The Miniaturist(44)
‘Which you are in danger of losing. The damage you’ve done, so careless with other people’s needs—’
‘Me? Your hypocrisy is breathtaking, Marin. I warned you back in August that I couldn’t—’
‘And I warned you, that if you didn’t stop with Jack something terrible was going to happen.’
Nella cannot bear to hear any more. She walks back to the staircase and picks up Peebo’s cage. As she goes downstairs she realizes never has she felt more powerful, nor more frightened. She pictures Johannes disappearing underwater, a face distorted, hair swirling like grey seaweed. Her hand could be the doing of it. They have been protected by these walls and that heavy front door for years – but they opened it and let Nella in, and now look what has happened. We don’t like traitors – Marin’s words come back to her, a reminder of the strange unity of these people to whom Nella half-belongs, waiting to see where her loyalty lies.
On the last stair, she sits and puts the cage beside her. Peebo is on his perch, gripping it obediently. Nella begins to tug at the door and it swings open with a light clang. Her little bird jumps in shock, his head twitching with curiosity, blinking at her with his bead-like eyes.
He is tentative at first, but then he takes his chance, and flies. Round and round the giant hall, up and up, swooping and flapping at the great space, his droppings falling abundant on the floor tiles. Let them fall, Nella thinks. Let him cover these blasted tiles with shit.
She leans back, watching Peebo’s upward spiral, shivering from the front window, left ajar. The bird flits from one side of the hall to the other. Nella can feel the displacement of air as his wings beat – the papery flap of bone and feather, the riffling of pinions as he finds a perch in the rafters his mistress cannot see.
Whatever her mother’s warnings – the women buried too soon in the Assendelft churchyard – Nella has always assumed that one day a baby would come. She touches her abdomen, imagining a curve there, a balloon of flesh hiding a child. Life in this house isn’t just preposterous, it’s a game, an exercise in fakery. Who is she now? What is she supposed to do?
‘Hungry?’ asks a voice.
Nella jumps as Cornelia appears from under the stairs, looking pale and apprehensive. She doesn’t bother to question what the maid is doing hovering there. No one is ever truly alone in this house; there will always be someone watching or listening. Doesn’t she herself listen – to footsteps, closing doors, those hurried whisperings?
‘No,’ she says, but she is hungry. She could eat that whole feast from the silversmiths’ now, and never stop – consuming every morsel to make her feel she has some substance.
‘Are you going to leave him flying around?’ asks Cornelia, pointing to the brief glimpse of green feathers as Peebo flies low before moving off again into the shadows.
‘I am,’ Nella replies. ‘He’s been waiting for this moment since the day he arrived.’
She hunches over and the maid kneels down and places both her hands on Nella’s knees. ‘This is your home now, Madame.’
‘How can this house of secrets ever be called a home?’
‘There’s only one secret in this house,’ Cornelia says. ‘Unless you have one too?’
‘No,’ Nella says, but she thinks of the miniaturist.
‘What’s in Assendelft for you, Madame? You never talk of it, you can hardly miss it.’
‘No one ever asks me about it, except for Agnes.’
‘Well, from what I’ve heard, it’s got more cows than people.’
‘Cornelia.’
But Nella relents with a nervous giggle, musing on the distance she now feels from that crumbling house, that lake, those childhood memories. She does wish people wouldn’t be so rude about it. I could find my way back, she supposes – Mama would have to forgive me eventually, especially when I told her the truth. And if I stay, Johannes will still have his escapes, running his risks with pastors and magistrates, the prospect of eternal damnation diminishing in the face of his desires. I, on the other hand, will have almost nothing. No promise of motherhood, no shared secrets in the night, no household to run – except the one inside a cabinet where no living soul can thrive.
And yet, Nella thinks to herself. I fight to emerge, that’s the message the miniaturist sent me. Assendelft is small, its company is limited, mired in the past. Here, in Amsterdam, the cabinet’s curtains have opened a new world, a strange world, a conundrum she wishes to solve. And most of all, there is no miniaturist in Assendelft.
The woman who lives on the Kalverstraat is nebulous, uncertain. She is possibly even dangerous – but right now, she is the only thing Nella can call her own. If she went back to the countryside, she would never know why the miniaturist had chosen to send her these unexpected pieces, she would never discover the truth behind the work. She knows she wants these deliveries to continue more than she wants them to stop. In a fanciful moment, it occurs to her that their very existence might keep her alive.
‘Cornelia – you followed me that day. At Johannes’ office.’
The maid looks sombre. ‘I did, Madame.’
‘I don’t like being followed. But I’m glad you did.’
Tales
In the working kitchen, the maid hands Nella a kandeel of hot spiced wine, pouring one for herself. ‘Peace at last,’ she says.