The Miniaturist(84)
The Hopeful Loaf
Outside her husband’s warehouse, Nella waits for Hanna and Arnoud Maakvrede, Johannes’ key around her neck. Her mind rings with this new truth of Marin and Johannes; their understanding made of light as much as shadow. Love a beam of sun which sometimes clouds the heart. It seems that Marin viewed marriage as a ceding of something, whereas so many women – including my own mother, Nella realizes – see it as the only possible form of influence a woman may have. Marriage is supposed to harness love, to increase a woman’s power, Nella supposes. But does it? Marin believed herself to be more powerful without it. Love has been left unharnessed, and indeed extraordinary things have happened. A child, a prison cell, yes – but also choice and the moulding of one’s own fate.
After the revelation about her past, Marin had wanted some distraction, some occupation – she had practically demanded it – and Nella had taken her chance. You weren’t callous, she tells herself, leaning up against the warehouse wall; it was absolute necessity. So, as Nella sat at the small table in the back room, away from the prying eyes of the canal, Marin had written a letter to Arnoud Maakvrede in Johannes’ hand. She had agreed with Nella’s new idea, inviting Maakvrede to taste the sugar with a proposition to sell it solely in the republic; a quicker sale to a ready audience. My marriage has afforded me a little influence at least, Nella thought wryly.
Marin’s voice plays through Nella’s head. ‘The profit-bar is ours to set. There are fifteen hundred cones, which I estimate, if we do well, could make thirty thousand guilders. Start higher than it will sell. Remember that if they want to purchase, we’ll be cutting the profit three ways now, and the bulk of the money still needs to go to Frans.’
‘But what if Arnoud has heard about Johannes – what if he won’t buy?’
‘It’s the guilder over godliness. All we can do is pray that Arnoud Maakvrede’s an Amsterdammer before he’s an angel.’
‘He might know we want to sell the stock quickly. He might see the rot.’
‘Hold your ground, Nella. Price it up, and make it seem that you’re discounting it because of the spores.’
Nella could not help admiring how Marin drew up the bridge of her sadness when it really was important, how she could put herself away somewhere others couldn’t reach. She wondered if she herself was too small for this big idea, that she would be swamped by it, drowned by her own ambition. And yet Marin gave her all the words she wanted to hear. ‘Petronella,’ she said quietly. ‘You are not doing this alone. I am here.’
Across the abandoned verkeerspel board, Marin’s hand reached out for hers and squeezed it, and in her astonishment, Nella thought her heart might burst.
Nella sees the confectioner couple approach in the cold light. She wonders if someone has told them what’s happened at the Stadhuis, but the scandal of a wealthy merchant’s arrest does not yet seem to have penetrated the city streets. Cornelia has reported nothing along the canal path – perhaps Aalbers, in his decency, has managed to keep the Stadhuis prison guards silent? But it will only be a matter of time before everyone knows what’s happened to Johannes Brandt. A strutting nine-year-old brat like Christoffel cannot be bridled as easily as a prison guard with mouths to feed. The surface of Amsterdam thrives on these mutual acts of surveillance, the neighbourly smothering of a person’s spirit.
Outside, in the shadow of the warehouse, Arnoud looks less inflamed, his apron replaced by a neat black suit and hat. He seems a different presence to the one battering his honeycomb trays. It’s as if the air has shrunk him.
‘Seigneur, Madame,’ Nella says, as she turns the key in the lock. ‘New Year greetings. Thank you both for coming.’
‘In your husband’s letter, he made no mention we would be meeting you,’ Arnoud says, unable to conceal his surprise at seeing Nella here alone.
‘Indeed, Seigneur,’ Nella replies, feeling Hanna’s shrewd eye upon her. ‘My husband is away.’
‘And Marin Brandt?’
‘Visiting family, Seigneur.’
‘I see.’ Arnoud is visibly perturbed by Nella’s youth and sex, as if she is a trick, a play-act – but just you wait, she thinks, clenching her fists in the cuffs of her coat.
‘Come this way, Seigneur, Madame. And mind your feet on the rungs.’
Leading Arnoud and Hanna up the ladder, Nella thinks of Agnes’ miniature hand back home. The loaf may not have turned any blacker in the cabinet, but outside that shrunken world a day has passed, another night of weather, another night of damp. Nella can hardly guess what she will find. What was once, is now no longer. Her heart starts thumping harder as she hears Arnoud wheezing up the rungs, Hanna’s neat step tapping the ladder behind him.
‘Here they are,’ she says, indicating the loaves when they reach the eaves.
‘I hadn’t expected there would be so much,’ says Arnoud.
‘Imagine it transformed to guilders.’ He raises his eyebrows and Nella winces inwardly at her own crass patter. Think of Marin, she tells herself. Be as affable as Johannes.
Hanna approaches the Surinam side and inhales sharply. ‘Rot?’ she asks.
‘Only on a few,’ says Nella. ‘The season has not been kind.’
Arnoud kneels down reverently, like a priest before an altar. ‘May I?’ he asks.