Chapter 29

“Dear Titus!” Magdalena says as we stroll down the street on the far side of the Westermarkt, the peach silk of her skirt swishing. “He is such a child. I am supposed to be the queasy one.” She raises her sweet voice to a shout above the din of the peddlers and their haggling customers. “For several weeks I was so tired I thought I was sure to die—I had Titus fetch the minister, and Moeder was up nights brewing me potions—but I have since shaken that malaise and feel quite marvelous.” Her pale eyes flash at a carter who has gotten too close with his wagon heaped with hay. “Are you blind?” she shouts. “You almost killed us!”

The carter yanks on his reins, jerking back his horse’s head. Hay slides off the top and onto the street. I stop to pick it up.

Magdalena pulls me away by the arm. “I am the stronger one of Titus and I,” she says over the marketplace din. “Women are always the stronger sex.” She smiles to herself. “The trick is not appearing to be so.”

I falter as we walk. Have I been appearing to be too strong to Carel? I should have never, ever mentioned I wanted to paint to him. He will think me in competition with him. And I am always spouting off my opinions. Does he think me bossy?

The noise lessens as we leave the Westermarkt. As I worry about chasing Carel away with my pushiness, Magdalena continues to list Titus’s many faults as we journey down narrow streets and across humpbacked bridges. Soon we enter Dam Square, where the sounds of laughter and clopping hooves and the creaking of carts mercifully drown out Magdalena’s complaints. I gaze at the Town Hall, remembering, all of the sudden, going there with Moeder to look for Vader’s picture. I remember seeing the men come with the cart when we returned home, and Vader raising his knife—

“Cornelia?” Magdalena peers into my face. “Cornelia, are you listening?” She pulls back with a swish of silk when satisfied she has my attention. “Do you see that third building to the left of the Town Hall? The pretty one, with the silver sign?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the Silversmith’s Guildhouse. When I was a child, my vader was the head of the guild. I imagine Little Jan shall be someday, too.”

“You don’t think Titus will want his son to deal in art with him—when he gets that business going better?”

“Oh, dear, no. It does not pay, does it? In fact—you mustn’t tell your vader, this is still a secret—Titus is taking silversmithing lessons from my uncle.”

“He is?”

“He seems to have quite a knack for it. He made me the sweetest candlesticks. He had engraved flowers on them. I keep them at our bedside.”

The candlesticks he had offered to me—dear Titus, had he tried to give them to me first?

She shades her eyes to look across the crowded square. “You will have to keep in mind this lacemaker when you next need lace. I know, I know, it is ladylike to make one’s own lace, but Johanna de Geer does not make hers. It is a waste of her good time, she says. A waste of mine, too. Goodness knows I have plenty of other things to do.”

Magdalena has a cook, a maid, and a moeder to jump to her every command. I wonder what those other things to do might be, besides to harry my brother.

“This woman makes lace far better than I can,” Magdalena says. “Of course she does. She is only a thousand years old. She has been at it so long she probably weaves all those threads as easily as breathing. Besides, Johanna has told me how to get a bargain from her.”

Magdalena trods near a legless beggar, who, quick on his hands, skitters crablike out of her way. “The secret, Johanna says, is to buy more than you need at a cut-rate price.”

I pull my apologetic gaze from the angry beggar.

“Later,” Magdalena says, “you bring back what you don’t need for a refund at the regular price. You come out ahead that way, you see.”

“But—isn’t that wrong?”

“No. The old woman builds a high profit into her price. I am just bringing it down to a reasonable rate. She should not charge so much in the first place.”

We leave Dam Square by way of the Damstraat. I recognize where we are—headed toward the Kloveniersburgwal.

Magdalena nods at a young woman dressed in pink silk with bows all over the skirt and trailed by a small brown-skinned boy in a matching livery. He struggles along on his tiptoes, balancing the long handle of a pink umbrella in an effort to keep her shaded.

“I asked Titus to get me one of those,” Magdalena says after they have passed. “But he is being rather stingy and refuses to. Johanna de Geer has one. Named Coco. A darling little thing from the New World. Quite rare, you know. He had an unfortunate habit of sucking his thumb—not really nice for serving at table—but she cured him by putting red East Indies pepper on his nail.”

