Girl with a Pearl Earring Read Free Page A

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 stories, 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 recognize 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