by Lynn Cullen
The baker gives Moeder the bread. She fits it into her basket. “And a dozen currant buns, please.”
I look at her in surprise. Has Vader sold a painting? We are going to eat like kings!
“Four stuivers, please,” the baker says.
Moeder tucks away the buns. “Could you please put that on my bill?”
The baker’s smile goes away.
“I ran out today without a single stuiver,” she says. “Isn’t that ridiculous? I shall return on Friday to pay.”
The baker’s voice is not nice. “Whom shall I record on the bill?”
Moeder touches her beads. “Hendrickje Stoffels.”
I look at Moeder. Why doesn’t she say that she’s the wife of Rembrandt van Rijn? Vader is famous. He knows rich people.
“We live at 4 Breestraat.”
What is wrong with her? That was our old address. We moved four years ago. I tug at her elbow.
“Good day, mijnheer.” She grabs my hand and pulls me out of the bakery. I’m so surprised I forget to jump the cracks. When I remember, it’s too late.
“Oh!”
“What’s wrong?” She gives me a bun before I can answer. “Here.”
I look at the bun. It’s not even de noen. She always makes me wait until de noen to eat after we have had breakfast.
“Go ahead. Eat it.”
I take a bite. Bah! Moeder was wrong. This bun is not as good as the buns from the other bakery; it is dry and hardly sweet. I don’t wait to empty my mouth to tell her the bad news.
“Shhh, puss,” she says. “I am trying to find our way.”
The houses here are different from our neighborhood. Taller. Cleaner. “Where are we?” When I look up at my moeder, there are tears in her eyes.
She wipes her eyes when she sees me looking. “It’s from the cold.” She smiles. “How would you like to see the biggest house in Amsterdam?”
I nod yes, though I don’t want to. I want to go home.
“It’s on the Kloveniersburgwal,” Moeder says. “Isn’t that a funny name?”
“Klo-Klov—”
“Kloveniersburgwal. You had better learn it, puss. It is the name of money.” Her voice is happy, but her smile goes away when she turns to look around.
“Here,” she says after we walk a minute, “this is the passage.”
We are hurrying so fast I cannot eat my bun. We come to a canal. It is much wider than ours, with beautiful painted boats on it, and there are big trees, their bare arms reaching into the cloudy sky. A shiny green carriage drawn by six white horses clatters by. I stare at it in wonder. Carriages drawn by six matched horses don’t come down the Rozengracht.
“How much farther?”
“Just a few more houses—it is right up there. We are on the Kloveniersburgwal now. Isn’t it pretty here?” She keeps her face pointed ahead, even though there is a boy with pretty gold hair watching us from the porch next to us. Someone opens the door to the house and pulls him inside.
Moeder seems not to have seen him. “You will like this mansion,” she says lightly. “For two years I have watched it rise out of the ground. It belongs to the Trip family. Your vader is painting the portraits of the Trippen for it—how do you like that?”
I nod as if I like it, though I hope they don’t send the picture back like they did from the Town Hall. Since then, many days Vader goes away in the morning and comes back at nighttime smelling of ale.
I stumble on a cobblestone and drop my bun. When I open my mouth to protest, I see Moeder staring at something down the street.
“Moeder?”
She puts her hand to her hidden beads with a little cry, but I see nothing different, just a group of men in black hats and capes, coming down the walkway like you see everywhere in Amsterdam.
She pulls me away from the dropped bun. We start running in the other direction. We run past one big building and another, my clompen slipping on the bricks, to the end of the street, where there is a big castle with five pointy-topped towers.
“What is this place?” My cap tips off my head as I look up at the main door. A giant could fit through it.
Moeder doesn’t answer, just throws open the door, her basket banging against the wood, and tugs me inside, my cap flapping. The group of men passes by. One of them looks over his shoulder at us, his golden curls under his big black hat catching on his collar. I wriggle out of Moeder’s grip to see him better. Could it be—is it my gold mustache man? I hope it is him so I can ask Moeder who he is. I tap my lips in our signal, but before he can tap back, Moeder pulls me into the dark and leans against the wall, clutching her basket.
