Outside, the winter night has darkened. The sky is a deep river of indigo, the stars pricked like lights in its flowing stream. Nella sits at her window, the miniature Peebo in her lap. Jack has long gone from his post. Where is Johannes now – will he take one of those mysterious gondolas, will he return to the Doge’s palace? Of course he will, Nella thinks. It’s Johannes. She turns to her cabinet and places Peebo gently on top of one of the velvet chairs. Things can change. She tries not to picture her real bird, out in a night like this, prey to hawks and owls. Perhaps the miniaturist has kept him safe – though from where else did these shortened little feathers come? The thought that the woman would pluck at him and do him harm is unbearable.
It’s time to find out. The Kalverstraat will be freezing at this hour, Nella thinks, pulling on her travelling cloak. And who knows how long it will take to persuade the miniaturist to come outside?
She drapes the small gold key the miniaturist sent around her own doll’s throat, placing her little self neatly on the real bedcovers. ‘I am not frightened,’ she says out loud, turning to see a brief gleam on the doll’s tiny clavicle. And yet, she cannot erase the thought that this gesture towards her miniature is the only thing that guarantees her safe return.
Nella has never gone out after dark in her entire life. In Assendelft, she’d only meet an errant fox breaking into a coop of chickens. The foxes in Amsterdam might take very different forms. Quietly opening her door, she inhales a lovely scent of lavender, diffusing in the passageway as steam moistens the air. The rest of the house is silent except for the sound of slopping water coming from the end of the corridor. Marin, who keeps her secrets like weapons, who wears sable dresses but eats old herring, appears to be having a midnight bath.
A bath at any time of day is a sumptuous thing to do, and Nella wonders at such nocturnal indulgence. Unable to resist, she moves silently down the corridor and puts her eye to the keyhole.
Marin has her back turned, blocking Nella’s view of the bath, which takes up most of the spare space left in her tiny room. Who put it there for her, filling it to the brim with hot water – surely not Marin herself? Her sister-in-law is not as slender as Nella thought she’d be. From behind there is a fleshiness to her thighs and buttocks, usually all hidden under her skirt. Marin’s clothes come before her, they tell the world who she wants to be.
But Marin unclothed is a different creature, her skin pale, limbs long. As she leans over to test the bath temperature, Nella sees that her breasts are not small. Marin clearly straps them down in the most unforgiving corsets. They are fuller and rounder, like they should belong to someone else. That this is Marin’s body at all is oddly unsettling.
Marin lifts a leg into the copper bath, then the other, sliding slowly in as if she aches. Her head leans back, she closes her eyes, the water covers her. She stays under for several seconds, seemingly kicking her leg against the side of the bath before coming up for air. As the dried lavender buds skate the surface of the water and release their scent, Marin rubs her skin until it turns pink.
The damp curls at her neck look girlish, unbearably vulnerable. Before her on the shelf next to all the books and animal skulls, Nella spies a small bowl of candied walnuts, gleaming like jewels in the candlelight. She cannot remember a single time Marin has publicly eaten a fritter, a waffle or bun – nothing, except Agnes’ sugar which she could barely swallow. Has Marin purloined these from the kitchen – has Cornelia colluded in her mistress’s secret appetite?
It is just like you, Marin, Nella thinks – to hide candied walnuts in your room and criticise me for loving marzipan. Sugar and herrings – Marin’s commodities beautifully define her infuriating contradictions.
‘What have you done?’ Marin suddenly asks the air. ‘What on earth have you done?’
Marin seems to wait, looking into the nothingness where no answer comes. Nella keeps her eye to the keyhole, terrified that the folds of her travelling cloak will rustle too loudly. After a while, Marin gets out of the bath with some difficulty, drying each leg and arm slowly. She looks well fed for someone who eats like a bird, who tells the world she denies herself the pleasures of sweets. Dressing in a long linen shift, Marin sits on her bed to the left of the bath, scanning the spines of her books.
Nella cannot draw her eyes away. Gone are her sister-in-law’s perfect skirts, her black stomachers, the white half-haloes of her headbands. Now Nella knows what lies beneath; she is witnessing the skin. Marin reaches out, pulling a piece of paper from one of the books. It is the love note, Nella is sure – and now Marin is shredding it into tiny pieces until there is no paper left, just white petals spilling on the surface of the bath. Then she puts her head in her hands and begins to weep.
Seeing her like this should make me feel powerful, Nella supposes, as Marin’s sobs flood her ears. Yet even now she eludes me. Like her idea of love, Marin is best witnessed in the chase – for caught like this, she is even more ungraspable. How would it feel, Nella wonders, to have Marin’s trust, to take this pain from her and help extinguish it?
Suddenly saddened, Nella turns away. That will never be. The naked intimacy of this moment pulses through her, quelling the desire to face the outside dark and cold. She wants to sleep. Tomorrow, Nella tells herself. For now, she will take up her smaller self from off the bedcover, garlanded with the golden key, and place it back in the cabinet.
As Nella draws her cloak close and heads towards her own room, a shadow shifts near the top of the stairs. The back of a foot, a heel aloft, gone into the darkness again.
