The Miniaturist(106)

‘The shock would not have helped, Seigneur. She was already very weak,’ Nella says quietly, hatred blooming within her, barely letting her breathe.

‘It most certainly would not’ Nella keeps silent – she does not want to give this man the fuel he craves. ‘Has your gebuurte come to help?’ he asks.

She remembers her father’s funeral in Assendelft, how the neighbours had come to aid her grieving mother; undressing his corpse, putting him in a nightgown, lifting his stiffening body onto an iron sheet, laying straw for leakage. Then the young unmarried females of the village, coming to lay palms and flowers, laurel leaves. There was no such gebuurte for Marin, just Cornelia and herself, desolation creeping through their panic – and Lysbeth, a woman who’d never even met her alive. At least Cornelia has lit those oil burners.

Nella is pained by the lack of dignity Marin is suffering in death. There should have been a gebuurte, for Marin was a good person, she was strong. In another life she could have led an army. But in the end, Marin kept no friends close – only one, and he is missing.

‘Yes, Pastor,’ she replies. ‘The neighbours have come. But we have to move her soon. We have to bring her to the church.’

‘She never married,’ Pellicorne says. ‘A waste.’

For some of us, Nella thinks, it’s a waste to be married.

It is completely dark outside. In the main body of the church, she can hear the organist practising on his pipes, torches being lit for evening prayer. The pastor stands up, smoothing his black tunic as if it is an apron. ‘If you have come to bury her here,’ he says, ‘that is impossible.’

There is a moment of silence. Nella keeps her feet upon the floor, her back straight.

‘Why, Pastor?’

Her voice is strong and reasonable, because she’s made it so. She will not let it trill, or give way to emotion. Pellicorne closes the burial register and looks at her, surprised, as if he is not used to being asked to elaborate. ‘We cannot have her, Madame. She is tainted by association. As are you.’ He pauses, boring into her with his stony eyes. ‘You have all of my pity, Madame.’

‘And yet none of your mercy.’

‘We are overflowing. I give my sermons to more skeletons than flesh. Dear God, the stink,’ he says to himself. ‘All the perfumes of Araby cannot mask these rotting Dutchmen.’ To Nella, he merely adds, ‘I am sorry for her death, but I cannot have her here.’

‘Seigneur—’

‘Go to the men at St Anthonis’, they will help you.’

‘No, Pastor. Not beyond the city walls. She worshipped here.’

‘Burial within the city is not an option for most these days, Madame.’

‘It must be for Marin Brandt.’

‘I have no more room. Do you hear?’

Nella pulls out of her pocket two hundred guilders from Arnoud and lays them on Pellicorne’s register. ‘If you will organize the gravestone, the coffin, the men to carry it, and the space in the church floor, I will, upon completion, double that sum,’ she says.

Pellicorne looks at the money. It is money coming from the wife of a sodomite. It is money coming from a woman. It is the deeplying root of evil, but it is a lot of money. ‘I cannot accept this,’ he says.

‘Greed is the canker we must cut out,’ Nella replies, her expression mournful.

‘Precisely.’ She can see he is pleased to have his sermon echoed.

‘You, a man of God, are surely best placed to guard the canker,’ Nella continues.

‘Once it’s been removed,’ he replies, his eyes flicking to the guilders.

‘Of course.’

‘There are many alms required for our city’s unfortunates.’

‘And something must be done for them, or the canker begins to bloom.’

They sit in silence.

‘There is a small space in the east corner of the church,’ Pellicorne says. ‘Room for a modest slab, nothing more.’

What a fool he is, Nella thinks. He is just a man like every other man, no closer to God than the next. She wonders how much will be skimmed off the four hundred before the pallbearers and the alms are paid. Would Marin like it, in the corner? She spent her life in the corner, perhaps she would prefer it in the nave. But then, in the nave, people would walk up and down on her. Some citizens probably desire such an ending, so they never are forgotten, held in memory and prayed for – but to Nella’s mind it is too undignified for Marin. It is better in the corner.

‘I am speaking the truth, Madame,’ says Pastor Pellicorne. ‘We are full up. That corner is the best that I can do.’

‘It will suit,’ she replies. ‘But I want the finest elm for the coffin.’

Pellicorne resumes his pen and opens the register once again. ‘I will see to it. The funeral could be next Tuesday evening, after the normal service?’

‘Very well.’

‘It is easier in the night. The smell that rises when you open up the floor puts people off their prayers.’

‘I see.’

‘How many people will come?’ he asks.

‘Not many,’ Nella replies. ‘Her life was quite secluded.’ She says this almost as a challenge, to see if he will contradict her, or offer some knowing aside regarding Marin’s hidden life. The bookshops she visited, he might say. The company she kept, that Negro she paraded through the streets.