Light of Her Own

by Callaghan, Carrie

  “It’s not right of her to be so cruel,” he said softly.

  Maria laid a hand on him and ushered him into a chaste embrace.

  “She can’t see anything but her painting,” she said. The words felt like a condemnation and, at the same time, a relief.

  Abraham stood back and nodded. “I know.”

  “I have an idea. I could use your help with something. And I know someone who’d be glad to see you today,” she said.

  “That’s hard to imagine.”

  She pressed against his arm and turned him in the direction of the leper house. “I went to visit your friends today, to talk about how I could help them. And I think they’ve got the materials for some curative ointments and poultices. I need your help gathering everything.”

  “That sounds simple enough.”

  “Wait until you see the task,” she said with a small smile.

  They walked in silence. As they passed the familiar brick houses and green-painted doors, an anger hatched from the flimsy shell in her chest that she had tried to use to contain her feelings. The anger crept and circled, feeding itself upon her thoughts. It was one thing to have ambition, but it was another to forget those who loved you. Or once did.

  She used her sleeve to wipe the sweat from her eyes, and she turned her thoughts to the other ingredients she might need. Some ground pig’s hoof most likely, which would be easy enough to find. And though she would not tell Abraham, she would take a cupful of the oil to be consecrated by the priest currently lodging in town, in the house where they had held their clandestine Mass this week. A blessing from the Lord could not hurt. She glanced at Abraham, who seemed lost in his own thoughts. He fingered a bit of thread that had come loose from his shirt cuff, and almost collided with a cart of onions and carrots.

  The sky was bare, and the sharp sun pricked them mercilessly. The crowds were starting to thin as people turned inside to eat their midday meal or rest from the heat. A calm seemed to unfurl, like a fog drifting over from the lake, and she tried to unclench her jaw.

  Maria had not asked Abraham about his time in Amsterdam, but while she tended to his back one morning he had told her a story that someone had told him. The man was a veteran of the war with the Hapsburgs, and he had seen the sack of Magdeburg, a Protestant town on the wrong side of some river in the German states. Maria had listened only partially as she dabbed the ointment on his wounded back, but when Abraham described a street, vacant except for the blood running down its gutters like the rain after a storm, she paused. They had both held still that morning, in reverence of the horror. Now, at the thought, the afternoon peace seemed to quiver. She wondered if cities elsewhere had lanes weeping blood now.

  They rounded a bend and could see the trees lining the canal up ahead. The smell of smoke wafted toward her. Some poor woman had burned her family’s food. Abraham glanced over but said nothing. When they reached the top of the bridge arcing over the canal, she stopped. A tendril of smoke curled out from the top window of the leper house, which she could see above the high wall. A bird cooed behind her, and she almost turned around to look at it. But then a plume of flame burst through the window, followed by the explosion of shattering glass.

  She screamed, a short gasp of terror. Maria ran toward the house, but then she stopped. She turned around and saw Abraham running toward her, then past her, toward the house. She had to alert the fire brigade. She ran, her skirts pulling unevenly at her waist and thumping against her legs, slowing her stride. A burning scent chased her.

  A man, his belly round under his fine linen doublet, stepped outside his house on the busy Kleine Houtstraat, which led to the southern gate.

  “Fire! There’s a fire,” Maria said, gasping and ragged. “Go tell the watchman!” She pointed south.

  His face clouded in affront at her command, but then his eyes widened. “Fire? Where?”

  “At the leper house. Hurry, please!”

  The muscles in his face relaxed, probably in relief that the fire was on the other side of the canal from his home, but he nodded and ran down the street toward the gate. Usually, the watchman was the first to spot flames, since fires most often sprouted at night. He would sound his trumpet and point his lantern in the direction of the fire. But today, there was no such alarm. Perhaps the sun glittered too brightly for the man’s eyes to discern the smoke.

  Maria wiped the sweat from her brow and resumed running toward the town hall, only a few more blocks away.

