She thinks of Crispijn’s kind face, his gentle hands on her hips. Of late, she has felt a kind of fluttering in her belly and begun to suspect a life grows there. Crispijn’s child. She drops to her knees, seeing nothing, lost inside a vortex of pain.

Her grief over the next week is a torment and she takes to her bed. Trays of food are brought and taken away by a sniffling Lotte. Anna’s absence is barely noted; Catharina has abandoned them all. She locks herself in her studio and forbids anyone to enter. Every night, Anna is haunted by Crispijn’s death. She saves him a dozen different ways, sees him die in a variety of poses, eyes open, arms flung wide to the sky. Waves of nausea assail her, forcing her awake, and she wraps her arms around her stomach and wishes for death.

One morning, she wakes to a dead fire. Shivering, she dresses herself and goes to visit Catharina. She knocks on the door, gently and then more urgently. When there is still no answer, she pushes open the door.

Catharina looks awful, her hair oily and flat, her clothes rumpled as if she has not slept for days. She looks at Anna as if she is a ghost.

‘Can I fetch you anything?’ Anna says.

Catharina doesn’t answer.

‘You need to eat,’ Anna says. ‘Let me fetch some of Mrs Hartog’s broth for you. Or a slice of bread.’

She turns to the door, trying not to sob.

‘I’m leaving,’ Catharina says. Anna turns back.

‘What?’

‘I’m going to France to find Griet.’ Catharina holds out a letter, her expression dull.

‘When were you going to tell me?’ Anna says.

Catharina shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. None of it matters now that he’s gone, don’t you understand?’ Her eyes flash. ‘He was everything to me,’ she says. ‘I am half a person. Half of me is in the grave. I cannot feel, I cannot think. I certainly cannot eat. If I go to France, at least I can escape this house and all the memories here.’

‘But what will become of us?’ Anna says, growing angry. It is so typical of Catharina, she thinks, to care only about her own grief. ‘I don’t want to leave Sterrenwijck. It is the only place I have felt safe these past few years.’

‘You will find a new position elsewhere,’ Catharina says. ‘I will write you a reference.’

‘I want to stay with you,’ Anna says. Tell her about the child, she thinks. But the words are frozen on her tongue. She can’t reveal an infant who has no father living. The authorities will throw her onto the streets. She is not Lady Killigrew, able to be pensioned off, her baby born in secrecy.