best pop them before they reach the ground,’ I said. ‘Else those tiles will have to be scrubbed again.’
The eldest girl lowered the pipe. Four sets of eyes stared at me with the same gaze that left no doubt they were sisters. I could see various features of their parents in them — grey eyes here, light brown eyes there, angular faces, impatient movements.
‘Are you the new maid?’ the eldest asked.
‘We were told to watch out for you,’ the bright redhead interrupted before I could reply.
‘Cornelia, go and get Tanneke,’ the eldest said to her.
‘You go, Aleydis,’ Cornelia in turn ordered the youngest, who gazed at me with wide grey eyes but did not move.
‘I'll go.’ The eldest must have decided my arrival was important after all.
‘No, I'll go.’ Cornelia jumped up and ran ahead of her older sister, leaving me alone with the two quieter girls.
I looked at the squirming baby in the girl's lap. ‘Is that your brother or your sister?’
‘Brother,’ the girl replied in a soft voice like a feather pillow. ‘His name is Johannes. Never call him Jan.’ She said the last words as if they were a familiar refrain.
‘I see. And your name?’
‘Lisbeth. And this is Aleydis.’ The youngest smiled at me. They were both dressed neatly in brown dresses with white aprons and caps.
‘And your older sister?’
‘Maertge. Never call her Maria. Our grandmother's name is Maria. Maria Thins. This is her house.’
The baby began to whimper. Lisbeth joggled him up and down on her knee.
I looked up at the house. It was certainly grander than ours, but not as grand as I had feared. It had two storeys, plus an attic, whereas ours had only the one, with a tiny attic. It was an end house, with the Molenpoort running down one side, so that it was a little wider than the other houses in the street. It felt less pressed in than many of the houses in Delft, which were packed together in narrow rows of brick along the canals, their chimneys and stepped roofs reflected in the green canal water. The ground-floor windows of this house were very high, and on the first floor there were three windows set close together rather than the two of other houses along the street.
From the front of the house the New Church tower was visible just across the canal. A strange view for a Catholic family, I thought. A church they will never even go inside.
‘So you're the maid, are you?’ I heard behind me.
The woman standing in the doorway had a broad face, pockmarked from an earlier illness. Her nose was bulbous and irregular, and her thick lips were pushed together to form a small mouth. Her eyes were light blue, as if she had caught the sky in them. She wore a grey-brown dress with a white chemise, a cap tied tight around her head, and an apron that was not as clean as mine. She stood blocking the doorway, so that Maertge and Cornelia had to push their way out round her, and looked at me with crossed arms as if waiting for a challenge.
Already she feels threatened by me, I thought. She will bully me if I let her.
‘My name is Griet,’ I said, gazing at her levelly. ‘I am the new maid.’
The woman shifted from one hip to the other. ‘You'd best come in, then,’ she said after a moment. She moved back into the shadowy interior so that the doorway was clear.
I stepped across the threshold.
What I always remembered about being in the front hall for the first time were the paintings. I stopped inside the door, clutching my bundle, and stared. I had seen paintings before, but never so many in one room. I counted eleven. The largest painting was of two men, almost naked, wrestling each other. I did not recognise it as a story from the Bible, and wondered if it was a Catholic subject. Other paintings were of more familiar things — piles of fruit, landscapes, ships on the sea, portraits. They seemed to be by several painters. I wondered which of them were my new master's. None was what I had expected of him.
Later I discovered they were all by other painters — he rarely kept his own finished paintings in the house. He was an art dealer as well as an artist, and paintings hung in almost every room, even where I slept. There were more than fifty in all, though the number varied over time as he traded and sold them.
‘Come now, no need to idle and gape.’ The woman hurried down a lengthy hallway, which ran along one side of the house all the way to the back. I followed as she turned abruptly into a room on the left. On the wall directly opposite hung a painting that was larger than me. It was of Christ on the Cross, surrounded by the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and St John. I tried not to stare but I was amazed by its size and subject. ‘Catholics are not so different from us,’ my father had said. But we did not have such pictures in our houses, or our churches, or anywhere. Now I would see this painting every day.
I was always to think of that room as the Crucifixion room. I was never comfortable in it.
The painting surprised me so much that I did not notice the woman in the corner until she spoke. ‘Well, girl,’ she said, ‘that is something new for you to see.’ She sat in a comfortable chair, smoking a pipe. Her teeth gripping the stem had gone brown, and her fingers were stained with ink. The rest of her was spotless — her black dress, lace collar, stiff white cap. Though her lined face was stern her light brown eyes seemed amused.
She was the kind of old woman who looked as if she would outlive everyone.
She is Catharina's mother, I thought suddenly. It was not just the colour of her eyes and the wisp of grey curl that escaped her cap in the same way as her daughter's. She had the manner of someone used to looking after those less able than she — of looking after Catharina. I understood now why I had been brought to her rather than her daughter.
Though she seemed to look at me casually, her gaze was watchful. When she narrowed her eyes I realised she knew everything I was thinking. I turned my head so that my cap hid my face.
Maria Thins puffed on her pipe and chuckled. ‘That's right, girl. You keep your thoughts to yourself here. So, you're to work for my daughter. She's out now, at the shops. Tanneke here will show you around and explain your duties.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, madam.’
Tanneke, who had been standing at the old woman's side, pushed past me. I followed, Maria Thins' eyes branding my back. I heard her chuckling again.
Tanneke took me first to the back of the house, where there were cooking and washing kitchens and two storage rooms. The washing kitchen led out to a tiny courtyard full of drying white laundry.
‘This needs ironing, for a start,’ Tanneke said. I said nothing, though it looked as if the laundry had not yet been bleached properly by the midday sun.
She led me back inside and pointed to a hole in the floor of one of the storage rooms, a ladder leading down into it. ‘You're to sleep there,’ she announced. ‘Drop your things there now and you can sort yourself out later.’
I reluctantly let my bundle drop into the dim hole, thinking of the stones Agnes and Frans and I had thrown into the canal to seek out the monsters. My things thudded on to the dirt floor.
