Tracy Chevalier 3-Book Collection: Girl With a Pearl Earring, Remarkable Creatures, Falling Angels. Tracy Chevalier
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well as at Mechelen. Perhaps she had decided to wait and see if things would change in the summer. Or perhaps she found it hard to chide him since she liked the painting so much.
‘It's a shame such a fine painting is to go only to the baker,’ she said one day. ‘We could have charged more if it were for van Ruijven.’ It was clear that while he painted the works, it was she who struck the deals.
The baker liked the painting too. The day he came to see it was very different from the formal visit van Ruijven and his wife had made several months before to view their painting. The baker brought his whole family, including several children and a sister or two. He was a merry man, with a face permanently flushed from the heat of his ovens and hair that looked as if it had been dipped in flour. He refused the wine Maria Thins offered, preferring a mug of beer. He loved children, and insisted that the four girls and Johannes be allowed into the studio. They loved him, as well — each time he visited he brought them another shell for their collection. This time it was a conch as big as my hand, rough and spiky and white with pale yellow marks on the outside, a polished pink and orange on the inside. The girls were delighted, and ran to get their other shells. They brought them upstairs and they and the baker's children played together in the storeroom while Tanneke and I served the guests in the studio.
The baker announced he was satisfied with the painting. ‘My daughter looks well, and that's enough for me,’ he said.
Afterwards, Maria Thins lamented that he had not looked at it as closely as van Ruijven would have, that his senses were dulled by the beer he drank and the disorder he surrounded himself with. I did not agree, though I did not say so. It seemed to me that the baker had an honest response to the painting. Van Ruijven tried too hard when he looked at paintings, with his honeyed words and studied expressions. He was too aware of having an audience to perform for, whereas the baker merely said what he thought.
I checked on the children in the storeroom. They had spread across the floor, sorting shells and getting sand everywhere. The chests and books and dishes and cushions kept there did not interest them.
Cornelia was climbing down the ladder from the attic. She jumped from three rungs up and shouted triumphantly as she crashed to the floor. When she looked at me briefly, her eyes were a challenge. One of the baker's sons, about Aleydis' age, climbed partway up the ladder and jumped to the floor. Then Aleydis tried it, and another child, and another.
I had never known how Cornelia managed to get to the attic to steal the madder that stained my apron red. It was in her nature to be sly, to slip away when no one was looking. I had said nothing to Maria Thins or him about her pilfering. I was not sure they would believe me. Instead I had made sure the colours were locked away whenever he and I were not there.
I said nothing to her now as she sprawled on the floor next to Maertge. But that night I checked my things. Everything was there — my broken tile, my tortoiseshell comb, my prayer book, my embroidered handkerchiefs, my collars, my chemises, my aprons and caps. I counted and sorted and refolded them.
Then I checked the colours, just to be sure. They too were in order, and the cupboard did not look as if it had been tampered with.
Perhaps she was just being a child after all, climbing a ladder to jump from it, looking for a game rather than mischief.
The baker took away his painting in May, but my master did not begin setting up the next painting until July. I grew anxious about this delay, expecting Maria Thins to blame me, even though we both knew that it was not my fault. Then one day I overheard her tell Catharina that a friend of van Ruijven's saw the painting of his wife with the pearl necklace and thought she should be looking out rather than at a mirror. Van Ruijven had thus decided that he wanted a painting with his wife's face turned towards the painter. ‘He doesn't paint that pose often,’ she remarked.
I could not hear Catharina's response. I stopped sweeping the floor of the girls' room for a moment.
‘You remember the last one,’ Maria Thins reminded her. ‘The maid. Remember van Ruijven and the maid in the red dress?’
Catharina snorted with muffled laughter.
‘That was the last time anyone looked out from one of his paintings,’ Maria Thins continued, ‘and what a scandal that was! I was sure he would say no when van Ruijven suggested it this time, but he has agreed to do it.’
I could not ask Maria Thins, who would know I had been listening to them. I could not ask Tanneke, who would never repeat gossip to me now. So one day when there were few people at his stall I asked Pieter the son if he had heard about the maid in the red dress.
‘Oh yes, that story went all around the Meat Hall,’ he answered, chuckling. He leaned over and began rearranging the cows' tongues on display. ‘It was several years ago now. It seems van Ruijven wanted one of his kitchen maids to sit for a painting with him. They dressed her in one of his wife's gowns, a red one, and van Ruijven made sure there was wine in the painting so he could get her to drink every time they sat together. Sure enough, before the painting was finished she was carrying van Ruijven's child.’
‘What happened to her?’
Pieter shrugged. ‘What happens to girls like that?’
His words froze my blood. Of course I had heard such stories before, but never one so close to me. I thought about my dreams of wearing Catharina's clothes, of van Ruijven grasping my chin in the hallway, of him saying ‘You should paint her’ to my master.
Pieter had stopped what he was doing, a frown on his face. ‘Why do you want to know about her?’
‘It's nothing,’ I answered lightly. ‘Just something I overheard. It means nothing.’
I had not been present when he set up the scene for the painting of the baker's daughter — I had not yet been assisting him. Now, however, the first time van Ruijven's wife came to sit for him I was up in the attic working, and could hear what he said. She was a quiet woman. She did what was asked of her without a sound. Even her fine shoes did not tap across the tiled floor. He had her stand by the unshuttered window, then sit in one of the two lion-head chairs placed around the table. I heard him close some shutters. ‘This painting will be darker than the last,’ he declared.
She did not respond. It was as if he were talking to himself. After a moment he called up to me. When I appeared he said, ‘Griet, get my wife's yellow mantle, and her pearl necklace and earrings.’
Catharina was visiting friends that afternoon so I could not ask her for her jewels. I would have been frightened to anyway. Instead I went to Maria Thins in the Crucifixion room, who unlocked Catharina's jewellery box and handed me the necklace and earrings. Then I got out the mantle from the cupboard in the great hall, shook it out and folded it carefully over my arm. I had never touched it before. I let my nose sink into the fur — it was very soft, like a baby rabbit's.
As I walked down the hallway to the stairs I had the sudden desire to run out the door with the riches in my arms. I could go to the star in the middle of Market Square, choose a direction to follow, and never come back.
Instead I returned to van Ruijven's wife and helped her into the mantle. She wore it as if it were her own skin. After sliding the earring wires through the holes in her lobes, she looped the pearls around her neck. I had taken up the ribbons to tie the necklace for her when he said, ‘Don't wear the necklace. Leave it on the table.’
She sat again. He sat in his chair and studied her. She did not seem to mind — she gazed into space, seeing nothing, as he had tried to get me to do.
‘Look at me,’ he said.
She looked at him. Her eyes were large and dark, almost black.
He laid a table-rug on the table, then changed it for the blue cloth. He laid the pearls in a line on the table, then in a heap, then in a line again. He asked her to stand, to sit, then to sit back, then to sit forward.
I thought he had forgotten that I was watching from the corner until he said, ‘Griet, get me Catharina's powder-brush.’
He had