He shot me an unapologetic grin. ‘Avril Svensson. She’s the best. She’s been down at the Mauritshuis finishing up some forensic photography work on the Rembrandts. I convinced her to come out here before going to the airport. She sent through the files this morning.’ He flicked through the images Avril had taken, pausing on a close-up of the printed fabric. ‘The detail is truly exquisite and I needed some high-quality shots to capture it properly. I thought the pattern in the brocade was flowers and black swans at first, but that doesn’t fit the geography or the dates. Black swans don’t crop up until at least the 19th century, so the bird is probably a peacock or a phoenix which fits my theory that the silk originated in Persia. It must have been imported into Holland sometime during the 17th century by an industrious silk merchant and sewn into a dress somewhere in Haarlem. The silk-weavers living there were extremely skilled. They would have known what was in fashion among the wealthy elites living in Amsterdam.’

He clicked through a series of close-ups, each shot capturing a different section of the dress – skirt, bodice, sleeves, hem. The final image had been taken from high above, giving an artistic, bird’s-eye view of the sleeves and skirt spread to their fullest length. Viewed from that angle, the outstretched dress was reminiscent of a body in an old-fashioned anatomy lesson. I imagined the gown surrounded by a host of curious faces: the ghosts of the women who’d worn it and the eyewitnesses who’d admired the silky sheen of the copper fabric shimmering under the warm glow of tapered candles. Theirs were the voices we needed to hear, if only we could convince the dress to give up their stories. I wanted to say this to Liam, but he was already talking about what Avril’s analysis of the fabric under UV light had revealed. ‘Based on traces of iron mordant in the fabric seams, the dress was originally gold, not brownish copper. It probably oxidised at some stage – maybe an air bubble got through the layer of mud and sand and landed on the fabric. The damage spread from there. The laces on the bodice have taken the worst of it. They’re so thin that they’re almost falling apart. Chemical analysis of the fabric’s composition showed a significant amount of gold thread woven through the silk. Given gold thread was so expensive, it’s highly likely the dress belonged to Catharina van Shurman rather than her companion. And the glass earrings you found – the Dutch tears – were listed in an inventory of goods taken at Sterrenwijck by the housekeeper, Susanna Hartog, in 1645.