I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (6 page)

“Nonsense.”

“That picture is still on stretchers. How are you to carry it? It’s huge.”

“In the handcart. Get the razor.”

I don’t like the looks of the razor’s edge, gleaming against the dull pottery of the bowl. “Why do you not shave yourself?”

Vader holds up his hands. “Palsy.”

It is true, each finger trembles independently, as if inhabited by separate creatures. He must be pretending.

“Stop it.”

He looks helplessly at his hands. “I can’t.”

“Then how do you paint?”

“God stills them.”

The hair rises on my arms.

I must stay calm and not provoke him further. I steady my voice. “I cannot shave you, Vader. I will cut you.”

“I won’t let you.”

I continue to protest, but he wears me down as usual and finally gets his way. When I am done, I have nicked him only five or six times around the chin—a most satisfactory job, considering the loose skin I have to navigate on his jowls. Soon we have breakfasted on ale and bread, and Vader has wrapped the painting in a linen drape and is buttoning up the paint-and ale-stained doublet that might have fit him when he was a young blade but from which he bursts like a sausage from its casing now.

“Come with me,” he says.

It occurs to me that the child who resulted from the affair that caused the rift between him and the van Uylenburgh family thirteen years ago might not aid in the sale of this painting. “No.”

“I need you to steady it in the cart.”

My stare is not sympathetic. But it is wasted on the back of his head as he fetches the handcart from the courtyard, cursing as he untangles it from the thorn-covered canes of the rose vine. He maneuvers it inside and in front of the painting, making muddy tracks on the tiles that I will have to clean.

“There is big money in this,” he says, “but if you won’t go, I won’t go either.”

“Why?” I say, completely puzzled.

“Just …” He lifts the wrapped picture and, grunting, puts it in the cart. “… because.”

The man’s nerve is exceeded only by his madness. But I have finished
The Marriage Trap
and haven’t been able to exchange it for another book at the bookseller’s shop and so have nothing to do but while away the time at home with the kitchen rats. Besides, the painting might get damaged if Vader moves it by himself. Soon we are on our way to the bridge past the New Maze Park, Vader pulling the cart, me trying to steady the picture as the wooden wheels rattle over the cobblestones that pave the center of our street.

Tijger follows us over the humpbacked brick bridge and past the hedges of the park, behind which the peacocks squawk as if they are being wrung for someone’s supper. “Go home,” I tell him, “before you get lost.”

He looks up at me, his tail swaying in languid unconcern.

Vader stops the cart to stamp his foot. “Shoo!”

Tijger sits down.

“Oh, well,” Vader says to Tijger. “You’ve figured out how to get us to wait on you hand and foot all these years, you can figure out how to get yourself home now.”

I fret over Tijger’s safety as he trails us again as we resume our clumsy journey with the cart. Tijger amuses Vader. Vader has sketched him many times—bathing, sleeping, scratching behind his ear. Tijger appears several times in the large-and-growing gallery of unsold paintings on the wall in the front room of our house.

I appear not once.

We go two streets to where there is a small poultry market surrounding the crossroads. I keep my head down as we cross diagonally to the far corner, passing ladies with their maids carrying baskets on their arms and girls selling eggs cradled in their aprons. A black-painted carriage rattles by, its springs squeaking. Two men walk past, then turn to look at Vader, who is a sight enough, pulling a child’s cart, though his idiot’s appearance is only compounded by his wisps of white hair waving about in the damp March wind. Rembrandt van Rijn might be the only man in Amsterdam not wearing a wide-brimmed black hat. I tug my own linen cap down by its strings, glad I have worn my hair loose so it can hang over my face. So keen am I not to be recognized, that it is not until we turn the corner onto the Lauriergracht that I realize Tijger is missing.

“Tijger!”

“Don’t worry about him,” said Vader. “He’ll go home.”

“What if he gets crushed by a carriage or chased by dogs? What if—” I stop, not wanting to give credence to a terrible thought: in times of plague, cats and dogs on the streets are rounded up and destroyed, for some believe they are carriers. During the last terrible pestilence, I’d had to keep him in the house … before we were locked in ourselves.

Vader studies my face. “You worry too much.”

“You don’t worry enough.”

He raises his gray brows at me.

