She rubs one damp palm nervously along her thigh, bunching the silk. Crispijn, sitting beside her, notices. Without asking, he picks up her hand and tucks it into the crook of his elbow. It’s a brotherly gesture, an act of gentle kindness, but it makes her skin tingle and sends a thrill of exhilaration whooshing through her stomach into her chest.

‘Careful. You’ll ruin your fine dress,’ he warns. ‘It would fetch a good sum at the cloth market. The fabric alone must be worth thirty guilders.’

‘I’ll never sell it,’ she says.

‘You won’t have to.’

Anna peers up at him curiously. But he has turned his face away and will not meet her gaze. Catharina, sitting opposite, pays them no attention. After all these months of nervous agitation, she seems finally to have found her inner calm. Her hands are clasped as if in prayer and the veiled hat she has chosen to wear disguises most of her face, leaving everything but her mouth and chin bathed in shadow.

The slums fall away as they near the heart of the city, replaced by peaked canal houses adorned with flourished scrolls and statues of heralds playing flutes and fiddles and rosy-cheeked cherubs flanked by outstretched angels’ wings. The coachman guides the horses through the cobbled streets, slowing to let a man trundling a wagon piled high with bolts of shimmering cloth push past them to join a throng of others heading towards a vast, grey-stone building.

‘That’s the Lakenhalle,’ Crispijn says. ‘You can buy any fabrics you like there, anything your heart desires, and have it sewn into a gown fit for royalty.’

Anna wonders if her mother’s dress came from a place like that. She never thought to question her mother or sister about its origins and now there is nobody left to ask. It feels as if the dress sprung fully-formed into her life when her sister passed away, but if Anna had tried to wear it years ago, the silk folds would have easily swallowed up her childish torso and limbs. I have grown up, she thinks, and the realisation is bittersweet.