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hands. “I’m having a lovely time. Lovely.” I simpered, waving an invisible fan in front of my face.
    Jan looked nervously back toward the kitchen door. “Elzelina, I think you had best go to bed.”
    He was so handsome. So concerned. “I don’t want to go to bed. I want to talk about Voltaire.”
    “Not just now, Elzelina,” he said, helping me to my feet.
    I tripped on something and landed against him, looking up from the middle of his chest. “Hello, Jan,” I said.
    He took my arm, half-lifting me. “We are going upstairs. It’s time you retired.” He was nearly dragging me up the stairs, into the nicest room on the second floor. There was a bed and a washstand, a candle by the bed, blue and white curtains drawn tight against the night. He shut the door.
    “You smell nice,” I said. He was tall. Tall. I wished he would kiss me again like the time he did in the arbor. It was nice. And then he did. The room was spinning around me, and I felt curiously light-headed. I supposed that brides were supposed to faint. I’d never fainted before. I’d never understood why. Brides fainted. I could faint.
    The room was spinning and dissolving into a riot of colors and sensations that made no sense. Somewhere there was the softness of the sheet beneath my bare back, the feel of his scratchy face against my chest. I giggled. I could have been floating on a cloud. I was not sure what happened next.
    When I awoke, it was morning, and my head was pounding. Or maybe, I thought, it was the door that was pounding. I covered my head with the pillow to keep out the noise and the brutal light from the window. The door swung open.
    “Good God!” I heard a man’s voice say. Oh, I thought drunkenly, I’m not wearing anything but a pillow over my head. The door slammed shut.
    Jan and his father were having a shouting match on the upstairs landing.
    “Twelve years old! Jesus Christ! Jan, you’re not my son! Jesus Christ! I told you to stay away from her! I ordered you! Jesus Christ!”
    “Sir,” said Jan dispassionately, “I informed you that I was going to marry Mademoiselle Versfelt.”
    “You are not!” his father shouted. “That little girl is getting dressed and I am taking her straight back to her mother, where I am going to grovel to her family and hope that you don’t face criminal charges. And you are going to be on the next ship to the Dutch East Indies, where you are never going to mess with her again!”
    I sat up in bed suddenly, hardly believing that Jan’s father could be so cruel. My body was very stiff and sore, a little blood streaking the insides of my thighs.
    Jan didn’t raise his voice. “No, sir, I am not. Because if I am, then Mademoiselle Versfelt is ruined. The marriage has already been consummated. If it does not take place, it is she who will be the injured party. No other suitor will ever wed her. She will remain unmarried the rest of her life, cooped up with her madwoman mother.”
    There was a long silence in the hall, so long that I wondered if they had gone away.
    Then I heard his father say, in a low, strangled voice that sounded almost like tears, “Damn you. There’s not a drop of human feeling in you, is there? You would do anything for money, regardless of decency.”
    “That is your opinion, sir,” Jan said.
    His father’s voice was very low. “Tell your fiancée to get dressed. I am taking her back for her mother’s blessing and consent. I will not have her speculated about by all good society. You will be married in the First Reformed Church in Amsterdam like respectable people. God help the poor girl, married to you!”
    I lay back on the bed, listening to his father’s footsteps on the stairs, suddenly frightened to death.

    T hat had been seven years ago, and I was no longer the naïve girl I had been then, blinded by dreams of love. I had given him two sons and brought him a great deal of money. I was a good hostess, a personable wife on the arm of an ambitious man.