The Miniaturist(25)
Johannes leaves her after his crab is fully scooped. ‘I won’t be long,’ he says with a sigh. ‘Business.’ He makes it sound a chore, installing himself in a corner with a group of men.
Nella feels wholly exposed without him, but watches with fascination as her husband appears to transform. If Johannes is tired of talking about work, commissions, the state of trade, he manages to hide it. How handsome he is compared to the others, despite their own fine coats and leather boots. Laughter rises above their hats, heads are thrown back – and amongst the tipped-up moony faces and russet cheeks, the beards flecked with tiny bits of crab, Johannes is in the centre, tanned and smiling.
I could love him, Nella thinks. It should be easy to be the wife of a man like that. And love has to come, otherwise I cannot live. Perhaps it will grow slowly, like one of Otto’s winter seeds.
Apprentices begin to approach Johannes, showing him what they have made, and he holds each piece up, handling the silver ewers and vases with delicate respect. A compliment from him sends the young men away delighted. The other merchants step back, watching Johannes with shrewd eyes as he opens the floor to artistic debate, the merits of seascape engravings over floral. He appears knowledgeable, observant, unusual to his core. He takes down names, pockets a silver box, tells an apprentice to see him at the VOC.
Nella is looking at her second course, a bowl of scallops drizzled in mutton broth and onion sauce, when the woman with the darting eyes moves forward. She is straight-backed, her fair hair twisted into an elaborate coif crowned by a black velvet band, seed pearls sewn along its curve. Silently, Nella thanks God for His small miracles, for Cornelia’s deft sewing that has made her dress fit.
The woman stops at the table, curtseying low. ‘Well, they said that you were young. Has he abandoned you?’
Nella grips the side of her bowl. ‘I’m eighteen.’
The woman stands up straight, her eyes scanning the room. ‘We wondered what you would look like,’ she carries on in the same quiet voice. ‘But now I see Brandt keeps the same standard of wife as he does everything else. The Oortman name is very old. And what does it say in Ecclesiastes? A good name is better than precious ointment!’ Her tone is solicitous, admiring – but there is something within it that prods at Nella’s vulnerability.
Nella attempts to extricate herself from the bench, but the table top and her large skirt conspire to wedge her in. The woman waits patiently for a curtsey, eyeing Nella’s struggle. Finally free from the narrow gap between trestle and bench, Nella bends low, her face close to the woman’s black brocade skirt, spanning out before her like the wings of a smothering crow.
‘Oh up, child,’ says the woman. Too late, Madame, thinks Nella. ‘I’m Agnes, wife to Frans Meermans. We live at the sign of the fox on the Prinsengracht. Frans adores hunting, so he picked it himself.’
This offered intimacy holds awkwardly in the air, and Nella merely smiles, having learned already from Marin that silence is a marginal advantage.
Agnes pats her coif and Nella sees what she’s supposed to – the rings adorning every one of her fingers – small rubies, amethysts and the mineral green flash of emerald. It is rather un-Dutch, all those precious stones for everyone to see – most women wear any jewel buried deep under the folds of their clothes. Nella tries to imagine Marin’s hands glittering this way.
In the face of Nella’s silence, Agnes gives a tight smile and continues. ‘We are practically neighbours, part of the same gebuurte.’
Agnes Meermans has a strangely laboured way of speaking, her words unspontaneous, as if she has been practising her gracefulness in front of a mirror. Nella stares at the collapsed halo of seed pearls circling the woman’s haughty head. The pearls are the same size as milk teeth, glinting in the candelabras’ dancing light.
Agnes is perhaps a little older than Marin, but her slim, plain face is unworked – no moles or sun patches, no dark half-moons beneath her eyes, no sign of toil or children. She seems ethereal, un-lived in – except for those dark eyes, which blink in quick succession and then half-close in feline laziness. Agnes takes in Nella’s silver dress, her narrow waist. ‘Where are you from?’ she asks.
‘Assendelft. My name is Petronella.’
‘A popular name, shared by many in this city. Did you like Assendelft?’
Agnes’ teeth, Nella notices, are slightly stained. She considers the best answer to give this woman, who seems to be testing her. ‘I have been from it for eleven days, Madame, and it could have been a decade.’
Agnes laughs. ‘Time is such a stubborn candle in the young. And how did Marin find you?’
‘Find me?’
Again Agnes laughs, cutting Nella off – a light expulsion of air, an aspirated disdain. This is not a conversation, it is Agnes sending out darts and watching them pierce. There seems to be a permanent lilt of amusement in her voice, but Nella is sure there is something else working away beneath this propped-up confidence, something she senses but cannot name. She looks straight at Agnes and smiles, defending her distress with whiter, younger teeth.
Around them the smells of cooked chicken, the stewed fruit and the sloshing sounds of wine jugs threaten to encroach upon their little circle, but Nella’s magnetic attraction to Agnes repels all else.
‘A bride for Johannes Brandt,’ says Agnes with a sigh, drawing Nella down gently but insistently by the arm to sit with her on the bench. ‘It’s been such a long time. Marin must be so pleased; she always said he must have children. But Brandt was so infuriating about heirs.’