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colour herself with vegetable dyes culled from the herb garden and hedgerows – woad for blue, madder for red and broom or onion skins for yellow. And most certainly she would have had no access to the pretty skeins of coloured silks, like those that as a child I had kept obsessively in their box arranged according to the spectrum, that glided so smoothly through all those squares of perforated binkercloth we used in sewing classes at school.
    I finished my sketch and held it at arm’s length. It was then that I saw what had been right beneath my nose: Catherine Anne Tregenna, with the capitals thus emphasized: CAT – Cat. I laughed aloud. I had wondered why she was not Kate or Cath; Cat seemed a remarkably modern sort of moniker for a seventeenth-century girl. I felt a sudden warm affection for this long-dead woman who had imposed her own lively chosen familiar name upon the world. Did she live up to her self-appointed totem animal, I wondered. Was she neat and sly, eyes slightly aslant, ever watchful? Did she move soft-footed around the manor house where she worked and smile quietly to herself at the foolishness of others? I could imagine her, small and dark, curled in a big wooden chair on cushions she had made herself, under the light of a narrow window, picking out the tail feathers of a fabulous bird with needle and bright threads on a length of pale linen – a runner for a dressing table, perhaps, the edging for a bedcover, or even the altar cloth so briefly mentioned. That commission intrigued me. What fun it would be to track down such a treasure and know a little of its provenance, maybe even follow the progress of its creation through the pages of the little book.
    I passed my hand affectionately across the age-foxed title page. 1625: the best part of four centuries away. At thirty-six and unmarried, in the seventeenth century I would have elicited both pity and ridicule. A spinster; an old maid: of no use to anyone and with no place in society. Pretty much the same as now, which was not particularly cheering; but what did I really know about the early seventeenth century? For me, it occupied a rather hazy space between the glorious Tudors and the Civil War and Restoration. Before continuing with my translation of Catherine’s journal, I should surely make an effort to set it in a bit more context.
    I went to examine my bookcase to see if there was anything there that might educate me further. From college, some poetry and Shakespeare plays with commentaries, Penguin guides to literature, a little gentle philosophy – nothing of much specific use. On the dusty bottom shelf of the bookcase in the spare room I found a set of children’s encyclopedias that probably dated from my grandmother’s schooldays. I hefted them out on to the floor. They gave off a whiff of mildew and face powder, the very smells I associated with being a child in the house my grandmother shared with her crabby older sister, and I wondered whether the scent was real or imagined, a memory that had imposed itself on the object by association. I had loved these encyclopedias and spent hours poring over their neatly engineered pull-out sections with dissections of an apple, a frog and a fly; diagrams of a steam engine and a medieval castle. I flicked through one of the volumes, finding in a short space long, detailed and illustrated articles on the history of art, Greek mythology, human anatomy, the Trojan War and the English feudal system. Two volumes further on (past the discovery of penicillin, wildlife on the savannah, Chaucer and Galileo) I found just what I was looking for.
    I put the other five volumes back on the shelf and took the sixth to my living room, settled myself into the leather sofa and started to read.
    Forty minutes later I felt replete with information. For what purported to be a children’s compendium of knowledge, the encyclopedia had proved a challenging and frankly spicy read, full of surprising details. I had known