singing or whistling under his breath. When things did not go well, he stopped, stared out the window, shifted abruptly, started up the attic ladder only to climb back down before he was halfway up.
“Sir,” I began when he came up to the attic to mix linseed oil into the white lead I had finished grinding. He was working on the fur of the sleeve. She had not come that day, but I had discovered he was able to paint parts of her without her being there.
He raised his eyebrows. “Yes, Griet?”
He and Maertge were the only people in the house who always called me by my name.
“Are your paintings Catholic paintings?”
He paused, the bottle of linseed oil poised over the shell that held the white lead. “Catholic paintings,” he repeated. He lowered his hand, tapping the bottle against the table top. “What do you mean by a Catholic painting?”
I had spoken before thinking. Now I did not know what to say. I tried a different question. “Why are there paintings in Catholic churches?”
“Have you ever been inside a Catholic church, Griet?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you have not seen paintings in a church, or statues or stained glass?”
“No.”
“You have seen paintings only in houses, or shops, or inns?”
“And at the market.”
“Yes, at the market. Do you like looking at paintings?”
“I do, sir.” I began to think he would not answer me, that he would simply ask me endless questions.
“What do you see when you look at one?”
“Why, what the painter has painted, sir.”
Although he nodded, I felt I had not answered as he wished.
“So when you look at the painting down in the studio, what do you see?”
“I do not see the Virgin Mary, that is certain.” I said this more in defiance of my mother than in answer to him.
He gazed at me in surprise. “Did you expect to see the Virgin Mary?”
“Oh no, sir,” I replied, flustered.
“Do you think the painting is Catholic?”
“I don’t know, sir. My mother said—”
“Your mother has not seen the painting, has she?”
“No.”
“Then she cannot tell you what it is that you see or do not see.”
“No.” Although he was right, I did not like him to be critical of my mother.
“It’s not the painting that is Catholic or Protestant,” he said, “but the people who look at it, and what they expect to see. A painting in a church is like a candle in a dark room—we use it to see better. It is the bridge between ourselves and God. But it is not a Protestant candle or a Catholic candle. It is simply a candle.”
“We do not need such things to help us to see God,” I countered. “We have His Word, and that is enough.”
He smiled. “Did you know, Griet, that I was brought up as a Protestant? I converted when I married. So you do not need to preach to me. I have heard such words before.”
I stared at him. I had never known anyone to decide no longer to be a Protestant. I did not believe you really could switch. And yet he had.
He seemed to be waiting for me to speak.
“Though I have never been inside a Catholic church,” I began slowly, “I think that if I saw a painting there, it would be like yours. Even though they are not scenes from the Bible, or the Virgin and Child, or the Crucifixion.” I shivered, thinking of the painting that had hung over my bed in the cellar.
He picked up the bottle again and carefully poured a few drops of oil into the shell. With his palette knife he began to mix the oil and white lead together until the paint was like butter that has been left out in a warm kitchen. I was bewitched by the movement of the silvery knife in the creamy white paint.
“There is a difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to painting,” he explained as he worked, “but it is not necessarily as great as you may think. Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things—tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids—are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?”
I wished my mother could hear him. He would have made even her understand.
Catharina did not like to have her jewelry box left in the studio, where she could not get to it. She was suspicious of me, in part because she did not like me, but also because she was influenced by the stories we had all heard of maids stealing silver spoons from their mistresses. Stealing and tempting the master of the house—that was what mistresses were always looking for in maids.
As I had discovered with van Ruijven, however, it was more often the man pursuing the maid than the other way around. To him a maid came free.
Although she rarely consulted him about household things, Catharina went to her husband to ask that something be done. I did not hear them talk of it myself—Maertge told me one morning. Maertge and I got on well at that time. She had grown older suddenly, losing interest in the other children, preferring to be with me in the mornings as I went about my work. From me she learned to sprinkle clothes with water to bleach them in the sun, to apply a mixture of salt and wine to grease stains to get them out, to scrub the flatiron with coarse salt so that it would not stick and scorch. Her hands were too fine to work in water, however—she could watch me but I would not let her wet her hands. My own were ruined by now—hard and red and cracked, despite my mother’s remedies to soften them. I had work hands and I was not yet eighteen.
Maertge was a little like my sister, Agnes, had been—lively, questioning, quick to decide what she thought. But she was also the eldest, with the eldest’s seriousness of purpose. She had looked after her sisters, as I had looked after my brother and sister. That made a girl cautious and wary of change.
“Mama wants her jewelry box back,” she announced as we passed around the star in Market Square on our way to the Meat Hall. “She has spoken to Papa about it.”
“What did she say?” I tried to sound unconcerned as I eyed the points of the star. I had noticed recently that when Catharina unlocked the studio door for me each morning she peered into the room at the table where her jewels lay.
Maertge hesitated. “Mama doesn’t like it that you are locked up with her jewelry at night,” she said at last. She did not add what Catharina was worried about—that I might pick up the pearls from the table, tuck the box under my arm, and climb from the window to the street, to escape to another city and another life.
In her way Maertge was trying to warn me. “She wants you to sleep downstairs again,” she continued. “The nurse is leaving soon and there is no reason for you to remain in the attic. She said either you or the jewelry box must go.”
“And what did your father say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He will think about it.”
My heart grew heavy like a stone in my chest. Catharina had asked him to choose between me and the jewelry box. He could not have both. But I knew he would not remove the box and pearls from the painting to keep me in the attic. He would remove me. I would no longer assist him.
I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamberpots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of flat land where, a long way off, the sea is visible but can never be reached. If I could not work with the colors, if I could not be near him, I did not know how I could continue to work in that house.
When we arrived at the butcher’s stall and Pieter the son was not there, my eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. I had not realized that I had wanted to see his kind, handsome face. Confused as I felt about him, he was my escape, my reminder that there was another world I could join. Perhaps I was not so different from my parents, who looked on him to save them, to put meat on their table.
Pieter the father was delighted by my tears. “I will tell my son you wept to find him gone,” he declared,
