Work Text:
[Obverse]
The smell of tallow in his study is pungent after hours of working in the dark. Johannes’ temples throb pouring over the ledgers, guilders dancing behind his eyes whenever he shuts them. He’s grown so tired of Amsterdam, of money, of Marin, this eternal chase for a sense of safety none of them will ever truly have.
Letting out a sigh, he gets up from his desk to open the window. Through the blackness of the city beyond, he inhales more than just air: The night is ripe with the scent of secrets. There’s sewage and soil, a fresh blackberry pie cooling on a windowsill, tobacco, the dying breath of the final rosebuds in the garden slipping away as the cold creeps in.
How he longs to be back at sea where there is nothing but salt on the breeze. Marin, though herself wishing she could come, has never actually understood what it is about those voyages that nourishes him. To her, they’re trades - the guilders, the product, and the power the essence of his trips - whereas to Johannes, what he seeks are the rolling nights on his ship where the world consists only of him and his crew.
Out there, life is so self-contained, it’s all his. There are no burgomasters, no Pastor Pellicorne, no VOC, and no guilds. On a ship, no letters can reach him. The days are what he makes them, and he and his men live entirely by their own laws.
But every ship that sails must come into harbor eventually.
Now Johannes is a city merchant, a married man. Marin broke the news of Nella to him unceremoniously after his trip before last and Johannes laughed at her, furious. Twelve years he’s protected her secret refusal of Frans Meermans; he took the fall for her freedom without question and here his sister goes: bartering away his without consulting him.
He hates that he can see the need for it. Marin would be so much less infuriating if she wasn’t always right. Sat in the Oortman’s house in Assendelft listening to Nella play, he’d thought that perhaps he could do this. He’s away so much; he’d hardly have to lie with her. They could become good friends, perhaps even allies.
Far from Amsterdam, such a thing had seemed possible, but now that her arrival in the city is imminent, Johannes no longer believes it. She’ll be just another soul trapped in this household stuffed to the attic with secrets.
Marin, Otto, and Cornelia all have their freedom in this cage, but Johannes wonders whether that will be true for Nella. Marin tells him she’ll be liberated from a poor, stifling life in the country, but Johannes isn’t so sure there will be any liberty in a life here at all.
“You don’t know what a woman’s life is like,” Marin said to him earlier and Johannes bit back, “neither do you,” before locking himself away in his study.
By now, all the fight has left him. He’s been married three weeks and there is no undoing it anymore. Defeated, he sinks down onto his guilder chest, sitting with his arms braced on his thighs and head hung low.
Between the tendrils of his greasy hair, a velvet face pokes through. Rezeki, the only love of his that’s been uncomplicated.
“Hello, my beauty,” Johannes murmurs. “Did I wake you?”
Dhana still dozes in the corner, but Rezeki’s eyes are alert and curious. She pushes her tar black nose into his collar, sniffing him out. Her grey fur is as soft as the spring’s first pussy willows. She’s his girl, a survivor of this cruel city, simultaneously a protector and his protegee. For a dog, she’s done a marvel of internalizing the duality of man.
Sensing his unhappiness, Rezeki lets out a low whine and licks at his outstretched palm. He’d gotten Dhana to keep her company while he is away but nothing can change the fact that no one could fill the space they hold in their heart for one another. Out on the Atlantic ocean with nothing but the sound of the waves to comfort him at night, it’s her he misses the most: the weight of a companion at his feet.
He hasn’t longed to see Marin for a decade, always trusting in Otto and Cornelia, Amsterdam but a distant wife he holds commitment but no love for. Not even Jack Phillips crosses his mind out there. Only Rezeki’s love - pure as glittering amber, snow white sugar, crystal clear diamonds - can reach him there.
Stroking her ears, Johannes wonders whether Nella will see as much when she arrives. Will she be jealous or adopt the dog as the jewel of her eye as she is to him?
“It will be alright,” he says, unsure whether he’s saying it to Rezeki or himself.
Amsterdam has drowned many a man, Johannes thinks, but I won’t be one of them.
[Reverse]
Her new chamber is cramped. From every direction, her old life is pushing in on her: snake skin, books, birds, maps. Marin feels as if she’s lying in a coffin.
She is used to Johannes’ resentment but tonight, it stings in anew. He hasn’t a clue what it is she is working to preserve, what she fights for. In the midst of their heated conversation downstairs, she felt the life inside her roll, and the reminder of its presence had made her complacent, her cheeks too hot to think.
Six months ago, she would have pushed the door of his study open before he had time to lock it or pounded on the smooth panels until he relented, but tonight, she withdrew without protest, too tired to argue.
The facts are inescapable whether or not she chooses to shout them at him. They need Nella; between Johannes’ preferences and her situation, there is nothing but a wife to hang their family name on. Marin has let him slink by without an heir for two decades, but with her own child solidifying inside her, she’s come to see that they are running out of time playing this verkeerspel of theirs.
Amsterdam is coming for them; she can sense its net closing in on them.
Guilders in the face of a bachelor with a black manservant and an unmarried woman with an insolent maid had been enough, but even the protection of money is finite, and Marin fears for the coming year. There will be a child to hide soon.
The weight of their household’s secrets hangs as heavy as a millstone around her neck.
Part of her is willing this new complication to go away, but she has had the recipe for a draught stashed in her bible for two months now and never has she had the courage to make it, let alone drink it. How could she snuff out such a miracle only because Amsterdam cannot understand it?
They’ve kept Otto, haven’t they? Perhaps this will be no different. It’s a foolish fantasy, of course, but Marin needs hope to live. She needs the notion of a faraway world to live in this cloistered little city. She needs the furs under her dresses to fight the chill of this house from creeping into her bones.
It’s taken her thirty years to understand why her mother never held an ounce of resentment for the life Marin stole from her. Not until now does she understand that she’d do just the same for the life inside her, so bright in its existence it eclipses her own.
Is it a sin? It can’t be. Is it a crime? Perhaps, but the Brandt’s have always skated the edge of Amsterdam’s patience in that regard.
Lying in the dark with her limbs by her side and her hair loose on the pillow, she wonders whether this is what it would feel like to be buried. The weight of her life on her chest certainly weighs as much as the earth itself.
Her thoughts are disrupted by a soft, rhythmic knock at her door. She turns her head to look as if she could see the shadow of his feet under the door even though he's standing in the dark. The sound comes again and Marin can resist herself no longer. She kicks away her sheets and tiptoes to the door.
The wood presses into her body as she opens it, its solid against the growing curve of her stomach. In the crack between her room and the house, she’s eye to eye with Otto, two animals in a clearing.
That they still play at this game as if she will ever deny him entry seems silly to her, though she cannot shake the belief that it is precisely their rituals that keep them safe.
The floorboards creak under her feet as she takes a step back to let Otto in. He’s a shadow in her room safe for the glint of the moonlight bouncing off his skin. Even after so many years, Marin cannot understand how he can simultaneously throw her whole being out of sorts – send her heart skittering, hands trembling – and yet instil such a calm in her.
Marin locks the door. Sweat coats the bolt time and time again.
Otto lies down in her bed as if it’s his, his face silvered by the moon. When Marin sits down on the mattress, he rests his hand on her thigh. It doesn’t move, his palm just a warm weight that’s an assurance of his presence, a reminder of his quiet, ardent love. Inches away, her secret lies nestled under layers of skin and flesh.
Marin tries to blink away the tears that have sprung up without her permission, her throat closing up as though she’s been suddenly pulled underwater. She has to tell him before it eats her alive.
“Otto,” she says, her voice hoarse, and feels him perk up.