I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (14 page)

“He said there are some excellent mosses in America,” Titus says. “According to Mijnheer Lam, it is a particularly mossy continent.”

“He thought our cook quite good,” Magdalena says. “Excellent with organ meat.”

“Our cook is not cheap,” Titus says.

“I like the beef,” I say.

Magdalena bestows her dimples upon me. “The recipe is from Johanna de Geer.”

“Magdalena is in a church group with Hendrik Trip’s wife, Johanna,” Titus says proudly. “They visit orphanages and give them old clothes. Magdalena and Johanna are quite good friends, you know.”

Magdalena lowers her face modestly. “We do a few simple works of charity together. As Johanna says, it is a woman’s duty to help the poor.”

I nod as daintily as possible as Vader continues tucking into his food. In my book on comportment, I have read that charity is one of the prettier virtues for a woman to develop. And Johanna de Geer could well afford to be charmingly charitable. She is one of the richest women in Amsterdam.

Magdalena looks up, her pretty mouth opening as if she cannot believe the brilliant idea that has just struck her. “Cornelia,” she says, “I’m thinking of going to my cloth merchant on Tuesday. Johanna has told me he has received a new shipment of silks from the Orient. Would you be interested in accompanying me? Perhaps I might find you material for a new frock.” She can barely contain her radiant smile, thrilled with the prospect of being so charitable.

“Oh, no! I couldn’t ask you to do that.” I cannot go to the cloth merchant’s establishment in my old-fashioned lace collar and worn brown dress. I will be as a fish out of the sea in a place in which Johanna de Geer shops

“Sure you could,” Titus says. “Excellent idea, Magdalena. No arguments, Bird.”

I glance at Vader but he appears not to be listening. Neel keeps his gaze on his plate. He has been eating so quietly at the far end of the table, I have nearly forgotten he was there. Beneath her silver-blond crown of ringlets and braids, Magdalena waits for an answer, her pretty face all sweet concern and generosity. I have no choice.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Sister,”
Magdalena insists.

The words feel awkward on my lips. “Thank you, sister.”

“I shall call on you at nine o’clock, then. Would that suit?”

“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?”