The Miniaturist(81)

‘Did Jack ever tell you who he worked for on the Kalverstraat?’ she asks.

‘He worked for lots of people.’

‘A woman from Bergen? With blonde hair? She trained with a clockmaker.’

Johannes takes a small bite of one of the sugared doughnuts and lights a candle on his table. Nella feels his cool regard on the top of her head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’d have remembered that.’

‘She is the miniaturist I hired to furnish the cabinet house. She made Rezeki’s puppet.’

At this, his tired eyes light up. ‘A woman?’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘What extraordinary skill and observation. I’d have been her patron, given half a chance.’ He reaches into his pocket, and with a captivated expression, tenderly lifts out the little dog. ‘I take her with me everywhere I go. She is the greatest comfort.’

‘Really?’ she whispers. Johannes hands her the miniature, and respectfully, Nella takes it, with a trembling fingertip stroking the softness of Rezeki’s mouse-skin head. On the dog’s skull, there is not the slightest trace of red. Nella checks again, but nothing remains of the rusty mark she had once been so convinced of.

‘I don’t understand,’ she breathes.

‘Nor I. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Nella peers one last time at the animal’s tiny skull. Nothing. Did I even see it? she asks herself. Doubt now riots against certainty – what she has seen and not seen these past few months swirls inside her head.

‘I sometimes wonder, if I sit very still in here,’ Johannes says, ‘if I have already died too.’

‘You are alive, Johannes. You are alive.’

‘A strange world,’ he says. ‘Human beings going around reassuring each other that they haven’t died. We know this is not Rezeki, and yet we somehow feel it is. Thus a solid object makes a formless memory. If only it were the other way round, that our minds could conjure into being anything we wanted.’ He sighs, drawing his hands down his face. ‘When Otto left, for the little I recognized myself, I could have been dead.’

He pauses, putting Rezeki back in his pocket. ‘This cell shall now be the compass of my waking life,’ he says, spanning his arms out like a crooked windmill. ‘There are horizons through the brickwork, Nella. You wait and see.’

Nella leaves him then, no longer able to bear that little room. The moss and the mice, the sounds of men screeching like birds; Johannes is locked in an aviary, her great owl surrounded by crows. Nella stumbles out into the winter sunshine, and only then does she cry – fierce, quiet tears, as she presses against the city’s wall.





Verkeerspel


As she pushes open the front door, the desire to tell Marin about the state of the sugar and Johannes’ condition dies in Nella’s throat.

In the middle of the hallway, rocking on its tin runners, is a full-sized cradle. Made of oak, it has been inlaid with marquetry of roses and daisies, honeysuckle and cornflowers. It has a hood, lined with velvet and fringed with lace. Beautiful and shocking, it is an exact replica of the cradle upstairs in the cabinet.

Still shaken from her visit to Johannes, Nella shuts the door. What she had first taken for a mock, a cradle sent to a woman whose marriage was a farce, has become a reality. Cornelia scurries up from the kitchen.

‘What is this?’ Nella says. ‘Do you think it came from—’

‘No,’ Cornelia says sharply. ‘Madame Marin ordered it. It arrived in a crate from Leiden.’

Nella touches the main body of the wood. It seems to sing under her fingers, the marquetry so finely tuned. ‘It’s the same as she sent me.’

‘I know,’ Cornelia replies. ‘Your somebody.’

Marin emerges from the salon. Up close, she now seems to have the girth of an oak. ‘The craftsmanship is extraordinary,’ she observes. ‘It is just as I imagined.’

‘How much did this cost to make, to transport it here?’ Nella imagines Johannes’ shrinking cloud of money finally evaporating into the air. ‘Marin, if any of our neighbours saw this arrive, what on earth would they think?’

‘Exactly the same as you.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed your mind whirring.’ Marin moves heavily towards her. ‘You want to take my child for yourself.’

How does Marin understand people’s thoughts quicker than anyone else? I could bluff, Nella thinks, but what’s the point? I was the one who said there must be no more secrets between us.

‘Marin, I don’t want to take your child—’

‘But you suppose he’d be convenient,’ Marin persists, covering her stomach with her hands as if Nella would wrench it there and then. ‘The last sacrifice? Giving up my baby for my brother – for you.’

‘Johannes is in the Stadhuis prison, Marin. And if we did pretend for a while that the child is mine, would that really be so awful? We could prove Johannes has the same desires – as other men. Don’t you want him to live?’

‘You really cannot see.’

‘See what? I see more than you.’

‘Petronella, this child will be far from convenient. You can believe that.’