‘No mistake,’ echoes Nella, trying to take control of her daze. Does Otto even know? she wonders. Did Marin ever tell – is that why he ran away? Cornelia looks as if she’s going to faint, and Nella wonders if the maid ever suspected this extraordinary truth. How determinedly she told the tale of Marin and Frans Meermans, how she boasted of her credentials as a keyhole queen! Otto was Cornelia’s friend, her equal in this house. She has lost her crown.
‘They like it, you know,’ Lysbeth says.
‘What on earth do you mean?’ snaps Cornelia.
‘The tightness of the swaddling,’ observes Lysbeth drily, blinking away Cornelia’s provocation. ‘It reminds them of the womb.’
Grief and confusion spreads over Cornelia’s face. When she thinks of Johannes in the Stadhuis and what has been indicted on his head, Nella knows it will be almost impossible to tell Cornelia another truth.
In Marin’s room, amid the seeds and feathers, Lysbeth proceeds to demonstrate the correct order of the swaddling bandages. Thea is pliant and half-asleep. She then feeds her again, and the child rouses, holding on for life, with an intensity of purpose that reminds Nella of Marin, poring over the ledger book or staring at one of Johannes’ maps. She stands peering at the wonderful conundrum, the peach toffee glow of Thea’s skin. Thea makes a little snuffle and curls her fingers to a fist. In the pattern of her newborn face, she has clearly claimed her father, but it is too early to tell exactly how far on one side the coin will fall.
Cornelia, moving as if in a dream, begins to light oil burners through the house, keeping the smell of death at bay. She turns all the mirrors to the wall, making sure her mistress’s spirit finds its way to Heaven. They do not want Marin stuck in the chimneys; they want her soul to fly through the clouds above the Amsterdam roofs.
They will have to move Marin’s body very soon, Lysbeth tells them. The bad airs will not be good for Thea. ‘Put a plain sheet on her, Madame.’
‘A plain sheet?’ says Nella. ‘I think not. Marin deserves the finest damask.’
‘She’d probably prefer the plain,’ comes Cornelia’s small voice.
Once the child is asleep, Lysbeth collects her three guilders, tucking them into her apron pocket. ‘Call for me when she wakes. I’m not far.’
Making her way through the kitchen door, under Nella’s insistence – no front door for Lysbeth Timmers, however much she’s being paid – she stops again and turns to her new employer. ‘What’s that thing you’ve got up there?’ she asks. ‘The big cupboard in the corner. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘It’s nothing,’ Nella says. ‘A toy.’
‘Quite a toy.’
‘Mrs Timmers—’
‘You must get the child baptized. Be quick, Madame. These early days are dangerous.’
Nella’s eyes fill with tears. She thinks of Slabbaert’s last words. Let the new baptism of Johannes Brandt be a warning to you all.
Lysbeth looks at her with a mixture of pity and impatience. ‘Just keep her cap on, Madame,’ she whispers. ‘I dare say it’s beautiful hair, but the poor child does have to live in these streets.’
As she says it, Nella wonders how that will even be possible. But Cornelia will never let the child go.
Cornelia is huddling by the cradle. Her face is waxen, blank. She looks wizened, and Nella is reminded of their first ever encounter in the hallway, her cockiness, her confident eye-balling of the new arrival. It does not seem possible that this is the same girl.
‘I tried, Madame.’
‘You did everything you could.’
Nella pauses, listening to the house. In the garden, a bundle of stiff browned sheets burns to light flakes, charred cotton fibre floating in the sky. Amongst the flames, Nella sees the sewn square of a cushion, a colourful bird’s nest in foliage. Cornelia has embroidered too much. Every moment, Marin’s voice.
‘We’re going to keep Thea, aren’t we, Madame?’ Cornelia whispers. ‘She’s safest here.’
‘We’re already bribing new people to keep our latest secret. When will it ever stop?’ Nella says. It’ll stop when the money runs out, the voice in her head replies.
‘I will die before I let anything happen to this child.’ Cornelia’s eyes are fierce.
‘Cornelia, even if it means taking her out of here to Assendelft, I promise you we won’t be giving her away.’
Now it is Assendelft which feels as far away as Batavia, not Amsterdam, as Agnes once said. Nella hears Marin again, her voice clear as a bell, grey eyes lighting up with scorn. There’s nothing to do in the countryside.
Cornelia nods. ‘Thea can wear a cap for her hair outside, and leave it free when she’s indoors.’
‘Cornelia—’
‘And we will have to tell Pastor Pellicorne about Madame Marin. We can’t just have her buried anywhere. I don’t want her put in St Anthonis’. It’s too far. I want her here, within the city walls—’
‘Let me make you something to eat,’ says Nella, sensing the maid’s rising hysteria. ‘Some cheese and bread?’
