She tries to sit up, but her legs are wet, coated with viscous fluid. The woman pushes her back gently. A circling pain sears her insides. She cries out in terror. A hand finds hers, the skin hard and work-worn. The pain subsides and then returns. Anna screams and her scream is like the wind, a deep, elemental shriek. She is drowning. Crispijn’s child is slipping away, she is losing him. He is rushing out of her like the tide. All she can do is clutch the woman’s hand, her lifeline in a stormy sea.

Anna wakes to find the storm has passed. She raises herself to her elbows, looking around in confusion. Someone has dressed her in a coarse cotton shift and she is lying on a hard cot in a small room. Grey light falls through an uncurtained window onto the sparse furnishings, just the bed and a chair. Outside, she can see the dark boughs of trees twisted across the sky. Recollection returns in a cold rush. Heart thumping, she runs both hands over the small swelling in her pelvis where she knows her child has been growing – still grows, assuming he survived her near-drowning in that terrible storm. From somewhere down the hallway she hears lilting voices raised in prayer. Her own prayer to her child is silent. She speaks the words aloud in her head. Please, let him live. She waits, holding her breath, listening for that faint drumbeat, the moth-like fluttering which had only just begun to make itself known, that soft but insistent rhythm. I am here, I am here. She weeps when the knocking inside her comes, tears tracking down her chin into the scratchy blanket as she imagines the small stirring of her baby’s tiny limbs, green shoots breaking the earth’s crust. Six more months and he will be a real child, someone she can hold, a connection to Crispijn and Catharina and her own past.

A moment later, the knocking becomes real.

‘My name is Yolente,’ Anna’s saviour says, standing in the doorframe, lowering her hand as she assesses Anna with dark, intelligent eyes. Yolente is a thin, wiry-haired woman, dressed entirely in black. Storm crow, Anna thinks. Harbinger of destiny. An image of Blanche’s face, wide-eyed, bloated, swims up, unbidden. Anna groans and clutches her stomach, squeezing her eyes shut as a wave of nausea forces its way up her body. Yolente darts forward with a bucket and when Anna has finished vomiting, helps ease her back onto the cot.

‘I thought you’d lose that child,’ the old woman remarks, touching Anna’s belly through the shift. ‘I did everything I could to save her. In the end, I prayed. God sent me a message this morning telling me he had spared you and your child for a reason. You’ll need to eat and rest and build up your strength to carry that girl to term.’