The Miniaturist(98)

‘Johannes,’ she calls. ‘I will come for you!’

‘No,’ says a voice. Nella is sure she hears it – a woman’s voice, coming from the top of the gallery stairs. She turns, searching blindly for its owner. Then she sees it – the sudden movement, the unmistakeable dip and flash of a pale blonde head.





Daughters


Her blood singing notes so high she doesn’t think them possible, Nella runs from the Stadhuis. She runs faster than she has ever run in her life, faster than when she was a girl, chasing Carel or Arabella through the woods and fields. People turn to watch her, this mad young woman with her mouth wide open, her eyes streaming – with the wind, they suppose. Where is she, Nella thinks, where has she gone? The burgomasters haven’t got her yet. There was no sign of her when Nella had stumbled to the bottom of the gallery steps, so she ran up the Heiligeweg and is now on the Kalverstraat. Nella, always nimble, propelled by a force that lets her fly.

But when she reaches the miniaturist’s house, she stops dead.

The door is still there, but the sign of the sun has gone. The rays of the heavenly body have been roughly hacked from the brickwork, the motto is half vanished, all that is left is For A Toy. Mounds of brick dust pile up on the step and the door has been left ajar.

Finally – today of all days – Nella can go inside. She looks up and down the street. The wool-seller opposite is nowhere to be seen. Let them put me in the Spinhuis for trespassing, she thinks, let them drown me too.

Nella pushes the door open and slips into a small room. It is shockingly bare, the floorboards scratched and dirty, empty shelves on exposed walls. How Cornelia would love to attack this place with her vinegar and beeswax. It looks as if it’s never been inhabited.

There is another room at the back, but that looks stripped of life as well. Nella moves silently up a wooden staircase, thinking her ribs will barely cage her heaving lungs.

When she gets to the top, her breath stops in her throat. A wide worktop has been built, running round all four walls; another square room, the floorboards dusty, the windows smeared with streaks of rain. But on the worktop, a world.

Tiny, unfinished pieces of furniture scatter across one part of the bench. Half-sawn and abandoned – oak, ash, mahogany, beech – chairs and tables, beds and cots, even a coffin, dressers, picture frames. There are enough pieces here to furnish ten, twenty cabinets, a lifetime of supplies. In a charred-out hearth, minuscule copper pans and imperfect pewter saucers spill like foreign currency, and the arms of a shrunken candlestick reach out like tiny tendrils.

And then the dolls. Rows and rows of puppet citizens – old men, young ladies, priests and militiamen, a herring-seller, a boy with a bandage on his eyes – and is that Arnoud Maakvrede, with his apron and a round red face? Some headless, others legless, some with blank faces, others with their hair elaborately curled, small hats the size of moths’ heads.

With trembling fingers, Nella sorts through the city of Amsterdam for a new Johannes, for one last desperate hope that he will live. Sunday at sundown – the three words wreathe in her mind like a never-ending curse. She spies a baby, no larger than her thumbnail, curled up, eyes closed with a small smile.

Then she cries out. Before her is a miniature house, small enough to sit in her palm. It is her house – nine rooms and five human figures carved within, the woodwork considered and intricate. Each room contains a miniature of the miniature she was sent, the green chairs, the lute, the cradle. Astonished, she encloses her life in the centre of her fist.

Nella puts it in her coat pocket with the baby, and after some hesitation she takes Arnoud too. The old residue of Cornelia’s superstition about idols is difficult to shake off, but Nella grips them tight, desperate for some comfort in the absence of any miniature Johannes.

Stacked up neatly and clipped with a peg, a pile of letters lies to Nella’s left. Her hands still shaking, she picks them up and begins to flick through the sheaf. One: Please – I have come to see you several times, but still you do not answer. Another: I received your miniature. Are you saying I shouldn’t marry him? Another: My husband threatens to stop this, but then I cannot bear to live. Another: You sent my twelve-year-old a cat; I must ask you to desist. Another: Thank you. He has been dead ten years and I miss him every day. Another: How did you know? I feel a madness creeping in. Some are merely lists: Two puppies, black and white, but one must be a runt. A looking-glass, holding a beautiful face.

Nella rifles for her own, and there it is, the first one written in October last year when she was newly arrived, when Marin stirred the silt and Cornelia could not yet be counted on as a friend. I cannot guess, she’d written, but that you are trained in the art of small things. How long ago that feels.

All this time, she thinks, I have been watched and guarded, taught and taunted. But never has she felt more vulnerable. Here she is – hidden in the middle of so many of Amsterdam’s women, their secret fears and hopes. She is no different. She is Agnes Meermans. She is the twelve-year-old. She is the woman who will miss her husband every day. We are legion, we women; in thrall to the miniaturist. I thought she was stealing my life, but in truth she opened its compartments and let me look inside.

Wiping her eyes, she finds all her other notes – including the long missive she lost the day Jack turned up in the hall, in which she requested the board game verkeerspel. It is still attached to the promissory note of five hundred guilders. Let that be the oil on your front door’s stubborn hinges, she had written, but the miniaturist hadn’t even exchanged it. She hadn’t taken the money.