I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (11 page)

I skip toward the canvas. “Let us see what is underneath.”

“No! He does not want—”

I fling back the drape. The unfinished images of a man leaning toward a woman hover like ghosts against a dead brown background.

Neel speaks in hushed tones as in the presence of God. “Who are they?”

Downstairs, the front door slams.

“Vader!” I flip the drape back over the painting. “Hide!”

“No.” Neel turns to face the door. “We poured out our draft, now we must drink it.”

I hold my breath as Vader trudges up the wooden stairs. He is not yet to the top when he sees us.

“Mijnheer—” Neel begins.

“So you have found my project. I wondered what was taking you. You children have so little curiosity.”

Neel and I exchange glances. Vader had been hiding his work like a hound with a new bone. And he’d been an ogre at breakfast, slamming down his mug and claiming I’d over-watered the ale, which I had. Now he was being sweet?

“You act so surprised.” Vader uncovers the canvas. “So, Neel, what do you think of it?”

I close my eyes and pray for Neel to use his best flattery. Keep Vader jolly, so he does not notice his precious family-group painting is missing. Maybe he does know and is toying with me, ready to spring when I least expect it.

“I know not what to think, mijnheer,” Neel says. “It is just a beginning.”

“Quite right, quite right. I didn’t want anyone to see it before I knew I had it down. I was afraid the image in my head would dry up. But I think I have it now, even though on the canvas it may not look like much.”

“May I ask, mijnheer, whom you are portraying?”

Vader smiles. “Not portraits. An allegory.”

Neel considers the canvas. “The subject?”

Vader puffs up like a peacock that has wandered over from the New Maze Park. “Tenderest love.”

Neel raises his eyebrows.

Vader laughs, then takes a yellow chunk of ochre from its linen wrapping. “I know. An impossible task.” He puts the ochre on the hollowed-out grinding slab and begins to pulverize it with a bell-shaped stone pestle. “How do you capture love or hate or any emotion, for that matter? It escapes the painter’s brush. We can only hope to simulate how it looks.”

Neel nods sadly. “So I have found. Here—let me take that.” I cannot help but notice how his forearms bulge as he grinds with the heavy pestle.

“This will be the exception,” Vader says, watching him, too. “God is guiding my hand.”

Neel does not flinch. He seems not to find Vader the least bit mad. Could he really think God would work through such an imperfect person? “Which biblical story do you use to convey it?” Neel asks as he grinds. “Jesus and his moeder? Anna and Tobit? David”—he glances at me—” and Bathsheba?”

Why does he squirm so when he mentions Bathsheba? I have no care for the story of the silly woman. Let her have her king David. No difficult choice.

“This time, no story,” Vader says. “No Bible, no classics, no writings of the ancients. Just two people, embodying love.”

Neel pauses. A blind man could read the doubt on his plain face. “Mijnheer, if anyone could do it, it would be you—but love? It is not like portraying apples in a still life. Love is not an object.”

I think of Carel and his pride in painting lemons. “It is better to get a real object right,” I say staunchly, “than to be thought mad for painting the impossible.”

Vader laughs. “What care I about what people think of me? They’ve already thought the worst. Anyhow, I am not afraid. I shall trust in God.” Vader smiles fondly at the unfinished picture as Neel fetches a jar of linseed oil to work into the ground pigment. “This shall be a present for Titus. To make amends.”

A mad picture in exchange for putting a curse on his marriage? Some compensation.

I watch as Vader pours the oil into the pile of yellow powder and Neel mixes it with the edge of a paint knife—a quiet team, working together to make color. Vader has never let me help him.

Anger at them both burns in my belly. Why do they leave me out?

There is a knock on the door.

Glad to get away from the cozy pair, I run down the stairs to answer it.

I open the door to a bright spring morning and Carel the Handsome, bent-kneed under the weight of a rolled-up canvas.

Even as my heart leaps, I gasp and put my hand to my cap. I am a mess.

“The buyer has turned it down,” he says. Through my own dismay of being caught in disarray, I notice his golden face is troubled.

The family group? “But it was requested.” I can feel my cheeks flame. Now he knows what a failure my vader is, rejected by all, respected by none. I brush desperately at my wrinkled apron.