  Her cries of “fire” attracted attention, and within minutes, a crew of men was hauling the city’s two large sail cloths from the shed behind the Stadhuis and dousing them with water. In the distance, she heard the horn blow, and she knew the townspeople would be filling their required leather buckets with water and forming a line to pass them toward the burning house. She hoped relief would come quickly enough. A fire threatened everyone. And inside the house were those adorable children. Her throat began to close in panic.

  The men bundled the sails up and ran off; they would wet them more thoroughly closer to the house in the fetid canal. Around her, people emerged from their houses, curious and concerned, and she pointed east toward the burning house. She saw a few of them grab their mandatory leather fire buckets and run toward the conflagration. Maria ran after them, her hands empty, and her heart pounding. She needed to help somehow.

  By the time they reached the canal, the smoke was billowing up above the brick wall. Two lines of men, peppered with a few stout women, stretched out of the gate. The lines convulsed with the frenzy of passing full buckets toward the house and empty buckets away, and the din of their yelling nearly rose above the roar of the fire and the calls for help inside. One of the sail cloths rested on the roof, and men on ladders continued to douse it with water as the buckets arrived. Flames twisted and reached out the windows.

  A scream pierced the air. Maria cringed and scrambled toward the gate. A wave of heat pushed her back. Breathless from the running, Maria turned toward the canal. She could help lift water into the buckets, or at least pass the sloshing pails. But there was no place for her, and the ground began to spin. She stumbled to the bridge’s low wall and leaned against the bricks. When she looked up, she saw Judith running along the canal toward the fire relief efforts. The street was crowded now, and she didn’t see Maria.

  More cries for help rent the air, and Maria squeezed her eyes shut. Her head was swimming, and her lungs burned from the smoke. By the gate, the water-bearers drew apart to let a child, bundled in rags and coughing, pass into the street. One of the lepers. It might have been Magdalena, though she couldn’t tell with the smoke. Maria tried to stand, but wobbled and fell back against the wall.

  She coughed. The smell of the smoke shifted from rich to acrid as the thick clouds gathered and rolled further away from the building. Judith walked over to the girl and knelt down. She said something Maria could not hear then reached an arm out. Judith paused, but then she rested her hand on the child’s shoulder and drew her in. The little girl’s face wrenched into a sob.

  A man, Abraham, emerged from the gate carrying a body between his arms. When he stepped clear of the billowing smoke, he set the woman down. She rubbed her eyes and hacked a gasping, ragged cough into her dirty clothes. Abraham stood up and walked over to Judith, who threw her arms around him. Behind them, the building groaned and cracked, and the water-carriers yelled down the line for more buckets.

  Abraham pried himself free of Judith, whose face had gone pale, and he ran back beyond the walls. Inside the burning house.

  Maria stood, but her knees buckled, and she leaned against the wall edge. A loud crash sounded from behind the brick walls, and screams joined the cacophony. Some of the rescuers streamed out from the gate then turned to stare back at the smoke. The roof had collapsed.

  Chapter 38

  THE FIRE RAGED ON THROUGH the day and into the night. It ate at the house’s masonry shell, and the night sky glowed a sullen orange
against the clouds of soot. The town poured bucket after bucket upon the flames, and as Judith passed sloshing full pails down the long, frantic line, she thought they might scoop the entire canal up and splash it upon the burning house. She hoped they would. She had to save Abraham.

  When he had run away from her, protesting that he had to save someone named Gerrit, Judith had screamed, demanding he return. She tried to follow him, but a woman with calloused hands and worn clothes pushed Judith into the bucket line. And then she saw the roof collapse. She stood, stunned and suspended, until someone pushed a full pail into her hands, and she had to pass it along to the next person. Then came another bucket, and another, and soon she surrendered to the rhythm and the blisters that bubbled under her palms.

  By morning, the largest and most ravenous flames had dimmed, and the house smoldered in tame fury. Judith collapsed onto a stone wall near the canal and pressed her raw, aching hands against her cheeks. Once she closed her eyes, she heard all around her a soft, crescendoing sobbing. The air grew saturated with mourning, as cries of anguish crept into the silence left by the defeated fire. Her own chest constricted, and a painful grief ripped through her. She had not seen Abraham since he ran into the house. She knew what that meant. She opened her eyes and saw children in rags with tears washing the ash from their faces, and women cradling crying men against their chests.

