Light of Her Own

by Callaghan, Carrie

  “Sir, you work here?” Judith plucked at the starched lace collar around her neck and then, realizing how nervous she looked, pulled her hand to her side.

  “That’s right. I run the place.” He looked her up and down. “You’re not looking for work, are you?”

  “No.” She stood up straight. “I’m looking for someone. Well, two people. Either one of them will do.” He used the apron tied around his gut to wipe each of his hands in turn. He arched his eyebrow and waited.

  “One of them was in here two evenings ago, selling some paintings. He had an azurite doublet. I couldn’t say what cut, exactly, but the color was a deep blue. Like the ocean at the horizon, or . . .” She closed her mouth and paused for a moment. “The other man worked with the first one. This man was tall, taller than you even, with blond hair and a nose that looked screwed on crooked. One side larger than the other. Have you seen either of them?”

  His eyes flickered at the corners when she mentioned the crooked nose. Judith saw details in faces others might have let glide past unnoticed. It was a product of her training, her hours staring at the angle of a model’s smile and discerning the exact color of a curl lying damp on a forehead.

  “Maybe a stuiver to make up for the time you’ve taken out of a busy day.” She held out a coin and, after a moment, he took it. His fingertips were rough.

  “I remember the man in blue, but I don’t know anything about him. Probably not from Haarlem, if I had to guess. But that nose, that reminds me of a type who lives on my brother’s street. A few blocks over. Not the best place for a lady, though.”

  She shrugged. He considered her for a moment, and then told her the street.

  “The man I’m thinking of,” he said, “he has an accent. French, or something. Sound right?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’d like to get a look at him and see.”

  The innkeeper nodded. “Don’t mention me. I don’t need any trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “You never know these days.” He gave her another calculating look and then walked across the room to heft up another crate of dirty dishes. Their conversation was over.

  The bells tolled the hour. It was too late now to continue her search, and she was almost late for her appointment to oversee Herold’s sketch. She turned back toward the De Grebber house. After a few blocks, she stopped at a small intersection, where one corner was occupied by a cooper’s shop, as advertised by the yellow cask painted above the entrance lintel. Her breath gave a frosted cloud, and she looked down the narrow street to her right, toward the home and workshop of Frans Hals, Haarlem’s most prominent painter. He painted lively figures whose emotions throbbed beneath the layers of pigment. Judith did not like to admit it, but she was jealous of the man’s skill. And his success.

  “Judith, there you are.”

  She turned around to see her brother, Abraham, regarding her with that half smile she loved and his arms crossed over his chest. He was tall and thin, and his eyes had the shape and silver flash of minnows.

  “Were you looking for me? I’m not as hard to find as you are.” She tapped his cheek with her index finger, and his smile broadened for a moment. Abraham didn’t have the constancy to hold an apprenticeship, so he skipped from job to job, like the oar of a boat dipping in and out of the water. He seemed afraid to grow attached to anything but Judith, and sometimes she feared he was drifting from her too.

  He glanced behind her at Frans Hals’s workshop. “Are you going in there? I’d rather not join you.” His hands, pink from the cold, plucked at his mended breeches.

  Judith gave him a quick kiss and nudged him into motion, walking toward the main square.

  “No, no time for Frans today. I was looking for someone, but now I have to head back to the workshop.”

  “That’s mysterious. The someone, I mean.”

  “Not really. He’s a man I have some painting business with.”

  “What’s his name? Maybe I know him.”

  Judith pretended to be distracted by a few swallows whose flight dipped over their heads, and then she laughed. She couldn’t lie to Abraham, no matter how embarrassed of her dealings she might be. “I don’t know his name,” she said finally. “But I can take care of it myself.”

  He nodded. “You tell me if you change your mind.” He stopped walking and held her elbow, pulling her to a halt beside him. “Help was what I wanted to talk to you about. I was hoping I could borrow a few coins. Not much, maybe fifty stuivers or so. I had to miss three days of work, I was sick, but the rent is due and . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Fifty stuivers? ‘Sblood, Abraham, that’s nearly three guilders. That’s a lot of money.”

