On the Kalverstraat
‘Sweet Jesu,’ mutters Cornelia. ‘Otto was right. This winter is going to be awful. Why do you want to go to the Kalverstraat?’
‘To leave a message for somebody,’ Nella replies, piqued at the ease with which Cornelia interrogates.
‘Who’s somebody?’
‘No one. A craftsman.’
‘I see.’ Cornelia shivers. ‘We’ll need to get our meat in soon, stretch it out till March at least. It’s odd he hasn’t sent us a cut.’
‘Who hasn’t sent us a cut?’
‘Never mind,’ Cornelia says, looking towards the canal and linking her arm through Nella’s. ‘Somebody.’ The young women huddle close, walking swiftly up the Herengracht towards the centre of the city. The cold is not quite unbearable yet – but its force is coming, Nella can tell. Feeling Cornelia’s arm through hers, she reflects on the oddness of their touching limbs. In Assendelft, maids and manservants were never so friendly with their actions. Most of them were actively unwilling.
‘Why didn’t Otto come?’ Nella asks. When Cornelia says nothing, she persists. ‘I saw him, he refused.’
‘He stays where it’s easiest,’ Cornelia replies.
‘Easiest?’ Nella laughs.
The maid scowls and Nella hopes she that she isn’t going to be given another never mind. But no; when it comes to Otto, Cornelia is expansive.
‘Toot calls his luck a double-edged sword,’ she says. ‘He’s here – and yet he isn’t.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘He was put on a Portuguese slave-ship, Madame – bound from Porto-Novo in Dahomey to Surinam. His parents were dead. The Seigneur was visiting the West India Company at the time, selling them copper for their cane refineries.’
‘What happened?’
‘The Seigneur saw the state of Toot and brought him back to Amsterdam.’
‘Johannes bought him.’
Cornelia bites her lip. ‘Guilders sometimes work quicker than a prayer.’
‘Don’t let Marin hear you say that.’
Cornelia ignores this comment; it appears the window for gossip about Marin and her pincers has been closed. ‘Otto was sixteen when he arrived,’ she says, ‘and I was twelve, as new to the house as him.’
Nella tries to picture them both arriving on the doorstep as she had. Was Marin lurking in the shadows of the hallway even then? What world had Otto left behind? She longs to ask him, but wonders if he’d want to tell. Nella has heard of a palm tree, but she cannot imagine the heat of Porto-Novo, the world of Surinam. All of it – exchanged for brick walls and canals, and a language he didn’t speak.
‘He’s quite the Dutch gentleman,’ Cornelia says, ‘but people think differently.’ Nella detects a new edge in her voice. ‘When he arrived he didn’t speak for a month. Just listening, always listening. That coffee-bean skin. I see you looking,’ she adds, a little sly.
‘I don’t,’ Nella protests.
‘Everyone does. Most people have never seen a man like him. When they still visited, the ladies rested their songbirds in his hair as if it was a nest. He hated it.’ Cornelia pauses. ‘No wonder Madame Marin can’t stand your parakeet.’
They walk on, the canal paths strangely muted, the slow brown water between them forming a thin veneer of ice around the edges. Nella tries to grasp at this image of the young black man, his head filled with birdsong, the women’s fingers pawing at his hair. She feels ashamed that her fascination with him is so obvious. Johannes treats him just like any other man, and Otto is just that – but his voice, his face – no one back in Assendelft would believe it. ‘Why don’t the ladies come any more?’ she asks.
But there is no answer to this, for Cornelia has stopped outside a confectioner’s shop, the sign of two sugar loaves and the name Arnoud Maakvrede above the door. ‘Madame,’ Cornelia urges. ‘Let us stop in here.’ Though wishing to exert just one drop of authority, Nella smells the baking and cannot resist.
Within is a delicious heat. Through an arch at the back of the shop, Nella spies a rotund middle-aged man, red-faced and sweating from the stove. On seeing them, he rolls his eyes. ‘Hanna, your friend’s here,’ he shouts into the air.
A woman appears, slightly older than Cornelia, her cap neatly pressed, flour and sugar dusting on her dress. Her face lights up. ‘Cornflower!’ she exclaims.
‘Cornflower?’ says Nella.
Cornelia blushes. ‘Hello, Hanna.’
‘Where’ve you been?’ Hanna motions for them both to take a seat in the coolest corner of the shop floor. She puts up a sign saying Closed, a waft of cinnamon in her wake.
‘What by all the angels are you doing, woman?’ cries the man.
‘Oh, Arnoud. Five minutes,’ Hanna says. The couple stare at each other, and he returns to the stove to bang an angry rhythm with his trays. ‘Honeycomb this morning,’ Hanna murmurs. ‘And marzipan in the afternoon. He’s best avoided.’
