Girl With a Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier
Those eyes are fixed on someone. But who? What is she thinking as she stares out from one of the world’s best-loved paintings?Johannes Vermeer can spot exceptional beauty. When servant girl Griet catches his eye, she soon becomes both student and muse. But then he gives her his wife’s pearl earrings to wear for a portrait, and a scandal erupts that could threaten Griet’s future.Vivid, captivating and much emulated, this is a timeless modern classic and an international bestseller, with over 5 million copies sold around the world; now with a new introduction by the author.
Copyright (#ulink_8f2d4e4b-d5a9-584a-9cdd-1a87dfa76feb)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Tracy Chevalier 1999
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover image Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665-6 (oil on canvas), Vermeer, Jan (Johannes) (1632-75) / Mauritshuis, The Hague, The Netherlands / Bridgeman Images
Tracy Chevalier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007232161
Ebook Edition © December 2018 ISBN: 9780007324361
Version: 2018-12-10
Praise for Girl with a Pearl Earring: (#ulink_4a91b938-4c2d-5f88-9ea7-d174e5e8c7fd)
‘Timeless, delicate and as exquisitely measured as one of Vermeer’s paintings, this novel entered my life when I was 16, and plunged me, probably forever, into the world of Golden Age Holland. Tense yet perfectly paced and filled with the beauty of life’s colours, Tracy Chevalier’s story of the personal costs behind art’s public genius is a masterpiece in its own right. I will hold this novel close for the rest of my life’
JESSIE BURTON
‘A portrait of radiance … Tracy Chevalier brings the real artist Vermeer and a fictional muse to life in a jewel of a novel’
TIME
‘Chevalier doesn’t put a foot wrong in this triumphant work … It is a beautifully written tale that mirrors the elegance of the painting that inspired it’
WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘It has a slow, magical current of its own that picks you up and carries you stealthily along … a beautiful story, lovingly told by a very talented writer’
DAILY MAIL
‘Chevalier’s writing skill and her knowledge of 17th-century Delft are such that she creates a world reminiscent of a Vermeer interior: suspended in a particular moment, it transcends its time and place’
NEW YORKER
‘This is a wonderful novel, mysterious, steeped in atmosphere. It is deeply revealing about the process of painting … a truly magical experience’
GUARDIAN
‘This is a novel which deserves, and I am sure will win, a prize – or two’
THE TIMES
‘Life in 17th-century Delft is evoked with a sharp eye for historical detail and the descriptions of Vermeer at work are superbly drawn. A sensuous and vividly crafted work of fiction from a highly-talented young novelist’
MAIL ON SUNDAY
Dedication (#ulink_fadd98c5-0399-5041-b9f3-1a50ac9f586b)
For my father
Table of Contents
Cover (#u3d0cdcf5-680d-50d7-a684-61154e8fd13d)
Title Page (#u79ce59c6-f212-52c1-8805-fe7bd3d01ec4)
Copyright (#ud1b98a82-f232-5b2b-b3a2-a733942744c4)
Praise (#u7f44462f-546d-5793-9329-f6c620720df4)
Dedication (#u5ce5e264-345c-5fc6-9bd6-07011c5e61f7)
Introduction (#u9f284120-a85c-5ee9-bbea-672dc9b98950)
Reflections on Girl with a Pearl Earring (#uc2f5146c-53af-5c51-a062-384d9cff421e)
1664 (#u29298bee-2f03-5aa2-b7b5-823d5aa8b402)
1665 (#litres_trial_promo)
1666 (#litres_trial_promo)
1676 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Tracy Chevalier (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_5603a958-5335-5331-bb1e-c93788cb3423)
Time is so elastic that twenty years can feel like a lifetime or a week. To me it seems only a year or two since Girl with a Pearl Earring was quietly published in the dog-days of August 1999, with little fanfare and a couple of respectable reviews.
Five million copies later, forty-three languages later (not counting Persian: illegally published, then banned by the Iranian government, recently unbanned – but still illegal!), a film with Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth later, this book is still running. It has legs, as they say. And I am still a little stunned by its success.
My relationship with Vermeer’s painting Girl with a Pearl Earring extends back far more than twenty years, however. I first discovered it existed in Autumn 1981 when I visited my sister in Boston. Walking into her apartment, I made a beeline for the poster of an unfamiliar painting that hung on her wall. The light, the colours, the girl’s piercing gaze: I was smitten. So much so that the next day I bought a poster of it for myself. It has accompanied me everywhere I’ve lived since. I even took it to London and back on a semester abroad during my university years. That same poster – now tattered and faded – still hangs in my study, and I look at it every day. Despite my love affair with the Girl, though, I only saw the painting in the flesh for the first time at a seminal Vermeer retrospective at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague in Spring 1996.
I have always been mesmerized by its beauty. The bright blue and yellow of the Girl’s antique headdress, the way light and shadow sculpt her face, the liquid pools of her eyes, the perfectly placed dab of white pearl in the dark shadow of her neck: these details are all not so much about the beauty of this particular girl herself, but choices Vermeer made in how to portray her. In fact, this is not a portrait of a specific person, but a tronie, a Dutch term for an idealized head of a ‘type’ of person, in this case a young woman. It is meant to be a universal image.
And yet: that gaze is specific. She is looking at us as if she knows us.
That last sentence contains a mistake that took me sixteen years to correct. One morning in November 1997 I was lying in bed in my London flat, looking at the poster, sixteen years after first discovering the Girl in Boston, and thought, ‘I wonder what Vermeer did to make her look at him like that.’ It was like a switch flipped. I had always thought she was looking at me, at us. But of course she wasn’t ever looking at us – she was looking at Vermeer when he painted her. That unreadable gaze – that yearning, guarded look – is at him.
Suddenly the painting became not about a specific girl, or even an idealized girl, but about a relationship. And what was that relationship? We don’t know. No one knows who the model was, and we know little about Vermeer either.
Right away I knew I was onto something. It’s rare to pinpoint specific moments in our lives that are true forks in the road, but that morning was one of them for me. A switch kind of flipped in my writing life too, and everything changed. Within three days I had made up the story of Griet, the servant who cleans Vermeer’s studio and catches his eye.
I researched and wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring in a dream-like bubble – quickly over nine months (I was pregnant, with a built-in biological deadline), as an unknown writer with no expectations from readers or publishers or myself. When I wrote the book I tried hard to be respectful of Vermeer, of the process, of the painting. I left a lot of space – literal (it’s short) and figurative – for the reader to consider and form her own opinions. In the worst-case scenario, people read Girl with a Pearl Earring and turn to the cover to study the painting. In the best case, afterwards they study other paintings more carefully too. My favourite contact with readers is when they tell me they look at art differently now.
Why has the book been so popular that we’re celebrating its 20th anniversary? Partly it’s the strength of the painting. But the novel also has a rare quality that I am not sure I will ever be able to replicate in another book. The style reflects and supports the subject. When I was first working on it I thought: You’re writing about Vermeer, so write it the way he paints – spare, focussed, stripped down to the essentials. Two clichés absolutely worked for me: Less Is More, and Form Follows Function. Many novels tell stories well, or create a unique style, but few successfully combine the two so that they support each other and become more than the sum of their parts.
Since that Mauritshuis show in 1996 and – perhaps – since the book’s success, Vermeer has become a Big Deal. Probably he would have anyway, and I am simply the luckiest writer ever to have been in the right place at the right time and able to ride the wave of his popularity. Even given that there are only thirty-six Vermeer paintings in existence, he is now one of the most exhibited Old Masters. Over the last twenty years I have seen Vermeer shows in London, New York, Madrid, Rome, Cambridge, Dublin. Most only displayed two or three Vermeers, and bulked out the offering with work by his contemporaries, with themes focussing on his hometown of Delft, or women, or genre paintings, or music – whatever link they could make that justifies showing the Vermeers.
Inevitably, to me at least, Vermeer’s paintings always leapt out from the others. His work has an ethereal quality that is hard to pinpoint. His colours are intense, his focus tight, his subjects seem to be in worlds of their own that we only get a peek at without being invited in. Viewers spend a long time in front of his work, much longer than with others. They are trying to figure out the magic. But that’s the thing about magic – it only works when you don’t know the trick.
If anything, the painting itself is even more popular than Vermeer himself. The image of the Girl is everywhere, on umbrellas, suitcases, jigsaw puzzles, bookmarks, water bottles. There is a Miffy doll dressed as the Girl, and a rubber duck of her that I float in my bath. Banksy has painted her on a Bristol wall with an existing security alarm in place of her earring. A friend’s daughter dressed up as her for Hallowe’en. My cousin Pierre had a boutique vineyard for a while in California and named his best bottle ‘One Pearl’, with the painting on the label. I have on occasion worn socks where the Girl peeks out from my ankles.
Social media is awash with images of her. There are over 25,000 Instagram posts with the hashtag #girlwithapearlearring featuring drawings and paintings copying the painting, embroidery of the image, cats and dogs inserted in place of her face, and lots and lots of people dressed up like her... Back before social media became the place to communicate, readers used to write to me sending photos of themselves or their daughter or their friend, dressed up as the Girl. Doesn’t my daughter look just like her? they said. No one does, however. Despite the universality of her appearance – her hair and eye colour unknown, her face turned so we can’t see the shape of her nose – the Girl is decidedly herself.
