Girl with a Pearl Earring

1665

My father wanted me to describe the painting once more.

“But nothing has changed since the last time,” I said.

“I want to hear it again,” he insisted, hunching over in his chair to get nearer to the fire. He sounded like Frans when he was a little boy and had been told there was nothing left to eat in the hotpot. My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again.

March was the month I was born.

Being blind seemed to make my father hate winter even more. His other senses strengthened, he felt the cold acutely, smelled the stale air in the house, tasted the blandness of the vegetable stew more than my mother. He suffered when the winter was long.

I felt sorry for him. When I could I smuggled to him treats from Tanneke’s kitchen—stewed cherries, dried apricots, a cold sausage, once a handful of dried rose petals I had found in Catharina’s cupboard.

“The baker’s daughter stands in a bright corner by a window,” I began patiently. “She is facing us, but is looking out the window, down to her right. She is wearing a yellow and black fitted bodice of silk and velvet, a dark blue skirt, and a white cap that hangs down in two points below her chin.”

“As you wear yours?” my father asked. He had never asked this before, though I had described the cap the same way each time.

“Yes, like mine. When you look at the cap long enough,” I added hurriedly, “you see that he has not really painted it white, but blue, and violet, and yellow.”

“But it’s a white cap, you said.”

“Yes, that’s what is so strange. It’s painted many colors, but when you look at it, you think it’s white.”

“Tile painting is much simpler,” my father grumbled. “You use blue and that’s all. A dark blue for the outlines, a light blue for the shadows. Blue is blue.”

And a tile is a tile, I thought, and nothing like his paintings. I wanted him to understand that white was not simply white. It was a lesson my master had taught me.

“What is she doing?” he asked after a moment.

“She has one hand on a pewter pitcher sitting on a table and one on a window she’s partly opened. She’s about to pick up the pitcher and dump the water from it out the window, but she’s stopped in the middle of what she’s doing and is either dreaming or looking at something in the street.”

“Which is she doing?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it seems one thing, sometimes the other.”

My father sat back in his seat, frowning. “First you say the cap is white but not painted white. Then you say the girl is doing one thing or maybe another. You’re confusing me.” He rubbed his brow as if his head ached.

“I’m sorry, Father. I’m trying to describe it accurately.”

“But what is the story in the painting?”

“His paintings don’t tell stories.”

He did not respond. He had been difficult all winter. If Agnes had been there she would have been able to cheer him. She had always known how to make him laugh.

“Mother, shall I light the footwarmers?” I asked, turning from my father to hide my irritation. Now that he was blind, he could easily sense the moods of others, when he wanted to. I did not like him being critical of the painting without having seen it, or comparing it to the tiles he had once painted. I wanted to tell him that if he could only see the painting he would understand that there was nothing confusing about it. It may not have told a story, but it was still a painting you could not stop looking at.

At the time my father and I talked, my mother had been busy around us, stirring the stew, feeding the fire, setting out plates and mugs, sharpening a knife to cut the bread. Without waiting for her to answer I gathered the footwarmers and took them to the back room where the peat was stored. As I filled them I chided myself for being angry with my father.

I brought the footwarmers back and lit them from the fire. When I had placed them under our seats at the table I led my father over to his chair while my mother spooned out the stew and poured the beer. My father took a bite and made a face. “Didn’t you bring anything from Papists’ Corner to sweeten this mush?” he muttered.

“I couldn’t. Tanneke has been difficult with me and I’ve stayed away from her kitchen.” I regretted it the moment the words left my mouth.

“Why? What did you do?” More and more my father was looking to find fault with me, at times even siding with Tanneke.

I thought quickly. “I spilled some of their best ale. A whole jug.”

My mother looked at me reproachfully. She knew when I lied. If my father hadn’t been feeling so miserable he might have noticed from my voice as well.

I was getting better at it, though.

When I left to go back my mother insisted on accompanying me part of the way, even though it was raining, a cold, hard rain. As we reached the Rietveld Canal and turned right towards Market Square, she said, “You will be seventeen soon.”

“Next week,” I agreed.

“Not long now until you are a woman.”

“Not long.” I kept my eyes on the raindrops pebbling the canal. I did not like to think about the future.

“I have heard that the butcher’s son is paying you attention.”

“Who told you that?”

In answer she simply brushed raindrops from her cap and shook out her shawl.

I shrugged. “I’m sure he’s paying me no more attention than he is other girls.”

I expected her to warn me, to tell me to be a good girl, to protect our family name. Instead she said, “Don’t be rude to him. Smile at him and be pleasant.”

Her words surprised me, but when I looked in her eyes and saw there the hunger for meat that a butcher’s son could provide, I understood why she had set aside her pride.

At least she did not ask me about the lie I had told earlier. I could not tell them why Tanneke was angry at me. That lie hid a much greater lie. I would have too much to explain.

Tanneke had discovered what I was doing during the afternoons when I was meant to be sewing.

I was assisting him.

It had begun two months before, one afternoon in January not long after Franciscus was born. It was very cold. Franciscus and Johannes were both poorly, with chesty coughs and trouble breathing. Catharina and the nurse were tending them by the fire in the washing kitchen while the rest of us sat close to the fire in the cooking kitchen.

Only he was not there. He was upstairs. The cold did not seem to affect him.

Catharina came to stand in the doorway between the two kitchens. “Someone must go to the apothecary,” she announced, her face flushed. “I need some things for the boys.” She looked pointedly at me.

Usually I would be the last chosen for such an errand. Visiting the apothecary was not like going to the butcher’s or fishmonger’s—tasks Catharina continued to leave to me after the birth of Franciscus. The apothecary was a respected doctor, and Catharina or Maria Thins liked to go to him. I was not allowed such a luxury. When it was so cold, however, any errand was given to the least important member of the house.

For once Maertge and Lisbeth did not ask to come with me. I wrapped myself in a woollen mantle and shawls while Catharina told me I was to ask for dried elder flowers and a coltsfoot elixir. Cornelia hung about, watching me tuck in the loose ends of the shawls.

“May I come with you?” she asked, smiling at me with well-practiced innocence. Sometimes I wondered if I judged her too harshly.

“No,” Catharina replied for me. “It’s far too cold. I won’t have another of my children getting sick. Off you go, then,” she said to me. “Quick as you can.”

I pulled the front door shut and stepped into the street. It was very quiet—people were sensibly huddled in their houses. The canal was frozen, the sky an angry grey. As the wind blew through me and I drew my nose further into the wool folds around my face, I heard my name being called. I looked around, thinking Cornelia had followed me. The front door was shut.

I looked up. He had opened a window and poked his head out.

“Sir?”

“Where are you going, Griet?”

“To the apothecary, sir. Mistress asked me. For the boys.”

“Will you get me something as well?”

“Of course, sir.” Suddenly the wind did not seem so bitter.

“Wait, I’ll write it down.” He disappeared and I waited. After a moment he reappeared and tossed down a small leather pouch. “Give the apothecary the paper inside and bring what he gives you back to me.”

I nodded and tucked the pouch into a fold of my shawl, pleased with this secret request.

The apothecary’s was along the Koornmarkt, towards the Rotterdam Gate. Although it was not far, each breath I took seemed to freeze inside me so that by the time I pushed into the shop I was unable to speak.

I had never been to an apothecary, not even before I became a maid—my mother had made all of our remedies. His shop was a small room, with shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling. They held all sizes of bottles, basins and earthenware jars, each one neatly labelled. I suspected that even if I could read the words I would not understand what each vessel held. Although the cold killed most smells, here there lingered an odor I did not recognize, like something in the forest, hidden under rotting leaves.

I had seen the apothecary himself only once, when he came to Franciscus’ birth feast a few weeks before. A bald, slight man, he reminded me of a baby bird. He was surprised to see me. Few people ventured out in such cold. He sat behind a table, a set of scales at his elbow, and waited for me to speak.

“I’ve come for my master and mistress,” I gasped at last when my throat had warmed enough for me to speak. He looked blank and I added, “The Vermeers.”

“Ah. How is the growing family?”

“The babies are ill. My mistress needs dried elder flowers and an elixir of coltsfoot. And my master—” I handed him the pouch. He took it with a puzzled expression, but when he read the slip of paper he nodded. “Run out of bone black and ocher,” he murmured. “That’s easily repaired. He’s never had anyone fetch the makings of colors for him before, though.” He squinted over the slip of paper at me. “He always gets them himself. This is a surprise.”

I said nothing.

“Have a seat, then. Back here by the fire while I get your things together.” He became busy, opening jars and weighing small mounds of dried flower buds, measuring syrup into a bottle, wrapping things carefully in paper and string. He placed some things in the leather pouch. The other packages he left loose.

“Does he need any canvases?” he asked over his shoulder as he replaced a jar on a high shelf.

“I wouldn’t know, sir. He asked me to get only what was on that paper.”

“This is very surprising, very surprising indeed.” He looked me up and down. I drew myself up—his attention made me wish I were taller. “Well, it is cold, after all. He wouldn’t go out unless he had to.” He handed me the packages and pouch and held the door open for me. Out in the street I looked back to see him still peering at me through a tiny window in the door.

Back at the house I went first to Catharina to give her the loose packages. Then I hurried to the stairs. He had come down and was waiting. I pulled the pouch from my shawl and handed it to him.

“Thank you, Griet,” he said.

“What are you doing?” Cornelia was watching us from further along the hallway.

To my surprise he didn’t answer her. He simply turned and climbed the stairs again, leaving me alone to face her.

The truth was the easiest answer, though I often felt uneasy telling Cornelia the truth. I was never sure what she would do with it. “I’ve bought some paint things for your father,” I explained.

“Did he ask you to?”

To that question I responded as her father had—I walked away from her toward the kitchens, removing my shawls as I went. I was afraid to answer, for I did not want to cause him harm. I knew already that it was best if no one knew I had run an errand for him.

I wondered if Cornelia would tell her mother what she had seen. Although young she was also shrewd, like her grandmother. She might hoard her information, carefully choosing when to reveal it.

She gave me her own answer a few days later.

It was a Sunday and I was in the cellar, looking in the chest where I kept my things for a collar to wear that my mother had embroidered for me. I saw immediately that my few belongings had been disturbed—collars not refolded, one of my chemises balled up and pushed into a corner, the tortoiseshell comb shaken from its handkerchief. The handkerchief around my father’s tile was folded so neatly that I became suspicious. When I opened it the tile came apart in two pieces. It had been broken so that the girl and boy were separated from each other, the boy now looking behind him at nothing, the girl all alone, her face hidden by her cap.

I wept then. Cornelia could not have guessed how that would hurt me. I would have been less upset if she had broken our heads from our bodies.

He began to ask me to do other things. One day he asked me to buy linseed oil at the apothecary’s on my way back from the fish stalls. I was to leave it at the bottom of the stairs for him so that he and the model would not be disturbed. So he said. Perhaps he was aware that Maria Thins or Catharina or Tanneke—or Cornelia—might notice if I went up to the studio at an unusual time.

It was not a house where secrets could be kept easily.

Another day he had me ask the butcher for a pig’s bladder. I did not understand why he wanted one until he later asked me to lay out paints he needed each morning when I had finished cleaning. He opened the drawers to the cupboard near his easel and showed me which paints were kept where, naming the colors as he went. I had not heard of many of the words—ultramarine, vermilion, massicot. The brown and yellow earth colors and the bone black and lead white were stored in little earthenware pots, covered with parchment to keep them from drying out. The more valuable colors—the blues and reds and yellows—were kept in small amounts in pigs’ bladders. A hole was punched in them so the paint could be squeezed out, with a nail plugging it shut.

