by Lynn Cullen
Vader folds his arms over his chest, his grin deepening. “And?”
Titus looks again at the canvas, then takes on a scolding tone. “Papa, you’re loading your paint with charcoal powder. Those dabs on the baby’s skirts are so thick they stand out from the canvas. You could use them as handles to pick up the painting.” Then he brightens. “Have you got a buyer?”
As miserable as Vader makes me, I cannot bear the look of hopeful anticipation on his face. “The eyes,” I whisper to Titus.
He doesn’t hear me. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Papa,” he says. “It looks good. The painting is very good.”
Vader holds onto the tail end of his smile. “Thank you, son.”
“Keep up the good work.” Titus claps him on the back. “Someone is sure to buy it. And I’ve got new contacts now, through Magdalena. All those years you trained me for the art market are finally going to pay off.”
“Good, son. Good.” Vader’s gaze is on the painting.
“Papa?”
Vader doesn’t answer; he’s looking at the picture. There is pity in Neel’s eyes as he watches him. Can Neel see what Vader’s own son cannot?
“Papa?” says Titus. “I brought two rounds of Edam cheese. There is a bottle of port for you, too. Magdalena won’t miss it—we have got a whole cellarful.”
“What?”
“Cheese, Papa, I brought you some.”
“Oh.” Vader turns away from the easel, his jaw set as if he has made a decision. “Thank you, son.” He smiles, but the light has left his pale green eyes.
Neel looks at me, but I will not look back. He should not judge Titus. Titus has been through more than he ever will. Titus and I together.
“Oh, and Bird,” Titus says, “before I go, I have been meaning to tell you—you had better be more careful about keeping the street clean in front of the house. Cases of the pestilence have been reported in town, and there is a new ordinance that all residents must sweep their streets each day.” He sees my expression. “Don’t worry, they think the sickness can be kept from spreading this way.”
“It is not in our hands, regardless,” Vader mutters, more to his painting than to us.
Chapter 6
The Sampling Officials.
1662. Canvas.
Shouts, coming from outside, wake me on my pallet. I hear scraping sounds.
I throw back my feather bag, hop across the cold tiles, then wipe the frost from the window with my shift front. Outside on the canal, two boys skate by. A mother pulls a sled with a bundled-up baby on it.
“It froze!” I whisper.
I pull on my clothes and run through the house, my shawl flapping like a seabird. “It froze! It froze! Titus! The canal has frozen!”
In the hall I nearly trip over Tijger, who runs away, his tail arched like a monkey’s. Moeder is peeling an onion in the kitchen.
“Moeder, the canal is frozen!”
“Neeltje, shhh!”
I peer out the kitchen window. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
Out on the canal, our neighbors, Mijnheer and Mevrouw Bicker, he tall and thin, she as small, round, and neat as a jam pot, skate by slowly, holding hands with their son and three little daughters, who are chopping along on their own little skates. Behind them, an old couple glides along in step, their windburned faces serious. They frown at the pack of boys yelling and racing toward them, all flapping scarves and chapped cheeks.
“Everyone’s skating! Let’s go!”
“I can’t, puss. I must have a nice soup available for de noen—Vader is expecting an important visitor. The sampling officials of the Draper’s Guild are considering your vader for their group portrait.”
Outside the window, one of the Bicker girls falls on the ice, her legs straight out in front of her. She starts to cry until little Mevrouw Bicker plucks her up from under her arms and spins her in a circle until she laughs.
“Why can’t we have fun like everyone else?”
“Shh, puss, we’ll go out later. You’ll just have to wait.”
“Where is Titus?”
“At his aunt’s.”
“Not again!” All I hear when Titus comes back from the van Loos’ is about his pretty cousin Magdalena. I stomp to the stairs to Vader’s studio and hang on the banisters. Why must I always wait? I hang upside down with my hair brushing the floor until my head gets tingly, then swing myself up the stairs.
