“So tell me this love story of yours, Lindsay. Go on.”

“You’re sure? It’s getting late. I could leave you my article if you’d prefer. You can read the story there. Almost all of it. Everything except the end—which I was asked not to use.”

“No, no. I dislike unfinished stories. Stories should have a clear beginning, a middle, and an end.” He smiled. “Besides, I’d rather hear it from you.”

“Very well.” Lindsay’s heart gave a skip. She picked up the photograph of the tall, white-haired, patrician woman with the lovely dress beside her. She could remember that interview so well: it had been her first major freelance commission. She had been twenty, proud of hitting on the idea for the piece, proud of placing it with Vogue, and—when she reached the house where the interview was to take place—very nervous indeed.

It had been a house in Belgravia, a tall, white-pillared building, its doors opened by a butler, the first butler Lindsay had ever seen outside films. She followed him up a wide staircase and into a huge drawing room with three long windows overlooking the garden square outside. It was autumn; a fire was lit, yet the room was filled with spring flowers. The former Letitia Lafitte Grant, now Lady Roseborough, had risen as she entered, and Lindsay, confronted with this figure of legendary elegance, had quailed.

Then her hands had been clasped, and Letitia had begun speaking in that warm southern voice, so Lindsay’s courage returned.

“Come have some tea, my dear. You’ve come here to ask me about my clothes? We’ll have us such fun—there’s things I’m going to show you that I haven’t looked at in a million years…” She had pronounced it ye-ahs. Lindsay, in the quiet of this room with Rowland now, could hear Letitia’s slow drawl as she herself recounted a story heard long before.

“The woman in this picture,” she explained, “was called Letitia Lafitte Grant, at least that was her name when this dress was made for her. She came from a very old Louisiana family, and had married into an even older and even richer one. Her family had heritage and the Grants had oil. When Letitia married, she went to live in their house, a very beautiful antebellum mansion on the north bank of the Mississippi, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. She was a famous southern hostess, a famous beauty, a famous horsewoman, and a famous collector of couture. She was also, I think, a generous woman—a woman with a very kind heart.”

Lindsay paused. “I went to interview her because of her legendary elegance. She was the kind of woman who could look wonderful in anything. She could make an ensemble out of a borrowed man’s shirt, one of her husband’s tweed jackets, an old pair of jeans. She loved couture clothes, went to the Paris collections twice a year for over twenty years, and had kept her entire wardrobe in a state of perfect preservation. She died about three years after I interviewed her. Her couture collection is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York now.