“Moeder, I wanted to see! Where are we?”
She doesn’t answer for a moment. When she does, she is out of breath. “The Weighing House.”
“It’s all dark. Why are we here?” Now I will never know if it was him.
I can hear her swallow between breaths. “I wanted to show … your vader did a painting …”
“May I help you?”
Moeder screams.
A bent old man holding a broom steps into the strip of light from the half-closed door.
“Sorry, mevrouw! I did not mean to scare you.” He scratches at one of the white bunches of hair curled over each ear. He smells of bacon and dust.
“I am fine.” Moeder pats at her beads. She is still breathing hard. “I am the … wife of Rembrandt van Rijn.” She pushes me forward. “I have brought my daughter … to see his picture of Dr. Deyman’s anatomy lesson.”
“Ah, the famous painting.”
Moeder nods.
He looks at me, then raises his droopy white brows at her. “The little girl …?”
Moeder opens her mouth, then closes it. “I did not think of that. I was remembering what a success … Never mind.” She turns to go. “Come, Cornelia.”
“But—you brought me in here to see it.” I like Vader’s paintings. Sometimes the people in them are so real they almost talk to me. I think they must know I am Vader’s daughter.
Moeder rubs at her neck. “A quick look, then.”
Tap, step. Tap, step. The old man uses his broom as a staff as he leads us up the stone staircase. “I know your husband,” he says. “I met him when he was doing the picture, though I’d heard of him before. Everyone has heard of the famous Rembrandt.”
“Yes,” Moeder murmurs.
“They say he has a bit of devilment in him, but he always had a smile and a nod for me.”
We reach the top of the steps, then head down a dark hall. The tapping of the old man’s broom handle echoes from the ceiling.
“I thought I remembered hearing Rembrandt lost his wife the year he did that painting that caused all the commotion, the picture of Captain Banning Cocq’s company.”
“That was his first wife,” Moeder says.
“Ohhh. Excuse me, mevrouw. I don’t believe I had heard he had remarried, but my memory’s gone tricky. You could tell me anything and I would forget it before de noen the next day. Congratulations, mevrouw.”
Moeder murmurs something.
The tapping stops. There is a jangle of keys, then the creaking of a hinge. A strong smell, even sharper than Vader’s paints, bites the inside of my nose as I step inside a dark room.
“Moeder, what stinks?”
“They do anatomies in here, little miss,” says the man. “Mevrouw, are you sure we should—”
I hear the rustle of Moeder’s bodice as she looks behind her. “Yes. Yes. But quickly, please.”
My nose runs as we wait for the man to push back the shutters at the windows with his broom handle. When the light pours in, I can see wooden seats all around, in rows that go down like steps. I follow Moeder’s stare to a big painting on the wall. I walk underneath it, my clompen clacking on the tile.
The picture is of men gathered around another man, who is lying on a table. The man on the table has big bare feet, pointed right at me, almost coming out of the picture, and they are dirty. There is a
cloth across his legs, but he is bare, all bare, and his stomach is all black.
No, it’s not black, it’s a big hole. A big, big hole. His insides have been scooped out like a roasting hen’s.
“Thank you, mijnheer,” Moeder says. “We must go now. Come, Neeltje.”
I cannot move. Why have they taken out his insides? Insides aren’t supposed to come out. They don’t want to come out, they want to stay inside and hide. If they get out, people will know bad things about you, secret things. You have to keep them hidden.
“Neeltje, please!”
Even dead, with his insides let loose, the hollow man’s face is unhappy under the mop of thick rosy hair hanging over his forehead.
Wait.
No.
That is not rose-colored hair, parted and pushed down from the top of his head; it is the hollow man’s own dead flesh. They have cut open his head and are looking inside.
“They’re not supposed to look in there! It’s supposed to stay inside! No one is to see it.”
“Don’t cry, schaapje,” the old man says. “There now, little maid.”
