The Naturalist's Daughter

by Téa Cooper

  He strolled across to the map cabinet, his gazed riveted on the box on top. ‘That’s a beautiful piece of work. Can I touch?’

  ‘You can do more than that. Open it.’ She was so proud of the early nineteenth-century collector’s chest made from red cedar and Australian rosewood she’d managed to unearth. It had a series of drawers and a green leather writing surface. All of the correspondence the Royal Society had sent was stored in there and the writing surface beneath the lid would be the perfect spot to display the sketchbook.

  Shaw lifted the top and his eyes lit up. He pulled out the drawers and lifted the lids on the various compartments. ‘This is wonderful, space for ink and nibs and paper and correspondence. The perfect way to showcase these old letters.’

  Her face flushed at his praise and she picked a pair of gloves and busied herself putting them on. ‘And perhaps the sketchbook.’

  ‘Mind if I take my jacket off and sit down?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He hung it on the back of a chair and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, then sat down and eased the sketchbook from its bag and placed it on the desk.

  She pulled up another stool and sat down, so close to him she could feel the warmth radiating from his skin. A prickle of awareness ran through her as his long fingers picked up the magnifying glass and wiped it clean with the cloth before putting on a pair of gloves.

  Shaw turned straight to the back of the book, his fingers grasping the magnifying glass tightly as he peered at the portrait of Winton, moving the glass until the fallen log was centre of the lens.

  ‘Interesting. You have a look.’ He stood and she slipped onto the stool, angling the magnifying glass. The image blurred then returned to focus and she lifted her head, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling.

  No, surely not.

  She pulled her spectacles from her pocket and hooked them over her ears. With her gloved finger she traced the faded writing along the tree trunk and where they thought there had been no signature she spotted R Winton written in pencil along the fallen branch of the tree.

  R Winton—who was R Winton? Right from the beginning she’d thought the style of the painting was different, that someone other than Charles Winton had painted it.

  She traced the W on Winton then turned back to the previous page. Nothing like it. Charles Winton’s signature was an impatient scrawl, no fanciful scrolls and swirls. She turned back to the painting. The foot of the R curled down under Winton making an almost flowery feminine line to the signature. She turned to the title page.

  There was no doubt about it. Two different Wintons had contributed to the sketchbook. Not just Charles. But who was R Winton. His son? His brother? No, it couldn’t be. That was a feminine hand if ever she’d seen one.

  With her mind churning she turned back to the painting. His wife. He didn’t have a wife. He wasn’t married, unless it had happened after he arrived in the colony. She’d checked the First Fleet records; they listed him as a single man. The early letters he’d sent to Sir Joseph Banks corroborated that, made him sound a solitary sort of chap buried in his work.

  She leant forward and pointed out the faded writing running along the fallen tree trunk. ‘It doesn’t say Resting it says Pa Resting then R Winton.’

  ‘No doubt about it. Hang on.’ His fingers grazed her arm.

  She froze as his touch sent a flurry of goose bumps across her skin.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t see.’ He rested on his elbows and moved the magnifying glass. ‘It definitely says Pa Resting.’

  She rammed her spectacles further up her nose then leant closer into the warm cloud of sandalwood soap surrounding him. ‘Pa Resting … Then R Winton is Charles Winton’s daughter.’

  ‘Or son.’

  ‘She can’t be a son. No boy would have writing as flowery as that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought a daughter would be encouraged to record anatomical drawings such as the ones earlier in the book.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ The male platypus must have been dissected, all its organs clearly marked including the spurs on its back legs and the venom gland. And below the drawing notes, in that feminine hand, a description of the effects of the venom.

  Shaw pushed back his chair and sighed. ‘Because we know the dates. The earliest is June 1817 and the watercolour is right at the end of the book; the latest date is October 1819. Girls didn’t make anatomical drawings in those days. It wasn’t appropriate. Not even today and look at the detail and the dissections.’ His finger hovered over the intricate line drawing and the annotation a common cloaca for reproduction and excretion.

