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portrait/01
When Nicolaes Vondel made known his intent to hire an assistant, all of Kleine Virrserijstraat should have gone abuzz with it. Painters should have gossiped like old women -- particularly the youngest de Bloot across the way, whose successes in procreation and investment balanced the blandness of his brush and let him think himself perceptive. But then it hardly took brains to know that invitations to Vondel's studio were normally reserved for his patrons: prim lawyers, modest industrialists, landless patricians upon sudden notions of frugality. And even they rarely accepted the privilege, hating to trip along the meat-market topping the Virrserijstraats (the Grosse tapered sausage-like to the Kleine) and preferring to send runners after their canvasses.
Nicolaes Vondel had no runner himself, of course, being that he had spent thirty years swearing on the Trinity that he would have neither assistant nor apprentice so long as he breathed. It was euphemised that he was a painter of the old school, and might as well have journeyed detailing beard-hairs for some lesser Van Eyck: no one nearing fifty had his knack for throwing about the weight of centuries. The clients who did show up to spit clove-seed on Vondel's steps did so surreptitiously; on leaving his studio they betrayed a grudging piety, like Orientals who have heard from the storm-clouds the true voice of God. Perhaps this too was a reason why despite his skill Vondel never saw the likes of Ferdinand Bol's distinguished patronage, though both had studied under Rembrandt.
"But then who hasn't," chuckled the masters at the Guild symposia Vondel forewent. With Rotterdam's typical pragmatism, these were held at De Pelgrim, where the variety of refreshment was wide and of peasantry spare.
"Paints mistresses as if he were composing Virgins."
"Ah! The reason he's never seen on Sundays!"
"That, or he's a Catholic."
"Come, come, do small merchants mind the dedication?"
"Neither they nor viscounts, vriend. Sold at St Luke's, didn't it?" (Here they would raise their glasses to the Saint himself, and to virgins.)
The Exhibition of St Luke was well-promoted by the Guild. Every five years the Rotterdam branch collected dues to rent the Trippenhuis, where northern gentiles and Hanover princes had ample room to get their fill of portraits, pastorals, and whatever non-grata historical scenes got shifted off to the back. The best work drew commissions. Less imaginative Guild branches in Delft and Amsterdam denounced the competition, and indeed in might have been a rude, if equitable, way to do business.
The last Exhibition had recognized Vondel's controversial Girl With Three Tulips, according its author a hundred-ducat portrait commission. A rumor that he was to paint Elizabeth of Hervorden enjoyed some popularity, even though the Abbess had died of pneumonia in the winter of 1680. The sensation surrounding Vondel's sudden fame delighted everyone in attendance, with the notable exceptions of Vondel himself and of Adriaen van de Vijver. Van de Vijver, grown fat and rich on the tutelage of Pieter de Hooch, had been the favorite for a princely sum; that he had famously accepted his defeat with humour and dignity did not well reflect on his usurper. As if dissatisfied with the mildness of the spectacle -- or with the absence of a civil suit -- Vondel then accosted van de Vijver in the street to call him an upstart schoolboy who bows at one's front and grimaces at one's back.
"What do you expect," was van de Vijver's comment on the incident. "Ten years now the bastard's spent tumbling from the dirt into the gutter." (He did not litigate.)
And even among the less biased there was consensus that the bastard in question was slipping. With the approach of another St Luke's he had grown so secretive that the business of his studio became something of a local mystery. The only reason Vondel's aforementioned change of heart went unexamined was that in the same week Philip Ras, the Swift, seized two merchantmen of East Indies outfit and was later seen strolling along Hoogstraat, gnawing a turkey-leg and thumbing his nose at the authorities.
*
So thrilling was the prospect of walking Vondel's floorboards that despite the odds three applicants eventually showed themselves. One by one they made their way along Virrserijstraat, pausing at each porch, palms pressed over the credentials folded in their clothing. One by one they knocked at the drab door of 22 to face Adelheid, Vondel's monolithic kitchen-maid. Each made to draw himself up before her stony features; all elected, one by one, to remove their hats.
