‘The limited appeal of furniture and dogs I can just understand. But a puppet of Jack Philips?’
To Nella’s astonishment, Marin yanks open the window and throws Jack through it. She runs to the casement to witness his flailing journey. He lands right in the middle of the iced canal, inert and marooned in the mass of white. A fear thrills through her. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Marin,’ she says. ‘You really shouldn’t.’
‘Don’t play with fire, Petronella,’ Marin snaps.
I could say the same to you, Nella thinks, looking miserably at the stranded doll. ‘It’s my cabinet, not yours,’ she calls, as Marin closes the bedroom door.
Jack remains outside on the ice. Nella tries to coax Rezeki to bring the doll back in her jaws, but the dog growls at the sight of it, skittering, her hackles raised. Nella wants to cross the frozen canal herself, but she is not as light as Bert and the other urchins, and they are no longer around to ask. She pictures herself falling through and drowning, all to save a puppet – compelled to protect it though she doesn’t know why. Keeping Jack closer to the cabinet just seems like the safest thing to do, where she can keep an eye on him. Reluctantly Nella goes back in, cursing Marin in her head.
That night, Nella falls into a restless sleep, the words of Marin’s ripped-up love note floating in her mind. Jack is speaking it, his English accent hitting the words like a skiff on choppy waves. You are sunlight through a window, which I stand in, warmed. From back to front, I love you. A thousand hours. Jack runs through the corridors of Nella’s mind, wet from the ice, wearing one of Marin’s animal skulls upon his curly head. Nella wakes up with a jolt, her dream so vivid that she’s convinced Jack is in the corner of the room.
The next morning is St Nicholas’s Day, the sixth of December. When Nella pulls open her curtains and looks below, her breath stops in her throat. Jack’s doll is sitting up against their door post, taking in the frosty light.
The Rebel
When Nella sneaks out to pick up the frozen puppet from the front step, the street is still empty. Mists rise like swirls of breath above the ice.
‘Where is everyone?’ she asks at breakfast, Jack hidden in her pocket. Marin says nothing, delicately dismantling a herring.
‘The burgomasters have succeeded once again,’ Otto says heavily, carrying in a board laden with herenbrood and a deep disc of yellow Gouda for Nella. His weariness for the bureaucracy of state sounds almost fond – almost like Johannes.
Marin abandons her herring and stirs a bowl of compote, the tips of her fingers bluish on the spoon. She stirs and stirs, staring at the glistening maceration of plum. ‘It has been publicly stated that dolls and puppets are forbidden,’ she says. Nella can feel Jack’s frozen doll against her leg, the offending item making a dark, damp circle on the wool. ‘Papistry,’ Marin continues. ‘Idolatry. A heinous attempt to capture the human soul.’
‘You sound frightened of them,’ Nella says. ‘Almost like you think they’ll come to life.’
‘Well, you can never be sure,’ observes Cornelia. She, like the other two women, is wrapped up in layers of clothing, swaddled tightly in her Haarlem shawls.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Marin snaps. Nella imagines tiny sugar crumbs gathered like snow in the corner of her sister-in-law’s solemn mouth as she weeps in another bath. Wearing her hidden fur, eating her secret stash of candied walnuts, protecting her unholy brother, Marin lives in two worlds. Is her deathless public propriety really a fear of God, or a fear of herself? What lies beating in that carefully protected heart?
Freezing air whistles through the crevices of the dining-room walls. The house does feel colder – as if the air from the night seeped in and hasn’t shifted. ‘The fires are lit,’ Nella says. ‘But it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. Have you noticed that?’
‘It’s because our wood supplies have thinned,’ says Otto.
‘It does us no harm to experience the cold,’ Marin replies.
‘But must experience always be endurance, Marin?’ Nella asks.
They all turn to Marin. ‘In suffering we find our truest selves,’ she says.
Nella follows Cornelia down to the warmth of the working kitchen, Jack still in her pocket. Cornelia clatters the plum compote jar and brandishes a rolling pin to attack some pastry for a pie. Otto follows, taking up a cloth to polish a battalion of Johannes’ spring boots lined up along the kitchen door. ‘Otto, will you sneak some peat from the attic? Madame Marin won’t notice.’ He nods, distracted. ‘She loves her privations, but we are feasters to our core,’ Cornelia observes. ‘Behind closed doors, I will bet you my entire set of pans that gingerbread men are being gobbled into women’s stomachs, no matter what the burgomasters say.’
