The Miniaturist(66)

‘But do you promise, Johannes?’

‘I promise.’

‘I believed your vow once,’ Nella says. ‘I pray this time you hold it true.’ In the background, the pendulum clock marks its velvet time. ‘Here,’ she says, lifting off the bed and gently parting the curtains of the cabinet. ‘I want you to have this.’

She puts the puppet of Rezeki in his hand and Johannes looks down, blinking with tired eyes, not sure at first what he’s seeing. ‘Rezeki?’ he utters.

‘Keep her safe.’

For a moment Johannes pauses, his eyes riveted to the tiny model in his hand. Then he lifts it up, touches the silky grey fur, the small intelligent eyes, the slender legs. ‘I’ve never seen such a thing. In all my travels.’

Nella notices that he does not comment on the red mark. If Johannes doesn’t choose to see it, she supposes, so much the better. ‘Your wedding present,’ she whispers. ‘I know Rezeki was never human-shaped, but still – don’t tell the burgomasters.’

Johannes looks at her, too moved to speak, clutching the gift like a talismanic comfort. Nella closes the door on him, listening to his quiet tread back to his own room, feeling strangely at peace.

But at dawn the next day, she finds herself woken roughly by Cornelia. The sky is split in streaks of orange and dark blue – it cannot be later than five o’clock. Nella shivers out of her dreams of red-soaked cloths and shrinking rooms, quickly conscious of the cold morning air.

‘What is it?’

‘Wake up, Madame, wake up.’

‘I am awake. What’s wrong?’ she asks. As she focuses on Cornelia’s looming, drawn face, fear plummets through her. ‘What’s happened to Johannes?’

Cornelia’s hands fall from Nella’s body like a pair of dead leaves.

‘Not the Seigneur. It’s Otto,’ she whispers, her voice breaking. ‘Otto’s gone.’





Souls and Purses


Cornelia dances around Johannes, having to be two servants. She puts his boots on, dropping small pies into his pockets, an apple, feeding him against her fears. Johannes pushes his arms through his jacket. ‘Where’s my brocade?’ he asks.

‘Trust you to ask that now,’ Marin mutters, grey with exhaustion.

‘I couldn’t find it, Seigneur,’ says Cornelia.

‘I’m going to check the docks,’ Johannes says. ‘Why did he run like that?’

‘Check the sugar too,’ calls Nella, chasing him outside.

Johannes looks at her in disbelief. ‘Toot comes first,’ he says. ‘We cannot lose him.’

But Nella cannot help thinking of Agnes’ blackened little loaf upstairs. It’s a sign – the miniaturist is trying to warn them, as she warned about Rezeki. Surely there is something to be done before they lose the sugar too? But Johannes has gone, and no wife can turn up to her husband’s warehouse unannounced.

There is no sign of a struggle in Otto’s bed, no broken furniture, the door unforced. A bag of clothes has gone.

‘He took the Seigneur’s jacket, I’m sure of it,’ Cornelia says.

‘Maybe he’ll sell it,’ Nella says.

‘It’s more likely he’ll keep it to wear. Why did he have to go?’

It strikes Nella that she has not asked Cornelia what she was doing looking for Otto in his bedroom at five o’clock in the morning. But Cornelia is literally unmanned, and to probe her now might do more harm than good.

‘Cornelia,’ Marin calls up the stairs. ‘Come here.’

Marin is in the salon, in three jackets, a shawl and two pairs of woollen stockings, clumsily trying to light a peat fire. When she straightens, she looks so bulky, so much taller than Nella and Cornelia. ‘I cannot light the peat,’ she says. Her speech slides like butter in a pan.

‘It’s Toot’s job to light fires, Madame.’ It is not on the peat’s thick smell that Cornelia appears to choke, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I’m not very good at this.’ The maid kneels before the grate, her body a folded mirror to her soul. ‘I asked along the canal,’ she murmurs. ‘No Africans taken into the Rasphuis or the Stadhuis prison.’

‘Cornelia,’ says Marin, lowering herself into the same chair Johannes had collapsed in at the news of Rezeki. Red-eyed and worrying at her layers, Marin cannot sit still. She takes a bite from a week-old slice of apple tart that Cornelia has brought for her, then puts it to one side.

Nella sends a prayer to the miniaturist, wherever she may be at this moment – Madame, send my husband a pair of wings. Fly him faster to the departing ships. Keep beloved Otto on this land.

‘He’ll escape,’ Marin says, rubbing her temples as if trying to solidify something restless shifting in her skull. ‘He’ll go to London. Down by the Thames he’ll have a hope of blending in.’

‘You sound so sure,’ says Nella.

‘I told him nothing would happen,’ Cornelia says. ‘Why didn’t he listen to me?’

‘Because he was frightened,’ Marin says, her breathing becoming heavier. She takes up the apple tart again and picks at it, almost talking to herself. ‘Better that he is gone. By removing himself he protected us. And what would happen to a man like Otto if the burgomasters got hold of him?’