The Miniaturist(64)
A dark and ragged sound rises up through Marin’s throat, her mouth twisted, years of frustration writ large across her face. ‘Are you listening to me, Johannes?’
‘You’ve been a useless, friendless pain since the day you were born—’
‘Your Englishman came knocking yesterday. Your brothel moth. And do you know what he did?’
‘No!’ cries Nella.
‘Thanks to him, your beloved Rezeki is dead.’
Johannes doesn’t move. ‘What did you say?’
‘You heard me.’
‘What? What did you say?’
‘Jack Philips rammed a dagger in her neck in the middle of your hallway. I warned you. I told you he was dangerous.’
Johannes moves very slowly back towards the chair, sitting down on it with strange caution, as if he cannot trust the touch of the wood. ‘You’re lying,’ he says.
‘If it hadn’t been for Otto, he might have killed us all.’
‘Marin!’ Nella shouts. ‘Enough!’
Johannes looks over to his wife. ‘Is it true, Nella? Or is my sister lying?’
Nella opens her mouth to speak, but no words come. At the sight of her expression, Johannes covers his mouth as if repressing a scream.
Otto stands up from the fire, his eyes full of tears. ‘He had a dagger, Seigneur. I thought he was going to – I never meant—’
‘Jack isn’t dead, Johannes. Otto showed more mercy,’ Marin interrupts. ‘Your little Englishman got up and walked away and your wife put Rezeki’s body in the cellar.’
‘Otto?’ Johannes utters his servant’s name like a question he can hardly bear to ask. His hand drops from his face, a raw blank space waiting the wave of grief.
‘It was all so fast,’ Nella whispers, but Johanne, a strange energy upon him, pushes past his sister, past Cornelia, mute with shock at the door. They hear him stumbling across the hallway, down the kitchen stairs. Nella follows him, and hears him opening the cellar. Johannes’ loss echoes up the corridor. ‘My sweet girl,’ he cries. ‘My sweet girl, my sweet girl. What has he done?’
Nella creeps along, wading against her own desire to stop, another part of her knowing she must try and give comfort. She finds Johannes on his knees, cradling the rigid dog, half-hanging out of her bloodstained sack. Rezeki’s head rests on her master’s arm, her wound oily in the half-light, teeth bared in a crooked grin.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Nella whispers, but Johannes cannot speak. He looks up at his wife, eyes wet, clinging to his love in disbelief.
The Witness
For the next two days, the house seems to nurse itself in a suspended quiet. Marin stays in her room, Cornelia plans the charity boxes they will send to the orphanages for Christmas, the cakes smaller this year, the meat pies fewer. Otto avoids them all, staying in the garden where he prods unnecessarily at the frozen soil. ‘You’ll disturb the bulbs, Toot,’ Cornelia says, but he ignores her. Nella smells a pig’s trotter pottage on the boil, and hears the chafing dishes and skimmers banging in time to Cornelia’s misery.
Johannes goes out both these evenings. No one asks him where he’s going, because they dread the answer. On the second evening after the argument, alone in her room, Nella stands before her cabinet house and holds up Agnes’ doll to the fading light. Somewhere in the house, she can hear a person being sick, the splatter of vomit in a tin bowl, susurrations, the refreshing waft of mint tea to settle a bad stomach. She too would like to purge the worry that waits inside. She hopes Johannes is in the warehouse on the Eastern Islands, working on the sugar – although there was something so unnerving about Agnes’ behaviour in the Old Church, that Nella can hardly believe the only cause for her anger is her business prospects.
As she examines Agnes’ miniature, Nella feels a shudder running up her back, her skin a sudden rash of goosebumps. The tip of Agnes’ cone of sugar has turned completely black. She cries aloud, trying to scratch the spores away, but they smear the rest of the loaf like soot. She attempts to break the loaf off – thinking to bury it in the garden, to inter its power – and it snaps, taking Agnes’ tiny hand with it.
Nella hurls the maimed doll to the floor, the severed hand with its ruined loaf still between her fingers. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mutters, unsure exactly to whom she is apologizing – to the doll, to Agnes, the miniaturist. The ruination in Agnes’ tiny hand feels irrevocable, and somehow all her fault.
The poor weather could have caused these tiny spores – but the cabinet is on the first floor, where the damp is not so bad. It could be dirt from the chimney, yet the cabinet’s contents are nowhere near it. All these logical possibilities; they never seem to fit. Like Rezeki’s mark, was this black stain always there, minuscule and virtually unnoticeable? Or has it inexplicably appeared, spreading in response to her panic over Agnes? No, Nella thinks – don’t be so ridiculous. It was simply another warning that you missed. She looks at the cabinet, at the array of baked pastries, the cradle, the paintings, the cutlery and books, wishing she’d paid more attention when the dolls and dogs first arrived. Are there more little bombs in there she cannot see, ready to explode?
Marin hates these dolls for their idolatry – but this blackened cone, this red mark on Rezeki, these extraordinary pieces of craftswomanship, are more than idolatry. They are intrusions Nella still cannot define. There is a story here and it seems like Nella’s, but isn’t hers to tell. She spins my life, she thinks. And I cannot see the consequences.