Susanna tenses. The woman from the pamphlet advances down the staircase towards them, carrying a candle. The illustrator’s eye saw truth when they translated Lady Catharina’s features onto the page. It’s all there – the strong jaw and unflattering hairstyle, the sharp, bird-bright eyes. Catharina’s age is impossible to discern. Although Cornelis swore she must be almost forty, she looks closer to twenty, her skin unblemished except for two slight parentheses around her quirk of a mouth. She wears a red velvet housecoat over a white nightgown, bishop sleeves billowing around her slim wrists. Pushing the sleeves back impatiently, she thrusts one hand on her hip and peers at them. Her hand, Anna sees, is scored by dozens of deep scars that must have bled significantly before they healed. Her first instinct is to recoil but then she catches sight of her own hands, the nails stripped thin, the skin at her wrists creased and mottled as if it belongs to someone twice her age.

Catharina misses nothing. ‘The engraving stele,’ she says, dropping her arm and shaking out the sleeve. ‘You have to make mistakes before you can achieve perfection. If you were an artist, you’d understand.’ She turns to the housekeeper. ‘Where is my brother? He hires a new servant and then cannot even get himself home in time to greet her. Must I do everything myself? Bring some food to the sitting room. I’d like to speak to Miss Tesseltje alone.’

The front room is a generously proportioned space. A coal fire crackles in the grate, casting its warm glow on the beechwood furniture. More paintings adorn the walls, too many for Anna to take in all at once although her fleeting impression is of specimens in a kunstkammer – her cabinet of curiosities containing a hodgepodge of half-peeled fruits and gauzy butterflies and striped caterpillars clinging to withered vines.

‘You’re even younger than I imagined,’ Catharina says, sinking into an overstuffed chair, leaving Anna to stand. ‘When Crispijn told me your age, and what happened to your family, I thought you must have done something quite wicked to deserve such punishment. But you look so innocent. By the time I was your age I was at university, studying with Descartes. I was writing poems in Latin and engraving my own portrait on bits of copperplate. What do you think of that?’

Anna doesn’t know how to respond to these extraordinary claims. She presses her palms together, hoping to stop the nervous trembling giving her away. Catharina’s cool gaze flicks up and down.

‘Are you pleased to be here?’ she says. ‘You’re to have your own room with a view overlooking the canal and the stables. It’s very pretty during daylight hours. Cornelis tells me you were living on the Raamgracht, in the Jodenbuurt.’

‘Yes,’ Anna says.