  “I know.” He looked at his feet. “But if I don’t pay the rent this month, I’ll lose my bed.”

  Judith sighed. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t now. And you still owe me from last time.”

  “I know, I was almost ready to pay it off, and then—”

  “Don’t, Abraham. I can’t.”

  He looked down again at his feet, and her eyes followed down to the cobblestones. His left boot was cracked and nearly split along the side. He scraped some mud from the sole onto a protruding stone.

  “If I don’t pay the rent, the landlord’ll have me at the magistrate’s. It’s enough to lose a hand.”

  She shook her head. “It’s more than rent, isn’t it?”

  Abraham pulled his arm away. “If I don’t pay him, he’ll find a way to collect his price.”

  Judith stepped back. She tried to set her expression, but her younger brother sagged in the street, and he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  He could, she knew, decide to leave Haarlem. Like their parents, who five years earlier had accumulated such debt that the city declared them bankrupt and the Reformed Church expelled them. God condemned the irresolute and insolvent, the minister had declared. So Jan and Trijn Leyster packed their few belongings onto a borrowed cart and drove out of town, as the sun was setting and the town gates closing. They gave their two children no farewell and only sent a scrawled letter, written by some literate stranger, some weeks later. By which point Judith was frantic with worry. Even while she lived away from Jan and Trijn’s home, she had attended church with them every Sunday. Her parents were her touchstone, and then they had disappeared. When she showed Abraham the letter, he grabbed the small bit of paper from her hand, crumpled it up, and threw it into a nearby canal. Judith gasped as the precious paper, the reverse side of which she could have used to draw, floated away half submerged. Their parents did not deserve a response, Abraham said with tears in his eyes. He swore he would never contact them again, and to Judith’s knowledge, he had not.

  No, she would not be her parents. Money was not more important than family. She took a deep breath.

  “It’s fine, Abraham. I can lend you the money. It sets me back, you understand? I’ll get you the coins in a few days.”

  “Thank you.” His face glowed rosy for a moment. He gave her a brief embrace, and resumed walking, his arm entwined with hers. “I’ll pay you back soon, I promise.”

  They walked together for a few more blocks, and Judith steered their path away from the linen-seller’s house with the clear light on Korte Barteljorisstraat. She didn’t tell Abraham about the workshop, though ordinarily she would have. She couldn’t think about the rent money she would need to find, not yet. For it would be her rent. She would find a way.

  Chapter 5

  MARCH

  IT WAS MIDDAY, AND MARIA had the workshop to herself. Everyone else was either resting or elsewhere, so she stole away to work. She lifted the cover off her portrait and frowned. She’d had to restrict her palette to mostly ochres and grays, the less expensive pigments her father did not mind giving to her. The somber colors suited her, mostly, for there was little in her concept of pain and penance that merited a lush blue or vibrant green, and the modest colors of earth and flesh reflected better h
er concept.

  In all her years helping in her father’s workshop, this was the first time she had tried to capture an aspect of herself, or even anything personal. Her labor had always been rote and in her father’s service, and that satisfied her. She loved the soaring feeling that filled her when she regarded others’ fine artwork, but there was little need for her own. Until now.

  Samuel’s most recent letter had arrived three Saturdays earlier. He had written to her on and off in the five years since he surveyed Haarlem’s art community for his book and had thus spent more time in his hometown. Then, she and Judith had been thrilled to read of themselves in his account. For nights, Judith would read out loud: “Again. ‘And also the daughter I have to praise. Who ever saw a painting made by the hand of a daughter? See here another’—that’s me—‘who paints with a good, keen sense.’ Do you think I have good, keen sense, Maria?” Judith would hug the book to her chest and fall back onto the straw mattress, smiling.

