‘We think we know the name of the ship already,’ I said. ‘It was called La Dragon. I was hoping you might have a record of it – judging by the style of the dress and the wreck’s position, it probably sank sometime between 1630 and 1660. The wreck you’re referring to, the one that belonged to Queen Henrietta’s envoy, is pretty well documented so I doubt the current could have shifted the dress and the other artefacts so far east. Bram says they were fastened quite securely to the deck when they were found. My colleague, Liam, who’s doing some forensic work on the dress, has a theory that it might have belonged to an artist called Catharina van Shurman. Her former companion – a woman called Anna Tesseltje – was travelling to the East Indies with her new mistress.’ I paused to allow a truck to rumble past on the street, the noisy bleating of sheep competing with the crunch of gears. ‘Anna seems to have taken the dress along with her, as well as a book bearing the van Shurmans’ heraldic crest. Possibly, they were given to her by Catharina – the two women were quite close. Your mother mentioned yesterday that some of the shipping ledgers date back to the mid-1600s. If I could find out a little more about La Dragon – who owned it, where it was headed, who was on board at the time it sank – it might help us pin down the time period and maybe even illuminate some hidden aspect of the island’s history. Can you think of a connection between Texel and Catharina van Shurman?’

Olivia frowned. ‘Not off the top of my head, no. But that isn’t to say one doesn’t exist. Plenty of artists came to Texel over the years. There’s a very famous painting hanging in the Rijksmuseum depicting the great Christmas disaster of 1630 when a storm sank over a hundred ships in one night. I can show you a reproduction of it later. We have one hanging in the gallery upstairs. But let’s look at the shipping records first.’

We followed her down into the basement. It was cold, as she’d warned, and a large portable humidifier hummed quietly in the corner, releasing a fine mist into the atmosphere through plastic vents to counteract the effects of potentially document-destroying heat. Dozens of archive boxes lined the metal shelves, organised by year and divided into categories.

‘We’ve digitised some of our earliest records,’ she told us, a trace of pride in her voice. ‘They were so fragile they were in danger of crumbling into nothing. It’s probably best if we search the database for the shipping records that correspond to the time you’re looking for, rather than disturbing the originals.’

She led us over to a computer and flicked on the monitor. I watched her scroll through a long file of scanned documents.