Millstone
Nella sees the hundreds of ships moored, their bodies spanning down the long, tapering jetties belonging to the VOC. Fluyts and galliots, hookers, square-sterns, various shapes and purposes all for the republic’s good. Most of the masts are naked, the rigging and sails folded away, protected from the elements until it is their time to be freshly tarred, drawn up and stretched across the wood.
Those ships that have sails look as if they are in bloom, ready to catch the trade winds and take their sailors far away. The hulls creak, swollen with the irrepressible salty damp that blights every deck-hand’s life. The air tangs on the tongue – the smell of bilge around the dock edge, the seagulls’ detritus they couldn’t quite finish, half-pecked bodies of fish. Below the diminishing light, sewage from the ships swills in the water.
The ships would normally be an impressive sight, their vast frames lilting on the waves, these vehicles of empire, dogs of war who do everyone’s dirty business. But in the fading Sunday afternoon, everyone’s eyes are drawn to the man with the millstone round his neck.
Whether it is a wedding or a funeral, ceremony in Amsterdam is frowned upon, ritual can be too gross, too papist, and must be avoided. But a rich man to be drowned is different, the moral juiciness, the symbolism that could be plucked out of the Bible, and of course a crowd has come. Along the jetty they stand, many other staff of the VOC, sea captains and clerks. There is Pastor Pellicorne, Schout Slabbaert, even Agnes Meermans, alone in her tatty fur collar. Her husband is not with her. There are several guildsmen, regents from the Stadhuis, their wives, other pastors, and the three solemn men who make up Johannes’ guard.
Nella stands at the back of the dockside crowd. Pellicorne glides his hard gaze over her, pretending not to see. The Pastor’s pall-bearers came last night to lift her sister-in-law into a coffin and take her away, and now Marin waits in the Old Church crypt for the last service she will ever attend.
Pellicorne turns back to the matter at hand. What inward glories must he be feeling now, Nella thinks. The will of the law and the will of the church are making their bloodthirsty claim, and he looks so disgustingly satisfied.
Nella has promised Johannes she would be here this afternoon, and a worse promise she has never had to keep. Last night they had sat in the dark of his cell for an hour, holding hands in silence, the guard leaving them be. That quiet, that hour, had a quality to it Nella will never experience again. In the future she will refer to it as her first wedding night, a communion where no words were needed. They lost their tangling, deceptive power, and in their place was a deeper, richer language.
When she left him, Nella stood at the door of his cell, and he smiled and looked so young – and she felt extremely old, as if somehow the silence had passed on all his grief to her. She will have to carry it whilst Johannes flies up, empty, hollow and free.
At the house, Cornelia has been sedated with a heavy sleeping draught, drawn up with frightening ease by Lysbeth Timmers, who had turned up at sunrise to feed Thea and decided not to leave. ‘You might be needing me for more today,’ she said. Their eyes met. Nella nodded wordlessly and now Lysbeth is in the house, waiting in the kitchen for her return.
Nella cannot be sure of the ground beneath her and she stands, trying to steady herself with her feet apart. The boisterous January wind blows through her coat, sharp as a cat’s claw. She is wearing a hood, a plain brown skirt of Cornelia’s. She has come in costume in order to endure this ordeal, as if the disguise might protect her from the truth.
Johannes is in a costume too. They have put him in a suit of silver satin which doesn’t fit, and a preening feather in his hat that Johannes would never wear, a pointed marker to indicate that how you dress is who you are. Nella catches flashes of it through the shoulders of the crowd, a bright sleeve like armour through the dun and black. She leans suddenly on the woman next to her. The woman jumps at the contact and turns.
‘It’s all right, my love,’ she says, seeing Nella’s terror. ‘Don’t look if you can’t bear it.’
Her kindness nearly splits Nella apart. How can good people come and watch this?
Slabbaert lays his hand on Johannes’ shoulder and from then on, Nella doesn’t look. She only hears, closing her eyes, the wind on her face, the sails slapping like wet laundry. She hears the millstone being dragged by the two executioners. Johannes, attached to the end of it, will by now be teetering on the edge of the jetty. The half-ton of stone makes a drawn-out, grating sound that runs under Nella’s skin into the core of her bones.
As the crowd inhales, she feels the hot release of urine rush down her stockinged legs, the wool soaking it up and chafing her skin. He is speaking. She imagines him turning to look for her, for Marin, for Cornelia. Let him see me, she thinks. Let him think I’m sending him a prayer.
But the wind blows Johannes’ final words off course and she does not catch them. Johannes, she whispers. She strains to hear, but there are prosaic mutterers around her, prayers and futile utterances. He is too weak to make his voice carry, and by the time the mutters fall to silence, the millstone has been rolled off the end of the jetty. Johannes. It smashes the choppy surface of the sea and plunges underneath.
She opens her eyes. A thick wave pushes up, crests in a white circle and disappears in seconds.
No one moves.
‘He was one of our best merchants,’ a man eventually says. ‘We’re fools.’
The crowd exhales, their hair whipping on their foreheads. ‘No body to bury,’ someone says. ‘They’re not bringing him back up.’
Nella turns away. She is alive, and she is not. She is down in the water with Johannes. Leaning against the wall, head towards the ground, her body threatens to turn her inside out. How long will it take for the sea to fill his lungs? Be quick, she thinks. Be free.
She senses something. The back of her neck prickles, her knees want to sag. Nella lifts her head, scanning the crowd for a flash of pale hair. She’s still here, Nella thinks. I can feel it. She looks across the people’s faces, searching for that cool, appraising gaze, a moment for the miniaturist to say good bye.
But it is not the miniaturist standing in the line of her eye.
He is thinner, dressed in the same clothes he left in, wearing that rich brocade coat. For a mad second Nella thinks her husband has come up from the water, that an angel has brought him back to life. But no, he is unmistakeable. Nella raises her hand in recognition, and, open-mouthed with grief, Otto lifts his palm. Five trembling fingers, a star shining out from the dark.