Girl With a Pearl Earring

A fearful look crossed Cornelia’s face. She dropped the stones she held.

A boat was moving along the canal from the direction of the Town Hall. I recognised the man poling from earlier that day – he had delivered his load of bricks and the boat was riding much higher. He grinned when he saw me.

I blushed. ‘Please, sir,’ I began, ‘can you help me get that pot?’

‘Oh, you’re looking at me now that you want something from me, are you? There’s a change!’

Cornelia was watching me curiously.

I swallowed. ‘I can’t reach the pot from here. Perhaps you could—’

The man leaned over, fished out the pot, dumped the water from it, and held it out to me. I ran down the steps and took it from him. ‘Thank you. I’m most grateful.’

He did not let go of the pot. ‘Is that all I get? No kiss?’ He reached over and pulled my sleeve. I jerked my arm away and wrestled the pot from him.

‘Not this time,’ I said as lightly as I could. I was never good at that sort of talk.

He laughed. ‘I’ll be looking for pots every time I pass here now, won’t I, young miss?’ He winked at Cornelia. ‘Pots and kisses.’ He took up his pole and pushed off.

As I climbed the steps back to the street I thought I saw a movement in the middle window on the first floor, the room where he was. I stared but could see nothing except the reflected sky.

Catharina returned while I was taking down laundry in the courtyard. I first heard her keys jangling in the hallway. They hung in a great bunch just below her waist, bouncing against her hip. Although they looked uncomfortable to me, she wore them with great pride. I then heard her in the cooking kitchen, ordering about Tanneke and the boy who had carried things from the shops for her. She spoke harshly to both.

I continued to pull down and fold bedsheets, napkins, pillowcases, tablecloths, shirts, chemises, aprons, handkerchiefs, collars, caps. They had been hung carelessly, bunched in places so that patches of cloth were still damp. And they had not been shaken first, so there were creases everywhere. I would be ironing much of the day to make them presentable.

Catharina appeared at the door, looking hot and tired, though the sun was not yet at its highest. Her chemise puffed out messily from the top of her blue dress, and the green housecoat she wore over it was already crumpled. Her blonde hair was frizzier than ever, especially as she wore no cap to smooth it. The curls fought against the combs that held them in a bun.

She looked as if she needed to sit quietly for a moment by the canal, where the sight of the water might calm and cool her.

I was not sure how I should be with her – I had never been a maid, nor had we ever had one in our house. There were no servants on our street. No one could afford one. I placed the laundry I was folding in a basket, then nodded at her. ‘Good morning, madam.’

She frowned and I realised I should have let her speak first. I would have to take more care with her.

‘Tanneke has taken you around the house?’ she said.

‘Yes, madam.’

‘Well, then, you will know what to do and you will do it.’ She hesitated, as if at a loss for words, and it came to me that she knew little more about being my mistress than I did about being her maid. Tanneke had probably been trained by Maria Thins and still followed her orders, whatever Catharina said to her.

I would have to help her without seeming to.

‘Tanneke has explained that besides the laundry you want me to go for the meat and fish, madam,’ I suggested gently.

Catharina brightened. ‘Yes. She will take you when you finish with the washing here. After that you will go every day yourself. And on other errands as I need you,’ she added.

‘Yes, madam.’ I waited. When she said nothing else I reached up to pull a man’s linen shirt from the line.

Catharina stared at the shirt. ‘Tomorrow,’ she announced as I was folding it, ‘I will show you upstairs where you are to clean. Early – first thing in the morning.’ Before I could reply she disappeared inside.

After I brought in the laundry I found the iron, cleaned it, and set it in the fire to heat. I had just begun ironing when Tanneke came and handed me a shopping pail. ‘We’re going to the butcher’s now,’ she said. ‘I’ll need the meat soon.’ I had heard her clattering in the cooking kitchen and had smelled parsnips roasting.

Out in front Catharina sat on the bench, with Lisbeth on a stool by her feet and Johannes asleep in a cradle. She was combing Lisbeth’s hair and searching for lice. Next to her Cornelia and Aleydis were sewing. ‘No, Aleydis,’ Catharina was saying, ‘pull the thread tight, that’s too loose. You show her, Cornelia.’