One morning while I was cleaning he came in and asked me to stand in for the baker’s daughter, who had taken ill and could not come. “I want to look for a moment,” he explained. “Someone must stand there.”

I obediently took her place, one hand on the handle of the water pitcher, the other on the window frame, opened slightly so that a chilly draft brushed my face and chest.

Perhaps this is why the baker’s daughter is ill, I thought.

He had opened all of the shutters. I had never seen the room so bright.

“Tilt your chin down,” he said. “And look down, not at me. Yes, that’s it. Don’t move.”

He was sitting by the easel. He did not pick up his palette or his knife or his brushes. He simply sat, hands in his lap, and looked.

My face turned red. I had not realized that he would stare at me so intently.

I tried to think of something else. I looked out the window and watched a boat moving along the canal. The man poling it was the man who had helped me get the pot from the canal my first day. How much has changed since that morning, I thought. I had not even seen one of his paintings then. Now I am standing in one.

“Don’t look at what you are looking at,” he said. “I can see it in your face. It is distracting you.”

I tried not to look at anything, but to think of other things. I thought of a day when our family went out into the countryside to pick herbs. I thought of a hanging I had seen in Market Square the year before, of a woman who had killed her daughter in a drunken rage. I thought of the look on Agnes’ face the last time I had seen her.

“You are thinking too much,” he said, shifting in his seat.

I felt as if I had washed a tub full of sheets but not got them clean. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what to do.”

“Try closing your eyes.”

I closed them. After a moment I felt the window frame and the pitcher in my hands, anchoring me. Then I could sense the wall behind me, and the table to my left, and the cold air from the window.

This must be how my father feels, I thought, with the space all around him, and his body knowing where it is.

“Good,” he said. “That is good. Thank you, Griet. You may continue cleaning.”

I had never seen a painting made from the beginning. I thought that you painted what you saw, using the colors you saw.

He taught me.

He began the painting of the baker’s daughter with a layer of pale grey on the white canvas. Then he made reddish-brown marks all over it to indicate where the girl and the table and pitcher and window and map would go. After that I thought he would begin to paint what he saw—a girl’s face, a blue skirt, a yellow and black bodice, a brown map, a silver pitcher and basin, a white wall. Instead he painted patches of color—black where her skirt would be, ocher for the bodice and the map on the wall, red for the pitcher and the basin it sat in, another grey for the wall. They were the wrong colors—none was the color of the thing itself. He spent a long time on these false colors, as I called them.

Sometimes the girl came and spent hour after hour standing in place, yet when I looked at the painting the next day nothing had been added or taken away. There were just areas of color that did not make things, no matter how long I studied them. I only knew what they were meant to be because I cleaned the objects themselves, and had seen what the girl was wearing when I peeked at her one day as she changed into Catharina’s yellow and black bodice in the great hall.

I reluctantly set out the colors he asked for each morning. One day I put out a blue as well. The second time I laid it out he said to me, “No ultramarine, Griet. Only the colors I asked for. Why did you set it out when I did not ask for it?” He was annoyed.

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s just—” I took a deep breath—”she is wearing a blue skirt. I thought you would want it, rather than leaving it black.”

“When I am ready, I will ask.”

I nodded and turned back to polishing the lion-head chair. My chest hurt. I did not want him to be angry at me.

He opened the middle window, filling the room with cold air.

“Come here, Griet.”

I set my rag on the sill and went to him.

“Look out the window.”

I looked out. It was a breezy day, with clouds disappearing behind the New Church tower.

“What color are those clouds?”

“Why, white, sir.”

He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Are they?”

I glanced at them. “And grey. Perhaps it will snow.”

“Come, Griet, you can do better than that. Think of your vegetables.”

“My vegetables, sir?”

He moved his head slightly. I was annoying him again. My jaw tightened.

“Think of how you separated the whites. Your turnips and your onions—are they the same white?”

Suddenly I understood. “No. The turnip has green in it, the onion yellow.”

“Exactly. Now, what colors do you see in the clouds?”

“There is some blue in them,” I said after studying them for a few minutes. “And—yellow as well. And there is some green!” I became so excited I actually pointed. I had been looking at clouds all my life, but I felt as if I saw them for the first time at that moment.

He smiled. “You will find there is little pure white in clouds, yet people say they are white. Now do you understand why I do not need the blue yet?”

“Yes, sir.” I did not really understand, but did not want to admit it. I felt I almost knew.

When at last he began to add colors on top of the false colors, I saw what he meant. He painted a light blue over the girl’s skirt, and it became a blue through which bits of black could be seen, darker in the shadow of the table, lighter closer to the window. To the wall areas he added yellow ocher, through which some of the grey showed. It became a bright but not a white wall. When the light shone on the wall, I discovered, it was not white, but many colors.

The pitcher and basin were the most complicated—they became yellow, and brown, and green, and blue. They reflected the pattern of the rug, the girl’s bodice, the blue cloth draped over the chair—everything but their true silver color. And yet they looked as they should, like a pitcher and a basin.

After that I could not stop looking at things.

It became harder to hide what I was doing when he wanted me to help him make the paints. One morning he took me up to the attic, reached by a ladder in the storeroom next to the studio. I had never been there before. It was a small room, with a steeply slanted roof and a window that let in light and a view of the New Church. There was little there apart from a small cupboard and a stone table with a hollow place in it, holding a stone shaped like an egg with one end cut off. I had seen a similar table once at my father’s tile factory. There were also some vessels—basins and shallow earthenware plates—as well as tongs by the tiny fireplace.

“I would like you to grind some things here for me, Griet,” he said. He opened a cupboard drawer and took out a black stick the length of my little finger. “This is a piece of ivory, charred in the fire,” he explained. “For making black paint.”

Dropping it in the bowl of the table, he added a gummy substance that smelled of animal. Then he picked up the stone, which he called a muller, and showed me how to hold it, and how to lean over the table and use my weight against the stone to crush the bone. After a few minutes he had ground it into a fine paste.

“Now you try.” He scooped the black paste into a small pot and got out another piece of ivory. I took up the muller and tried to imitate his stance as I leaned over the table.

“No, your hand needs to do this.” He placed his hand over mine. The shock of his touch made me drop the muller, which rolled off the table and fell on the floor.

I jumped away from him and bent down to pick it up. “I’m sorry, sir,” I muttered, placing the muller in the bowl.

He did not try to touch me again.

“Move your hand up a little,” he commanded instead. “That’s right. Now use your shoulder to turn, your wrist to finish.”

It took me much longer to grind my piece, for I was clumsy and flustered from his touch. And I was smaller than him, and unused to the movement I was meant to make. At least my arms were strong from wringing out laundry.

“A little finer,” he suggested when he inspected the bowl. I ground for a few more minutes before he decided it was ready, having me rub the paste between my fingers so I would know how fine he wanted it. Then he laid several more pieces of bone on the table. “Tomorrow I will show you how to grind white lead. It is much easier than bone.”

I stared at the ivory.

“What is it, Griet? You’re not frightened of a few bones, are you? They are no different from the ivory comb you use to tidy your hair.”

I would never be rich enough to own such a comb. I tidied my hair with my fingers.

“It’s not that, sir.” All the other things he had asked of me I was able to do while cleaning or running errands. No one but Cornelia had become suspicious. But grinding things would take time—I could not do it while I was meant to be cleaning the studio, and I could not explain to others why I must go to the attic at times, leaving my other tasks. “This will take some time to grind,” I said feebly.

“Once you are used to it, it will not take as long as today.”

I hated to question or disobey him—he was my master. But I feared the anger of the women downstairs. “I’m meant to go to the butcher’s now, and to do the ironing, sir. For the mistress.” My words sounded petty.

He did not move. “To the butcher’s?” He was frowning.

“Yes, sir. The mistress will want to know why I cannot do my other work. She will want to know that I am helping you, up here. It’s not easy for me to come up for no reason.”

There was a long silence. The bell in the New Church tower struck seven times.

“I see,” he murmured when it had stopped. “Let me consider this.” He removed some of the ivory, putting it back in a drawer. “Do this bit now.” He gestured at what was left. “It shouldn’t take long. I must go out. Leave it here when you are done.”

He would have to speak to Catharina and tell her about my work. Then it would be easier for me to do things for him.

I waited, but he said nothing to Catharina.

The solution to the problem of the colors came unexpectedly from Tanneke. Since Franciscus’ birth the nurse had been sleeping in the Crucifixion room with Tanneke. From there she could get easily to the great hall to feed the baby when he woke. Although Catharina was not feeding him herself, she insisted that Franciscus sleep in a cradle next to her. I thought this a strange arrangement, but when I came to know Catharina better I understood that she wanted to hold on to the appearance of motherhood, if not the tasks themselves.

Tanneke was not happy sharing her room with the nurse, complaining that the nurse got up too often to tend to the baby, and when she did remain in bed she snored. Tanneke spoke of it to everyone, whether they listened or not. She began to slacken her work, and blamed it on not getting enough sleep. Maria Thins told her there was nothing they could do, but Tanneke continued to grumble. She often threw black looks at me—before I came to live in the house Tanneke had slept where I did in the cellar whenever a nurse was needed. It was almost as if she blamed me for the nurse’s snores.

One evening she even appealed to Catharina. Catharina was preparing herself for an evening at the van Ruijvens’, despite the cold. She was in a good mood—wearing her pearls and yellow mantle always made her happy. Over her mantle she had tied a wide linen collar that covered her shoulders and protected the cloth from the powder she was dusting on her face. As Tanneke listed her woes, Catharina continued to powder herself, holding up a mirror to inspect the results. Her hair had been dressed in braids and ribbons, and as long as she kept her happy expression she was very beautiful, the combination of her blond hair and light brown eyes making her look exotic.

At last she waved the powder-brush at Tanneke. “Stop!” she cried with a laugh. “We need the nurse and she must sleep near me. There’s no space in the girls’ room, but there is in yours, so she is there. There’s nothing to be done. Why do you bother me about it?”

“Perhaps there is one thing that may be done,” he said. I glanced up from the cupboard where I was searching for an apron for Lisbeth. He was standing in the doorway. Catharina gazed up at her husband in surprise. He rarely showed interest in domestic affairs. “Put a bed up in the attic and let someone sleep there. Griet, perhaps.”

“Griet in the attic? Why?” Catharina cried.

“Then Tanneke may sleep in the cellar, as she prefers,” he explained mildly.

“But—” Catharina stopped, confused. She seemed to disapprove of the idea but could not say why.

“Oh yes, madam,” Tanneke broke in eagerly. “That would certainly help.” She glanced at me.

I busied myself refolding the children’s clothes, though they were already tidy.

“What about the key to the studio?” Catharina finally found an argument. There was only one entrance to the attic, by the ladder in the studio’s storeroom. To get to my bed I would have to pass through the studio, which was kept locked at night. “We can’t give a maid the key.”

“She won’t need a key,” he countered. “You may lock the studio door once she has gone to bed. Then in the morning she may clean the studio before you come and unlock the door.”

I paused with my folding. I did not like the idea of being locked into my room at night.

Unfortunately this notion seemed to please Catharina. Perhaps she thought locking me away would keep me both safely in one place and out of her sight. “All right, then,” she decided. She made most decisions quickly. She turned to Tanneke and me. “Tomorrow you two move a bed to the attic. This is only temporary,” she added, “until the nurse is no longer needed.”