  She might be wrong. She ran to the demolished front gate. Inside the courtyard, the wrecked house radiated heat, and the lingering flames ate slowly away at what beams remained. She grabbed the shoulder of the first man she saw.

  “Abraham, have you seen him? Abraham Leyster. Tall and thin. Have you?”

  He shook his head, and she ran to the next man. And the next. And the next. No one had seen him.

  An old man in a long gray robe hobbled over to her. He looked at her, and his red eyes spilled over with tears. When he raised his sleeve to wipe them away, she saw he had knobs in the place of a few of his fingers.

  “I . . .” He started to speak, but his throat swallowed the words. He pressed his eyes shut, and his cheeks gleamed in the dim morning sun. “I’m sorry,” he managed finally. He reached out as if to touch her, and then he stepped back.

  “No,” Judith said. But her throat closed over her breath.

  She nodded at the man. She could manage no more response than that, and she stepped away. She walked around the courtyard, calling softly for Abraham.

  The colors around her faded, as if bleached by the sun, and she blinked her eyes, burnt by the ash. She left the enclosure and walked back into the street. Still she called his name, and the few townspeople nearby looked at her with pity.

  Judith could see his face perfectly in her mind’s eye. She strained to fix her thoughts on his details, to pin his expressions.

  “No, you can’t go,” she said, not caring that she spoke out loud. She would not let herself cry though. If she held back her tears, she might still find him. If she behaved as she ought to, calm and reasonably, Haarlem might unearth him unharmed from some corner of the wreckage. She wanted to argue with him, to convince him to stay home. To never have left, never have ran out after they fought. No, she should have stopped him earlier. So much earlier. She had been so ignorant. She conjured his image again, as if it were a portrait. His smile brightened then melted. She felt as if someone was prying her ribs from her body, one by one, and raking her chest with talons. Judith knelt in the street and pressed her palms against her dry eyes.

  THREE DAYS PASSED before the workers could remove enough of the wreckage to find the bodies. Judith spent her time waiting seated on her stool and staring out the window at the gray street below. She gave the boys the time to do as they pleased, but she heard them lingering about the house. When Judith wrenched her thoughts into the present, she was surprised to see that Carolein had set them to scrubbing the hearths, and her apprentices had obeyed. They hunched on their knees and scoured the hearthstones. She sometimes thought the rivulets of sweat running down their sooty faces might be tears.

  The workers brought Abraham’s body, wrapped in a linen shroud, to her house. They laid him on her bed and backed out of the room without a word. Judith stood above the tall form and reached out a hand to touch the fabric. It was colder than she had expected. Behind her, in the entryway, she heard Carolein talking to the men. Slowly, Judith unwrapped the body.

  His head and torso were charred and brittle, and one of his arms was bent across his chest. His legs were almost untouched, and his brown linen pants were streaked with soot. One shoe had fallen off. Judith turned away for a few minutes.

  Then, gingerly, she undressed Abraham’s body. Carolein came bearing a bucket and cloth and, without speaking, they washed what skin they could. Judith stayed away from the charred areas, though once she got too close, and black greasy ash smeared across Abraham’s unburnt skin. She fought back the urge to retch.

  They draped a fresh shirt around his torso and put clean pants on his legs. Carolein wrapped his head in fine linen, and then left the room to send Davit to find a scribe who would write out the public death notice. Judith pulled a chair over and sat beside the bed. She could see his scarred hand, the D etching the pallid skin. She pressed her eyes closed and waited.

  Carolein returned and crouched down on the floor next to Judith. Carolein’s brown skirts pooled out around her like stiff paint on a palette. She cupped Judith’s elbow in her hand.