Do I feel guilty about this overexposure? Sometimes. The novel may well have played a part in that. But no matter how dispiriting it is to see an image of Girl with a Pearl Earring on an ashtray, somehow the painting manages to rise above such exposure and maintain its fundamental mystery. What is the Girl feeling as she looks at the painter? I have written a novel about that look, and talked about it for twenty years, and I still don’t know. As long as the mystery remains – and it always will, I think – we will be enchanted by the painting and everything associated with it.
Tracy Chevalier
February 2019
Reflections on Girl with a Pearl Earring (#ulink_9c41d2ff-5c68-59d1-9655-a1257a97581a)
by Rose Tremain
I’ve been trying to analyse what makes this novel so successful – a veritable work of art.
I feel that two things are key: the pace and the form.
Much is made, in the book, of the fact that Vermeer painted slowly – too slowly for the whims of his family, who waited so impatiently for works to be finished and to be sold for good money. It seems to me that Tracy has made a beautiful virtue out of this slowness in the shaping of her novel. Things unfold in a calm, unhurried and uncluttered way. The narrative has almost a shy coyness about itself, willing to give us only so much at any one time to lure the reader deeper and deeper into the story. It moves at Vermeer’s pace. But, just as we are confident that the artist is embarked on works of great beauty and stillness, so, here, we see the author quietly bringing to life a delicate human drama.
How Tracy controls the form is complex. It relates, once again to Vermeer himself and the gentle way in which the innocent maid, Griet, begins to understand his technique, which is unhurried and arduous. He moves people, objects and furniture around until he has found the combination that feels right to him. And Tracy does the same, giving us ever-changing alignments of the circumstances and the people who are going to shape Griet’s destiny. When Vermeer begins to paint, he does surprising things, laying on dull backgrounds before beginning to sketch in the figures. He explains to Griet that the colour white is almost never ‘pure’, but brought to purity, and brought to its crucial role in a painting (eventually the earring itself) by the presence of other tones within it.
And this is how Tracy shapes her narrative – by small, unexpected increments, often defined by colour (the red of the butcher’s blood under Pieter’s nails, the cloudy white of the laundry, the Delft blue of Griet’s father’s tiles, the flaming tones of Cornelia’s hair) laying them in sparingly and – most crucial of all – never anticipating for us too neatly what role they are going to play.
Tracy always researches her books very thoroughly. To write about quilt-making she makes quilts. To write about fossils, she gathers and studies them, thus giving great authenticity to the work. But in Girl with a Pearl Earring we experience a lot more than a feeling of a writer doing meticulous homework; we are led deep inside the strange, closed world of the artist and the innocent girl who, for a brief moment, moved him to a love he could only express through a picture. We are as captive to that world as Griet is captive to her master. This is one of those rare novels where all the decisions made by the author appear inevitable and right. And millions of readers agreed. They were perfectly at home in this book. They felt they were part of a timeless painting.
RT. 2018
(#ulink_92093b8d-1d63-5031-b52c-172941654c1e)
My mother did not tell me they were coming. Afterwards she said she did not want me to appear nervous. I was surprised, for I thought she knew me well. Strangers would think I was calm. I did not cry as a baby. Only my mother would note the tightness along my jaw, the widening of my already wide eyes.
I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen when I heard voices outside our front door – a woman’s, bright as polished brass, and a man’s, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our house. I could hear rich carpets in their voices, books and pearls and fur.
I was glad that earlier I had scrubbed the front step so hard.
My mother’s voice – a cooking pot, a flagon – approached from the front room. They were coming to the kitchen. I pushed the leeks I had been chopping into place, then set the knife on the table, wiped my hands on my apron, and pressed my lips together to smooth them.
My mother appeared in the doorway, her eyes two warnings. Behind her the woman had to duck her head because she was so tall, taller than the man following her.
All of our family, even my father and brother, were small.
The woman looked as if she had been blown about by the wind, although it was a calm day. Her cap was askew so that tiny blonde curls escaped and hung about her forehead like bees which she swatted at impatiently several times. Her collar needed straightening and was not as crisp as it could be. She pushed her grey mantle back from her shoulders, and I saw then that under her dark blue dress a baby was growing. It would arrive by the year’s end, or before.
The woman’s face was like an oval serving plate, flashing at times, dull at others. Her eyes were two light brown buttons, a colour I had rarely seen coupled with blond hair. She made a show of watching me hard, but could not fix her attention on me, her eyes darting about the room.
‘This is the girl, then,’ she said abruptly.
‘This is my daughter, Griet,’ my mother replied. I nodded respectfully to the man and woman.
‘Well. She’s not very big. Is she strong enough?’ As the woman turned to look at the man, a fold of her mantle caught the handle of the knife I had been using, knocking it off the table so that it spun across the floor.
The woman cried out.
‘Catharina,’ the man said calmly. He spoke her name as if he held cinnamon in his mouth. The woman stopped, making an effort to quiet herself.
I stepped over and picked up the knife, polishing the blade on my apron before placing it back on the table. The knife had brushed against the vegetables. I set a piece of carrot back in its place.
The man was watching me, his eyes grey like the sea. He had a long, angular face, and his expression was steady, in contrast to his wife’s, which flickered like a candle. He had no beard or moustache, and I was glad, for it gave him a clean appearance. He wore a black cloak over his shoulders, a white shirt, and a fine lace collar. His hat pressed into hair the red of brick washed by rain.
‘What have you been doing here, Griet?’ he asked.
I was surprised by the question but knew enough to hide it. ‘Chopping vegetables, sir. For the soup.’
I always laid vegetables out in a circle, each with its own section like a slice of pie. There were five slices: red cabbage, onions, leeks, carrots and turnips. I had used a knife edge to shape each slice, and placed a carrot disc in the centre.
The man tapped his finger on the table. ‘Are they laid out in the order in which they will go into the soup?’ he suggested, studying the circle.
‘No, sir.’ I hesitated. I could not say why I had laid out the vegetables as I did. I simply set them as I felt they should be, but I was too frightened to say so to a gentleman.
‘I see you have separated the whites,’ he said, indicating the turnips and onions. ‘And then the orange and the purple, they do not sit together. Why is that?’ He picked up a shred of cabbage and a piece of carrot and shook them like dice in his hand.
I looked at my mother, who nodded slightly.
‘The colours fight when they are side by side, sir.’
He arched his eyebrows, as if he had not expected such a response. ‘And do you spend much time setting out the vegetables before you make the soup?’
‘Oh no, sir,’ I replied, confused. I did not want him to think I was idle.
From the corner of my eye I saw a movement. My sister, Agnes, was peering round the doorpost and had shaken her head at my response. I did not often lie. I looked down.
The man turned his head slightly and Agnes disappeared. He dropped the pieces of carrot and cabbage into their slices. The cabbage shred fell partly into the onions. I wanted to reach over and tease it into place. I did not, but he knew that I wanted to. He was testing me.
‘That’s enough prattle,’ the woman declared. Though she was annoyed by his attention to me, it was me she frowned at. ‘Tomorrow, then?’ She looked at the man before sweeping out of the room, my mother behind her. The man glanced once more at what was to be the soup, then nodded at me and followed the women.
When my mother returned I was sitting by the vegetable wheel. I waited for her to speak. She was hunching her shoulders as if against a winter chill, though it was summer and the kitchen was hot.
‘You are to start tomorrow as their maid. If you do well, you will be paid eight stuivers a day. You will live with them.’
I pressed my lips together.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Griet,’ my mother said. ‘We have to, now your father has lost his trade.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘On the Oude Langendijck, where it intersects with the Molenpoort.’
‘Papists’ Corner? They’re Catholic?’
‘You can come home Sundays. They have agreed to that.’ My mother cupped her hands around the turnips, scooped them up along with some of the cabbage and onions and dropped them into the pot of water waiting on the fire. The pie slices I had made so carefully were ruined.
I climbed the stairs to see my father. He was sitting at the front of the attic by the window, where the light touched his face. It was the closest he came now to seeing.
Father had been a tile painter, his fingers still stained blue from painting cupids, maids, soldiers, ships, children, fish, flowers, animals on to white tiles, glazing them, firing them, selling them. One day the kiln exploded, taking his eyes and his trade. He was the lucky one – two other men died.
I sat next to him and held his hand.
‘I heard,’ he said before I could speak. ‘I heard everything.’ His hearing had taken the strength from his missing eyes.
I could not think of anything to say that would not sound reproachful.
‘I’m sorry, Griet. I would like to have done better for you.’ The place where his eyes had been, where the doctor had sewn shut the skin, looked sorrowful. ‘But he is a good gentleman, and fair. He will treat you well.’ He said nothing about the woman.
‘How can you be sure of this, Father? Do you know him?’
‘Don’t you know who he is?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember the painting we saw in the Town Hall a few years ago, which van Ruijven was displaying after he bought it? It was a view of Delft, from the Rotterdam and Schiedam Gates. With the sky that took up so much of the painting, and the sunlight on some of the buildings.’
‘And the paint had sand in it to make the brickwork and the roofs look rough,’ I added. ‘And there were long shadows in the water, and tiny people on the shore nearest us.’
‘That’s the one.’ Father’s sockets widened as if he still had eyes and was looking at the painting again.
