I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (2 page)

Vader crooks a corner of his thin lips, which are as red as a child’s, even though the rest of his face is flabby and yellowing. He was old when I was born, though my mother was twenty-eight. “What is the jest?”

Tijger fights to get down. I set him on the floor. “Nothing. Who were your models? You’ve had no families up here lately.”

When Vader doesn’t answer, I go to the rear window. Doves scuttle to one side of the ledge as I look through the thick panes against which thorny naked rose vines rattle. A deep
bong
rocks the sill on which I lean, giving me a start. It is the death bells of the West Church, at the end of our canal. It has been four years since that terrible time of plague, and still the Westerkerk’s foul bells make me flinch. How does one get over a time such as that? In the final year of the pestilence, twenty thousand people died, one for every ten in the city. The death bells had sounded day and night. Funeral processions lined up at the churchyard gates, waiting their turn to bury the victims from the families able to scrape together the guilders for a funeral and the gravedigger. The other choice was to toss a body into the pit behind the Plague Hospital and sprinkle it with quicklime. No street in the city had been without a house whose occupants were locked behind a door marked with a hastily painted
P
for
pest
, and our street—our house—had been no different.

Now, on the other side of our bare patch of courtyard, two of the van Roop girls jump ropes outside their back door. Their family is new-come to the neighborhood. The family who had lived there before them, the Bickers, had all been taken by the sickness and no one would rent the house for years. Now the van Roop moeder, her bundled baby on her hip, pulls wash off the clothesline strung across the back of the house. All of a sudden I know who Vader is painting.

“It’s the van Roops—they are the family on your canvas.”

Vader throws a grin over his shoulder.

I fight off a wave of pride for having guessed correctly. Cleverness buys no bread. But at least now it makes sense. For weeks I had noticed Vader staring out the back window of his studio when I had brought him his tray for dinner. When I told Titus about it some days ago at breakfast, he merely dunked his bread in his watery ale and said, “So?”

I had voiced what everyone whispers in Amsterdam. “So the old man is going mad.”

“You are just learning this?”

“Well, I think he has gotten worse.”

“Maybe,” Titus said around a mouthful of bread. Only Titus, with his smooth dark brows, dimpled chin, and finely cut lips, can manage to look handsome while loading his cheeks with half a loaf. Perhaps it is the way his coppery hair curls to his shoulders. My hair is a darker red-brown, with waves given to frizz when it rains. And while his eyes are a hundred interesting shades of green arranged in a halo of flecks, mine are the plain brown of a cow’s. It is obvious we have different mothers.

My own chunk of bread crumbled into my ale. I fished the soggy bit from the bottom of my mug. “How can you be so calm? We can’t even pay the baker’s bill.”

“Things may change.”

Hope rose in me like a soap bubble. “Have you had luck with the prints?” Titus had been making the rounds of dealers lately with some prints Vader had made several years ago. Usually there is a market for Vader’s etchings. If only we could get him to stop his crazy painting and make more of them.

“With the prints?” Titus said as he sliced another piece of cheese. “No, not just yet.”

“Why doesn’t he give people what they want?” I cried. “Vader can paint as smoothly as anyone—I have seen his old pictures. Why does he have to throw globs of paint on the canvas like dog mess?”

Titus gave me a pitying look. “You are as stubborn as he is. Once you figure out that you cannot change him, you will feel so much better.” He wiped his mouth, then pushed back his bench.

“Don’t you care what happens to us?”

Titus bared his teeth at his reflection in the kitchen window. “Yes.”

“Where are you going?” I hoped I did not know the answer though I was certain that I did. He was always running off to the van Loos’ fancy house on the Singel, to see Magdalena. As if he had a chance with her. “Don’t go.”

His expression was that of an amused angel. “Why, my little Worry Bird?”

He was shaming himself, chasing her so, that was why. The van Loos would never have him, poor as we are. The son of an out-of-fashion painter would make a terrible match for someone of their sort, though Titus’s mother, Saskia—who was not my mother, as even strangers will so kindly point out—was the van Loos’ cousin. Saskia had married Vader when he was the most promising young artist in Amsterdam. Now that Vader was a broken old man, the van Loos could not possibly wish to taint their line with the likes of us. Not with me in the family, the daughter of Rembrandt by his housemaid.

