The Miniaturist(103)

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.