Light of Her Own

by Callaghan, Carrie

  Maria shook her head. “I have a father, but he’s not here. He has his work, in any case.”

  “You do what seems best. All I can say is that I hope you will join me in easing the suffering of others. I’ll be at the western gate, the wooden building before the marshes. A short walk north of here.” She held the kitten in one hand and, with her free hand, cupped her palm against Maria’s cheek. Her fingertips were soft and cool, and Maria wanted to lean her head into the gesture.

  Sara took a step back. They had walked through the university grounds and reached a brick wall. A tall tree shaded an open gateway, and beyond it were rows of raised garden beds. Maria could see the fresh green of new spring plants reaching toward the timid sun.

  “I’m off to do some botanical investigation,” Sara said. “I hope to see you after the midday meal. I’ll bring an extra loaf for you.”

  Maria hoped Sara would embrace her, and her hand fluttered at her side as she wondered if she should reach out. But the older woman simply smiled and turned into the garden with the kitten still clasped to her chest.

  Chapter 19

  JUDITH STOOD IN THE BACK of the large room and watched the auction. Her first Guild auction. At the front of the room stood the auctioneer, a stooped, gray-haired man who had once been a painter but could no longer manipulate a brush. His voice, though, still carried. Behind him, the walls were lined with nearly fifty paintings hung one on top of the other, such that almost none of the plaster behind was visible. Busy history scenes with shepherds and lush green trees looked down on peasants caught laughing outside a country tavern, which sidled up against still life paintings of or sliced apples and cheeses or tulips or pheasants still dripping with blood. It had taken Judith a few anxious minutes to search out her three paintings: two merrymaking canvases and a smaller panel of a little girl laughing and holding a kitten. The merrymaking pictures were twinned pendants—each with young men dressed in vibrant suits, whose crimson and sapphire folds she had loved capturing, but one painting showed the men delighting in their drink and company, while the second added the dark skeleton of Death to their party. Don’t have too much fun, she had whispered to her figures while she painted them. Judgment awaits.

  In the crowd she spotted the candlemaker, Abraham Recht, and his wife Baefje Willems. Judith’s hand fluttered to her mouth, and she tried to unclench the snake that wound its way around her gut. The candlemaker was known for being a lavish investor in painters, and he took particular delight in discovering new artists. That he shared a name with her brother could only be a good omen, she hoped. She whispered a prayer begging for the merchant’s favor, and then a second one for Abraham, wherever he was. He would have marveled at the room, and yet he would never have let it intimidate him.

  “Attention, gentlemen,” called Franchoys, the auctioneer. “Painters, out with you. The auction shall commence.”

  Judith glanced around. She had not realized that she would not be permitted to stay for the sale. She knew there was no risk of theft, not like her illegal auction, but she was too anxious to do anything but watch and hope her paintings earned her the money she needed. The other painters standing at the back began to file out. She tugged at the sleeve of one of them, Floris van Dyck, an older man with an aristocratic nose and an elegant beard.

  “We have to leave?”

  He blinked in confusion, and then narrowed his eyes when he realized who she was.

  “Painters with paintings for sale are always asked to leave once the bidding begins. It’s been like that for decades.” He turned toward his companion, Willem Heda, and shook his head. “Astonishing who they’ll let in,” he said, loud enough for Judith to hear.

  She clenched her jaw shut and remained still while they filed out. She couldn’t make a scene here, not with the buyers present. But she wanted to drag him up to the front and show him her three paintings. They had more energy and passion than any of his glossy still life paintings of pewter plates and cheese.

  By the time she had collected herself enough to look around again, she saw that all the artists had left. She inched toward the back wall, in hopes that the shadows might hide her. But as she did, she saw the auctioneer looking at her with a raised eyebrow. She exhaled and went out to the street.

  The other painters had dispersed, surely gone to De Basterdpijp, the Guild’s preferred tavern, off Grote Markt square. Judith couldn’t bear to beg for a seat at someone else’s convivial table, so she went home. It was her own home, at least. For now.

