Nella bites her tongue and absorbs the barb. ‘Well, exactly. No prying eyes.’
‘Do you know what the word pregnant is in French, Nella? Enceinte.’
Nella is irritated – Marin is so like her brother, diverting the path of conversation with her foreign tongues, blanketing you with worldly overtones.
‘Do you know what else it means?’ Marin persists, and now Nella hears the faint note of panic in her voice. ‘A surround. A wall. A trap.’
Nella kneels down in front of her. ‘How far are you gone?’ she says, wanting to be practical.
Marin exhales, resting her arms on the top of her belly. ‘Seven months or so.’
‘Seven months? I would never have known. My mother’s been pregnant four times since I can remember, but I couldn’t tell with you.’
‘You weren’t looking, Nella. I let my skirts out and bound my breasts.’
Nella cannot help smiling – even in this extraordinary situation, the act of tamping herself down, of sliding her truth away from all their gazes, makes Marin proud. ‘But these days I’m finding it hard to walk. It’s like bending over a globe.’
‘You’ll show soon. However many skirts and shawls you wear.’
‘I’m tall at least. I shall just look like a glutton, the embodiment of my sin.’
Nella glances at the glass. This preparation could easily have killed her. Preparation – named as if it is the beginning of something, when really it is the end. A girl in Assendelft died from drinking a preparation of hellebore and pennyroyal. Her brother’s friends had forced themselves upon her and one of them had ‘hooked in his child’ as the saying went. Her father made the mixture, and something went wrong, for they buried her the next morning.
Most countryside people can tell a poisonous mushroom, a fatal shrub. Seven months is far too late; after so much careful concealment, Marin would have perished too. Does Marin know this or not? Both possibilities disturb.
‘Where did you get the poison from?’
‘A book,’ says Marin. ‘The ingredients came from three separate apothecaries. Johannes thinks I stole all my seeds and leaves from him, but in fact half of them come from quacks in Amsterdam.’
‘But why tonight? Had you never wondered before now what you were going to do?’ Marin looks away, refusing to answer. ‘Marin, these preparations are very dangerous if you don’t drink them early enough,’ Nella persists, but Marin stays silent.
‘Marin, did you want this child to live?’
Marin touches her stomach, and still she doesn’t speak, staring into an infinity Nella cannot see. Nella’s eye moves to the stack of books. One title now stands out, Children’s Diseases by Stephanus Blankaart, and she cannot believe she didn’t consider its presence the last time she was here.
Marin focuses on the book too, and she looks frightened and strangely young. Nella takes her hand, a little pulse passing from palm to palm. ‘I remember you reaching for my fingers the first day I arrived.’
‘No. That isn’t true.’
‘Marin, I recall it quite clearly.’
‘You gave me your hand as if it were a gift. You were so . . . confident.’
‘I was not. And you proffered yours as if you were pointing me back outside. You said I had strong bones for seventeen.’
‘What a ridiculous thing to say.’ Marin sounds mystified.
‘Especially as I was eighteen.’
It is Marin’s skin that has softened; the exchange is now complete. Her body leans against Nella’s, lulled into a truce. Nella cannot quite believe what the evening has brought, in this tiny room of maps. It is too large a fact to incorporate – her mind hums around the edges of it, making its way in. She wants to ask so many questions, but doesn’t know how to start.
The two of them rest in this unprecedented state, and she has a thought. This child could be proof that Johannes is the husband he’s supposed to be – the creator of a good Dutch family. But looking over at Marin’s pale face, Nella stops her tongue. Give me your child, Marin, and protect your brother’s fate. They are not easy words to offer, and probably harder to receive. Marin has been making sacrifices all her life, and such a suggestion must be gently made. ‘We’ll have to find a midwife,’ she says gently.
‘You’ll have to go to the warehouse and check the sugar,’ comes Marin’s reply. Her body starts to stiffen.
‘But, Marin! What are we going to do with you?’
Nella marvels at Marin’s ability to divide herself like this, slipping the fact of her baby like a jewel into her pocket. Marin rises unsteadily off the bed and picks her way across the scattered skulls. Without her overskirts on, Nella can see her full curve, the rising swell of her breasts. Behind the walls of Marin’s anchored body a baby tumbles, possessed and possessor, its unmet mother a god to it. The child is coming – and despite Nella’s hope for openness, she knows this will be the greatest secret they will ever have to keep.
The mention of the sugar unfurls a memory in her mind. ‘Johannes gave me a list of names for selling the sugar,’ she says, reluctantly, having no wish to let Marin divert the conversation from the question of her unborn child.
