The Miniaturist(17)

‘Who’s somebody?’

‘No one. A craftsman.’

‘I see.’ Cornelia shivers. ‘We’ll need to get our meat in soon, stretch it out till March at least. It’s odd he hasn’t sent us a cut.’

‘Who hasn’t sent us a cut?’

‘Never mind,’ Cornelia says, looking towards the canal and linking her arm through Nella’s. ‘Somebody.’ The young women huddle close, walking swiftly up the Herengracht towards the centre of the city. The cold is not quite unbearable yet – but its force is coming, Nella can tell. Feeling Cornelia’s arm through hers, she reflects on the oddness of their touching limbs. In Assendelft, maids and manservants were never so friendly with their actions. Most of them were actively unwilling.

‘Why didn’t Otto come?’ Nella asks. When Cornelia says nothing, she persists. ‘I saw him, he refused.’

‘He stays where it’s easiest,’ Cornelia replies.

‘Easiest?’ Nella laughs.

The maid scowls and Nella hopes she that she isn’t going to be given another never mind. But no; when it comes to Otto, Cornelia is expansive.

‘Toot calls his luck a double-edged sword,’ she says. ‘He’s here – and yet he isn’t.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘He was put on a Portuguese slave-ship, Madame – bound from Porto-Novo in Dahomey to Surinam. His parents were dead. The Seigneur was visiting the West India Company at the time, selling them copper for their cane refineries.’

‘What happened?’

‘The Seigneur saw the state of Toot and brought him back to Amsterdam.’

‘Johannes bought him.’

Cornelia bites her lip. ‘Guilders sometimes work quicker than a prayer.’

‘Don’t let Marin hear you say that.’

Cornelia ignores this comment; it appears the window for gossip about Marin and her pincers has been closed. ‘Otto was sixteen when he arrived,’ she says, ‘and I was twelve, as new to the house as him.’

Nella tries to picture them both arriving on the doorstep as she had. Was Marin lurking in the shadows of the hallway even then? What world had Otto left behind? She longs to ask him, but wonders if he’d want to tell. Nella has heard of a palm tree, but she cannot imagine the heat of Porto-Novo, the world of Surinam. All of it – exchanged for brick walls and canals, and a language he didn’t speak.

‘He’s quite the Dutch gentleman,’ Cornelia says, ‘but people think differently.’ Nella detects a new edge in her voice. ‘When he arrived he didn’t speak for a month. Just listening, always listening. That coffee-bean skin. I see you looking,’ she adds, a little sly.

‘I don’t,’ Nella protests.

‘Everyone does. Most people have never seen a man like him. When they still visited, the ladies rested their songbirds in his hair as if it was a nest. He hated it.’ Cornelia pauses. ‘No wonder Madame Marin can’t stand your parakeet.’

They walk on, the canal paths strangely muted, the slow brown water between them forming a thin veneer of ice around the edges. Nella tries to grasp at this image of the young black man, his head filled with birdsong, the women’s fingers pawing at his hair. She feels ashamed that her fascination with him is so obvious. Johannes treats him just like any other man, and Otto is just that – but his voice, his face – no one back in Assendelft would believe it. ‘Why don’t the ladies come any more?’ she asks.

But there is no answer to this, for Cornelia has stopped outside a confectioner’s shop, the sign of two sugar loaves and the name Arnoud Maakvrede above the door. ‘Madame,’ Cornelia urges. ‘Let us stop in here.’ Though wishing to exert just one drop of authority, Nella smells the baking and cannot resist.

Within is a delicious heat. Through an arch at the back of the shop, Nella spies a rotund middle-aged man, red-faced and sweating from the stove. On seeing them, he rolls his eyes. ‘Hanna, your friend’s here,’ he shouts into the air.

A woman appears, slightly older than Cornelia, her cap neatly pressed, flour and sugar dusting on her dress. Her face lights up. ‘Cornflower!’ she exclaims.

‘Cornflower?’ says Nella.

Cornelia blushes. ‘Hello, Hanna.’

‘Where’ve you been?’ Hanna motions for them both to take a seat in the coolest corner of the shop floor. She puts up a sign saying Closed, a waft of cinnamon in her wake.

‘What by all the angels are you doing, woman?’ cries the man.

‘Oh, Arnoud. Five minutes,’ Hanna says. The couple stare at each other, and he returns to the stove to bang an angry rhythm with his trays. ‘Honeycomb this morning,’ Hanna murmurs. ‘And marzipan in the afternoon. He’s best avoided.’

‘But to avoid him now is to see much more of him later,’ says Cornelia, the concern etched on her face.

Hanna throws her a glance. ‘Well, you’re here now and I want to see you.’

Nella looks around at the shining wooden floors, the scrubbed counter, the pastries adorning the shop window, piled like irresistible presents. She wonders why Cornelia has brought her here instead of taking her straight to the Kalverstraat, but the smell of sweet cakes is so delicious. Who is Cornflower – this softer, sweeter person conjured by the wife of a confectioner? The verbal baptism is sudden and strange, unsettling Cornelia’s essence. She remembers something Cornelia said the first morning, about calling Otto Toot. He thinks nicknames are silly, but I like them.