“You don’t,” I say, standing my ground.

“What good does worrying do?” he says. “Has it ever changed the course of anything?”

“Let’s just go home,” I say miserably.

He shakes his head. “We’re here now.”

He points to the house just ahead. The building is one of a row of houses four stories high and four windows wide—palaces, compared to ours. Van Uylenburgh’s house might be just a canal away in distance, but it is a world away in style. Dealers of art must fare better than the artists themselves—at least in Vader’s case.

I glance at my brown wool dress and thin apron, then at Vader in his paint-spotted, ale-stained, belly-gapping doublet, with his set of bloody chicken tracks on his jowls. We make a ridiculous picture—two beggars with a rag cart—as we approach the porch steps.

“Let me go over and wait on the bridge.”

Vader grabs my arm as I start to cross back across the street. “Nonsense. I want you to see the young pinch-stuiver’s face when he beholds this piece. He has had a steady diet of ordinariness—it’s about time he gets a little dessert.” He lets go of my arm to knock on the tall red-varnished door. A young woman in a winged white cap, blue gown, and starched collar and apron answers before I can run.

“Is your master here?” Vader asks.

I study the woman. How did Vader know she was a maid? She is dressed far better than I.

She looks him up and down, disapproval writ all over the pink cheeks of her fresh-from-the-countryside face. “Who should I say is calling?”

“Rembrandt,” says Vader.

She peers at him with interest, then bangs the door shut. I hear the voices of men inside. What if Gerrit van Uylenburgh doesn’t want the picture and Vader gets nasty? I think of the time a merchant from the East India Company came to see about having his portrait made. When he saw the pictures on our wall, he said that he was looking for something more modern and smooth and less lumpy. Vader threw a bowl, missing the merchant by a hairsbreadth. “I shall give you lumpy!” he cried.

Fear mushrooms inside me. “Vader, remember, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar!”

Vader looks at me as if I am the cracked one.

“Use your charm,” I say helplessly.

Vader laughs. “Charm?” He shifts on his feet. “What is taking him?”

A boy not much older than me opens the door. He is slender yet powerfully built and has curls of spun gold, and now, upon seeing my vader on the stoop, there is surprise in the eyes as blue as the irises that grow at the river’s edge.

Dear Lord, the boy from the wedding. What is he doing here?

“Who are you?” Vader says.

“Carel Bruyningh. Mijnheer van Uylenburgh’s agent.” He tilts his head and looks at me.

He will never remember me. In my plain clothes and with my plain hair, I am completely unmemorable, or, worse, if he does remember me, it will be as the daughter of the fallen painter Rembrandt.

“Since when,” Vader says, “does young Gerrit send a pup to represent him?”

Dear Lord, let me run!

The handsome Carel straightens. “I know about art, sir. I am working on my masterpiece—I expect to be admitted to the guild quite soon though I am only sixteen.” He raises his chin. “I study with Ferdinand Bol.”

“Then you have a lot of unlearning to do,” says Vader. Before Carel can react, Vader says, “A Bruyningh. Any relation to Nicolaes?”

Oh, dear Lord, just let me go!

“He is my uncle, mijnheer. I am familiar with the portrait you painted of him—a powerful piece of work. It is in his house. You did it several years ago.”

“Fifteen years to be exact.” Vader stares at him in a very rude way. “And how is our dear Nicolaes these days?”

“Quite well, mijnheer.” The boy glances at me. I study van Uylenburgh’s house as if I had great interest in architecture, though pretending to look at something has not worked well for me in the past.

“Did he ever find himself a wife?” Vader asks.

I know now that I shall die from embarrassment. Does Vader know no bounds?

But Carel just laughs. “Uncle Nicolaes? Not yet.” He holds out his hand for Vader to shake. His fingers look thick and strong, and though there is green paint under his nails, his hands are smooth. I slink my own rough hands behind my back.

“I am honored to meet you,” he tells Vader. “You are a legend.”

“I’m not dead yet,” Vader growls.

“No, mijnheer! I did not mean—” The boy breaks off, blushing.

Vader peers over Carel’s shoulder. “Where is Gerrit?”

“I am afraid he is busy, mijnheer. But I am authorized to act for him.” He looks at me. “I saw you at the wedding. Are you Mijnheer van Rijn’s daughter?”