Temporary as my trips to the butcher and fishmonger were meant to be temporary, I thought.

“Come with me to the studio for a moment,” he said. He was looking at her in a way I had begun to recognize—a painter’s way.

“Me?” Catharina smiled at her husband. Invitations to his studio were rare. She set down her powder-brush with a flourish and began to remove the wide collar, now covered with dust.

He reached out and grasped her hand. “Leave that.”

This was almost as surprising as his suggestion to move me to the attic. As he led Catharina upstairs, Tanneke and I exchanged looks.

The next day the baker’s daughter began to wear the wide white collar while modelling for the painting.

Maria Thins was not so easily fooled. When she heard from a gleeful Tanneke about her move to the cellar and mine to the attic she puffed on her pipe and frowned. “You two could just switch”—she pointed at us with the pipe—”so that Griet sleeps with the nurse and you go in the cellar. Then there is no need for anyone to move to the attic.”

Tanneke was not listening—she was too full of her victory to notice the logic in her mistress’s words.

“Mistress has agreed to it,” I said simply.

Maria Thins gave me a long sideways look.

Sleeping in the attic made it easier for me to work there, but I still had little time to do so. I could get up earlier and go to bed later, but sometimes he gave me so much work that I had to find a way to go up in the afternoons, when I normally sat by the fire and sewed. I began to complain of not being able to see my stitching in the dim kitchen, and needing the light of my bright attic room. Or I said my stomach hurt and I wanted to lie down. Maria Thins gave me that same sideways look each time I made an excuse, but did not comment.

I began to get used to lying.

Once he had suggested that I sleep in the attic he left it to me to arrange my duties so that I could work for him. He never helped by lying for me, or asking me if I had time to spare for him. He gave me instructions in the morning and expected them to be done by the next day.

The colors themselves made up for the troubles I had hiding what I was doing. I came to love grinding the things he brought from the apothecary—bones, white lead, madder, massicot—to see how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough, dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors was magical.

From him I learned too how to wash substances to rid them of impurities and bring out the true colors. I used a series of shells as shallow bowls, and rinsed and rerinsed colors, sometimes thirty times, to get out the chalk or sand or gravel. It was long and tedious work, but very satisfying to see the color grow cleaner with each wash, and closer to what was needed.

The only color he did not allow me to handle was ultramarine. Lapis lazuli was so expensive, and the process of extracting a pure blue from the stone so difficult, that he worked with it himself.

I grew used to being around him. Sometimes we stood side by side in the small room, me grinding white lead, him washing lapis or burning ochers in the fire. He said little to me. He was a quiet man. I did not speak either. It was peaceful then, with the light coming in through the window. When we were done we poured water from a pitcher over each other’s hands and scrubbed ourselves clean.

It was very cold in the attic—although there was the little fire he used for heating linseed oil or burning colors, I did not dare light it unless he wanted me to. Otherwise I would have to explain to Catharina and Maria Thins why peat and wood were disappearing so fast.

I did not mind the cold so much when he was there. When he stood close to me I could feel the warmth of his body.

I was washing a bit of massicot I had just ground one afternoon when I heard Maria Thins’ voice in the studio below. He was working on the painting, the baker’s daughter sighing occasionally as she stood.

“Are you cold, girl?” Maria Thins asked.

“A little,” came the faint reply.

“Why doesn’t she have a footwarmer?”

His voice was so low that I didn’t hear his answer.

“It won’t show in the painting, not by her feet. We don’t want her getting sick again.”

Again I could not hear what he said.

“Griet can get one for her,” Maria Thins suggested. “She should be in the attic, for she’s meant to have a stomachache. I’ll just find her.”

She was quicker than I had thought an old woman could be. By the time I put my foot on the top rung she was halfway up the ladder. I stepped back into the attic. I could not escape her, and there was no time to hide anything.

When Maria Thins climbed into the room, she quickly took in the shells laid in rows on the table, the jug of water, the apron I wore speckled with yellow from the massicot.

“So this is what you’ve been up to, eh, girl? I thought as much.”

I lowered my eyes. I did not know what to say.

“Stomachache, sore eyes. We are not all idiots around here, you know.”

Ask him, I longed to tell her. He is my master. This is his doing.

But she did not call to him. Nor did he appear at the bottom of the ladder to explain.

There was a long silence. Then Maria Thins said, “How long have you been assisting him, girl?”

“A few weeks, madam.”

“He’s been painting faster these last weeks, I’ve noticed.”

I raised my eyes. Her face was calculating.

“You help him to paint faster, girl,” she said in a low voice, “and you’ll keep your place here. Not a word to my daughter or Tanneke, now.”

“Yes, madam.”

She chuckled. “I might have known, clever one that you are. You almost fooled even me. Now, get that poor girl down there a footwarmer.”

I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth pigments. I liked my view of the New Church, and the quiet. No one came up except him. The girls did not visit me as they sometimes had in the cellar, or secretly search through my things. I felt alone there, perched high above the noisy household, able to see it from a distance.

Rather like him.

The best part, however, was that I could spend more time in the studio. Sometimes I wrapped myself in a blanket and crept down late at night when the house was still. I looked at the painting he was working on by candlelight, or opened a shutter a little to let in moonlight. Sometimes I sat in the dark in one of the lion-head chairs pulled up to the table and rested my elbow on the blue and red table rug that covered it. I imagined wearing the yellow and black bodice and pearls, holding a glass of wine, sitting across the table from him.

There was one thing I did not like about the attic, however. I did not like being locked in at night.

Catharina had got the studio key back from Maria Thins and began to lock and unlock the door. She must have felt it gave her some control over me. She was not happy about my being in the attic—it meant I was closer to him, to the place she was not allowed in but where I could wander freely.

It must have been hard for a wife to accept such an arrangement.

It worked for a time, however. For a time I was able to slip away in the afternoons and wash and grind colors for him. Catharina often slept then—Franciscus had not settled, and woke her most nights so that she needed sleep during the day. Tanneke usually fell asleep by the fire as well, and I could leave the kitchen without always having to make up an excuse. The girls were busy with Johannes, teaching him to walk and talk, and rarely noticed my absence. If they did Maria Thins said I was running an errand for her, fetching things from her rooms, or sewing something for her that needed bright attic light to work by. They were children, after all, absorbed in their own world, indifferent to the adult lives around them except when it directly affected them.

Or so I thought.

One afternoon I was washing white lead when Cornelia called my name from downstairs. I quickly wiped my hands, removed the apron I wore for attic work and changed into my daily apron before climbing down the ladder to her. She stood on the threshold of the studio, looking as if she were standing at the edge of a puddle and tempted to step in it.

“What is it?” I spoke rather sharply.

“Tanneke wants you.” Cornelia turned and led the way to the stairs. She hesitated at the top. “Will you help me, Griet?” she asked plaintively. “Go first so that if I fall you will catch me. The stairs are so steep.”

It was unlike her to be scared, even on stairs she did not use much. I was touched, or perhaps I was simply feeling guilty for being sharp with her. I descended the stairs, then turned and held out my arms. “Now you.”

Cornelia was standing at the top, hands in her pockets. She started down the stairs, one hand on the banister, the other balled into a tight fist. When she was most of the way down she let go and jumped so that she fell against me, sliding down my front, pressing painfully into my stomach. Once she regained her feet she began to laugh, head thrown up, brown eyes narrowed to slits.

“Naughty girl,” I muttered, regretting my softness.

I found Tanneke in the cooking kitchen, Johannes in her lap.

“Cornelia said you wanted me.”

“Yes, she’s torn one of her collars and wants you to mend it. Wouldn’t let me touch it—I don’t know why, she knows I mend collars best.” As Tanneke handed it to me her eyes strayed to my apron. “What’s that there? Are you bleeding?”

I looked down. A slash of red dust crossed my stomach like a streak on a window pane. For a moment I thought of the aprons of Pieter the father and son.

Tanneke leaned closer. “That’s not blood. It looks like powder. How did that get there?”

I gazed at the streak. Madder, I thought. I ground this a few weeks ago.

Only I heard the stifled giggle from the hallway.

Cornelia had been waiting some time for this mischief. She had even managed somehow to get up to the attic to steal the powder.

I did not make up an answer fast enough. As I hesitated, Tanneke’s suspicion grew. “Have you been in the master’s things?” she said in an accusing tone. She had, after all, modelled for him and knew what he kept in the studio.

“No, it was—” I stopped. If I tattled on Cornelia I would sound petty and it would probably not stop Tanneke from discovering what I did in the attic.

“I think young mistress had better see this,” she decided.

“No,” I said quickly.

Tanneke drew herself up as much as she could with a sleeping child in her lap. “Take off your apron,” she commanded, “so I can show it to the young mistress.”

“Tanneke,” I said, gazing levelly at her, “if you know what’s best for you, you’ll not disturb Catharina, you’ll speak to Maria Thins. Alone, not in front of the girls.”

It was those words, with their bullying tone, that caused the most damage between Tanneke and me. I did not think to sound like that—I was simply desperate to stop her from telling Catharina any way I could. But she would never forgive me for treating her as if she were below me.

My words at least had their effect. Tanneke gave me a hard, angry look, but behind it was uncertainty, and the desire indeed to tell her own beloved mistress. She hung between that desire and the wish to punish my impudence by disobeying me.

“Speak to your mistress,” I said softly. “But speak to her alone.”

Though my back was to the door, I sensed Cornelia slipping away from it.

Tanneke’s own instincts won. With a stony face she handed Johannes to me and went to find Maria Thins. Before I settled him on my lap I carefully wiped away the red pigment with a rag, then threw it in the fire. It still left a stain. I sat with my arms around the little boy and waited for my fate to be decided.

I never found out what Maria Thins said to Tanneke, what threats or promises she made to keep her quiet. But it worked—Tanneke said nothing about my attic work to Catharina or the girls, or to me. She became much harder with me, though—deliberately difficult rather than unthinkingly so. She sent me back to the fish stalls with the cod I knew she had asked for, swearing she had told me to buy flounder. When she cooked she became sloppier, spilling as much grease as she could on her apron so that I would have to soak the cloth longer and scrub harder to get the grease out. She left buckets for me to empty, and stopped bringing water to fill the kitchen cistern or mopping the floors. She sat and watched me balefully, refusing to move her feet so that I had to mop around them, to find afterwards that one foot had covered a sticky puddle of grease.

She did not talk kindly to me any longer. She made me feel alone in a house full of people.

So I did not dare to take nice things from her kitchen to cheer my father with. And I did not tell my parents how hard things were for me at the Oude Langendijck, how careful I had to be to keep my place. Nor could I tell them about the few good things—the colors I made, the nights when I sat alone in the studio, the moments when he and I worked side by side and I was warmed by his presence.

All I could tell them about were his paintings.

One April morning when the cold at last had gone, I was walking along the Koornmarkt to the apothecary when Pieter the son appeared at my side and wished me good day. I had not seen him earlier. He wore a clean apron and carried a bundle, which he said he was delivering further along the Koornmarkt. He was going the same way as me and asked if he could walk with me. I nodded—I did not feel I could say no. Through the winter I had seen him once or twice a week at the Meat Hall. I always found it hard to meet his gaze—his eyes felt like needles pricking my skin. His attention worried me.

“You look tired,” he said now. “Your eyes are red. They are working you too hard.”

Indeed, they were working me hard. My master had given me so much bone to grind that I had to get up very early to finish it. And the night before Tanneke had made me stay up late to rewash the kitchen floor after she spilled a pan of grease all over it.

