The Winter Dress

Lauren Chater

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781760850227
• eBook ISBN: 9781760850234
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Longlisted for the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize. 'From a few shimmering strands of truth, Lauren Chater has spun an intriguing story of love, loss and fulfilment.'Pip Williams, bestselling author of The Dictionary of Lost Words Two women separated by centuries but connected by one beautiful silk dress. A captivating novel based on a real-life shipwreck discovered off Texel Island by the bestselling author of Gulliver's Wife, Lauren Chater. The brightness of silk in that dull room was like the heavens parting after a storm... She saw herself remade, no longer a poor laundress but a woman with means. Jo Baaker, a textiles historian and Dutch expat is drawn back to the island where she was born to investigate the provenance of a 17th-century silk dress. Retrieved by local divers from a sunken shipwreck, the dress offers tantalising clues about the way people lived and died during Holland's famous Golden Age. Jo's research leads her to Anna Tesseltje, a poor Amsterdam laundress turned ladies' companion who served the enigmatic artist Catharina van Shurman. The two women were said to share a powerful bond, so why did Anna abandon Catharina at the height of her misfortune? Jo is convinced the truth lies hidden between the folds of this extraordinary dress. But as she delves deeper into Anna's history, troubling details about her own past begin to emerge. On the small Dutch island of Texel where fortunes are lost and secrets lie buried for centuries, Jo will finally discover the truth about herself and the woman who wore the Winter Dress. Praise for The Winter Dress
'Chater has delivered a beautifully told story that takes an intriguing historical mystery and weaves it into a richly imagined tale that is every bit as breathtaking and beguiling as the remarkable dress it is based on.' Better Reading ' Vivid, expansive and richly imagined, The Winter Dress weaves together a fascinating historical mystery and an uncompromising portrait of the possibility and price of female autonomy with remarkable and deeply affecting results.' James Bradley, author of Wrack 'Wrap yourself in Chater's prose. The Winter Dress is a captivating tale of discovery and obsession by one of Australia's very best historical fiction authors. Absolutely essential reading.' Melissa Ashley, author of The Birdman's Wife

1

Jo

2019

The first thing I recall about that day is not the image of the dress nor Bram’s phone call. It’s the man’s clothes, arranged in a neat pile halfway up the beach. A pair of shorts folded over canvas sneakers. A white shirt fluttering in the breeze. The stranger had removed his watch before he entered the water. In the gathering heat, its glass dial blazed like a second sun. Two grim-faced paramedics knelt on the sand packing up their equipment, while a uniformed cop directed curious onlookers away from the poor man’s body, partially concealed under a plastic sheet.

I imagined the fleshy contours and rich, sun-tanned hues of the victim’s face – not the blanched, sunken look he’d worn when the lifeguards dragged him out of the surf, but that earlier version of him, the living, breathing one that had escaped my notice. After arriving at Bondi Beach an hour ago, I’d run as quickly as I could towards the water, paddling hard until I felt the vertiginous pull of the current grip my legs and arms, the sandy shelf giving way to a bottomless blue. I floated, waiting for the sea to work its magic and ease the knotted tension in my neck.

I’d spent most of the previous day hunched over my laptop, attempting to finish writing my book. The past eight months had taught me that it was one thing to write a dissertation on cultural dress theory and quite another to convert it into a digestible piece of creative non-fiction people might actually want to read. Before leaving my job as a lecturer at the London Metropolitan University, I’d applied for, and been accepted into, a research fellowship program at Sydney University. I’d written most of the first draft of my textiles book in a tiny office overlooking the university quadrangle, knocking out twelve chapters within six months in a kind of frenzy. Then, for reasons I found hard to explain to the Dean and my colleagues, my progress had stalled.

I had started sleeping badly, my dreams brimming with voices speaking all at once, as if half a dozen radio frequencies had been spliced together to torture me. Some of the voices I recognised as belonging to people I knew but many of them remained stubbornly vague. They prattled on about the most mundane subjects – what they were planning to eat for dinner, what mischief their children got up to, the kind of house they hoped they could afford once the mortgage rates fell. I’d tried everything to tune them out – meditation before bed, half a Valium before dinner. I even banned caffeine from my diet, although my resolution lasted less than a fortnight (the coffee withdrawals made me so irritable that my aunt, Marieke, insisted I resume the habit). And then, just as suddenly as they had started, the bad dreams lifted. For the past few days, my head had been clear. No more voices, no more headaches. Just peace. The terms of the university fellowship stipulated that the book I was working on needed to be ready for publication within a year. Meeting the deadline would be challenging after my health issues but, if I worked hard, not impossible. I’d pushed myself yesterday to regain some momentum. Now I was paying for it.

My neck had felt poker-stiff, the tendons stretched as taut as piano wire. Every turn of my head sent a ripple of pain shooting down a labyrinth of nerve-endings into my spine. I could have arranged a massage but that would have meant putting my body in a stranger’s hands and making the dreaded small talk, an ability I’d always admired in others since it was a skill I felt I lacked. The beach had seemed a far safer bet.

Marieke insisted the cure for any ailment was salt water. She swore by the restorative benefits of a good cry, vowing she always felt better afterwards. But crying had never affected me that way. I hadn’t even cried the night two police arrived from the Dutch mainland on Texel, the small island where I lived, to tell me that my parents’ bodies had been found in an isolated swamp in Southern Holland. Too numb and shocked to accept what they were trying to say, I assumed the tears would come later. I waited for them to arrive, the way I expected my parents to walk through the door again, their voices raised in perpetual argument over some slight committed years ago. But they never did.

