‘We don’t need him,’ Catharina says, waving her hand dismissively. Sinking back into her chair, she picks at her bread, slicing it into halves then quarters before sitting back and leaving the food untouched. Anna stirs a spoon through her own rapidly cooling pottage. Since arriving at Sterrenwijck, she has eaten everything set down in front of her, but today her appetite has shrivelled to the size of a pea. Crispijn’s unexpected departure has cast a pall over what should be a day of relief, the culmination of artistic negotiations between the van Shurman and Horst estates. The house already feels different without Crispijn, emptier and more sombre, like the aftermath of a funeral. Anna has grown used to spending time with him, chatting about the stars and Catharina’s progress with the commissioned portraits.

The evening after they returned from the Winter Queen’s masque, he invited her up to see the heavenly constellations. Viewing the stars through the telescope in his attic bedroom made her feel tiny and insignificant, a grain of sand on a vast celestial beach. It held at bay the worst of her fears about her father’s curse, although she still found herself rising in the night and going to the dresser and fumbling about in the dark until she felt the cool silk of her mother’s gown, reassuring in its constancy. The night before last, their hands connected as he adjusted the eyepiece and Anna felt the touch of his skin sear her fingers. She jerked her hand away, starting guiltily as if she’d burned it. Crispijn only smiled and held out the telescope, moving aside slightly so she could look through it to see the bright orb of Venus burning like a beacon in the darkness.

Lotte slips in to clear away the breakfast food as Catharina moves into the parlour to wait for the Horsts. Anna follows her, watching as she moves to stand beside the window, her eyes fixed on the drive, her gaze burning with a feverish intensity. Barely two weeks have expired since the Winter Queen’s masque, but it feels to Anna as if a dozen years have passed. Each morning, Catharina wakes before the sun to pace the perimeter of her bedchamber. Like a restless ghost, she rattles the combs in their ivory cups, pokes about in her writing desk and tugs extravagant costumes from her dresser, holding them up against her body and muttering to herself before tossing them in a crumpled heap. Anna follows in her wake, yawning as she bends to scoop up discarded clothes and return them to the fold. She sets aside the ones that need cleaning and mending, fingering the stained collars and small holes in Catharina’s damask silk waistcoats, thinking of the lye bath she will ask Mrs Hartog to prepare for them later.