The Miniaturist(100)
‘In all honesty, Madame, I haven’t seen her for years.’ He clears his throat and worries his puff of hair, patting his skull as if to keep in the grief quivering up towards the surface. ‘All these letters kept arriving, and then I discovered she’d placed this notice in Smit’s List. “All, and yet nothing”.’
‘But—’
‘It is hard for me to believe that Petronella was trying to frighten you.’
Nella thinks of Agnes, her bitten-down nails, her strange, distracted manner. ‘I imagine she frightened many of us, Seigneur.’
He frowns. ‘My daughter has a great wonder for the world, Madame. But I concede; she is often greatly dismissive of the way it presents itself to her. She always said there was something beyond her reach and she called it “the fleeting forever”.’ He sits at the end of the bed, his feet not touching the floor. ‘If only she’d been happy with clocks!’ he exclaims. ‘But Petronella long desired to live outside the boundaries of measured time. Always wayward, always curious. She mocked the way people clung to their timepieces, how everything had to be in order. My work was too restrictive for her, and yet the creations she put together in my workshop would barely sell. I admit – they were extraordinary, but I was loath to put my name to them and claim them as my own.’
‘Why ever not?’
He smiles. ‘Because they didn’t tell the time! They measured other things – things people didn’t want to be reminded of. Mortality, a broken heart. Ignorance and folly. Where numbers should have been, she painted customers’ faces. She sent them messages that sprang out of the clock when the hand reached twelve. I had to beg her to stop. She said it was because she could see into their souls, their inner time, a place that paid no heed to hours and minutes. It was like trying to tame a cat.’
‘Did you believe that she could see into people’s souls?’ Nella asks. ‘She seemed to know so much that was going to happen to me.’
Windelbreke rubs his chin. ‘Did she?’ he says. He looks towards his daughter’s workshop. ‘You sound as adamant as all those other women who wrote to me. So keen to give up self-dominion.’
‘No! If anything, Seigneur, she has helped me take it back.’
She is silenced by the truth of this, her protestation. Windelbreke spreads his hands. ‘She gave you back your own possession.’ He smiles, looking shyly pleased. ‘All I can tell you is this, Madame. My daughter believed readily that what she was doing had purpose. But I tried to teach her that her gift of observation could only go so far. Other people would have to choose to see what she saw too, or she’d wear herself to nothing. If she didn’t reply to you, perhaps she felt you’d understood. You saw what she was trying to say.’
Nella can feel tears coming. ‘But I don’t understand,’ she says.
‘But I wonder if you do.’
Nella stares at the lines on her palms, leading off her skin, directing her to places she cannot see. She clenches them, rolling up these maps of her self. ‘Perhaps I do,’ she says. Windelbreke unnerves her with his probing questions. She wants to run home to the Herengracht, to be with Marin and Cornelia and Thea, to sit with Dhana and stroke her ears. But they will ask about Johannes and she will have to tell them. Sunday at sundown. She doesn’t know if she has the strength.
‘I don’t know what she’s been doing all these years – what strange skills she’s picked up or the company she’s kept,’ Lucas Windelbreke says. ‘She’s the cleverest person I ever knew. But if you see my daughter, Madame, please tell her to come home.’
Nella leaves Windelbreke, a daughter missing, slowly packing her beautiful handiwork into a set of boxes. ‘It can’t stay here,’ he says. ‘But I’m not throwing it away. Perhaps she’ll come to Bruges and retrieve it.’ He sounds unconvinced.
Nella thinks of the women throughout Amsterdam waiting for their next delivery. Some in trepidation, many in hope, others with the glazed eye of those who cannot live without something else to support them, without the miniaturist and her quality so elusive. They will wait for their happiness. And when it doesn’t come – when the pieces stop, as they stopped for Nella – what will they do then? These women gave her their letters, and the miniaturist exchanged them for the currency of themselves. They own themselves, to barter, hoard or spend.
Nella walks back down the Kalverstraat, oblivious to the calls of shopkeepers. Sunday at sundown. How will I tell them? she asks herself. How will I tell them that Johannes is going to have a stone put round his neck before being thrown into the sea?
Numbly, she keeps walking through the streets, onto the Golden Bend. Cornelia is standing at the door, waiting, and at the sight of her, Nella’s news of Johannes, and the secret of Lucas Windelbreke and the miniaturist, dies in her throat. The girl is pale and sombre. She looks so much older than her years.
‘We did something wrong,’ is all Cornelia says. ‘We did it wrong.’
A Closing Door
Time, in these instances, is not easy to measure. Nella ploughs the freshest of her memories – leaving Marin awake, running to the Stadhuis and then to the Kalverstraat in search of a salvation that was never going to come. All of it on this self-same day – but Slabbaert’s sentence, Windelbreke’s secrets – they feel as if they happened last year. Marin has swallowed time, and on the map of her pale skin, Nella cannot find the clue of when she sank and how she disappeared.