Tracy Chevalier 3-Book Collection: Girl With a Pearl Earring, Remarkable Creatures, Falling Angels. Tracy Chevalier

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 colour 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.’

      He did not remove the jewellery box, and he did not ask me to leave. Instead he brought the box and pearls and earrings to Catharina every evening, and she locked them away in the cupboard in the great hall where she kept the yellow mantle. In the morning when she unlocked the studio door to let me out she handed me the box and jewels. My first task in the studio became to place the box and pearls back on the table, and set out the earrings if van Ruijven's wife was coming to model. Catharina watched from the doorway as I made the measurements with my arms and hands. My gestures would have looked odd to anyone, but she never asked what I was doing. She did not dare.

      Cornelia must have known about the problem with the jewellery 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 jewellery 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 realised 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.

      I opened the chest where I kept my things and unwrapped the comb from its handkerchief. I rarely looked at the comb – in that house I had no reason to wear it or even to admire it. It reminded me too much of the kind of life I could never have as a maid. Now that I knew to look at it closely, I could see it was not my grandmother's, though very similar. The scallop shape at the end of it was longer and more curved, and there were tiny serrated marks on each panel of the scallop. It was finer than my grandmother's, though not so much finer.

      I wonder if I will ever see my grandmother's comb again, I thought.

      I sat for so long on the bed, the comb in my lap, that he stopped grinding again.

      ‘What is wrong, Griet?’

      His tone was gentle. That made it easier to say what I had no choice but to say.

      ‘Sir,’ I declared at last, ‘I need your help.’

      I remained in my attic room, sitting on my bed, hands in my lap, while he spoke to Catharina and Maria Thins, while they searched Cornelia, then searched among the girls' things for my grandmother's comb. Maertge finally found it, hidden in the large shell the baker had given them when he came to see his painting. That was probably when Cornelia had switched the combs, climbing down from the attic while the children were all playing in the storeroom and hiding my comb inside the first thing she could find.

      It was Maria Thins who had to beat Cornelia — he made it clear it was not his duty, and Catharina refused to, even when she knew that Cornelia should be punished. Maertge told me later that Cornelia did not cry, but sneered throughout the beating.

      It was Maria Thins too who came to see me in the attic. ‘Well, girl,’ she said, leaning against the grinding table, ‘you have set the cat loose in the poultry house now.’

      ‘I did nothing,’ I protested.

      ‘No, but you have managed to make a few enemies. Why is that? We've never had so much trouble with other help.’ She chuckled, but behind her laugh she was sober. ‘But he has backed you, in his way,’ she continued, ‘and that is more powerful than anything Catharina or Cornelia or Tanneke or even I may say against you.’

      She tossed my grandmother's comb in my lap. I wrapped it in a handkerchief and replaced it in the chest. Then I turned to Maria Thins. If I did not ask her now, I would never know. This might be the only time she would be willing to answer me. ‘Please, madam, what did he say? About me?’

      Maria Thins gave me a knowing look. ‘Don't flatter yourself, girl. He said very little about