The Master makes a bargain: that Margarethe cook and clean without direction, that Ruth gather wildflowers for his painting, and that Iris, plain and bright, sit for him to draw. They can stay, at least until the Master's apprentice returns from a journey on the painter's behalf. They enter willingly, until Iris sees the sketches of nudes that the Master uses for his paintings. Wordlessly, the girl points them out to her mother, who inquires—they are very hungry—if it is the Master's intention the girl sit for him undraped. He denies it vigorously, sends the mother to market on credit, and both the girls to gather flowers, telling Iris she looks like a crone before her time.
But not before Iris has looked around to see a glory of paintings
of religious subjects, and heard the Master's weary tirade that the Dutch, the Protestant Dutch, do not love such pictures overmuch, preferring portraits and still-lifes. He also "catalogs the corruption of the world" but those paintings—perhaps even less salable than the others—are kept in a locked room. Iris cannot bring herself to even glance at the door. He numbers among these misfits a gloriously beautiful girl the little family had caught a glimpse of before that window, too, slammed shut, after Ruth, thick and dull, had taken or been given a wooden windmill.
Because of his age, and very little else, he reminds Iris of her father, not yet a week dead and very possibly unburied. The thought dogs her like a minor demon, and the Master sends the two sisters off, having first told them the directions to the field. Off they go through the city, which is not quite foreign—they speak Dutch as well as English—but which is unfamiliar. Not even the sights of the prosperous port turn Iris's thoughts from the night of her father's death, when the people that had once been their neighbors came for their mother and them in the night and they scarcely managed to slip away from the mob.
Having set her simple sister about the task, Iris seeks refuge in looking about her. She climbs an aged apple tree and looks at the place she has come to: There is much to see and Iris, who tells stories for herself and her sister, imagines more. That plume of smoke might be from a dragon...
(to be continued)
The picture is an annunciation by Peter Paul Rubens; Click on it for closer look.