The portrait sittings continue for the next month. Each morning, the Horsts arrive in their carriage and Mrs Hartog shows them into the library where Anna is tasked with ensuring they are comfortably seen to – that there is ample wine filling their crystal goblets, that the outfits they are to be painted in are pressed and clean, no untoward creases to distract Catharina as she sketches the figures into the scene. Blanche poses wearing a gown of silver gilt damask. It is the dress she was married in. She tells Anna that Maarten chose it for her, that it was one of the gifts he brought with him when he came to meet her father at the inn in Amsterdam where their family was staying after they fled to the Continent. Maarten was there to negotiate the terms of the arrangement. He obtained her measurements in advance from Blanche’s mother and the silver dress arrived in its own carriage, as if it were a real person.

‘Was it not a little presumptuous of him, Madam?’ Anna says when they are alone. ‘To arrange the outfit if the marriage wasn’t already agreed upon?’ They are standing in a small chamber that opens off the grand library and has been adapted as something of a makeshift dressing room. She tightens the laces on Blanche’s bodice as gently as she can, avoiding the faded bruises on the girl’s shoulders and back. At least there are no fresh ones. Since the sittings have begun, Anna has noticed no further injuries on Blanche’s person and she has started to wonder if she imagined the abuse. Perhaps Maarten was right and Blanche was choking and he was trying to help her. Perhaps his cruelty does not extend to his wife, although he is driving them all mad with his demands about the portrait. Outside the door, she can hear him now, barking orders at Henrick. The poor manservant has been recruited to help Maarten into his costume since Maarten has no valet of his own. Henrick’s fingers are gnarled and he struggles to pin Maarten’s suit together. Anna hears him mumbling a string of apologies and Maarten’s terse rejoinder. If Crispijn were here, she thinks, he would do a better job. But he would probably refuse to help. The servants have no power to do anything but follow Catharina’s orders. Crispijn would not last a day in this tense atmosphere.

‘Oh, we were very grateful that he considered me at all,’ Blanche says. ‘When we fled England, we left with nothing and disguised ourselves as peasants to escape the notice of Cromwell’s soldiers. It would have been improper for me to be seen in the Oude Kerk wearing a shabby blouse and kirtle. Maarten tells me this gown is worth more than what an artist working in The Hague makes in one year and I think it is very fine.’

She touches the gown’s sleeves delicately, a half-smile on her lips, and Anna wonders if Blanche missed the hidden sting in Maarten’s boast, his belittling of Catharina’s work.