I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (5 page)

I won’t let them see me wince. Am I not worth worrying about?

Vader points with his mug toward the painting of the family scene resting on the easel. “What do you think?” he asks Titus.

Titus leans forward to examine it.

“Not so close! The smell of paint will not agree with you.”

Titus laughs. “Do not use that old line with me—I’ve got paint running through my blood. I won’t look too closely at the brushstrokes, if that’s what you want.” He steps back. “Excellent likenesses, Papa. It’s the van Roops from across the courtyard, isn’t it?”

“Very good.” Vader’s smile becomes sly. “Do you notice anything else?”

Neel flashes me a conspiratory glance but I won’t acknowledge him. If he recognizes Titus’s eyes in the picture, it is because he’s had time to study it.

“You use more gold pigment in your reds these days,” says Titus.

Vader folds his arms over his chest, his grin deepening. “And?”

Titus looks again at the canvas, then takes on a scolding tone. “Papa, you’re loading your paint with charcoal powder. Those dabs on the baby’s skirts are so thick they stand out from the canvas. You could use them as handles to pick up the painting.” Then he brightens. “Have you got a buyer?”

As miserable as Vader makes me, I cannot bear the look of hopeful anticipation on his face. “The eyes,” I whisper to Titus.

He doesn’t hear me. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Papa,” he says. “It looks good. The painting is very good.”

Vader holds onto the tail end of his smile. “Thank you, son.”

“Keep up the good work.” Titus claps him on the back. “Someone is sure to buy it. And I’ve got new contacts now, through Magdalena. All those years you trained me for the art market are finally going to pay off.”

“Good, son. Good.” Vader’s gaze is on the painting.

“Papa?”

Vader doesn’t answer; he’s looking at the picture. There is pity in Neel’s eyes as he watches him. Can Neel see what Vader’s own son cannot?

“Papa?” says Titus. “I brought two rounds of Edam cheese. There is a bottle of port for you, too. Magdalena won’t miss it—we have got a whole cellarful.”

“What?”

“
Cheese
, Papa, I brought you some.”

“Oh.” Vader turns away from the easel, his jaw set as if he has made a decision. “Thank you, son.” He smiles, but the light has left his pale green eyes.

Neel looks at me, but I will not look back. He should not judge Titus. Titus has been through more than he ever will. Titus and I together.

“Oh, and Bird,” Titus says, “before I go, I have been meaning to tell you—you had better be more careful about keeping the street clean in front of the house. Cases of the pestilence have been reported in town, and there is a new ordinance that all residents must sweep their streets each day.” He sees my expression. “Don’t worry, they think the sickness can be kept from spreading this way.”

“It is not in our hands, regardless,” Vader mutters, more to his painting than to us.

Chapter
6

The Sampling Officials
.
1662. Canvas.

Shouts, coming from outside, wake me on my pallet. I hear scraping sounds
.

I throw back my feather bag, hop across the cold tiles, then wipe the frost from the window with my shift front. Outside on the canal, two boys skate by. A mother pulls a sled with a bundled-up baby on it
.

“It froze!” I whisper
.

I pull on my clothes and run through the house, my shawl flapping like a seabird. “It froze! It froze! Titus! The canal has frozen!”

In the hall I nearly trip over Tijger, who runs away, his tail arched like a monkey’s. Moeder is peeling an onion in the kitchen
.

“Moeder, the canal is frozen!”

“Neeltje, shhh!”

I peer out the kitchen window. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

Out on the canal, our neighbors
, Mijnheer
and
Mevrouw
Bicker, he tall and thin, she as small, round, and neat as a jam pot, skate by slowly, holding hands with their son and three little daughters, who are chopping along on their own little skates. Behind them, an old couple glides along in step, their windburned faces serious. They frown at the pack of boys yelling and racing toward them, all flapping scarves and chapped cheeks
.

“Everyone’s skating! Let’s go!”

“I can’t, puss. I must have a nice soup available for de noen—Vader is expecting an important visitor. The sampling officials of the Draper’s Guild are considering your vader for their group portrait.”

