Nella’s eyes flick to the pile of letters, visible on the worktop through the other room. ‘It was because your daughter was beginning to frighten me,’ she says. ‘But she never replied, and neither did you. I wanted to know why she was sending me these pieces.’
‘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.
Marin’s cleverness has endured until the end, enabling her to leave unseen. Her spirit has slipped through their fingers. Even in her final breath has she evaded, keeping for herself the moment of her death.
‘No,’ Nella chokes. ‘No. Marin, do you hear me?’
But Nella knows that she is no longer there. Standing with Cornelia at the side of the bed, they touch Marin’s face. She is covered in a sheen of moisture, as if she’s been lying in the rain.
Shaking, Cornelia gathers up Marin’s solitary legacy from her inert breast. She lifts Thea up, her entire hand cupping the baby’s tiny skull. Cornelia has swaddled her with so many lengths of cotton, only her nutshell face peeps through. Nella and Cornelia remain at the bed, still obedient to Marin in their shock.
‘It isn’t possible,’ Nella breathes.
‘There was nothing I could do,’ says a voice at the open door. Nella jumps, turning in horror to see a large woman walking towards them, sleeves rolled up, built like an Assendelft cow-herd.
‘Who—’
‘Lysbeth Timmers,’ the woman interrupts. ‘Your maid found me in Smit’s List. You should take that child out of here immediately.’
‘She was the nearest,’ Cornelia mutters to Nella, her voice hoarse as she holds Thea tight. ‘You told me to, Madame.’
Nella stares at this Lysbeth Timmers, shielding Marin’s prone body from the stranger’s shrewd observance. In this odd, held calm, she wonders how she could have been so reckless, telling Cornelia to throw open their doors and expose their secrets. A fox in the hen house, Lysbeth stands with her hands on her hips.
‘She’s a wet-nurse,’ Cornelia whispers. ‘But she didn’t pass the midwife examination.’
‘I birthed four children of my own,’ Lysbeth answers equably, overhearing. She strides towards them, plucking Thea out of Cornelia’s arms.
‘No!’ Cornelia cries as Lysbeth carries the child to the threshold, where she pulls up a chair. The wet-nurse examines the baby back and front, as if Thea were a suspect vegetable at market. After running her reddened fingers over Thea’s tight little cap, without further ado she pulls down her loosened corset and shirt. She hikes Thea onto her dark pink nipple and lets the child feed. ‘You’ve done a bad job,’ she observes.
‘What do you mean?’ Cornelia says. Nella hears the inexplicable panic in her voice.
Lysbeth looks up at her. ‘Swaddling her like this.’
Exhausted, Nella bristles. ‘We’re not paying you for your criticism, Mrs Timmers,’ she says.
‘Look,’ says Lysbeth, unruffled. ‘Their limbs are like wax at this age. If you bind them wrong, you’ll have a crooked spine and twisted legs by the time she’s one year old.’
She pulls Thea off her breast and begins unravelling her like a parcel. In a second, she has whipped off the child’s cap.
Cornelia takes a step forward, tense, alert.
‘What’s the matter?’ Nella asks. In the rush to the Stadhuis, she had barely looked at the child the morning after the birth. But now, as she remembers Cornelia’s agitation – It doesn’t seem possible. It cannot be true – her own eyes see what the astonished maid was trying to tell her.
With her head of dark hair, so black for a Dutch baby, Thea’s newly washed skin is the colour of a candied walnut. The baby’s eyes have opened, and her irises are small pools of night. Nella comes closer; she cannot stop staring.
‘Thea,’ Cornelia breathes. ‘Oh, Toot.’
As if she has heard this, Otto’s daughter turns to the maid. She offers a newborn’s gaze; a world entirely of herself.
Lysbeth looks up at Nella, waiting for her to speak. As the silence in the room thickens, Marin’s words begin to race around Nella’s head. This child will be far from convenient. If he survives, this child will be stained. Surely Lysbeth can hear her hammering heart? Beside her, Cornelia seems paralysed.
‘You will be amply rewarded – for all your help. A guilder a day,’ Nella manages to say, a tremor in her voice revealing the shock at what she’s seeing; a face in a face, a secret rising. From back to front, I love you.
Lysbeth puffs out her cheeks in contemplation, her rough hand gently patting Thea’s black hair. The illegal wet-nurse takes in the paintings, the pendulum clock, the silver ewer. Her eyes focus on the huge cabinet holding their miniature lives, standing so opulent, so redundant, that Nella feels ashamed.
‘I’m sure I will, Madame,’ Lysbeth finally observes. ‘I’ll take four guilders a day.’
Nella is still too astonished to say much, but she’s been in Amsterdam long enough to know that one barters as soon as breathes. Generally, she feels relieved that Lysbeth seems to desire their money more than their secrets, but perhaps the woman is enjoying her sudden luck too much. I will not be beholden, Nella tells herself. The wet-nurse seems to know the chaos that swirls beneath the surface, but unfortunately she also knows her price.
Maybe Johannes was right – even abstracts such as silence can be negotiated as one might a haunch of deer, a brace of pheasant, a handsome slab of cheese. She thinks of Johannes’ dwindled chest of guilders. You must go and see Hanna, she reminds herself. All that sugar needs to sell. But when? Things are already spilling over, just as Otto said they would.
‘Two guilders a day, Madame.’
Lysbeth Timmers wrinkles her nose. ‘Given the unusual circumstances I’m sure you’ll understand. Three.’
I nearly told Frans Meermans that Marin had birthed his child, Nella thinks, inwardly wincing at what might have happened had he caught that secret too. ‘So be it, Mrs Timmers,’ she says. ‘Three guilders a day. For all your help.’
Lysbeth nods, satisfied. ‘You can rely on me. I’m not interested in the burgomasters.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mrs Timmers.’
Lysbeth grins. ‘Like that, is it? Well, a father’s a father in my world. All the same. And she’s a pretty one, make no mistake.’