room, my mother behind her. The man glanced once more at what was to be the soup, then nodded at me and followed the women.
When my mother returned I was sitting by the vegetable wheel. I waited for her to speak. She was hunching her shoulders as if against a winter chill, though it was summer and the kitchen was hot.
‘You are to start tomorrow as their maid. If you do well, you will be paid eight stuivers a day. You will live with them.’
I pressed my lips together.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Griet,’ my mother said. ‘We have to, now your father has lost his trade.’
‘Where do they live?’
‘On the Oude Langendijck, where it intersects with the Molenpoort.’
‘Papists’ Corner? They’re Catholic?’
‘You can come home Sundays. They have agreed to that.’ My mother cupped her hands around the turnips, scooped them up along with some of the cabbage and onions and dropped them into the pot of water waiting on the fire. The pie slices I had made so carefully were ruined.
I climbed the stairs to see my father. He was sitting at the front of the attic by the window, where the light touched his face. It was the closest he came now to seeing.
Father had been a tile painter, his fingers still stained blue from painting cupids, maids, soldiers, ships, children, fish, flowers, animals on to white tiles, glazing them, firing them, selling them. One day the kiln exploded, taking his eyes and his trade. He was the lucky one – two other men died.
I sat next to him and held his hand.
‘I heard,’ he said before I could speak. ‘I heard everything.’ His hearing had taken the strength from his missing eyes.
I could not think of anything to say that would not sound reproachful.
‘I’m sorry, Griet. I would like to have done better for you.’ The place where his eyes had been, where the doctor had sewn shut the skin, looked sorrowful. ‘But he is a good gentleman, and fair. He will treat you well.’ He said nothing about the woman.
‘How can you be sure of this, Father? Do you know him?’
‘Don’t you know who he is?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember the painting we saw in the Town Hall a few years ago, which van Ruijven was displaying after he bought it? It was a view of Delft, from the Rotterdam and Schiedam Gates. With the sky that took up so much of the painting, and the sunlight on some of the buildings.’
‘And the paint had sand in it to make the brickwork and the roofs look rough,’ I added. ‘And there were long shadows in the water, and tiny people on the shore nearest us.’
‘That’s the one.’ Father’s sockets widened as if he still had eyes and was looking at the painting again.
I remembered it well, remembered thinking that I had stood at that very spot many times and never seen Delft the way the painter had.
‘That man was van Ruijven?’
‘The patron?’ Father chuckled. ‘No, no, child, not him. That was the painter. Vermeer. That was Johannes Vermeer and his wife. You’re to clean his studio.’
To the few things I was taking with me my mother added another cap, collar and apron so that each day I could wash one and wear the other, and would always look clean. She also gave me an ornamental tortoiseshell comb, shaped like a shell, that had been my grandmother’s and was too fine for a maid to wear, and a prayer book I could read when I needed to escape the Catholicism around me.
As we gathered my things she explained why I was to work for the Vermeers. ‘You know that your new master is headman of the Guild of St Luke, and was when your father had his accident last year?’
I nodded, still shocked that I was to work for such an artist.
‘The Guild looks after its own, as best it can. Remember the box your father gave money to every week for years? That money goes to masters in need, as we are now. But it goes only so far, you see, especially now with Frans in his apprenticeship and no money coming in. We have no choice. We won’t take public charity, not if we can manage without. Then your father heard that your new master was looking for a maid who could clean his studio without moving anything, and he put forward your name, thinking that as headman, and knowing our circumstances, Vermeer would be likely to try to help.’
I sifted through what she had said. ‘How do you clean a room without moving anything?’
‘Of course you must move things, but you must find a way to put them back exactly so it looks as if nothing has been disturbed. As you do for your father now that he cannot see.’
After my father’s accident we had learned to place things where he always knew to find them. It was one thing to do this for a blind man, though. Quite another for a man with a painter’s eyes.
Agnes said nothing to me after the visit. When I got into bed next to her that night she remained silent, though she did not turn her back to me. She lay gazing at the ceiling. Once I had blown out the candle it was so dark I could see nothing. I turned towards her.
‘You know I don’t want to leave. I have to.’
Silence.
‘We need the money. We have nothing now that Father can’t work.’
‘Eight stuivers a day isn’t such a lot of money.’ Agnes had a hoarse voice, as if her throat were covered with cobwebs.
‘It will keep the family in bread. And a bit of cheese. That’s not so little.’
‘I’ll be all alone. You’re leaving me all alone. First Frans, then you.’
Of all of us Agnes had been the most upset when Frans left the previous year. He and she had always fought like cats but she sulked for days once he was gone. At ten she was the youngest of us three children, and had never before known a time when Frans and I were not there.
‘Mother and Father will still be here. And I’ll visit on Sundays. Besides, it was no surprise when Frans went.’ We had known for years that our brother would start his apprenticeship when he turned thirteen. Our father had saved hard to pay the apprentice fee, and talked endlessly of how Frans would learn another aspect of the trade, then come back and they would set up a tile factory together.
Now our father sat by the window and never spoke of the future.
After the accident Frans had come home for two days. He had not visited since. The last time I saw him I had gone to the factory across town where he was apprenticed. He looked exhausted and had burns up and down his arms from pulling tiles from the kiln. He told me he worked from dawn until so late that at times he was too tired even to eat. ‘Father never told me it would be this bad,’ he muttered resentfully. ‘He always said his apprenticeship was the making of him.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ I replied. ‘It made him what he is now.’
When I was ready to leave the next morning my