I did not want to blame my master. “Tanneke has taken against me,” I said instead, “and gives me more to do. Then, of course, it’s getting warmer as well and we are cleaning the winter out of the house.” I added this so that he would not think I was complaining about her.

“Tanneke is an odd one,” he said, “but loyal.”

“To Maria Thins, yes.”

“To the family as well. Remember how she defended Catharina from her mad brother?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Pieter looked surprised. “It was the talk of the Meat Hall for days. Ah, but you don’t gossip, do you? You keep your eyes open but you don’t tell tales, or listen to them.” He seemed to approve. “Me, I hear it all day from the old ones waiting for meat. Can’t help but some of it sticks.”

“What did Tanneke do?” I asked despite myself.

Pieter smiled. “When your mistress was carrying the last child but one—what’s its name?”

“Johannes. Like his father.”

Pieter’s smile dimmed like a cloud crossing the sun. “Yes, like his father.” He took up the tale again. “One day Catharina’s brother, Willem, came around to the Oude Langendijck, when she was big with child, and began to beat her, right in the street.”

“Why?”

“He’s missing a brick or two, they say. He’s always been violent. His father as well. You know the father and Maria Thins separated many years ago? He used to beat her.”

“Beat Maria Thins?” I repeated in wonder. I would never have guessed that anyone could beat Maria Thins.

“So when Willem began hitting Catharina it seems Tanneke got in between them to protect her. Even thumped him soundly.”

Where was my master when this happened? I thought. He could not have remained in his studio. He could not have. He must have been out at the Guild, or with van Leeuwenhoek, or at Mechelen, his mother’s inn.

“Maria Thins and Catharina managed to have Willem confined last year,” Pieter continued. “Can’t leave the house he’s lodged in. That’s why you haven’t seen him. Have you really heard nothing of this? Don’t they talk in your house?”

“Not to me.” I thought of all the times Catharina and her mother put their heads together in the Crucifixion room, falling silent when I entered. “And I don’t listen behind doorways.”

“Of course you don’t.” Pieter was smiling again as if I had told a joke. Like everyone else, he thought all maids eavesdropped. There were many assumptions about maids that people made about me.

I was silent the rest of the way. I had not known that Tanneke could be so loyal and brave, despite all she said behind Catharina’s back, or that Catharina had suffered such blows, or that Maria Thins could have such a son. I tried to imagine my own brother beating me in the street but could not.

Pieter said no more—he could see my confusion. When he left me in front of the apothecary he simply touched my elbow and continued on his way. I had to stand for a moment looking into the dark green water of the canal before I shook my head to clear it and turned to the apothecary’s door.

I was shaking from my thoughts a picture of the knife spinning on my mother’s kitchen floor.

One Sunday Pieter the son came to services at our church. He must have slipped in after my parents and me, and sat in the back, for I did not see him until afterward when we were outside speaking to our neighbors. He was standing off to one side, watching me. When I caught sight of him I drew in my breath sharply. At least, I thought, he is Protestant. I had not been certain before. Since working in the house at Papists’ Corner I was no longer certain of many things.

My mother followed my gaze. “Who is that?”

“The butcher’s son.”

She gave me a curious look, part surprise, part fear. “Go to him,” she whispered, “and bring him to us.”

I obeyed her and went up to Pieter. “Why are you here?” I asked, knowing I should be more polite.

He smiled. “Hello, Griet. No pleasant words for me?”

“Why are you here?”

“I’m going to services in every church in Delft, to see which I like best. It may take some time.” When he saw my face he dropped his tone—joking was not the way with me. “I came to see you, and to meet your parents.”

I blushed so hot I felt feverish. “I would rather you did not,” I said softly.

“Why not?”

“I’m only seventeen. I don’t—I’m not thinking of such things yet.”

“There’s no rush,” Pieter said.

I looked down at his hands—they were clean, but there were still traces of blood around his nails. I thought of my master’s hand over mine as he showed me how to grind bone, and shivered.

People were staring at us, for he was a stranger to the church. And he was a handsome man—even I could see that, with his long blond curls, bright eyes and ready smile. Several young women were trying to catch his eye.

“Will you introduce me to your parents?”

Reluctantly I led him to them. Pieter nodded to my mother and grasped my father’s hand, who stepped back nervously. Since he had lost his eyes he was shy of meeting strangers. And he had never before met a man who showed interest in me.

“Don’t worry, Father,” I whispered to him while my mother was introducing Pieter to a neighbor, “you aren’t losing me.”

“We’ve already lost you, Griet. We lost you the moment you became a maid.”

I was glad he could not see the tears that pricked my eyes.

Pieter the son did not come every week to our church, but he came often enough that each Sunday I grew nervous, smoothing my skirt more than it needed, pressing my lips together as we sat in our pew.

“Has he come? Is he here?” my father would ask each Sunday, turning his head this way and that.

I let my mother answer. “Yes,” she would say, “he is here,” or “No, he has not come.”

Pieter always said hello to my parents before greeting me. At first they were uneasy with him. However, Pieter chatted easily to them, ignoring their awkward responses and long silences. He knew how to talk to people, meeting so many at his father’s stall. After several Sundays my parents became used to him. The first time my father laughed at something Pieter said he was so surprised at himself that he immediately frowned, until Pieter said something else to make him laugh again.

There was always a moment after they had been speaking when my parents stepped back and left us alone. Pieter wisely let them decide when. The first few times it did not happen at all. Then one Sunday my mother pointedly took my father’s arm and said, “Let us go and speak to the minister.”

For several Sundays I dreaded that moment until I too became used to being on my own with him in front of so many watchful eyes. Pieter sometimes teased me gently, but more often he asked me what I had been doing during the week, or told me stories he had heard in the Meat Hall, or described auctions at the Beast Market. He was patient with me when I became tongue-tied or sharp or dismissive.

He never asked me about my master. I never told him I was working with the colors. I was glad he did not ask me.

On those Sundays I felt very confused. When I should be listening to Pieter I found myself thinking about my master.

One Sunday in May, when I had been working at the house on the Oude Langendijck for almost a year, my mother said to Pieter just before she and my father left us alone, “Will you come back to eat with us after next Sunday’s service?”

Pieter smiled as I gaped at her. “I’ll come.”

I barely heard what he said after that. When he finally left and my parents and I went home I had to bite my lips so that I would not shout. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to invite Pieter?” I muttered.

My mother glanced at me sideways. “It’s time we asked him,” was all she said.

She was right—it would be rude of us not to invite him to our house. I had not played this game with a man before, but I had seen what went on with others. If Pieter was serious, then my parents would have to treat him seriously.

I also knew what a hardship it would be to them to have him come. My parents had very little now. Despite my wages and what my mother made from spinning wool for others, they could barely feed themselves, much less another mouth—and a butcher’s mouth at that. I could do little to help them—take what I could from Tanneke’s kitchen, a bit of wood, perhaps, some onions, some bread. They would eat less that week and light the fire less, just so that they could feed him properly.

But they insisted that he come. They would not say so to me, but they must have seen feeding him as a way of filling our own stomachs in the future. A butcher’s wife—and her parents—would always eat well. A little hunger now would bring a heavy stomach eventually.

Later, when he began coming regularly, Pieter sent them gifts of meat which my mother would cook for the Sunday. At that first Sunday dinner, however, she sensibly did not serve meat to a butcher’s son. He would have been able to judge exactly how poor they were by the cut of the joint. Instead she made a fish stew, even adding shrimps and lobster, never telling me how she managed to pay for them.

The house, though shabby, gleamed from her attentions. She had got out some of my father’s best tiles, those she had not had to sell, and polished and lined them up along the wall so Peter could look at them as he ate. He praised my mother’s stew, and his words were genuine. She was pleased, and blushed and smiled and gave him more. Afterwards he asked my father about the tiles, describing each one until my father recognized it and could complete the description.

“Griet has the best one,” he said after they had gone through all those in the room. “It’s of her and her brother.”

“I’d like to see it,” Pieter murmured.

I studied my chapped hands in my lap and swallowed. I had not told them what Cornelia had done to my tile.

As Pieter was leaving my mother whispered to me to see him to the end of the street. I walked beside him, sure that our neighbors were staring, though in truth it was a rainy day and there were few people out. I felt as if my parents had pushed me into the street, that a deal had been made and I was being passed into the hands of a man. At least he is a good man, I thought, even if his hands are not as clean as they could be.

Close to the Rietveld Canal there was an alley that Pieter guided me to, his hand at the small of my back. Agnes used to hide there during our games as children. I stood against the wall and let Pieter kiss me. He was so eager that he bit my lips. I did not cry out—I licked away the salty blood and looked over his shoulder at the wet brick wall opposite as he pushed himself against me. A raindrop fell into my eye.

I would not let him do all he wanted. After a time Pieter stepped back. He reached a hand towards my head. I moved away.

“You favor your caps, don’t you?” he said.

“I’m not rich enough to dress my hair and go without a cap,” I snapped. “Nor am I a—” I did not finish. I did not need to tell him what other kind of woman left her head bare.

“But your cap covers all your hair. Why is that? Most women show some of their hair.”

I did not answer.

“What color is your hair?”

“Brown.”

“Light or dark?”

“Dark.”

Pieter smiled as if he were indulging a child in a game. “Straight or curly?”

“Neither. Both.” I winced at my confusion.

“Long or short?”

I hesitated. “Below my shoulders.”

He continued to smile at me, then kissed me once more and turned back toward Market Square.

I had hesitated because I did not want to lie but did not want him to know. My hair was long and could not be tamed. When it was uncovered it seemed to belong to another Griet—a Griet who would stand in an alley alone with a man, who was not so calm and quiet and clean. A Griet like the women who dared to bare their heads. That was why I kept my hair completely hidden—so that there would be no trace of that Griet.

He finished the painting of the baker’s daughter. This time I had warning, for he stopped asking me to grind and wash colors. He did not use much paint now, nor did he make sudden changes at the end as he had with the woman with the pearl necklace. He had made changes earlier, removing one of the chairs from the painting, and moving the map along the wall. I was less surprised by such changes, for I’d had the chance to think of them myself, and knew that what he did made the painting better.

He borrowed van Leeuwenhoek’s camera obscura again to look at the scene one last time. When he had set it up he allowed me to look through it as well. Although I still did not understand how it worked, I came to admire the scenes the camera painted inside itself, the miniature, reversed pictures of things in the room. The colors of ordinary objects became more intense—the table rug a deeper red, the wall map a glowing brown like a glass of ale held up to the sun. I was not sure how the camera helped him to paint, but I was becoming more like Maria Thins—if it made him paint better, I did not question it.

He was not painting faster, however. He spent five months on the girl with the water pitcher. I often worried that Maria Thins would remind me that I had not helped him to work faster, and tell me to pack my things and leave.

She did not. She knew that he had been very busy at the Guild that winter, as well as at Mechelen. Perhaps she had decided to wait and see if things would change in the summer. Or perhaps she found it hard to chide him since she liked the painting so much.

“It’s a shame such a fine painting is to go only to the baker,” she said one day. “We could have charged more if it were for van Ruijven.” It was clear that while he painted the works, it was she who struck the deals.

