Girl with a Pearl Earring (31 page)

I nodded to her. “I’m sorry for your loss and your troubles, madam.”

“Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.”

I did not know how to respond to such words, so I simply said what I knew to be true. “You wanted to see me, madam.”

“No, it’s Catharina who is to see you.”

“Catharina?” I could not keep the surprise from my voice.

Maria Thins smiled sourly. “You never did learn to keep your thoughts to yourself, did you, girl? Never mind, I expect you get by well enough with your butcher, if he doesn’t ask too much of you.”

I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it.

“That’s right. You’re learning. Now, Catharina and van Leeuwenhoek are in the great hall. He is the executor of the will, you see.”

I did not see. I wanted to ask her what she meant, and why van Leeuwenhoek was there, but I did not dare. “Yes, madam,” I said simply.

Maria Thins chuckled briefly. “The most trouble we’ve ever had with a maid,” she muttered, shaking her head before disappearing inside.

I stepped into the front hallway. There were still paintings hanging everywhere on the walls, some I recognized, others I did not. I half expected to see myself among the still lifes and seascapes, but of course I was not there.

I glanced at the stairs leading up to his studio and stopped, my chest tightening. To stand in the house again, his room above me, was more than I thought I could bear, even though I knew he was not there. For so many years I had not let myself think of the hours I spent grinding colors at his side, sitting in the light of the windows, watching him look at me. For the first time in two months I became fully aware that he was dead. He was dead and he would paint no more paintings. There were so few—I had heard that he never did paint faster, as Maria Thins and Catharina had wanted him to.

It was only when a girl poked her head out from the Crucifixion room that I forced myself to take a deep breath and walk down the hallway towards her. Cornelia was now about the age I had been when I first became a maid. Her red hair had darkened over the ten years and was simply dressed, without ribbons or braids. She had grown less menacing to me over time. In fact I almost pitied her—her face was twisted by a cunning that gave a girl her age an ugly look.

I wondered what would happen to her, what would happen to them all. Despite Tanneke’s confidence in her mistress’s ability to arrange things, it was a big family, with a big debt. I had heard in the market that they had not paid their bill to the baker in three years, and after my master’s death the baker had taken pity on Catharina and accepted a painting to settle the debt. For a brief moment I wondered if Catharina was going to give me a painting too, to settle her debt with Pieter.

Cornelia pulled her head back into the room and I stepped into the great hall. It had not changed much since I had worked there. The bed still had its green silk curtains, now faded. The ivory-inlaid cupboard was there, and the table and Spanish leather chairs, and the paintings of his family and hers. Everything appeared older, dustier, more battered. The red and brown floor tiles were cracked or missing in places.

Van Leeuwenhoek was standing with his back to the door, his hands clasped behind him, studying a painting of soldiers drinking in a tavern. He turned around and bowed to me, still the kind gentleman.

Catharina was seated at the table. She was not wearing black as I had expected. I did not know if she meant to taunt me, but she wore the yellow mantle trimmed with ermine. It too had a faded look about it, as if it had been worn too many times. There were badly repaired rents in the sleeves, and the fur had been eaten away in places by moths. Nonetheless, she was playing her part as the elegant lady of the house. She had dressed her hair carefully and was wearing powder and her pearl necklace.

She was not wearing the earrings.

Her face did not match her elegance. No amount of powder could mask her rigid anger, her reluctance, her fear. She did not want to meet with me, but she had to.

“Madam, you wished to see me.” I thought it best to address myself to her, though I looked at van Leeuwenhoek as I spoke.

“Yes.” Catharina did not gesture to a chair, as she would have to another lady. She let me stand.

There was an awkward silence as she sat and I stood, waiting for her to begin. She was clearly struggling to speak. Van Leeuwenhoek shifted from one foot to the other.

I did not try to help her. There seemed to be no way that I could. I watched her hands shuffle some papers on the table, run along the edges of the jewelry box at her elbow, pick up the powder-brush and set it down again. She wiped her hands on a white cloth.

“You know that my husband died two months ago?” she began at last.

“I had heard, madam, yes. I was very sorry to hear of it. May God keep him.”

Catharina did not seem to take in my feeble words. Her mind was elsewhere. She picked up the brush again and ran her fingers through its bristles.

“It was the war with France, you see, that brought us to this state. Not even van Ruijven wanted to buy paintings then. And my mother had problems collecting her rents. And he had to take over the mortgage on his mother’s inn. So it is no wonder things grew so difficult.”

The last thing I had expected from Catharina was an explanation of why they ran into debt. Fifteen guilders after all this time is not so very much, I wanted to say. Pieter has let it go. Think no more of it. But I dared not interrupt her.