  ‘Oh rubbish. If he was her father it would be totally acceptable.’ She huffed. For some reason she wanted R Winton to be a female. Deep in her heart of hearts more than that. She knew R Winton was Charles’s daughter.

  Shaw raised an eyebrow and turned a few more pages. ‘These ones for example.’ He pointed to the detailed line drawings of the female suckling its young. ‘No woman would draw something like this with or without her father’s permission, not in the early nineteenth century. Not now. It was the era when girls were hot-housed and chaperoned to death.’

  Tamsin studied the picture of the platypus in the burrow, the two juveniles clamped to her body. Maybe he was right. She couldn’t imagine Father discussing such things, and he was a physician. ‘More to the point it wasn’t until 1832 the evidence of mammary glands, the distinguishing feature of mammals, was accepted. This one is dated 1819.’ She bit her lip and tugged the book under the magnifying glass. ‘Can you see a signature on this one?’

  Shaw’s big warm hand covered hers and he edged the glass to the right. ‘Yes. Right there. See. Winton.’

  She extracted her hand and pushed her spectacles further up her nose. ‘Where’s the C?’

  ‘There,’ Shaw said with an air of triumph.

  She leant so close to the glass her nose almost touched the surface. She was right, she knew she was. ‘That…’ She traced the top curve of the C … ‘is the top of the R. Look more carefully.’ She skidded her stool back and stood up stretching the cramped muscles in her back.

  Shaw leant forward arms resting on the desktop so the material of his waistcoat strained across his shoulders. ‘Maybe.’

  If only she’d had Shaw’s help when she was organising the correspondence. Truth was she liked working with him, liked him a lot. She snuck a glance at him from under her lashes. He really was quite handsome. ‘No maybe about it. I need to record this.’ She reached for a pencil and paper. ‘Can you go back to the beginning? I’ll write down the page numbers and we’ll go through all the drawings and see if we can find a signature on each one.’

  ‘Okay. Page one: Watercolour—Platypus on bank. C Winton, June 1818. Is it all right if I name the drawings?’

  ‘Fine, it’ll make it easier in fact. So long as you don’t annotate the book.’

  ‘Of course not! This is just for us.’

  Us—she rather liked that. Us. It was so nice to have a work colleague, especially one who made her feel the way Shaw did. The thought took her by surprise. Always a loner she’d relished the opportunity of working by herself and believed she’d enjoyed it. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Page two: Line drawing—Dissected male platypus. C Winton, July 1818. This is strange.’ He peered down at the facing page. ‘The drawing is signed C Winton but the notes are written in the other handwriting.’

  ‘R Winton’s writing you mean?’

  ‘Yes, and they’re dated October 1819. They explain the symptoms of toxicity.’ His gloved fingers hovered over the words. ‘Goodness it sounds dreadful; writhing, intense pain, lockjaw.’

  ‘Wait a minute. What was the date?’

  ‘October 1819.’

  It couldn’t be. Tamsin’s heart started to thump and she turned to the pile of papers on the shelf behind her desk. She had to find it. Somewhere she’d made a timeline to try to plot the history of platypus research. ‘Here it is.
“The pain was intense and almost paralysing … the arm was swollen to the shoulder, and quite useless, and the pain in the hand very severe …” That was written in 1876. There were some earlier references to the spur but nothing about toxicity.’ She ran her finger down the column of dates. ‘That picture of the female suckling its young.’

  ‘Hang on a minute … Here we are, page ten. You can see the eggs too. And there’s a dissected female on the next page.’

  She peered over his shoulder. ‘See there … an egg in the uterus.’ She stabbed at the drawing. ‘Jamison’s observation that females laid eggs was disregarded in 1816. It wasn’t until 1884 it was proved that platypus were oviparous. Someone shot a female that had laid one egg and when they dissected the poor creature they found another in the uterus finally ending the eighty-year-old argument.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is that no one knew of Winton’s research, can’t have?’

  ‘That would seem to be the case.’

  ‘Maybe it’s all imagination. Supposition.’

  A flash of anger streaked through Tamsin. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, the man was a scientist.’

  ‘And allowed someone else to annotate his notebook. How do we know R Winton didn’t add her drawings and notes years later and just forged the dates?’