I remembered it well, remembered thinking that I had stood at that very spot many times and never seen Delft the way the painter had.
‘That man was van Ruijven?’
‘The patron?’ Father chuckled. ‘No, no, child, not him. That was the painter. Vermeer. That was Johannes Vermeer and his wife. You’re to clean his studio.’
To the few things I was taking with me my mother added another cap, collar and apron so that each day I could wash one and wear the other, and would always look clean. She also gave me an ornamental tortoiseshell comb, shaped like a shell, that had been my grandmother’s and was too fine for a maid to wear, and a prayer book I could read when I needed to escape the Catholicism around me.
As we gathered my things she explained why I was to work for the Vermeers. ‘You know that your new master is headman of the Guild of St Luke, and was when your father had his accident last year?’
I nodded, still shocked that I was to work for such an artist.
‘The Guild looks after its own, as best it can. Remember the box your father gave money to every week for years? That money goes to masters in need, as we are now. But it goes only so far, you see, especially now with Frans in his apprenticeship and no money coming in. We have no choice. We won’t take public charity, not if we can manage without. Then your father heard that your new master was looking for a maid who could clean his studio without moving anything, and he put forward your name, thinking that as headman, and knowing our circumstances, Vermeer would be likely to try to help.’
I sifted through what she had said. ‘How do you clean a room without moving anything?’
‘Of course you must move things, but you must find a way to put them back exactly so it looks as if nothing has been disturbed. As you do for your father now that he cannot see.’
After my father’s accident we had learned to place things where he always knew to find them. It was one thing to do this for a blind man, though. Quite another for a man with a painter’s eyes.
Agnes said nothing to me after the visit. When I got into bed next to her that night she remained silent, though she did not turn her back to me. She lay gazing at the ceiling. Once I had blown out the candle it was so dark I could see nothing. I turned towards her.
‘You know I don’t want to leave. I have to.’
Silence.
‘We need the money. We have nothing now that Father can’t work.’
‘Eight stuivers a day isn’t such a lot of money.’ Agnes had a hoarse voice, as if her throat were covered with cobwebs.
‘It will keep the family in bread. And a bit of cheese. That’s not so little.’
‘I’ll be all alone. You’re leaving me all alone. First Frans, then you.’
Of all of us Agnes had been the most upset when Frans left the previous year. He and she had always fought like cats but she sulked for days once he was gone. At ten she was the youngest of us three children, and had never before known a time when Frans and I were not there.
‘Mother and Father will still be here. And I’ll visit on Sundays. Besides, it was no surprise when Frans went.’ We had known for years that our brother would start his apprenticeship when he turned thirteen. Our father had saved hard to pay the apprentice fee, and talked endlessly of how Frans would learn another aspect of the trade, then come back and they would set up a tile factory together.
Now our father sat by the window and never spoke of the future.
After the accident Frans had come home for two days. He had not visited since. The last time I saw him I had gone to the factory across town where he was apprenticed. He looked exhausted and had burns up and down his arms from pulling tiles from the kiln. He told me he worked from dawn until so late that at times he was too tired even to eat. ‘Father never told me it would be this bad,’ he muttered resentfully. ‘He always said his apprenticeship was the making of him.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ I replied. ‘It made him what he is now.’
When I was ready to leave the next morning my father shuffled out to the front step, feeling his way along the wall. I hugged my mother and Agnes. ‘Sunday will come in no time,’ my mother said.
My father handed me something wrapped in a handkerchief. ‘To remind you of home,’ he said. ‘Of us.’
It was my favourite tile of his. Most of his tiles we had at home were faulty in some way – chipped or cut crookedly, or the picture was blurred because the kiln had been too hot. This one, though, my father kept specially for us. It was a simple picture of two small figures, a boy and an older girl. They were not playing as children usually did in tiles. They were simply walking along, and were like Frans and me whenever we walked together – clearly our father had thought of us as he painted it. The boy was a little ahead of the girl but had turned back to say something. His face was mischievous, his hair messy. The girl wore her cap as I wore mine, not as most other girls did, with the ends tied under their chins or behind their necks. I favoured a white cap that folded in a wide brim around my face, covering my hair completely and hanging down in points on each side of my face so that from the side my expression was hidden. I kept the cap stiff by boiling it with potato peelings.
I walked away from our house, carrying my things tied up in an apron. It was still early – our neighbours were throwing buckets of water on to their steps and the street in front of their houses, and scrubbing them clean. Agnes would do that now, as well as many of my other tasks. She would have less time to play in the street and along the canals. Her life was changing too.
People nodded at me and watched curiously as I passed. No one asked where I was going or called out kind words. They did not need to – they knew what happened to families when a man lost his trade. It would be something to discuss later – young Griet become a maid, her father brought the family low. They would not gloat, however. The same thing could easily happen to them.
I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home. When I reached the end and turned out of sight of my family, though, it became a little easier to walk steadily and look around me. The morning was still cool, the sky a flat grey-white pulled close over Delft like a sheet, the summer sun not yet high enough to burn it away. The canal I walked along was a mirror of white light tinged with green. As the sun grew brighter the canal would darken to the colour of moss.
Frans, Agnes and I used to sit beside that canal and throw things in – pebbles, sticks, once a broken tile – and imagine what they might touch on the bottom – not fish, but creatures from our imagination, with many eyes, scales, hands and fins. Frans thought up the most interesting monsters. Agnes was the most frightened. I always stopped the game, too inclined to see things as they were to be able to think up things that were not.
There were a few boats on the canal, moving towards Market Square. It was not market day, however, when the canal was so full you couldn’t see the water. One boat was carrying river fish for the stalls at Jeronymous Bridge. Another sat low on the water, loaded with bricks. The man poling the boat called out a greeting to me. I merely nodded and lowered my head so that the edge of my cap hid my face.
I crossed a bridge over the canal and turned into the open space of Market Square, even then busy with people crisscrossing it on their way to some task – buying meat at the Meat Hall, or bread at the baker’s, taking wood to be weighed at the Weigh House. Children ran errands for their parents, apprentices for their masters, maids for their households. Horses and carts clattered across the stones. To my right was the Town Hall, with its gilded front and white marble faces gazing down from the keystones above the windows. To my left was the New Church, where I had been baptised sixteen years before. Its tall, narrow tower made me think of a stone birdcage. Father had taken us up it once. I would never forget the sight of Delft spread below us, each narrow brick house and steep red roof and green waterway and city gate marked for ever in my mind, tiny and yet distinct. I asked my father then if every Dutch city looked like that, but he did not know. He had never visited any other city, not even The Hague, two hours away on foot.
I walked to the centre of the square. There the stones had been laid to form an eight-pointed star set inside a circle. Each point aimed towards a different part of Delft. I thought of it as the very centre of the town, and as the centre of my life. Frans and Agnes and I had played in that star since we were old enough to run to the market. In our favourite game, one of us chose a point and one of us named a thing – a stork, a church, a wheelbarrow, a flower – and we ran in that direction looking for that thing. We had explored most of Delft that way.
One point, however, we had never followed. I had never gone to Papists’ Corner, where the Catholics lived. The house where I was to work was just ten minutes from home, the time it took a pot of water to boil, but I had never passed by it.
I knew no Catholics. There were not so many in Delft, and none in our street or in the shops we used. It was not that we avoided them, but they kept to themselves. They were tolerated in Delft, but were expected not to parade their faith openly. They held their services privately, in modest places that did not look like churches from the outside.
My father had worked with Catholics and told me they were no different from us. If anything they were less solemn. They liked to eat and drink and sing and game. He said this almost as if he envied them.
I followed the point of the star now, walking across the square more slowly than everyone else, for I was reluctant to leave its familiarity. I crossed the bridge over the canal and turned left up the Oude Langendijck. On my left the canal ran parallel to the street, separating it from Market Square.
At the intersection with the Molenpoort, four girls were sitting on a bench beside the open door of a house. They were arranged in order of size, from the oldest, who looked to be about Agnes’ age, to the youngest, who was probably about four. One of the middle girls held a baby in her lap – a large baby, who was probably already crawling and would soon be ready to walk.
Five children, I thought. And another expected.
The oldest was blowing bubbles through a scallop shell fixed to the end of a hollowed stick, very like one my father had made for us. The others were jumping up and popping the bubbles as they appeared. The girl with the baby in her lap could not move much, catching few bubbles although she was seated next to the bubble blower. The youngest at the end was the furthest away and the smallest, and had no chance to reach the bubbles. The second youngest was the quickest, darting after the bubbles and clapping her hands around them. She had the brightest hair of the four, red like the dry brick wall behind her. The youngest and the girl with the baby both had curly blonde hair like their mother’s, while the eldest’s was the same dark red as her father’s.
I watched the girl with the bright hair swat at the bubbles, popping them just before they broke on the damp grey and white tiles set diagonally in rows before the house. She will be a handful, I thought. ‘You’d best pop them before they reach the ground,’ I said. ‘Else those tiles will have to be scrubbed again.’
The eldest girl lowered the pipe. Four sets of eyes stared at me with the same gaze that left no doubt they were sisters. I could see various features of their parents in them – grey eyes here, light brown eyes there, angular faces, impatient movements.
‘Are you the new maid?’ the eldest asked.
