Chapter 12
It has been more than a week since my walk with Carel, but at the moment, fear has driven any warm and happy thoughts of him as deeply underground as the piles that keep every building in Amsterdam from sinking into the marshy soil. Vader has been vile tempered since breakfast and I know not why, but if he discovers that his painting is missing in such a mood, objects will fly.
To this end, I am in the attic, choking on dust and the tarry smell of the roof beams as I skirt past chests and straw figures and strange objects covered with cloths. I want not to uncover things if I don’t have to—it is like disturbing a grave. Releasing ghosts. I have avoided this attic for many a year, and I have had no reason to come here. It is Vader’s storeroom. His rubbish. The drek he cannot use in his studio, he drags across the landing into here. But there are paintings in here, I know. I have seen them, long ago. I need one now. If I am lucky, I can find a rolled-up one to substitute for the family group I have taken to van Uylenburgh. I can put it in his studio where the other one was. It is a miracle Vader has not missed it already, perhaps due to his work on his mysterious project. Or could it be that his lack of notice is more evidence of his failing mind?
There is something that looks to be a roll of canvas on the floor. I push it with my foot, lifting dust, but it does not come undone. Several strings bind it along its length.
The floorboard creaks behind me.
I gasp. “Hello?”
Tijger strolls in, calm as a king though his faded orange legs are bowed with age.
“You.” I pick him up. He weighs less than dust. “You gave me a fright.”
He regards me, unconcerned.
I put him down. My heart beating in my ears, I bend down to peel back an edge of the canvas.
A silky fringe falls against my hand. There are swirls of raw sienna and sable against rich vermilion.
A carpet. What was I so afraid of?
I sit back on my heels and sigh.
“Cornelia.”
I whirl around. Neel is standing in the doorway.
The man blows about as silently as duck down. “What do you want?”
“I am looking for your vader.”
I walk briskly toward him, forcing him to back onto the landing between the attic and Vader’s studio. Neel Suythof needs not to be poking around in here. “He stepped out to get more pigments. He will be back soon.” I pick up Tijger and shut the attic door.
“I wished for him to see if he thought I was making progress on my painting,” Neel says.
“I am sure you have caught the essence of that straw dummy.”
He folds his arms.
“I jest!”
He shakes his head, his tangled hair brushing his shoulders. When he turns to the stairs, I find that I wish he would stay.
“Wait.”
He gives me a look of patient annoyance.
“Vader is gone—let us look in his studio. You know how he has been up to something devious lately.”
“No, Cornelia! If he wanted us to see whatever is in there—”
I throw open the door. A large canvas, draped by linen, stands in the studio.
The horror in Neel’s eyes is too delicious. You would think I was suggesting that we rob a grave.
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 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!”