“And then there were the children. Do you know how much bread eleven children eat?” She looked up at me briefly, then back down at the powder-brush.

One painting’s worth over three years, I answered silently. One very fine painting, to a sympathetic baker.

I heard the click of a tile in the hallway, and the rustle of a dress being stilled by a hand. Cornelia, I thought, still spying. She too is taking her place in the drama.

I waited, holding back the questions I wanted to ask.

Van Leeuwenhoek finally spoke. “Griet, when a will has been drawn up,” he began in his deep voice, “an inventory of the family’s possessions must be taken to establish the assets while considering the debts. However, there are private matters that Catharina would like to attend to before this is done.” He glanced at Catharina. She continued to play with the powder-brush.

They do not like each other still, I thought. They would not even be in the same room together if they could help it.

Van Leeuwenhoek picked up a piece of paper from the table. “He wrote this letter to me ten days before he died,” he said to me. He turned to Catharina. “You must do this,” he ordered, “for they are yours to give, not his or mine. As executor of his will I should not even be here to witness this, but he was my friend, and I would like to see his wish granted.”

Catharina snatched the paper from his hand. “My husband was not a sick man, you know,” she addressed herself to me. “He was not really ill until a day or two before his death. It was the strain of the debt that drove him into a frenzy.”

I could not imagine my master in a frenzy.

Catharina looked down at the letter, glanced at van Leeuwenhoek, then opened her jewelry box. “He asked that you have these.” She picked out the earrings and after a moment’s hesitation laid them on the table.

I felt faint and closed my eyes, touching the back of the chair lightly with my fingers to steady myself.

“I have not worn them again,” Catharina declared in a bitter tone. “I could not.”

I opened my eyes. “I cannot take your earrings, madam.”

“Why not? You took them once before. And besides, it’s not for you to decide. He has decided for you, and for me. They are yours now, so take them.”

I hesitated, then reached over and picked them up. They were cool and smooth to the touch, as I had remembered them, and in their grey and white curve a world was reflected.

I took them.

“Now go,” Catharina ordered in a voice muffled with hidden tears. “I have done what he asked. I will do no more.” She stood up, crumpled the paper and threw it on the fire. She watched it flare up, her back to me.

I felt truly sorry for her. Although she could not see it, I nodded to her respectfully, and then to van Leeuwenhoek, who smiled at me. “Take care to remain yourself,” he had warned me so long ago. I wondered if I had done so. It was not always easy to know.

I slipped across the floor, clutching my earrings, my feet making loose tiles clink together. I closed the door softly behind me.

Cornelia was standing out in the hallway. The brown dress she wore had been repaired in several places and was not as clean as it could be. As I brushed past her she said in a low, eager voice, “You could give them to me.” Her greedy eyes were laughing.

I reached over and slapped her.

When I got back to Market Square I stopped by the star in the center and looked down at the pearls in my hand. I could not keep them. What would I do with them? I could not tell Pieter how I came to have them—it would mean explaining everything that had happened so long ago. I could not wear the earrings anyway—a butcher’s wife did not wear such things, no more than a maid did.

I walked around the star several times. Then I set out for a place I had heard of but never been to, tucked away in a back street behind the New Church. I would not have visited such a place ten years before.

The man’s trade was keeping secrets. I knew that he would ask me no questions, nor tell anyone that I had gone to him. After seeing so many goods come and go, he was no longer curious about the stories behind them. He held the earrings up to the light, bit them, took them outside to squint at them.

“Twenty guilders,” he said.

I nodded, took the coins he held out, and left without looking back.

There were five extra guilders I would not be able to explain. I separated five coins from the others and held them tight in my fist. I would hide them somewhere that Pieter and my sons would not look, some unexpected place that only I knew of.

I would never spend them.

Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free.

One of the most helpful and readable sources on seventeenth-century Holland is Simon Schama’s
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
(1987). What little is known about Vermeer’s life and family has been thoroughly documented by John Montias in
Vermeer and His Milieu
(1989). The catalogue for the 1996 Vermeer exhibition has beautiful reproductions and clear analyses of the paintings.

I would like to thank Philip Steadman, Nicola Costaras, Humphrey Ocean, and Joanna Woodall for talking with me about various aspects of Vermeer’s work. Mick Bartram, Ora Dresner, Nina Killham, Dale Reynolds, and Robert and Angela Royston all made helpful and supportive comments about the manuscript in progress. Thanks, finally, to my agent, Jonny Geller, and my editor, Susan Watt, for doing what they do so well.