My heart sinks for the little boy, so far from home without a moeder. What is wrong with Magdalena, not realizing he is not a toy or a pet but a feeling, frightened child? “What happens to the little boys when they grow up?”

Magdalena blinks her almond-shaped eyes. “I do not know. I had not thought of that.” She laughs. “Now I know why Titus calls you Worry Bird. I shall call you the same.” She pauses a moment at a street corner and presses a slender finger to her lips. “Now, where are we?”

My heart beats harder. What if we see Carel? What foolish blunders will I make around him with her judging my every move? Has Vader told her and Titus that I’m not to see him?

“Are we going to Kloveniersburgwal?”

“No,” she says, “the street before it. The shop is quite convenient to Johanna’s house. Why do you ask?”

I shake my head.

“Oh, I know.” She gives me a sly smile. “It is the Bruyningh boy, isn’t it?”

I look down.

“Wor-ry Bird!” she sings.

I bite my lip.

“There’s no use in denying it. People talk, you know. A person cannot sneeze in this town without everyone knowing it.”

I gasp. “What did Vader say?”

“Your vader? Nothing that I know of.”

“Someone else is talking? What could they possibly say?”

“Oh, just that you two young people are keeping company. Nothing much. Johanna mentioned it to me—Carel’s vader has been grumbling.”

“Carel’s vader is grumbling!”

Her pretty face clouds. “Maybe I ought not to tell you.”

“Please do. You must!”

“It’s just that, well, Carel’s vader does not approve.”

My gut turns to stone. “He does not approve of my vader.”

“No, actually he respects your vader. Your vader is actually quite famous, you know. Everyone still speaks with wonder of The Company of Banning Cocq, odd as that painting was with all the commotion in it. What in the world was a girl with a chicken doing in the middle of a company of shooters?” She shakes her silvered ringlets in amusement. “Regardless, it is common knowledge your vader has been sought out by princes from both here and abroad.”

I find I am starved for her words of praise about Vader. “Princes?”

“The Stadholder himself, for one, and just last year, the Florentine prince, Cosimo de Medici.”

I remember a group of men in slashed sleeves and feathered hats appearing at our door last December, but as they had left without purchasing one of Vader’s pictures, I had put them out of my mind. Could it truly have been a prince and his men? If only it were true that Vader was not a laughingstock! I could hold my head high and claim my place with Carel.

“Now, to be sure, everyone thinks your vader is the tiniest bit odd, but that is the artist’s lot, is it not? Part and parcel with the lifestyle. There’s a new young artist in Delft, Jan Vermeer, who paints his wife, daughters, and maid, all doing absolutely nothing. It is like painting dust gathering! Titus thinks his work great, but I find him quite mad. This is why I won’t have my little Jan take up the brush—too many oddbodies in the trade. But the problem with Mijnheer Bruyningh does not lie with your vader.”

I look at her.

She smiles sadly, as if she is most sorry for me. “You should never listen to what people say. I understand your moeder was very sweet.”

The meaning slowly sinks in. “You mean, Carel’s vader does not approve of my moeder?”

She waves her hand. “Put it out of your mind.”

But I cannot. I feel the sting of it during our visit to the lace-maker, a grandmotherly woman from Bruges whose kind attempt to show me different lace patterns does nothing to shake the sick feeling in my gut. Soon we are off with a large bundle of lace—much too much for a baby’s gown—and though I feel badly for the lacemaker, at least we are going home, where I can hide and lick my wounds. But instead of turning for home, Magdalena leads us toward the Kloveniersburgwal.

“Where are we going?” I ask in a panic.

“I would like to drop in on Johanna,” she says.

“Johanna de Geer?” Just down the street from Carel’s house? “But—I am not dressed properly!”

“Is that dress I had made for you not to your liking?”

I look down on my plain dark garb. “I love it, but—”

“Wor-ry Bird!” Magdalena says. “Do not fear seeing Carel or his vader. We shall duck into Johanna’s without anyone being the wiser. Who are those Bruyninghs to us, anyway?”

We continue toward the Trippenhuis. I try to slow my step but Magdalena only sails ahead faster, a slim, sleek craft cutting through the choppy sea of fellow Amsterdammers. I remember my red beads, still hidden under my collar, and pull them out, my only way of bettering my appearance. By the time we arrive at the Trips, I am almost faint with fear.