The first to arrive forgot to sit down, consumed with curiosity. He hovered in the midst of the receiving-room, risking glances at Adelheid until she grew self-conscious and stomped off after the washing. Beyond her receding vastness a steep stairway could be glimpsed rising to the studio; from the door that elevated entrance slanted a slice of fresh sunlight. Back on the mortal plane, the space was dim and spare, broken by a pair of shabby couches and what appeared to be a crate draped with sacking. Odd objects were strewn on and about a long bench shoved askance beneath the window. The young candidate inspected without touching a large ball of string, a bottle half-filled with a pungent liquid he dare not identify, and the cracked skull of a Rhesus monkey which he mistook for a child's. When Vondel wandered down from the studio, resembling a bird of prey and absently holding a ripe orange, the young man remembered at last to sit, and not to push his luck.
There were brisk inquiries after his references, his knowledge of lesser Van Eycks, his ability to read and write in the Germanic. Sometimes after posing a question Vondel glanced a little ways off and toward the ceiling, not inattentively, as if trying to catch a fib by cadence. It was not long before the young man gathered that his chances would likely boil down to a strategic dash of frankness.
"It's simply," he ventured at last. "It is such an honor."
"An honor?"
"To observe, I mean to say, to absorb the secret by which a genius approaches his craft."
The master snorted. "Some would beg to differ."
"I wouldn't know why! I mean, you hear all sorts of talk, but most of it is folderol. Ever since I had the fortune of seeing Girl With Three Tulips, I have been dying to discover how you, sir, managed to capture her beauty without making her beautiful. Her quality is nearly... nearly supernatural. By God, you could almost see her sigh!"
"Discreet, aren't you."
"Begging pardon?"
"I mean that you exude professional tact."
"Oh, certainly! For instance, in regards to your distinguished residence, should anyone ask about my having been here I'd just s----aah!"
For Vondel had walloped him with the orange.
It caught the young man on the shoulder. From six feet away there had been no time to put up a warding hand; the victim could only watch in shock as the offending projectile bounced off him with a pigskin's sprightly curve. Both his gaze and Vondel's followed its roll under the couch. The master was the first to break the strained pause that ensued.
"Get out."
"Ah. Oh." The young man's embarrassment mingled with horror. "All right. Many thanks for..." Presumably for some enigmatic lesson, not yet grasped. "For your time..."
He rose from his seat as one mortally wounded.
"Yes, yes," said the master. "Get out."
The following day brought another candidate, refuse of de Bloot's workshop across the street. His left iris was the color of egg-white thinning over a boiled yolk.
Vondel recognized the lad and said, "I am not seeking an apprentice."
"Better to clean brushes and sweep floors than do nothing."
"Could be. Pray, are you blind, or what?"
The young man bristled. "I manage just as well as you, you codger, if not better!"
The orange proved otherwise.
The third visitor was the eighteen-year-old son of Frits Dekkers, a physician from St Laurens Kerk. True to such a background, his first inquiry concerned the pay.
"But that is slavery!" he cried upon hearing the estimate.
"Not if you intend to someday be a journeyman." Vondel gestured to the amenities. "All this is very educational."
"I don't intend to do any such thing," pronounced the junior Dekkers. He apologized and left, narrowly escaping assault by fruit.
Having shut the entry at his back, Adelheid, the maid, rounded on her employer. "Nothing wrong with that one, either! See! You act foul, you get nobody. Nobody but Adelheid with four babies at home."
Vondel ignored her, striding between studio and kitchen with a furrowed brow. He peeled the orange and consumed a good portion before catching himself.
"No harm in giving it one more drag," he said at length. "See to tomorrow's shopping on Hoogstraat, and get de Hooch's girl to pass the word."
"Ach! So far for walking!"
"No matter. Fine, don't buy anything. No. Buy apples."
"So far for walking so you can act clever. You think yourself so clever, being foul to feel better." Adelheid crossed herself sourly. "Lord have mercy."
"I'm doing this with you in mind," said Vondel, retreating to the stair of his studio. Just as her expression began to soften, he added, "Fouling your mood does indeed do mine better," and shoved close the door.