‘We were told to watch out for you,’ the bright redhead interrupted before I could reply.
‘Cornelia, go and get Tanneke,’ the eldest said to her.
‘You go, Aleydis,’ Cornelia in turn ordered the youngest, who gazed at me with wide grey eyes but did not move.
‘I’ll go.’ The eldest must have decided my arrival was important after all.
‘No, I’ll go.’ Cornelia jumped up and ran ahead of her older sister, leaving me alone with the two quieter girls.
I looked at the squirming baby in the girl’s lap. ‘Is that your brother or your sister?’
‘Brother,’ the girl replied in a soft voice like a feather pillow. ‘His name is Johannes. Never call him Jan.’ She said the last words as if they were a familiar refrain.
‘I see. And your name?’
‘Lisbeth. And this is Aleydis.’ The youngest smiled at me. They were both dressed neatly in brown dresses with white aprons and caps.
‘And your older sister?’
‘Maertge. Never call her Maria. Our grandmother’s name is Maria. Maria Thins. This is her house.’
The baby began to whimper. Lisbeth joggled him up and down on her knee.
I looked up at the house. It was certainly grander than ours, but not as grand as I had feared. It had two storeys, plus an attic, whereas ours had only the one, with a tiny attic. It was an end house, with the Molenpoort running down one side, so that it was a little wider than the other houses in the street. It felt less pressed in than many of the houses in Delft, which were packed together in narrow rows of brick along the canals, their chimneys and stepped roofs reflected in the green canal water. The ground-floor windows of this house were very high, and on the first floor there were three windows set close together rather than the two of other houses along the street.
From the front of the house the New Church tower was visible just across the canal. A strange view for a Catholic family, I thought. A church they will never even go inside.
‘So you’re the maid, are you?’ I heard behind me.
The woman standing in the doorway had a broad face, pockmarked from an earlier illness. Her nose was bulbous and irregular, and her thick lips were pushed together to form a small mouth. Her eyes were light blue, as if she had caught the sky in them. She wore a grey-brown dress with a white chemise, a cap tied tight around her head, and an apron that was not as clean as mine. She stood blocking the doorway, so that Maertge and Cornelia had to push their way out round her, and looked at me with crossed arms as if waiting for a challenge.
Already she feels threatened by me, I thought. She will bully me if I let her.
‘My name is Griet,’ I said, gazing at her levelly. ‘I am the new maid.’
The woman shifted from one hip to the other. ‘You’d best come in, then,’ she said after a moment. She moved back into the shadowy interior so that the doorway was clear.
I stepped across the threshold.
What I always remembered about being in the front hall for the first time were the paintings. I stopped inside the door, clutching my bundle, and stared. I had seen paintings before, but never so many in one room. I counted eleven. The largest painting was of two men, almost naked, wrestling each other. I did not recognise it as a story from the Bible, and wondered if it was a Catholic subject. Other paintings were of more familiar things – piles of fruit, landscapes, ships on the sea, portraits. They seemed to be by several painters. I wondered which of them were my new master’s. None was what I had expected of him.
Later I discovered they were all by other painters – he rarely kept his own finished paintings in the house. He was an art dealer as well as an artist, and paintings hung in almost every room, even where I slept. There were more than fifty in all, though the number varied over time as he traded and sold them.
‘Come now, no need to idle and gape.’ The woman hurried down a lengthy hallway, which ran along one side of the house all the way to the back. I followed as she turned abruptly into a room on the left. On the wall directly opposite hung a painting that was larger than me. It was of Christ on the Cross, surrounded by the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and St John. I tried not to stare but I was amazed by its size and subject. ‘Catholics are not so different from us,’ my father had said. But we did not have such pictures in our houses, or our churches, or anywhere. Now I would see this painting every day.
I was always to think of that room as the Crucifixion room. I was never comfortable in it.
The painting surprised me so much that I did not notice the woman in the corner until she spoke. ‘Well, girl,’ she said, ‘that is something new for you to see.’ She sat in a comfortable chair, smoking a pipe. Her teeth gripping the stem had gone brown, and her fingers were stained with ink. The rest of her was spotless – her black dress, lace collar, stiff white cap. Though her lined face was stern her light brown eyes seemed amused.
She was the kind of old woman who looked as if she would outlive everyone.
She is Catharina’s mother, I thought suddenly. It was not just the colour of her eyes and the wisp of grey curl that escaped her cap in the same way as her daughter’s. She had the manner of someone used to looking after those less able than she – of looking after Catharina. I understood now why I had been brought to her rather than her daughter.
Though she seemed to look at me casually, her gaze was watchful. When she narrowed her eyes I realised she knew everything I was thinking. I turned my head so that my cap hid my face.
Maria Thins puffed on her pipe and chuckled. ‘That’s right, girl. You keep your thoughts to yourself here. So, you’re to work for my daughter. She’s out now, at the shops. Tanneke here will show you around and explain your duties.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, madam.’
Tanneke, who had been standing at the old woman’s side, pushed past me. I followed, Maria Thins’ eyes branding my back. I heard her chuckling again.
Tanneke took me first to the back of the house, where there were cooking and washing kitchens and two storage rooms. The washing kitchen led out to a tiny courtyard full of drying white laundry.
‘This needs ironing, for a start,’ Tanneke said. I said nothing, though it looked as if the laundry had not yet been bleached properly by the midday sun.
She led me back inside and pointed to a hole in the floor of one of the storage rooms, a ladder leading down into it. ‘You’re to sleep there,’ she announced. ‘Drop your things there now and you can sort yourself out later.’
I reluctantly let my bundle drop into the dim hole, thinking of the stones Agnes and Frans and I had thrown into the canal to seek out the monsters. My things thudded on to the dirt floor. I felt like an apple tree losing its fruit.
I followed Tanneke back along the hallway, which all the rooms opened off – many more rooms than in our house. Next to the Crucifixion room where Maria Thins sat, towards the front of the house, was a smaller room with children’s beds, chamberpots, small chairs and a table, on it various earthenware, candlesticks, snuffers and clothing, all in a jumble.
‘The girls sleep here,’ Tanneke mumbled, perhaps embarrassed by the mess.
She turned up the hallway again and opened a door into a large room, where light streamed in from the front windows and across the red and grey tiled floor. ‘The great hall,’ she muttered. ‘Master and mistress sleep here.’
Their bed was hung with green silk curtains. There was other furniture in the room – a large cupboard inlaid with ebony, a whitewood table pushed up to the windows with several Spanish leather chairs arranged around it. But again it was the paintings that struck me. More hung in this room than anywhere else. I counted to nineteen silently. Most were portraits – they appeared to be members of both families. There was also a painting of the Virgin Mary, and one of the three kings worshipping the Christ Child. I gazed at both uneasily.
‘Now, upstairs.’ Tanneke went first up the steep stairs, then put a finger to her lips. I climbed as quietly as I could. At the top I looked around and saw the closed door. Behind it was a silence that I knew was him.
I stood, my eyes fixed on the door, not daring to move in case it opened and he came out.
Tanneke leaned towards me and whispered, ‘You’ll be cleaning in there, which the young mistress will explain to you later. And these rooms—’ she pointed to doors towards the back of the house ‘—are my mistress’ rooms. Only I go in there to clean.’
We crept downstairs again. When we were back in the washing kitchen Tanneke said, ‘You’re to take on the laundry for the house.’ She pointed to a great mound of clothes – they had fallen far behind with their washing. I would struggle to catch up. ‘There’s a cistern in the cooking kitchen but you’d best get your water for washing from the canal – it’s clean enough in this part of town.’
‘Tanneke,’ I said in a low voice, ‘have you been doing all this yourself? The cooking and cleaning and washing for the house?’
I had chosen the right words. ‘And some of the shopping.’ Tanneke puffed up with pride at her own industry. ‘Young mistress does most of it, of course, but she goes off raw meat and fish when she’s carrying a child. And that’s often,’ she added in a whisper. ‘You’re to go to the Meat Hall and the fish stalls too. That will be another of your duties.’
With that she left me to the laundry. Including me there were ten of us now in the house, one a baby who would dirty more clothes than the rest. I would be laundering every day, my hands chapped and cracked from the soap and water, my face red from standing over the steam, my back aching from lifting wet cloth, my arms burned by the iron. But I was new and I was young – it was to be expected I would have the hardest tasks.
The laundry needed to soak for a day before I could wash it. In the storage room that led down to the cellar I found two pewter waterpots and a copper kettle. I took the pots with me and walked up the long hallway to the front door.
The girls were still sitting on the bench. Now Lisbeth had the bubble blower while Maertge fed baby Johannes bread softened with milk. Cornelia and Aleydis were chasing bubbles. When I appeared they all stopped what they were doing and looked at me expectantly.
‘You’re the new maid,’ the girl with the bright red hair declared.
‘Yes, Cornelia.’
Cornelia picked up a pebble and threw it across the road into the canal. There were long scratches up and down her arm – she must have been bothering the house cat.
‘Where will you sleep?’ Maertge asked, wiping mushy fingers on her apron.
‘In the cellar.’
‘We like it down there,’ Cornelia said. ‘Let’s go and play there now!’
She darted inside but did not go far. When no one followed her she came back out, her face cross.
