The Miniaturist(69)
‘Beelzebub will burst on all of us, Frans, if you carry on like this! You speak of doing your duty to God but I think it’s for your guilders. Money, wealth – you never used to be like this.’
It has to be Jack, Nella thinks, up against the warehouse wall. She almost wants it to be him – some constancy at least, some love perhaps, in the changing shades of this disaster. She wonders if Johannes is still there at the warehouse, unaware that he has been discovered. He needs to know, she thinks. He needs to get away.
‘Did you speak to my husband?’ she asks.
Meermans turns to her with a sneer. ‘Certainly not,’ he says. ‘Agnes was – it became imperative for us to leave the scene. She is not yet quite recovered.’
‘Don’t seek this triumph, Frans,’ Marin begs. ‘You’ll ruin us all. We can come to an arrangement—’
‘Arrangement? Don’t you dare talk to me about an arrangement, Madame. Johannes has arranged enough in my life.’
‘Frans, we’ll sell your sugar, and let that be an end—’
‘No, Marin,’ he says, wrenching open the door. ‘I am a different man now, and I will not stem the tide.’
Escape
As Frans Meermans storms out into the freezing day, Marin’s legs give way. It is disturbing to watch, like the collapse of a particularly beautiful tree. Cornelia rushes to her, trying to prop her up. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Marin says, staring at Nella. ‘Can it be true? Can he really have been such a fool?’
‘To bed, Madame,’ Cornelia says, trying to lift Marin up in a desperate effort. She bows under Marin’s weight and her mistress shakes her off, sitting down on the hall stairs.
‘Frans will go to the burgomasters,’ Marin says. The words bruise the tender atmosphere Meermans has left behind. It is chilling how she looks – dead-eyed, limp, her voice bereft of any spirit. ‘He didn’t come here first to offer us clemency. He just came to crow.’
‘Then we must take advantage of his self-importance,’ Nella says. ‘Johannes doesn’t know that he was seen. He only has a few hours in which to escape.’
‘The Seigneur too?’ Cornelia says. ‘But we cannot live here just the three of us.’
‘Can you think of something better?’ Nella asks.
The hallway falls very quiet. Irritated with her own bad mood, Nella worries Dhana’s silky ears through her fingers, thinking about Agnes’ blackened loaf upstairs, wondering where Johannes is. The sugar has made Meermans angry, angrier perhaps than seeing Johannes enjoying forbidden fruit. Several thousand guilders might neutralize this rage against the Brandts.
‘I don’t know how, but we have to sell the sugar,’ she says. ‘Meermans is looking for payment.’
Marin looks up at her. ‘He said some of it was paste.’
‘Exactly. Some of it. He’s probably exaggerating. He likes to lie. And he might stay silent if we sell his stock.’
‘Nothing will keep that man silent. Believe me. And what are you proposing? Do you know all the buyers in Europe and beyond, Petronella – the London cooks, the Milanese pastry-men, the duchesses and marquises and sultans? Do you speak five languages?’
‘I am searching for the light, Marin. In the middle of all this murk.’
An hour later, Nella stands before her cabinet house, staring at the rooms for some clue, some sign, of what to do. The golden pendulum clock is an awful, regular reminder that her husband has still not come home, that the minutes are ticking by. How odd it is, she thinks, that some hours feel like days, and others fly too fast. It is freezing cold outside the window, and she feels the numbing sensation in her toes, imagining her flesh made inert like that man found hacked beneath the ice. At least her breath is misting. I’m still alive, she thinks.
Moonlight creeps in through a gap in the curtain, extraordinary in its strength, showing up every swirling pattern of the pewter, turning it to quicksilver shooting through the wood. All nine rooms are illuminated, and the faces of the people inside them almost glow. Nella’s betrothal cup is a pale thimble, the cradle lace a shining web. Agnes’ severed hand still rests on a chair like a silver charm, the sugar loaf bone-white except for the tip. Nella tries to see if the tip has darkened any further. She cannot tell. Black spores still grimly visible, it rests in her palm like something diseased.
I am not even fortune’s bricklayer, let alone its architect, she thinks. The miniaturist’s elliptical mottoes and her beautiful pieces are still locked in their own world, so tactile yet so unreachable. Tonight, they seem to taunt her. The less Nella understands the miniaturist’s reasons for doing all this, the more powerful the miniaturist seems. Nella prays that Lucas Windelbreke has received her letter, that some clarity will come for her to find the key.
Taking her husband’s doll from the cabinet, Nella weighs him in her palm. Did the miniaturist see this coming too – Johannes discovered on the dock by his enemy? His back is still bent to the side, burdened by his bag of money. It doesn’t seem to have lightened, and Nella tries to take encouragement from this, but cannot fully trust herself to intuit its true meaning.
She hears the front door, followed by the familiar click as Johannes enters his study. Putting his doll back in the cabinet, Nella runs downstairs and walks straight in.