‘Or husbands, nibbling effigies of their wives,’ Nella adds. Her joke is heavy, hanging undigested in the air; this talk of wives, of edible men to be held in the hand. Never to be nibbled, Nella flushes with shame. To distract herself, she imagines cheerier scenes behind doors other than theirs. Celebrations turned inwards – houses draped in paper chains and fir branches, buns fresh from the stove, laughter and kandeels of cinnamon wine. It is happening all over the city today, St Nicholas’ Day, the patron saint of children and sailors celebrated in a carnival of hidden defiance. Sinterklaas belongs to them. As does their gluttony, so does their guilt.
It is hard right now to imagine the Magi in the boiling desert, travelling to worship the soon-to-be-Christ. Nella wants the doors and windows open, to let in the spirit of revelation. An open window might maintain an open mind. ‘Christmas soon,’ Cornelia says, ‘and then – Epiphany.’ Her voice hints at a private bliss.
‘What’s so special about Epiphany?’
‘The Seigneur lets Toot and me dress up like lords and eat at his table. No chores all day. Of course,’ Cornelia adds, ‘I still have to make the food. Madame Marin doesn’t let it go that far.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I’ll make a King’s Cake too,’ Cornelia says. ‘Hide a coin in the mix. Whoever bites it will be king for a day.’
Otto laughs, a sound with a bitter edge. It makes Nella’s head turn, it sounds so unlike him. And when she looks at him, he will not meet her eye.
‘This came for you,’ Marin says, making her way down the kitchen stairs.
Nella’s heart lifts that something new has come from the miniaturist, but the writing on the front flushes a melancholy through her before the letter is even opened. It is her mother’s wiry hand, inviting her daughter and son-in-law to spend some of the festive season back in Assendelft. Carel misses you. The loops and lines are a painful reminder of a life which for Nella no longer exists.
‘Will you leave?’ Marin asks.
The pleading note in her question comes as a surprise. Something has slipped in Marin over these three weeks, and amidst her flashes of ill temper she has a new vulnerability. She really seems to want me to stay, Nella thinks – and could I even bear to go back, my flat stomach wrapped in a dress of Bengal silk, no growing child to brag of, my marriage a hollow victory? Johannes could perform the role of loving husband without much fuss. He is complacent when it comes to keeping his wits. But I would let mine go – they would fall from my grasp the moment I saw my mother’s hopeful face.
‘No,’ she replies. ‘I think it best that I stay here. I’ll send the gifts I bought. We’ll go next year.’
‘We’ll have a feast of sorts,’ Marin offers.
‘No herrings?’
‘None at all.’
The women’s two pledges flit between them like a pair of moths, charging the air with a new sort of energy.
Nella reinstates Jack in the cabinet house with mixed feelings. It still seems better to have him where she can keep an eye on him, although his presence remains unnerving. Later in the evening, some illicit musicians come to risk a song outside for money, and Nella leans out of the hallway window to hear their low singing. Otto and Cornelia hover, looking half-desperate to see the musicians, half-terrified of what Marin might say. ‘The St George Militia might come,’ Cornelia says. ‘You should see their swords. They patrol to keep the peace but there might be blood.’
‘Smashed violins? I look forward to it,’ says Nella, drily.
Cornelia laughs. ‘You sound like the Seigneur.’
Marin says Nella should shut the window and draw the curtains. ‘People will see you, hanging out the window like a washerwoman – or worse,’ she hisses as Cornelia scurries away. She paces behind Nella in the dark of the unlit hall, but as Nella keeps listening to the musicians, so does Otto, standing a little further off.
As the recorder pipes faster, the drummer beats a heady, insistent rhythm on the taut pigskin, thumping in response to Nella’s heart. Otto said she shouldn’t kick a hive, but part of her will always be a country girl. She thinks of Jack upstairs – all of them, wedged in those miniature rooms, waiting for something to happen. No, Nella decides. I’m not afraid of anything that comes with a sting.