*
It was another fortnight before the last of the applicants knocked at 22 Virrserijstraat. Middle autumn was setting on with endless storms, and Vondel was worried for his small investments, cotton and silk on miles of turgid ocean. And already the thin shipments of lapis and ochre were late getting in; the price of ultramarine had nearly doubled, and Vondel was wondering whether he shouldn't convince the young Iris to attend her next sitting in something dark, in order to compensate with charcoal. The lights for her Prussian-blue bodice had already been worked in, but it wasn't too late to grow frugal. Surveying his pigment stocks, Vondel did not hear the knock until it grew insistent, and remembered at length that Adelheid was not due in until dawn.
The youth on the porch had no hat to keep off the wet. In his ill-fitting cloak he resembled a drenched ostrich, particularly about the way he bobbed his head in greeting. His somnambulant expression broke only slightly before one of Vondel's up-and-downs, which the latter enjoyed casting to great effect over the aquiline galleon-hull of his nose.
"It's late," said the master. "I'm bezig."
His visitor made no motion to answer, holding the unfocused expression of one closely tasting an exotic spice. For a moment Vondel wondered if the youth wasn't really lost -- in awe, timidity, or in general -- but again the latter bobbed his head and fumbled to produce some coarse paper from his vest, proffering the credit like a specimen of Inca gold. The penmanship was that of the kind of scribe who sets up shop at the harbor, to help hard-up sons break the news to their mothers.
Vondel made a show of peering at it this way and that, harrumphing at the light and the inauspicious gist. He shooed his visitor in. "Stay," he ordered, pointing at the stone flags just inside the door. For the writing he rustled up a hand-lens. Squinting through with every sign of great labor, he read:
Esteemed Sir,
Being that our Profit is short We can nae longer imploy Pieter and suffer A LOSS. He is quick to lern and nimble at most Things. Though he seems sloew he is is a hardy GOD-FEARING LAD and also tested by HIS TRIALS. He will work very much for VERY LITTLE. We beg you Esteemed Sir to please shew YOUR VIRTUE, (etc.)
The eponymous Pieter dripped on the flagstones and watched as his saga was reviewed no less than three times. Over the X was a name from Grosse Virrserijstraat, one sometimes heard when talk fell to decent cuts of meat, though naturally the talker in question was usually Adelheid. Vondel himself wouldn't know a prime from a mouse-round; he only told diligent from overpaid when time came for supper.
"No sense for your own worth," he allowed at last, inspecting his new problem with a wholesaler's air. "Promising. What's God's fault with you, boy?"
Pieter said nothing, but stood blinking from the water in his brows and in the chamois catching up his hair. He appeared neither bored nor anxious, but rather as one who, having seen all that life could offer, only chooses to persist for lack of non-blasphemous alternative. Everything about him was brown -- clothing, hair, face with a smudge of Italy among the effects of sun and grime. His eyes were large and shallow, so much like a heifer's that Vondel found himself appreciating the truth of one's being what one ate.
"You're slow?"
Pieter shook his head slowly.
"My mistake. Did you get here on your own, or did some poor cousin shove you into the road, facing a hopeful vector?"
A nod, then another shake of the head, then a firmer nod, umber brows grown thick over a complex question.
Vondel sighed. "Do you have any notion of the goings in a painterly workshop?"
Confusion, though "Do you know what I do?" produced a tentative nod.
"Well, at the least--" here Vondel bent into a hacking cough. As he clutched at his chest, Pieter patted himself with a child's concentration and pulled out a cloth square the color of steam. Seeing what was being proffered, the master rocked back in distaste. He made to scrub this hand against his sleeve, but a further coughing fit rendered him more egalitarian. The lingering smell left by the handkerchief was warm and a tinge fungal.
"At the least you know what you know," recovered Vondel, returning the favor. Without bias toward distaste or graciousness, Pieter shoved the soiled specimen back in his pocket.
"Ever seen an oil painting, boy?"
A shake of the head.
"Do you know that I'm quite famous for producing them?"
Another shake.
"Ever worked anywhere besides the butcher's?"
Obviously not.
"Obviously not. Tell me one good reason I shouldn't point you on the return trajectory, hmm? You have to the count of ten."