“I am sorry, Cornelia. It should have sold. I think it is interesting.” He shuffles in place. “Where would you like this?”

Vader laughs upstairs. I break out in a sweat.

Carel peers inside. “Is that your vader? Perhaps I should talk to him myself.”

“No! No, he is busy. Painting.” It is bad enough to be discovered as a slattern by Carel, but to incur Vader’s wrath in front of him?

“Put it in there!”

“The kitchen?”

“Yes. It’s a good place.” I can hide it there until I get a chance to move it.

Carel steps forward with the canvas, then pauses in the entrance hall. He has noticed Vader’s picture of Moeder in her shift.

“This way!” I yelp. “Quickly.”

I press my hands against my face as he carries the painting through the front room to the kitchen. I am ashamed of the reek of cooked cabbage and the damp, cracked kitchen walls.

“Where should it go?” he asks.

Vader’s voice is at the top of the stairs.

“Behind these barrels,” I say. “Quickly.”

“Cornelia?” Vader calls.

“Surely you have heard about my vader’s terrible temper,” I whisper. “He will not be happy about this.” Not a lie, for certain, though I mean about taking his painting without permission, not his reaction to the buyer’s rejecting it. “We must let his choler cool.”

No matter the true reason, Carel seems to see the logic in this. He dumps the canvas, then hurries after me through the half door leading into the courtyard outside.

We pause on the step. The van Roop girls are on their side of the courtyard, jumping rope in the crisp April air. “Can you walk?” Carel asks over their singsong verses. The wind whips a shoot of the rose vine that grows near the door, nearly lashing my face. I push it away, scratching my hand on its tiny new thorns.

Inside the house, Vader calls.

“I would like to. Yes.”

It is not a walk but a run we break into as we hurry between narrow houses down the alleyway. Several doors away from my own, we burst from the shadows onto the street and are met with the fresh morning sun.

“First warm day of the year,” Carel says.

We look before us. Across the canal, the sunlight catches each shiny holly leaf in the hedge of the New Maze Park, turning it into a wall of glittering emeralds. Yellow-green pearls glow on the tips of the linden-tree branches. A frog hops into the canal, sending coins of silver light bobbing on the brown water. The duck family glides past all in a line, save for a duckling who darts at a dragonfly, then races in a panic to catch up with its brothers.

“I’d like to try to paint this scene,” Carel says. “‘The Canal Near Cornelia’s House on a Sunny Spring Morn.’”

I must not grin like a fool. “Oh, a landscape now? You must have mastered your glass.”

He raises his brows. “You remembered? Well, yes. I can now put reflections in reflections. You should see. I am no van Eyck, but I am getting there.”

I laugh, then cast a look behind me at my house. I see movement in the window of Vader’s studio.

“I would like to paint you,” Carel says.

“Me?”

“I know,” says Carel, “you must be tired of it. You have probably been painted a hundred times.”

“Not really. Sometimes I sit for Neel, but just to hold a position.”

We wait for an old man stumping by with his cane to pass. “Your vader has not painted you? He is mad.” Carel sees my grimace. “I mean, he is missing an opportunity.”

I look doubtful.

“I mean it. If you were my daughter, I would have painted you a thousand times. You are beautiful.”

I search for a sign that he is jesting. I have been called many things. Skittish. Willful. A crazy man’s daughter.

Never beautiful.

A flock of butterflies has been set free in my stomach. I want to throw back my head and crow. I try to think how my book says I should comport myself, but my brain is full of tumbling puppies. I manage to mumble, “So are you.”

His laugh rings out. Two wood doves burst up, their wings whistling, from the linden tree. “You are a different one. No, don’t look like that! I mean it well. I am glad you are different.”

I can hardly keep from glancing at him as we walk along in silence. Does he realize I am poor? Does he think me awkward and stupid and mad?

As if on cue, the death bells of the Westerkerk sound out. “There are your bells again,” I blurt. “Have you tried counting them”—
Lord, can you not stop yourself, girl?
—” since last time?” There. Now I have revealed that I have recalled, one thousand times, every word he last spoke.

