He seemed to be waiting for me to speak.

“Though I have never been inside a Catholic church,” I began slowly, “I think that if I saw a painting there, it would be like yours. Even though they are not scenes from the Bible, or the Virgin and Child, or the Crucifixion.” I shivered, thinking of the painting that had hung over my bed in the cellar.

He picked up the bottle again and carefully poured a few drops of oil into the shell. With his palette knife he began to mix the oil and white lead together until the paint was like butter that has been left out in a warm kitchen. I was bewitched by the movement of the silvery knife in the creamy white paint.

“There is a difference between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to painting,” he explained as he worked, “but it is not necessarily as great as you may think. Paintings may serve a spiritual purpose for Catholics, but remember too that Protestants see God everywhere, in everything. By painting everyday things—tables and chairs, bowls and pitchers, soldiers and maids—are they not celebrating God’s creation as well?”

I wished my mother could hear him. He would have made even her understand.

As I had discovered with van Ruijven, however, it was more often the man pursuing the maid than the other way around. To him a maid came free.

Although she rarely consulted him about household things, Catharina went to her husband to ask that something be done. I did not hear them talk of it myself—Maertge told me one morning. Maertge and I got on well at that time. She had grown older suddenly, losing interest in the other children, preferring to be with me in the mornings as I went about my work. From me she learned to sprinkle clothes with water to bleach them in the sun, to apply a mixture of salt and wine to grease stains to get them out, to scrub the flatiron with coarse salt so that it would not stick and scorch. Her hands were too fine to work in water, however—she could watch me but I would not let her wet her hands. My own were ruined by now—hard and red and cracked, despite my mother’s remedies to soften them. I had work hands and I was not yet eighteen.

Maertge was a little like my sister, Agnes, had been—lively, questioning, quick to decide what she thought. But she was also the eldest, with the eldest’s seriousness of purpose. She had looked after her sisters, as I had looked after my brother and sister. That made a girl cautious and wary of change.

“Mama wants her jewelry box back,” she announced as we passed around the star in Market Square on our way to the Meat Hall. “She has spoken to Papa about it.”

“What did she say?” I tried to sound unconcerned as I eyed the points of the star. I had noticed recently that when Catharina unlocked the studio door for me each morning she peered into the room at the table where her jewels lay.

Maertge hesitated. “Mama doesn’t like it that you are locked up with her jewelry at night,” she said at last. She did not add what Catharina was worried about—that I might pick up the pearls from the table, tuck the box under my arm, and climb from the window to the street, to escape to another city and another life.

In her way Maertge was trying to warn me. “She wants you to sleep downstairs again,” she continued. “The nurse is leaving soon and there is no reason for you to remain in the attic. She said either you or the jewelry box must go.”

“And what did your father say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He will think about it.”

My heart grew heavy like a stone in my chest. Catharina had asked him to choose between me and the jewelry box. He could not have both. But I knew he would not remove the box and pearls from the painting to keep me in the attic. He would remove me. I would no longer assist him.

I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamberpots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of flat land where, a long way off, the sea is visible but can never be reached. If I could not work with the colors, if I could not be near him, I did not know how I could continue to work in that house.

When we arrived at the butcher’s stall and Pieter the son was not there, my eyes unexpectedly filled with tears. I had not realized that I had wanted to see his kind, handsome face. Confused as I felt about him, he was my escape, my reminder that there was another world I could join. Perhaps I was not so different from my parents, who looked on him to save them, to put meat on their table.

Pieter the father was delighted by my tears. “I will tell my son you wept to find him gone,” he declared, scrubbing his chopping board clean of blood.

“You will do no such thing,” I muttered. “Maertge, what do we want today?”

“Stewing beef,” she answered promptly. “Four pounds.”

I wiped my eyes with a corner of my apron. “There’s a fly in my eye,” I said briskly. “Perhaps it is not so clean around here. The dirt attracts flies.”

Pieter the father laughed heartily. “Fly in her eye, she says! Dirt here. Of course there are flies—they come for the blood, not the dirt. The best meat is the bloodiest and attracts the most flies. You’ll find out for yourself someday. No need to put on airs with us, madam.” He winked at Maertge. “What do you think, miss? Should young Griet condemn a place when she’ll be serving there herself in a few years?”

Maertge tried not to look shocked, but she was clearly surprised by his suggestion that I might not be with her family for always. She had the sense not to answer him—instead she took a sudden interest in the baby a woman at the next stall was holding.

“Please,” I said in a low voice to Pieter the father, “don’t say such things to her, or any of the family, even in jest. I am their maid. That is what I am. To suggest otherwise is to show them disrespect.”

Pieter the father regarded me. His eyes changed color with every shift in the light. I did not think even my master could have captured them in paint. “Perhaps you’re right,” he conceded. “I can see I’ll have to be more careful when I tease you. But I’ll tell you one thing, my dear—you’d best get used to flies.”

Cornelia must have known about the problem with the jewelry box. Perhaps like Maertge she had overheard her parents discussing it. She may have seen Catharina bringing up the box in the morning and him carrying it down again at night, and guessed something was wrong. Whatever she saw or understood, she decided it was time to stir the pot once more.

For no particular reason but a vague distrust, she did not like me. She was very like her mother in that way.

She began it, as she had with the torn collar and the red paint on my apron, with a request. Catharina was dressing her hair one rainy morning, Cornelia idling at her side, watching. I was starching clothes in the washing kitchen so I did not hear them. But it was probably she who suggested that her mother wear tortoiseshell combs in her hair.

A few minutes later Catharina came to the doorway separating the washing and cooking kitchens and announced, “One of my combs is missing. Has either of you seen it?” Although she was speaking to both Tanneke and me, she was staring hard at me.

“No, madam,” Tanneke replied solemnly, coming from the cooking kitchen to stand in the doorway as well so she could look at me.

“No, madam,” I echoed. When I saw Cornelia peeking in from the hallway, with the mischievous look so natural to her, I knew she had begun something that would once again lead to me.

She will do this until she drives me away, I thought.

“Someone must know where it is,” Catharina said.

“Shall I help you search the cupboard again, madam?” Tanneke asked. “Or shall we look elsewhere?” she added pointedly.

“Perhaps it is in your jewelry box,” I suggested.

“Perhaps.”

Catharina passed into the hallway. Cornelia turned and followed her.

I thought she would pay no attention to my suggestion, since it came from me. When I heard her on the stairs, however, I realized she was heading to the studio, and hurried to join her—she would need me. She was waiting, furious, in the studio doorway, Cornelia lingering behind her.

“Bring the box to me,” Catharina ordered quietly, the humiliation of not being able to enter the room tingeing her words with an edge I had not heard before. She had often spoken sharply and loudly. The quiet control of her tone this time was much more frightening.

I could hear him in the attic. I knew what he was doing—he was grinding lapis for paint for the tablecloth.

I picked up the box and brought it to Catharina, leaving the pearls on the table. Without a word she carried it downstairs, Cornelia once again trailing behind her like a cat thinking it is about to be fed. She would go to the great hall and sort through all her jewels, to see if anything else was missing. Perhaps other things were—it was hard to guess what a seven-year-old determined to make mischief might do.

She would not find the comb in her box. I knew exactly where it was.

I did not follow her, but climbed up to the attic.

He looked at me in surprise, his hand holding the muller suspended above the bowl, but he did not ask me why I had come upstairs. He began grinding again.