I had not thought they could all be so calm together.

Maertge ran over from the canal. ‘Are you going to the butcher’s? May I go too, Mama?’

‘Only if you stay with Tanneke and mind her.’

I was glad that Maertge came with us. Tanneke was still wary of me, but Maertge was merry and quick and that made it easier for us to be friendly.

I asked Tanneke how long she had worked for Maria Thins.

‘Oh, many years,’ she said. ‘A few before master and young mistress were married and came to live here. I started when I was no older than you. How old are you, then?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘I began when I was fourteen,’ Tanneke countered triumphantly. ‘Half my life I’ve worked here.’

I would not have said such a thing with pride. Her work had worn her so that she looked older than her twenty-eight years.

The Meat Hall was just behind the Town Hall, south and to the west of Market Square. Inside were thirty-two stalls – there had been thirty-two butchers in Delft for generations. It was busy with housewives and maids choosing, bartering and buying for their families, and men carrying carcasses back and forth. Sawdust on the floor soaked up blood and clung to shoes and hems of dresses. There was a tang of blood in the air that always made me shiver, though at one time I had gone there every week and ought to have grown used to the smell. Still, I was pleased to be in a familiar place. As we passed between the stalls the butcher we used to buy our meat from before my father’s accident called out to me. I smiled at him, relieved to see a face I knew. It was the first time I had smiled all day.

It was strange to meet so many new people and see so many new things in one morning, and to do so apart from all the familiar things that made up my life. Before, if I met someone new I was always surrounded by family and neighbours. If I went to a new place I was with Frans or my mother or father and felt no threat. The new was woven in with the old, like the darning in a sock.

Frans told me not long after he began his apprenticeship that he had almost run away, not from the hard work, but because he could not face the strangeness day after day. What kept him there was knowing that our father had spent all his savings on the apprentice fee, and would have sent him right back if he had come home. Besides, he would find much more strangeness out in the world if he went elsewhere.

‘I will come and see you,’ I whispered to the butcher, ‘when I am alone.’ Then I hurried to catch up with Tanneke and Maertge.

They had stopped at a stall further along. The butcher there was a handsome man, with greying blond curls and bright blue eyes.

‘Pieter, this is Griet,’ Tanneke said. ‘She will be fetching the meat for us now. You’re to add it to our account as usual.’

I tried to keep my eyes on his face, but I could not help glancing down at his blood-splattered apron. Our butcher always wore a clean apron when he was selling, changing it whenever he got blood on it.

‘Ah.’ Pieter looked me over as if I were a plump chicken he was considering roasting. ‘What would you like today, Griet?’

I turned to Tanneke. ‘Four pounds of chops and a pound of tongue,’ she ordered.

Pieter smiled. ‘And what do you think of that, miss?’ he addressed Maertge. ‘Don’t I sell the best tongue in Delft?’

Maertge nodded and giggled as she gazed at the display of joints, chops, tongue, pigs’ feet, sausages.

‘You’ll find, Griet, that I have the best meat and the most honest scales in the hall,’ Pieter remarked as he weighed the tongue. ‘You’ll have no complaints about me.’

I stared at his apron and swallowed. Pieter put the chops and tongue into the pail I carried, winked at me and turned to serve the next customer.

We went next to the fish stalls, just beside the Meat Hall. Seagulls hovered above the stalls, waiting for the fishheads and innards the fishmongers threw into the canal. Tanneke introduced me to their fishmonger – also different from ours. I was to alternate each day between meat and fish.

When we left I did not want to go back to the house, to Catharina and the children on the bench. I wanted to walk home. I wanted to step into my mother’s kitchen and hand her the pailful of chops. We had not eaten meat in months.

Catharina was combing through Cornelia’s hair when we returned. They paid no attention to me. I helped Tanneke with dinner, turning the meat on the grill, fetching things for the table in the great hall, cutting the bread.

