by Lynn Cullen
“Yes.” I remember my manners. “Please. Sister. Unless—Vader, do I have to model?” Even being captive to Vader and Neel would be preferable to exposing myself to certain shame.
“Go.” Vader wipes his mouth with his napkin. “I can work on the other figure in my painting, if Neel would be so good as to remain.”
Neel speaks up for the first time since we sat down to dinner. “Of course, mijnheer.”
“Why don’t you just spring for some models, Vader?” Titus says. “Surely there are some beggars in the neighborhood who could use some coin.”
“Neel and Cornelia are perfect,” Vader says.
Ha. Titus knows the reason Vader does not hire models these days. No stuivers.
Just then a gray cat leaps onto the open window. Magdalena screams.
“Titus! Remove that beast, quickly!”
With a screech of chair legs on tile, Titus gets up from the table and shoos away the cat with his napkin.
“They harbor the distemper,” Magdalena says, patting her breast. “Johanna de Geer has heard the cases of contagion are growing again. Cornelia, do you still keep that cat of yours?”
“Tijger?” I think of Carel’s increasing count of the death bells. He’d said he’d seen a house marked with a P on the Kalverstraat. How many cases will there be before the contagion tips into a full-blown plague? A tingle slithers up my spine.
“You must get rid of it immediately!” Magdalena cries. “It is a danger to all of our health.”
“We had him during the last contagion,” I say.
“And wasn’t there a death?” she demands.
Titus puts his hand on hers. “Now, sweetest, we survived, didn’t we?” he says lightly, but his words cannot take away the memory she has evoked. We eat in strained silence, spoons clicking on china, as the specter of the pestilence with its plague wardens banging on doors, its acrid smell of fires to burn the possessions of the dead, its wagons trundling by, arms and legs flopping over the sides, floats above us.
A mechanical clock chimes its golden tune on the sideboard. “Vader,” Titus says, “what did you say you were working on?”
Vader swallows his mouthful. “It’s a surprise.”
The rest at table breathe a silent sigh for a change in subject.
“Being mysterious, are you?” Titus says with a grin.
Magdalena lifts her head as if being brave, then offers her tiny pearl teeth in a smile. “Vader, can you at least say where you got the idea?”
Vader stabs a chunk of meat with his knife and puts it in his mouth. “God.”
Magdalena raises her slivers of brows.
“I think what she means, Vader,” Titus says, “is did you see something that inspired you? What was it in your daily life that set off the spark?”
Vader swallows his mouthful. “I cannot claim any such credit. It was all His idea.”
Like not attending church. How convenient to do whatever one wishes, then to claim God has made one do it.
Titus wipes his hands on his gold brocade napkin. “Vader—”
“It took me a while to learn to sit back and let Him do what He wishes, but I am finally getting the hang of it.” Vader smiles. “I used to think I was the great one, that I alone was the genius. Rembrandt van Rijn, the miller’s son—boy wonder! Ruben’s heir! Leonardo of the North! I know better now. I don’t know why God chose me, but I will shut up and listen, if that is what He wants.”
The room is quiet except for Vader’s renewed chewing of food. What troubles me is that I want to believe him.
I am glad when Magdalena speaks up. “What are you working on, Neel?” she asks brightly.
He clears his throat. “A Prodigal Son, actually.”
“Haven’t Prodigal Sons been done rather much?” Titus says. “The one Vader did with my …” He frowns, his spoon poised at his mouth. “Well, I hope you will at least have the good sense to use models from the neighborhood if you have to paint sinners.”
I flash a nervous glance at Magdalena. Does she know that Vader once painted Titus’s mother—her cousin—as a whore? He portrayed our dear Saskia in the act of being dandled on his lap, painting his own grinning self as the bad son before he’d turned good.
“I don’t know,” says Vader. “It brings so much more depth to a painting when you use people you know.”
“Yes,” Titus says pointedly, “but what if those people take offense about the roles in which they are depicted?”
I frown at Neel, who has stopped eating to watch me. I wonder if he would feel as loyal to Vader if he knew Vader was working on his own new Prodigal Son.
