The Miniaturist(78)

Despite their peace, there is something concentrated about these separate pieces of land, for all things here have one purpose – the raw end of commerce, the storing of supplies, the repair of ships, the sustenance of sailors and captains alike. Following Marin’s directions, she finally reaches Johannes’ warehouse, six storeys high, a small black door at the front.

The lock is well oiled and the door opens easily. She readjusts Cornelia’s too-large skirt and apron. They had tried to decide what would be worse – a maid caught in her master’s storehouse, or his wife? Better a maid, they thought. Johannes Brandt’s reputation could do without the added news that Madame Petronella was snooping on the Islands. She imagines Frans and Agnes coming here, creeping round the back of the building.

‘Sit here, girl,’ she orders Dhana, trying to focus on the task in hand. She pats the whippet on the head. ‘And bark if anyone comes near.’ We should hire a guard dog permanently, she thinks. Now Jack has disappeared.

The interior takes Nella’s breath away. She feels so small, standing at the bottom of a long, spindly ladder that reaches past five busy floors of Johannes’ stock. He is the man who has it all, but who has so often felt bereft of everything.

Nella begins to scale the ladder, seeking out the sugar. It feels as if she is climbing through her husband’s life. Up and up she goes into the cavernous chamber, her skirts catching on the rungs, threatening her with a fall. Past bolts of Coromandel and Bengal silk, cloves, mace and nutmeg in crates marked Molucca, pepper labelled from Malabar, peels of Ceylonese cinnamon, tea-leaves in crates painted via Batavia, planks of expensive-looking wood, copper pipes, strips of tin, piles of Haarlem wool. Past Delft plates, casks of wine branded Espa?a and Jerez, boxes of vermilion and cochineal, mercury for mirrors and the syphilis, Persian trinkets cast in gold and silver. Gripping the rungs, she understands Marin’s fascination with her brother’s work. Here is real life, she thinks, out of breath and giddy. Here is where true adventures come to land.

Nella has to climb right to the eaves to find the sugar loaves. Johannes has stored them in the middle of the floorboards, covered in linen, away from the damp. This attention touches her; it almost makes her cry. Meermans would have her think he’d just thrown Agnes’ loaves on the ground floor with the spare sails and untarred ropes. But it isn’t true. Johannes has taken care. There are so many loaves, they touch the beams of the roof.

Scrambling off the ladder, Nella approaches the linen cape and lifts a corner gingerly. The sugar loaves are laid on top of each other like cannon. It looks like one loaf is missing, no doubt the one Agnes brought to dinner – a dubious sweetener if ever there was. If this came tumbling down, Nella thinks, I’d be crushed.

There are well over a thousand cones here. Nella kneels by the loaves which seem to have been more recently refined. They are still neat and shining bright, are indeed marked with the three crosses of the city of Amsterdam. Some of the other half, refined in Surinam, is damp to the touch, and Nella’s fingers come away slightly covered in white paste. At the back of the sugar structure, tiny black spores have indeed spread over a quarter of the Surinam side. Nothing can save the precious crystals that already have the blight. But still, she thinks – Meermans has exaggerated, seen what he wanted to see. Maybe we could dry them out – part of each loaf would surely be salvageable.

Exhilarated, she tastes what has come away on her fingers. Imagine if I died from a lick of bad sugar, from the craving craze of lekkerheid, she thinks. Wouldn’t Pastor Pellicorne love that.

She pulls out Johannes’ list from her pocket, full of abundant, ornamental names. It contains the households of earls and cardinals, an infanta, a baron, people with a desire to sweeten their leisure times in London, Milano, Roma, Hamburg, even the outposts of the VOC. It is astonishing how Johannes has managed to trade with the Spanish individuals, the English, given how his country has warred with theirs. It reminds Nella of something he said to Meermans at the silversmiths’. We are seen abroad as untrustworthy. I have no desire to be such a thing.

There is so much more sugar than she anticipated. The reality of Johannes and Marin’s current helplessness weighs on Nella’s shoulders. When she suggested to Johannes that employing an agent to sail abroad for them would take up too much of their precious commission, he hadn’t denied it. But they need someone nearer to hand, someone who understands, someone keen to get their hands on the sugar. Nella stands, hands on her hips, thinking hard, staring into Frans and Agnes’ livelihood. And then it comes to her – a comment the first month she was in Amsterdam, sitting wide-eyed with an unwrapped cake resting in her lap. The speaker was a person Nella had immediately liked, a woman with grace and expertise. Honeycomb this morning and marzipan in the afternoon.

Nella crumples her husband’s list. Yes, she cries silently to the brickwork and beams, the caulked timber roof of her husband’s domain. I know what we must do.





Stadhuis


Nella follows a guard through the first underground passageway of the Stadhuis prison and then down a long flank of the building. She can hear the inmates’ rough coughs and complaints. The place is bigger than she thought. It seems to expand inexplicably as she walks it, escaping her sense of proportion. Cell after cell, brick after brick, she cannot seem to comprehend it.

Nella starts to hear shrieks and moans, clanging bars and whimpering. She holds her head high in case they can smell her growing fear, trying to block out the cacophony of male squeals.