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doubt you have some duties to carry out for Mistress Harris’s return; and we’ll have no more talk of pirates.’
    Cat untangled the gorse circlet from her hair. With the next great gust of wind she tossed it seawards, and together they watched it buffeted till it sprang apart and rained its flowers down upon the rocks.

5

    13 th of June. This daie markes the marriage of oure new kyng Charles with Henrietta, Princesse of France & Navarre; & also the discoverie of the fishing bote Constance off Moushole rocks, all crewe lost & her gear cut lose. None knoe the fate of these men but a Turkiss sword was found stucke in her woode & Rob has made mee sware to say nothynge of Pyrats or Turks lest rumor spred feare. So I wryte my secret here & this Booke & I alone shall share it. I have heared the Turks are blacke men with shaven heades & crewel wayes. Rob sayes they are no better than wyld beasts, but I woulde trewlye love to see one for my selfe …
     
    I put the book aside, astonished. I don’t know what I had been expecting, other than notes on the patterns that the book contained, thoughts about the colours of thread and the type of stitch one might use to execute the design, but this sudden window into the past was like a glimpse of treasure.
    I found myself wondering whether Michael had read any of Catherine’s cryptic, faded entries, or had merely glimpsed them and seen them as defacements, maybe even beaten down the price with the dealer because they spoiled the edition? I could easily imagine him doing just that, complaining about a small or imagined flaw, always seeking a bargain, a way of saving money. I could not count the number of times I had turned away, embarrassed, as he haggled with some hapless stallholder or car-boot seller. The idea of him trawling through his favourite antiquarian bookshops of Bloomsbury seeking a suitable farewell gift for me made me nauseous. How long had he been preparing for that moment? How long had he and Anna been back on ‘good terms’ – and just exactly what did that mealy-mouthed little phrase mean? I imagined the pair of them, dark-haired and olive-skinned, similar in build, elegantly intertwined… had this rapprochement overlapped with our trysts for days, for weeks or for months? I ran to the bathroom and threw up till my eyes and nose burned with bile.
    When I came back to my bed, feeling shaky and void, the book was waiting for me on the lamp table. My notebook lay beside it, filled now with my own scribbled interpretations of Cat Tregenna’s journal entries. I had pored over the strange formations of her letters, the bizarre spelling and the unfamiliar sentence structures of another age for over three hours, filling six pages of my notebook, though my handwriting was in no way as neat as that of the young embroiderer, being marred with crossings out, underlinings, question marks where I could not make sense of a word. Hardly a pretty artefact for someone to discover four hundred years hence. And yet, for all the difference between our times, I felt a strong connection with Catherine Anne Tregenna; and not just for our shared love of embroidery. I too had grown up in Cornwall and, like her, had dreamed of escape.
    On a new sheet of paper I wrote her name, then idly sketched a curling vine around the capitals: a simple cross-stitch exercise to work on a sampler, the sort of thing with which a young girl might have begun her needlework education in times past. I wondered if Catherine had done this very thing: picking out her name in a simple, plain colour before embellishing it with leaves and flowers. My knowledge of Jacobean needlework told me that it would have been unlikely that she would have been able to work with anything very fine for her first attempts. If she had come from a poor family, even one that had some social aspirations, she would probably have been limited to practising on hessian or sacking and roughly dyed hanks of homespun wool she had had to