But Anna has noticed that, for all his talk, he doesn’t eat much and there is a thinness about his wrists, like canvas drawn over a timber frame, which reminds her of how her father looked in his final months. She has to push this thought away in order to smile when he asks her to read aloud, whatever takes her fancy. Sometimes it’s Virgil’s Eclogues, where the story’s bucolic setting soothes them both. Sometimes she reads him the English gardening pamphlets he’d brought back from one of his trips to London. If Catharina joins them – if she can tear herself away from searching for Griet – she reads them Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, translating passages from Latin to Dutch effortlessly. Catharina’s appetite for both food and philosophy is robust. Most nights, she shovels in her supper before fleeing upstairs to write more letters. It’s rare for Anna to see her walking to the studio to paint. The Horsts’ marriage portrait has stalled. Maarten refuses to pay and Catharina, now that she has gained the knowledge he once held over her, has stopped. The last time Anna saw the unfinished portrait, it was propped against the studio wall next to a painting of Griet modelling a sea nymph’s daughter. Anna had set down the wine goblets Catharina had asked her to clean and tilted her neck, taking the marriage portrait in sideways. What a strange feeling it gave her, to see herself mirrored on the canvas like that. She had the oddest sense of looking down through time, could see herself hanging on a wall somewhere in Sterrenwijck, watching the lives of the van Shurmans and their servants pass by.

Of the three figures in the painting, hers was the most substantially finished. Blanche’s figure was ghost-like and Maarten was a series of smudges and mistakes redrawn – the consequence of all his fussy changes, Anna supposed. She is consumed by guilty thoughts that Blanche was probably being punished on her behalf. If she had agreed to take the position offered to her, perhaps the painting would have been finished. It might have healed the rift between the two families and made Blanche’s life less of a torment. But there was Griet to consider, wasn’t there? Before she met the Horsts, Anna sometimes dreamed that Griet was haunting her bedchamber, searching in the dresser for the sketch Catharina made and the stray hairs Anna had plucked from the combs. Now she knows Griet is alive and Catharina does, too, and this knowledge has changed everything in the household. It’s almost a relief, she thinks, to hear that Catharina has tracked her down.

‘What do you intend to do about it?’ Crispijn says.

Catharina’s smile fades. ‘Well, we must go and fetch her,’ she says stoutly.