‘Playing with your telescopes again?’ Catharina murmurs, although she sounds distracted, still gazing past him at the empty corridor.

Crispijn shakes his head. ‘I’ve no wish to stay here and watch you debase yourself at Maarten’s feet. Unless you’ve changed your mind?’

His words seem to snap Catharina from her reverie. She glares at him as she stands, facing him so they are eye to eye. ‘You are right to take your high morals elsewhere. I’m doing this for Griet – not for you, and certainly not for me. Maarten knows where she is. We must convince him to help us find her.’

Crispijn nods gravely, as if this is the answer he expected. With one last bow to Anna, he settles his wide-brimmed hat on his head and disappears into the corridor. The front door slams. There is the jingle of a horse’s reins, then the clatter of hooves on the drive.

‘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.