I Am Rembrandt's Daughter (18 page)

“You cannot go like that.”

At the bottom of the steps, he gazes down at his brown painting gown. It is as spotted with dabs of yellow as Tijger’s aging belly. Vader shrugs, then takes it off, revealing a green doublet thrice the age of Tijger himself.

“That’s no better!”

“I am just going to my son’s.”

What if he runs into Carel? And I cannot bear for Magdalena to sniff at him in his rags, let alone for me to be left here with Neel.

“Put on your good doublet and breeches and I will shave you.”

“I don’t want to bother and it’s my birthday, so I don’t have to.”

“Don’t you want Titus to be proud of you?”

He clicks his tongue and heaves a sigh. Slowly he shuffles to the back room, where he arranges himself on his bed like a lamb for slaughter. He follows me with pale green eyes red-rimmed with age as I prepare his soap and razor.

“You really should not be so rough on Neel, you know,” he says.

“I am not rough on Neel.”

“He would treat a woman as she should be treated. That is important, Cornelia.”

“I know it is.” I come over, then, with an intake of breath, hold down his jaw and pull the razor over his slack cheek. “That is why I am fond of Carel. He treats me like a queen.”

He catches some soap sliding down his neck with his shift sleeve as I tap the razor in the bowl of water. “Young Bruyningh,” he grumbles. “When are you going to grow tired of him?”

“Never! I would think you’d be encouraging me with him. All those ships.”

“I don’t give two figs about them.”

“I’d think you would. I don’t know how else we are going to survive.”

“How we survive is my problem. You are much too young to worry about that.”

I want to laugh out loud. I have been worrying about surviving my whole life! “Someone has got to worry about how we are to live.”

“Pig feathers. When has worry ever changed the course of anything? Anyhow, when you become of marrying age, you should look for a man who will love and esteem you, not who can buy you the most trinkets.”

I cannot believe the ridiculousness of this conversation. Vader, the man who would not bother to recognize his love for Moeder under the law, has become an expert on how to treat a woman.

I start to shave him, then stop. Though I would rather swim to New Amsterdam in January, the time has come to face what I do not wish to face. “Vader, why did you not marry Moeder?”

He blinks up at me, a gray, rheumy-eyed lamb, as I stand over him with the razor. “That was between your moeder and me.”

I take a deep breath. “Titus told me it was because you would lose all of his moeder’s money if you did.”

“Is that what he told you?”

I swallow the dry lump in my throat, hoping he will deny it. “Yes.”

“Well, it is true that Saskia’s last will made it impossible for me to remarry if I wished to keep her money.”

“So it was for money!” How can he admit this? Does he not think of how this wounds me? “And it wasn’t even enough to keep us afloat.”

“You can believe what you need to about your moeder and me. Just remember what I said about Neel.”

I take an angry stroke at his cheek. “Neel is an old man.”

“He is twenty-one,” Vader says calmly for a man with a razor at his throat, “five years younger than Titus, though he is very mature for his age.”

I wipe the razor on my rag. “He acts older than you.”

“I suppose that is an insult—to whom, I don’t know. Both of us, I assume. But I’ll disregard it. Let it be on the record that I consider Neel wise for his age.”

I rip another path through the soapsuds. “You haven’t told me what happened with you and Moeder.”

He opens his mouth to reply.

Just then Neel’s footsteps ring on the stairs. I feel Vader’s eyes upon me as Neel enters, dressed in his street clothes. “Mijnheer, I am off to buy some new pigments.” He peers at Vader’s face, then smiles at me. “No nicks yet.”

“She gets better with age,” Vader says. “People do,” he says pointedly at me.

“I am not done with you yet,” I warn him.

Neel starts to smile, then sees I am not jesting. His face grows sober. “I shall return tomorrow.”

Vader waves his hand. “Go. Go. You have my blessing.”

I finish Vader in silence, gathering the strength to press him further about Moeder, but before I can get up the courage, I am done and he has put on his best doublet and sleeves and is away.