‘Aleydis,’ I said, extending my hand to the youngest girl, ‘will you show me where to get water from the canal?’
She took my hand and looked up at me. Her eyes were like two shiny grey coins. We crossed the street, Cornelia and Lisbeth following. Aleydis led me to stairs that descended to the water. As we peeked over I tightened my grip on her hand, as I had done years before with Frans and Agnes whenever we stood next to water.
‘You stand back from the edge,’ I ordered. Aleydis obediently took a step back. But Cornelia followed close behind me as I carried the pots down the steps.
‘Cornelia, are you going to help me carry the water? If not, go back up to your sisters.’
She looked at me, and then she did the worst thing. If she had sulked or shouted, I would know I had mastered her. Instead she laughed.
I reached over and slapped her. Her face turned red, but she did not cry. She ran back up the steps. Aleydis and Lisbeth peered down at me solemnly.
I had a feeling then. This is how it will be with her mother, I thought, except that I will not be able to slap her.
I filled the pots and carried them to the top of the steps. Cornelia had disappeared. Maertge was still sitting with Johannes. I took one of the pots inside and back to the cooking kitchen, where I built up the fire, filled the copper kettle, and put it on to heat.
When I came back Cornelia was outside again, her face still flushed. The girls were playing with tops on the grey and white tiles. None of them looked up at me.
The pot I had left was missing. I looked into the canal and saw it floating, upside down, just out of reach of the stairs.
‘Yes, you will be a handful,’ I murmured. I looked around for a stick to fish it out with but could find none. I filled the other pot again and carried it inside, turning my head so that the girls could not see my face. I set the pot next to the kettle on the fire. Then I went outside again, this time with a broom.
Cornelia was throwing stones at the pot, probably hoping to sink it.
‘I’ll slap you again if you don’t stop.’
‘I’ll tell our mother. Maids don’t slap us.’ Cornelia threw another stone.
‘Shall I tell your grandmother what you’ve done?’
A fearful look crossed Cornelia’s face. She dropped the stones she held.
A boat was moving along the canal from the direction of the Town Hall. I recognised the man poling from earlier that day – he had delivered his load of bricks and the boat was riding much higher. He grinned when he saw me.
I blushed. ‘Please, sir,’ I began, ‘can you help me get that pot?’
‘Oh, you’re looking at me now that you want something from me, are you? There’s a change!’
Cornelia was watching me curiously.
I swallowed. ‘I can’t reach the pot from here. Perhaps you could—’
The man leaned over, fished out the pot, dumped the water from it, and held it out to me. I ran down the steps and took it from him. ‘Thank you. I’m most grateful.’
He did not let go of the pot. ‘Is that all I get? No kiss?’ He reached over and pulled my sleeve. I jerked my arm away and wrestled the pot from him.
‘Not this time,’ I said as lightly as I could. I was never good at that sort of talk.
He laughed. ‘I’ll be looking for pots every time I pass here now, won’t I, young miss?’ He winked at Cornelia. ‘Pots and kisses.’ He took up his pole and pushed off.
As I climbed the steps back to the street I thought I saw a movement in the middle window on the first floor, the room where he was. I stared but could see nothing except the reflected sky.
Catharina returned while I was taking down laundry in the courtyard. I first heard her keys jangling in the hallway. They hung in a great bunch just below her waist, bouncing against her hip. Although they looked uncomfortable to me, she wore them with great pride. I then heard her in the cooking kitchen, ordering about Tanneke and the boy who had carried things from the shops for her. She spoke harshly to both.
I continued to pull down and fold bedsheets, napkins, pillowcases, tablecloths, shirts, chemises, aprons, handkerchiefs, collars, caps. They had been hung carelessly, bunched in places so that patches of cloth were still damp. And they had not been shaken first, so there were creases everywhere. I would be ironing much of the day to make them presentable.
Catharina appeared at the door, looking hot and tired, though the sun was not yet at its highest. Her chemise puffed out messily from the top of her blue dress, and the green housecoat she wore over it was already crumpled. Her blonde hair was frizzier than ever, especially as she wore no cap to smooth it. The curls fought against the combs that held them in a bun.
She looked as if she needed to sit quietly for a moment by the canal, where the sight of the water might calm and cool her.
I was not sure how I should be with her – I had never been a maid, nor had we ever had one in our house. There were no servants on our street. No one could afford one. I placed the laundry I was folding in a basket, then nodded at her. ‘Good morning, madam.’
She frowned and I realised I should have let her speak first. I would have to take more care with her.
‘Tanneke has taken you around the house?’ she said.
‘Yes, madam.’
‘Well, then, you will know what to do and you will do it.’ She hesitated, as if at a loss for words, and it came to me that she knew little more about being my mistress than I did about being her maid. Tanneke had probably been trained by Maria Thins and still followed her orders, whatever Catharina said to her.
I would have to help her without seeming to.
‘Tanneke has explained that besides the laundry you want me to go for the meat and fish, madam,’ I suggested gently.
Catharina brightened. ‘Yes. She will take you when you finish with the washing here. After that you will go every day yourself. And on other errands as I need you,’ she added.
‘Yes, madam.’ I waited. When she said nothing else I reached up to pull a man’s linen shirt from the line.
Catharina stared at the shirt. ‘Tomorrow,’ she announced as I was folding it, ‘I will show you upstairs where you are to clean. Early – first thing in the morning.’ Before I could reply she disappeared inside.
After I brought in the laundry I found the iron, cleaned it, and set it in the fire to heat. I had just begun ironing when Tanneke came and handed me a shopping pail. ‘We’re going to the butcher’s now,’ she said. ‘I’ll need the meat soon.’ I had heard her clattering in the cooking kitchen and had smelled parsnips roasting.
Out in front Catharina sat on the bench, with Lisbeth on a stool by her feet and Johannes asleep in a cradle. She was combing Lisbeth’s hair and searching for lice. Next to her Cornelia and Aleydis were sewing. ‘No, Aleydis,’ Catharina was saying, ‘pull the thread tight, that’s too loose. You show her, Cornelia.’
I had not thought they could all be so calm together.
Maertge ran over from the canal. ‘Are you going to the butcher’s? May I go too, Mama?’
‘Only if you stay with Tanneke and mind her.’
I was glad that Maertge came with us. Tanneke was still wary of me, but Maertge was merry and quick and that made it easier for us to be friendly.
I asked Tanneke how long she had worked for Maria Thins.
‘Oh, many years,’ she said. ‘A few before master and young mistress were married and came to live here. I started when I was no older than you. How old are you, then?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘I began when I was fourteen,’ Tanneke countered triumphantly. ‘Half my life I’ve worked here.’
I would not have said such a thing with pride. Her work had worn her so that she looked older than her twenty-eight years.
The Meat Hall was just behind the Town Hall, south and to the west of Market Square. Inside were thirty-two stalls – there had been thirty-two butchers in Delft for generations. It was busy with housewives and maids choosing, bartering and buying for their families, and men carrying carcasses back and forth. Sawdust on the floor soaked up blood and clung to shoes and hems of dresses. There was a tang of blood in the air that always made me shiver, though at one time I had gone there every week and ought to have grown used to the smell. Still, I was pleased to be in a familiar place. As we passed between the stalls the butcher we used to buy our meat from before my father’s accident called out to me. I smiled at him, relieved to see a face I knew. It was the first time I had smiled all day.
It was strange to meet so many new people and see so many new things in one morning, and to do so apart from all the familiar things that made up my life. Before, if I met someone new I was always surrounded by family and neighbours. If I went to a new place I was with Frans or my mother or father and felt no threat. The new was woven in with the old, like the darning in a sock.
Frans told me not long after he began his apprenticeship that he had almost run away, not from the hard work, but because he could not face the strangeness day after day. What kept him there was knowing that our father had spent all his savings on the apprentice fee, and would have sent him right back if he had come home. Besides, he would find much more strangeness out in the world if he went elsewhere.
‘I will come and see you,’ I whispered to the butcher, ‘when I am alone.’ Then I hurried to catch up with Tanneke and Maertge.
They had stopped at a stall further along. The butcher there was a handsome man, with greying blond curls and bright blue eyes.
‘Pieter, this is Griet,’ Tanneke said. ‘She will be fetching the meat for us now. You’re to add it to our account as usual.’
I tried to keep my eyes on his face, but I could not help glancing down at his blood-splattered apron. Our butcher always wore a clean apron when he was selling, changing it whenever he got blood on it.
‘Ah.’ Pieter looked me over as if I were a plump chicken he was considering roasting. ‘What would you like today, Griet?’
I turned to Tanneke. ‘Four pounds of chops and a pound of tongue,’ she ordered.
Pieter smiled. ‘And what do you think of that, miss?’ he addressed Maertge. ‘Don’t I sell the best tongue in Delft?’
Maertge nodded and giggled as she gazed at the display of joints, chops, tongue, pigs’ feet, sausages.
‘You’ll find, Griet, that I have the best meat and the most honest scales in the hall,’ Pieter remarked as he weighed the tongue. ‘You’ll have no complaints about me.’
I stared at his apron and swallowed. Pieter put the chops and tongue into the pail I carried, winked at me and turned to serve the next customer.
We went next to the fish stalls, just beside the Meat Hall. Seagulls hovered above the stalls, waiting for the fishheads and innards the fishmongers threw into the canal. Tanneke introduced me to their fishmonger – also different from ours. I was to alternate each day between meat and fish.
