The Miniaturist(9)

‘I know how a man drowns,’ he murmurs. ‘You seem to forget I’ve had to spend most of my life on the sea.’

There is a warning in Johannes’ voice, but Marin keeps going. ‘I asked the man clearing the dockside why the burgomasters had drowned them. He said they didn’t have the guilders to appease their God.’

Breathless, she stops. Johannes seems almost bereft, sagging in his chair. ‘I thought God forgives all, Marin?’ he says. He doesn’t seem to want an answer to his question.

The air is hot, the atmosphere a bruise. Red-faced, Cornelia appears and clears the plates, and Johannes rises from his chair. The three women look at him expectantly, but he moves out of the room, batting the air with his hand. Marin and Cornelia seem to know what this means, Marin taking up the book she has brought with her to breakfast. Nella eyes the title – Hooft’s play, True Fool.

‘How often does he go away?’ Nella asks.

Marin puts the book down, tutting in displeasure as a page bends the wrong way on the table. ‘My brother leaves. He comes back. He leaves again,’ she sighs. ‘You’ll see. It’s not difficult. Anyone could do it.’

‘I didn’t ask if it was difficult. And who is Frans Meermans?’

‘Cornelia, how is Petronella’s parakeet this morning?’ Marin asks.

‘He’s well, Madame. Well.’ Cornelia avoids Nella’s eye. Today there are no giggles, no sly remarks. She seems tired, as if something is bothering her.

‘He needs clean air,’ says Nella. ‘The kitchen must be so full of cooking fumes. I’d like to fly him round my room.’

‘He’ll peck at something valuable,’ says Marin.

‘He won’t.’

‘He’ll fly out of the window.’

‘I’ll keep it closed.’

Marin slams her book shut and walks out. The maid straightens, narrowing her blue eyes in her mistress’s wake. After a moment’s hesitation, she too leaves the room. Nella slumps back in her chair, staring sightlessly into Johannes’ map. The door is still open, and she can hear Marin and Johannes whispering outside the study.

‘For the love of Christ, Marin. Have you got nothing better to do?’

‘You’ve a wife now. Where are you going?’

‘I also have a business.’

‘What business do you have on a Sunday?’

‘Marin, do you think this house is run by magic? I’m going to check the sugar.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Marin hisses. ‘I won’t allow this.’ Nella feels the tension condensing between the siblings, a second, silent language filling to the brim.

‘What other man lets his sister speak to him like this? Your word is not the law.’

‘Perhaps. But it’s closer than you think.’

Johannes strides out of the front door, and Nella hears the velvet suck of air, the outside once more shut away. She peers round the door and observes her new sister-in-law in the hallway. Marin has covered her face, and her shoulders hunch; a pose of misery.





Trompe l’?il


As Marin turns upstairs and her footsteps echo away, Nella creeps down to the lower ground floor, where Peebo clicks for his mistress. To her surprise, Peebo’s cage is now hanging in the best kitchen. No cooking takes place here – that exertion is saved for the working kitchen, across the corridor. The best kitchen is a room used solely to display the Brandt collection of China-ware, free of spattering pots and pans, the walls unstained. Nella wonders how long Peebo has been breathing clean air, and more intriguingly, who committed this act of charity.

Otto sits at a small side table, slowly buffing the silver cutlery they will be using for dinner. He is not tall, but his shoulders are wide and he looks too big for his chair. On seeing her at the threshold, he points towards Peebo’s cage. ‘He’s a noisy little thing,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry. I’d have him in my room—’

‘I like his noise.’

‘Oh. Good. Thank you for putting him there.’

‘It wasn’t me, Madame.’

Madame. It feels lovely when he says it. His shirt is immaculate, neatly pressed, no loose threads or stains. His arms beneath the calico move with unconscious grace. How old is he? Thirty, perhaps a little younger. His boots shine like a general’s. Everything about him is so fresh, so unfamiliar. To be called Madame in her own house by a servant in such perfect clothes is suddenly the apogee of her very being. Her heart swells with gratitude but Otto doesn’t seem to notice.

Blushing, Nella walks to the cage and begins to stroke her parakeet through the bars. Peebo makes a gentle ick-ick sound, and runs his beak through his feathers as though in search of something.

‘Where’s he from?’ Otto asks.

‘I don’t know. My uncle bought him.’

‘Not born from an egg in Assendelft, then?’

Nella shakes her head. Nothing so bright and otherly would ever be born in Assendelft. She feels awkward but giddy – Otto knows the name of her village. What would her mother, the grandfathers in the town square, the little schoolchildren, make of this man?

As Otto picks up a fork and runs a soft cloth through each of the tines, Nella presses on the cage bars until her fingertips turn white, craning her neck as she follows the polished wall tiles, right up to the ceiling. Someone has painted a trick of the eye upon it – a glass dome pushes up beyond the plaster towards an impossible sky.