  She bit back a sigh. ‘Let’s look at the rest of the pictures and then we have to find out who this R Winton is.’

  By the time they’d reached the end of the sketchbook Tamsin had a three-page list with each drawing named and the artist identified; a little over half were signed by Charles Winton and several by R Winton including a series that had no signature, just additional notes and the same date, October 1819.

  ‘Look at this.’ Shaw straightened up and caught her eye. A quick frown crossed his forehead then he waved a sheet of cartridge paper in his hand and laid it carefully on the tabletop and unfolded it. ‘It was tucked in the back of the book under the end paper which had come loose. I hadn’t noticed it before.’

  A line drawing, a pencil sketch that almost sprang off the page, a lake and a bleak moor, unlike anything she’d ever seen. ‘That doesn’t look like Australia.’

  ‘I don’t think it is. What do you think?’

  ‘I have no idea but it just isn’t Australian. Look at the clouds, they’re hanging so low and they’re so threatening. And it has a title, Dozmary Pool. Where’s that?’

  Tamsin tucked in the loose ends of her hair then pushed back her stool. Her mind whirled. ‘Let’s have a break, we deserve it. I’ll go and get us a drink. Tea. Water? No coffee I’m afraid.’

  ‘Water will be fine.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  He pulled his watch from his fob pocket. ‘Lunchtime.’

  ‘I better check and make sure we haven’t been locked in. Mrs Williams always locks up down here before she goes to lunch.’

  ‘Maybe we are locked in.’

  ‘Don’t! It sounds like a horror story.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind, I’ve enjoyed every moment.’ Shaw threw her a smile.

  Her face flushed the colour of a beet. ‘It’s a shame I can’t take the sketchbook home and work on it tonight.’ Anything to change the subject.

  ‘No chance. I promised Mrs Rushworth I’d take full responsibility and see it was kept locked up. To be honest I was worried about it last night. It should be kept under lock and key.’

  ‘So you must be convinced it is authentic.’

  He rubbed his hands together. ‘I wonder what it would be worth on the open market. We need to discover who this R Winton is. If we had her dates, birth and death, we could at least rule out tampering. It seems that more than half the drawings might be hers.’

  Hers. ‘So you agree with my thesis that R Winton was a woman, Charles Winton’s daughter?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or his wife. Granddaughter even. It needs some more investigation. I cannot understand why Winton handed over control of his research.’

  ‘Plenty of women were capable artists even in those days. And anyway, if Winton had sent it to Sir Joseph Banks the book wouldn’t be tucked in some house in the back of beyond. It would have been lodged with the Royal Society in London and the whole question of the platypus would have been resolved long before 1884.’

  And Charles Winton would have received credit for his discoveries instead of being consigned to some forgotten shelf in a dusty old study in the Hunter. ‘It would be nice to give him credit for his years of research, even if it is posthumously.’

  Shaw closed the sketchbook and slipped it back into its linen bag. ‘I’ve got to go now. I’ll be back tomorrow and we can take a closer look. Is there somewhere we can keep this until next week?’

  ‘Of course there is.’ The idea of the sketchbook remaining at the Library filled Tamsin with a huge sense of achievement. Not only was it the first step to it remaining, it meant that Shaw trusted her. She swung open the door of the safe under the bench. ‘Put it in here.’

  He slipped the bag inside and she took the key from the hook above her desk and locked the safe. ‘Quite safe.’ She patted her pocket where she’d put the key.

  ‘Good! The responsibility was getting me down, and now we know a little more I’m convinced it is more valuable than I anticipated.’

  ‘I’ll go back over the paperwork from England and see if I missed anything. My curiosity is killing me. I need to know who R Winton is and I want to make certain Winton’s signatures match with the correspondence.’

  ‘Are you two still in here?’ Mrs Williams stood in the open doorway. ‘Hello, Mr Everdene.’ She held out her hand. ‘Nice to meet you. I’m Mrs Williams. I was rather hoping I could take a look at the sketchbook.’