When we left I did not want to go back to the house, to Catharina and the children on the bench. I wanted to walk home. I wanted to step into my mother’s kitchen and hand her the pailful of chops. We had not eaten meat in months.
Catharina was combing through Cornelia’s hair when we returned. They paid no attention to me. I helped Tanneke with dinner, turning the meat on the grill, fetching things for the table in the great hall, cutting the bread.
When the meal was ready the girls came in, Maertge joining Tanneke in the cooking kitchen while the others sat down in the great hall. I had just placed the tongue in the meat barrel in one of the storage rooms – Tanneke had left it out and the cat had almost got to it – when he appeared from outside, standing in the doorway at the end of the long hall, wearing his hat and cloak. I stood still and he paused, the light behind him so that I could not see his face. I did not know if he was looking down the hallway at me. After a moment he disappeared into the great hall.
Tanneke and Maertge served while I looked after the baby in the Crucifixion room. When Tanneke was done she joined me and we ate and drank what the family did – chops, parsnips, bread, and mugs of beer. Although Pieter’s meat was no better than our family butcher’s, it was a welcome taste after going so long without. The bread was rye rather than the cheaper brown bread we had been eating, and the beer was not so watery either.
I did not wait on the family at that dinner and so I did not see him. Occasionally I heard his voice, usually along with Maria Thins’. From their tones it was clear they got on well.
After dinner Tanneke and I cleared up, then mopped the floors of the kitchens and storage rooms. The walls of each kitchen were tiled in white, and the fireplace in blue and white Delft tiles painted with birds in one section, ships in another, and soldiers in another. I studied them carefully, but none had been painted by my father.
I spent most of the rest of the day ironing in the washing kitchen, occasionally stopping to build up the fire, fetch wood, or step into the courtyard to escape the heat. The girls played in and out of the house, sometimes coming in to watch me and poke at the fire, another time to tease Tanneke when they found her asleep next door in the cooking kitchen, Johannes crawling around her feet. They were a little uneasy with me – perhaps they thought I might slap them. Cornelia scowled at me and did not stay long in the room, but Maertge and Lisbeth took the clothes I had ironed and put them away for me in the cupboard in the great hall. Their mother was asleep there. ‘The last month before the baby comes she’ll stay in bed much of the day,’ Tanneke confided, ‘propped up with pillows all around her.’
Maria Thins had gone to her upstairs rooms after dinner. Once, though, I heard her in the hallway and when I looked up she was standing in the doorway, watching me. She said nothing, so I turned back to my ironing and pretended she wasn’t there. After a moment out of the corner of my eye I saw her nod and shuffle off.
He had a guest upstairs – I heard two male voices as they climbed up. Later when I heard them coming down I peeked around the door to watch them go out. The man with him was plump and wore a long white feather in his hat.
When it got dark we lit candles, and Tanneke and I had bread and cheese and beer with the children in the Crucifixion room while the others ate tongue in the great hall. I was careful to sit with my back to the Crucifixion scene. I was so exhausted I could hardly think. At home I had worked just as hard but it was never so tiring as in a strange house where everything was new and I was always tense and serious. At home I had been able to laugh with my mother or Agnes or Frans. Here there was no one to laugh with.
I had not yet been down to the cellar where I was to sleep. I took a candle with me but was too tired to look around beyond finding a bed, pillow and blanket. Leaving the trap door of the cellar open so that cool, fresh air could reach me, I took off my shoes, cap, apron and dress, prayed briefly, and lay down. I was about to blow out the candle when I noticed the painting hanging at the foot of my bed. I sat up, wide awake now. It was another picture of Christ on the Cross, smaller than the one upstairs but even more disturbing. Christ had thrown his head back in pain, and Mary Magdalene’s eyes were rolling. I lay back gingerly, unable to take my eyes off it. I could not imagine sleeping in the room with the painting. I wanted to take it down but did not dare. Finally I blew out the candle – I could not afford to waste candles on my first day in the new house. I lay back again, my eyes fixed to the place where I knew the painting hung.
I slept badly that night, tired as I was. I woke often and looked for the painting. Though I could see nothing on the wall, every detail was fixed in my mind. Finally, when it was beginning to grow light, the painting appeared again and I was sure the Virgin Mary was looking down at me.
When I got up in the morning I tried not to look at the painting, instead studying the contents of the cellar in the dim light that fell through the window in the storage room above me. There was not much to see – several tapestry-covered chairs piled up, a few other broken chairs, a mirror, and two more paintings, both still lifes, leaning against the wall. Would anyone notice if I replaced the Crucifixion with a still life?
Cornelia would. And she would tell her mother.
I did not know what Catharina – or any of them – thought of my being Protestant. It was a curious feeling, having to be aware of it myself. I had never before been outnumbered.
I turned my back on the painting and climbed the ladder. Catharina’s keys were clinking at the front of the house and I went to find her. She moved slowly, as if she were half asleep, but she made an effort to draw herself up when she saw me. She led me up the stairs, climbing slowly, holding tightly to the rail to pull her bulk up.
At the studio she searched among the keys, then unlocked and pushed open the door. The room was dark, the shutters closed – I could make out only a little from the cracks of light streaming in between them. The room gave off a clean, sharp odour of linseed oil that reminded me of my father’s clothes when he had returned from the tile factory at night. It smelled like wood and fresh-cut hay mixed together.
Catharina remained on the threshold. I did not dare enter before her. After an awkward moment she ordered, ‘Open the shutters, then. Not the window on the left. Just the middle and far windows. And only the lower part of the middle window.’
I crossed the room, edging around an easel and chair to the middle window. I pulled open the lower window, then opened out the shutters. I did not look at the painting on the easel, not while Catharina was watching me from the doorway.
A table had been pushed up against the window on the right, with a chair set in the corner. The chair’s back and seat were of leather tooled with yellow flowers and leaves.
‘Don’t move anything over there,’ Catharina reminded me. ‘That is what he is painting.’
Even if I stood on my toes I was too small to reach the upper window and shutters. I would have to stand on the chair, but did not want to do so in front of her. She made me nervous, waiting in the doorway for me to make a mistake.
I considered what to do.
It was the baby who saved me – he began wailing downstairs. Catharina shifted from one hip to the other. As I hesitated she grew impatient and finally left to tend to Johannes.
I quickly climbed up and stood carefully on the wooden frame of the chair, pulled open the upper window, leaned out and pushed the shutters open. Peeking down at the street below, I spied Tanneke scrubbing the tiles in front of the house. She did not see me, but a cat padding across the wet tiles behind her paused and looked up.
I opened the lower window and shutters and got down from the chair. Something moved in front of me and I froze. The movement stopped. It was me, reflected in a mirror that hung on the wall between the two windows. I gazed at myself. Although I had an anxious, guilty expression, my face was also bathed in light, making my skin glow. I stared, surprised, then stepped away.
Now that I had a moment I surveyed the room. It was a large, square space, not as long as the great hall downstairs. With the windows open it was bright and airy, with whitewashed walls, and grey and white marble tiles on the floor, the darker tiles set in a pattern of square crosses. A row of Delft tiles painted with cupids lined the bottom of the walls to protect the whitewash from our mops. They were not my father’s.
Though it was a big room, it held little furniture. There was the easel and chair set in front of the middle window, and the table placed in front of the window in the right corner. Besides the chair I had stood on there was another by the table, of plain leather nailed on with brass studs, and two lion heads carved into the tops of the posts. Against the far wall, behind the chair and easel, was a small cupboard, its drawers closed, several brushes and a knife with a diamond-shaped blade arranged on top next to clean palettes. Beside the cupboard was a desk on which were papers and books and prints. Two more lion-head chairs had been set against the wall near the doorway.
It was an orderly room, empty of the clutter of everyday life. It felt different from the rest of the house, almost as if it were in another house altogether. When the door was closed it would be difficult to hear the shouts of the children, the jangle of Catharina’s keys, the sweeping of our brooms.
I took up my broom, bucket of water and dustcloth and began to clean. I started in the corner where the scene of the painting had been set up, where I knew I must not move a thing. I kneeled on the chair to dust the window I had struggled to open, and the yellow curtain that hung to one side of it in the corner, touching it lightly so that I would not disturb its folds. The panes of glass were dirty and needed scrubbing with warm water, but I was not sure if he wanted them clean. I would have to ask Catharina.
I dusted the chairs, polishing the brass studs and lion heads. The table had not been cleaned properly in some time. Someone had wiped around the objects placed there – a powderbrush, a pewter bowl, a letter, a black ceramic pot, blue cloth heaped to one side and hanging over the edge – but they had to be moved for the table really to be cleaned. As my mother had said, I would have to find a way to move things yet put them back exactly as if they had not been touched.
The letter lay close to the corner of the table. If I placed my thumb along one edge of the paper, my second finger along another, and anchored my hand with my smallest finger hooked to the table edge, I should be able to move the letter, dust there, and replace it where my hand indicated.
I laid my fingers against the edges and drew in my breath, then removed the letter, dusted, and replaced it all in one quick movement. I was not sure why I felt I had to do it quickly. I stood back from the table. The letter seemed to be in the right place, though only he would really know.
