be, I had often seen him look at her, touch her shoulder, speak to her in a low voice laced with honey.

I did not like to think of him in that way, with his wife and children. I preferred to think of him alone in his studio. Or not alone, but with only me.

“You have another brother, girls,” he said. “His name is Franciscus. Would you like to see him?” He led them inside while I hung back in the street, holding Johannes.

Tanneke opened the shutters of the great hall’s lower windows and leaned out.

“Is the mistress all right?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. She makes a racket but there’s nothing behind it. She’s made to have babies—pops them out like a chestnut from its shell. Now come, master wants to say a prayer of thanks.”

Though uncomfortable, I could not refuse to pray with them. Protestants would have done the same after a good birth. I carried Johannes into the great hall, which was much lighter now and full of people. When I set him down he tottered over to his sisters, who were gathered around the bed. The curtains had been drawn back and Catharina lay propped against pillows, cradling the baby. Though exhausted, she was smiling, happy for once. My master stood near her, gazing down at his new son. Aleydis was holding his hand. Tanneke and the midwife were clearing away basins and bloody sheets while the new nurse waited near the bed.

Maria Thins came in from one of the kitchens with some wine and three glasses on a tray. When she set them down he let go of Aleydis’ hand, stepped away from the bed, and he and Maria Thins kneeled. Tanneke and the midwife stopped what they were doing and kneeled as well. Then the nurse and children and I kneeled, Johannes squirming and crying out as Lisbeth forced him to sit.

My master said a prayer to God, thanking Him for the safe delivery of Franciscus and for sparing Catharina. He added some Catholic phrases in Latin which I did not understand, but I did not mind much—he had a low, soothing voice that I liked to listen to.

When he was done Maria Thins poured three glasses of wine and she and he and Catharina drank good health to the baby. Then Catharina handed the baby to the nurse, who put him to her breast.

Tanneke signalled to me and we left the room to get bread and smoked herring for the midwife and the girls. “We’ll begin preparing for the birth feast now,” Tanneke remarked as we were setting things out. “Young mistress likes a big one. We’ll be run off our feet as usual.”

The birth feast was the biggest celebration I was to witness in that house. We had ten days to prepare for it, ten days of cleaning and cooking. Maria Thins hired two girls for a week to help Tanneke with the food and me with the cleaning. My girl was slow witted but worked well as long as I told her exactly what to do and kept a close eye on her. One day we washed—whether they were clean already or not—all the tablecloths and napkins that would be needed for the feast, as well as all the clothes in the house—shirts, robes, bonnets, collars, handkerchiefs, caps, aprons. The linens took another day. Then we washed all the tankards, glasses, earthenware plates, jugs, copper pots, pancake pans, iron grills and spits, spoons, ladles, as well as those from the neighbors, who lent them for the occasion. We polished the brass and the copper and the silver. We took curtains down and shook them outside, and beat all the cushions and rugs. We polished the wood of the beds, the cupboards, the chairs and tables, the windowsills, until everything gleamed.

By the end my hands were cracked and bleeding.

It was very clean for the feast.

Maria Thins placed special orders for lamb and veal and tongue, for a whole pig, for hare and pheasant and capons, for oysters and lobsters and caviar and herring, for sweet wine and the best ale, for sweet cakes prepared specially by the baker.

When I placed the meat order for Maria Thins with Pieter the father, he rubbed his hands. “So, yet another mouth to feed,” he proclaimed. “All the better for us!”

Great wheels of Gouda and Edam arrived, and artichokes and oranges and lemons and grapes and plums, and almonds and hazelnuts. Even a pineapple was sent, gift of a wealthy cousin of Maria Thins. I had never seen one before, and was not tempted by its rough, prickly skin. It was not for me to eat anyway. None of the food was, except for the odd taste Tanneke allowed us. She let me try a tiny bit of caviar, which I liked less than I admitted, for all its luxury, and some of the sweet wine, which was wonderfully spiced with cinnamon.

Extra peat and wood were piled in the courtyard, and spits borrowed from a neighbor. Barrels of ale were also kept in the courtyard, and the pig was roasted there. Maria Thins hired a young boy to look after all the fires, which were in use all night once we began roasting the pig.

Throughout the preparations Catharina remained in bed with Franciscus, tended by the nurse, serene as a swan. Like a swan too, though, she had a long neck and sharp beak. I kept away from her.