The baker liked the painting too. The day he came to see it was very different from the formal visit van Ruijven and his wife had made several months before to view their painting. The baker brought his whole family, including several children and a sister or two. He was a merry man, with a face permanently flushed from the heat of his ovens and hair that looked as if it had been dipped in flour. He refused the wine Maria Thins offered, preferring a mug of beer. He loved children, and insisted that the four girls and Johannes be allowed into the studio. They loved him as well—each time he visited he brought them another shell for their collection. This time it was a conch as big as my hand, rough and spiky and white with pale yellow marks on the outside, a polished pink and orange on the inside. The girls were delighted, and ran to get their other shells. They brought them upstairs and they and the baker’s children played together in the storeroom while Tanneke and I served the guests in the studio.

The baker announced he was satisfied with the painting. “My daughter looks well, and that’s enough for me,” he said.

Afterwards, Maria Thins lamented that he had not looked at it as closely as van Ruijven would have, that his senses were dulled by the beer he drank and the disorder he surrounded himself with. I did not agree, though I did not say so. It seemed to me that the baker had an honest response to the painting. Van Ruijven tried too hard when he looked at paintings, with his honeyed words and studied expressions. He was too aware of having an audience to perform for, whereas the baker merely said what he thought.

I checked on the children in the storeroom. They had spread across the floor, sorting shells and getting sand everywhere. The chests and books and dishes and cushions kept there did not interest them.

Cornelia was climbing down the ladder from the attic. She jumped from three rungs up and shouted triumphantly as she crashed to the floor. When she looked at me briefly, her eyes were a challenge. One of the baker’s sons, about Aleydis’ age, climbed partway up the ladder and jumped to the floor. Then Aleydis tried it, and another child, and another.

I had never known how Cornelia managed to get to the attic to steal the madder that stained my apron red. It was in her nature to be sly, to slip away when no one was looking. I had said nothing to Maria Thins or him about her pilfering. I was not sure they would believe me. Instead I had made sure the colors were locked away whenever he and I were not there.

I said nothing to her now as she sprawled on the floor next to Maertge. But that night I checked my things. Everything was there—my broken tile, my tortoiseshell comb, my prayer book, my embroidered handkerchiefs, my collars, my chemises, my aprons and caps. I counted and sorted and refolded them.

Then I checked the colors, just to be sure. They too were in order, and the cupboard did not look as if it had been tampered with.

Perhaps she was just being a child after all, climbing a ladder to jump from it, looking for a game rather than mischief.

The baker took away his painting in May, but my master did not begin setting up the next painting until July. I grew anxious about this delay, expecting Maria Thins to blame me, even though we both knew that it was not my fault. Then one day I overheard her tell Catharina that a friend of van Ruijven’s saw the painting of his wife with the pearl necklace and thought she should be looking out rather than at a mirror. Van Ruijven had thus decided that he wanted a painting with his wife’s face turned towards the painter. “He doesn’t paint that pose often,” she remarked.

I could not hear Catharina’s response. I stopped sweeping the floor of the girls’ room for a moment.

“You remember the last one,” Maria Thins reminded her. “The maid. Remember van Ruijven and the maid in the red dress?”

Catharina snorted with muffled laughter.

“That was the last time anyone looked out from one of his paintings,” Maria Thins continued, “and what a scandal that was! I was sure he would say no when van Ruijven suggested it this time, but he has agreed to do it.”

I could not ask Maria Thins, who would know I had been listening to them. I could not ask Tanneke, who would never repeat gossip to me now. So one day when there were few people at his stall I asked Pieter the son if he had heard about the maid in the red dress.

“Oh yes, that story went all around the Meat Hall,” he answered, chuckling. He leaned over and began rearranging the cows’ tongues on display. “It was several years ago now. It seems van Ruijven wanted one of his kitchen maids to sit for a painting with him. They dressed her in one of his wife’s gowns, a red one, and van Ruijven made sure there was wine in the painting so he could get her to drink every time they sat together. Sure enough, before the painting was finished she was carrying van Ruijven’s child.”

“What happened to her?”

Pieter shrugged. “What happens to girls like that?”

His words froze my blood. Of course I had heard such stories before, but never one so close to me. I thought about my dreams of wearing Catharina’s clothes, of van Ruijven grasping my chin in the hallway, of him saying “You should paint her” to my master.

Pieter had stopped what he was doing, a frown on his face. “Why do you want to know about her?”

“It’s nothing,” I answered lightly. “Just something I overheard. It means nothing.”

I had not been present when he set up the scene for the painting of the baker’s daughter—I had not yet been assisting him. Now, however, the first time van Ruijven’s wife came to sit for him I was up in the attic working, and could hear what he said. She was a quiet woman. She did what was asked of her without a sound. Even her fine shoes did not tap across the tiled floor. He had her stand by the unshuttered window, then sit in one of the two lion-head chairs placed around the table. I heard him close some shutters. “This painting will be darker than the last,” he declared.

She did not respond. It was as if he were talking to himself. After a moment he called up to me. When I appeared he said, “Griet, get my wife’s yellow mantle, and her pearl necklace and earrings.”

Catharina was visiting friends that afternoon so I could not ask her for her jewels. I would have been frightened to anyway. Instead I went to Maria Thins in the Crucifixion room, who unlocked Catharina’s jewelry box and handed me the necklace and earrings. Then I got out the mantle from the cupboard in the great hall, shook it out and folded it carefully over my arm. I had never touched it before. I let my nose sink into the fur—it was very soft, like a baby rabbit’s.

As I walked down the hallway to the stairs I had the sudden desire to run out the door with the riches in my arms. I could go to the star in the middle of Market Square, choose a direction to follow, and never come back.

Instead I returned to van Ruijven’s wife and helped her into the mantle. She wore it as if it were her own skin. After sliding the earring wires through the holes in her lobes, she looped the pearls around her neck. I had taken up the ribbons to tie the necklace for her when he said, “Don’t wear the necklace. Leave it on the table.”

She sat again. He sat in his chair and studied her. She did not seem to mind—she gazed into space, seeing nothing, as he had tried to get me to do.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked at him. Her eyes were large and dark, almost black.

He laid a table rug on the table, then changed it for the blue cloth. He laid the pearls in a line on the table, then in a heap, then in a line again. He asked her to stand, to sit, then to sit back, then to sit forward.

I thought he had forgotten that I was watching from the corner until he said, “Griet, get me Catharina’s powder-brush.”

He had her hold the brush up to her face, lay it on the table with her hand still grasping it, leave it to one side. He handed it to me. “Take it back.”

When I returned he had given her a quill and paper. She sat in the chair, leaning forward, and wrote, an inkwell at her right. He opened a pair of the upper shutters and closed the bottom pair. The room became darker but the light shone on her high round forehead, on her arm resting on the table, on the sleeve of the yellow mantle.

“Move your left hand forward slightly,” he said. “There.”

She wrote.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked at him.

He got a map from the storeroom and hung it on the wall behind her. He took it down again. He tried a small landscape, a painting of a ship, the bare wall. Then he disappeared downstairs.

While he was gone I watched van Ruijven’s wife closely. It was perhaps rude of me, but I wanted to see what she would do. She did not move. She seemed to settle into the pose more completely. By the time he returned, with a still life of musical instruments, she looked as if she had always been sitting at the table, writing her letter. I had heard he painted her once before the previous necklace painting, playing a lute. She must have learned by now what he wanted from a model. Perhaps she simply was what he wanted.

He hung the painting behind her, then sat down again to study her. As they gazed at each other I felt as if I were not there. I wanted to leave, to go back to my colors, but I did not dare disturb the moment.

“The next time you come, wear white ribbons in your hair instead of pink, and a yellow ribbon where you tie your hair at the back.”

She nodded so slightly that her head hardly moved.

“You may sit back.”

As he released her, I felt free to go.

The next day he pulled up another chair to the table. The day after that he brought up Catharina’s jewelry box and set it on the table. Its drawers were studded with pearls around the keyholes.

Van Leeuwenhoek arrived with his camera obscura while I was working in the attic. “You will have to get one of your own some day,” I heard him say in his deep voice. “Though I admit it gives me the opportunity to see what you’re painting. Where is the model?”

“She could not come.”

“That is a problem.”

“No. Griet,” he called.

I climbed down the ladder. When I entered the studio van Leeuwenhoek gazed at me in astonishment. He had very clear brown eyes, with large lids that made him look sleepy. He was far from sleepy, though, but alert and puzzled, his mouth drawn in tightly at the corners. Despite his surprise at seeing me, he had a kindly look about him, and when he recovered he even bowed.

No gentleman had ever bowed to me before. I could not stop myself—I smiled.

Van Leeuwenhoek laughed. “What were you doing up there, my dear?”

“Grinding colors, sir.”

He turned to my master. “An assistant! What other surprises do you have for me? Next you’ll be teaching her to paint your women for you.”

My master was not amused. “Griet,” he said, “sit as you saw van Ruijven’s wife do the other day.”

I stepped nervously to the chair and sat, leaning forward as she had done.

“Take up the quill.”

I picked it up, my hand trembling and making the feather shake, and placed my hands as I had remembered hers. I prayed he would not ask me to write something, as he had van Ruijven’s wife. My father had taught me to write my name, but little else. At least I knew how to hold the quill. I glanced at the sheets on the table and wondered what van Ruijven’s wife had written on them. I could read a little, from familiar things like my prayer book, but not a lady’s hand.

“Look at me.”

I looked at him. I tried to be van Ruijven’s wife.

He cleared his throat. “She will be wearing the yellow mantle,” he said to van Leeuwenhoek, who nodded.

My master stood, and they set up the camera obscura so that it pointed at me. Then they took turns looking. When they were bent over the box with the black robe over their heads, it became easier for me to sit and think of nothing, as I knew he wanted me to.

He had van Leeuwenhoek move the painting on the back wall several times before he was satisfied with its position, then open and shut shutters while he kept his head under the robe. At last he seemed satisfied. He stood up and folded the robe over the back of the chair, then stepped over to the desk, picked up a piece of paper, and handed it to van Leeuwenhoek. They began discussing its contents—Guild business he wanted advice about. They talked for a long time.

Van Leeuwenhoek glanced up. “For the mercy of God, man, let the girl get back to her work.”

My master looked at me as if surprised that I was still sitting at the table, quill in hand. “Griet, you may go.”

As I left I thought I saw a look of pity cross van Leeuwenhoek’s face.

He left the camera set up in the studio for some days. I was able to look through it several times on my own, lingering on the objects on the table. Something about the scene he was to paint bothered me. It was like looking at a painting that has been hung crookedly. I wanted to change something, but I did not know what. The box gave me no answers.

One day van Ruijven’s wife came again and he looked at her for a long time in the camera. I was passing through the studio while his head was covered, and walked as quietly as I could so I would not disturb them. I stood behind him for a moment to look at the setting with her in it. She must have seen me but gave no sign, continuing to gaze straight at him with her dark eyes.

It came to me then that the scene was too neat. Although I valued tidiness over most things, I knew from his other paintings that there should be some disorder on the table, something to snag the eye. I pondered each object—the jewelry box, the blue table rug, the pearls, the letter, the inkwell—and decided what I would change. I returned quietly to the attic, surprised by my bold thoughts.

Once it was clear to me what he should do to the scene, I waited for him to make the change.

He did not move anything on the table. He adjusted the shutters slightly, the tilt of her head, the angle of her quill. But he did not change what I had expected him to.

I thought about it while I was wringing out sheets, while I was turning the spit for Tanneke, while I was wiping the kitchen tiles, while I was rinsing colors. While I lay in bed at night I thought about it. Sometimes I got up to look again. No, I was not mistaken.

He returned the camera to van Leeuwenhoek.

Whenever I looked at the scene my chest grew tight as if something were pressing on it.