Still, if this was to be my test, I had best get it done.
From the letter I measured with my hand to the powderbrush, then placed my fingers at various points around one side of the brush. I removed it, dusted, replaced it, and measured the space between it and the letter. I did the same with the bowl.
This was how I cleaned without seeming to move anything. I measured each thing in relation to the objects around it and the space between them. The small things on the table were easy, the furniture harder – I used my feet, my knees, sometimes my shoulders and chin with the chairs.
I did not know what to do with the blue cloth heaped messily on the table. I would not be able to get the folds exact if I moved the cloth. For now I left it alone, hoping that for a day or two he would not notice until I had found a way to clean it.
With the rest of the room I could be less careful. I dusted and swept and mopped – the floor, the walls, the windows, the furniture – with the satisfaction of tackling a room in need of a good cleaning. In the far corner, opposite the table and window, a door led to a storeroom, filled with paintings and canvases, chairs, chests, dishes, bedpans, a coat rack and a row of books. I cleaned in there too, tidying the things away so that there was more order to the room.
All the while I had avoided cleaning around the easel. I did not know why, but I was nervous about seeing the painting that sat on it. At last, though, there was nothing left to do. I dusted the chair in front of the easel, then began to dust the easel itself, trying not to look at the painting.
When I glimpsed the yellow satin, however, I had to stop.
I was still staring at the painting when Maria Thins spoke.
‘Not a common sight, now, is it?’
I had not heard her come in. She stood inside the doorway, slightly stooped, wearing a fine black dress and lace collar.
I did not know what to say, and I couldn’t help it – I turned back to the painting.
Maria Thins laughed. ‘You’re not the only one to forget your manners in front of one of his paintings, girl.’ She came over to stand beside me. ‘Yes, he’s managed this one well. That’s van Ruijven’s wife.’ I recognised the name as the patron my father had mentioned. ‘She’s not beautiful but he makes her so,’ she added. ‘It will fetch a good price.’
Because it was the first painting of his I was to see, I always remembered it better than the others, even those I saw grow from the first layer of underpaint to the final highlights.
A woman stood in front of a table, turned towards a mirror on the wall so that she was in profile. She wore a mantle of rich yellow satin trimmed with white ermine, and a fashionable five-pointed red ribbon in her hair. A window lit her from the left, falling across her face and tracing the delicate curve of her forehead and nose. She was tying a string of pearls round her neck, holding the ribbons up, her hands suspended in the air. Entranced with herself in the mirror, she did not seem to be aware that anyone was looking at her. Behind her on a bright white wall was an old map, in the dark foreground the table with the letter on it, the powderbrush and the other things I had dusted around.
I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.
I thought of me looking at my reflection in the mirror earlier and was ashamed.
Maria Thins seemed content to stand with me and contemplate the painting. It was odd to look at it with the setting just behind it. Already from my dusting I knew all of the objects on the table, and their relation to one another – the letter by the corner, the powderbrush lying casually next to the pewter bowl, the blue cloth bunched around the dark pot. Everything seemed to be exactly the same, except cleaner and purer. It made a mockery of my own cleaning.
Then I saw a difference. I drew in my breath.
‘What is it, girl?’
‘In the painting there are no lion heads on the chair next to the woman,’ I said.
‘No. There was once a lute sitting on that chair as well. He makes plenty of changes. He doesn’t paint just what he sees, but what will suit. Tell me, girl, do you think this painting is done?’
I stared at her. Her question must be a trick but I could not imagine any change that would make it better.
‘Isn’t it?’ I faltered.
Maria Thins snorted. ‘He’s been working on it for three months. I expect he’ll do so for two more months. He will change things. You’ll see.’ She looked around. ‘Done your cleaning, have you? Well, then, go on, girl – go to your other tasks. He’ll come soon to see how you’ve done.’
I looked at the painting one last time, but by studying it so hard I felt something slip away. It was like looking at a star in the night sky – if I looked at one directly I could barely see it, but if I looked from the corner of my eye it became much brighter.
I gathered my broom and bucket and cloth. When I left the room, Maria Thins was still standing in front of the painting.
I filled the pots from the canal and set them on the fire, then went to find Tanneke. She was in the room where the girls slept, helping Cornelia to dress while Maertge helped Aleydis and Lisbeth helped herself. Tanneke was not in good spirits, glancing at me only to ignore me as I tried to speak to her. Finally I stood directly in front of her so that she had to look at me. ‘Tanneke, I’ll go to the fish stalls now. What would you like today?’
‘Going so early? We always go later in the day.’ Tanneke still did not look at me. She was tying white ribbons into five-pointed stars in Cornelia’s hair.
‘I’m free while the water is heating and thought I would go now,’ I replied simply. I did not add that the best cuts were to be had early, even if the butcher or fishmonger promised to set aside things for the family. She should know that. ‘What would you like?’
‘Don’t fancy fish today. Go to the butcher’s for a mutton joint.’ Tanneke finished with the ribbons and Cornelia jumped up and pushed past me. Tanneke turned away and opened a chest to search for something. I watched her broad back for a moment, the greyish-brown dress pulled tight across it.
She was jealous of me. I had cleaned the studio, where she was not allowed, where no one, it seemed, could go except me and Maria Thins.
When Tanneke straightened, a bonnet in her hand, she said, ‘The master painted me once, you know. Painted me pouring milk. Everyone said it was his best painting.’
‘I’d like to see it,’ I responded. ‘Is it still here?’
‘Oh no, van Ruijven bought it.’
I thought for a moment. ‘So one of Delft’s wealthiest men takes pleasure in looking at you each day.’
Tanneke grinned, her pocked face growing even wider. The right words changed her mood in a moment. It was simply up to me to find the words.
I turned to go before her mood could sour. ‘May I come with you?’ Maertge asked.
‘And me?’ Lisbeth added.
‘Not today,’ I said firmly. ‘You have something to eat and help Tanneke.’ I did not want it to become habit for the girls to accompany me. I would use it as a reward for minding me.
I was also longing to walk in familiar streets on my own, not to have a constant reminder of my new life chattering at my side. As I stepped into Market Square, leaving Papists’ Corner behind, I breathed in deeply. I had not realised that I had been holding myself in tight all the time I was with the family.
Before going to Pieter’s stall I stopped at the butcher I knew, who beamed when he saw me. ‘At last you decide to say hello! What, yesterday you were too grand for the likes of me?’ he teased.
I started to explain my new situation but he interrupted me. ‘Of course I know. Everyone is talking – Jan the tiler’s daughter has gone to work for the painter Vermeer. And then I see after one day she is already too proud to speak to old friends!’
‘I have nothing to be so proud of, becoming a maid. My father is ashamed.’
‘Your father was simply unlucky. No one is blaming him. There is no need for you to be ashamed, my dear. Except of course that you are not buying your meat from me.’
‘I have no choice, I’m afraid. That’s for my mistress to decide.’
‘Oh, it is, is it? So your buying from Pieter has nothing to do with his handsome son?’
I frowned. ‘I have not seen his son.’
The butcher laughed. ‘You will, you will. Off you go. When you see your mother next tell her to come and see me. I will set aside something for her.’
I thanked him and passed along the stalls to Pieter’s. He seemed surprised to see me. ‘Here already, are you? Couldn’t wait to get here for more of that tongue?’
‘I’d like a joint of mutton today, please.’
‘Now tell me, Griet, was that not the best tongue you have had?’
I refused to give him the compliment he craved. ‘The master and mistress ate it. They did not remark on it.’
Behind Pieter a young man turned round – he had been cutting into a side of beef at a table behind the stall. He must have been the son, for though he was taller than his father, he had the same bright blue eyes. His blond hair was long and thick with curls, framing a face that made me think of apricots. Only his bloody apron was displeasing to the eye.
His eyes came to rest on me like a butterfly on a flower and I could not keep from blushing. I repeated my request for mutton, keeping my eyes on his father. Pieter rummaged through his meat and pulled out a joint for me, laying it on the counter. Two sets of eyes watched me.
The joint was grey at the edges. I sniffed the meat. ‘This is not fresh,’ I said bluntly. ‘Mistress will be none too pleased that you expect her family to eat meat such as this.’ My tone was haughtier than I had intended. Perhaps it needed to be.
Father and son stared at me. I held the gaze of the father, trying to ignore the son.
At last Pieter turned to his son. ‘Pieter, get me that joint set aside on the cart.’
‘But that’s meant for—’ Pieter the son stopped. He disappeared, returning with another joint, which I could immediately see was superior. I nodded. ‘That’s better.’
Pieter the son wrapped the joint and placed it in my pail. I thanked him. As I turned to go I caught the glance that passed between father and son. Even then I knew somehow what it meant, and what it would mean for me.
Catharina was sitting on the bench when I got back, feeding Johannes. I showed her the joint and she nodded. As I was about to go in she said in a low voice, ‘My husband has inspected the studio and found the cleaning suited him.’ She did not look at me.
‘Thank you, madam.’ I stepped inside, glanced at a still life of fruits and a lobster, and thought, So, I really am to stay.