When the meal was ready the girls came in, Maertge joining Tanneke in the cooking kitchen while the others sat down in the great hall. I had just placed the tongue in the meat barrel in one of the storage rooms – Tanneke had left it out and the cat had almost got to it – when he appeared from outside, standing in the doorway at the end of the long hall, wearing his hat and cloak. I stood still and he paused, the light behind him so that I could not see his face. I did not know if he was looking down the hallway at me. After a moment he disappeared into the great hall.

Tanneke and Maertge served while I looked after the baby in the Crucifixion room. When Tanneke was done she joined me and we ate and drank what the family did – chops, parsnips, bread, and mugs of beer. Although Pieter’s meat was no better than our family butcher’s, it was a welcome taste after going so long without. The bread was rye rather than the cheaper brown bread we had been eating, and the beer was not so watery either.

I did not wait on the family at that dinner and so I did not see him. Occasionally I heard his voice, usually along with Maria Thins’. From their tones it was clear they got on well.

After dinner Tanneke and I cleared up, then mopped the floors of the kitchens and storage rooms. The walls of each kitchen were tiled in white, and the fireplace in blue and white Delft tiles painted with birds in one section, ships in another, and soldiers in another. I studied them carefully, but none had been painted by my father.

I spent most of the rest of the day ironing in the washing kitchen, occasionally stopping to build up the fire, fetch wood, or step into the courtyard to escape the heat. The girls played in and out of the house, sometimes coming in to watch me and poke at the fire, another time to tease Tanneke when they found her asleep next door in the cooking kitchen, Johannes crawling around her feet. They were a little uneasy with me – perhaps they thought I might slap them. Cornelia scowled at me and did not stay long in the room, but Maertge and Lisbeth took the clothes I had ironed and put them away for me in the cupboard in the great hall. Their mother was asleep there. ‘The last month before the baby comes she’ll stay in bed much of the day,’ Tanneke confided, ‘propped up with pillows all around her.’

Maria Thins had gone to her upstairs rooms after dinner. Once, though, I heard her in the hallway and when I looked up she was standing in the doorway, watching me. She said nothing, so I turned back to my ironing and pretended she wasn’t there. After a moment out of the corner of my eye I saw her nod and shuffle off.

He had a guest upstairs – I heard two male voices as they climbed up. Later when I heard them coming down I peeked around the door to watch them go out. The man with him was plump and wore a long white feather in his hat.

When it got dark we lit candles, and Tanneke and I had bread and cheese and beer with the children in the Crucifixion room while the others ate tongue in the great hall. I was careful to sit with my back to the Crucifixion scene. I was so exhausted I could hardly think. At home I had worked just as hard but it was never so tiring as in a strange house where everything was new and I was always tense and serious. At home I had been able to laugh with my mother or Agnes or Frans. Here there was no one to laugh with.

I had not yet been down to the cellar where I was to sleep. I took a candle with me but was too tired to look around beyond finding a bed, pillow and blanket. Leaving the trap door of the cellar open so that cool, fresh air could reach me, I took off my shoes, cap, apron and dress, prayed briefly, and lay down. I was about to blow out the candle when I noticed the painting hanging at the foot of my bed. I sat up, wide awake now. It was another picture of Christ on the Cross, smaller than the one upstairs but even more disturbing. Christ had thrown his head back in pain, and Mary Magdalene’s eyes were rolling. I lay back gingerly, unable to take my eyes off it. I could not imagine sleeping in the room with the painting. I wanted to take it down but did not dare. Finally I blew out the candle – I could not afford to waste candles on my first day in the new house. I lay back again, my eyes fixed to the place where I knew the painting hung.

I slept badly that night, tired as I was. I woke often and looked for the painting. Though I could see nothing on the wall, every detail was fixed in my mind. Finally, when it was beginning to grow light, the painting appeared again and I was sure the Virgin Mary was looking down at me.

When I got up in the morning I tried not to look at the painting, instead studying the contents of the cellar in the dim light that fell through the window in the storage room above me. There was not much to see – several tapestry-covered chairs piled up, a few other broken chairs, a mirror, and two more paintings, both still lifes, leaning against the wall. Would anyone notice if I replaced the Crucifixion with a still life?

