‘And what then?’ Crispijn says. ‘What do you propose we do with her? Do you suppose she will be able to return here? That her family won’t try to reclaim her yet again? You think that they will give up control of her just because you have discovered where she is being kept? There is also the difficulty of helping her escape the convent, assuming she wants to leave…’

‘Why would she want to stay there?’ Catharina bursts out.

Crispijn shrugs. He looks weary, Anna thinks.

‘I will ask Queen Elizabeth to find a situation for her,’ Catharina says, her expression hard. ‘Her Majesty will not refuse me. She is a generous patron and a kind friend. And she believes in friendship and love. Why else would they call her the Queen of Hearts?’

‘It will need to be far,’ Crispijn says. ‘A different country. Somewhere her family cannot exert their influence and control. A foreign court.’

Catharina says nothing. In the stillness, Anna hears Mrs Hartog lecturing Lotte for letting the supper burn. The smell of burned potatoes taints the air like a sour omen.

‘Would you be happy,’ Crispijn says, softly, ‘to let Griet go again?’

‘Yes, if I knew she was safe,’ Catharina says. ‘If I knew she had gone there of her own free will, not forced in to it.’ A small sob escapes her. ‘She is my world, Crispijn. My soul cannot rest knowing that hers is suffering in bondage, trapped somewhere she has no desire to be.’

Crispijn holds his sister’s gaze for a long time. And then he closes his eyes and rubs his temples. ‘Very well,’ he says. ‘Then let me think.’

Two days later, they reach the slum-lined outskirts of Ghent. The private coach they are travelling in is old and smells of leather and sweat. An unfamiliar horseman tightens the reins and the creatures slow, the better to navigate the winding, twisted streets jammed with smoke-blackened shacks. Anna, wearing her mother’s dress, leans forward to watch the hungry, doe-eyed children and nursing mothers who stare frostily back, the women’s modesty barely preserved by an arrangement of ragged shawls.

There is a lump in Anna’s throat. The sentence for impersonating a person of status in the Dutch Republic is imprisonment. Anna might once have laughed at the ludicrous notion of dressing in her mother’s silk gown and presenting herself as the sister-in-law of someone she has never met. Now, after everything she has experienced this past year, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. But if things do not go well today, she might well end up one of these unfortunates, crushed by the wheel of life, unable to claw herself out of her own miserable circumstances. She doesn’t know what the prisons are like here in Ghent, but in Amsterdam, parents and nursemaids use the Spinhuis as a threat to goad girls into good behaviour.