Girl with a Pearl Earring, The

by Tracy Chevalier

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

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

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

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

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

  I was assisting him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sir?”

  “Where are you going, Griet?”

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

  “Will you get me something as well?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Ah. How is the growing family?”

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

  I said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Thank you, Griet,” he said.

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

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

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

  “Did he ask you to?”

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

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

  She gave me her own answer a few days later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Try closing your eyes.”

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

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

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

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

  He taught me.

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

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

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

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

  “When I am ready, I will ask.”

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

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

  “Come here, Griet.”

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

  “Look out the window.”

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

  “What color are those clouds?”

  “Why, white, sir.”

  He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Are they?”

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

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

  “My vegetables, sir?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  After that I could not stop looking at things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He did not try to touch me again.

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

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

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

  I stared at the ivory.

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

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

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