The Miniaturist(6)
Nella does not know what this means. As he steps back into the candlelight she sees his face is tanned and beaten by the sun. His irises, grey like Marin’s, are almost translucent. Her husband is no prince, his hair greasy at the scalp, a dull metallic. ‘I’m here,’ she says.
‘So you are.’ He gestures to her nightgown. ‘You should be asleep.’
‘I came to greet you.’
He comes forward and kisses her hand, his mouth softer than she imagined. ‘We’ll talk in the morning, Nella. I am glad you arrived safely. I’m so glad.’
His eyes rest on nothing for long. Nella considers the conundrum of his energetic fatigue, noticing a musky tang in the air, intense and unsettling. Retreating into the yellow glow of what looks to be his study, Johannes shuts the door.
Nella waits for a moment, looking up the main staircase into the pitch black. Marin must surely be asleep, she thinks. I’ll just take one look, to be sure my little bird’s all right.
Tiptoeing down the stairs to the kitchens, she finds her parakeet’s cage hanging by the open stove, the dying embers gently illuminating the metal bars. ‘All maids are dangerous,’ her mother had said, ‘but the city ones are worse.’ She hadn’t explained exactly why, but at least Peebo is alive, on his perch, feathers up, hopping and clicking in acknowledgement of Nella’s presence. More than anything she wants to take him upstairs, but she thinks of what Marin might do if she’s disobeyed, Cornelia arranging a dinner of two little drumsticks with a garland of green feathers. ‘Goodnight, Peebo,’ she whispers.
Through her bedroom window the mists rise off the Herengracht, the moon above a faded coin. Drawing the curtains and gathering her shawl around her, Nella takes a seat in the corner, still wary of her giant bed. Her new husband is a rich man in Amsterdam, a city power-broker, a lord of the sea and all its bounty. ‘Life’s hard if you’re not a wife,’ her mother had observed. ‘Why?’ Nella asked. Having witnessed her mother’s constant annoyance at her father turn to panic on the news of his posthumous debts, she asked why Mrs Oortman was so keen to shackle her daughter to a possibly similar risk. Her mother looked at her as if she was mad, but this time she did explain. ‘Because Seigneur Brandt is a city shepherd, and your father was only a sheep.’
Nella looks at the silver ewer on the side, the smooth mahogany writing desk, the Turkey rug, the voluptuous paintings. A beautiful pendulum clock makes its gentle measure of time. There are suns and moons on its face, its hands are filigreed. It is the most beautiful clock Nella has ever seen. Everything looks new, and speaks of wealth. Nella has never learned this particular language, but she thinks it will be necessary. Picking up the fallen cushions on the floor, she mounts them on the coverlet of deep red silk.
The first time Nella bled, aged twelve, her mother told her that the purpose of that blood was ‘the security of children’. Nella never thought there was much to feel secure about, hearing the cries through the village of women in their labour pains, the coffins sometimes marched to church soon after.
Love was much more nebulous than stains on linen rags. Her monthly blood never seemed connected to what Nella suspected love could be – of the body but beyond it. ‘That’s love, Petronella,’ Mrs Oortman said, observing how Arabella held the puppy Blackeye tight until she nearly choked his canine life away. When musicians in the village sang about love, they sang indeed of pain concealed in the bounty. True love was a flower in the gut, its petals unfurling inside out. You would risk all for love – blissful, never without its drops of dismay.
Mrs Oortman had always complained there were no suitors good enough for miles – ‘hay-chewers’, she called the local boys. The city, and Johannes Brandt, held her daughter’s future.
‘But – love, Mother. Will I love him?’
‘The girl wants love,’ Mrs Oortman cried theatrically to the peeling Assendelft walls. ‘She wants the peaches and the cream.’
Nella was told it was right that she leave Assendelft, and God knows that by the end to escape was all she wanted. She had no desire to play shipwrecks with Carel and Arabella any more, but this doesn’t stop the disappointment flooding in now, sitting by her empty wedding bed in Amsterdam like a nursemaid to a patient. What is the point of being here if her husband will not even greet her properly? Clambering up on the blank mattress, she burrows amongst the cushions, thwarted by the scornful look in Cornelia’s eyes, the edge in Marin’s voice, Johannes’ indifference. I am the girl, Nella thinks, who hasn’t had a single peach, never mind the cream.
The house still seems awake despite the unforgiving hour. She hears the sound of the front door being opened and shut, and then another door above her. There is whispering, footsteps padding across the corridor, before an intense quiet wraps the rooms.
She listens, desolate, a hairline crack of moonlight glinting over painted hare and rotten pomegranate. It is a deceptive quiet, as if the house itself is breathing. But she doesn’t dare leave her bed again, not on her first night. Thoughts of last summer’s lute playing have gone, and all Nella can hear running through her head is the herring-seller’s words – idiot, idiot, screeching her country voice.
New Alphabet
After opening the curtain to let in the morning sun, Cornelia stands at the end of Nella’s rumpled bed. ‘The Seigneur’s arrived from London,’ she says to the small foot poking through the bedclothes. ‘You’ll breakfast together.’