I crouch down in the doorway at the top. Vader is standing in his studio, with palette and brushes in hand. I am not allowed to be here. I should run back downstairs, but I like the way he looks. I like his square back, his thick arms holding the painting things, the gray curls coming out the bottom of his cap. I want to sit by him and smell his spicy skin.
“Cornelia,” Vader growls, “what are you doing?”
Someone calls, “Hallo, little miss.”
I peek past Vader’s legs. A man in a golden robe sits at a table to the side of Vader’s easel. He’s holding a sword as thick as his hairy hand. His face is mostly covered in beard, but where one of his eyes should be is an empty flap of skin.
I scramble backward like a crab, then fall on my back.
He scratches his beard, brown and bristly as the ratcatcher’s dog, with the tip of his sword. “She’s afraid of the weapon. Don’t worry, miss, there’s no edge to it. It couldn’t slice a round of cheese.” He whacks his own arm to prove it. No blood.
“Cornelia,” Vader says, “say hello to Mijnheer Gootman.”
“Make that Claudius Civilis,” the man says stoutly, lifting his sword. “Ain’t I a handsome king?”
I can’t look at him. What if the flap comes open?
“Sorry, mijnheer,” Vader says, “she’s a skittish one.”
“Let her be,” Mijnheer Gootman says. “I had my own little schaapje, little Trientje. She was a shy one, too. Taken by the plague, she was, just last summer.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Vader says. “I lost my first child that way.”
“It was a hard time for the wife and me.” Mijnheer Gootman sighs loudly, then a smile lifts his beard. “I saw you watching your vader paint, miss. Are you going to be a painter like your old pa?”
I sit up. Paint stinks but I don’t mind. I would like to paint like Vader, to make things come alive in pictures.
“That’s hardly likely,” Vader mutters.
“Because she’s a girl?” says Mijnheer Gootman. “Do not underestimate a woman, my friend. How many widows have you seen take over their dead husband’s shop and build up the business tenfold?”
“It’s not that Cornelia is a girl,” Vader mutters.
Footsteps tap briskly up the stairs. A man in a glossy black cape arrives at the studio door, then steps over me. With a smell of flowers, he puts out a yellow-gloved hand. “Rembrandt.”
Vader shifts his brushes to his other hand to shake. “Mijnheer van Neve.” He nods to the one-eyed man. “This is Jan Gootman. He is a cobbler from down the street.”
Mijnheer Gootman leans on the table and sticks out his own hairy hand to Mijnheer van Neve as Vader goes back to painting. The fancy man curls his lip at Mijnheer Gootman’s paw, like he has sniffed a rotten onion.
“Sorry, Rembrandt,” Mijnheer van Neve says as Vader dabs at the canvas. “I did not know you were working. Your … wife … sent me up.” Behind Vader’s back, he narrows his eyes at me and smiles as if he has heard something naughty. “I shall come back later.”
“No need.” Vader loads his brush with black. “If you’ve come to discuss the terms for your group portrait of the sampling officials, I can do so now as I paint. I’ve got to keep working on this piece for the new Town Hall. I suppose you heard I won that commission—the biggest picture in the building. Quite a project.”
But the fancy man is already leaving. “I shall come back.”
Vader stops painting. “Mijnheer van Neve—”
“I shall be back.”
Mijnheer Gootman is still fr
owning at his unshaken hand as the fancy man goes down the stairs. Vader turns back to him and sighs. “Now where were we, my friend?”
I stand up, put my arms on top my head, and twist so my skirt swirls this way and that to get Mijnheer Gootman to notice me. Please talk some more about girls like me painting. Because I want to paint. More than anything.
But Mijnheer Gootman only uses the tip of his blunt sword to push up the crown sliding down his forehead. “How much longer do you think it will be, Mijnheer van Rijn? If I’m gone too long from the shop, there will be hell to pay with the wife.”
