inventory of the family’s possessions must be taken to establish the assets while considering the debts. However, there are private matters that Catharina would like to attend to before this is done.” He glanced at Catharina. She continued to play with the powder-brush.
They do not like each other still, I thought. They would not even be in the same room together if they could help it.
Van Leeuwenhoek picked up a piece of paper from the table. “He wrote this letter to me ten days before he died,” he said to me. He turned to Catharina. “You must do this,” he ordered, “for they are yours to give, not his or mine. As executor of his will I should not even be here to witness this, but he was my friend, and I would like to see his wish granted.”
Catharina snatched the paper from his hand. “My husband was not a sick man, you know,” she addressed herself to me. “He was not really ill until a day or two before his death. It was the strain of the debt that drove him into a frenzy.”
I could not imagine my master in a frenzy.
Catharina looked down at the letter, glanced at van Leeuwenhoek, then opened her jewelry box. “He asked that you have these.” She picked out the earrings and after a moment’s hesitation laid them on the table.
I felt faint and closed my eyes, touching the back of the chair lightly with my fingers to steady myself.
“I have not worn them again,” Catharina declared in a bitter tone. “I could not.”
I opened my eyes. “I cannot take your earrings, madam.”
“Why not? You took them once before. And besides, it’s not for you to decide. He has decided for you, and for me. They are yours now, so take them.”
I hesitated, then reached over and picked them up. They were cool and smooth to the touch, as I had remembered them, and in their grey and white curve a world was reflected.
I took them.
“Now go,” Catharina ordered in a voice muffled with hidden tears. “I have done what he asked. I will do no more.” She stood up, crumpled the paper and threw it on the fire. She watched it flare up, her back to me.
I felt truly sorry for her. Although she could not see it, I nodded to her respectfully, and then to van Leeuwenhoek, who smiled at me. “Take care to remain yourself,” he had warned me so long ago. I wondered if I had done so. It was not always easy to know.
I slipped across the floor, clutching my earrings, my feet making loose tiles clink together. I closed the door softly behind me.
Cornelia was standing out in the hallway. The brown dress she wore had been repaired in several places and was not as clean as it could be. As I brushed past her she said in a low, eager voice, “You could give them to me.” Her greedy eyes were laughing.
I reached over and slapped her.
When I got back to Market Square I stopped by the star in the center and looked down at the pearls in my hand. I could not keep them. What would I do with them? I could not tell Pieter how I came to have them—it would mean explaining everything that had happened so long ago. I could not wear the earrings anyway—a butcher’s wife did not wear such things, no more than a maid did.
I walked around the star several times. Then I set out for a place I had heard of but never been to, tucked away in a back street behind the New Church. I would not have visited such a place ten years before.
The man’s trade was keeping secrets. I knew that he would ask me no questions, nor tell anyone that I had gone to him. After seeing so many goods come and go, he was no longer curious about the stories behind them. He held the earrings up to the light, bit them, took them outside to squint at them.
“Twenty guilders,” he said.
I nodded, took the coins he held out, and left without looking back.
There were five extra guilders I would not be able to explain. I separated five coins from the others and held them tight in my fist. I would hide them somewhere that Pieter and my sons would not look, some unexpected place that only I knew of.
I would never spend them.
Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of the most helpful and readable sources on seventeenth-century Holland is Simon Schama’s
I would like to thank Philip Steadman, Nicola Costaras, Humphrey Ocean, and Joanna Woodall for talking with me about various aspects of Vermeer’s work. Mick Bartram, Ora Dresner, Nina Killham, Dale Reynolds, and Robert and Angela Royston all made helpful and supportive comments about the manuscript in progress. Thanks, finally, to my agent, Jonny Geller, and my editor, Susan Watt, for doing what they do so well.