  In the three weeks since she had signed her lease with Chrispijn de Mildt, Judith had moved into the house, hired a servant, and taken on a second apprentice—a dark-haired fourteen-year-old named Hendrik Jacobsz. The money from Lachine had proven barely enough to cover the first month’s rent and supplies, and she had convinced Hendrik’s father to pay part of his fee up front, which provided for the household’s food. Now, as she walked in the gray afternoon light, she tried not to think about how many days her workshop would last unless she sold more paintings. But of course she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Ten more days before the money ran out.

  She opened the door and entered the cold house. She skimped on everything, of course, and certainly could not buy firewood. Upstairs, she heard the boys talking quietly in the workshop. At least they were working. Carolein, the servant, walked past with an armload of clean linens that she was taking to hang from ropes along the stairwell. Judith lifted a hand, thinking to tell the woman to rest, to suggest they relax together in the kitchen. But the older woman’s gaze was fixed on the pile in her arms, and she bit her lip as she tried not to topple it.

  Judith walked back to the kitchen by herself. She sat on the bench by the main table and looked at the onions hung from the ceiling. The light, thin as it was, still made the brown onion skins glow. Had Maria been there, she would have seen it and nodded in appreciation. But it had been three weeks since her friend had left. Maria and Abraham had been a constant rhythm in her life, like a mule’s hooves on the paving stones or the slow passage of water in the canals. Judith rested her head in her hands and tried to think of anything trivial, anything like the breath of the wind against the windowpanes or the cold feeling of the tile under her thin shoes. Anything but the tears that seemed always now to threaten at the corners of her eyes.

  THE NEXT DAY, a porter came to the front door.

  “Here are the coins for the one that sold, Mistress,” he said. Judith’s mouth fell open. Only one. She sucked in a half breath, but the porter had turned away to gesture at his companion, who had a small wagon of painted panels and stretched canvases tied to their supports. “Bring the two on top. Yes, those up there.” By the time he faced her again, she had composed herself.

  “The panel sold? With the little girl?”

  “If that’s the one that’s missing, I suppose so. I don’t have the records; sorry, Mistress. I deliver what’s left over. I’m surprised you had two left behind—I heard there were good sales. And yours look nice. Maybe I’ll buy one next time,” he said and gave her a smile with both eyebrows raised.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, embarrassed that he had seen her need to be comforted. “I’ll take those. Oh, here’s a penning, and another for your friend, for the trouble.” She shut the door before he could say anything else.

  With the paintings nestled under each arm, Judith leaned against the wall. She took a deep breath and lifted her gaze to the ceiling, where she could see, among the deep shadows, some gradients of gray where the uneven plaster caught the light. She took another deep breath and carried the paintings back up to the workshop. She propped them against the wall, image side facing the plaster. There, while the boys sketched quietly, she took out her ledger notebook and recorded the amount she had earned. Six guilders. Her vision blurred for a moment while the tears welled up, but she blinked them away before anyone could notice.

  The next day Judith went to the De Grebber house to collect the last of her
belongings: a few stray linen shifts that had been hanging on the laundry line and a copybook. Frans de Grebber looked at her with dark, sad eyes when she walked into his workspace, but she said nothing. What could she say? In the weeks since Maria had departed for Leiden, no one had heard anything more than her one cryptic letter. After four days, Maria’s brother Pieter had gone to look for her, but no one in Leiden knew where she was. She had delivered the Guild’s message and then disappeared. Judith walked through the workspace and up to her old loft bedroom. She couldn’t bear another agonizing conversation with the despondent Frans. And she could not escape the sense that Maria’s disappearance was somehow a reflection of her own inadequacy. She closed her eyes and took a deep draught of the house’s familiar smells: the rich, mineral smell of paint, the warm aroma of simmering stew, and the earthy undertones of the peat fire. She wished she could send those scents to Maria, to somehow remind her how much she had loved her home. Or so Judith thought. But then, how much about her friend did she know? Judith was failing as an artist, and perhaps that was the latest failure in a long string of disasters that she was only now seeing. Judith tucked the book under her arm and descended from the loft. She walked, head down, through the workshop, left her key to the De Grebber house on a table in the entry hall, and quietly closed the door behind her.