  ‘Tamsin’s just locked it in the safe. I’m afraid I have to leave but I’m happy for her to show you.’ He shrugged into his jacket and picked up his hat. ‘Don’t forget to tell Mrs Williams about the Peek Frean family, too.’

  ‘Peek Frean? As in biscuits.’ Mrs Williams tipped her head to one side.

  ‘Hasn’t Tamsin told you about her little discovery?’ He stood with the same cheeky grin on his face that he’d had when they’d first asked Mrs Rushworth for the tin. It made her feel as though they had a special bond.

  ‘No, she hasn’t.’

  ‘Then you have lots to catch up on. I’ll call in tomorrow.’

  She didn’t want him to go. Wanted him to stay and help her find out more about R Winton. ‘Goodbye.’ Her voice held a disgustingly plaintive note, which she doubted Mrs Williams would miss. The door closed behind Shaw and she stood for a moment relishing the last hint of sandalwood soap.

  ‘Now show me your sketchbook.’ Mrs Williams rubbed her hands together sounding very much as though she was trying to cheer up a child whose attention needed diverting. Was she that transparent?

  ‘Tamsin?’

  She brought her eyes back into focus.

  ‘The sketchbook.’ Mrs Williams sat down on the stool. ‘My curiosity is killing me.’

  She pulled the key out and unlocked the safe. ‘I didn’t think Shaw would leave the sketchbook here.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘He promised Mrs Rushworth, Mrs Quinleaven’s daughter, he wouldn’t let it out of his sight.’

  ‘However he’s happy if it’s here under lock and key. He obviously thinks you can be trusted.’ She let out a laugh. ‘It’s ridiculous. This woman sounds like a nightmare.’

  Tamsin loosened the drawstring on the bag and placed the sketchbook back onto the workbench, then passed Mrs Williams a pair of gloves.

  ‘Mrs Quinleaven must have had an idea of its value otherwise she wouldn’t have contacted us. It’s in remarkable condition.’

  ‘A silverfish scuttled out when we first opened it but I don’t think it’s done very much damage and there’s a thread loose in the binding. I’m presuming the water and ink stains on the cover are simply from use.’

  A strange set of expressions worked their way across Mrs Williams’s fac
e as she turned the pages, interspersed with the odd sigh and gasp. Tamsin sat waiting with her hands clasped in her lap. There was no doubt about the authenticity of the book in her mind but why would Winton let someone else add to it? It made no sense at all, even if it was his daughter. Or son.

  As much as she hated to admit it, Shaw was right. In those days girls spent their time on embroidery and taking tea, not dissection and anatomical drawings. According to Mrs Benson at the Missionary Society, Mother had caused enough of a fuss when she’d signed on as a nurse at twenty-one and all she was doing was bandaging wounds and changing bedpans.

  Mrs Williams moved the magnifying glass aside and rubbed her eyes. ‘If you want my opinion it’s authentic. Certainly early 1800s. The paper, the binding, even the ink. The thing that confuses me is the two totally different styles yet the title on the cover makes no reference to anyone other than Charles Winton. I wonder if we can get any sort of timeframe on the images that aren’t dated.’

  ‘I thought of that but they are interspersed through the whole book. It’s not as though the last pages of the book were filled with watercolours. Under the glass we picked up another signature.’

  Mrs Williams closed the book, slipped it back in the bag, took off her gloves and folded her arms. ‘Come on, tell me.’

  ‘The work in the sketchbook isn’t entirely Charles Winton’s.’

  ‘I mentioned the different styles. If they were completed over a period of years it would also be understandable, he may have changed his approach. The watercolours remind me of an exhibition I saw at the Gallery a few months back. Impressionists.’

  ‘I’m talking specifically about the picture of Winton. The portrait.’

  Mrs Williams’s eyes darkened and a slight frown puckered the skin of her forehead and she held her body still, very still. ‘What makes you say that?’

  She turned to the last page. ‘Under the magnifying glass you can see the pencil lines beneath the tree trunk. They weren’t part of the original sketch, before the watercolours were added as I first supposed, they were a signature. R Winton not C Winton.’ She raised her eyebrows and sat back in the chair.