Again the youth said nothing, though in the space of a blink a chill brightness stole like a draft through his face. Swiftly those brows reunited like amorous caterpillars, but Vondel, who had noticed, was forced to conceal his own mirth in another fit of coughing. And to admit that he had been persuaded.
"Is Pieter your name, then? And your family?"
A gesture to the letter, a nod.
"No. Your father's name."
Here Pieter did not, as might be customary under the circumstances, grow abruptly fascinated by his own feet, or adopt the stricken pathos of orphans begging for loading-work along the Maas. He simply shrugged.
"Tragic," commented Vondel. "Well, come on, if you mean to wrap your flea-brain about the tasks before you."
He took the steps to the receiving-room doggedly, as if resigned to pain. He croaked a little and stumbled around in the dim, feeling for some necessary object. After a moment Pieter followed, yet unable to reconcile belief with luck. When Vondel caught the whites of those bovine eyes shining with all the eloquence of heavenly orbs, he said, "This is only a probation. For your quick way with words."
Hearing a slight exhalation of relief, likely still composed of the air outside, he chose the moment to turn and throw. A short distance behind him, Pieter did not flinch, though his lips parted soundlessly. Back and forth he gaped, from his hand now clutching a freckled apple to his employer's flatly satisfied mien.
*
Midway through Thursday morning, Adelheid had well-nigh convinced herself that she was losing her wits. In the seven years she had juggled her motley children and her chronic muscle-cramps to work for Vondel, she had never seen him suffer much more than a sneeze. Now, in the space of nary a week, the master had grown weary and old. He wheezed. He staggered. He cursed things underfoot with the fluency and practice of many years, and hacked like catching death whilst doing so. The steps to the studio, which he normally took with baleful efficiency, were now the bane of his waning days.
"ADELHEID," he would bellow just as she was minding the boil on the stew. "ADELHEID!!"
"What."
"Hand me my cane, woman! What are you, deaf?"
The cane had appeared overnight, from locations undisclosed.
"Lord have mercy." Adelheid crossed herself. As a girl she had seen her father's cottage burned down by Protestants; at fourteen, she had rowed a skiff sixty miles down the Maas, to live and make her living in a city of God. Hers had been a life filled with His trials, all of which she had passed with apogean marks; still, Adelheid suspected she did not deserve this.
At least there was now Pieter. Pieter could carry water from the well, and lend some strength to wringing the wash. He could risk his neck to sway atop a ladder propped against the back wall and tend to the drain-pipes. He dropped things, annoyed the master, and disturbed the rhythms of Adelheid's household, but after a time she had to admit that Pieter's youth and health outstripped the ripples he created. In the grey-suffused mornings he might be glimpsed by the yard wall, reaching upward like a river-reed to collect dry sheets before the drizzle found them. As a vengeful November sent forth day after miserable day, he could be bid to walk a quarter-mile after provisions, a clutch of dukaats in his pocket, having nodded back the inventory grunted and shouted by Adelheid. A week at this persuaded Vondel to let him handle the brushes, whose silky filaments Pieter bathed in a solution of white spirit that bit the skin and stank like it should. If Pieter minded, he did not express it; all day long his clay-and-water face remained empty, save for the times he bit his tongue in effort, or smiled at some pedestrian epiphany. One evening the colorglass light through the kitchen window stirred this in him, and thus touched he turned looking for Adelheid, who would share none of it. She bade him get back to work while she stood tiptoe in the yard and advised de Bloot's kitchen-girl on the uses of a new husband.
The beggar's lot Pieter received consisted largely of permission to sleep under the house, jammed in with the preserves, the firewood, and a modest collection of spirits. That he had no means to voice complaint should have pleased his immediate superior, who derided backtalk and now enjoyed a satisfactory schedule of off-days. And yet Adelheid did not like him. From the first, when she had walked into the house and caught the eye of this strange, dull boy holding a broom the wrong way, she had sensed something that caused her to confront Vondel.
"I don't like him."
"So," the master had replied. Then he had made her show Pieter how to sweep.