‘But to avoid him now is to see much more of him later,’ says Cornelia, the concern etched on her face.
Hanna throws her a glance. ‘Well, you’re here now and I want to see you.’
Nella looks around at the shining wooden floors, the scrubbed counter, the pastries adorning the shop window, piled like irresistible presents. She wonders why Cornelia has brought her here instead of taking her straight to the Kalverstraat, but the smell of sweet cakes is so delicious. Who is Cornflower – this softer, sweeter person conjured by the wife of a confectioner? The verbal baptism is sudden and strange, unsettling Cornelia’s essence. She remembers something Cornelia said the first morning, about calling Otto Toot. He thinks nicknames are silly, but I like them.
The paper used to wrap the cakes looks expensive, and comes in a variety of colours: scarlet, indigo, grass-green, cloud-white. Cornelia looks meaningfully at Hanna, gives her a dip of the chin that the older woman seems to understand. ‘Please, Madame,’ Hanna says to Nella. ‘Do have a look around.’
Dutifully, Nella roams the shop, looking over the waffles, the spiced biscuits, the cinnamon and chocolate syrups, the orange and lemon cakes, the fruit rolls. As she watches Arnoud through the arch, bashing the cooled stubborn trays of honeycomb, she tries to listen to Hanna and Cornelia as they keep their voices low.
‘Frans and Agnes Meermans wanted only the Seigneur to distribute it,’ Cornelia says. ‘They know how far his business spreads abroad. And Madame Marin’s encouraging it. Even though she hates sugar, even though it belongs to them.’
‘It could make them all a lot of money.’
Cornelia sniffs. ‘It could. But I think there’s other reasons.’
Hanna ignores this, more interested in the business side of things. ‘But why not sell it here? With no guild to control these rapscallions, so much of this city’s sugar is cut at the cheap refineries with flour, chalk and God knows what. There are pastry chefs and bakers along the Nes and the Street of Buns who can do with better product.’
Arnoud curses loudly, finally dislodging the honeycomb.
‘Try something,’ Hanna calls brightly to Nella. She reaches over the counter and comes back with a little crinkled parcel. Nella, confused to see pity in the older woman’s eyes, unwraps the offering and discovers a fried ball of dough, covered with sugar and cinnamon.
‘Thank you,’ she says, returning her gaze to Arnoud firing up his oven, pretending her attention is solely on the fat confectioner.
‘Hanna, I think it’s happening again,’ Cornelia whispers.
‘You were never sure the first time.’
‘I know, but—’
‘You can do nothing, Cornflower. Head down, that’s what they taught us.’
‘Han, I wish—’
‘Shh, take this. It’s nearly the last of it.’
Nella turns in time to see a packet pass between the women, disappearing swiftly from Hanna’s fingers into Cornelia’s skirts.
‘I have to go,’ says Cornelia, standing up. ‘We must pay a visit to the Kalverstraat’ She weights the word, a shadow passing her face.
Hanna squeezes Cornelia’s hand. ‘Well, give the door a kick from me,’ she says. ‘My five minutes is up. I must go and help Arnoud. Anyone would think he was hammering armour the way he bangs those trays.’
Back outside, Cornelia hurries along. ‘Who is Hanna?’ Nella asks. ‘Why does she call you Cornflower? And why are we kicking a door?’
But Cornelia is morose and mute; the talk with Hanna has released an unexpected gloom.
The Kalverstraat is a long, busy street away from the canal, where many sellers ply their trade. They no longer sell calves and cows there, but the manure from horses lends it a meaty, pungent atmosphere amidst the print and dye shops, the haberdashers and apothecaries.
‘Cornelia, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, Madame,’ comes the eventual, sullen reply. But Nella has already spotted the sign of the sun. A small stone sun has indeed been engraved on a plaque, embedded in the brickwork. Painted freshly gold, it’s a heavenly body come to earth; bright stone rays shoot from a glowing orb. It is so high up in the wall that Nella cannot touch it. Beneath the sun, a motto has been engraved: Everything Man Sees He Takes For A Toy.
‘Thus is he always, forever a boy,’ Cornelia says wistfully. ‘I haven’t heard that saying for years.’ She looks up and down the street as though in search of something. Nella knocks on the small, plain door, barely noticeable amidst the noise and bustle, and waits for the miniaturist to reveal himself.
There is no reply. Cornelia stamps her feet with cold. ‘Madame, there’s no one there.’
‘Just wait,’ Nella says, knocking again. There are four windows looking onto the street, and she thinks that perhaps there is a shadow at one of them, but she cannot be sure. ‘Hello?’ she shouts, but no answer comes.