Chapter 17

At table, that afternoon of our first dinner at the House of the Gilded Scales, Magdalena delicately stretches her creamy neck in my direction. Below finely haired brows, she blinks pale almond-shaped eyes like a dainty creature unused to strong light. “Cornelia, sister, is the beef cooked to your liking?”

Except at Jannetje Zilver’s house, I have had beef twice before in my life. Once was at kermis, the town festival in the fall, when they roasted an ox in the square by the poultry market and everyone got too drunk to chase me off. The other was at the wedding feast of neighbors who were Moeder’s friends until Vader got in an argument with them over the noise they made cutting stone in their courtyard, though cutting stone is what the man did for his living. Ruined his concentration, Vader said. Magdalena’s beef is good as far as I can tell. But it is hard to delight in the eating of it, after Vader has turned on me for no reason and the thought of Carel flirting with girls at church has burned a hole in my stomach. “Yes,” I say. “It’s good.”

“What’s wrong, Cornelia?” Titus says, “You’ve been unnaturally quiet.”

Even if I had not been unsettled by Vader and by jealous thoughts of Carel, I would not know what to say at a table set with blue-and-white china, ruby glass goblets, and a silver saltcellar shaped like a swan. I am used to our battered table in the kitchen.

Fortunately, Magdalena does not wait for my answer. “Last week,” she addresses the table in general, “we entertained Silvius Lam, the world’s leading expert on mosses. He has been all around the world, examining the different mosses.”

“Is that so,” Vader says, his mouth full.

“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.