Given to prayer and honest work, Adelheid was not a particularly introspective woman. All her life she had gotten by on the wit of instinct. No one had ever asked about her feelings on a subject, and as such she did not know how to quantify the shades of aversion experienced whenever Pieter was in close quarter. At times it seemed to her that, coming near him, she was privy to the low kind of intuition that makes a dog flatten its ears.
That, and she suspected he did not much take to her, either.
Nicolaes Vondel had no runner himself, of course, being that he had spent thirty years swearing on the Trinity that he would have neither assistant nor apprentice so long as he breathed. It was euphemised that he was a painter of the old school, and might as well have journeyed detailing beard-hairs for some lesser Van Eyck: no one nearing fifty had his knack for throwing about the weight of centuries. The clients who did show up to spit clove-seed on Vondel's steps did so surreptitiously; on leaving his studio they betrayed a grudging piety, like Orientals who have heard from the storm-clouds the true voice of God. Perhaps this too was a reason why despite his skill Vondel never saw the likes of Ferdinand Bol's distinguished patronage, though both had studied under Rembrandt.
"But then who hasn't," chuckled the masters at the Guild symposia Vondel forewent. With Rotterdam's typical pragmatism, these were held at De Pelgrim, where the variety of refreshment was wide and of peasantry spare.
"Paints mistresses as if he were composing Virgins."
"Ah! The reason he's never seen on Sundays!"
"That, or he's a Catholic."
"Come, come, do small merchants mind the dedication?"
"Neither they nor viscounts, vriend. Sold at St Luke's, didn't it?" (Here they would raise their glasses to the Saint himself, and to virgins.)
The Exhibition of St Luke was well-promoted by the Guild. Every five years the Rotterdam branch collected dues to rent the Trippenhuis, where northern gentiles and Hanover princes had ample room to get their fill of portraits, pastorals, and whatever non-grata historical scenes got shifted off to the back. The best work drew commissions. Less imaginative Guild branches in Delft and Amsterdam denounced the competition, and indeed in might have been a rude, if equitable, way to do business.
The last Exhibition had recognized Vondel's controversial Girl With Three Tulips, according its author a hundred-ducat portrait commission. A rumor that he was to paint Elizabeth of Hervorden enjoyed some popularity, even though the Abbess had died of pneumonia in the winter of 1680. The sensation surrounding Vondel's sudden fame delighted everyone in attendance, with the notable exceptions of Vondel himself and of Adriaen van de Vijver. Van de Vijver, grown fat and rich on the tutelage of Pieter de Hooch, had been the favorite for a princely sum; that he had famously accepted his defeat with humour and dignity did not well reflect on his usurper. As if dissatisfied with the mildness of the spectacle -- or with the absence of a civil suit -- Vondel then accosted van de Vijver in the street to call him an upstart schoolboy who bows at one's front and grimaces at one's back.
"What do you expect," was van de Vijver's comment on the incident. "Ten years now the bastard's spent tumbling from the dirt into the gutter." (He did not litigate.)
And even among the less biased there was consensus that the bastard in question was slipping. With the approach of another St Luke's he had grown so secretive that the business of his studio became something of a local mystery. The only reason Vondel's aforementioned change of heart went unexamined was that in the same week Philip Ras, the Swift, seized two merchantmen of East Indies outfit and was later seen strolling along Hoogstraat, gnawing a turkey-leg and thumbing his nose at the authorities.
*
So thrilling was the prospect of walking Vondel's floorboards that despite the odds three applicants eventually showed themselves. One by one they made their way along Virrserijstraat, pausing at each porch, palms pressed over the credentials folded in their clothing. One by one they knocked at the drab door of 22 to face Adelheid, Vondel's monolithic kitchen-maid. Each made to draw himself up before her stony features; all elected, one by one, to remove their hats.