‘Not hungry,’ Cornelia replies, jumping to her feet. ‘But we must make something and take it to the Seigneur.’
Nella sits, depleted in the face of Cornelia’s mania, unable to find the words to explain what has happened today at the Stadhuis. She longs to see Johannes, but they will have to do something about Marin, first thing tomorrow morning, after some sleep. Today is Thursday. By Sunday at sundown, she, Cornelia and Thea will be in freefall, Lysbeth Timmers hanging on to their hems. It seems as easy to take a life in this city as it is to lift a counter off the verkeerspel board.
There may never have been a baby like this in the whole of Amsterdam. There are the Sephardi Jews, of course – the dark Lisboa boys and girls, and the mulattos brought by Portuguese merchants, who wait outside the synagogue on the Houtgracht, reserving seats for their mistresses. There are the Armenians fleeing the Ottoman Turks – and who knows what happens out in the Indies – but in Amsterdam, people keep to their own, they do not mix. It’s why people always stared at Otto. Yet here is a pure combination of the republic’s opposites, born not thousands of miles away, but in the secret folds of the fatherland, on the richest part of the Golden Bend. Thea is even more scandalously unique to these cobbles and canals than her father.
From back to front, I love you. Otto and Toot, full circle, the notes and the child he left behind a reflection of himself. Nella remembers the whisperings at night, the closing doors, the blank face of Cornelia when in the mornings Nella would ask her if she’d been up late. Marin, in tears at the Old Church. Otto, terrified, weeks later in the same pew. Had Marin told him then?
The only thing Nella may ever understand about Otto and Marin is Thea, who in turn will be a secret to herself; her mother dead and father missing. Nella thinks of another mother, in Bergen, and another frustrated child, growing up in Bruges with an elderly father. Why was the miniaturist taken away? I am crazed for lack of sleep, Nella tells herself, trying to look backwards, to signs she might have missed about Otto and Marin, or the other Petronella. She cannot be sure if a new day will make any of it easier to understand.
Cornelia peers at Thea’s face. ‘I wanted it to be Seigneur Meermans,’ she says in a quiet voice. ‘I wanted it to be him.’
‘Why?’
But Cornelia doesn’t reply; this is the stretch of her confession. She had been so determined about the identity of Marin’s secret love, the gift of salted piglet and Agnes’ wifely jealousy. I should have given Cornelia more chores, said Marin, grumbling about her propensity to embroider stories. Meermans’ gaze would linger on Marin, true; but Marin herself never presented any proof. And what did she say when questioned over her affections? You’re carrying his child, Nella had said to her. I have taken things from Johannes that were not mine to take, was her reply. Elliptical Marin, as ever, living in the shadows between lies and truth.
‘I want things to be the way they were,’ Cornelia says.
‘Cornelia,’ Nella says, reaching for her hand. ‘I have to tell you about Johannes.’ She feels her grief bloom, an unwieldy rose dropping its petals too quickly. Clear-eyed, quiet, the maid sits on the bed.
‘So tell me,’ Cornelia says, not letting go.
Nella thinks the walls will break with the force of Cornelia’s tears. Thea wakes of course, and Nella lifts the crying newborn from her cloud of cotton. The child is mesmerizing, their little crotchet wrapped in white, her lungs a tiny pair of bellows calling to the room.
‘Why has God punished us, Madame? Did He always plan this?’
‘I don’t know. He may have posed the question, but we are the answer, Cornelia. We must endure. For Thea’s sake, we must emerge from this.’
‘But how? How will we live?’ Cornelia asks, burying her face in her hands.
‘Fetch Lysbeth,’ Nella says, ‘Thea needs to feed.’
Calmed by the need to calm, Cornelia quietens at the baby’s noise. Blotchy-faced and numb, she leaves Nella on the bed, with Thea squalling in her arms. Lying back with the child, something digs into the top of Nella’s spine, and when she feels under the pillow, her fingers find a small, hard object.
Otto, she breathes, looking at his doll, his real daughter weighing the crook of her other arm. Nella hadn’t noticed he’d been taken from the cabinet. Did Marin sleep here, night after night with him hidden beneath her, a comfort that failed to conjure him home?
‘Where are you?’ Nella asks, as if her words will bring him back where the doll has so miserably failed. Thea cries for milk, their noisy cherub of a brave new world. This child has a beginning, just as Johannes and Marin have been handed an end.
Quietly, in the midst of the baby’s chaos, Nella utters a particular prayer. Back in Assendelft, bereft at the death of his father, Carel had written a summons to God. It was defiant and childish, in the best sense of the words. It comes back to Nella now, the words etched in her heart, and she murmurs it into the shell of Thea’s tiny ear. A call for comfort, a desire for resurrection. A never-ending hope.