I waited one minute, two, but there was no response.

Meanwhile Frances was flicking through another book. “Did they have oysters in Elizabethan times?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“I’m a bit wary of shellfish. You don’t want to poison a roomful of lawyers.”

My attention drifted away and I suddenly heard Frances’s voice raised, as if she was trying to rouse me from sleep.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t hear what you were saying. I was trying to sort something out in my head.”

She looked at me with concern. “Are you all right? You’re rather pale.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Maybe a bit tired.”

Frances fussed over me as if she was my granny. She felt my brow with her thin, cool hand. She made me coffee and even asked if I’d like a touch of brandy in it. “Now, that might be the thing for the end of the party,” she said. “Did they have coffee in Elizabethan times? They must have had brandy.”

Reluctantly I left my desk and we thumbed through the cookbooks for ideas. We discussed goujons of sole, deviled whitebait, creamed mushrooms and smoked eel, baby tomatoes stuffed with crab, and new potatoes stuffed with caviar. Frances was doubtful about the last. “I’ll need to run this past the wretched Daisy at G and C’s,” she said. “This might be a bit steep even for them. I saw some caviar at Fortnum’s the other day. It was about a million pounds a thimbleful.”

As she was talking, I heard a ping from Milena’s computer and suddenly it was as if I was in a dream and Frances’s words were meaningless background noise. I had to force myself to talk normally as she put the cookbooks down and wandered across to the shelves for an exhibition catalogue.

“Can you give me a moment?” I said, and walked across to Milena’s computer. I clicked on the new message. “Nobody has this address,” it said. “How did you get it?”

I collected my thoughts and made myself take on the character of Jackie, a nonexistent person conjured up by another nonexistent person. “Maybe I got it wrong,” I wrote. “I just wanted your name to see if I’ve mixed it up with someone else. But if it’s a problem, don’t worry about it.”

I sent it and returned to Frances, who had found an old catalogue for an exhibition of Elizabethan miniatures. She smiled and pointed at an exquisitely delicate oval image of a woman wearing a tall hat with a white ostrich feather, a lace ruff, sleeves bunched and embroidered with gold thread and a rigid, richly decorated bodice. “She looks like you,” she said. “I’d like to see you in that.”

“I haven’t the waistline for it,” I said.