The Miniaturist(29)
There are maps on all the walls, more than Marin has. Nella looks over the shapes of Virginia and the rest of the Americas, the Mare Pacificum, the Moluccas, Japan. Each one is scored with fine lines shooting off in diamond patterns. These are items of precision, not dotted with wishful questions. Beneath the window is a huge padlocked chest, carved from a dark wood. ‘That’s where the guilders are stored,’ Johannes says, sitting up on his stool.
Nella wishes Johannes would be more wolfish than owlish. It would give her the sense of a proper role, if not her wifely cue. ‘I wanted – to thank you,’ she falters. ‘For my cabinet. I have such plans—’
‘You do not need to thank me,’ he says, batting the air with his hand again. ‘It is the least I can do.’
‘But I wanted to show you my thanks,’ she says.
Nella attempts to mimic the physical grace of Agnes Meermans, giving a caress of his shirtsleeve with her trembling hand. She wants that unity, that image of a marriage to be made real. He does not react. Her fingers paw him like a tugging child’s.
‘Yes?’ he says.
She lowers her hand and rests it upon the top of his thigh. Never in her life has she touched a man like this, never mind someone so imposing. She can feel the muscular bulk of his leg through the thick wool. ‘When you speak those languages, you fascinate me,’ she says.
Immediately, she knows she’s said something wrong. He pulls himself off the stool. ‘What?’ he says.
Johannes looks so dismayed that Nella puts her hands to her mouth as if to wipe away the words. ‘I just – it was just—’
‘Come here,’ he interrupts. To Nella’s surprise, he strokes her hair with rough movements.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, though she does not know for what she is apologizing. He leans down, holding her narrow arms, and kisses her on the mouth.
The shock of it – the alarming hot residues of wine and crab – assaults her, and it takes all her might not to tense up in his grip. She parts her lips a little, if only to release the pressure from his mouth. He keeps holding her – and she decides quickly before fear gets the better – to bring her hand down to the front of his breeches. If this is what all women have to do, she thinks – then practice must make it vaguely pleasurable.
Nella can just make it out, the snug bulge she has no knowledge of. But it isn’t the rod her mother promised, it’s more of a curled worm, a—
Her fingers seem to set off a spring, and Johannes drops her, jumping back into the edge of his desk. ‘Nella,’ he says. ‘Oh, God.’
‘Hus—’
‘Go!’ he cries. ‘Get out.’
Nella stumbles away to a single admonishing bark from Rezeki, and Johannes slams the door. She hears his key turn in the lock, and as the terror of being out in this darkened hallway floods back, she runs upstairs to her room.
The cabinet is in the corner, and she pulls its curtains back, the cradle within glowing like an insult in the moonlight. Nella kicks the cabinet’s leg, but the wood and tortoiseshell do not yield, and she hears the crack of bone. Yelping in pain, she refuses to cry. She limps round the room, turning her husband’s paintings to the wall. Caught hare and rotten pomegranate, every single one.
Steps
‘Why are the paintings all topsy-turvy?’ Cornelia asks, turning the one nearest her back to its normal position. A painted caterpillar, crawling from the pomegranate, creeps towards the edge of the frame. The maid shudders, glancing at the cabinet. ‘You can learn to live here, Madame,’ she says quietly. ‘You just have to want to do it.’
Nella watches her with one eye open, last night’s humiliation flooding in. It pins her to the bed and she pushes her face in the pillow. Was it Cornelia down in the hall last night, listening to the disaster unfold? Then why didn’t she comfort me? The thought of her wifely failure being overheard is devastating.
Johannes’ rejection coats Nella’s spirit like a film. She’d dash her own head if it meant she could remove these foolish ideas of true love, of marriage beds, laughter and children. As Cornelia turns another painting, the splayed oyster on a dark indigo background, Nella feels the walls closing in, their magnifying images of dead game and overblown blooms.
‘I think Marin tried to slip the worst pictures over to you,’ Cornelia says. Another crumb, at least – this grin, Cornelia’s little offering of information, Marin and her cunning betrayed by someone slyer.
Cornelia pulls open the curtains and the late-October morning light throws everything into stark relief. She grimaces as she shucks off one of her pattens, jutting out a small foot. ‘Believe it or don’t believe it, Madame,’ she says, ‘but my feet get tired too.’ Balancing herself against the wall, she begins rubbing her sole. ‘Bloody tired. Like a dead man’s.’
Nella sits up. Back in Assendelft, there was never a maid like her. This sense of freedom Cornelia has, to do and say things she wouldn’t anywhere else. Cornelia’s voice is brightly conversational; the pleasure of feet-rubbing appears too great to worry what her mistress thinks. Perhaps it is something in this house, Nella thinks, some permissiveness I do not understand. Life here is indeed topsy-turvy – seeming wrong, but shining a light upon them all. How darned Cornelia’s stockings are, a criss-cross of stitches, a rash of wool. Can’t Marin give her better ones? Nella remembers Johannes’ comment on his cloudy, untouchable wealth.