‘At last!’ the mother cries. Anna picks up her bundle. The inside of the barge is damp, the boards slippery with bilge water and mud tramped in from numerous city quarters. There are no windows. The air feels close, as if with each inhalation Anna takes, the wood exudes a counter-breath, releasing the odours of sweaty bodies and stale pipe-smoke trapped for years inside the grain. She chooses the same seat as before, settling herself opposite the mother and her grizzling infant. The young girl has tucked Amandel into her cloak. His head pokes out of the girl’s collar, his wet nose quivering. He and the girl blink in unison and Anna thinks of a painting that hung inside her father’s study – Hercules slaying the Hydra, a beast controlled by one mind and one heart. Once the transport is full, they move off, the vessel swaying back and forth as the horses strain against the bit, their hooves churning up familiar towpaths cut through the grassy banks.

Goodbye, Anna thinks. Her throat aches and her eyes sting. She should have spent more time this morning memorising the room she and Lijsbeth shared. Instead, afraid of missing the barge, she hurried out the door without looking back. She sees again Lijsbeth’s body laid out on the mattress, her flesh greased with unguents, her jaw tightly bound. The smell of laurel leaves haunted the corners of the room for weeks, a scent Anna used to appreciate for its clean medicinal properties, but which she will now forever associate with her sister’s death. When she arrived home after Lijsbeth’s funeral, she found one of her neighbours had wedged a handful of straw under a brick and jammed it against her door, an old ritual to stop the dead coming back to harass the living. Anna refused to acknowledge its existence. The dead can haunt you easily enough, she now knows. There’s no need for straw and broken stones. A quiet moment is all it takes.

‘Are you travelling alone?’ the mother asks.

Anna blinks away the image of her sister’s still face. ‘Yes.’

The woman nods. ‘We’re on our way to Haarlem to join my husband, a clothmaker. We were due to leave a month ago, but we had to stay behind and wait for this little one to grace us with his presence.’

She frowns down at the blankets and clucks her tongue, as if the baby is responsible for delaying his birth.

‘Are you staying in Haarlem, too?’ The older child’s voice is slightly muffled by the dog’s fur.

‘I’m going on to The Hague,’ Anna says.

‘What’s there for you?’ asks the mother.

Anna shifts on the hard seat. ‘A favourable position in a good household.’

The mother frowns. ‘You look too young to be a kamermeid.’