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sighed. “Three hundred and sixty years. Give or take a decade.”
    Claudia gasped. “Three hundred and—? You mean you’ve been around for three hundred and sixty years?”
    â€œAnd you probably didn’t peg me for a day over twelve,” Pim said with a sly smile.
    â€œWhat is your name, boy?”
    â€œPim, mistress. My name is Pim.”
    Granny Custos jabbed the bit of her pipe toward his tiny image. “You, Pim, have a story to tell. And I want to hear it.”
    Claudia leaned in confidentially. “I’ve been trying to get him to tell me about his past for weeks now, but every time—”
    â€œ Silenzio , child,” Granny Custos said. “Pim is about to tell his story.”
    Who is this woman? Claudia thought as they turned their heads toward Pim.
    Pim looked from one pair of eyes to the other and then sighed again. He nodded and began his story.

 
    C HAPTER 5
    C LAUDIA COULDN’T believe it—she had poked and prodded Pim for more than two whole weeks to hear his story. And now he was going to tell Granny Custos only five minutes after meeting her. But then again, it seemed that no one could really say no to Granny Custos.
    Pim cleared his throat and Claudia scarcely breathed. The walls around her seemed to fade away as her friend spoke.
    â€œHaarlem, in the Netherlands. That’s where I lived before it all. My father died when I was young, and I lived alone with my mother in our small home. We never had much. She was a washerwoman. Laundry. But our home did hold one magnificent possession: a painting, created by a friend of my father and given to him long before his death.
    â€œThe painting was a large but simple landscape—snowy fields and sleeping trees outside of Haarlem during the winter. My eyes and my fingers memorized that painting. How it used color, the detail of the tiny brushstrokes, the texture that the canvas added to places where the paint was thin. I wondered how something so marvelous could be created by the human hand. I wanted to find out. I wanted to create something myself.
    â€œWhen I was eleven, my mother encountered my father’s friend, the artist, on the streets of Haarlem. They spoke of my father, and then of me. She told him how I adored his painting, and about my ambitions to learn how to paint. Johannes Verspronck 5 —the painter—told her to send me to his workshop the following week. I went, and Master Verspronck put me to work mixing colors and preparing canvases. He must have seen some promise in me, because he took me on as an apprentice, even though I was younger than most. This was before Master Verspronck became famous, but noblemen still hired him to paint their portraits. I helped him during those visits as he captured their images on canvas.”
    Pim began pacing slowly back and forth in his painting, as though he were telling the story more to himself than to the others in the room.
    â€œI apprenticed with Master Verspronck for more than a year. At that time he received a request to paint the portrait of a lady. Dame Nee Gezicht, a beautiful and wealthy woman, but also a strange one. She lived in a dark manor on the edge of the city and was rarely seen in the streets. That was how the people of Haarlem preferred it. People whispered about her in the shadows. They said she was a witch with mischievous and dark magic, who spoke only in mumbled poetry. They said she had traded her left eye for power from the devil. And I believed every breath of rumor. But she promised Master Verspronck an impressive commission, and he agreed to the assignment.”
    Claudia squirmed at the description of Nee Gezicht and folded her arms tight across her chest.
    â€œUnlike the estates to the north, the landscape at Nee Gezicht’s manor was barren, without flowers or trees. But behind her manor stood row after row of tall, bushy tomato vines. She posed for the painting in front of those vines. When I