“You shouldn’t complain,” Vader says. “I have painted you as an angel speaking to St. Matthew and as a monk.”
Titus laughs. “Appropriately enough. But others not painted as favorably could be hurt.”
Even with Neel’s gaze upon me, my memory crawls on its own to a place I don’t wish it to go. I see a red ribbon winding down …
Neel speaks up. “My Prodigal Son will be different, at least from any I have seen. I wish to take up the story at a further point in the telling, when the vader is forgiving the son, not when the son is in his debauchery. My aim is to show the vader’s forgiveness. How sweet it is to him.”
“Good luck,” says Titus.
Vader sees me watching him. “Neel and I have been talking,” he says to me, responding to my unspoken accusation of stealing Neel’s idea. So this is what he had been sketching this morning.
Jealousy flames up within. Vader can work with Neel on a painting but not me. They are in their own snug little world, better artists than me, better than Carel, better than everyone.
“Why don’t you do still lifes?” I exclaim to Neel. “They are pretty, they fetch a good price, and everyone likes them. What’s so wrong with painting lemons?”
“Nothing,” Neel says, “but that is not what I’m called to do.”
I scowl at his serious face. He’s as bad as Vader. They deserve each other. Let them paint together in Vader’s cramped and dreary workshop while Carel becomes famous and even richer for his lemons. And I—I shall be a virtuous lady, handing out linen shifts to hungry orphans, and my husband, if not Carel, will be someone like him.
But, oh dear Lord, if only it could be Carel.
Chapter 18
Bathsheba with King David’s Letter.
1654. Canvas.
My front tooth is loose—a top one. For days I have pushed it with my tongue, checking to see if it could be tightened back up. It hasn’t. Now it hangs by a bony thread, as if something inside won’t let go of it.
I go find Moeder, scrubbing the stairs.
“Not now, Cornelia.” She pulls a dripping gray rag from her bucket. “Frederik Rihel is coming. It’s an important commission.” She wrings water from her rag and slaps it on a stair.
Jannetje Zilver lost her front teeth last year. Something must be terribly wrong with mine since they have not dropped out. What if there are no new ones to come in behind them? If the tooth goes and there is no new one I will be ugly. Moeder will never call me pretty puss anymore. Vader will never paint me like he does Titus.
I feel a crunch in my mouth and taste blood on my tongue. The hair prickles on my neck as I fold back my lip and pick out a jagged bit of pearl. My tooth.
“Neeltje!” Moeder sits back on her heels. “Look at your cat!”
At the top of the wet stairs, Tijger is giving himself a bath.
“He will track up my stairs,” she says. “What are you waiting for? Please get him right now.”
Moeder’s voice is more cross than usual. Now is not the time to break the news that her puss is permanently ugly. I take four giant steps up the stairs in my stocking feet and grab Tijger.
“Where am I to put him?” I call down. My stomach aches with worry about my tooth.
“Anywhere!” she cries. “In the attic for now!”
I look at the door on the other side of the landing and
draw in a breath. I don’t like it in there.
Clutching Tijger close, I open the attic door and walk slowly into the room. The only light comes through a small, round, dusty window. An empty birdcage hangs from the rafters. It smells like tar and dust and old bones. I want to cry.
Something skitters across the floor.
I jump back. Tijger springs from my arms so fast I am knocked into something wall-like behind me. A heavy cloth slumps on top on me. I scream and struggle out from under it, then come face-to-face with a towering canvas.
It is a painting—Vader’s work. I recognize his colors. Brown and yellow and red. In the center of it, a lady sits on a cloth. She is big, bigger than real size.
Other than a velvet necklace and a band around her arm, she is naked.
I have never seen a lady’s naked form before. Only bad women show their bodies—being naked is a sin. Even Moeder gets but half-undressed when she washes. I stare at the bare lady’s body, at the dark V between the legs; I memorize the breasts. Then I follow the red ribbon winding up her neck like a snake. In her hair, there is a string of red beads. I come to the face. It is turned to the side.
My insides drop.
