Johannes runs a shaking hand over the crown of his head, as if to find some answer there. ‘It was years ago now,’ he says, ‘but I did something to make Frans very unhappy. And then I committed the greater crime of being successful. It echoes on and now comes back to haunt me.’
Nella imagines the younger Johannes turning Frans away from the house, his sister watching hidden at a window, the ugly humiliation which has now enwrapped them all.
‘I had thought that accepting their commission of the sugar might perhaps bring about an entente’ Johannes says. ‘But Frans has . . . curdled. He has waited a long time to take his revenge on the Brandts. I am everything he hates, and wants to be. And Agnes – well. Agnes will always follow the path of his poison crumbs.’
‘I believe Agnes admires you.’
‘Well, that will only make it worse.’ Johannes’ eyes glitter like two grey beads in the bad light. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. I don’t deserve it,’ he says, taking her hand.
Nella supposes it is something to be appreciated at least, if she cannot be loved. Finding substitutes for the real thing – when will that ever stop? And yet, she would rather stay next to him than be anywhere else.
‘If I don’t confess, there’ll be a trial,’ Johannes says. ‘In a few weeks. Either way, I don’t expect to get out of here alive.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘I’ll make arrangements. You, Marin, Cornelia. And Otto, if he ever comes back.’ Johannes sounds brisk all of a sudden, a notary dividing up someone else’s will. ‘There’ll be a few men of the Amsterdam schepenbank at the hearing, although Schout Pieter Slabbaert will oversee it.’
‘Why not just the Schout?’
‘Because of the severity of the charge. Because it’s me. Because the more scandalous the case, the more our goodly citizens become involved.’ He pauses. ‘But I imagine it will be quickly done.’
‘Johannes—’
‘Severe charges usually end in death.’ His voice begins to catch. ‘And the Schout likes to share the blame. The more people take part in a ritual, the more justified it seems.’
‘I’ll find Jack,’ Nella says, ‘I’ll pay him more to change his story.’ She pictures Johannes’ emptying chest of guilders, the blackening sugar piled up on the sixth floor of his warehouse. ‘And I’ve thought of a plan—’
‘There’s a guard,’ Johannes says. ‘They call him the Bloody Shepherd.’ He grips her hand tighter. ‘A priest by profession, by nature a monster.’
The last word hangs in the damp air, gigantic, undefeatable. Nella touches her face. The moisture in the air has made it so cold. How has Johannes survived in here one day?
‘I’ve seen his victims carried past,’ Johannes says. ‘Their bones popped out of every socket – and you can’t put them back. Legs no longer legs, limbs of soggy cotton, guts like addled meat. They’ll twist me open to make me say things. I’ll say them, Nella, and that will be that.’
Johannes buries his face as deep as he can in her shoulder. Nella feels the plane of his nose pointing into her flesh, and she puts her arms around him. She wants to wash him from tip to toe, to make him fresh again, make him smell of spice, cardamom caught in the nail. ‘Johannes,’ she whispers. ‘Johannes. You have a wife. You have me. Isn’t that proof enough?’
‘It would never have been enough.’
Then what about a child? she wants to ask. What about a child? Marin’s secret is on the tip of her tongue. More time, she thinks – all I want is more time. Who knows what story we could have told with two months’ grace?
‘Johannes,’ she says, ‘I wish I’d been enough.’
Johannes pulls back from her, and clasps the sides of her face. ‘You have been a miracle.’
The light is fading in the cell, the guard will be back soon. Nella has not spent this much time alone with her husband in the whole of their four-month marriage. She remembers telling Johannes in his study how much he fascinated her. Looking at him now, those words hold true. His conversation and knowledge, his dry accommodation of the world’s hypocrisies, his desire to be what he is. He lifts his hand to the candlelight, and the strong, hard ridges of his fingers are beautiful. How much she wants him to live.
This talk of transformation, how things can change, of rooms inhabited and emptied, sibling bodies stretched to reveal two such different secrets – it makes her want to tell him about the miniaturist. It seems a lifetime ago that she walked down the staircase and saw the cabinet waiting on the marble tiles. How offended she was, how angry Marin had been.
‘Did Jack ever tell you who he worked for on the Kalverstraat?’ she asks.
‘He worked for lots of people.’
‘A woman from Bergen? With blonde hair? She trained with a clockmaker.’
Johannes takes a small bite of one of the sugared doughnuts and lights a candle on his table. Nella feels his cool regard on the top of her head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’d have remembered that.’
‘She is the miniaturist I hired to furnish the cabinet house. She made Rezeki’s puppet.’
At this, his tired eyes light up. ‘A woman?’
‘Yes, I believe so.’
‘What extraordinary skill and observation. I’d have been her patron, given half a chance.’ He reaches into his pocket, and with a captivated expression, tenderly lifts out the little dog. ‘I take her with me everywhere I go. She is the greatest comfort.’
