You wore wool the colour of wet bark and your hands were always cold. The counting-house faced the canal, and the bells of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw split the morning into halves you could fit numbers between. They called you Maerten, though it was not the name your mother used.

You were good. The factor said so, twice, when wine had loosened him. You balanced what could not be balanced — a shipment of alum lost off Sluys, a debt the Adornes would not name. You wrote each missing florin in a hand so small the ink seemed to apologise.

In the spring of your thirty-second year, you closed the ledger and did not open it again. You walked to the Bouverie gate with a coat, a knife, and a sketchbook you had hidden behind the tax rolls. The factor sent a man to find you. The man returned alone. Bruges remembers the name Maerten only as a smudge in a margin — but the margin is in your hand, and it is steady.