‘Yet your life there was like one underwater. A few cows, your draughty house, and boredom. I thought this marriage might give you – an adventure.’
‘I thought you said women don’t have adventures,’ Nella snaps. Even as she says this, she thinks about the miniaturist on the Kalverstraat. ‘Are we in danger, Marin? Why do we need that sugar money? Johannes wouldn’t sell it if he didn’t have to.’
‘Keep your enemies close.’
‘I thought Agnes Meermans was supposed to be your friend.’
‘The sugar profits will protect us,’ Marin replies, looking back out of the window. ‘In Amsterdam, God, for all His glory, only goes so far.’
‘How can you say such a thing? You, who are so pious—’
‘What I believe has nothing to do with what I can control. We are not poor, but the sugar is a dam against the rising waves. And you protect us too, Petronella.’
‘I protect you?’
‘Of course. And believe me, we are grateful.’
Marin’s awkward gratitude blooms in Nella’s blood, swelling her with self-importance. She tries to hide her pleasure, concentrating on the swirling design of the coverlet.
‘Marin, tell me – what would happen if Agnes and Frans found out about Johannes?’
‘I hope they would have mercy.’ Marin pauses, finding a chair. ‘But I suspect that they would not.’
In the heavy silence, Marin collapses slowly like a puppet, her legs folding beneath her, arms and neck slack, chin to chest. ‘Do you know what they do to men like my brother?’ she says. ‘They drown them. The holy magistrates put weights on their necks and push them in the water.’ A wave of devastation seems to draw down Marin’s body. ‘But even if they dragged Johannes back up and cut him open,’ she says, ‘they still wouldn’t find what they wanted.’
‘Why not?’
Tears start to strand on Marin’s pale cheeks. She presses her hand to her chest as if to ebb her grief. ‘Because, Petronella – it’s something in his soul. It’s something in his soul and you cannot get it out.’
Decisions
Nella opens her door an hour later, holding Peebo in his cage. The sun shines a thin light through the landing window, turning the wall before her pale lemon. She can hear Johannes in Marin’s tiny room, the low rise and fall of their hushed voices. Leaving Peebo’s cage at the top of the stairs, she creeps along the corridor.
‘Why can’t you keep away from that man? I think how this might end and I cannot bear it.’
‘He has no one, Marin.’
‘You underestimate him.’ Marin sounds exhausted. ‘He has no loyalty.’
‘You think the worst of everyone.’
‘I see him, Johannes. He’ll bleed us dry. How much have you paid him now?’
‘He’s helping guard the sugar. It’s a fair exchange. At least it stops him making deliveries and coming round here.’
Nella measures the beats of Marin’s silence. ‘With what blind eyes you view the world,’ she finally says, her voice holding down her fury. ‘Why is your warehouse any less exposed than this house? He should be kept as far away as possible from anything to do with us. What if Petronella tells her mother – or the burgomasters?’
‘Nella has a heart—’
‘Whose existence you’ve barely acknowledged.’
‘Not true. Not fair. I’ve bought that cabinet, those dresses, I took her to the feast. What else am I supposed to do?’
‘You know what else.’
There is a long pause. ‘I believe,’ Johannes says, ‘that she’s the lost piece in our puzzle.’
‘Which you are in danger of losing. The damage you’ve done, so careless with other people’s needs—’
‘Me? Your hypocrisy is breathtaking, Marin. I warned you back in August that I couldn’t—’
‘And I warned you, that if you didn’t stop with Jack something terrible was going to happen.’
Nella cannot bear to hear any more. She walks back to the staircase and picks up Peebo’s cage. As she goes downstairs she realizes never has she felt more powerful, nor more frightened. She pictures Johannes disappearing underwater, a face distorted, hair swirling like grey seaweed. Her hand could be the doing of it. They have been protected by these walls and that heavy front door for years – but they opened it and let Nella in, and now look what has happened. We don’t like traitors – Marin’s words come back to her, a reminder of the strange unity of these people to whom Nella half-belongs, waiting to see where her loyalty lies.