‘Well, good.’
But before Nella can continue, they hear the patter of receding footsteps along the corridor. ‘Cornelia,’ Marin says. ‘All her life, listening at doors!’
‘I’ll talk to her.’
Marin sighs. ‘I suppose you must, before she fabulates another story.’
‘She won’t need to,’ Nella says, heading for the door. ‘Nothing here is more fabulous than the truth.’
No Anchor
In Nella’s room, Cornelia is at first silent and stubborn, but she breaks, collapsing to the bed as if her bones are ash. ‘I knew it,’ she says, but her mystified face betrays her fighting talk. Nella rushes to the maid, giving her a tight embrace. Poor Cornelia, she thinks. You’ve been hoodwinked. But the monumental sleight of hand has been played upon all their watch. This is the greatest trick Marin has ever pulled – except it’s real.
‘I knew something was wrong,’ says Cornelia. ‘But I didn’t want to believe. A baby?’
‘She put animal blood on her rags to fool us.’
‘Clever idea,’ Cornelia replies, her frown changing to a grudging admiration.
‘Certainly cleverer than being unmarried and getting with child.’
‘Madame!’ Cornelia looks outraged, and Nella realizes that she is not going to tell this orphan about Marin’s mixture. Although, she thinks with a surge of fondness, I’ll bet this Queen of Keyholes heard it all.
A child is on its way. Marin’s secret has been released, and now Nella sees it in the curtains’ swell, in the roundness of her bedroom pillows. She stares past Cornelia, to the middle of her bed. Marin has the one thing I will never have. Unbidden, the image of Meermans and Marin together enters Nella’s mind. Their two bodies, the swell of him pressing between her legs, the rod of pain – him rolling down Marin’s stockings, opening her, crying out in the heat of it. That is unfair, she thinks. It was probably more than that – for here is a man who believed that Marin’s touch lingered for a thousand hours, that she was the sunlight which he stood in, warmed. With such poetry, how could it ever have been so underwhelming?
‘What will we do with the child?’ Cornelia asks.
‘I suppose Marin might take it to a private orphanage.’
Cornelia jumps to her feet. ‘No! We must keep it, Madame.’
‘Cornelia, it isn’t your choice to make,’ Nella says. ‘Nor mine neither,’ she adds, thinking of Johannes in his cell.
The maid folds her arms. ‘I would look after that baby like a lion.’
‘That may be, Cornelia. But don’t dream of things you can’t have.’
This is too harsh, and Nella knows it, her exhaustion boiling over. It sounds like something Marin might say. Cornelia moves away from her towards the cabinet. The moon has now gone behind a cloud, and the candlelight pitches unevenly across the tortoiseshell.
Cornelia draws back the yellow velvet curtains and peers in. Nella, too ashamed by her outburst, does nothing to stop her. The maid lifts out the cradle, rocking it back and forth on her hand. ‘So beautiful,’ she breathes.
I should have noticed, Nella thinks – that of all the items Marin wanted to hold, the cradle was her first choice. How much else have I failed to observe? Too much, and still I keep on failing.
Cornelia has already pulled out Marin’s doll. ‘It’s her,’ she says, staring in disbelief at her mistress. ‘As if I’m holding her in my palm!’
Marin in miniature stares up at both women, her mouth set firm, her grey eyes unwavering. Cornelia runs her hand down the seam of her mistress’s skirt, the soft black wool a voluminous pleasure to touch. She holds her up in the candlelight. ‘Be safe, Madame,’ she whispers, clutching the doll in both hands. As Cornelia’s lips meet the miniature stomach to give it a kiss, she pulls away with a jerk.
‘What’s wrong? Cornelia, what is it?’
‘I can feel something.’
Nella snatches the doll back, lifting the skirts and then the underskirt, peeling away each layer until she reaches Marin’s body of stuffed linen. When her fingers touch Cornelia’s discovery, her excitement sickens. The miniaturist has beaten them again.
Unmistakeable, Marin’s diminutive body holds the curve of an unborn child. A nub, a walnut, a nothing-yet, but soon-to-be. The doll appears weighed down like the woman along the corridor, full-bellied with time.
Cornelia is horrified. ‘You ordered a doll of Madame Marin, carrying a child?’ As the maid’s cornflower-blue eyes shine at her with accusation, Nella’s own body feels unwieldy. ‘How could you betray us like this?’
‘No, no,’ Nella pleads. The slipping has begun, the loose brick, the hole in the dam.
‘You know how rumour spreads—’