![]() ![]() What follows for Nella is a series of puzzles. ![]() Not exactly a fun town for a marzipan lover with a cabinet house in need of tiny new inhabitants. Thanks to its Calvinist burgomasters, the people of Amsterdam eat their sugar in secret, and are forbidden to own dolls or any other replicas of the human form. Lonely, she longs for the company of her parakeet, Peebo, but he has been confined by Marin to the kitchen, the sudden absence of his bright feathers symbolising the puritan repression at work in the wider city. Johannes does not come to her at night, and his wedding gift is a cabinet house – an exquisitely diminutive replica of his own property – which he now invites Nella to fill with miniature furniture at his expense. The marriage is more arrangement than love match, and for Nella, a country girl, Johannes and his household are an alarming prospect: his waspish sister, Marin, terrifies her half to death, and she finds it hard to lift her eyes from the startling sight of his manservant, Otto, a former slave. I t is 1686, and in Amsterdam, 18-year-old Nella Oortman arrives at the grand house of her new husband, the wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt. ![]()
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