The Miniaturist(108)

What is she buying here – peace, or a moment to enjoy her own hard work? Nella glows with the sum Hanna has proposed.

‘In the long run,’ Hanna says, ‘I believe it will benefit us all.’

Nella walks quickly from Hanna and Arnoud towards the Stadhuis. The guard lets her through the gates, she treads the same corridor, and Johannes’ door is drawn back. It is three guilders this time to allow more than the usual quarter-hour. Johannes’ finite existence is making him more expensive, but Nella would give ten times that if she had to. There is a distinct smell of rosewater and pumpkin wafting about the guard, Nella notices. Checking the money in his hand, he nods, closing the cell door.

Someone, maybe Cornelia, has shaved Johannes’ stubble, which serves to make him more cadaverous, as if his skull is making its way inside out. I should have brought him a new shirt, she thinks, peering at her husband in the dim light. The one he’s wearing is ragged and thin. Nella swallows, girding herself against the sight. He sits on the pallet of straw, head against the damp brick, long legs twisting awkwardly out of his hips.

She realizes how like Marin he looks, haughty in repose, half-handsome even now. Her throat tightens. There is excrement in the corner, covered haphazardly with straw. She looks away.

If I told him everything, Nella wonders, who would Johannes think had betrayed him more? She remembers Jack screaming at Otto – he knows you’ve done something. Johannes had once questioned Marin’s piety in that argument in the salon, and later, she’d said she had taken something of her brother’s that wasn’t hers to take. Did Johannes know, and look away? It seems incredible but then much about Johannes’ person is incredible. He and Marin often pulled Otto between themselves, claiming him like territory, arguing over who appreciated or needed him most.

The two remaining pasties lie uneaten at Johannes’ side. ‘You should eat those while they’re fresh,’ she says.

‘Sit with me,’ he replies, his voice quiet.

How frail he looks, the light drained from his eyes. Nella can almost feel his spirit dissolving into the air, to nothingness. She wants to grab at it and hold it in fistfuls, stop it from getting away.

‘I’m selling the sugar,’ she says, sitting down. ‘A confectioner is helping me.’

‘I don’t think you’ll shift it all by tomorrow,’ he replies, with the shade of a smile.

Nella pushes back the instinct to sob. It seems Cornelia has kept her promise to keep quiet about Marin, but how can they not confess to him what has happened? His sister, his most beloved adversary, is dead. How is it possible he cannot tell the grief in the faces of his women?

‘Meermans will never take a bribe now, anyway,’ Johannes says. ‘It appears that some things don’t have a price after all. Marin was right, you cannot barter for abstracts. Certainly not for betrayal.’

Nella pictures Lysbeth Timmers, hustling for her silence. ‘But this is Amsterdam—’

‘Where the pendulum swings from God to a guilder. Frans says he’s doing this to save my soul, but underneath it, he’s fuming that I didn’t sell the sugar overnight. He’s fighting for his loaves by calling me a sodomite.’

‘Is that the only reason, Johannes – revenge?’

He looks at her in the gloom, and she waits. Now, she thinks; now surely he will tell about Marin and her refusal to marry. But Johannes is loyal to the end. ‘That sugar represented so much for him,’ he says. ‘And I mocked it with indifference.’

‘Why did you do that? Because of Jack?’

‘No. Because I could taste Frans’ and Agnes’ greed upon the air and it disgusted me.’

‘But you’re a merchant, not a philosopher.’

‘Greed is not a prerequisite for being good at business, Nella. I crave very little for myself.’

‘Just potatoes?’

He smiles. ‘Just potatoes. And you are right, I am not a philosopher. I am merely a man who happens to have sailed to Surinam.’

‘You said the sugar was delicious.’

He looks grimly round the room. ‘And thus am I amply rewarded. The secret in business is not to care too much, to always be prepared to lose. It seems I cared both too little and too much.’

The prospect of Johannes’ greatest loss to come looms large. ‘I misjudged the situation. Old wounds,’ he says. ‘No matter now. Come, there’s nothing to do. Cornelia drenched me with her tears and now you too. You could have brought me a new shirt. What a terrible wife you are,’ he chides, squeezing her hand. ‘You must tell Marin that she cannot come here.’

Loss washes through her; a brackish tide.

‘I would not want her to see me like this,’ he says.

‘Johannes. Why did Jack betray you?’

He runs a hand through his silvering hair. ‘Money, I suppose, and what money means. It has to be money, because any other reason I cannot counter.’ The silence thickens; she senses Johannes’ struggle to keep down his own fear. ‘You should have heard Agnes’ testimony,’ he says. ‘Her spirit was always brittle, but in that moment, I believe it truly snapped.’

He speaks quickly, pulling himself away from darker thoughts. ‘Agnes has always loved Frans, but too much love like that can be a poison. How happy she was to do his bidding this time, I know not. She believes in her God, of course, and the sanctified order of how things should be. But there was something about her on Thursday morning. She seemed quite disordered, as if she knew perfectly well she was doing something wrong, but was going to do it anyway. She has probably never known herself better than in that moment, nor taken herself more by surprise.’