The Miniaturist(58)
‘All will be well,’ Nella says. ‘We’ll fetch you a surgeon.’
His voice is muffled in her cap, but Jack sounds like he is laughing. ‘Oh, Madame,’ he whispers. ‘You little girl. It’ll take more than a f*cking needle to murder me.’
It takes Nella a moment to understand. Jack crawls to his feet. He lurches towards the front door, the knife still in him, his movement like a tavern roll, drunk on his performance. She cannot marry the blood-soaked shirt, the protruding hilt and his pleadings for life with this cockiness, this morbid glee at having tricked her that he was on his way to meet his maker.
‘I believed you,’ she whispers.
Otto steps back, stunned. Jack opens the door and, moving slowly into the thin light, he turns to face them, bowing deep and low as his fingers fumble with the hilt. He winces, sliding the dagger from out of the wound, pleased at the expression on Nella’s horrified face. ‘I’ll be needing this,’ he says, staunching the flow with one hand, the other lifting the flash of scarlet metal. ‘Attempted murder. Evidence.’
‘I wish that knife had found your heart,’ says Nella.
‘I hide it well,’ he says, giving her a winner’s smile. His wild curls mat to his brow, the dagger drips in his hand. He turns, running a crooked passage down the steps.
Marin, her face smeared with the faint red mark of Jack’s lips, slumps against the panelling. ‘Sweet Jesu,’ she whispers, her grey eyes on Otto. ‘Sweet Jesu, save us all.’
THREE
December, 1686
His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely.
This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.
Song of Solomon 5:16
Stains
‘The Seigneur found Rezeki in a sack,’ Cornelia says in the hallway, her voice murky with grief. She watches Nella shuck the dog’s rigid body into an empty grain bag. ‘Around the back of the VOC, eight years ago. They were all dead – all the puppies, except for her.’
‘We need a mop, Cornelia. Lemon juice and vinegar.’ Cornelia nods. There are still red sweeps of blood across the marble tiles, but the maid doesn’t move. The picture frame attacked by Jack is now propped against the panelling. Marin ordered it to be hollowed out. ‘He won’t care, Madame,’ Otto had advised, but she insisted. ‘It is not for him,’ she said. ‘I cannot stand to see it half-ravaged.’ Otto completed Jack’s handiwork, his hand shaking slightly as he carved the canvas from the wood.
Now in the kitchen, Marin and Otto talk in low voices. It’s my fault, Nella thinks – I carried Jack’s doll inside after Marin threw him out. There he was the next morning, laid out on the front step, an omen of what was to come. If it was the miniaturist who laid him there, a horrid presage of what was to happen in this hall – why would she do that – why insist that this poisonous creature should stay close at all? ‘Cornelia,’ she says, rousing herself. ‘We need to clean this up.’
She tries to push Rezeki’s legs into the bag, but they are too long.
When Nella and Cornelia go down to the kitchen, Rezeki’s paws protruding inelegantly from the sack, an air of aftermath hangs between the gleam of pans. So near to Christmas, the killing of a master’s beloved dog feels like the opening act of some macabre carnival. The dog-murderer is out there somewhere, nursing more than simply a physical wound.
Otto places his trembling hands on the ancient oak of the table. Nella’s thoughts are clogged. She wants to comfort him, but he won’t even look at her. Dhana is slumped by the fire, whining at the sack in Nella’s hand.
‘Please can we bury her now?’ asks Cornelia.
There is an uneasy pause. ‘No,’ Marin says.
‘But she’ll start to smell—’
‘Just put her in the cellar.’
It is Nella who places Rezeki down gently, in the dark, upon the damp loam and potatoes. ‘Poor, poor girl,’ she says, choking on her breath. ‘Godspeed.’
‘What if Jack reports what I did?’ says Otto, back in the kitchen. ‘He’s got the knife, the wound to prove it and a tongue in his head to tell tales. He mentioned evidence, attempted murder. The militia will arrest me. And what if they ask him why he was here?’
‘Exactly,’ Marin says, banging her fist on the table. ‘I know a bit about Jack Philips. He likes the taste of life. Jack is a bragger but he would never go to the authorities. He would be signing his own death warrant and he knows it. He’s English, he’s a sodomite, and he used to be an actor. I can’t think of three things our burgomasters hate more.’
‘He has no money, Madame. What might a man do when he is desperate?’ Otto says, his expression clouding. ‘If they ask him why he came here, then the Seigneur is embroiled.’
He shakes his head and Cornelia bustles over with a basket of herenbrood, some pieces of chicory and a contrary, sunny wedge of Gouda. Nella cuts the cheese as the maid busies herself at the stove. There will be no potatoes or mushrooms in tonight’s dish, for Cornelia cannot even bear to look at the cellar door, let alone go into the darkness. Nella clings to her sounds of determined, domestic activity – the clang of pans, the onions softening in butter, the spitting of the bacon. Their irregular but constant beat is better now than any street-musician’s festive melody.