He set a canvas on the easel and painted a coat of lead white and chalk mixed with a bit of burnt sienna and yellow ocher.

My chest grew tighter, waiting for him.

He sketched lightly in reddish brown the outline of the woman and of each object.

When he began to paint great blocks of false colors, I thought my chest would burst like a sack that has been filled with too much flour.

As I lay in bed one night I decided I would have to make the change myself.

The next morning I cleaned, setting the jewelry box back carefully, relining the pearls, replacing the letter, polishing and replacing the inkwell. I took a deep breath to ease the pressure in my chest. Then in one quick movement I pulled the front part of the blue cloth onto the table so that it flowed out of the dark shadows under the table and up in a slant onto the table in front of the jewelry box. I made a few adjustments to the lines of the folds, then stepped back. It echoed the shape of van Ruijven’s wife’s arm as she held the quill.

Yes, I thought, and pressed my lips together. He may send me away for changing it, but it is better now.

That afternoon I did not go up to the attic, although there was plenty of work for me there. I sat outside on the bench with Tanneke and mended shirts. He had not gone to his studio that morning, but to the Guild, and had dined at van Leeuwenhoek’s. He had not yet seen the change.

I waited anxiously on the bench. Even Tanneke, who tried to ignore me these days, noted my mood. “What’s the matter with you, girl?” she asked. She had taken to calling me girl like her mistress. “You’re acting like a chicken that knows it’s for the slaughter.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Tell me about what happened when Catharina’s brother came here last. I heard about it at the market. They still mention you,” I added, hoping to distract and flatter her, and to cover up how clumsily I moved away from her question.

For a moment Tanneke sat up straighter, until she remembered who was asking. “That’s not your business,” she snapped. “That’s family business, not for the likes of you.”

A few months before she would have delighted in telling a story that set her in the best light. But it was me who was asking, and I was not to be trusted or humored or favored with her words, though it must have pained her to pass up the chance to boast.

Then I saw him—he was walking towards us up the Oude Langendijck, his hat tilted to shield his face from the spring sunlight, his dark cloak pushed back from his shoulders. As he drew up to us I could not look at him.

“Afternoon, sir,” Tanneke sang out in a completely different tone.

“Hello, Tanneke. Are you enjoying the sun?”

“Oh yes, sir. I do like the sun on my face.”

I kept my eyes on the stitches I had made. I could feel him looking at me.

After he went inside Tanneke hissed, “Say hello to the master when he speaks to you, girl. Your manners are a disgrace.”

“It was you he spoke to.”

“And so he should. But you needn’t be so rude or you’ll end up in the street, with no place here.”

He must be upstairs now, I thought. He must have seen what I’ve done.

I waited, barely able to hold my needle. I did not know exactly what I expected. Would he berate me in front of Tanneke? Would he raise his voice for the first time since I had come to live in his house? Would he say the painting was ruined?

Perhaps he would simply pull down the blue cloth so that it hung as it had before. Perhaps he would say nothing to me.

Later that night I saw him briefly as he came down for supper. He did not appear to be one thing or the other, happy or angry, unconcerned or anxious. He did not ignore me but he did not look at me either.

When I went up to bed I checked to see if he had pulled the cloth to hang as it had before I touched it.

He had not. I held up my candle to the easel—he had resketched in reddish brown the folds of the blue cloth. He had made my change.

I lay in bed that night smiling in the dark.

The next morning he came in as I was cleaning around the jewelry box. He had never before seen me making my measurements. I had laid my arm along one edge and moved the box to dust under and around it. When I looked over he was watching me. He did not say anything. Nor did I—I was concerned to set the box back exactly as it had been. Then I sponged the blue cloth with a damp rag, especially careful with the new folds I had made. My hands shook a little as I cleaned.

When I was done I looked up at him.

“Tell me, Griet, why did you change the tablecloth?” His tone was the same as when he had asked me about the vegetables at my parents’ house.

I thought for a moment. “There needs to be some disorder in the scene, to contrast with her tranquillity,” I explained. “Something to tease the eye. And yet it must be something pleasing to the eye as well, and it is, because the cloth and her arm are in a similar position.”

There was a long pause. He was gazing at the table. I waited, wiping my hands against my apron.

“I had not thought I would learn something from a maid,” he said at last.

On Sunday my mother joined us as I described the new painting to my father. Pieter was with us, and had fixed his eyes on a patch of sunlight on the floor. He was always quiet when we talked about my master’s paintings.

I did not tell them about the change I had made that my master approved of.

“I think his paintings are not good for the soul,” my mother announced suddenly. She was frowning. She had never before spoken of his work.

My father turned his face towards her in surprise.

“Good for the purse, more like,” Frans quipped. It was one of the rare Sundays when he was visiting. Lately he had become obsessed with money. He questioned me about the value of things in the house on the Oude Langendijck, of the pearls and mantle in the painting, of the pearl-encrusted jewelry box and what it held, of the number and size of paintings that hung on the walls. I did not tell him much. I was sorry to think it of my own brother, but I feared his thoughts had turned to easier ways of making a living than as an apprentice in a tile factory. I suspected he was only dreaming, but I did not want to fuel those dreams with visions of expensive objects within his—or his sister’s—reach.

“What do you mean, Mother?” I asked, ignoring Frans.

“There is something dangerous about your description of his paintings,” she explained. “From the way you talk they could be of religious scenes. It is as if the woman you describe is the Virgin Mary when she is just a woman, writing a letter. You give the painting meaning that it does not have or deserve. There are thousands of paintings in Delft. You can see them everywhere, hanging in a tavern as readily as in a rich man’s house. You could take two weeks’ maid’s wages and buy one at the market.”

“If I did that,” I replied, “you and Father would not eat for two weeks, and you would die without seeing what I bought.”

My father winced. Frans, who had been tying knots in a length of string, went very still. Pieter glanced at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could not do it.

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

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

He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, Griet?”

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

“Are your paintings Catholic paintings?”

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

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

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

“No, sir.”

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

“No.”

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

“And at the market.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh no, sir,” I replied, flustered.

“Do you think the painting is Catholic?”

“I don’t know, sir. My mother said—”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He seemed to be waiting for me to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what did your father say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is wrong, Griet?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I did nothing,” I protested.

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

“What did she say when you told her?”

“She’s not happy, of course, but she’s more afraid of his anger.” Maria Thins hesitated. “There’s another reason why she’s not so concerned. I may as well tell you now. She’s carrying a child again.”

“Another?” I let slip. I was surprised that Catharina would want another child when they were so short of money.

Maria Thins frowned at me. “Watch yourself, girl.”

“I’m sorry, madam.” I instantly regretted having spoken even that one word. It was not for me to say how big their family should be. “Has the doctor been?” I asked, trying to make amends.

“Doesn’t need to. She knows the signs, she’s been through it enough.” For a moment Maria Thins’ face made clear her thoughts—she too wondered about so many children. Then she became stern again. “You go about your duties, stay out of her way, and help him, but don’t parade it in front of the house. Your place here is not so secure.”

I nodded and let my eyes rest on her gnarled hands as they fumbled with a pipe. She lit it and puffed for a moment. Then she chuckled. “Never so much trouble with a maid before. Lord love us!”

On Sunday I took the comb back to my mother. I did not tell her what had happened—I simply said it was too fine for a maid to keep.

Some things changed for me in the house after the trouble with the comb. Catharina’s treatment of me was the greatest surprise. I had expected that she would be even more difficult than before—give me more work, berate me whenever she could, make me as uncomfortable as possible. Instead she seemed to fear me. She removed the studio key from the precious bunch at her hip and handed it back to Maria Thins, never locking or unlocking the door again. She left her jewelry box in the studio, sending her mother to fetch what she needed from it. She avoided me as much as she could. Once I understood this, I kept out of her way as well.

She did not say anything about my afternoon work in the attic. Maria Thins must have impressed upon her the notion that my help would make him paint more, and support the child she carried as well as those she had already. She had taken to heart his words about her care of the children, who were after all her main charge, and began to spend more time with them than she had before. With the encouragement of Maria Thins, she even began to teach Maertge and Lisbeth to read and write.

Maria Thins was more subtle, but she too changed toward me, treating me with more respect. I was still clearly a maid, but she did not dismiss me so readily, or ignore me, as she did sometimes with Tanneke. She would not go so far as to ask my opinion, but she made me feel less excluded from the household.

I was also surprised when Tanneke softened toward me. I had thought she enjoyed being angry and bearing me a grudge, but perhaps it had worn her out. Or perhaps once it was clear that he took my side, she felt it best not to appear to be opposed to me. Perhaps they all felt like that. Whatever the reason, she stopped creating extra work for me by spilling things, stopped muttering about me under her breath and giving me hard sideways looks. She did not befriend me, but it became easier to work with her.

It was cruel, perhaps, but I felt I had won a battle against her. She was older and had been a part of the household for much longer, but his favoring me clearly carried more weight than her loyalty and experience. She could have felt this slight deeply, but she accepted defeat more easily than I would have expected. Tanneke was a simple creature underneath, and wanted an easy time of it. The easiest way was to accept me.

Although her mother took closer charge of her, Cornelia did not change. She was Catharina’s favorite, perhaps because she most resembled her in spirit, and Catharina would do little to tame her ways. Sometimes she looked at me with her light brown eyes, her head tilted so that her red curls dangled about her face, and I thought of the sneer Maertge had described as Cornelia’s expression while she was being beaten. And I thought again, as I had on my first day: She will be a handful.

Though I did not make a show of it, I avoided Cornelia as I did her mother. I did not wish to encourage her. I hid the broken tile, my best lace collar, which my mother had made for me, and my finest embroidered handkerchief, so that she could not use them against me.

He did not treat me differently after the affair of the comb. When I thanked him for speaking up for me, he shook his head as if shooing away a fly that buzzed about him.

It was I who felt differently about him. I felt indebted. I felt that if he asked me to do something I could not say no. I did not know what he would ask that I would want to say no to, but nonetheless I did not like the position I had come to be in.

I was disappointed in him as well, though I did not like to think about it. I had wanted him to tell Catharina himself about my assisting him, to show that he was not afraid to tell her, that he supported me.

That is what I wanted.

Maria Thins came to see him in his studio one afternoon in the middle of October, when the painting of van Ruijven’s wife was nearly complete. She must have known I was working in the attic and could hear her, but nevertheless she spoke directly to him.

She asked him what he intended to paint next. When he did not reply she said, “You must paint a larger painting, with more figures in it, as you used to. Not another woman alone with only her thoughts. When van Ruijven comes to see his painting you must suggest another to him. Perhaps a companion piece to something you’ve already painted for him. He will agree—he usually does. And he will pay more for it.”

He still did not respond.

“We’re further in debt,” Maria Thins said bluntly. “We need the money.”

“He may ask that she be in it,” he said. His voice was low but I was able to hear what he said, though only later did I understand what he meant.

“So?”

“No. Not like that.”

“We’ll worry about that when it happens, not before.”

A few days later van Ruijven and his wife came to see the finished painting. In the morning my master and I prepared the room for their visit. He took the pearls and jewelry box down to Catharina while I put away everything else and set out chairs. Then he moved the easel and painting into the place where the setting had been and had me open all the shutters.

That morning I helped Tanneke prepare a special dinner for them. I did not think I would have to see them, and when they came at noon it was Tanneke who took up wine as they gathered in the studio. When she returned, however, she announced that I was to help her serve dinner rather than Maertge, who was old enough to join them at the table. “My mistress has decided this,” she added.