  Chapter 20

  MAY

  JUDITH HELD OUT HER PALETTE, a small paddle about the width of her outstretched fingers, and the apprentice

  Hendrik smeared onto it the ochre and yellow paints he had prepared. She was teaching him how to grind pigments and blend them with linseed oil to make paints. The boys were learning how to heat the oil to thicken it when necessary and how to sun-bleach it in shallow dishes to bind the lightest colors. Hendrik was proving reasonably able. The younger boy, Davit, crouched on a stool in a corner, sketching an arm from a book showing a series of disembodied arms onto a tafelet, a reusable notebook with pages that could be scrubbed out. The tafelet Judith had lent the boy was not as nice as her leather-bound one, with its ornate clasps that held the metal point stylus. That one she used for her own sketches. Still, Davit would cradle his and wrap it in a length of ivory linen whenever he put it away. He was a gentle boy. Nothing like her own brother had been at the same age, eight years ago. Judith sighed. Davit bit his lip as he worried with his charcoal stick at the knob of a sketched elbow.

  Judith dabbed some of Hendrik’s paint onto the prepared panel. She would have liked to ground the panels here in the workshop, but with such a small workshop she did not have enough hands to do all the work, so she bought the prepared wood and strips of canvas from a specialty store supplied by a newly accredited primuerder. With so many workshops, a man could apparently make his living selling primed supports. She tensed her jaw. The reddish-brown paint clumped to her brush and stuck unevenly when she wiped it across the surface.

  “You’ve done a good job with the pigment size,” she told him. “But this needs more oil. See?”

  The boy furrowed his brow, drawing his dark, nervous eyebrows together. He was fifteen and hardly ever stopped moving. She doubted he had the patience for the minutiae of painting.

  “It’s . . . that we’re nearly out. I didn’t want to use it up.” He held up the cork-stoppered jug.

  Judith frowned. The price of linseed oil had been creeping up recently, and with her budget stretched as tight as it was, she could barely afford to buy more. She had tried buying walnut oil, which didn’t work quite as well as a binding agent and was always expensive. Recently, both oils had become nearly impossible to find.

  “That was good of you to try to conserve. But the paint does us no benefit if it doesn’t flow properly. Here. See if you can redeem these.”

  Hendrik scraped the two colors back into their respective pots, each tone scrupulously separate, and returned to his blending.

  Carolein stood on the workshop threshold and dried her hands on her faded gray skirt. She was so industrious in her enthusiasm to clean that Judith had banned her from the workshop. Carolein’s energies might otherwise reorganize the carefully placed brushes or disassemble a set of props jumbled on a tabletop.

  “Mistress Judith, there’s someone to see you. A young fellow.” Carolein’s flat, plain face sparkled with unusual curiosity. Judith wondered what about the unexpected visitor had caught the woman’s attention. She took a sharp breath, and her heart pounded. Abraham.

  She wiped her hands on her smock, took it off, and hung it on a hook in the wall.

  “Continue at your tasks, boys. I’ll be right back.” Davit looked up and smiled; Hendrik nodded and tested a little paint on the scrap of wood by his side. His foot tapped an irregular, unceasing beat that faded as Judith descended to the entry hall.

  She had hung two of her finished pictures flanking the door but had otherwise neglected to decorate the wide space. She tucked a few stray strands of brown hair under her linen cap and cleared her throat. The young man standing by the door looked away from the painting he had been considering, a small, energetic piece portraying two children playing with a ball and stick, and he gave her a reserved smile. Not Abraham. Judith’s shoulders sagged for an instant, until she straightened her back. He had large eyes the color of soft leather and a fine mustache curving over his mouth. He looked to be about eighteen.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Forgive me for interrupting you. You were painting?”

