De Rijp, March 1654
The funeral was a week ago and I still feel more relieved than anything else. I know that’s indefensible, that I should be grieving, but it’s impossible.
I stand with my arms folded, gazing out of the top half of the kitchen door at the fields and meadows surrounding the farm, but don’t really see them.
It should never have come to this. Looking back, I can’t understand what came over me that night. For years I’d thought of Govert as just another man from the village, not someone I paid any particular attention to. I never gave him much thought at all. Not that he wasn’t an attractive man, in a certain way he was. The first time I noticed him was at the village fair, when he pulled me up to dance and held me to him. I’d been drinking, of course I had been drinking, but not so much that I couldn’t hear his heavy breathing or feel his body pressing against mine, his muscular arms clasping me so tentatively.
With every turn our hips brushed and the grip with which he steered me through the other dancing couples tightened. It was an exciting feeling. I realised he was in love with me. The off-putting way he stared
