‘They are,’ I said. ‘But I’ve been offered an opportunity I can’t really refuse.’ I plucked a pair of copper pliers off a shelf, dropped them into a ziplock bag. ‘Bram Lange called earlier. You remember Bram? He wants me to visit him on Texel. I agreed to go.’

Marieke pressed a palm against her thin chest.

‘At last! What changed your mind?’

I told her briefly about Bram’s phone call and the shipwrecked items. I didn’t elaborate on the specifics of why Bram and his friends had been diving. If Marieke discovered there might be legal trouble looming on the horizon, she’d only come up with some unhelpful suggestion about putting things back where they belonged.

‘So you understand why I have to go,’ I concluded. ‘I’ll still be working on the book. In fact, if everything goes to plan, I might be able to use the research on the dress to write the final chapter.’

It was the first time all morning I’d let myself say those words aloud and, as soon as they were out, I knew they were true. I had the strangest sense of peering down through time, as though I was gazing into the ocean, trying to puzzle out sinuous patterns carved in sand. I wanted the dress for myself. Not to wear – I would never dream of committing such a sin – but simply to hold it and smell it, to experience first-hand its craftsmanship, its perfections as well as its flaws. There was something seductive about the way the silk fabric flowed, as if the dress, even on land, remembered an earlier version of itself. As if it were more fish than fabric. It would be the perfect example to support my argument that women’s historical clothing was just as worthy of scholarship as men’s. Women’s dresses were less likely to survive because they laboured harder, making do with what they had, altering or selling their gowns to compensate for disasters like the death of a protective male figure, a father or husband. They lived their lives at the mercy of other people’s whims. This dress was a survivor and I had the spookiest premonition that its owner had been, too.

Marieke could not possibly understand.