“Listen, Rowland,” she said firmly, removing from the back of the kitchen door a frilly apron Rowland would certainly never have purchased. “Let’s get one thing clear. This is work. We’re colleagues. With luck we might end up friends. I do not have designs on you. I’m not moving in on you. I hate people who do that. I’ve had innumerable lovers who tried to do just that to me—and they’re all ex-lovers now.”

“Really?” Rowland said, recovering his poise, leaning back against the door and raising an eyebrow. “Innumerable, eh?”

“You don’t need chapter and verse.” Lindsay began opening cupboards. “I’m just telling you, the techniques are roughly the same. In my case they start telling me what wine to buy. Then they criticize my clothes. Then they tell me how to bring up my son. Then they complain about the hours I work. At which point”—she glanced back at him with a smile—“I usually let Louise loose on them.”

“If they’re that easily detached, they probably weren’t worth bothering with in the first place,” Rowland remarked.

Lindsay, mildly thrilled by this statement, ignored it, and made a great show of going through cabinets in search of food. The exchange seemed to have been useful, she thought; Rowland now appeared much more relaxed, in a good humor, even quietly amused. He found a bottle of wine and uncorked it. He set two places at the table.

“So, Sylvie wasn’t serious, then?” Lindsay managed to interject. Rowland looked genuinely astonished, then a little embittered.

“Serious? I thought you’d heard the gossip. I never get seriously involved. Didn’t your informants make that clear?”

Lindsay decided it was safer to say no more. She concentrated her attention on Rowland’s kitchen, which, though primitive, had charm. The refrigerator might be antique, and the gas stove looked prewar, but the room had a beautiful York stone floor, and a splendid built-in breakfront—at present, unfortunately, still painted its original Victorian brown.

Blue, Lindsay thought; that wonderful flat, washed-out Swedish blue; or perhaps an off cream. Then you could put lots of blue and white plates on it, and a huge jug of wildflowers. You could have a rash mat on the floor… really, all the room needed was repainting, and things…

“So tell me. I’m going to cross-examine you now,” Rowland said, sitting down at the pine table—it was nice, that pine table—and running his hands through his astonishing hair. “First, why has no one else made this connection before? Those two dresses are identical. Your piece appeared in Vogue, after all.”

“Timing, mainly,” Lindsay answered, staring at Rowland’s small store of edibles and wondering how on earth you could make a meal from these ingredients. “My article didn’t appear until spring 1979, three years after the Cazarès St. Petersburg collection. It ran in an English magazine, and that particular 1976 Cazarès dress was featured only in an American publication. Unless you put the two photographs side by side, you’d never make the connection. At most, you’d note a resemblance and pass on.”