I opened my car door and sat in the driver’s seat. As I lifted the key to the ignition, a great heaviness overcame me. My hand shook. I stabbed at the ignition, came up short. Tried again. Failed. Resigned, I let the key drop into my lap and took a few deep, steadying breaths, letting my mind wander to the images I’d been analysing yesterday. This kind of procedural sifting never failed to calm me. Thinking about clothes had always offered sanctuary, a safe place to retreat to when the harsh realities of life threatened to overwhelm. The chapter I’d been working on yesterday had focused on the impact of the English Civil War on 17th-century European fashion. I’d managed to track down a number of suitable examples of formal male dress, including some grisly images of the blood-stained shirt King Charles I had been wearing when he lost his head on the execution block outside the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. There was also an exquisitely embroidered men’s hunting jacket, wearer unknown. While little was known about the origins of the embroidered jacket, the King’s shirt had become a relic after his death, understandably infused with the horrible import of deliberately killing the God-ordained English monarch: a kind of existential buyer’s regret. What I needed now were real examples of gowns – not something painted, since portraits couldn’t always be relied upon to convey the precise ways clothes sat on a person’s figure, but tangible artefacts through which I could explore the complexities of women’s lives. Unfortunately, few examples of clothing from that period existed now. The ones that did were housed in archives and museums far from Sydney. The Met in New York and the Musée de la mode et du textile in Paris held some extraordinary pieces of women’s clothing in their collections but organising to view them or requesting permission to reprint the images taken by their official photographers would take time.

My phone buzzed in the bottom of my bag, snapping me out of my contemplation. I fished it out and unlocked a message from an unknown number and drew in a small breath as a photograph of a late Jacobean court dress flickered to life on the screen. The colour was striking: rich ox-blood, overlaid with burnished copper. The elaborately embroidered fabric patterned with pale florets, caterpillars and bees, a common motif signifying birth, death and fertility. There was some obvious damage. A dark stain had turned the laces black, indicating the corrupting presence of iron mordant. Once prized as a fixative that brought out the glorious shades of natural dye, the metal salts could weaken the chemical structure of fabric over time.