Slipping the protective pattens over her thin-soled shoes, she tightens the leather straps and ties a freshly starched cap over her hair. There. She is ready, except for her face and hands. She runs a finger along the hard spine of half a frozen slab. Her once-white hands are now permanently stained with ashes, the nails cracked from all the lye Lijsbeth insists on pouring into the copper pans they use to launder other people’s collars. Their friends have been kind, under the circumstances. There is always work for them. Not the kind of labour Anna once imagined, but what choice does she have? At least Cornelis de Witt, the successful engraver who lives on the Kalverstraat, doesn’t look down on her when she arrives at his door clutching a bucket under one arm and a basket under the other. One of the city’s favoured artisans, he once offered to tutor her – to show her how he made the engravings in their metal frames come alive, the shadowed planes of a woman’s face, the caulked ceilings of a church. It would be a leisurely distraction, something to fill in the time before her inevitable engagement. It wasn’t hard to convince her father, Lodewijk, to give his permission. Lijsbeth would need to be married first and they had not even begun entertaining suitors. Then Lodewijk had his first bad spell, the one that led to his rapid decline. Now her father is gone and, each week, instead of following Cornelis de Witt into his workshop, Anna follows his maid into the washroom to collect the household’s soiled nightshirts and stained collars. Sometimes, as she’s brushing down his shirts, a fine layer of copper shavings sifts like grains of sand onto the tiles. Sometimes, she shuts her eyes and imagines she is standing on a beach, watching ships battle a raging storm.

There is a story her father used to tell, a family legend about the night she was born.

Christmas Eve. Winter. In Holland’s north, near the bustling port of Oudeschild, a tempest converged on the Texel anchorage where hundreds of ships, including eight of her father’s galleons, had waited patiently for a strong westerly to stave off a lee shore and drive them out to sea. Lodewijk was a merchant whose ambitions for dynastic success had overcome the kind of humble origins that might have caused another man to doubt his place in the world.