On nights when Maria and Juni climbed out the window to poke around and look down lanes and sandy paths, they felt more fortunate than the Jansens’ daughters, who wore heavy silk dresses and undergarments constructed with bones, and tight shoes that left blisters on their feet, and were rarely allowed to go out on their own, even now that they were married and living in their husbands’ homes. Juni was called upon by young men and boys who were dazzled by her beauty, but no one noticed Maria. She’d learned a lesson from Hannah and Rebecca, and to protect herself from love she wore a black petticoat under her dress, the hem stitched with blue thread, the fabric washed with cloves and blackthorn. She knew how to walk in the shadows so she wouldn’t shine in the darkness. No one looked at her twice.

Often Maria and Juni borrowed the donkey kept in the stable with the family’s horses. They called the sulky creature Slechte Jongen, “Bad Boy,” for he would balk and refuse to carry them home, forcing them to pull him along with a rope to ensure they’d be back in time to start the family’s breakfast. They were almost children again when they urged the donkey to keep moving, holding their stomachs, keeping their hands over their mouths so their laughter wouldn’t rise into the air. But their world was not one meant for children, only for obedience and work. It was an island where some people had everything and others had nothing, and you could judge who was who from the shoes that they wore, the color of their skin, and whether or not their eyes were kept downcast while walking on the winding streets.

On some nights the girls visited the caves north of the city where escaped slaves had hidden, often until they were nothing but bones. Between 1662 and 1669, twenty-four thousand slaves had been shipped through Curaçao by the Dutch West India Company and the Royal African Company in Jamaica. These caves had been sacred places for the original people of the island, the Arawaks, all gone now, murdered or killed off by disease or shipped to work on plantations on other islands. The original people had left behind drawings that were more than a thousand years old. It was here, where marvelous renderings of the life they had known or imagined had been etched into the rock, that Maria often lit a white candle in memory of Hannah Owens. She was grateful for the years when she had been hidden away from the rest of the world in Devotion Field, and for the gift Hannah had given her when she taught her to read and write.