  Maria wrote him a brief note of thanks, and to her surprise, he responded with an avalanche of affection. He had seen her as a girl, certainly, but now that she was a young woman, he was struck by her beauty, he said. And though he kept his courtship respectful, writing letters even when he was in town, Maria was baffled. She mentioned it to Judith, who laughed. “You could certainly do worse,” her friend had said, and though Maria protested she wanted nothing to do with the man, Judith persisted in teasing her about it. Eventually, the letters stopped coming, and Judith’s jokes tapered off.

  Until last year, when Maria saw Samuel in the Grote Markt. It was summer then, and he was listening to an itinerant preacher at the edge of the square, in front of an ornately carved doorway. When Samuel saw Maria, his face brightened into a smile.

  “It’s a pleasure to see you again,” he said, approaching before she could disappear into the crowd. “I’m sorry I troubled you with my correspondence so long ago. I married, you know, but my wife died two years past.” He paused to watch her reaction, and she dipped her head in sympathy. “I would have told you I was back in Haarlem permanently now, but I wasn’t sure the news would be welcome.”

  “It’s pleasant to see you,” she said, and there was some truth to it. He was a charming man, in his earnest way, with large brown eyes and a well-trimmed beard. If only he weren’t a heretic and wanderer.

  He coughed, and then again, and a spasm took over him. She looked at her feet.

  “I’m sorry, I seem to be recovering from something,” he said when he regained his voice. “Can I walk with you?”

  They strolled around the market, and Maria told Samuel what news she had heard recently of Haarlem’s painters—that Frans Hals was once again mired in debt, and that Jacob de Gheyn had died. She suspected he already knew all this, but Samuel listened, then asked about her own painting.

  “I do little now,” she said, fixing her eyes on the roofline over his shoulder. “I mostly help my father.”

  “I’m sure you’re a good helpmeet,” he said. He reached over and drew his thumb down her cheek. She froze. “I must attend to some business, but I’ll visit later.”

  Maria was too startled by his touch to object. Samuel nodded then left her. In spite of the warm sun, her cheek felt frozen as she walked home frowning. She went directly to her father in his workshop and told him she had seen the poet. To her surprise, he was delighted.

  “It’ll be good to have him back in town. Was he writing another account? The last was so helpful for business. Did he say anything?”

  “He said he would visit me here later, but mentioned little about painting,” she said.

  Frans de Grebber raised an eyebrow. “He seems fond of you. That’s wonderful, Maria. Think of the advantages such a connection would bring for us.”

  They spoke little more about it, and Samuel never came. He sent a letter apologizing, but wrote nothing else until this latest letter. He was again ill, he said, and he could think of little else but her. That he would cry to leave this world without knowing her company better. And he begged her to marry him. She burned the letter in the hearth before anyone else could see it.

  Maria prayed the rosary every night, but now her entreaties needed greater strength. She hated to injure the man by turning him down, yet she could never marry a preacher of the Reformed Church. So she needed God’s help. One night, during her cycle of the rosary, a remembered image came to her. One of her father’s copybooks held a woodblock print that had long intrigued her: it showed a young woman clad in rags and holding a single, glowing candle. As a child, Maria had brushed her fingertips over the ink and wondered what the flame illuminated, and what it did not. What lay beyond the candle’s gift of light, outside the printed lines? Or was it simply the light itself that mattered, like the light within the soul? The darkness beyond might be as meaningless as death. Or meaningful? She loved that she could not decide. And the vision of that woodblock inspired her. God was asking for an offering.

  Clearly, that old, adored print was the appropriate subject. It was not vanity to paint herself onto this flame-bearing woman. The woman was a sinner, and so was she. Painting herself into this image was acknowledgment, which was, in turn, humility.

  Now Maria sat on her stool in front of the easel and considered the panel in the clouded light. She strove to capture an acknowledgment of both sin and redemption, shadow and flame, in the piece, yet the painting fell short. She closed her eyes and felt wrung out, with an empty, bitter feeling in her chest, as if a hound clawed at her soul. Her father would have had the skill, certainly. Judith too. Maria squeezed her eyes shut more tightly. This was her sacrifice and her struggle. She would have to make the painting sufficient using her own resources.

