But then came the storm. It appeared out of nowhere, the only clues a sudden smudging of sky and a subtle restlessness in the water as the waves bellied and writhed. Having no time to raise the alarm, twelve sailors belonging to one of Lodewijk’s crews were swept overboard. They sank soundlessly, leaving nothing to mark their departure. Eight of his prized galleons were torn apart and the wreckage, combined with the debris belonging to the twenty other galleons which sank that night, was strewn across Texel’s beaches for weeks following the fatal storm. When a messenger delivered the news to Lodewijk in his counting house on the Amsterdam Bourse, Anna’s father sat stunned, and then he began to weep. He blamed himself for ordering the ship’s captains not to parcel out the most valuable goods onto smaller vessels as soon as they arrived, but to wait until the cargo could be unloaded all together and fitted onto small barges capable of navigating the narrow waterways trapped between the canal houses of Amsterdam and Delft. The decision to save a few stuivers had cost twelve men their lives and decimated a third of Lodewijk’s fleet. There was a message here, buried in these tragic losses. What was it? What was God trying to tell him?

Here the messenger, who had been watching in uncomfortable silence as his master wept, spoke again, eager to share the other news he had been dispatched to deliver: the safe arrival, an hour ago, of Lodewijk’s second daughter. The confluence of the two disparate occasions left poor Lodewijk conflicted. On one hand, the partial destruction of his shipping empire. On the other, new life. When he made his way home and trudged up the stairs to greet his newborn daughter, he experienced a flash of divine inspiration. He would name her Anna Tesseltjeruineren – Ruin on Texel. God would surely approve of such pious nomenclature. Anna’s name was the currency that would tip the spiritual scales in their family’s favour. She was the bargain through which he would strike a deal with Almighty God and her name would serve as a reminder that worldly wealth could be snatched away by Him at any moment. Out of kindness to Arabella, he agreed to shorten the child’s name to Anna Tesseltje. Now the name is a part of Anna, like the taste of her favourite dish, appeltaerten, like the waxy coolness of her dead mother’s cheek, or the oozing fissures on her own ruined hands. She flexes her blistered fingers experimentally, wincing as a welt splits, the pink flesh gaping like a hungry mouth.