And anyhow, if Titus married Magdalena, I would die of loneliness.

“Just stay,” I said.

“I’ve got work to do,” said Titus.

Only Titus’s willingness to knock on dealers’ doors has kept us out of the poorhouse. No dealer wants to speak to Vader. They cannot sell the strange work that he does, and besides, he owes them all money. I had hugged my arms to my chest as Titus plunked his hat over his coppery curls and left.

Now, in Vader’s dusty studio, Tijger rubs against my legs, wanting to be picked up again now that I have put him down. I obey. He weighs less than he used to, as if age were hollowing his bones.

“What are you going to do with this picture?” I ask Vader. Maybe a patron with money has come to him directly and asked him to portray a family. It is possible. Vader does receive a commission now and then, and sometimes, miraculously, it pleases him to please a patron.

“Do with it?” Vader asks in his guttural voice.

“Did someone ask you for it?”

“Yes.” He dabs the finest point of white in the mother’s eye. The sound of cooing doves echoes in the room. “God.”

Something shrivels inside of me. No one else’s vader speaks of God as if he actually knew Him. Normal vaders keep God where He belongs, in church. Vader doesn’t even go to church, and he got Moeder kicked out of it when he wouldn’t marry her after I was born. He heaps shame upon himself and his family, yet seems to chat as freely to God as did Moses in the Bible, without the bother of the burning bush. “I should get dinner,” I murmur.

I go back downstairs, Tijger trailing me majestically, fetch my book, then go to check on the pot of cabbage, onions, and a soupbone I had put upon the kitchen fire. There will be enough soup for Titus if he will come home for supper, but there is no guarantee of that. Each day Titus is gone longer trying to sell Vader’s work when he is not falling over himself at Magdalena’s. I am here with just Vader and his best friend, God Almighty, unless Neel comes.

The very thought of Cornelis Suythof—Neel, as he has us call him—makes me squirm. Once Vader had many pupils, Titus tells me, before we lost the big house and took this cheap place by the canal. I can still hear the sound of students tramping up the wide stairs of our grand old house, laughing, singing naughty songs, dropping their brushes or palettes with a clatter. Only a few pupils followed Vader to our new house, and now Vader has but one—Neel the Serious, with his messy dark hair and staring eyes. If only he smiled now and then, he would be handsome in a dark and even manly way, but at twenty-one, when he should be dashing and merry like Titus, he is as somber as a church tower.

I am on my stool, my book open on my lap, when footsteps tap outside the open window. Someone bounds from the street onto our stoop; the front door creaks open. The footsteps head not to the studio, but my way. It is too early for Titus. Oh, Lord, Serious Neel is due for lessons. What does he want from me now?

But it is Titus who trots into the kitchen and picks up the ladle in the pot over the fire. “Cabbage again, milady?”

It is odd how relief stings more than anger. “Don’t speak ill of it unless you cook it yourself.”

“Why, little Worry Bird, what is the matter? If it’s cabbage that’s making you cranky, you’ll be happy to hear that soon you will not have to dine on a steady diet of it—not if I can help it.”

“You sold some prints!” I jump up. My book slides to the floor.

He grins when he picks up the book. “
The Seven Deadly Sins of Maidservants
? The things you read. Weren’t you reading
Famous Courtesans
last week?”

I snatch the book from his hands. “Who’d you sell the prints to? Tell me they fetched at least a guilder. We need to pay the baker and the greengrocer and—”

He grabs me by the arms and gives me a playful shake. “Bird! Hush! Worry, worry, worry, when you should be congratulating me!”

“Why?” I say, my head rattling.

He lets me go. “Your big brother is getting married. Magdalena and I are to wed as soon as the banns are published.”

Chapter
2

Peter Denying Christ.
1660. Canvas.