I was surprised—the last time they viewed their painting Maria Thins had tried to keep me away from van Ruijven. I did not say so to Tanneke, though. “Is van Leeuwenhoek there too?” I asked instead. “I thought I heard his voice in the hallway.”

Tanneke nodded absently. She was tasting the roasted pheasant. “Not bad,” she murmured. “I can hold my head as high as any cook of van Ruijven’s.”

While she was upstairs I had basted the pheasant and sprinkled it with salt, which Tanneke used too sparingly.

When they came down to dinner and everyone was seated, Tanneke and I began to bring in the dishes. Catharina glared at me. Never good at concealing her thoughts, she was horrified to see that I was serving.

My master too looked as if he had cracked his tooth on a stone. He stared coldly at Maria Thins, who feigned indifference behind her glass of wine.

Van Ruijven, however, grinned. “Ah, the wide-eyed maid!” he cried. “I wondered where you’d got to. How are you, my girl?”

“Very well, sir, thank you,” I murmured, placing a slice of pheasant on his plate and moving away as quickly as I could. Not quickly enough, however—he managed to slide his hand along my thigh. I could still feel the ghost of it a few minutes later.

While van Ruijven’s wife and Maertge remained oblivious, van Leeuwenhoek noted everything—Catharina’s fury, my master’s irritation, Maria Thins’ shrug, van Ruijven’s lingering hand. When I served him he searched my face as if looking there for the answer to how a simple maid could cause so much trouble. I was grateful to him—there was no blame in his expression.

Tanneke too had noticed the stir I caused, and for once was helpful. We said nothing in the kitchen, but it was she who made the trips back to the table to bring out the gravy, to refill the wine, to serve more food, while I looked after things in the kitchen. I had to go back only once, when we were both to clear away the plates. Tanneke went directly to van Ruijven’s place while I took up plates at the other end of the table. Van Ruijven’s eyes followed me everywhere.

So did my master’s.

I tried to ignore them, instead listening to Maria Thins. She was discussing the next painting. “You were pleased with the one of the music lesson, weren’t you?” she said. “What better to follow such a painting with than another with a musical setting? After a lesson, a concert, perhaps with more people in it, three or four musicians, an audience—”

“No audience,” my master interrupted. “I do not paint audiences.”

Maria Thins regarded him skeptically.

“Come, come,” van Leeuwenhoek interjected genially, “surely an audience is less interesting than the musicians themselves.”

I was glad he defended my master.

“I don’t care about audiences,” van Ruijven announced, “but I would like to be in the painting. I will play the lute.” After a pause he added, “I want her in it too.” I did not have to look at him to know he had gestured at me.

Tanneke jerked her head slightly towards the kitchen and I escaped with the little I had cleared, leaving her to gather the rest. I wanted to look at my master but did not dare. As I was leaving I heard Catharina say in a gay voice, “What a fine idea! Like that painting with you and the maid in the red dress. Do you remember her?”

On Sunday my mother spoke to me when we were alone in her kitchen. My father was sitting out in the late October sun while we prepared dinner. “You know I don’t listen to market gossip,” she began, “but it is hard not to hear it when my daughter’s name is mentioned.”

I immediately thought of Pieter the son. Nothing we did in the alley was worthy of gossip. I had insisted on that. “I don’t know what you mean, Mother,” I answered honestly.

My mother pulled in the corners of her mouth. “They are saying your master is going to paint you.” It was as if the words themselves made her mouth purse.

I stopped stirring the pot I had been tending. “Who says this?”

My mother sighed, reluctant to pass along overheard tales. “Some women selling apples.”

When I did not respond she took my silence to mean the worst. “Why didn’t you tell me, Griet?”

“Mother, I haven’t even heard this myself. No one has said anything to me!”

She did not believe me.

“It’s true,” I insisted. “My master has said nothing, Maria Thins has said nothing. I simply clean his studio. That’s as close as I get to his paintings.” I had never told her about my attic work. “How can you believe old women selling apples rather than me?”

“When there’s talk about someone at the market, there’s usually a reason for it, even if it’s not what’s actually being said.” My mother left the kitchen to call my father. She would say no more about the subject that day, but I began to fear she might be right—I would be the last to be told.

The next day at the Meat Hall I decided to ask Pieter the father about the rumor. I did not dare speak of it to Pieter the son. If my mother had heard the gossip, he would have as well. I knew he would not be pleased. Although he had never said so to me, it was clear he was jealous of my master.

Pieter the son was not at the stall. I did not have to wait long for Pieter the father to say something himself. “What’s this I hear?” he smirked as I approached. “Going to have your picture painted, are you? Soon you’ll be too grand for the likes of my son. He’s gone off in a sulk to the Beast Market because of you.”

“Tell me what you have heard.”

“Oh, you want it told again, do you?” He raised his voice. “Shall I make it into a fine tale for a few others?”

“Hush,” I hissed. Underneath his bravado I sensed he was angry with me. “Just tell me what you have heard.”

Pieter the father lowered his voice. “Only that van Ruijven’s cook was saying you are to sit with her master for a painting.”

“I know nothing of this,” I stated firmly, aware even as I said it that, as with my mother, my words had little effect. Pieter the father scooped up a handful of pigs’ kidneys. “It’s not me you should be talking to,” he said, weighing them in his hand.

I waited a few days before speaking to Maria Thins. I wanted to see if anyone would tell me first. I found her in the Crucifixion room one afternoon when Catharina was asleep and Maertge had taken the girls to the Beast Market. Tanneke was in the kitchen sewing and watching Johannes and Franciscus.

“May I speak to you, madam?” I said in a low voice.

“What is it, girl?” She lit her pipe and regarded me through the smoke. “Trouble again?” She sounded weary.

“I don’t know, madam. But I have heard a strange thing.”

“So have we all heard strange things.”

“I have heard that—that I am to be in a painting. With van Ruijven.”

Maria Thins chuckled. “Yes, that is a strange thing. They’ve been talking in the market, have they?”

I nodded.

She leaned back in her chair and puffed on her pipe. “Tell me, what would you think of being in such a painting?”

I did not know what to answer. “What would I think, madam?” I repeated dumbly.

“I wouldn’t bother to ask some people that. Tanneke, for instance. When he painted her she stood there happily pouring milk for months without a thought passing through that head, God love her. But you—no, there’s all manner of things you think but don’t say. I wonder what they are?”

I said the one sensible thing I knew she would understand. “I do not wish to sit with van Ruijven, madam. I do not think his intentions are honorable.” My words were stiff.

“His intentions are never honorable when it comes to young women.”

I nervously wiped my hands on my apron.

“It seems you have a champion to defend your honor,” she continued. “My son-in-law is no more willing to paint you with van Ruijven than you are willing to sit with him.”

I did not try to hide my relief.

“But,” Maria Thins warned, “van Ruijven is his patron, and a wealthy and powerful man. We cannot afford to offend him.”

“What will you say to him, madam?”

“I’m still trying to decide. In the meantime, you will have to put up with the rumors. Don’t answer them—we don’t want van Ruijven hearing from the market gossips that you are refusing to sit with him.”

I must have looked uncomfortable. “Don’t worry, girl,” Maria Thins growled, tapping her pipe on the table to loosen the ash. “We’ll take care of this. You keep your head down and go about your work, and not a word to anyone.”

“Yes, madam.”

I did tell one person, though. I felt I had to.

It had been easy enough to avoid Pieter the son—there were auctions all that week at the Beast Market, of animals that had been fattening all summer and autumn in the countryside and were ready for slaughter just before winter began. Pieter had gone every day to the sales.

The afternoon after Maria Thins and I spoke I slipped out to look for him at the market, just around the corner from the Oude Langendijck. It was quieter there in the afternoon than in the morning, when the auctions took place. By now many of the beasts had been driven away by their new owners, and men stood about under the plane trees that lined the square, counting their money and discussing the deals that had been made. The leaves on the trees had turned yellow and fallen to mingle with the dung and urine I could smell long before I reached the market.

Pieter the son was sitting with another man outside one of the taverns on the square, a tankard of beer in front of him. Deep in conversation, he did not see me as I stood silently near his table. It was his companion who looked up, then nudged Pieter.

“I would like to speak to you for a moment,” I said quickly, before Pieter had a chance even to look surprised.

His companion immediately jumped up and offered me his chair.

“Could we walk?” I gestured to the square.

“Of course,” Pieter said. He nodded to his friend and followed me across the street. From his expression it was not clear whether or not he was pleased to see me.

“How were the auctions today?” I asked awkwardly. I was never good at making everyday talk.

Pieter shrugged. He took my elbow to steer me around a pile of dung, then dropped his hand.

I gave up. “There has been gossip about me in the market,” I said bluntly.

“There is gossip about everyone at one time or another,” he replied neutrally.

“It’s not true what they say. I’m not going to be in a painting with van Ruijven.”

“Van Ruijven likes you. My father told me.”

“But I’m not going to be in a painting with him.”

“He is very powerful.”

“You must believe me, Pieter.”

“He is very powerful,” he repeated, “and you are but a maid. Who do you think will win that round of cards?”

“You think I will become like the maid in the red dress.”

“Only if you drink his wine.” Pieter gazed at me levelly.

“My master does not want to paint me with van Ruijven,” I said reluctantly after a moment. I had not wanted to mention him.

“That’s good. I don’t want him to paint you either.”

I stopped and closed my eyes. The close animal smell was beginning to make me feel faint.

“You’re getting caught where you should not be, Griet,” Pieter said more kindly. “Theirs is not your world.”

I opened my eyes and took a step back from him. “I came here to explain that the rumor is false, not to be accused by you. Now I’m sorry I bothered.”

“Don’t be. I do believe you.” He sighed. “But you have little power over what happens to you. Surely you can see that?”

When I did not answer he added, “If your master did want to paint a picture of you and van Ruijven, do you really think you could say no?”

It was a question I had asked myself but found no answer to. “Thank you for reminding me of how helpless I am,” I replied tartly.

“You wouldn’t be, with me. We would run our own business, earn our own money, rule our own lives. Isn’t that what you want?”

I looked at him, at his bright blue eyes, his yellow curls, his eager face. I was a fool even to hesitate.

“I didn’t come here to talk about this. I’m too young yet.” I used the old excuse. Someday I would be too old to use it.

“I never know what you’re thinking, Griet,” he tried again. “You’re so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.”

I smoothed my cap, checking with my fingers for stray hairs. “All I mean to say is that there is no painting,” I declared, ignoring what he had just said. “Maria Thins has promised me. But you’re not to tell anyone. If they speak to you of me in the market, say nothing. Don’t try to defend me. Otherwise van Ruijven may hear and your words will work against us.”

Pieter nodded unhappily and kicked at a bit of dirty straw.

He will not always be so reasonable, I thought. One day he will give up.

To reward him for his reasonableness, I let him take me into a space between two houses off the Beast Market and run his hands down my body, cupping them where there were curves. I tried to take pleasure in it, but I was still feeling sick from the animal smell.

Whatever I said to Pieter the son, I myself did not feel reassured by Maria Thins’ promise to keep me out of the painting. She was a formidable woman, astute in business, certain of her place, but she was not van Ruijven. I did not see how they could refuse him what he wanted. He had wanted a painting of his wife looking directly at the painter, and my master had made it. He had wanted a painting of the maid in the red dress, and had got that. If he wanted me, why should he not get me?