Chapter 7
It has been two weeks since Titus left me for Magdalena and the House of the Gilded Scales. It is an unusually fine day for mid-March. A few furry scraps of clouds creep across a sky as blue as the expensive chunks of lapis lazuli Vader grinds for his paint. A breeze damp with the sea plucks at my skirt as I stand at the edge of the canal with Tijger, who has followed me outside, his majestic strut lending my lowly errand a more regal air. Save for the soft plopping sound of the boats tied in the canal, and the screech of the gulls, it seems oddly quiet, until the death bells of the Westerkerk break the silence. A shiver of fear runs through me, then I shake it off. It is probably not the plague. A person rich enough to buy the bell ringer’s services has died of something else. Let us all weep buckets.
Vader’s shout sails out the upper window. “CORNELIA!”
Not again.
In the canal, a brown mother duck and her five fist-sized yellow ducklings slice through my reflection in the murky water. I pour the contents of the slop jar into the canal, well away from them. Maybe if I ignore Vader he will forget about me.
“Cornelia! Do not waste time!”
I groan when I see a passenger boat approaching, pulled from the other side of the canal by a boy on a bony black horse. I hurry into the house before the passengers, seated around the edges of the boat, can hear him. Now that Vader has been told to call for me, he does it day and night. Why did we tell him not to shout for Titus?
I find Vader in the back room, sitting on the steps to his bed-cupboard. He is putting on his shoes.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I need to be shaved. I am going out.”
“So go to a surgeon, like everyone else,” I say, though I know we can’t afford it.
He points to a bowl on the floor. There is a razor, strap, and sponge in it.
“You want me to shave you? I don’t know how to shave!”
“There’s a piece of soap in the bowl—suds it up, slap it on.” He pats his face to demonstrate. “There’s nothing to it. Titus used to do it for me.”
I grimace at the grizzled tufts sprouting from his leathery cheeks and chin. He has not shaved since Titus’s marriage. For that matter, he has not gone out but has shut himself up in his studio, painting a portrait of himself. The man has more portraits of himself than the king of Spain.
“I can’t shave you.” I cringe at the thought of him wandering around in public, shaved or not. “Where are you going?”
He chuckles as if to let me in on a lark. “To pay Gerrit van Uylenburgh a visit. We will see if the young shoot’s taste for art has improved or if he remains as thickheaded as his vader. Old Hendrick was a dull old ox if I ever saw one. A stuiver-pincher, too.”
I wince. “Mijnheer van Uylenburgh won’t talk to you! Don’t you remember what you did at the wedding?”
“What?”
“The wine!”
“What?”
“You made Magdalena spill it. You cursed their marriage!”
“Oh, that. It was an accident. Besides, who believes in that superstitious nonsense?”
“Magdalena’s mother, for one. Those were not tears of joy she was crying when Magdalena was wiping Titus’s collar.”
Vader scowls at me for reminding him. “Well, this is business. If there is a guilder to be made, van Uylenburgh will be for it.”
“But he has sold few of your paintings since …” I cross my arms. It was not my fault Vader took up with his maid. I did not ask to be born.
“I have not given him anything to sell.”
That cannot be true, but there is no arguing with the man. “Maybe you ought to let Titus talk to him first, now that their ties are stronger.”
“No need. I will let my painting do the talking.”
“Which painting?”
“The family group.” He finishes with his shoes, then puts his hands on his knees, elbows out. “I no longer need it.”
I want to shout a protest. I love that picture—the look in the baby’s eyes is all I have of Titus now that he’s Magdalena’s, but I don’t say a word. We need the money too badly. “I think we should wait for Titus.”
“Nonsense.”
“That picture is still on stretchers. How are you to carry it? It’s huge.”
“In the handcart. Get the razor.”
I don’t like the looks of the razor’s edge, gleaming against the dull pottery of the bowl. “Why do you not shave yourself?”
Vader holds up his hands. “Palsy.”
It is true, each finger trembles independently, as if inhabited by separate creatures. He must be pretending.
“Stop it.”
He looks helplessly at his hands. “I can’t.”
“Then how do you paint?”
“God stills them.”
The hair rises on my arms.
I must stay calm and not provoke him further. I steady my voice. “I cannot shave you, Vader. I will cut you.”
“I won’t let you.”