Cornelia would. And she would tell her mother.

I did not know what Catharina – or any of them – thought of my being Protestant. It was a curious feeling, having to be aware of it myself. I had never before been outnumbered.

I turned my back on the painting and climbed the ladder. Catharina’s keys were clinking at the front of the house and I went to find her. She moved slowly, as if she were half asleep, but she made an effort to draw herself up when she saw me. She led me up the stairs, climbing slowly, holding tightly to the rail to pull her bulk up.

At the studio she searched among the keys, then unlocked and pushed open the door. The room was dark, the shutters closed – I could make out only a little from the cracks of light streaming in between them. The room gave off a clean, sharp odour of linseed oil that reminded me of my father’s clothes when he had returned from the tile factory at night. It smelled like wood and fresh-cut hay mixed together.

Catharina remained on the threshold. I did not dare enter before her. After an awkward moment she ordered, ‘Open the shutters, then. Not the window on the left. Just the middle and far windows. And only the lower part of the middle window.’

I crossed the room, edging around an easel and chair to the middle window. I pulled open the lower window, then opened out the shutters. I did not look at the painting on the easel, not while Catharina was watching me from the doorway.

A table had been pushed up against the window on the right, with a chair set in the corner. The chair’s back and seat were of leather tooled with yellow flowers and leaves.

‘Don’t move anything over there,’ Catharina reminded me. ‘That is what he is painting.’

Even if I stood on my toes I was too small to reach the upper window and shutters. I would have to stand on the chair, but did not want to do so in front of her. She made me nervous, waiting in the doorway for me to make a mistake.

I considered what to do.

It was the baby who saved me – he began wailing downstairs. Catharina shifted from one hip to the other. As I hesitated she grew impatient and finally left to tend to Johannes.

I quickly climbed up and stood carefully on the wooden frame of the chair, pulled open the upper window, leaned out and pushed the shutters open. Peeking down at the street below, I spied Tanneke scrubbing the tiles in front of the house. She did not see me, but a cat padding across the wet tiles behind her paused and looked up.

I opened the lower window and shutters and got down from the chair. Something moved in front of me and I froze. The movement stopped. It was me, reflected in a mirror that hung on the wall between the two windows. I gazed at myself. Although I had an anxious, guilty expression, my face was also bathed in light, making my skin glow. I stared, surprised, then stepped away.

Now that I had a moment I surveyed the room. It was a large, square space, not as long as the great hall downstairs. With the windows open it was bright and airy, with whitewashed walls, and grey and white marble tiles on the floor, the darker tiles set in a pattern of square crosses. A row of Delft tiles painted with cupids lined the bottom of the walls to protect the whitewash from our mops. They were not my father’s.

Though it was a big room, it held little furniture. There was the easel and chair set in front of the middle window, and the table placed in front of the window in the right corner. Besides the chair I had stood on there was another by the table, of plain leather nailed on with brass studs, and two lion heads carved into the tops of the posts. Against the far wall, behind the chair and easel, was a small cupboard, its drawers closed, several brushes and a knife with a diamond-shaped blade arranged on top next to clean palettes. Beside the cupboard was a desk on which were papers and books and prints. Two more lion-head chairs had been set against the wall near the doorway.

It was an orderly room, empty of the clutter of everyday life. It felt different from the rest of the house, almost as if it were in another house altogether. When the door was closed it would be difficult to hear the shouts of the children, the jangle of Catharina’s keys, the sweeping of our brooms.

I took up my broom, bucket of water and dustcloth and began to clean. I started in the corner where the scene of the painting had been set up, where I knew I must not move a thing. I kneeled on the chair to dust the window I had struggled to open, and the yellow curtain that hung to one side of it in the corner, touching it lightly so that I would not disturb its folds. The panes of glass were dirty and needed scrubbing with warm water, but I was not sure if he wanted them clean. I would have to ask Catharina.

