On the last day of her old life, Anna Tesseltje wakes to find the water in the washstand has frozen solid. She uses a knife to jam the blade against the porcelain until the ice breaks apart, the cracked halves glisten like oceans trapped inside a storm glass. After dropping to her knees to pray, she dresses quickly, eager to fashion a barrier between her skin and the frigid air, even if that obstacle is only the addition of a cloak. After a wet autumn, winter has finally settled over Amsterdam, bringing frost and wild winds and stinging sleet. She has learned to sleep in whatever clothing she can find, shivering as cold seeps through the windowpane. But she refuses to sleep in the cloak. The cloth reeks of the bleach her sister Lijsbeth rubbed into the worst of the stains as well as some lingering, unidentified malodour – the sweetness of rot. The sleeves hang past Anna’s fingers. She folds them back, trying to ignore the spectre of the cloak’s former inhabitant. The dame at the second-hand clothing market swore that the owner sold it to her on her way to her new situation to work as a maid at a grand house on the Golden Bend. She suggested the cloak would bring Anna luck, too. You can’t put a price on luck, Anna knew she should quibble over the cost. If Lijsbeth had been with her, she would have. Instead, she handed over three stuivers and prayed that, whatever the owner’s real fate, she had not died of the plague.