No. Not her. No, God.
“Neeltje,” says Moeder.
I jump.
She stands in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
The quiet floats like dust between us as she follows my eyes to the picture. When the deep bong of the death bells breaks the silence, Moeder turns her head to listen.
The look on her face is as in the picture.
My inside self pushes at my throat like it wants to get out. I’m going to be sick.
“It is all right, Cornelia,” she says.
She is worse than Vader. He is mean and shouts but doesn’t hide that he is bad. Moeder acts good, but she is not. She is not who I thought she was.
“Cornelia?”
I push past her.
She doesn’t call after me.
Chapter 19
The silvery loops of Magdalena’s shining braids and ringlets bounce lightly as she threads her way across the cobblestones of Dam Square. As it is surprisingly warm this the sixth day of April, she wears no cape, just a lilac velvet gown with the skirt drawn up to show the intricate design of the silver brocade skirt below. With her gauzy white linen collar wrapped around her shoulders like folded wings, and the single ostrich feather she holds like a fluffy wand, she looks every inch the Fairy Queen. Meanwhile all around us dogs bark, peddlers call, and lepers shake their rattles. Magdalena is a pearl among swine, even when trailed by a tattered brown shadow. Me.
A team of horses clops heavily by, straining at their harnesses to pull a wagon heaped with barrels. Magdalena taps her hand with her ostrich feather, pausing for me to catch up. “We haven’t far to go to Mijnheer Brower’s shop. Are you tired?”
My shoes pinch so badly that I can barely walk. They are Moeder’s and too small, but my own pair is too shoddy to be worn in public. “I am fine, thank you.”
“Sister.”
“Thank you, sister.”
She smiles. “You are going to love Mijnheer Brower’s. His cloth is peerless. All imported. Straight from the Orient, and of the highest quality, too. All the Trippen buy their cloth there. Johanna swears by it. Maybe we shall see her there.”
My stomach rolls.
“The marvelous thing about Mijnheer Brower,” Magdalena says, raising her voice above a ratcatcher’s loud boasts of his wares, “is that he takes markdowns at the drop of a bonnet. I simply say, ‘Oh, mijnheer, this material smells like Chinamen!’ or ‘Mijnheer, are you sure this was not soiled upon by your dog?’ and down he’ll mark it. I get the best quality at a fraction of the price. You should never pay full price on anything, you know. Why put your gold in someone else’s pockets?”
There’s a man over by the corner of the Town Hall. Though his face is hidden by the shadow of his hat, he appears to be staring at us through the crowd. Magdalena’s beauty must be attracting him. She is probably used to such attention.
“Those are pretty beads,” Magdalena says, pointing at me with her feather. “Coral, are they?”
“I think so. I don’t know.” I touch the strand around my neck. I had taken them out from under my pillow, where they’d been hiding for years, and had thrown them on this morning at the last minute, after I had looked in the mirror and seen the pale brown ghost standing before it. I needed something to brighten me up, and the necklace was the only good piece I had.
“Coral is sweet,” Magdalena says. “I had several stones set in a collar for my dog. The brown and white of his ears are so pretty against the red.” She blinks as she smiles, indicating that only a hound would be caught dead wearing the stones.
The man by the Town Hall has left his post and is picking his way through the crowd. He’s moving in our direction. Does he know Magdalena?
“I prefer pearl,” Magdalena says. “Titus gave me these for our wedding.” She pushes back a mass of shiny ringlets with her feather. “Are they not pretty?”
I pull my gaze from the man to look at the pearl drop, large as a chestnut, dangling from her thin earlobe. How nice for Titus to have wed so well. A few months ago he couldn’t even afford bread.
Magdalena lifts her chin and smiles. “Do you know this man?” she says out of the side of her dainty mouth.
The man from the Town Hall steps in our path. He holds his thick but upright frame, suited in fine black wool, in the easy way of a man used to being admired. A friendly grin creases the coarse red flesh of his clean-shaven lower face—his skin has the look of someone fond of his ale, or perhaps too long at sea. Still, there is something boyishly handsome about the jaw visible beneath the wide brim of his hat. Even without seeing his eyes, I can tell he’s a man’s man, and a woman’s man, and he knows it.
