Empty Rooms
Lysbeth Timmers sleeps in the kitchen. The next morning, Friday, her face looks misted with the room’s damp air. ‘The lady’s body,’ she says. ‘You’ll need some help.’
Nella feels a surge of gratefulness. She hears Johannes’ voice in her head, questioning his sister. Marin, do you think this house is run by magic? Not by magic, Nella thinks, but by people like Cornelia and Lysbeth Timmers.
Cornelia, whose fingers barely brushed Marin in life, now has to handle her mistress and hold her tightly. ‘She always hated to be touched,’ the maid says. Presented with the reality of Thea, Nella wonders how true this statement can really be.
‘This one.’ Cornelia holds up a long black skirt. She is talkative today, as if her voice will banish the demons calling from the Stadhuis, the words Sunday at sundown now spiralling in her head too. The fabric panels of the corset they select are lined with lengths of sable and squirrel, and a strip of velvet runs along the spine. ‘It will suit Madame Marin perfectly,’ Cornelia says.
Nella feels as if she is standing on wet sand that could sink at any moment. Her armpits are wet with sweat, her bowels feel loose. ‘So it will,’ she replies with a weak smile.
Lysbeth frowns. ‘Clothes are all very well,’ she says. ‘But we must prepare her first.’
This is the hardest part.
They sit Marin up, and Lysbeth uses a sharp knife to cut off the petticoat and cotton blouse. Nella steels herself as the fabric parts in two, trying to focus solely on the task in hand. It is almost too painful to look at the empty, sagging pouch where Thea has lived for nearly nine months – and unavoidable to see Marin’s rounded, ready breasts. Between her legs the birth cord still remains, the thing they couldn’t get out.
Cornelia gulps for air, from grief or repulsion, Nella cannot tell. The entrance Thea made into the world seems sealed up, but Nella dares not go too close, fearing she may dislodge more blood. Instead, they rub the remainder of the lavender oil into other parts of Marin’s body, smothering her gradually intensifying smell, so strangely sweet.
Nella and Lysbeth stagger as they lift Marin; Cornelia gently puts on the skirt, tying it with shaking fingers. As Nella leans her forward, Marin’s head thuds to her chest. Cornelia threads an arm through the corset. ‘I haven’t dressed her for years,’ she says, her voice light and high, skimming on her breath. ‘She always did it herself.’
Cornelia rolls on woollen stockings, and a pair of rabbit-skin slippers embroidered with the initials M and B. Nella washes Marin’s face, dabbing it reverently with fresh towels. Lysbeth unbinds her hair and re-plaits it, tucking it in a neat white cap.
‘Wait,’ Nella says. She runs to Marin’s small room, where Thea lies sleeping in her oak cradle. Nella pulls down the map of Africa, still annotated with its unanswered questions – Weather? Food? God?
‘We should put more of her collections in with her,’ says Cornelia, when she sees what Nella has brought. ‘The feathers and spices – those books.’
‘No,’ says Nella. ‘We’re going to keep them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because one day they’ll be Thea’s.’
Cornelia nods, looking overwhelmed by the logic and melancholy of such an idea. Nella imagines Cornelia in four years’ time, showing the little girl the wider world her mother once so assiduously, no doubt lovingly pieced together. As the maid’s blue eyes take on an absent look, Nella wonders if Cornelia is thinking of that future too – Thea, dangling her little legs over the bed, shown this strange inheritance by the maid who loved her mother. Nella wants Cornelia to cling to the image, a future boon to drag her from the horror of today.
‘She looks peaceful,’ says Cornelia.
But Nella sees the familiar furrow on her sister-in-law’s brow, as if she was doing a mildly taxing sum, or thinking of her brother. Marin does not look peaceful. She looks as if she didn’t want to die. There was still so much to do.
Whilst Lysbeth and Cornelia go to Marin’s room to tend to Thea, Nella walks downstairs to Otto’s tool cupboard, where his implements are laid out on a tidy shelf, ever ready, neatly oiled and sharpened. She finds what she’s looking for. Assendelft farmers used to call them bludgeoners, and she watched them as a girl, their stocky arms swiping hardily at dying trees.
Back upstairs, the women’s voices murmuring along the corridor, Nella locks her bedroom door for the first time.
She eyes it in the corner, Johannes’ beautiful gift. Back in October, he had called the cabinet a distraction, but Nella, on the threshold of a new life, had taken it as no more than an insult to her fragile status. She rejected this uninhabitable world, then gradually believed it held the answers, that the miniaturist was the one who held the light. But Johannes was right, in a way, Nella thinks. Everything about this cabinet was indeed distracting. So much happened while I was looking the other way. I was sure I’d been standing still, yet look how far I’ve come.
Only now is Nella sure what must be done. She approaches the cabinet and lifts up her arms, mirroring the local men who’d hacked at groaning trunks. One inhaled breath, one held moment, then down the axe comes. It drives through the tortoiseshell, it buckles the splintering elm. Pewter veins snake like plant roots, velvet curtains crumple to the ground. Nella smashes and smashes, bringing the house to its knees. The floors collapse, the ceilings cave, the craft and time, the detail and power, tumbling to her feet.
Blood pumping through her body, Nella drops the axe and reaches into the wreckage. She rips the Italian leather wallpaper, the tapestry, the glue between the marble floor. Taking the books, she tears their tiny pages. She crushes the betrothal cup in her clenched fist, and the soft metal submits to her pressure, the couple round the side flattened to nothingness. Gathering the rosewood chairs, the birdcage, Peebo, the box of marzipan, the lute, she breaks them under the sole of her shoe, all unrecognizable, for ever ruined.
With fingers like claws, Nella breaks open Meermans’ body, shredding his broad-brimmed hat. She pulls Jack’s head off like a dying flower. With a piece of elm, she smashes Agnes’ hand, still clutching the blackened sugar loaf. Nella does not spare Cornelia nor her own two selves – the grey and gold, one sent by the miniaturist, the other left by Agnes on the Stadhuis gallery floor. She hurls them into the pile along with Johannes’ sack of money. Only Marin and Johannes does she keep intact, putting them in her pocket with Otto and the little child. Thea can have them when she’s older; portraits out of time.
She feels Arnoud in her pocket and hesitates. It’s just a doll, she tells herself, still astonished by the miniaturist’s strange alchemy of craftsmanship and spying. It’s nothing. She weighs him in her palm. Most of the sugar has not yet sold. Almost hating herself, Nella stuffs the pastrymaker hastily back into her skirt, safe and out of sight.
Emptied, exhausted, Nella can destroy no more; her wedding gift has turned into a pyre. Sliding to the floor beside it, she rests her head upon her drawn-up knees. With no one to hold her, she holds herself; her body wracked with sobs.