The rest of the day passed much as the first had, and as the days to follow would. Once I had cleaned the studio and gone to the fish stalls or the Meat Hall I began again on the laundry, one day sorting, soaking and working on stains, another day scrubbing, rinsing, boiling and wringing before hanging things to dry and be bleached in the noon sun, another day ironing and mending and folding. At some point I always stopped to help Tanneke with the midday meal. Afterwards we cleaned up, and then I had a little time free to rest and sew on the bench out front, or back in the courtyard. After that I finished whatever I had been doing in the morning, then helped Tanneke with the late meal. The last thing we did was to mop the floors once more so that they would be fresh and clean for the morning.
At night I covered the Crucifixion hanging at the foot of my bed with the apron I had worn that day. I slept better then. The next day I added the apron to the day’s wash.
While Catharina was unlocking the studio door on the second morning I asked her if I should clean the windows.
‘Why not?’ she answered sharply. ‘You do not need to ask me such petty things.’
‘Because of the light, madam,’ I explained. ‘It might change the painting if I clean them. You see?’
She did not see. She would not or could not come into the room to look at the painting. It seemed she never entered the studio. When Tanneke was in the right mood I would have to ask her why. Catharina went downstairs to ask him and called up to me to leave the windows.
When I cleaned the studio I saw nothing to indicate that he had been there at all. Nothing had been moved, the palettes were clean, the painting itself appeared no different. But I could feel that he had been there.
I had seen very little of him the first two days I was in the house on the Oude Langendijck. I heard him sometimes, on the stairs, in the hallway, chuckling with his children, talking softly to Catharina. Hearing his voice made me feel as if I were walking along the edge of a canal and unsure of my steps. I did not know how he would treat me in his own house, whether or not he would pay attention to the vegetables I chopped in his kitchen.
No gentleman had ever taken such an interest in me before.
I came face to face with him on my third day in the house. Just before dinner I went to find a plate that Lisbeth had left outside and almost ran into him as he carried Aleydis in his arms down the hallway.
I stepped back. He and Aleydis regarded me with the same grey eyes. He neither smiled nor did not smile at me. It was hard to meet his eyes. I thought of the woman looking at herself in the painting upstairs, of wearing pearls and yellow satin. She would have no trouble meeting the gaze of a gentleman. When I managed to lift my eyes to his he was no longer looking at me.
The next day I saw the woman herself. On my way back from the butcher a man and woman walked ahead of me on the Oude Langendijck. At our door he turned to her and bowed, then walked on. There was a long white feather in his hat – he must have been the visitor from a few days earlier. From the brief glimpse I caught of his profile I saw that he had a moustache, and a plump face to match his body. He smiled as if he were about to pay a flattering but false compliment. The woman turned into the house before I could see her face but I did see the five-pointed red ribbon in her hair. I held back, waiting by the doorway until I heard her go up the stairs.
Later I was putting away some clothes in the cupboard in the great hall when she came back down. I stood up as she entered. She was carrying the yellow mantle in her arms. The ribbon was still in her hair.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Where is Catharina?’
‘She’s gone with her mother to the Town Hall, madam. Family business.’
‘I see. Never mind, I’ll see her another day. I’ll leave this here for her.’ She draped the mantle across the bed and dropped the pearl necklace on top of it.
‘Yes, madam.’
I could not take my eyes off her. I felt as if I were seeing her and yet not seeing her. It was a strange sensation. She was, as Maria Thins had said, not as beautiful as when the light struck her in the painting. Yet she was beautiful, if only because I was remembering her so. She gazed at me with a puzzled look on her face, as if she ought to know me since I was staring at her with such familiarity. I managed to lower my eyes. ‘I will tell her you called, madam.’
She nodded but looked troubled. She glanced at the pearls she had laid on top of the mantle. ‘I think I shall leave these up in the studio with him,’ she announced, picking up the necklace. She did not look at me, but I knew she was thinking that maids were not to be trusted with pearls. After she had gone her face lingered like perfume.
On Saturday Catharina and Maria Thins took Tanneke and Maertge with them to the market in the square, where they would buy vegetables to last the week, staples and other things for the house. I longed to go with them, thinking I might see my mother and sister, but I was told to stay at the house with the younger girls and the baby. It was difficult to keep them from running off to the market. I would have taken them there myself but I did not dare leave the house unattended. Instead we watched the boats go up and down the canal, full on their way to the market with cabbages, pigs, flowers, wood, flour, strawberries, horseshoes. They were empty on the way back, the boatmen counting money or drinking. I taught the girls games I had played with Agnes and Frans, and they taught me games they had made up. They blew bubbles, played with their dolls, ran with their hoops while I sat on the bench with Johannes in my lap.
Cornelia seemed to have forgotten about the slap. She was cheerful and friendly, helpful with Johannes, obedient to me. ‘Will you help me?’ she asked me as she tried to climb on to a barrel the neighbours had left out in the street. Her light brown eyes were wide and innocent. I found myself warming to her sweetness, yet knowing I could not trust her. She could be the most interesting of the girls, but also the most changeable – the best and the worst at the same time.
They were sorting through a collection of shells they had brought outside, dividing them into piles of different colours, when he came out of the house. I squeezed the baby round his middle, feeling his ribs under my hands. He squealed and I buried my nose in his ear to hide my face.
‘Papa, can I go with you?’ Cornelia cried, jumping up and grabbing his hand. I could not see the expression on his face – the tilt of his head and the brim of his hat hid it.
Lisbeth and Aleydis abandoned their shells. ‘I want to go too!’ they shouted in unison, grabbing his other hand.
He shook his head and then I could see his bemused expression. ‘Not today – I’m going to the apothecary’s.’
‘Will you buy paint things, Papa?’ Cornelia asked, still holding on to his hand.
‘Among other things.’
Baby Johannes began to cry and he glanced down at me. I bounced the baby, feeling awkward.
He looked as if he would say something, but instead he shook off the girls and strode down the Oude Langendijck.
He had not said a word to me since we discussed the colour and shape of vegetables.
I woke very early on Sunday, for I was excited about going home. I had to wait for Catharina to unlock the front door, but when I heard it swing open I came out to find Maria Thins with the key.
‘My daughter is tired today,’ she said as she stood aside to let me out. ‘She will rest for a few days. Can you manage without her?’
‘Of course, madam,’ I replied, then added, ‘and I may always ask you if I have questions.’
Maria Thins chuckled. ‘Ah, you’re a cunning one, girl. You know whose pot to spoon from. Never mind, we can do with a bit of cleverness around here.’ She handed me some coins, my wages for the days I had worked. ‘Off you go now, to tell your mother all about us, I suspect.’
I slipped away before she could say more, crossed Market Square, past those going to early services at the New Church, and hurried up the streets and canals that led me home. When I turned into my street I thought how different it felt already after less than a week away. The light seemed brighter and flatter, the canal wider. The plane trees lining the canal stood perfectly still, like sentries waiting for me.
Agnes was sitting on the bench in front of our house. When she saw me she called inside, ‘She’s here!’ then ran to me and took my arm. ‘How is it?’ she asked, not even saying hello. ‘Are they nice? Do you work hard? Are there any girls there? Is the house very grand? Where do you sleep? Do you eat off fine plates?’
I laughed and would not answer any of her questions until I had hugged my mother and greeted my father. Although it was not very much, I felt proud to hand over to my mother the few coins in my hand. This was, after all, why I was working.
My father came to sit outside with us and hear about my new life. I gave my hands to him to guide him over the front stoop. As he sat down on the bench he rubbed my palms with his thumb. ‘Your hands are chapped,’ he said. ‘So rough and worn. Already you have the scars of hard work.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I answered lightly. ‘There was so much laundry waiting for me because they didn’t have enough help before. It will get easier soon.’
My mother studied my hands. ‘I’ll soak some mallow in oil,’ she said. ‘That will keep your hands soft. Agnes and I will go into the country to pick some.’
‘Tell us!’ Agnes cried. ‘Tell us about them.’
I told them. Only a few things I didn’t mention – how tired I was at night; how the Crucifixion scene hung at the foot of my bed; how I had slapped Cornelia; how Maertge and Agnes were the same age. Otherwise I told them everything.
I passed on the message from our butcher to my mother. ‘That is kind of him,’ she said, ‘but he knows we have no money for meat and will not take such charity.’
‘I don’t think he meant it as charity,’ I explained. ‘I think he meant it out of friendship.’
She did not answer, but I knew she would not go back to the butcher.
When I mentioned the new butchers, Pieter the father and son, she raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
Afterwards we went to services at our church, where I was surrounded by familiar faces and familiar words. Sitting between Agnes and my mother, I felt my back relaxing into the pew, and my face softening from the mask I had worn all week. I thought I might cry.
Mother and Agnes would not let me help them with dinner when we came back home. I sat with my father on the bench in the sun. He held his face up to the warmth and kept his head cocked that way all the time we talked.
‘Now, Griet,’ he said, ‘tell me about your new master. You hardly said a word about him.’
‘I haven’t seen much of him,’ I was able to reply truthfully. ‘He is either in his studio, where no one is to disturb him, or he is out.’
‘Taking care of Guild business, I expect. But you have been in his studio – you told us about the cleaning and the measurements, but nothing about the painting he is working on. Describe it to me.’
‘I don’t know if I can in such a way that you will be able to see it.’
‘Try. I have little to think of now except for memories. It will give me pleasure to imagine a painting by a master, even if my mind creates only a poor imitation.’
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