‘Anna Tesseltje!’ he cries, all smiles under his woollen cap. He is dressed for the workshop, a tunic tied over loose-fitting breeches, his long face smooth and hairless. More than once, she’s heard him say that an engraver’s first duty is to his face. If he cannot attend the lines on his own face, how can he master the ones on his plate?

‘I’m here for the laundry, sir,’ she says, in case he mistakes her presence for some other purpose.

He smiles. ‘Of course you are. Come in, come in.’

She sidles cautiously past him into the main kitchen, a dim cavern crammed with painted plates and silverware. Where is Maria? The place is quiet, no harried footsteps or trumpeting bellows drifting down from the living quarters upstairs. She drags off her pattens and slips on the uncomfortable wooden wedges Maria insists on making her wear inside the house.

‘Are you all alone, sir?’

Cornelis nods. ‘Luke is at the guildhall, fetching some correspondence on my behalf. Maria’s child is ill. I told her not to come back to the house until he improves. I don’t want the pestilence running rampant through my family. How is your sister?’

Anna hesitates, thinking of Lijsbeth’s wet, hacking cough. She clears her own throat experimentally, guarding against a tingling heat.

‘She’s working at the van Vliets’ today,’ she says, eying the overflowing pile of linen in the corner. Without the maid’s assistance, there will be more to do and less time in which to do it. ‘I should get to work, sir.’

For the next hour, she works methodically, building up the fire in the washing kitchen until sweat breaks out on her skin and dampens her armpits. When she’s sure the fire is hot enough, she pegs out shirts to dry on wooden racks and dumps the soiled collars into the tub. She uses a brush to scrape off the stains, biting her lip against the raw-knuckle pain. Most of the collars are the everyday kind, but a few, like the ones Cornelis de Witt wears to his meetings with the guild members of St Luke’s, are made from finer stuff. Anna has never been inside the guildhall; she’s only passed by it and heard Cornelis describe it to his young sons – the gable stone over the artists’ entrance depicting the philosopher saint and the sacrificial ox, the pointed turrets housing not only the painters and engravers but the surgeons and anatomists, the masons and the blacksmiths, all of them crammed together like parishioners in a church vying for the attention of a visiting archbishop.

Luke returns as she is heating the iron. Cornelis’ apprentice is a few years younger than Anna. His family own an apothecary on the Kalverstraat. They can easily absorb the apprentice fees. She glimpses him through the passageway, the bright gilt of his curly, shoulder-length hair, his well-cut clothes. Envy flares then fades.