The first to arrive forgot to sit down, consumed with curiosity. He hovered in the midst of the receiving-room, risking glances at Adelheid until she grew self-conscious and stomped off after the washing. Beyond her receding vastness a steep stairway could be glimpsed rising to the studio; from the door that elevated entrance slanted a slice of fresh sunlight. Back on the mortal plane, the space was dim and spare, broken by a pair of shabby couches and what appeared to be a crate draped with sacking. Odd objects were strewn on and about a long bench shoved askance beneath the window. The young candidate inspected without touching a large ball of string, a bottle half-filled with a pungent liquid he dare not identify, and the cracked skull of a Rhesus monkey which he mistook for a child's. When Vondel wandered down from the studio, resembling a bird of prey and absently holding a ripe orange, the young man remembered at last to sit, and not to push his luck.
There were brisk inquiries after his references, his knowledge of lesser Van Eycks, his ability to read and write in the Germanic. Sometimes after posing a question Vondel glanced a little ways off and toward the ceiling, not inattentively, as if trying to catch a fib by cadence. It was not long before the young man gathered that his chances would likely boil down to a strategic dash of frankness.
"It's simply," he ventured at last. "It is such an honor."
"An honor?"
"To observe, I mean to say, to absorb the secret by which a genius approaches his craft."
The master snorted. "Some would beg to differ."
"I wouldn't know why! I mean, you hear all sorts of talk, but most of it is folderol. Ever since I had the fortune of seeing Girl With Three Tulips, I have been dying to discover how you, sir, managed to capture her beauty without making her beautiful. Her quality is nearly... nearly supernatural. By God, you could almost see her sigh!"
"Discreet, aren't you."
"Begging pardon?"
"I mean that you exude professional tact."
"Oh, certainly! For instance, in regards to your distinguished residence, should anyone ask about my having been here I'd just s----aah!"
For Vondel had walloped him with the orange.
It caught the young man on the shoulder. From six feet away there had been no time to put up a warding hand; the victim could only watch in shock as the offending projectile bounced off him with a pigskin's sprightly curve. Both his gaze and Vondel's followed its roll under the couch. The master was the first to break the strained pause that ensued.
"Get out."
"Ah. Oh." The young man's embarrassment mingled with horror. "All right. Many thanks for..." Presumably for some enigmatic lesson, not yet grasped. "For your time..."
He rose from his seat as one mortally wounded.
"Yes, yes," said the master. "Get out."
The following day brought another candidate, refuse of de Bloot's workshop across the street. His left iris was the color of egg-white thinning over a boiled yolk.
Vondel recognized the lad and said, "I am not seeking an apprentice."
"Better to clean brushes and sweep floors than do nothing."
"Could be. Pray, are you blind, or what?"
The young man bristled. "I manage just as well as you, you codger, if not better!"
The orange proved otherwise.
The third visitor was the eighteen-year-old son of Frits Dekkers, a physician from St Laurens Kerk. True to such a background, his first inquiry concerned the pay.
"But that is slavery!" he cried upon hearing the estimate.
"Not if you intend to someday be a journeyman." Vondel gestured to the amenities. "All this is very educational."
"I don't intend to do any such thing," pronounced the junior Dekkers. He apologized and left, narrowly escaping assault by fruit.
Having shut the entry at his back, Adelheid, the maid, rounded on her employer. "Nothing wrong with that one, either! See! You act foul, you get nobody. Nobody but Adelheid with four babies at home."
Vondel ignored her, striding between studio and kitchen with a furrowed brow. He peeled the orange and consumed a good portion before catching himself.
"No harm in giving it one more drag," he said at length. "See to tomorrow's shopping on Hoogstraat, and get de Hooch's girl to pass the word."
"Ach! So far for walking!"
"No matter. Fine, don't buy anything. No. Buy apples."
"So far for walking so you can act clever. You think yourself so clever, being foul to feel better." Adelheid crossed herself sourly. "Lord have mercy."
"I'm doing this with you in mind," said Vondel, retreating to the stair of his studio. Just as her expression began to soften, he added, "Fouling your mood does indeed do mine better," and shoved close the door.
*
It was another fortnight before the last of the applicants knocked at 22 Virrserijstraat. Middle autumn was setting on with endless storms, and Vondel was worried for his small investments, cotton and silk on miles of turgid ocean. And already the thin shipments of lapis and ochre were late getting in; the price of ultramarine had nearly doubled, and Vondel was wondering whether he shouldn't convince the young Iris to attend her next sitting in something dark, in order to compensate with charcoal. The lights for her Prussian-blue bodice had already been worked in, but it wasn't too late to grow frugal. Surveying his pigment stocks, Vondel did not hear the knock until it grew insistent, and remembered at length that Adelheid was not due in until dawn.