I dusted the chairs, polishing the brass studs and lion heads. The table had not been cleaned properly in some time. Someone had wiped around the objects placed there – a powderbrush, a pewter bowl, a letter, a black ceramic pot, blue cloth heaped to one side and hanging over the edge – but they had to be moved for the table really to be cleaned. As my mother had said, I would have to find a way to move things yet put them back exactly as if they had not been touched.

The letter lay close to the corner of the table. If I placed my thumb along one edge of the paper, my second finger along another, and anchored my hand with my smallest finger hooked to the table edge, I should be able to move the letter, dust there, and replace it where my hand indicated.

I laid my fingers against the edges and drew in my breath, then removed the letter, dusted, and replaced it all in one quick movement. I was not sure why I felt I had to do it quickly. I stood back from the table. The letter seemed to be in the right place, though only he would really know.

Still, if this was to be my test, I had best get it done.

From the letter I measured with my hand to the powderbrush, then placed my fingers at various points around one side of the brush. I removed it, dusted, replaced it, and measured the space between it and the letter. I did the same with the bowl.

This was how I cleaned without seeming to move anything. I measured each thing in relation to the objects around it and the space between them. The small things on the table were easy, the furniture harder – I used my feet, my knees, sometimes my shoulders and chin with the chairs.

I did not know what to do with the blue cloth heaped messily on the table. I would not be able to get the folds exact if I moved the cloth. For now I left it alone, hoping that for a day or two he would not notice until I had found a way to clean it.

With the rest of the room I could be less careful. I dusted and swept and mopped – the floor, the walls, the windows, the furniture – with the satisfaction of tackling a room in need of a good cleaning. In the far corner, opposite the table and window, a door led to a storeroom, filled with paintings and canvases, chairs, chests, dishes, bedpans, a coat rack and a row of books. I cleaned in there too, tidying the things away so that there was more order to the room.

All the while I had avoided cleaning around the easel. I did not know why, but I was nervous about seeing the painting that sat on it. At last, though, there was nothing left to do. I dusted the chair in front of the easel, then began to dust the easel itself, trying not to look at the painting.

When I glimpsed the yellow satin, however, I had to stop.

I was still staring at the painting when Maria Thins spoke.

‘Not a common sight, now, is it?’

I had not heard her come in. She stood inside the doorway, slightly stooped, wearing a fine black dress and lace collar.

I did not know what to say, and I couldn’t help it – I turned back to the painting.

Maria Thins laughed. ‘You’re not the only one to forget your manners in front of one of his paintings, girl.’ She came over to stand beside me. ‘Yes, he’s managed this one well. That’s van Ruijven’s wife.’ I recognised the name as the patron my father had mentioned. ‘She’s not beautiful but he makes her so,’ she added. ‘It will fetch a good price.’

Because it was the first painting of his I was to see, I always remembered it better than the others, even those I saw grow from the first layer of underpaint to the final highlights.

A woman stood in front of a table, turned towards a mirror on the wall so that she was in profile. She wore a mantle of rich yellow satin trimmed with white ermine, and a fashionable five-pointed red ribbon in her hair. A window lit her from the left, falling across her face and tracing the delicate curve of her forehead and nose. She was tying a string of pearls round her neck, holding the ribbons up, her hands suspended in the air. Entranced with herself in the mirror, she did not seem to be aware that anyone was looking at her. Behind her on a bright white wall was an old map, in the dark foreground the table with the letter on it, the powderbrush and the other things I had dusted around.

I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.

I thought of me looking at my reflection in the mirror earlier and was ashamed.

Maria Thins seemed content to stand with me and contemplate the painting. It was odd to look at it with the setting just behind it. Already from my dusting I knew all of the objects on the table, and their relation to one another – the letter by the corner, the powderbrush lying casually next to the pewter bowl, the blue cloth bunched around the dark pot. Everything seemed to be exactly the same, except cleaner and purer. It made a mockery of my own cleaning.

Then I saw a difference. I drew in my breath.

‘What is it, girl?’

‘In the painting there are no lion heads on the chair next to the woman,’ I said.

‘No. There was once a lute sitting on that chair as well. He makes plenty of changes. He doesn’t paint just what he sees, but what will suit. Tell me, girl, do you think this painting is done?’