“This is how she would like the house to be every day,” Tanneke grumbled to me as she was preparing jugged hare and I was boiling water to wash the windows with. “She wants everything to be in a state around her. Queen of the bedcovers!” I chuckled with her, knowing I shouldn’t encourage her to be disloyal but cheered none the less when she was.

He stayed away during the preparations, locked in his studio or escaping to the Guild. I saw him only once, three days before the feast. The hired girl and I were polishing candlesticks in the kitchen when Lisbeth came to find me. “Butcher’s asking for you,” she said. “Out front.”

I dropped the polishing cloth, wiped my hands on my apron and followed her up the hallway. I knew it would be the son. He had never seen me in Papists’ Corner. At least my face was not chapped and red as it normally was from hanging over the steaming laundry.

Pieter the son had pulled up a cart in front of the house, loaded with the meat Maria Thins had ordered. The girls were peering into it. Only Cornelia looked round. When I appeared in the doorway Pieter smiled at me. I remained calm and did not blush. Cornelia was watching me.

She was not the only one. I felt his presence at my back—he had come down the hallway behind me. I turned to look at him, and saw that he had seen Pieter’s smile, and the expectation there as well.

He transferred his grey eyes to me. They were cold. I felt dizzy, as if I had stood up too quickly. I turned back round. Pieter’s smile was not so wide now. He had seen my dizziness.

I felt caught between the two men. It was not a pleasant feeling.

I stood aside to let my master pass. He turned into the Molenpoort without a word or glance. Pieter and I watched him go in silence.

“I have your order,” Pieter said then. “Where would you like it?”

That Sunday when I went home to my parents I did not want to tell them that another child had been born. I thought it would remind them of losing Agnes. But my mother had heard of it at the market and so I was made to describe to them the birth and praying with the family and all the preparations that had been made so far for the feast. My mother was concerned about the state of my hands, but I promised her the worst was done.

“And a painting?” my father asked. “Has he begun another painting?” He always hoped that I would describe a new painting to him.

“Nothing,” I replied. I had spent little time in the studio that week. Nothing there had changed.

“Perhaps he is idle,” my mother said.

“He is not that,” I answered quickly.

“Perhaps he does not want to see,” my father said.

“I don’t know what he wants,” I said more sharply than I had intended. My mother gazed at me. My father shifted in his seat.

I said nothing more about him.

The guests began to arrive around noon on the feast day. By evening there were perhaps a hundred people in and out of the house, spilling into the courtyard and the street. All sorts had been invited—wealthy merchants as well as our baker, tailor, cobbler, apothecary. Neighbors were there, and my master’s mother and sister, and Maria Thins’ cousins. Painters were there, and other Guild members. Van Leeuwenhoek was there, and van Ruijven and his wife.

Even Pieter the father was there, without his blood-stained apron, nodding and smiling at me as I passed with a jug of spiced wine. “Well, Griet,” he said as I poured him some, “my son will be jealous that I’m spending the evening with you.”

“I think not,” I murmured, pulling away from him, embarrassed.

Catharina was the center of attention. She had on a green silk dress altered to accommodate her belly, which had not yet shrunk. Over it she wore the ermine-trimmed yellow mantle van Ruijven’s wife had worn for the painting. It was odd to see it around another woman’s shoulders. I didn’t like her wearing it, though it was of course hers to wear. She also wore a pearl necklace and earrings, and her blond curls were dressed prettily. She had recovered quickly from the birth, and was very merry and graceful, her body relieved of some of the burden it had been carrying over the months. She moved easily through the rooms, drinking and laughing with her guests, lighting candles, calling for food, bringing people together. She stopped only to make a fuss over Franciscus when he was being fed by the nurse.

My master was much quieter. He spent most of his time in one corner of the great hall, talking to van Leeuwenhoek, though his eyes often followed Catharina around the room as she moved among her guests. He wore a smart black velvet jacket and his paternity cap, and looked comfortable though not much interested in the party. Large crowds did not appeal to him as they did his wife.

Late in the evening, van Ruijven managed to corner me in the hallway as I was passing along it with a lighted candle and a wine jug. “Ah, the wide-eyed maid,” he cried, leaning into me. “Hello, my girl.” He grabbed my chin in his hand, his other hand pulling the candle up to light my face. I did not like the way he looked at me.

“You should paint her,” he said over his shoulder.