I continue to protest, but he wears me down as usual and finally gets his way. When I am done, I have nicked him only five or six times around the chin—a most satisfactory job, considering the loose skin I have to navigate on his jowls. Soon we have breakfasted on ale and bread, and Vader has wrapped the painting in a linen drape and is buttoning up the paint-and ale-stained doublet that might have fit him when he was a young blade but from which he bursts like a sausage from its casing now.
“Come with me,” he says.
It occurs to me that the child who resulted from the affair that caused the rift between him and the van Uylenburgh family thirteen years ago might not aid in the sale of this painting. “No.”
“I need you to steady it in the cart.”
My stare is not sympathetic. But it is wasted on the back of his head as he fetches the handcart from the courtyard, cursing as he untangles it from the thorn-covered canes of the rose vine. He maneuvers it inside and in front of the painting, making muddy tracks on the tiles that I will have to clean.
“There is big money in this,” he says, “but if you won’t go, I won’t go either.”
“Why?” I say, completely puzzled.
“Just …” He lifts the wrapped picture and, grunting, puts it in the cart. “… because.”
The man’s nerve is exceeded only by his madness. But I have finished The Marriage Trap and haven’t been able to exchange it for another book at the bookseller’s shop and so have nothing to do but while away the time at home with the kitchen rats. Besides, the painting might get damaged if Vader moves it by himself. Soon we are on our way to the bridge past the New Maze Park, Vader pulling the cart, me trying to steady the picture as the wooden wheels rattle over the cobblestones that pave the center of our street.
Tijger follows us over the humpbacked brick bridge and past the hedges of the park, behind which the peacocks squawk as if they are being wrung for someone’s supper. “Go home,” I tell him, “before you get lost.”
He looks up at me, his tail swaying in languid unconcern.
Vader stops the cart to stamp his foot. “Shoo!”
Tijger sits down.
“Oh, well,” Vader says to Tijger. “You’ve figured out how to get us to wait on you hand and foot all these years, you can figure out how to get yourself home now.”
I fret over Tijger’s safety as he trails us again as we resume our clumsy jou
rney with the cart. Tijger amuses Vader. Vader has sketched him many times—bathing, sleeping, scratching behind his ear. Tijger appears several times in the large-and-growing gallery of unsold paintings on the wall in the front room of our house.
I appear not once.
We go two streets to where there is a small poultry market surrounding the crossroads. I keep my head down as we cross diagonally to the far corner, passing ladies with their maids carrying baskets on their arms and girls selling eggs cradled in their aprons. A black-painted carriage rattles by, its springs squeaking. Two men walk past, then turn to look at Vader, who is a sight enough, pulling a child’s cart, though his idiot’s appearance is only compounded by his wisps of white hair waving about in the damp March wind. Rembrandt van Rijn might be the only man in Amsterdam not wearing a wide-brimmed black hat. I tug my own linen cap down by its strings, glad I have worn my hair loose so it can hang over my face. So keen am I not to be recognized, that it is not until we turn the corner onto the Lauriergracht that I realize Tijger is missing.
“Tijger!”
“Don’t worry about him,” said Vader. “He’ll go home.”
“What if he gets crushed by a carriage or chased by dogs? What if—” I stop, not wanting to give credence to a terrible thought: in times of plague, cats and dogs on the streets are rounded up and destroyed, for some believe they are carriers. During the last terrible pestilence, I’d had to keep him in the house … before we were locked in ourselves.
Vader studies my face. “You worry too much.”
“You don’t worry enough.”
He raises his gray brows at me.
“You don’t,” I say, standing my ground.
“What good does worrying do?” he says. “Has it ever changed the course of anything?”
“Let’s just go home,” I say miserably.
He shakes his head. “We’re here now.”
He points to the house just ahead. The building is one of a row of houses four stories high and four windows wide—palaces, compared to ours. Van Uylenburgh’s house might be just a canal away in distance, but it is a world away in style. Dealers of art must fare better than the artists themselves—at least in Vader’s case.