Arrival
From the Stadhuis, she sets off quickly in the direction of the Kalverstraat, but running footsteps and Cornelia’s cry stop her in her tracks. ‘Madame, Madame!’
‘Cornelia? I found Meermans—’
‘Did you tell him about Madame Marin?’ Cornelia, stricken, looks up and down the street. She appears green in the dim rainy light, her hands bunched together as if clutching a sprig of invisible flowers.
‘No.’ Nella feels suddenly exhausted. ‘I traded with him. Guilders for a life.’
Cornelia’s face falls. ‘But did you persuade him to stop testifying?’
‘I gave him a thousand guilders as a start for his precious sugar crystals. I cannot promise it will change anything, Cornelia. I’ve tried. He’s done something to the miniaturist, he sent the burgomasters there. I don’t know if she’s—’
‘You must come home.’
‘But—’
‘Now. There’s something happening to Madame Marin’s heart.’
‘Feel it,’ says Marin, waddling out of the gloom as soon as the two women arrive and close the heavy door. ‘My heart’s beating so fast.’
Nella puts her fingers to Marin’s neck and feels the pulse jumping, surging through. Marin gasps, reaching out for her.
‘What is it?’
‘The pain,’ she wheezes. ‘It’s breaking me apart.’
‘Pain?’ says Cornelia, horrified. ‘You said no pain had started.’
Marin moans. On her skirts, liquid soaks the dark wool, down towards the hem in an expanding circle.
‘Upstairs,’ says Nella, trying to sound calm, but her own heart is thumping. ‘We’ll go to my room. It’s nearer the kitchen to fetch water.’
‘Is it my time?’ Marin asks, her voice high with fear.
‘I think it might be. We have to fetch a midwife.’
‘No.’
‘We can buy her silence.’
‘With what, Petronella? You’re not the only one who looks in Johannes’ chest.’
‘Please, Marin. We have enough to pay her! Be calm.’
‘I don’t want anyone here but you and Cornelia.’ Marin grips Nella’s hand, as if clinging to it will make everything all right. ‘Women do this all the time, Petronella. No one but you can see.’
‘I’ll fetch hot water,’ Cornelia says, rushing down to the working kitchen. Nella notices Blankaart’s book is open on a chair.
‘You do know what to do, Petronella?’
‘I’ll try.’ Nella was four when Carel was born, nine when Arabella was dragged out of their mother. She remembers the screaming, the panting, the lowing like a cow let loose in the house. The sheets stained red, piled up later in the garden, ready for the pyre. The weak light on her mother’s clammy face, the look of marvel on her father’s. There were the others of course, the children who didn’t make it. She’d been older then. Nella closes her eyes, trying to remember what the mid-wives did, trying to forget those little corpses.
‘Good,’ says Marin, but she looks pale.
‘When the pain was bad,’ Nella says, ‘my mother paced.’
For two hours, Marin paces upstairs, groaning when the rolls of thunder break inside her. Nella goes to the window, thinking of Johannes on his pallet of straw, of Jack, performing his way out of a locked box, of Meermans with his rain-spattered pride and guilders, of Agnes waiting for a message from the Kalverstraat. Where is the miniaturist now? In the corner of Nella’s eye, the cabinet house lives behind its yellow curtains, full of puppets held in time. Your cabinet will remain unfinished, Madame.
Outside, the rain has intensified; January rain, cold and unrelenting. There is a dog scuffle, the blur of a tawny cat. A sharp stench suddenly fills the room and Nella turns from the window to see the look of pure horror on Marin’s face, staring at the pile of hot, bloody faeces at her feet.
‘Oh God,’ Marin says, covering her face with her hands. Nella guides her back towards the bed. ‘My body is not my own. I am—’
‘Think no more of it. This is a good sign.’
‘But what’s happening? I’m falling apart. There’ll be nothing left of me once the baby’s here.’
Nella wipes away the mess, and puts the soiled towel into a bucket with a lid. When she turns round, Marin is curled up on her side. ‘This is not how I imagined it would be,’ she says, her face buried in the cushions.
‘No,’ says Nella, handing her a clean, damp towel. ‘It never is.’
Marin crushes lavender in her fist, breathing it deeply. ‘I’m so tired,’ she says. ‘I’m worn to my bones.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ says Nella, but she knows they’re only words. Outside in the hallway, she breathes the cool air, relieved to have escaped the bedroom’s thick atmosphere, its sluggish pulse of fear. Cornelia comes up the stairs, taking Nella’s hand and giving her a smile. ‘It is a blessing, Madame,’ she says. ‘It is a blessing that you came here.’
As evening falls and the rain continues, the waves of pain come constantly. Marin seems to be spiralling through herself. It feels, she says, like a deep, rolling agony. I am a cloud full of blood, she mutters – a giant bruise, my skin being broken over and over. For her comfort, they have taken off her outer skirts and she wears nothing but a cotton blouse and petticoats.
Marin is a vessel for the pain and she is the pain itself. She is nothing she has ever been before. As Cornelia and Nella dab Marin’s forehead and rub scented oils in her temples to calm her, Nella thinks of Marin as a mountain, huge and anchored, immoveable. The child inside her is a pilgrim descending her heights, in motion whilst Marin herself is paralysed. Every step he takes, every prod of his staff in her side, every kick gives him more power.
Marin cries out. Her hair is plastered to her forehead, her normally smooth face looks flushed and puffy. Leaning over the side of the bed, she vomits onto the rug.
‘We should get help,’ whispers Nella. ‘Look at her. She wouldn’t even know.’
Cornelia bites her lip, considering Marin’s sweat-soaked, scrunched-up face. ‘She would,’ she whispers back, her eyes shining with fear. ‘We can’t. Madame Marin wants no one else to know.’ She throws a towel over the thin liquid Marin has expelled, watching it soak up. ‘And anyway, who would we fetch?’
‘There’ll be someone in Smit’s List. We don’t know what we’re doing,’ hisses Nella. ‘Is she supposed to vomit like that?’
‘Where is he?’ Marin mutters, wiping her mouth on one of the cushions. Nella gives her the corner of a damp face cloth to suck the moisture.
‘We’ll have to look under her petticoat,’ she murmurs, walking back to Cornelia.
Cornelia blanches. ‘She would have my head off if I did that. She doesn’t even let me look at her bare back.’
‘We have to. I don’t know if this pain is normal.’
‘You will have to, Madame,’ says Cornelia. ‘I cannot.’
Marin’s eyelids flutter and she begins a low, guttural sound. It pitches higher, rising out of her like a bugle call. When she lets out another of these piercing exhalations, Nella hesitates no longer and gets on her knees, lifting the hem of Marin’s petticoat. It is almost unthinkable, looking between Marin’s legs. It is blasphemy.
Nella ducks her head under the hot fug of the petticoat and looks hard at what she can see. It is the most extraordinary thing she has ever laid eyes on. Neither fish nor fowl, nor godly nor human, and yet strangely all these things at once. At that moment, it seems like something coming from another land. A small thing stretched giant, a huge mouth stoppered with a baby’s head.