The youth on the porch had no hat to keep off the wet. In his ill-fitting cloak he resembled a drenched ostrich, particularly about the way he bobbed his head in greeting. His somnambulant expression broke only slightly before one of Vondel's up-and-downs, which the latter enjoyed casting to great effect over the aquiline galleon-hull of his nose.
"It's late," said the master. "I'm bezig."
His visitor made no motion to answer, holding the unfocused expression of one closely tasting an exotic spice. For a moment Vondel wondered if the youth wasn't really lost -- in awe, timidity, or in general -- but again the latter bobbed his head and fumbled to produce some coarse paper from his vest, proffering the credit like a specimen of Inca gold. The penmanship was that of the kind of scribe who sets up shop at the harbor, to help hard-up sons break the news to their mothers.
Vondel made a show of peering at it this way and that, harrumphing at the light and the inauspicious gist. He shooed his visitor in. "Stay," he ordered, pointing at the stone flags just inside the door. For the writing he rustled up a hand-lens. Squinting through with every sign of great labor, he read:
Esteemed Sir,
Being that our Profit is short We can nae longer imploy Pieter and suffer A LOSS. He is quick to lern and nimble at most Things. Though he seems sloew he is is a hardy GOD-FEARING LAD and also tested by HIS TRIALS. He will work very much for VERY LITTLE. We beg you Esteemed Sir to please shew YOUR VIRTUE, (etc.)
The eponymous Pieter dripped on the flagstones and watched as his saga was reviewed no less than three times. Over the X was a name from Grosse Virrserijstraat, one sometimes heard when talk fell to decent cuts of meat, though naturally the talker in question was usually Adelheid. Vondel himself wouldn't know a prime from a mouse-round; he only told diligent from overpaid when time came for supper.
"No sense for your own worth," he allowed at last, inspecting his new problem with a wholesaler's air. "Promising. What's God's fault with you, boy?"
Pieter said nothing, but stood blinking from the water in his brows and in the chamois catching up his hair. He appeared neither bored nor anxious, but rather as one who, having seen all that life could offer, only chooses to persist for lack of non-blasphemous alternative. Everything about him was brown -- clothing, hair, face with a smudge of Italy among the effects of sun and grime. His eyes were large and shallow, so much like a heifer's that Vondel found himself appreciating the truth of one's being what one ate.
"You're slow?"
Pieter shook his head slowly.
"My mistake. Did you get here on your own, or did some poor cousin shove you into the road, facing a hopeful vector?"
A nod, then another shake of the head, then a firmer nod, umber brows grown thick over a complex question.
Vondel sighed. "Do you have any notion of the goings in a painterly workshop?"
Confusion, though "Do you know what I do?" produced a tentative nod.
"Well, at the least--" here Vondel bent into a hacking cough. As he clutched at his chest, Pieter patted himself with a child's concentration and pulled out a cloth square the color of steam. Seeing what was being proffered, the master rocked back in distaste. He made to scrub this hand against his sleeve, but a further coughing fit rendered him more egalitarian. The lingering smell left by the handkerchief was warm and a tinge fungal.
"At the least you know what you know," recovered Vondel, returning the favor. Without bias toward distaste or graciousness, Pieter shoved the soiled specimen back in his pocket.
"Ever seen an oil painting, boy?"
A shake of the head.
"Do you know that I'm quite famous for producing them?"
Another shake.
"Ever worked anywhere besides the butcher's?"
Obviously not.
"Obviously not. Tell me one good reason I shouldn't point you on the return trajectory, hmm? You have to the count of ten."
Again the youth said nothing, though in the space of a blink a chill brightness stole like a draft through his face. Swiftly those brows reunited like amorous caterpillars, but Vondel, who had noticed, was forced to conceal his own mirth in another fit of coughing. And to admit that he had been persuaded.
"Is Pieter your name, then? And your family?"