He smiles. “They have rung three times a day, on average, though they rang eight times on Thursday and just once on Monday. I have counted the times, hoping we would meet again and I could tell you.”

“So you were right. They do ring more these days.” I battle back the silly grin that threatens to swallow my face. He must think me addled, grinning about more deaths.

His face becomes clouded. “I saw a red
P
on a door yesterday,” he says quietly, “over on the Kalverstraat.”

A tiny pang of fear jabs into my heart. No. I will not be afraid. I will not let it ruin my happiness. “That doesn’t mean a great pestilence is afoot. There are always a few isolated cases. People have been keeping the streets cleaner—the city will make bonfires if it gets bad. It’s not like it was before.”

He nods slowly. “You are right. I am foolish about this sort of thing. It’s just that…” He looks to me. I wait in encouraging silence. “It’s just that I lost my moeder in the last bad year of plague.”

I breathe in to dispel the sadness. “In truth, I suffered the same. Five years ago, this July. You aren’t being foolish. It still hurts, very much.”

“My moeder left us in September. It was horrible.” He touches my hand. “I should have known you would understand. We have much in common, don’t we?”

I gaze up into his awaiting blue eyes but must look away fast. He will think me a ghoul, grinning like this as we speak of grief.

He stops me beneath a budding linden. He is lifting my chin.

“This is how I will paint you, when you look like this.”

My insides are aflame. They push at my very flesh, seeking to burst outside.

I look into his eyes, then at the pink-brown swell of his lips. I nearly swoon as their fullness compacts into a pucker.

“I—”

“Shhhh,” he whispers. The gentle pressure of his finger on my lips stuns me into silence.

“How am I to capture you?” His eyes caress me with their warmth. Something inside me strains toward him, frightening me with its insistence.

My throat is so swollen with emotion I can barely swallow. “I should go,” I whisper.

I fumble into a turn and run, not feeling the bricks under my feet. Carel Bruyningh touched me. He likes me! Carel Bruyningh. Oh, dear God!

“Cornelia!” he calls after me. “May I see you again?”

I cast a look over my shoulder as he stands beneath the green-sprigged linden, his golden brows raised in hope. It is the best moment in my life.

“Yes!”

Chapter
13

Juno
.
Begun about 1661, finished after summer 1665. Canvas.

When I get home, Moeder is not in the kitchen or in the courtyard hanging wash. I hope she is not in the studio, but she is, sitting on a throne, holding a queen’s gold rod. She’s dressed up in a gold velvet gown that must have cost hundreds. There is no money for St. Nicolaes Day presents, but there is always plenty for things Vader paints in his pictures
.

Moeder sees me. She moves to get up
.

“Hendrickje, please,” Vader says. “You must be still.”

“Cornelia is home from school and needs to eat.”

“She knows where we keep the cheese,” Vader says. “Please, sit. Remember you are Juno, queen of the world, full of wisdom, patience, and goodness.”

“I warn you, Rembrandt, I don’t feel the least bit patient, good, or wise.”

“Hendrickje,” Vader says, as if soothing a cat
.

“The sampling officials are still waiting and the Trippen have canceled the rest of their family portraits, you took so long to complete their parents’ pictures. Now what are we going to do?”

“They wouldn’t have liked them anyway,” Vader says. “They want them done in the style of my youth.”

“Then why don’t you do it? Is it so hard to please people?”

“Even if I try, they find reason to delay payment. I might as well please myself.”

“Oh!” Moeder cries, then gets up and leaves. I run after her. She goes into the courtyard, where she jerks the clothes off the line
.

“Not now, Cornelia,” she says
.

I go to the front stoop. Titus finds me there when he lets out Tijger. “What are you doing out here, Bird? It’s freezing.”

When I don’t answer, he sits down next to me. We watch the wood doves peck at something pink on the cobblestones until Tijger springs after them
.

“I told Jannetje Zilver I got an ivory doll for St. Nicolaes Day,” I say at last
.

“That was dumb,” Titus says. “Why’d you do that?” Titus knows that I just got some nuts in my shoes, even though the other neighborhood children got apples and soap-bubble pipes and dolls in theirs. Nuts are what I get every year. I wonder what Titus got when he was young
.