I wander to the window, where Carel’s withered bunch of lavender hangs, and lean on the stone sill. Outside, the youngest van Roop girl runs from our alleyway and into the street, pushing a hoop, as the death bells of the Westerkerk begin to toll, vibrating the stone under my elbows. Over on the Street That Is the Name of Money, does Carel hear them, too? Does he pause at his ledgers and think not of another death, of which there are so many now in the center of town, but of me—of my eyes, of my lips? I push on the lavender, causing it to rain faded blue buds. He cared enough to protect me from the plague—why should I wait for him to come here, when I can do him the favor of going to him? Fie on the silly rules that say the boy must do the courting! I’ve got legs—I can use them.

“Thank you, Magdalena,” I say out loud as I whisk the new dark blue bodice and skirt she has bought me from their pegs on the wall. With speed and care I put them on, dress my hair with the red ribbon I have found in the linen press in the back room, grab my red beads from under my pillow, then take to the street.

The blacksmith’s story may not be the only one with a happy ending.

Chapter
24

Hendrickje Bathing
.
1655. Panel.

The rain pours down, plastering my hair to my head as I sit on the stoop, my guts pushing and turning, threatening to come up my throat. Behind me, the red-painted
P
blazes on the door. I can almost feel it burning into my back. On the other side of the door, in the back room, is Vader, shut up with her. He would not bring her out though the man with the cart had come for her. When I had tried to tell Vader the man was waiting, he threw Moeder’s red beads at me. At last the man had gone away, the arms and legs of the bodies flopping over the sides of the cart as it bounced over the cobblestones. Now the rain pours down. I stick out my tongue and taste the rain and snot and tears as I push up my sopping sleeve and uncover the red mark on my arm where the beads had hit
.

A man comes down the empty street. His hat is pulled down low because of the rain, but there’s a bounce to his step and his cape snaps smartly. He carries a pink flower that he shields from the rain with one hand. It’s a rose, like the kind in our courtyard. When he tips up his head to look at me, I see his gold mustache
.

I stand, the beads clenched in my hand
.

Through the curtain of rain, I see him smile as he trots closer. He’s grinning as he casually leans to look behind me
.

He stops. The rain pours in a curtain between us
.

“Who?” he calls, his voice strained
.

I open my hand and look at her beads. “Moeder.”

I say it, but I do not believe it
.

“Hendrickje?”

I glare at him. If he knew her, why didn’t he help her? Why didn’t anyone help her? Why didn’t anyone help me?

Even through the rain I can hear the Gold Mustache Man gurgle like hands are squeezing his throat. He staggers backward, then slipping on the wet bricks, turns and stumbles away
.

Slowly, I sit back down. Out in the canal, ducks are floating. They don’t care about the rain. In my mind, I see Moeder as Vader once painted her: wading amongst them, wearing only a shift. As in the painting, the white cloth floats around her legs in a filmy cloud. The ducks don’t care. They drift past her on the water and sleep
.

Chapter
25

Peddlers cry out as I rush past the wooden stalls cluttering the sides of the Westermarkt, on my way to find Carel.

“Hey, aniseed! Aniseed for your stomach pains!”

“Herrings! Sweet as sugar! All fresh! Herrings!”

“Best raisins!”

“See my pears!”

“My carrots!”

“My oranges!”

They would not waste their breath on me if they knew I have not a stuiver.

In the middle of the square, I ask a stringy-haired woman with a tray of wooden toys if she knows where the Trippenhuis might be—surely everyone has heard of the largest house in Amsterdam. Carel lives two houses away.

The woman pulls back with a flap of greasy hair and gives me a look of disgust. “Do I look like someone who breaks bread with the Trippen?”

I notice her coarse wool sleeves, even more patched at the elbow than my everyday pair, and her dirt-blackened toes peeking from under her dress. “Excuse me, mevrouw.”

She waves her hand. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you don’t have to look so pitiful. See that street on the other side of the square?” She points toward a group of gentlemen gathered at a street corner, their cassocks folded neatly over their arms. “That’ll take you straight to the Dam Square—you can walk it in the time it takes to boil an eel. You will know you’re in the Dam when you see the Town Hall. Can’t miss it. Biggest building in town, bigger than all the churches—it’s got the preachers hopping mad.”

