Free Girl Reading by Katie Ward Page A

salt.
    Chinese porcelain held up and admired for its decoration and translucence; silk from Bengal; tea from Ceylon; Japanese gold and silver; cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, precious pepper from the Moluccas, the Banda Islands, Malabar, and Sumatra; coffee and rice and opium and camphor: jealously guarded treasure. Even souls are bought and sold, written up in a numbered column by the slave traders.
    The glitter of currency counted out of the port and immense wealth counted back in. Warehouses filled and emptied and refilled. A signature. Hefty mariners straining with physical work, men in expensive robes surveying progress, barefoot children chasing and climbing in dangerous places, prostitutes competing for trade. Boisterous inns. The rowing boats pass, and the shouting and the whistling, farewells and greetings. The pong of decomposition on the breeze. Flick of sails and twirl of smoke. Here in the grime, in the dipping and rising of vessels on the tide, in the maps of secret routes across the oceans, in the firm handshakes, in the bureaucratic structures, here is the most powerful agency in the world at work.
    When they find the right church, it is on a shabby lane and indistinguishable on the outside from other Amsterdam houses. Hidden, as it were.
    Esther will never know for certain whether this was Father’slast action as a sane man or the first action of a madman. But she will always be thankful for the day he brought her to a room noisy with conversations she could understand; will cherish the discovery that a place existed where people use their hands instead of their tongues for speech.
    She tells him he is the cleverest of all fathers, he has got them here and now he can rest. But he is withdrawing into himself before her eyes, turns away from her entreaties, folds into a crouch on the floor.
    Excuse me, lass, is your father all right? Would you like some help? You bring that chair over, we will pick him up.
    Christiaan’s imagination burns hot yellow and red; the iron of his personality is smelted. What is left is scorched and brittle: debris, the rubbish. His wife protected him when she was alive but now, after he has buried her in unconsecrated soil, the fiends are coming for him in hordes. It is Sunday again and they are here—the grotesques have come to stare at him and torment him (they demand their entertainment, they have paid their entrance fee). They wear civilized clothes and speak in refined voices but are plotting all the while, and will eventually drag him into a hole that is at once dark and aflame, smelling of rot, slithering with worms that will crawl over his flesh, eat him alive. He can feel them on him, in him.
    His distress is amusing for the visitors. They find it hilarious when he makes funny gestures, waves his distracted hands in the air. What is he doing? Pumping pretend bellows? Carving with a pretend chisel? Striking a pretend nail on its pretend head? They believe he is miming the smithy he fantasizes about. They do not know he is trying to communicate with the daughter he pines for.
    The mute maid who has been taking care of Jurina’s stepson must go and that is final. There was a period of grace following the wedding—JurinaBos is no tyrant. But that was almost a year ago and her baby is due any day. It is, she thinks, unseemly for a lady of her quality to have servants without the requisite skills and abilities. She has been charitable thus far, gracious in her acknowledgment of the maid’s diligence and cleanliness, and yet the time has come—
    Pieter Janssens Elinga, the painter and the husband, acquiesces. His adolescent moneyed bride shall have her way. He is beholden to her. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary anyhow, following the death of his first wife, Beatrix van der Mijlen (whom they do not talk about). Esther, barely more than a child herself, was cheap to employ and all he could afford. An investment that enabled him to woo and remarry, for he was disadvantaged