Outside the window, one of the Bicker girls falls on the ice, her legs straight out in front of her. She starts to cry until little Mevrouw Bicker plucks her up from under her arms and spins her in a circle until she laughs
.

“Why can’t we have fun like everyone else?”

“Shh, puss, we’ll go out later. You’ll just have to wait.”

“Where is Titus?”

“At his aunt’s.”

“Not again!” All I hear when Titus comes back from the van Loos’ is about his pretty cousin Magdalena. I stomp to the stairs to Vader’s studio and hang on the banisters. Why must I always wait? I hang upside down with my hair brushing the floor until my head gets tingly, then swing myself up the stairs
.

I crouch down in the doorway at the top. Vader is standing in his studio, with palette and brushes in hand. I am not allowed to be here. I should run back downstairs, but I like the way he looks. I like his square back, his thick arms holding the painting things, the gray curls coming out the bottom of his cap. I want to sit by him and smell his spicy skin
.

“Cornelia,” Vader growls, “what are you doing?”

Someone calls, “Hallo, little miss.”

I peek past Vader’s legs. A man in a golden robe sits at a table to the side of Vader’s easel. He’s holding a sword as thick as his hairy hand. His face is mostly covered in beard, but where one of his eyes should be is an empty flap of skin
.

I scramble backward like a crab, then fall on my back
.

He scratches his beard, brown and bristly as the rat-catcher’s dog, with the tip of his sword. “She’s afraid of the weapon. Don’t worry, miss, there’s no edge to it. It couldn’t slice a round of cheese.” He whacks his own arm to prove it. No blood
.

“Cornelia,” Vader says, “say hello to Mijnheer Gootman.”

“Make that Claudius Civilis,” the man says stoutly, lifting his sword. “Ain’t I a handsome king?”

I can’t look at him. What if the flap comes open?

“Sorry, mijnheer,” Vader says, “she’s a skittish one.”

“Let her be,” Mijnheer Gootman says. “I had my own little
schaapje,
little Trientje. She was a shy one, too. Taken by the plague, she was, just last summer.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Vader says. “I lost my first child that way.”

“It was a hard time for the wife and me.” Mijnheer Gootman sighs loudly, then a smile lifts his beard. “I saw you watching your vader paint, miss. Are you going to be a painter like your old pa?”

I sit up. Paint stinks but I don’t mind. I would like to paint like Vader, to make things come alive in pictures
.

“That’s hardly likely,” Vader mutters
.

“Because she’s a girl?” says Mijnheer Gootman. “Do not underestimate a woman, my friend. How many widows have you seen take over their dead husband’s shop and build up the business tenfold?”

“It’s not that Cornelia is a girl,” Vader mutters
.

Footsteps tap briskly up the stairs. A man in a glossy black cape arrives at the studio door, then steps over me. With a smell of flowers, he puts out a yellow-gloved hand. “Rembrandt.”

Vader shifts his brushes to his other hand to shake. “Mijnheer van Neve.” He nods to the one-eyed man. “This is Jan Gootman. He is a cobbler from down the street.”

Mijnheer Gootman leans on the table and sticks out his own hairy hand to Mijnheer van Neve as Vader goes back to painting. The fancy man curls his lip at Mijnheer Gootman’s paw, like he has sniffed a rotten onion
.

“Sorry, Rembrandt,” Mijnheer van Neve says as Vader dabs at the canvas. “I did not know you were working. Your … wife … sent me up.” Behind Vader’s back, he narrows his eyes at me and smiles as if he has heard something naughty. “I shall come back later.”

“No need.” Vader loads his brush with black. “If you’ve come to discuss the terms for your group portrait of the sampling officials, I can do so now as I paint. I’ve got to keep working on this piece for the new Town Hall. I suppose you heard I won that commission—the biggest picture in the building. Quite a project.”

But the fancy man is already leaving. “I shall come back.”

Vader stops painting. “Mijnheer van Neve—”

“I shall be back.”

Mijnheer Gootman is still frowning at his unshaken hand as the fancy man goes down the stairs. Vader turns back to him and sighs. “Now where were we, my friend?”

