New Alphabet
After opening the curtain to let in the morning sun, Cornelia stands at the end of Nella’s rumpled bed. ‘The Seigneur’s arrived from London,’ she says to the small foot poking through the bedclothes. ‘You’ll breakfast together.’
Nella’s head shoots up from the pillow, her face puffy as a cherub’s. She can hear every maid along the Herengracht, their mops clanking in buckets like muted bells as they wash the filth from their front steps. ‘How long have I been asleep?’ she asks.
‘Long enough,’ replies the maid.
‘I could have been in this bed for three months, under a spell.’
Cornelia laughs. ‘What a spell.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing, Madame.’ She offers her hands. ‘Come. I have to dress you.’
‘You were up late.’
‘I was, was I?’ Cornelia’s tone is impudent, and this confidence makes Nella falter. None of her mother’s maids spoke to her in such a way.
‘I heard the front door in the night,’ she says. ‘And one above me. I’m sure of it.’
‘Impossible,’ replies the maid. ‘Toot locked it before you went up.’
‘Toot?’
‘It’s what I call Otto. He thinks nicknames are silly, but I like them.’ Cornelia takes an undershirt and puts it over Nella’s head and rigs her into a blue gown shot with silver. ‘The Seigneur paid for this,’ she says, her voice full of admiration. Nella’s excitement at the gift quickly fades – the sleeves are too long, and however tightly Cornelia ties her in, her ribcage seems to shrink within the oversized corset.
‘Madame Marin sent the seamstress your measurements,’ Cornelia tuts, pulling the stays tighter and tighter, dismayed by the acres of ribbon left over. ‘Your mother put them in a letter. What will I do with all this spare material?’
‘The seamstress must have got it wrong,’ says Nella, looking down at her swamped arms. ‘I’m sure my mother knows my size.’
When Nella enters the dining room, Johannes is talking with Otto, murmuring over some lengthy documents. On seeing his wife he bows, an amused expression on his face. The colour of his eyes has solidified, from fish to flint. Marin sips lemon water, her eyes fixed on the gigantic map on the wall behind her brother’s head, pieces of land suspended in gaping paper oceans.
‘Thank you for my dress,’ Nella manages to say. Otto moves to the corner and waits, hands full with Johannes’ paperwork.
‘This must be one of them,’ replies Johannes. ‘I ordered several. But it does not look as I imagined it would. Is it not a little large? Marin, is it not a little large?’
Marin takes a seat, tidying her napkin into a perfect white square, a loose tile on the black expanse of her lap.
‘I fear it may be, Seigneur,’ says Nella. The quiver in her voice is embarrassing. Where was it, along the line of communication between Assendelft and Amsterdam, that her bridal body was shrunk to parody? She looks at the map on the wall, determined not to pick at the ludicrous length of her sleeves. There is Nova Hollandia, palm trees fringing its coast, turquoise seas and ebony faces inviting the onlooker in.
‘Never mind,’ Johannes says, ‘Cornelia will trim you down.’ His hand wraps round a small glass of beer. ‘Come and sit, eat something.’
A hardened loaf and a slim fish lie on a plate in the centre of the damask tablecloth. ‘We are eating frugally this morning,’ Marin explains, eyeing her brother’s glass. ‘A gesture of humility.’
‘Or privation as a thrill,’ Johannes murmurs, taking up a forkful of herring. The room is silent except for the sound of his gentle mastication, the bread a block between them, dry, untouched. Nella tries to swallow her fear, staring at her empty plate, noticing how the aura of sadness so quickly gathers around her husband. ‘Think of the things you’ll eat, Nella,’ her brother Carel had said. ‘I heard in Amsterdam they scoff strawberries dipped in gold.’ Now how little impressed he’d be.
‘Marin, have some of this fine ale,’ Johannes says eventually.
‘It gives me indigestion,’ she replies.
‘The Amsterdammer’s diet of money and shame. You can’t trust yourself. Go on, be defiant. Bravery in this city is so rare these days.’
‘I just don’t feel well.’
Johannes laughs at this, but Marin’s face is pinched in humourless pain. ‘Papist,’ she says.
During the self-improving breakfast, Johannes does not apologize for failing to attend his new wife’s arrival the day before. It is to his sister he talks, whilst Nella is forced to roll up her shirtsleeves in order not to drag them through her piece of oily fish. Otto is dismissed and he bows, his fingers clasped carefully around the sheaves of paper. ‘See to it, Otto,’ Johannes says. ‘With my thanks.’ Nella wonders whether the men Johannes trades with also have a servant like Otto, or whether he is the only one. She scrutinizes Otto’s face for any expression of discomfort, but he seems sure and deft.
Bullion prices, paintings as currency, the carelessness of some of the cargo-packers moving his stock from Batavia – Marin devours Johannes’ far tastier titbits. If he ever seems reluctant, Marin snatches them, an honour which might evaporate. She takes his snippets of tobacco sales, those of silk and coffee, of cinnamon and salt. He talks of the shogunate’s new limitations of transporting gold and silver from Dejima, of the long-term damage this might cause, but how the VOC are determined that profit must come before pride.
Nella feels drunk with all this new information, but Marin’s head seems steady. What news of the pepper treaty with the Sultan of Bantam, and what does that mean for the VOC? Johannes tells her of the clove-planters’ rebellions in Ambon, their land over-populated with trees at the VOC’s behest. When Marin demands the exact nature of their unrest, he grimaces. ‘By now, the situation will have changed, Marin, and we’ll know nothing.’
‘And that, Johannes, is too often the problem.’ She asks him about some silk due to a tailor in Lombardy. ‘Who won the import right?’
‘I forget,’ he says.
‘Who, Johannes? Who?’
‘Henry Field. A merchant with the English East India,’ he replies.
Marin thumps her fist. ‘The English.’ Johannes looks at her, saying nothing. ‘Think of what this means, brother. Think. The last two years. Allowing it to wander to another man’s purse. We haven’t—’
‘But the English buy up our Haarlem linen.’
‘With their tight fists.’
‘They say the same of us.’
From bullion to sultans via the English, Marin’s lexicon is a serious astonishment. Johannes is surely crossing a forbidden boundary – for what other woman knows this much about the ins and outs of the VOC?
Nella feels quite invisible and ignored – it is her first day here and neither of them has asked her a single question, though at least the mercenary debate gives Nella an opportunity to inspect her new husband under lowered lids. That suntanned skin – she and Marin are ghostly in comparison. Nella imagines him with a pirate’s hat, his ship beating the dark-blue waves of a faraway sea.