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?

As if sensing her sour mood, Crispijn catches her eye and smiles. ‘How was your journey?’

Anna swallows a forkful of herring. ‘Good, sir, thank you, although the roads are bad this time of year. They had to call in the icebreaker twice before we left, the frost spread so fast. It has a habit of creeping back just when you think the path is clear.’

He nods. ‘It’s worse at sea, not that I’ve been recently. Out there the pack ice makes it hard for the whalers to hunt. It crushes the ships and screens the beasts so they cannot be seen from the surface. Many sailors have already drowned this season, thanks to this brutal weather. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky the cold is merely an inconvenience for us, not a matter of life and death.’

Anna drops her eyes to her plate, the mention of drowned sailors settling like a lead bar in her stomach.