  Perhaps some blue, a hint of rich indigo in the black shadow behind the woman’s head might be enough of a hint at redemption. A reminder of the Virgin’s celestial robes and of the purity of Heaven. She stood up from her stool by her easel and walked over to her father’s pigment cabinet. A jar of smalt rested on a nearby tabletop, but the resulting blue wouldn’t have the depth that azurite could grant. No, smalt wouldn’t serve. Azurite was expensive, and Frans de Grebber kept it all locked away. Maybe she could borrow some. She jiggled the small latch, but the lock held. Maria placed her hands on her hips and regarded the wooden cabinet, and then the empty room. She could ask her father, who likely sat in his bedroom down the hall working on his ledger book. Or she could buy her own. She liked the idea of having her own little pot of azurite, a tiny stash for her own artistic extravagances. If she spent her sparse coins, the painting would have even more meaning.

  Maria had a few guilders she had saved over the years, and she dropped the coins into the cloth pocket tied at her waist. She left the house without saying a word to anyone, easily done as the boys were resting and listening to her older brother Pieter, who was visiting and playing the lute. Outside, the street was peppered with shoppers, vendors, and children. She nodded at a neighbor and hurried on. A few blocks from her home, a rectangular placard covered in black silk and edged in lace hung from the front door of a house. The device meant that a baby had been born, but stillborn, as indicated by the black. Maria had to stifle the urge to make the forbidden sign of the cross. That poor family, burdened by broken hopes—or so she imagined. She thought of her mother, weakened from the stillborn death of her last child. She had never seemed to recover; the heartache, which Maria had been powerless to remedy, eventually dragged her into the grave four years later. How Maria had cried at her mother’s deathbed, wishing she could have been enough to anchor her mother in this world, even if the stillborn baby had departed. Maria gave a heavy nod in the direction of the house.

  The shop was near the docks, on the northeastern side of town, a fairly long walk. She skirted the edge of the busy Grote Markt square and crossed a tree-lined canal. Judith had grown up in this northern neighborhood. Her father’s brewery, bought with the ambition of leaving linen work behind, was once there,
on the corner where Maria turned from Bakenessergracht to the quay that ran along the Sparen River. Now Jan Leyster’s low brick building was a warehouse, leased to the United East India Company, judging by the round smell of nutmeg lingering near the door. Sea birds swooped overhead, and among the crowd was a beautiful woman who tilted her head and grimaced as she walked with mincing steps.

  The supply shop was the lower level of a broad house, and the front door hung open, in spite of the cold. A young boy threw a rag ball against the wall at a small spot not covered in wooden panels or finished art: displays for the merchant’s fine quality pigments. The rest of the wall radiated colors, from the carmine red of the precious cochineal to the blinding purity of the lead white. The boy stopped when he noticed her and stood looking expectantly at her.

  “You work here?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  Maria raised an eyebrow, but the boy said nothing else.

  “I would like some azurite. The smallest bit.”

  He nodded again, walked into a room deeper in the house. He returned quickly with a bronze key held delicately in his fingers, which he used to open a trunk lying next to a large table, bare except for two sets of scales. After rummaging around in the trunk for a moment, he lifted a pewter scoop filled with coarsely ground radiant blue pebbles. He poured it out, almost shard by shard, and scrutinized the needle on the scale.

  “That look right to you?” he asked her, in a soft, ringing voice.

  “Yes.” She glanced around, hoping no one she knew would enter the shop. Especially no one from her house.

  He told her the price, and she paid it without hesitation, even though it was nearly the amount of all the coins in her pocket. He twisted it in a scrap of paper, and Maria left.

  She felt as if the small package emanated warmth into her cold palm, and she let a smile play across her face. She decided to return home a different way, to avoid the busy riverside and cut through a smaller street. A few dogs scampered ahead, tussling over a picked-over bone. They were sleek enough to belong to a home, although she was not sure any of the modest households nearby would want to feed a dog. Then one growled at her, baring its teeth, and she froze. The dog turned away, and she walked on, unsettled.