On the last stair, she sits and puts the cage beside her. Peebo is on his perch, gripping it obediently. Nella begins to tug at the door and it swings open with a light clang. Her little bird jumps in shock, his head twitching with curiosity, blinking at her with his bead-like eyes.
He is tentative at first, but then he takes his chance, and flies. Round and round the giant hall, up and up, swooping and flapping at the great space, his droppings falling abundant on the floor tiles. Let them fall, Nella thinks. Let him cover these blasted tiles with shit.
She leans back, watching Peebo’s upward spiral, shivering from the front window, left ajar. The bird flits from one side of the hall to the other. Nella can feel the displacement of air as his wings beat – the papery flap of bone and feather, the riffling of pinions as he finds a perch in the rafters his mistress cannot see.
Whatever her mother’s warnings – the women buried too soon in the Assendelft churchyard – Nella has always assumed that one day a baby would come. She touches her abdomen, imagining a curve there, a balloon of flesh hiding a child. Life in this house isn’t just preposterous, it’s a game, an exercise in fakery. Who is she now? What is she supposed to do?
‘Hungry?’ asks a voice.
Nella jumps as Cornelia appears from under the stairs, looking pale and apprehensive. She doesn’t bother to question what the maid is doing hovering there. No one is ever truly alone in this house; there will always be someone watching or listening. Doesn’t she herself listen – to footsteps, closing doors, those hurried whisperings?
‘No,’ she says, but she is hungry. She could eat that whole feast from the silversmiths’ now, and never stop – consuming every morsel to make her feel she has some substance.
‘Are you going to leave him flying around?’ asks Cornelia, pointing to the brief glimpse of green feathers as Peebo flies low before moving off again into the shadows.
‘I am,’ Nella replies. ‘He’s been waiting for this moment since the day he arrived.’
She hunches over and the maid kneels down and places both her hands on Nella’s knees. ‘This is your home now, Madame.’
‘How can this house of secrets ever be called a home?’
‘There’s only one secret in this house,’ Cornelia says. ‘Unless you have one too?’
‘No,’ Nella says, but she thinks of the miniaturist.
‘What’s in Assendelft for you, Madame? You never talk of it, you can hardly miss it.’
‘No one ever asks me about it, except for Agnes.’
‘Well, from what I’ve heard, it’s got more cows than people.’
‘Cornelia.’
But Nella relents with a nervous giggle, musing on the distance she now feels from that crumbling house, that lake, those childhood memories. She does wish people wouldn’t be so rude about it. I could find my way back, she supposes – Mama would have to forgive me eventually, especially when I told her the truth. And if I stay, Johannes will still have his escapes, running his risks with pastors and magistrates, the prospect of eternal damnation diminishing in the face of his desires. I, on the other hand, will have almost nothing. No promise of motherhood, no shared secrets in the night, no household to run – except the one inside a cabinet where no living soul can thrive.
And yet, Nella thinks to herself. I fight to emerge, that’s the message the miniaturist sent me. Assendelft is small, its company is limited, mired in the past. Here, in Amsterdam, the cabinet’s curtains have opened a new world, a strange world, a conundrum she wishes to solve. And most of all, there is no miniaturist in Assendelft.
The woman who lives on the Kalverstraat is nebulous, uncertain. She is possibly even dangerous – but right now, she is the only thing Nella can call her own. If she went back to the countryside, she would never know why the miniaturist had chosen to send her these unexpected pieces, she would never discover the truth behind the work. She knows she wants these deliveries to continue more than she wants them to stop. In a fanciful moment, it occurs to her that their very existence might keep her alive.
‘Cornelia – you followed me that day. At Johannes’ office.’
The maid looks sombre. ‘I did, Madame.’
‘I don’t like being followed. But I’m glad you did.’