But when I turn around to protest that I am not crying, I see he is not talking to me.
He is speaking to Moeder.
Chapter 11
It is a rare bright day in March. The sun shines into the water of the canal, giving it the brown and cloudy look of beef broth. I slog over van Uylenburgh’s bridge with Vader’s quickly unfurling canvas. What a sight I must be—the canvas is as heavy as a calf and as hard to hold as one, too, and the linen strips I hastily wrapped around it before I stole it out of the house are unwinding like bandages from a neglected wound. Curse you, Titus, for suggesting I bring it here. We do not need the money this badly. I would rather starve than have Carel come to the door and find the madman’s daughter wrestling with this flapping beast. A well-bred girl my age is supposed to trip daintily down the street with her maid by her side, not haul ungainly wares across town like a dockworker.
I knock, praying for the maid to answer or another student or even van Uylenburgh himself—anyone but Carel.
The door creaks open on rusty hinges. Carel Bruyningh stands in the entrance in his shirtsleeves. “Yes?”
The minute I see his handsome face, I know I was the dullest of simpletons to think that if I brushed my hair, put on a clean cap and collar, and cleansed my teeth with a piece of straw, I would be presentable enough for the likes of him.
“I am Cornelia, daughter of—”
“I know who you are.”
I hold back my groan. Of course he does. Everyone knows the daughters of madmen and criminals.
Well, now that I have made a sight of myself and ruined the chance I never had with him anyway, I might as well get on with business. “My brother said Mijnheer van Uylenburgh had a buyer for this picture.”
“Here, that must be heavy.”
He is taller than me—Titus’s height, but more well muscled. I dare not look at his golden curls as he takes the canvas from my arms, but oh, I can smell him. Salty bread, green leaves, and soap. I breathe deeply.
“Are you well?” he asks.
A startled snort escapes me. “Yes.”
“I thought maybe you had a cold.”
“No. I am fine.” Why can I not behave like a normal girl? Why must I always be my vader’s coarse daughter? I might as well scratch my armpits and spit.
He folds back a corner of the canvas that has flopped open. “Which picture is this?” He speaks as if we were two respectable people in the habit of discussing art.
I compose my voice. “It is a family group, as Mijnheer van Uylenburgh requested for his buyer.”
“Really?” He catches at the canvas as it slithers onto the stoop. “Van Uylenburgh found someone?” he says, scrambling to pick it up.
The painting appears not to have been hurt. I bob in a flustered curtsy. I am going to kill Titus. “I am sorry to trouble you. I must have misunderstood. It must have been another dealer—”
“Hello?” It’s a man’s voice. “Is that Rembrandt’s girl?”
Gerrit van Uylenburgh comes to the doorway. Without his large hat, he is a whole other creature, like a snail without its shell. He is just a mite of a man, with dark-lashed blue eyes, a turned-up nose, and little hair on his narrow head. What remains of his locks starts just above his ears and hangs to his shoulders in a wispy black veil.
“Is this the family group Titus was telling me about?” he says.
Titus, the brother I’m going to murder? “Yes, mijnheer.”
“Come in. Let me see this thing. It was a private deal,” he tells Carel when he sees Carel’s look of confusion.
Silently cursing Titus, I step inside the entrance hall and look around as Carel lets the canvas slump to the floor and van Uylenburgh gets on his knees to examine it. Though the blue and white floor tiles glisten and the dark wood of the walls gleams, the air seethes with the scent of boiling mutton and onions. Through this sheep-scented miasma, I see the walls are hung with paintings of historical subjects rendered in smooth, bright colors. They will sell fast, no doubt. From what Titus tells me, such paintings are all the rage, though to me, they are as empty of emotion as a China plate. In spite of all their roughness, I prefer Vader’s paintings—perhaps because of it. Somehow, through those slashes of paint, the inner person comes to the surface. How does Vader do it? How does he make Baby van Roop and all the love he feels for his moeder—the same deep love Titus feels for Vader—come alive in dabs of pigment arranged on the canvas at my feet?