“Good day, mevrouw.” He sweeps low in a bow to Magdalena and removes his hat, revealing stray filaments of gold in his graying mass of curls, then replaces it before I can take measure of his face. “I hope I have not alarmed you. I am an old friend of your husband.” He takes her hand. “Nicolaes Bruyningh.”
I stifle a gasp. Carel’s uncle.
He does not notice me. “Congratulations on your marriage,” he says to Magdalena. “I saw you and Titus at the jeweler’s shop several weeks back, when I was at the goldsmith’s next door, but did not want to disturb you, especially if Titus was on the brink of making a purchase you greatly desired.” He smiles, then kisses her hand. “It is good to make your acquaintance at last.”
Magdalena laughs. Her cheeks are tinged with the palest pink as she flutters her feather. “The pleasure is mine.”
He turns to me. “And this is—?”
I strain to see into the shadows of his hat. There is something quite familiar about him.
“This is my sister-in-law,” Magdalena says, “Cornelia.”
He takes my hand in his own, which is surprisingly dry and hard, as if his insides have solidified into stone. “So this is the famous Cornelia. I have heard about you from my nephew Carel.”
“You have?”
Magdalena laughs fondly at my clumsy response, as one would at a trained monkey.
“Oh yes,” says Nicolaes Bruyningh. “All good things, I assure you. He says you have an eye for art. You must get that from your vader.”
I glow from within. Carel spoke of my talent? “Yes, mijnheer.”
“You and he must be very close.”
Does he mean my vader or Carel? I try harder to see under his hat to determine whom he might mean, but he pulls back.
He eases the brim of his hat down farther over his face. “It is good,” he says suavely, “to keep family ties.”
I know enough from reading Maidenly Virtues to nod politely, though I have no idea what he is trying to say.
“With my brother living next door, I have been able to watch Carel and his brothers and sisters grow up right under my nose,” he says. “I heard them c
ry when they were hungry, laugh when they were playing, whimper when they were sick. It was almost like raising them myself—without the sleepless nights, of course. Carel is the baby of the family, you know.”
I strive for the tone of a merchant’s well-bred daughter. “He speaks most admiringly of his older brothers and sisters, mijnheer.”
“Yes, well, perhaps I should have you and Carel around for dinner sometime,” he says. “An old bachelor like me could use some lively company at table.”
“Oh,” Magdalena says, “that would be most kind, would it not, Cornelia? Titus and I just had her dine with us ourselves. She is a complete delight.”
“I imagine she is. My nephew was not born a fool. Well, I must not detain you ladies from your business.” Nicolaes Bruyningh bows. “Good day.”
“Imagine that,” Magdalena says as soon as we have walked a sufficient distance away from him. “Young Carel is speaking of you. When he gets a little older, he will be quite the catch, you know. The Bruyninghs are wonderfully wealthy. All those ships.”
I shiver with excitement as I picture myself dressed in glossy silks and drinking a cup of chocolate in a stately mansion. But such joys would not be half the pleasure of just being the wife of Carel Bruyningh, and having his iris-blue gaze upon me each morning … and each night. My knees buckle with momentary weakness.
“I tell you who you must watch out for,” says Magdalena as we continue across the square, “is that apprentice boy your vader keeps, Ned, Will …”
“Neel?” I look over my shoulder. Nicolaes Bruyningh stands where we left him, though housewives and carts and groups of men cross before him. When he sees me looking, he tips his hat. I turn back around, blushing. I have seen him before. I know I have.
“I suppose that is his name,” says Magdalena. “The boy who came to dinner on Sunday. Rather a serious young thing. Anyhow, do you know if he has money?”
“Neel? I don’t know. Enough to pay my vader. Why?”
“Because the boy is obviously smitten with you.”
“Neel?” We round the corner onto a narrow street lined with neatly kept step-gabled houses. I laugh even though my feet are threatening mutiny in my moeder’s shoes.