Nella finds a sole miniaturist listed in a book of Amsterdam traders, someone excluded from the city’s rigid ruling system of guilds. But he gives her a magnificent wedding gift – a beautiful miniature replica of their house with money to furnish it. When Johannes finally appears he is kind but distant. With her bird banished to the kitchens, Nella is as alone as she has even been, alone with the sound of voices and footsteps that she hears making their way around the dark house by night. Nella is given Marin’s own room, a grand room in a grand house, decorated in paintings that depict hunted game in all its gore. But when the door opens, her groom, Johannes Brandt, is absent, taken away by work, and in his place is his sister Marin, an imposing, unfriendly husbandless woman, and two peculiar servants, Cornelia and Otto. But here Nella is, with nothing but her pet bird to remind her of her home and family. But no courtship took place, there was no marriage to speak of, no intimacy or celebration, instead just a contract. In the Autumn of 1686, 18-year-old Nella Oortman arrives on the doorstep of a merchant’s house in Amsterdam.
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