I notice Carel watching me. Shame, then anger wells up inside me. I must be a curiosity to him, like the arm in the jar in Vader’s studio.
Gerrit van Uylenburgh stands up. “I saw you at the wedding,” he says, brushing off the knees of his black breeches. “You are all grown up now. How old are you?”
“Almost fourteen.” Just give me the money and I shall leave.
He nods. “Well, I suppose the old man keeps you busy.”
“Yes, mijnheer.”
“He hasn’t changed a bit, I see. Does what he pleases when he pleases.”
“Yes, mijnheer.” I glance at the door.
“Well, we aren’t here to disparage your father, are we?” He fluffs back the remains of his hair. “As I told Titus, I might have a buyer for this piece. How much does your vader ask?”
I look at him stupidly. “I can’t say.”
“He sent you here with a painting to sell and you don’t know the price?”
Tears of frustration burn at my throat. It was all I could do to lug the canvas out of the house while Vader was on a walk along the river. I was so occupied with getting away with the painting while not sweating onto the fresh cap I had donned in case I saw Carel that I had not thought of the selling price.
“Cagey as ever—my vader warned me about him,” van Uylenburgh says. “Doesn’t want to limit his offer, does he? Well, this kind of rough thing doesn’t fetch much, no matter what kind of game your vader wants to play. But the buyer did ask specifically for this picture.”
“May I ask,” I say, “who it is?” Titus would want to know.
“He wishes to remain anonymous.” Van Uylenburgh glances at Carel. “At least until after the purchase is made. Then he will reveal himself.” He holds open the door. “I shall send word of his offer. Thank you for bringing the painting. It must have been a beast to carry.”
I cannot move. As eager as I was for buchts, I had not thought of the possibility of returning home without any. Stupid! Had I not heard Vader complain a thousand times how slow buyers were to pay? Now I have nothing with which to calm Vader’s temper when he finds the picture missing.
“I have got other clients coming soon.” Van Uylenburgh looks over my head in case I had not caught his meaning.
“Dank u wel.” I bob my good-bye and hasten away.
Outside, the fishy smell of the canal quickly overtakes the sheepy odor of the house of van Uylenburgh. I am thinking
how Vader is going to roar, when I hear someone call, “Cornelia!”
Carel strides toward me, the tassels of his collar bouncing on his taut chest. He has run out without his cassock. I touch my cap, then my throat. Why had I not worn Moeder’s red beads? I had them in my hand, but I am so stupid about them. I’ve done nothing wrong, I can wear them all I want. Now I look but plain and young.
“I’m glad your vader’s picture has a buyer,” he says.
Vader again. I start walking along the canal.
He falls in stride beside me. “I could not get it out of my mind after I saw it,” he says. “It was almost as if you could feel what was inside of each person.”
I glance at him.
He looks over his shoulder. “I had to get out of there. I am apprenticed to Ferdinand Bol, who has got a studio in van Uylenburgh’s house, but van Uylenburgh thinks I am his errand boy. He works me to the bone if I let him.” When he smiles, the sunlight catches his golden lashes. His eyes are the bright blue of a jay’s wing.
My gaze dives for the bricks of the walkway. “How soon will van Uylenburgh pay? Not that it matters.”
“It might be weeks. Buyers are notorious for not paying until their arms are twisted. I don’t know who this one is—some are worse than others. The richer they are, the slower they pay.”
“That’s not fair.”
“That is the way it is.” We stop at the bridge. A brisk March wind blows his blond curls off his forehead. His skin is tawny, almost as golden as his hair. At that moment, the death bells of the Westerkerk sound, their deep ringing almost as loud at this remove as at home.
“Someone has died again,” he says.
I notice the sprinkling of golden freckles on his face when he frowns. “Yes.”
“Does it seem to you that they have been ringing more than usual these days?”
I thought only I noticed them. “Are they?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I could count them. I don’t remember them going so often, not since the beginning of …” He scowls and takes a breath.