I stand up, put my arms on top my head, and twist so my skirt swirls this way and that to get Mijnheer Gootman to notice me. Please talk some more about girls like me painting. Because I want to paint. More than anything
.

But Mijnheer Gootman only uses the tip of his blunt sword to push up the crown sliding down his forehead. “How much longer do you think it will be, Mijnheer van Rijn? If I’m gone too long from the shop, there will be hell to pay with the wife.”

Chapter
7

It has been two weeks since Titus left me for Magdalena and the House of the Gilded Scales. It is an unusually fine day for mid-March. A few furry scraps of clouds creep across a sky as blue as the expensive chunks of lapis lazuli Vader grinds for his paint. A breeze damp with the sea plucks at my skirt as I stand at the edge of the canal with Tijger, who has followed me outside, his majestic strut lending my lowly errand a more regal air. Save for the soft plopping sound of the boats tied in the canal, and the screech of the gulls, it seems oddly quiet, until the death bells of the Westerkerk break the silence. A shiver of fear runs through me, then I shake it off. It is probably not the plague. A person rich enough to buy the bell ringer’s services has died of something else. Let us all weep buckets.

Vader’s shout sails out the upper window. “CORNELIA!”

Not again.

In the canal, a brown mother duck and her five fist-sized yellow ducklings slice through my reflection in the murky water. I pour the contents of the slop jar into the canal, well away from them. Maybe if I ignore Vader he will forget about me.

“Cornelia! Do not waste time!”

I groan when I see a passenger boat approaching, pulled from the other side of the canal by a boy on a bony black horse. I hurry into the house before the passengers, seated around the edges of the boat, can hear him. Now that Vader has been told to call for me, he does it day and night. Why did we tell him not to shout for Titus?

I find Vader in the back room, sitting on the steps to his bed-cupboard. He is putting on his shoes.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I need to be shaved. I am going out.”

“So go to a surgeon, like everyone else,” I say, though I know we can’t afford it.

He points to a bowl on the floor. There is a razor, strap, and sponge in it.

“You want me to shave you? I don’t know how to shave!”

“There’s a piece of soap in the bowl—suds it up, slap it on.” He pats his face to demonstrate. “There’s nothing to it. Titus used to do it for me.”

I grimace at the grizzled tufts sprouting from his leathery cheeks and chin. He has not shaved since Titus’s marriage. For that matter, he has not gone out but has shut himself up in his studio, painting a portrait of himself. The man has more portraits of himself than the king of Spain.

“I can’t shave you.” I cringe at the thought of him wandering around in public, shaved or not. “Where are you going?”

He chuckles as if to let me in on a lark. “To pay Gerrit van Uylenburgh a visit. We will see if the young shoot’s taste for art has improved or if he remains as thickheaded as his vader. Old Hendrick was a dull old ox if I ever saw one. A stuiver-pincher, too.”

I wince. “Mijnheer van Uylenburgh won’t talk to you! Don’t you remember what you did at the wedding?”

“What?”

“The wine!”

“What?”

“You made Magdalena spill it. You cursed their marriage!”

“Oh, that. It was an accident. Besides, who believes in that superstitious nonsense?”

“Magdalena’s mother, for one. Those were not tears of joy she was crying when Magdalena was wiping Titus’s collar.”

Vader scowls at me for reminding him. “Well, this is business. If there is a guilder to be made, van Uylenburgh will be for it.”

“But he has sold few of your paintings since …” I cross my arms. It was not my fault Vader took up with his maid. I did not ask to be born.

“I have not given him anything to sell.”

That cannot be true, but there is no arguing with the man. “Maybe you ought to let Titus talk to him first, now that their ties are stronger.”

“No need. I will let my painting do the talking.”

“Which painting?”

“The family group.” He finishes with his shoes, then puts his hands on his knees, elbows out. “I no longer need it.”

I want to shout a protest. I love that picture—the look in the baby’s eyes is all I have of Titus now that he’s Magdalena’s, but I don’t say a word. We need the money too badly. “I think we should wait for Titus.”