The Boy on the Ice
A dead body has bobbed to the surface of the Herengracht, a man without his arms or legs, just a trunk and head. Men hack at the ice to remove it as Marin watches, hiding herself behind the front door. The canal is a year-long dumping ground and as it solidifies with the cold, past deeds rise to be scrutinized by the rest of the city. Johannes’ absence stretches into its second week, and more prosaic items emerge as the water freezes harder; broken furniture, chamber pots, ten kittens in a tight and pitiful circle. Nella fantasizes about warming them up, watching them come alive again, the torture they suffered nothing but a dream. When the authorities carry the man’s body away like a severed haunch, Marin predicts that his murder will remain unsolved.
‘These things were done in the dark in order to stay there,’ she observes. Nella can almost smell again the lavender of Marin’s bath. Marin seems distracted, looking out of the windows, wandering through the rooms.
Alone in her own room, wrapped up in two shawls, Nella holds the doll of Jack Philips in her hands. It seems easier to do this, now Johannes is away. Jack has a physical springiness and his leather coat has been tooled beautifully. Nella pulls lightly at his hair, wondering if wherever Jack is, he can feel the ache on his skull. It seems possible. I hope he can, Nella thinks. A feeling of power rushes through her, a desire to destroy. Resisting, but exhilarated, she returns him to the top of the cabinet house, where he lolls to one side.
Outside, enterprising street-urchins skate on the frozen canal, their light bodies no threat to the new ice crust. They remind Nella of Carel, skidding and sliding, whooping in joy. She opens the front door, hearing them call to one another – Christoffel! Daniel! Pieter! Nella steps out, instinctively searching the sky for a beloved flash of green, but there is none.
One of the skaters is the blind boy, the one who stole from the herring-seller the first day Nella arrived. The others call him Bert. Bert looks underfed, but seems at least to enjoy the reprieve the skating gives him, swooping around with his friends. Nella marvels at the way he skates as fast as the rest – one arm out, ready for a fall. The slipperiness of the environment is a great leveller. He skates off, up the unending frozen beam of light.
Every time Nella plans to go to the Kalverstraat, Marin finds something for her to do. Nothing has been delivered since the dolls and the miniature Peebo, and Nella finds herself impatient. Johannes has been away two weeks when December arrives, and she declares she must go and buy her family some festive gifts. She goes shopping through the Amsterdam streets, choosing a Milanese riding crop for Carel and a China tulip vase for her mother, items to tell the tale of a successful merchant’s wife. But on the Street of Buns with Cornelia, shopping for the tastiest gingerbread for her sister, she looks around constantly for a pale blonde head of hair, those cool and watchful eyes. Nella almost wants to be spied on. It would make her feel alive.
She wants to go to the Kalverstraat, but Cornelia contrives it that they end up in Arnoud Maakvrede’s shop, saying that Arabella deserves Amsterdam’s best baking.
‘Gingerbread has been banned,’ Hanna says, her face grim. ‘At least, in shapes of mankind. I thought Arnoud was going to lay an egg, he looked so angry. We’ve had to crush entire families and sell them on as crumbs.’
‘What? Why?’
‘The burgomasters,’ she says, as if that explains all. Cornelia shudders.
Arnoud confirms that the forms of men and women, boys and girls, have indeed been banned, as have the doll-seller booths on the Vijzeldam. The reason has something to do with the Catholics, he says. False idols, the importance of the invisible over the tangible. ‘Puppets are funny things,’ Cornelia sniffs.
‘That doesn’t make the Church right,’ says Arnoud. ‘Think of the cost.’
‘We’ll just have to make them in the shape of dogs,’ says Hanna, ever-enterprising.
Instead of gingerbread, Nella buys Arabella a book of insect prints. She supposes her sister would prefer Arnoud’s finest biscuits, but better, she thinks, that Arabella should have a book and learn a little. You wouldn’t have thought such a thing back in August, Nella tells herself. She feels differenced, as if something is working on her and she has taken the bait.
Back home, Marin sizes up the riding crop. ‘How much did this cost? He’s only a child.’
‘It’s what Johannes did with my cabinet,’ Nella observes, giddy with her purchases, feeling powerful and rich. ‘I’m only following suit.’
By the third week of Johannes’ absence, icicles hang off every door frame, every windowsill, even off the spiders’ webs in the garden, like tiny crystal needles. The four of them wake up cold and they all go to bed shivering. Nella yearns for spring, for blossom, the smell of turned earth, new animals, the vivid oily tang in the root of lamb’s wool. She waits at the door for something to arrive from the miniaturist, but nothing comes. Remembering Hanna’s comment about the burgomasters, the banning of puppets at Christmas, she wonders whether the miniaturist will ever send anything again.
Returning to her room, she finds Marin with her hands in the cabinet. It is a shock to see her there, and Nella rushes over, trying to pull the curtain across.
‘You didn’t ask to come in!’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Marin replies. ‘I wonder how that feels.’ She has something in her hand, and she seems agitated. ‘Petronella, did you tell someone about us?’
Please, God, Nella thinks. Let her not have found her own doll. Marin opens her palm and on it Jack Philips lies, as beautiful as his real self. ‘What are you trying to do to us?’
‘Marin—’