A gesture to the letter, a nod.
"No. Your father's name."
Here Pieter did not, as might be customary under the circumstances, grow abruptly fascinated by his own feet, or adopt the stricken pathos of orphans begging for loading-work along the Maas. He simply shrugged.
"Tragic," commented Vondel. "Well, come on, if you mean to wrap your flea-brain about the tasks before you."
He took the steps to the receiving-room doggedly, as if resigned to pain. He croaked a little and stumbled around in the dim, feeling for some necessary object. After a moment Pieter followed, yet unable to reconcile belief with luck. When Vondel caught the whites of those bovine eyes shining with all the eloquence of heavenly orbs, he said, "This is only a probation. For your quick way with words."
Hearing a slight exhalation of relief, likely still composed of the air outside, he chose the moment to turn and throw. A short distance behind him, Pieter did not flinch, though his lips parted soundlessly. Back and forth he gaped, from his hand now clutching a freckled apple to his employer's flatly satisfied mien.
*
Midway through Thursday morning, Adelheid had well-nigh convinced herself that she was losing her wits. In the seven years she had juggled her motley children and her chronic muscle-cramps to work for Vondel, she had never seen him suffer much more than a sneeze. Now, in the space of nary a week, the master had grown weary and old. He wheezed. He staggered. He cursed things underfoot with the fluency and practice of many years, and hacked like catching death whilst doing so. The steps to the studio, which he normally took with baleful efficiency, were now the bane of his waning days.
"ADELHEID," he would bellow just as she was minding the boil on the stew. "ADELHEID!!"
"What."
"Hand me my cane, woman! What are you, deaf?"
The cane had appeared overnight, from locations undisclosed.
"Lord have mercy." Adelheid crossed herself. As a girl she had seen her father's cottage burned down by Protestants; at fourteen, she had rowed a skiff sixty miles down the Maas, to live and make her living in a city of God. Hers had been a life filled with His trials, all of which she had passed with apogean marks; still, Adelheid suspected she did not deserve this.
At least there was now Pieter. Pieter could carry water from the well, and lend some strength to wringing the wash. He could risk his neck to sway atop a ladder propped against the back wall and tend to the drain-pipes. He dropped things, annoyed the master, and disturbed the rhythms of Adelheid's household, but after a time she had to admit that Pieter's youth and health outstripped the ripples he created. In the grey-suffused mornings he might be glimpsed by the yard wall, reaching upward like a river-reed to collect dry sheets before the drizzle found them. As a vengeful November sent forth day after miserable day, he could be bid to walk a quarter-mile after provisions, a clutch of dukaats in his pocket, having nodded back the inventory grunted and shouted by Adelheid. A week at this persuaded Vondel to let him handle the brushes, whose silky filaments Pieter bathed in a solution of white spirit that bit the skin and stank like it should. If Pieter minded, he did not express it; all day long his clay-and-water face remained empty, save for the times he bit his tongue in effort, or smiled at some pedestrian epiphany. One evening the colorglass light through the kitchen window stirred this in him, and thus touched he turned looking for Adelheid, who would share none of it. She bade him get back to work while she stood tiptoe in the yard and advised de Bloot's kitchen-girl on the uses of a new husband.
The beggar's lot Pieter received consisted largely of permission to sleep under the house, jammed in with the preserves, the firewood, and a modest collection of spirits. That he had no means to voice complaint should have pleased his immediate superior, who derided backtalk and now enjoyed a satisfactory schedule of off-days. And yet Adelheid did not like him. From the first, when she had walked into the house and caught the eye of this strange, dull boy holding a broom the wrong way, she had sensed something that caused her to confront Vondel.
"I don't like him."
"So," the master had replied. Then he had made her show Pieter how to sweep.
Given to prayer and honest work, Adelheid was not a particularly introspective woman. All her life she had gotten by on the wit of instinct. No one had ever asked about her feelings on a subject, and as such she did not know how to quantify the shades of aversion experienced whenever Pieter was in close quarter. At times it seemed to her that, coming near him, she was privy to the low kind of intuition that makes a dog flatten its ears.
That, and she suspected he did not much take to her, either.