He has Catharina’s strong jaw and brown eyes, so dark as to be almost black, and thick copper hair which falls in loose waves around his shoulders. Anna’s gaze travels along the tablecloth to his hands. Compared to Catharina’s and her own, his are virtually unmarked. They are smooth and alabaster pale, as if carved from a stone slab, and clearly belong to a gentleman of leisure whose entire existence involves being waited on. For some reason, their purity bothers her. Even her father’s hands were rougher, marred by his early merchant days, the calluses and blackened nailbeds standing testament to his daily inspection of goods in the company warehouse. The van Shurmans’ wealth, by contrast, seems somehow ill-gotten, not the result of hard labour, but something far uglier – idleness, perhaps. An inheritance that has not been earned. Anna has heard tales about the glaring pretensions of Catholic families, their rooms shamelessly papered with tooled leather and gold leaf, their gardens overflowing with expensive water features and marble statues. But the van Shurmans are devoted Protestants. Perhaps this is simply how people live who have amassed so much wealth it can’t be spent any faster.

Her father often railed against such excess. If money was the root of all evil, he used to say, then idleness and the worship of Papist idolatry were its bedfellows. Anna’s family had been rich, but not this rich. They didn’t eat to indulgence as though food was going out of fashion. The only luxuries Lodewijk permitted in their house on the Herengracht were clothes and books. Anna was always welcome to browse the volumes in Lodewijk’s study. He might have cursed her by giving her a name nobody could forget, but he was generous where learning was concerned. Perhaps he felt guilty for saddling her with the lack of a future or perhaps it was simply the absence of any son to converse with that endeared Anna to him and helped him overlook any misgivings he might have had about women’s education. In any case, she found herself returning often to the writings of Virgil and Ovid housed in the leather-bound volumes in his study. The memory of those books in their familiar bindings is both a balm to her now and a torment. She remembers once stumbling on a Dutch translation of Seneca’s philosophies. That book, astonishingly, had been written by a Danish noblewoman, Birgitte Thott. There was a picture of the author in the frontispiece wearing a wimple and looking stern, although there was something about the way her almond-shaped eyes tilted at the corners that suggested to Anna a latent sense of humour. Women can be both successful and self-sufficient, her expression seemed to say. Anything was possible. Anna nursed this thought to herself for years. Now she thinks: what was all that learning actually good for? How did reading all those books in her father’s study serve her in the laundering of other people’s linens? How will it help her survive?