One day three men I had not seen before came with a harpsichord tied securely in a cart. A boy followed them carrying a bass viol that was bigger than he. They were not van Ruijven’s instruments, but from one of his relations who was fond of music. The whole house gathered to watch the men struggle with the harpsichord on the steep stairs. Cornelia stood right at the bottom—if they were to drop the instrument it would fall directly on her. I wanted to reach out and pull her back, and if it had been one of the other children I would not have hesitated. Instead I remained where I was. It was Catharina who finally insisted that she move to a safer spot.

When they got it up the stairs they took it to the studio, my master supervising them. After the men left, he called down to Catharina. Maria Thins followed her up. A moment later we heard the sound of the harpsichord being played. The girls sat on the stairs while Tanneke and I stood in the hallway, listening.

“Is that the mistress playing? Or your mistress?” I asked Tanneke. It seemed so unlike either of them that I thought perhaps he was playing and simply wanted Catharina to be his audience.

“It’s the young mistress, of course,” Tanneke hissed. “Why would he have asked her up otherwise? She’s very good, is the young mistress. She played when she was a girl. But her father kept their harpsichord when he and my mistress separated. Have you never heard young mistress complain about not being able to afford an instrument?”

“No.” I thought for a moment. “Do you think he will paint her? For this painting with van Ruijven?” Tanneke must have heard the market gossip but had said nothing of it to me.

“Oh, the master never paints her. She can’t sit still!”

Over the next few days he moved a table and chairs into the setting, and lifted the harpsichord’s lid, which was painted with a landscape of rocks and trees and sky. He spread a table rug on the table in the foreground, and set the bass viol under it.

One day Maria Thins called me to the Crucifixion room. “Now, girl,” she said, “this afternoon I want you to go on some errands for me. To the apothecary’s for some elder flowers and hyssop—Franciscus has a cough now that it’s cold again. And then to Old Mary the spinner for some wool, just enough for a collar for Aleydis. Did you notice hers is unravelling?” She paused, as if calculating how long it would take me to get from place to place. “And then go to Jan Mayer’s house to ask when his brother is expected in Delft. He lives by the Rietveld Tower. That’s near your parents, isn’t it? You may stop in and visit them.”

Maria Thins had never allowed me to see my parents apart from Sundays. Then I guessed. “Is van Ruijven coming today, madam?”

“Don’t let him see you,” she answered grimly. “It’s best if you’re not here at all. Then if he asks for you we can say you’re out.”

For a moment I wanted to laugh. Van Ruijven had us all—even Maria Thins—running like rabbits before dogs.

My mother was surprised to see me that afternoon. Luckily a neighbor was visiting and she could not question me closely. My father was not so interested. He had changed much since I’d left home, since Agnes had died. He was no longer so curious about the world outside his street, rarely asking me about the goings-on at the Oude Langendijck or in the market. Only the paintings still interested him.

“Mother,” I announced as we sat by the fire, “my master is beginning the painting that you were asking about. Van Ruijven has come over and he is setting it up today. Everyone who is to be in the painting is there now.”

Our neighbor, a bright-eyed old woman who loved market talk, gazed at me as if I had just set a roast capon in front of her. My mother frowned—she knew what I was doing.

There, I thought. That will take care of the rumors.

He was not himself that evening. I heard him snap at Maria Thins at supper, and he went out later and came back smelling of the tavern. I was climbing the stairs to bed when he came in. He looked up at me, his face tired and red. His expression was not angry, but weary, as of a man who has just seen all the wood he must chop, or a maid faced with a mountain of laundry.

The next morning the studio gave few clues about what had happened the afternoon before. Two chairs had been placed, one at the harpsichord, the other with its back to the painter. There was a lute on the chair, and a violin on the table to the left. The bass viol still lay in the shadows under the table. It was hard to tell from the arrangement how many people were to be in the painting.

Later Maertge told me that van Ruijven had come with his sister and one of his daughters.

“How old is the daughter?” I could not help asking.

“Seventeen, I think.”

My age.

They came around again a few days later. Maria Thins sent me on more errands and told me to amuse myself elsewhere for the morning. I wanted to remind her that I could not stay away every day they came to be painted—it was getting too cold to idle in the streets, and there was too much work to do. But I did not say anything. I could not explain it, but I felt something was to change soon. I just did not know how.

I could not go to my parents again—they would think something was wrong, and explaining otherwise would make them believe even worse things were happening. Instead I went to Frans’ factory. I had not seen him since he had asked me about the valuables in the house. His questions had angered me and I had made no effort to visit him.

The woman at the gate did not recognize me. When I asked to see Frans she shrugged and stepped aside, disappearing without showing me where to go. I walked into a low building where boys Frans’ age sat on benches at long tables, painting tiles. They were working on simple designs, with nothing of the graceful style of my father’s tiles. Many were not even painting the main figures, but only the flourishes in the corners of the tiles, the leaves and curlicues, leaving a blank center for a more skilled master to fill.

When they saw me a chorus of high whistles erupted that made me want to stop my ears. I went up to the nearest boy and asked him where my brother was. He turned red and ducked his head. Though I was a welcome distraction, no one would answer my question.

I found another building, smaller and hotter, housing the kiln. Frans was there alone, with his shirt off and the sweat pouring from him and a grim look on his face. The muscles in his arms and chest had grown. He was becoming a man.

He had tied quilted material around his forearms and hands that made him look clumsy, but when he pulled trays of tiles in and out of the kiln, he skillfully wielded the flat sheets so that he did not burn himself. I was afraid to call to him because he would be startled and might drop a tray. But he saw me before I spoke, and immediately set down the tray he held.

“Griet, what are you doing here? Is something wrong with Mother or Father?”

“No, no, they’re fine. I’ve just come to visit.”

“Oh.” Frans pulled the cloths from his arms, wiped his face with a rag and gulped beer from a mug. He leaned against the wall and rolled his shoulders the way men do who have finished unloading cargo from a canal boat and are easing and stretching their muscles. I had never seen him make such a gesture before.

“Are you still working the kiln? They have not moved you to something else? Glazing, or painting like those boys in the other building?”

Frans shrugged.

“But those boys are the same age as you. Shouldn’t you be—” I could not finish my sentence when I saw the look on his face.

“It’s punishment,” he said in a low voice.

“Why? Punishment for what?”

Frans did not answer.

“Frans, you must tell me or I’ll tell our parents you’re in trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble,” he said quickly. “I made the owner angry, is all.”

“How?”

“I did something his wife didn’t like.”

“What did you do?”

Frans hesitated. “It was she who started it,” he said softly. “She showed her interest, you see. But when I showed mine she told her husband. He didn’t throw me out because he’s a friend of Father’s. So I’m on the kiln until his humor improves.”

“Frans! How could you be so stupid? You know she’s not for the likes of you. To endanger your place here for something like that?”

“You don’t understand what it’s like,” Frans muttered. “Working here, it’s exhausting, it’s boring. It was something to think about, that’s all. You have no right to judge, you with your butcher that you’ll marry and have a fine life with. Easy for you to say what my life should be like when all I can see are endless tiles and long days. Why shouldn’t I admire a pretty face when I see one?”

I wanted to protest, to tell him that I understood. At night I sometimes dreamed of piles of laundry that never got smaller no matter how much I scrubbed and boiled and ironed.

“Was she the woman at the gate?” I asked instead.

Frans shrugged and drank more beer. I pictured her sour expression and wondered how such a face could ever tempt him.

“Why are you here, anyway?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be at Papists’ Corner?”

I had prepared an excuse for why I had come, that an errand had taken me to that part of Delft. But I felt so sorry for my brother that I found myself telling him about van Ruijven and the painting. It was a relief to confide in him.

He listened carefully. When I finished he declared, “You see, we’re not so different, with the attentions we’ve had from those above us.”

“But I haven’t responded to van Ruijven, and have no intention to.”

“I didn’t mean van Ruijven,” Frans said, his look suddenly sly. “No, not him. I meant your master.”

“What about my master?” I cried.

Frans smiled. “Now, Griet, don’t work yourself into a state.”

“Stop that! What are you suggesting? He has never—”

“He doesn’t have to. It’s clear from your face. You want him. You can hide it from our parents and your butcher man, but you can’t hide it from me. I know you better than that.”

He did. He did know me better.

I opened my mouth but no words came out.

Although it was December, and cold, I walked so fast and fretted so much over Frans that I got back to Papists’ Corner long before I should have. I grew hot and began to loosen my shawls to cool my face. As I was walking up the Oude Langendijck I saw van Ruijven and my master coming toward me. I bowed my head and crossed over so that I would pass by my master’s side rather than van Ruijven’s but the crossing only drew van Ruijven’s attention to me. He stopped, forcing my master to halt with him.

“You—the wide-eyed maid,” he called, turning towards me. “They told me you were out. I think you’ve been avoiding me. What’s your name, my girl?”

“Griet, sir.” I kept my eyes fixed on my master’s shoes. They were shiny and black—Maertge had polished them under my guidance earlier that day.

“Well, Griet, have you been avoiding me?”

“Oh no, sir. I’ve been on errands.” I held up a pail of things I had been to get for Maria Thins before I visited Frans.

“I hope I will see more of you, then.”

“Yes, sir.” Two women were standing behind the men. I peeked at their faces and guessed they were the daughter and sister who were sitting for the painting. The daughter was staring at me.

“You have not forgotten your promise, I hope,” van Ruijven said to my master.

My master jerked his head like a puppet. “No,” he replied after a moment.

“Good, I expect you’ll want to make a start on that before you ask us to come again.” Van Ruijven’s smile made me shiver.

There was a long silence. I glanced at my master. He was struggling to maintain a calm expression, but I knew he was angry.

“Yes,” he said at last, his eyes on the house opposite. He did not look at me.

I did not understand that conversation in the street, but I knew it was to do with me. The next day I discovered how.

In the morning he asked me to come up in the afternoon. I assumed he wanted me to work with the colors, that he was starting the concert painting. When I got to the studio he was not there. I went straight to the attic. The grinding table was clear—nothing had been laid out for me. I climbed back down the ladder, feeling foolish.

He had come in and was standing in the studio, looking out a window.

“Take a seat, please, Griet,” he said, his back to me.

I sat in the chair by the harpsichord. I did not touch it—I had never touched an instrument except to clean it. As I waited I studied the paintings he had hung on the back wall that would form part of the concert painting. There was a landscape on the left, and on the right a picture of three people—a woman playing a lute, wearing a dress that revealed much of her bosom, a gentleman with his arm around her, and an old woman. The man was buying the young woman’s favors, the old woman reaching to take the coin he held out. Maria Thins owned the painting and had told me it was called The Procuress.

“Not that chair.” He had turned from the window. “That is where van Ruijven’s daughter sits.”

Where I would have sat, I thought, if I were to be in the painting.

He got another of the lion-head chairs and set it close to his easel but sideways so it faced the window. “Sit here.”

“What do you want, sir?” I asked, sitting. I was puzzled—we never sat together. I shivered, although I was not cold.

“Don’t talk.” He opened a shutter so that the light fell directly on my face. “Look out the window.” He sat down in his chair by the easel.

I gazed at the New Church tower and swallowed. I could feel my jaw tightening and my eyes widening.

“Now look at me.”

I turned my head and looked at him over my left shoulder.

His eyes locked with mine. I could think of nothing except how their grey was like the inside of an oyster shell.

He seemed to be waiting for something. My face began to strain with the fear that I was not giving him what he wanted.

“Griet,” he said softly. It was all he had to say. My eyes filled with tears I did not shed. I knew now.

“Yes. Don’t move.”

He was going to paint me.