I draw in a breath. I was there once, though it has been years. I see my moeder and me, searching through the corridors of the Town Hall, looking for Vader’s picture.

“Did you hear me?” the toy lady says.

“Yes, mevrouw. I should go to the Town Hall.”

The toy lady frowns like she doesn’t believe me. “Good. Then go straight through to the first big street. The Damstraat. Cross two canals, stop at the third. That would be the Kloveniersburgwal.” She shifts under the straps of her tray. “You can’t miss the Trippenhuis. It’s a filthy-big pile. Oh—would you look at that!”

I turn around. The crowd is melting away like sugar in the rain from a woman tapping her way across the square with a large white stick. She holds her son’s hand and looks neither left nor right, and no one looks at her.

“I don’t care if they give them white sticks or not,” the toy lady says. “Family members of plague victims shouldn’t be out and about. What, we’re supposed to be able to run fast enough when we see the stick? I say keep ‘em at home ‘til everyone who’s dying is dead. We can’t afford another big contagion. I lost my moeder, vader, four sisters, and two brothers the last time the plague went through, and I tell you what, I’m not losing no one again. I got my own family now.”

I bob my thanks, then hurry on. I will not worry about a new wave of pestilence. Yes, it is making its rounds—Carel’s count of the death bells is proof of that—but over the past few months, its toll has kept steady, unlike the year Moeder was carried off, when it spread until every street, every house was filled with wailing. There have been no outbreaks on our street or on Carel’s, by his last report. Maybe this contagion will burn itself out, like this woman says, on the few unfortunate families who have caught it, God rest their souls. Surely there can never be a time of plague like there had been before, not now, when I am happy and have Carel and everything to hope for.

I concentrate on more immediate things, like not sweating, a trick in a wool bodice and skirt in the heat of July, and ignore the curious glances of basket-toting housewives sniffing nosegays to ward off the pestilence, and the wink of a man in a pale green cassock. I think of the look Carel will have on his face when I appear at his door. Just imagining his surprise and delight makes me want to squirm with joy.

When I get to the Dam, it is packed with peddlers and lepers and Chinamen and merchants with pomanders around their necks to prevent catching the contagion. Sailors stagger by, smiled at by ladies in bright silks. Dogs sniff among the lot of them, shying away from the horses clopping across the square with their loads. Above it all, looking down calmly like a benevolent rich uncle, is the Town Hall.

I step directly into the path of a drayman’s horse.

“Out of the way!” The drayman shakes his whip.

I jump aside with a gasp, then bawl out to a maid carrying a jug, “Which way to the Kloveniersburgwal?”

She points to a street. I stumble away.

A group of people are funneling into the street. I step into the crowd as if I belong there, though my heart is pounding in my ears. What if I can’t find Carel? Will I be able to find my way back? Thankful that Moeder’s shoes have stretched with the wearing of them, I keep going, over one humpbacked bridge, then another, walking at a furious pace until over the shoulders of the crowd, I see a bridge over a third canal. I fight my way out of the stream of people to catch my breath.

Before me a wide expanse of canal churns majestically under a stately brick bridge. Though the water here is as brown and thick as in our sleepy little canal, the large size, bright colors, and variety of boats sailing upon it give the canal an air of great importance. Through the flapping forest of sails, I can see the five-story mansions lining the street on the other side, the well-groomed twin to the street behind me.

A little boy on a hobbyhorse hobbles toward me.

“Is this the Kloveniersburgwal?” I ask.

He wrinkles his nose up at me then gallops away.

Even children know I do not belong on the Street That Is the Name of Money.

I peer down the brick-paved walkway, then through the jumble of sails on the canal. I realize now that the toy lady had not said which side of the canal the Trippenhuis was on or even which way to go.

The largest house in immediate sight is a redbrick mansion to my right. I set my cap for it, willing Carel to pop from a neighboring door. When I get closer, I can read the sign swinging in the wind above its tall stone entranceway.