  “The head worker left this for you, from Paulus van Beresteyn. Abraham’s wages, those that hadn’t been paid yet.” She dropped a small leather pouch in Judith’s hand. The weight of the coins caught Judith’s attention, and she looked first at Carolein’s face, her eyes wide with empathy, and then at the pouch. She opened it and counted the coins inside. Thirty-two guilders.

  “That’s as much as he’d earn in half a year. Or more,” she said in a low voice. She couldn’t marshal any more sound than that, and she realized she didn’t want to talk about Abraham’s earnings in front of him. As if he would think less of her for considering money now.

  Carolein nodded. “It’s about as much as a funeral will cost.” She stood, gave Judith another brief caress on the shoulder, and left.

  Judith counted the coins again. Carolein was right. Abraham had no guild to pay for his funeral, and Paulus van Beresteyn must have known he had little in the way of family either. The magistrate, as ambitious and rigid as he was, meant well. She knew about ambition. Tears rushed up and blurred her sight. How undeserving Judith was of any family. She was both grateful for the gift and angry at herself for having to accept it. A better sister would have been willing to spend her last cent to send her brother on his way properly. She knew, even now, that she couldn’t do that.

  She stood. She did need to plan a funeral, no matter where the money came from. Judith walked over to lay her hand upon Abraham’s still chest, and then she left. The list began forming in her mind: coffin, a black shroud, food, beer. Flowers, for his youth. She had little time, and yet the litany of tasks closed over her thoughts with the relief of an embrace. She closed the door to her room and called for Carolein.

  Chapter 39

  JUDITH THANKED THE MAN, WHO smelled of brine and whose name she had already forgotten, and stepped out of the crowd of mourners. She leaned against the cool plaster of her wall, straightened the black lace covering her hair, and watched as the knot of men dressed in the traditional black robes shuffled past one another to give their respects to the coffin. She and Carolein had decided, against the pastor’s wishes, to place the top upon the wooden box. Her brother’s covered face was too intimate in its description of his death and last pains for Judith to leave him to others’ eyes.

  She didn’t know many of the mourners gathered now in her house. Men from the docks and Abraham’s life before he fled, she imagined. She had wanted the lepers to attend, but Carolein pointed out that if they did, the sick would be the only mourners. Judith thought that would be fine, bu
t in the end, she conceded to tradition.

  A good number of the painters from St. Luke’s Guild had come too, ostensibly out of sympathy for her, but she suspected it was more to demonstrate guild cohesiveness. They had never met Abraham. In the crowded overflow in her entry hall, Judith saw Frans de Grebber and Maria, but she stayed away from both of them. They had come for Abraham and would have nothing kind to say to her. She couldn’t bear any more reprobation, no matter how much she deserved it. And she was grateful, in a way, that Jan Miense Molenaer was in Amsterdam still, where he had traveled before the fire to set up a relationship with a dealer and meet with a merchant who wanted to commission a portrait for his daughter’s wedding. She had sent Jan a letter about the funeral but heard no response. That was fine—good even. Bearing her grief alone seemed fitting. Judith spoke only in soft thank yous and mumbled affirmation of whatever anyone said to her about Abraham, though few people spoke to her at all.

  The pastor cleared his throat, and the low murmur of conversation drifted into silence.

  “We are here to mourn the passing of the brave young man, Abraham Leyster, who died before his time. A few words from the Holy Bible.” He bent his gray head over the few pages he had brought, verses copied from the holy book, and read them in a voice that rolled up and down First Corinthians, then a brief selection of the Psalms. Judith’s attention wavered between the pastor’s palsied hands and the closed coffin. Why would her brother never grow old and complain of aches in his joints or dim hearing? He had left her alone. Or she had driven him away, into the flames?

  She’d heard no word from their parents. The full room swayed slightly under the spell of the pastor’s words, and she imagined her bowed and bewildered parents cutting their way through the crowd. She had waited three days to write them, for it had felt too final to see on paper the words confirming that Abraham was dead until she could see him for herself. But by the time she had the funeral announced, she knew she had to tell them. Now, she exhaled a jagged breath and tried not to think about why her father and mother had not arrived or written. Perhaps the letter had gotten lost.