I checked on the children in the storeroom. They had spread across the floor, sorting shells and getting sand everywhere. The chests and books and dishes and cushions kept there did not interest them.

Cornelia was climbing down the ladder from the attic. She jumped from three rungs up and shouted triumphantly as she crashed to the floor. When she looked at me briefly, her eyes were a challenge. One of the baker’s sons, about Aleydis’ age, climbed partway up the ladder and jumped to the floor. Then Aleydis tried it, and another child, and another.

I had never known how Cornelia managed to get to the attic to steal the madder that stained my apron red. It was in her nature to be sly, to slip away when no one was looking. I had said nothing to Maria Thins or him about her pilfering. I was not sure they would believe me. Instead I had made sure the colors were locked away whenever he and I were not there.

I said nothing to her now as she sprawled on the floor next to Maertge. But that night I checked my things. Everything was there—my broken tile, my tortoiseshell comb, my prayer book, my embroidered handkerchiefs, my collars, my chemises, my aprons and caps. I counted and sorted and refolded them.

Then I checked the colors, just to be sure. They too were in order, and the cupboard did not look as if it had been tampered with.

Perhaps she was just being a child after all, climbing a ladder to jump from it, looking for a game rather than mischief.

The baker took away his painting in May, but my master did not begin setting up the next painting until July. I grew anxious about this delay, expecting Maria Thins to blame me, even though we both knew that it was not my fault. Then one day I overheard her tell Catharina that a friend of van Ruijven’s saw the painting of his wife with the pearl necklace and thought she should be looking out rather than at a mirror. Van Ruijven had thus decided that he wanted a painting with his wife’s face turned towards the painter. “He doesn’t paint that pose often,” she remarked.

I could not hear Catharina’s response. I stopped sweeping the floor of the girls’ room for a moment.

“You remember the last one,” Maria Thins reminded her. “The maid. Remember van Ruijven and the maid in the red dress?”

Catharina snorted with muffled laughter.

“That was the last time anyone looked out from one of his paintings,” Maria Thins continued, “and what a scandal that was! I was sure he would say no when van Ruijven suggested it this time, but he has agreed to do it.”

I could not ask Maria Thins, who would know I had been listening to them. I could not ask Tanneke, who would never repeat gossip to me now. So one day when there were few people at his stall I asked Pieter the son if he had heard about the maid in the red dress.

“Oh yes, that story went all around the Meat Hall,” he answered, chuckling. He leaned over and began rearranging the cows’ tongues on display. “It was several years ago now. It seems van Ruijven wanted one of his kitchen maids to sit for a painting with him. They dressed her in one of his wife’s gowns, a red one, and van Ruijven made sure there was wine in the painting so he could get her to drink every time they sat together. Sure enough, before the painting was finished she was carrying van Ruijven’s child.”

“What happened to her?”

Pieter shrugged. “What happens to girls like that?”

His words froze my blood. Of course I had heard such stories before, but never one so close to me. I thought about my dreams of wearing Catharina’s clothes, of van Ruijven grasping my chin in the hallway, of him saying “You should paint her” to my master.

Pieter had stopped what he was doing, a frown on his face. “Why do you want to know about her?”

“It’s nothing,” I answered lightly. “Just something I overheard. It means nothing.”

I had not been present when he set up the scene for the painting of the baker’s daughter—I had not yet been assisting him. Now, however, the first time van Ruijven’s wife came to sit for him I was up in the attic working, and could hear what he said. She was a quiet woman. She did what was asked of her without a sound. Even her fine shoes did not tap across the tiled floor. He had her stand by the unshuttered window, then sit in one of the two lion-head chairs placed around the table. I heard him close some shutters. “This painting will be darker than the last,” he declared.

She did not respond. It was as if he were talking to himself. After a moment he called up to me. When I appeared he said, “Griet, get my wife’s yellow mantle, and her pearl necklace and earrings.”

Catharina was visiting friends that afternoon so I could not ask her for her jewels. I would have been frightened to anyway. Instead I went to Maria Thins in the Crucifixion room, who unlocked Catharina’s jewelry box and handed me the necklace and earrings. Then I got out the mantle from the cupboard in the great hall, shook it out and folded it carefully over my arm. I had never touched it before. I let my nose sink into the fur—it was very soft, like a baby rabbit’s.

As I walked down the hallway to the stairs I had the sudden desire to run out the door with the riches in my arms. I could go to the star in the middle of Market Square, choose a direction to follow, and never come back.

Instead I returned to van Ruijven’s wife and helped her into the mantle. She wore it as if it were her own skin. After sliding the earring wires through the holes in her lobes, she looped the pearls around her neck. I had taken up the ribbons to tie the necklace for her when he said, “Don’t wear the necklace. Leave it on the table.”

She sat again. He sat in his chair and studied her. She did not seem to mind—she gazed into space, seeing nothing, as he had tried to get me to do.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked at him. Her eyes were large and dark, almost black.

He laid a table rug on the table, then changed it for the blue cloth. He laid the pearls in a line on the table, then in a heap, then in a line again. He asked her to stand, to sit, then to sit back, then to sit forward.

I thought he had forgotten that I was watching from the corner until he said, “Griet, get me Catharina’s powder-brush.”

He had her hold the brush up to her face, lay it on the table with her hand still grasping it, leave it to one side. He handed it to me. “Take it back.”

When I returned he had given her a quill and paper. She sat in the chair, leaning forward, and wrote, an inkwell at her right. He opened a pair of the upper shutters and closed the bottom pair. The room became darker but the light shone on her high round forehead, on her arm resting on the table, on the sleeve of the yellow mantle.

“Move your left hand forward slightly,” he said. “There.”

She wrote.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked at him.

He got a map from the storeroom and hung it on the wall behind her. He took it down again. He tried a small landscape, a painting of a ship, the bare wall. Then he disappeared downstairs.

While he was gone I watched van Ruijven’s wife closely. It was perhaps rude of me, but I wanted to see what she would do. She did not move. She seemed to settle into the pose more completely. By the time he returned, with a still life of musical instruments, she looked as if she had always been sitting at the table, writing her letter. I had heard he painted her once before the previous necklace painting, playing a lute. She must have learned by now what he wanted from a model. Perhaps she simply was what he wanted.

He hung the painting behind her, then sat down again to study her. As they gazed at each other I felt as if I were not there. I wanted to leave, to go back to my colors, but I did not dare disturb the moment.