If I could shrivel into dust and be blown to the winds, I should welcome it, but there is no such escape for me. I smile weakly, then touch Vader’s arm. “We should go.”

Vader shakes me off. “I shall speak only to Gerrit,” he tells Carel.

“So sorry, mijnheer,” Carel says, his pale brows knitted in what I would think was true regret had I not known what a ridiculous figure Vader cuts. “He is not available.”

“Well, I am not available to show my work to children.”

“I am sorry, mijnheer, truly.” Carel’s face is red. He glances at me. I pick at my apron as if a speck of lint has so completely captured my attention that I have not heard Vader insult him.

Vader rips the drape from the painting that sits cockeyed in the wagon. “What will your master say when he finds he has missed this?”

Carel’s mouth eases open as he beholds the painting of the van Roop family. At last he says, “Nice.”

“Nice?”
says Vader.

“I know it is good—very good. Still, I cannot take it.”

Vader’s voice drips with sarcasm:
“You know it is ‘good’ and you ‘cannot take it’?”

“Mijnheer, if you please, look at those globs of paint. Even I know there is no market for rough stuff like that. Have you not seen Bol’s work? Or Nicholas Maes’s?”

“Dullheaded students of mine,” Vader says. “You lost your chance.” He hastily throws the linen over the painting, then storms away, dragging the cart behind him like a five-year-old with his play-cart. I follow like a whipped hound.

“I am sorry, mijnheer!” Carel calls after us. “Good-bye, Miss—Miss…”

I fight off the desire to give him one last look—I cannot, no,
I will not
take the risk of finding a smirk upon his handsome face.

As we retreat down the walkway, more crowded now with midmorning activity, there are no words sharp enough to rain upon my vader, none that will penetrate his thick skin and wound him as his actions have wounded me. It is enough that he shames me before our neighbors and Titus’s relatives and anyone else we come into contact with, but to humiliate me in front of a handsome boy who actually remembered me—
me
, Cornelia—it is unbearable. I stalk behind him, my face down so as not to meet the eyes of the passersby, but by the time we reach the poultry market around the corner, I can no longer hold it in.

I wait until a young woman in a green cape and her servant, an older woman, move beyond hearing. “We should not have gone,” I scold.

Vader stops pulling the rattling cart and whirls around in the center of the busy crossroads. “What?”

I meet his irritable gaze, though it would be easier to hold my hand to coals. “We should not have gone.” I hold my voice down for privacy, grateful for the hens screeching in the stalls around us. “You shame me.”

“You’re ashamed?” he says, raising his voice.

A woman hurries by, holding the hands of her two little sons. She flicks us a worried glance.

“Yes,” I whisper. “Shhh!”

His voice grows louder. “You think I don’t feel shame?”

This is why I don’t speak up. “Vader—”

“I am sick with it! Sick! But I embrace it.” He pounds his chest with his fist. “I take it to my heart like my bride.”

Two women with market baskets on their arms and their mouths hanging open back toward the string of plucked ducks hanging behind them. Vader does not see them, or if he does, he does not care.

“My shame is a gift!” he shouts. “It is my cross and I thank my God for it. How can you ever feel mercy if you have never carried a cross?”

A poultryman, wiping his bloody knife on his apron, moves around the row of naked birds hanging from his stall to join the women.

“Chiaroscuro,” Vader growls. “Do you know what that is?”

“Yes,” I whisper quickly, “light against darkness—shhhh. Please, let us go.”

“Light against darkness, the first principle of painting. What is light without darkness to set it off? Same goes for joy and pain. How are you to savor joy if you have never known pain?” Only then does he notice the crowd he has drawn. “What are you people staring at?”

A woman struts up like one of the hens she has come to buy. “Miss, are you unharmed?” she asks me.

“Of course she is,” Vader snaps.

“I asked the girl,” the woman says.

Shock ties my tongue. Let me sink onto these fowl-shat stones and die.

Housewives, poultrymen, and maidservants all stare as Vader snatches up the handle of his cart and stalks away with his rattling burden.

“Are you unharmed?” the woman asks me again.

I nod as Vader rounds the corner, my gaze following the hastily covered painting. Left to bash against the sides of the cart, it is taking a battering.