The Miniaturist(105)
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.
The Canker in the Orchard
That evening, Cornelia will not be dissuaded from going to the Stadhuis prison. In a fever of activity, she has made pasties of hen and veal, rosewater and sweetened pumpkin, cabbage and beef. They smell of home, of a solid kitchen with good utensils, a sensible cook at the helm.
‘I’m going, Madame,’ she says. Determination has put some colour back in her face.
‘Don’t tell him what’s happened here.’
Cornelia draws the warm package of her food to her body, her eyes welling with tears. ‘I would rather die than break his heart, Madame,’ she says, burying the pies deep in her apron.
‘I know.’
‘But if we did tell him about Thea, a baby, a beginning—’
‘It would give him more regret for the life he is about to leave. I don’t think he could bear it.’
Cornelia bridles at the awful decisions they are being forced to make. Nella watches the maid’s forlorn figure as she moves up the canal.
Lysbeth is in the working kitchen, folding fresh cloths for Thea. ‘Will you stay with her for a couple of hours while I go out?’ asks Nella.
Lysbeth looks up. ‘Gladly, Madame.’
It pleases Nella that Lysbeth doesn’t ask where she’s going; so unlike Cornelia. She wonders what Lysbeth might say about the carnage in her room, the damage wreaked by a child bride upon her toy. ‘There’s firewood upstairs,’ she says to the wet-nurse. ‘We should keep Thea warm.’
Nella is granted entry through the door of the kerkmeester’s room behind the organ of the Old Church. Pastor Pellicorne is at his desk. It is for Cornelia that Nella is here. She would rather have Marin buried quietly in St Anthonis’ church, away from public scrutiny. ‘Wouldn’t that have been what she wanted too?’ she’d asked Cornelia.
‘No, Madame. She’d have wanted the highest civic honour this city can bestow.’ This is normality, Cornelia stilling the surface. Thus Marin’s legacy lives on; that the most obsessive of Marin’s preoccupations should remain alive in her maid is a bitter heartening.
Pellicorne looks at Nella, trying to bury the glint of his distaste. You know who I am, she thinks, her hatred budding. You were standing outside the Stadhuis, bellowing for all to hear. Nella has come armed in her wealth, but pearls and a silver dress feel like flimsy armour in the face of Pellicorne’s disdain.
‘I have come to report a death,’ she says, looking straight at him, her voice clear.
Pellicorne dips his chin upon his abundant collar. ‘I thought that wasn’t till Sunday?’ he says, pulling his bulging burial register towards him, a large leather-covered book accounting for all the bodily traffic of this city, leaving for Heaven or Hell. He dips his pen in the ink.
Nella steadies herself, breathing deeply. ‘I’ve come to report the death of Marin Brandt.’
Pellicorne’s pen hovers. He peers at Nella, his hard face craning forward over the ledger. ‘Death?’ he utters.
‘Yesterday afternoon.’
The pen is laid down, Pellicorne leans back. ‘May God bless her soul,’ he says eventually. He narrows his eyes. ‘Tell me, how did our sister Marin Brandt leave the world?’
Nella pictures Marin’s corpse, the bloodied sheets, newborn Thea, then she travels back; Otto and Marin intertwined, their secret buried deep in Marin’s living body.
‘She died of a fever, Pastor.’
He looks alarmed. ‘The sweating sickness, you think?’
‘No, Seigneur. She was sick for a while.’
‘True, I have not seen her in church these last weeks.’ Pellicorne draws his hands together, rests his chin upon the tips of his tapering fingers. ‘I had wondered if her absence was anything to do with her brother.’