It is afternoon and I am on my knees, pulling a string for Tijger to chase. A flash lights the dark room. Thunder rattles the windowpanes and the pictures on the walls. I am five and big and do not get scared at a silly thing like thunder. I get up on my tiptoes to look outside. Rain is coming down sideways, bouncing off the stones of the street, making little pocks in the water of the canal like the marks in Vader’s cheeks. It has beaten the petals off the tulips that grow under our tree. I look behind me. Where is Tijger? Thunder booms again
.

I jump up and run to the back room and tag the bed-cupboard where Moeder sleeps
.

“Moeder, wake up!”

“Nicolaes,” she whispers
.

Silly moeder! “No, it’s Neeltje.”

Moeder’s eyes open. Slowly, like she is underwater, she reaches for me. Just before her hand reaches my cheek, it drops. Her eyes slowly close again
.

Moeder sleeps a lot. Unless she is cleaning
.

I climb up onto the bed and sit in the afternoon dark. I pick my nose until there is nothing left to pick, then try to tie the laces that have come undone on my top. I twist them one way, then another—how do I make a loop?

A skittering sound comes from across the room. The hairs prick on my arms. Last week during the night, I had awoken with a rat on me. When I screamed, Vader barked from his bed above my pallet, “Go back to sleep!”

The rat had sat on my chest, looking at me, twitching its dirty whiskers
.

“But … it’s a rat!”

Vader grunted something to Moeder, then rustled the bedclothes
.

The rat sprang away, its nails poking into my shift
.

“All I wanted was sleep!” Vader stepped over my pallet and left the room
.

I popped up. “Moeder?”

She held up the top feather bag. I crawled underneath next to her
.

“It’s almost dawn, pretty puss,” she had said in a sleepy voice. “No more rats. Rats hate the light.”

Now, in the dark of the stormy afternoon, I hear the rustling again. I crawl up to Moeder’s face again
.

“Moeder?” When she doesn’t answer, I put my eyes up to hers. Still asleep
.

There is an unlit lamp across the room, sitting on its shelf in the wall. It’s too high for me to reach, and if I could, how would I light it? Even if I were allowed to touch a fireplace, there is only one lit and it is in the kitchen, and who knows how many rats might be hiding between here and there?

I hear a creaking overhead. Vader, in his studio. He would have light
.

With all the courage I can muster, I dash up the stairs, then crawl to a corner of Vader’s room. Three lamps are eating up the darkness. If I am very quiet, Vader might not see me
.

Vader is sketching at his desk, the hanging sleeve of his brown gown waggling from his elbow as he works. He stops and swallows. He sniffs. I hold my breath. His sleeve waggles again
.

I stay frozen in my spot as long as I can. But the hard floor hurts my tailbone and my bottom itches because Moeder forgot to dress me in my shift after my bath yesterday and my wool skirt torments my skin. I cannot … keep … still. Look at how the firelight sputters in the lamp nearest me, the one Vader had put on the floor behind him. As quiet as the sneakiest rat, I crawl to it and put my hand in front of its light. My skin glows red as if lit from within. Inside, there are knotty sticks that run the length of my fingers. I look up at the arm floating in the jar on the shelf. The skin has been peeled back like the petals on a tulip; meaty strings float around the bone. I look at my own hand. There is a whole other being sealed up in there, an ugly one I do not want to know
.

“What are you doing?” Vader says
.

I jerk my hand behind my back
.

“Where is your mother?”

“Asleep.”

“Then why do you not go play?”

I look at the rain pouring down outside the window. “I—I’m hungry. I have not had
de noen”

“No lunch? It’s two o’clock. She should get up.” Vader frowns. “Never mind, do what you were doing.” He nods. “Put your hand in front of the lamp.”

I cannot move. Is this a test?

“Go on, Cornelia. Put your hand in front of the lamp like you were doing—but come around to this side and do it.”

I hear Moeder’s voice in my head
, You must never play with fire.
If I make the wrong move, I will be shut out in the dark. I bite my hand
.

“What’s wrong with you, girl? How’d I ever raise such a timid thing? Just put your hand in front of the lamp.”

The front door scrapes open, slams. Footsteps pound up the stairs
.