‘Really?’ she whispers. Johannes hands her the miniature, and respectfully, Nella takes it, with a trembling fingertip stroking the softness of Rezeki’s mouse-skin head. On the dog’s skull, there is not the slightest trace of red. Nella checks again, but nothing remains of the rusty mark she had once been so convinced of.
‘I don’t understand,’ she breathes.
‘Nor I. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Nella peers one last time at the animal’s tiny skull. Nothing. Did I even see it? she asks herself. Doubt now riots against certainty – what she has seen and not seen these past few months swirls inside her head.
‘I sometimes wonder, if I sit very still in here,’ Johannes says, ‘if I have already died too.’
‘You are alive, Johannes. You are alive.’
‘A strange world,’ he says. ‘Human beings going around reassuring each other that they haven’t died. We know this is not Rezeki, and yet we somehow feel it is. Thus a solid object makes a formless memory. If only it were the other way round, that our minds could conjure into being anything we wanted.’ He sighs, drawing his hands down his face. ‘When Otto left, for the little I recognized myself, I could have been dead.’
He pauses, putting Rezeki back in his pocket. ‘This cell shall now be the compass of my waking life,’ he says, spanning his arms out like a crooked windmill. ‘There are horizons through the brickwork, Nella. You wait and see.’
Nella leaves him then, no longer able to bear that little room. The moss and the mice, the sounds of men screeching like birds; Johannes is locked in an aviary, her great owl surrounded by crows. Nella stumbles out into the winter sunshine, and only then does she cry – fierce, quiet tears, as she presses against the city’s wall.
Verkeerspel
As she pushes open the front door, the desire to tell Marin about the state of the sugar and Johannes’ condition dies in Nella’s throat.
In the middle of the hallway, rocking on its tin runners, is a full-sized cradle. Made of oak, it has been inlaid with marquetry of roses and daisies, honeysuckle and cornflowers. It has a hood, lined with velvet and fringed with lace. Beautiful and shocking, it is an exact replica of the cradle upstairs in the cabinet.
Still shaken from her visit to Johannes, Nella shuts the door. What she had first taken for a mock, a cradle sent to a woman whose marriage was a farce, has become a reality. Cornelia scurries up from the kitchen.
‘What is this?’ Nella says. ‘Do you think it came from—’
‘No,’ Cornelia says sharply. ‘Madame Marin ordered it. It arrived in a crate from Leiden.’
Nella touches the main body of the wood. It seems to sing under her fingers, the marquetry so finely tuned. ‘It’s the same as she sent me.’
‘I know,’ Cornelia replies. ‘Your somebody.’
Marin emerges from the salon. Up close, she now seems to have the girth of an oak. ‘The craftsmanship is extraordinary,’ she observes. ‘It is just as I imagined.’
‘How much did this cost to make, to transport it here?’ Nella imagines Johannes’ shrinking cloud of money finally evaporating into the air. ‘Marin, if any of our neighbours saw this arrive, what on earth would they think?’
‘Exactly the same as you.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed your mind whirring.’ Marin moves heavily towards her. ‘You want to take my child for yourself.’
How does Marin understand people’s thoughts quicker than anyone else? I could bluff, Nella thinks, but what’s the point? I was the one who said there must be no more secrets between us.
‘Marin, I don’t want to take your child—’
‘But you suppose he’d be convenient,’ Marin persists, covering her stomach with her hands as if Nella would wrench it there and then. ‘The last sacrifice? Giving up my baby for my brother – for you.’
‘Johannes is in the Stadhuis prison, Marin. And if we did pretend for a while that the child is mine, would that really be so awful? We could prove Johannes has the same desires – as other men. Don’t you want him to live?’
‘You really cannot see.’
‘See what? I see more than you.’
‘Petronella, this child will be far from convenient. You can believe that.’
‘I know that, Marin, I know. And while I’m trying to save us, you’re spending money we simply do not have.’
The slap comes from nowhere, stinging Nella’s face.
‘I marvel how he could ever love you,’ Nella says. Hot and cruel, the words rush out before she can stop them.
‘He did,’ Marin says. ‘He does.’
‘We will have to hire a midwife,’ Nella says quietly. ‘I cannot bear the weight of this birth alone.’
Marin snorts. ‘You won’t be bearing any weight at all.’
‘Stop, stop,’ Cornelia pleads.
‘Marin, it’s the law—’
‘No. Absolutely not.’ Marin roughly pushes the end of the cradle; it rocks back and forth, its emptiness strangely antagonizing. ‘Do you know what else is the law, Petronella?’ Her cheeks are flushed, her hair has loosened from her cap. ‘A midwife has to write down the identity of the father. And if we don’t tell her, she’ll report our silence too.’ She stops the cradle, breathing heavily. ‘So like everything else, I will be dealing with this alone.’
Marin places her hand on her stomach, but this time she flinches, as if she’s touched a burning coal.