My master was there. He was frowning. He looked as if he wanted to say something to his patron but could not.

“Griet, get me some more wine.” Pieter the father had popped out from the Crucifixion room and was holding a cup towards me.

“Yes, sir.” I pulled my chin from van Ruijven’s grasp and quickly crossed to Pieter the father. I could feel two pairs of eyes on my back.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sir, the jug’s empty. I’ll just get some more from the kitchen.” I hurried away, holding the jug close so they would not discover that it was full.

When I returned a few minutes later only Pieter the father remained, leaning against the wall. “Thank you,” I said in a low voice as I filled his glass.

He winked at me. “It was worth it just to hear you call me sir. I’ll never hear that again, will I?” He raised his glass in a mock toast and drank.

After the feast winter descended on us, and the house became cold and flat. Besides a great deal of cleaning up, there was no longer something to look forward to. The girls, even Aleydis, became difficult, demanding attention, rarely helping. Maria Thins spent longer in her own rooms upstairs than she had before. Franciscus, who had remained quiet all the way through the feast, suffered from wind and began to cry almost constantly. He made a piercing sound that could be heard throughout the house—in the courtyard, in the studio, in the cellar. Given her nature, Catharina was surprisingly patient with the baby, but snapped at everyone else, even her husband.

I had managed to put Agnes from my mind while preparing for the feast, but memories of her returned even more strongly than before. Now that I had time to think, I thought too much. I was like a dog licking its wounds to clean them but making them worse.

Worst of all, he was angry with me. Since the night van Ruijven cornered me, perhaps even since Pieter the son smiled at me, he had become more distant. I seemed also to cross paths with him more often than before. Although he went out a great deal—in part to escape Franciscus’ crying—I always seemed to be coming in the front door as he was leaving, or coming down the stairs as he was going up, or sweeping the Crucifixion room when he was looking for Maria Thins there. One day on an errand for Catharina I even met him in Market Square. Each time he nodded politely, then stepped aside to let me pass without looking at me.

I had offended him, but I did not know how.

The studio had become cold and flat as well. Before it had felt busy and full of purpose—it was where paintings were being made. Now, though I quickly swept away any dust that settled, it was simply an empty room, waiting for nothing but dust. I did not want it to be a sad place. I wanted to take refuge there, as I had before.

One morning Maria Thins came to open the door for me and found it already unlocked. We peered into the semidarkness. He was asleep at the table, his head on his arms, his back to the door. Maria Thins backed out. “Must have come up here because of the baby’s cries,” she muttered. I tried to look again but she was blocking the way. She shut the door softly. “Leave him be. You can clean there later.”

The next morning in the studio I opened all the shutters and looked around the room for something I could do, something I could touch that would not offend him, something I could move that he would not notice. Everything was in its place—the table, the chairs, the desk covered with books and papers, the cupboard with the brushes and knife carefully arranged on top, the easel propped against the wall, the clean palettes next to it. The objects he had painted were packed away in the storeroom or back in use in the house.

One of the bells of the New Church began to toll the hour. I went to the window to look out. By the time the bell had finished its sixth stroke I knew what I would do.

I got some water heated on the fire, some soap and clean rags and brought them back to the studio, where I began cleaning the windows. I had to stand on the table to reach the top panes.

I was washing the last window when I heard him enter the room. I turned to look at him over my left shoulder, my eyes wide. “Sir,” I began nervously. I was not sure how to explain my impulse to clean.

“Stop.”

I froze, horrified that I had gone against his wishes.

“Don’t move.”

He was staring at me as if a ghost had suddenly appeared in his studio.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, dropping the rag into the bucket of water. “I should have asked you first. But you are not painting anything at the moment and—”

He looked puzzled, then shook his head. “Oh, the windows. No, you may continue what you were doing.”

I would rather not have cleaned in front of him, but as he continued to stand there I had no choice. I swished the rag in the water, wrung it out and began wiping the panes again, inside and out.

I finished the window and stepped back to view the effect. The light that shone in was pure.

He was still standing behind me. “Does that please you, sir?” I asked.

“Look over your shoulder at me again.”

I did as he commanded. He was studying me. He was interested in me again.

“The light,” I said. “It’s cleaner now.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

The next morning the table had been moved back to the painting corner and covered with a red, yellow and blue table rug. A chair was set against the back wall, and a map hung over it.

He had begun again