  She nodded. His eyes brightened.

  “Of course, that’s wonderful. I mean, obviously you’re painting, but it’s wonderful work. That’s what I’m here about.

  Painting. I’d like to apprentice myself to your workshop.”

  Judith cocked her head to the right. “Aren’t you a little old?” She was only five years or so older than him, but she had begun her apprenticeship much younger—at thirteen. As most aspiring painters did. By now, this young man should be approaching independence.

  “You’re right, but I do have some experience. I worked with Jacques de Gheyn for a few years.”

  “But he died, what, two years ago?”

  “That’s right.” He gave a weak laugh. “That’s why I left. I thought I’d try something else. But I want to come back to painting.” His hands were clasped together. Outside, a vender down the street was selling his produce in time for the midday meal.

  She didn’t ask why he had chosen her workshop for his re-entry into painting. The answer was too embarrassing to them both. Who else would take an aged apprentice but the disreputable, even desperate, workshop of the new lady painter?

  “Jacob de Gheyn was a strange one, no? Those drawings of witches and bizarre creatures. And his habits . . .” Judith had heard the old artist had regularly wandered alone after curfew—titillating, but not damning behavior—and she wanted to see how the young man reacted.

  He shrugged and said nothing.

  “And your name?”

  “Willem Willmsooz.”

  “Your parents approve? And are you prepared to pay the fee?”

  “Of course.” He kept his eyes to a painting hung behind her.

  Judith tapped a finger against her chin. “I don’t think that’s the truth. I’m sorry, but I can’t—”

  “You’re right, my parents don’t know yet. But they support my interest in painting. They will pay the fees.”

  Judith pressed her lips together and looked at him, waiting.

  “I’m reliable. I promise.” He gave her a confident grin.

  She exhaled. “Why don’t you come up and do some sketches? Show me your training.” She did not want to seem too eager. But the funds provided by another apprentice, even after subtracting the costs, would be a boon. As would be the extra help.

  He looked her in the eye and held her gaze. “I’d be happy to.”

  She turned away to walk upstairs and tried to convince herself the warmth she felt creeping up her neck was the heat from the small peat fire or the contact of
her rough collar. Something other than a flush.

  Without so much as glancing at a copybook, Willem drew finely detailed images of flowers with silverpoint on a tafelet borrowed from a worried Davit. They were the sort of thing Jacob de Gheyn specialized in. The flowers were technically sound, but not consistent with Judith’s more energetic style, and not really useful to her figure paintings. Still, she wanted a third apprentice.

  “You never had any problems with Jacob? Anything I should know about?”

  “No.” His voice was steady.

  “Well.” She wiped the tafelet clean and returned it to Davit, who flickered his eyes up toward Willem before returning to his exercises. Willem was examining the small, bright workshop and did not seem to notice.

  “Well,” Judith said again. “If your family is prepared to pay the fee, I suppose we could find a place for you.”

  Willem’s face glowed with a wide grin, and he grabbed her hand. “Thank you, that’s wonderful. May I bring my belongings by today?”

  Her eyes widened at the touch. Still, she left her hand in his palm for a moment before withdrawing it. “Yes, that would be fine.”

  “Would you look at that?” he murmured. He had stepped closer to Davit by the window and leaned down to look at the boy’s drawings. “That’s quite good. See the shading at the arm?”

  Judith joined them, while Hendrik stood by his mixing station and held a mortar suspended in the air as he stared.

  “Yes, it’s nicely done, Davit,” she said. “But don’t let this young man’s praise get to you. Keep practicing. Willem, I’ll tell Carolein to air out the loft for you. It’s all we have left. These two share a room as it is.” She knew he was avoiding something, but he was old enough to make his own decisions. As long as he paid. And maybe soon he would trust her enough to reveal what the problem was. She would enjoy having someone to talk to.