Wolfert lifts his head as Anna squeaks opens a drawer and searches inside for her gloves. In the nested bedclothes, he resembles a beached seal rather than an old hound, his dark coat greasy and back-combed. Grey light bathes his stooped shoulders and his stale breath forms a wispy, lopsided crown over his crinkled forehead.

He stretches out his limbs and yawns, his yellowed teeth worn to nubs.

‘Hush,’ Anna says, throwing an anxious glance at the curtain dividing the bedroom she shares with her sister. If Lijsbeth discovers Wolfert upstairs, she will banish him to the kitchen. Each night, Anna listens for her sister’s heavy snores before she sneaks downstairs to collect him. She loves to observe the careful spectacle of Wolfert’s nightly ritual, the way he searches the corners of the room for stray crumbs and huffs explosively into the vaulted archways of old mouse-holes before dragging his arthritic body up the step-ladder and settling near her feet. Wolfert was her father’s dog. They went everywhere together – the warehouses, the church, her father’s favourite tavern in the Eastern Islands. He never touched the dice, preferring to donate any extra money he made to the church and the city orphanage where he felt the money could do some good. Anna hopes these moral kindnesses have brought him some small luxuries in the afterlife. She hopes he has found a measure of peace since she failed to ease his distress in his final months. His confusion was a blank void, terrifying in its nothingness. He kept calling her Arabella.

At every turn, Anna failed to convince him she was not the woman who died giving birth to a son all those years ago. Once, in a fit of delirium, her father gripped Anna’s waist and pulled her to him, his voice sweetened with misplaced desire. Anna managed to free herself and slip past Lijsbeth who stood watching in the doorway, a frigid smile contorting her features, a bowl of broth cooling in her cupped hands. Later, Anna heard her sister in the voorhuis, sobbing over their father’s enfeeblement. She thought about going down, but she knew Lijsbeth would reject any offer of comfort. She realised that until that moment, her sister had been able to ignore Lodewijk’s wild fancies. There could be no pretence now that Anna, too, had witnessed his deterioration.