When Marieke had showed up to make the funeral arrangements and organise the adoption paperwork so I could leave Holland and return to live with her in Australia, I’d asked if she thought it was odd I was yet to cry over my parents’ deaths. What if I was one of those strange criminals you read about in the news – a person devoid of empathy who tortures others without remorse? But Marieke had assured me grief has its own timeline.

‘Your parents died in a freak accident, Josefeine, something nobody could have predicted. It will take time for the shock to wear off. But one day, you will cry, and when that moment comes I’ll be there to console you.’

I’d never quite worked up the courage to tell her she was wrong.

I let the ocean cradle me and, after half an hour’s gentle rocking elapsed, raised my head and glanced back towards the shore. The southern end of the beach was already packed, although it was not yet nine. Teenagers splashed playfully in the shallows and a pod of surfers wove in and out of sight, their boards spearing the waves as neatly as needles through cloth. Bondi had been packed with tourists and locals for as long as I could remember. I could still recite the number of the bus that had conveyed me to the city interchange during the summer holidays, I could picture it wheezing to a stop outside Marieke’s Marrickville terrace where she’d brought me to live. There was a particularly cranky bus driver on the 412 route who always shouted at me to hurry, then sighed as if greatly put upon when I fumbled the unfamiliar coins. I once heard him mimic my Dutch accent to another passenger, exaggerating the vowels like a toddler learning their first rhyme. I accepted his mocking without complaint but promised myself I would work hard to be rid of the accent, casting off the fragments of my old life like an ill-fitting shell.

How strange everything had seemed in those early months. Even the light was different. It stung my eyes if I stared too long at the waves and it painted glowing after-images of striped towels and beach umbrellas on the back of my eyelids. That particular kind of light – that bright, unforgiving Australian sunshine – was a stark contrast to the soft ambience of my Northern European childhood. It marked, distinctly, the two phases of my early existence and allowed me to press on without worrying too much about the past. Moving to Australia with the only person in my family brave enough to leave the island of Texel, where generations of Baakers had always lived, seemed like a wild adventure, the fulfilment of a destiny I’d always sensed waiting. I felt reborn, as if I’d been given a second chance. I knew I had to be tough to survive and I wasn’t about to throw away my hard-won independence by dwelling on things that might have been.

I was still floating on my back when the screaming began. A woman’s voice, shrill, panicked. I’ve never been scared of sharks – you can’t be when you dive as regularly as I do. You’ve got more chance of being caught in a rip and washed out to sea than you do of ending up as a white pointer’s lunch. But the screaming rattled my nerves so I started paddling in, using the current to propel me through the surf. As I neared the shore, two lifeguards emerged, hauling something wet and heavy between them, water streaming off their shoulders and necks as they fought the tide. Spectators standing in the shallows watched the drama unfold, their faces frozen as if turned to stone.

I staggered back onto the sand just as the lifeguards laid the man down and began performing CPR. By the time the paramedics arrived, it was obvious to everyone that the man was gone. His profile was a pallid sculpture carved from bleached bone, save for his nose and lips which were purple-tinged: classic signs of oxygen deprivation. A few months after my parents died, I became obsessed with drownings and near-drownings. It was a morbid fascination; something I’m now a little ashamed to admit, although in my defence, I was sixteen and my whole world had been upended by their unexpected passing.

When I had first arrived in Australia, Marieke was working as an administration assistant in a community art gallery. It was the summer holidays. I was yet to make any friends. Each morning, I followed Marieke into town and she dropped me at the State Library. I spent hours there poring over books and old newspapers and dog-eared magazines, indulging in my strange infatuation. I learned that there are five stages of drowning, that clinical death can occur after four minutes of complete submersion. I learned that even after successful resuscitation, some victims continue to experience breathing difficulties, hallucinations and confusion. Approximately ninety per cent of drownings occur in freshwater lakes, rivers and swimming pools. The remaining ten per cent take place in sea water.

People who have drowned and been brought back describe the experience as ‘surreal’. They liken it to sitting in a darkened theatre, watching themselves as actors going through the motions on screen. First comes disbelief – the mind and body struggling for dominance, one refusing to acknowledge how serious the situation is while the other searches frantically for a source of oxygen, rapidly leading to a semi-conscious state. Doctors describe this as ‘the breaking point’ – the moment where chemical sensors inside the body trigger an involuntary breath that drags water into the windpipe. After that comes shock and then the grave acceptance of their inevitable fate: a kind of surrendering.

These accounts had made me shiver even as I devoured them. Was this what my parents experienced in their final moments? The enduring mystery – that I would never know their last thoughts – had haunted me well into adulthood. There was one thing I was sure of, though. When death had rushed headlong into the salt plains of Saeftinghe, flooding the sea asters and scurvy grass verging the isolated hiking trail where they’d chosen to walk that day without a guide, their last moments hadn’t been spent worrying about what would happen to me. I was their burden. They’d always made that perfectly clear.

Swinging my bag over my shoulder, I walked towards the carpark, passing the small group keeping silent vigil over the man’s body. There was nothing to be done. The police would check his identification and notify his next of kin as they had when my parents had passed. I had been spared the horror of having to identify them because my best friend’s father offered to do it for me. I was grateful to him then, as I was grateful for a good many things Bram’s family did for me, providing stability where none existed.

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.

I had no doubt that close examination under a microscope would reveal tiny holes in the delicate fabric. The damage would inevitably worsen, spreading like spores of mould on cheese until the entire composition eventually broke down. For now though, the undamaged parts of the brocade shimmered like fish scales, illuminated by an arc of rainbow light as if someone had sponged the panels with water to bring out the peculiar, dazzling shine of gold thread ribboned throughout the weft. The hem and sleeves were fringed with yellow-starched reticella lace, very fine meshwork which must have taken hours of back-breaking labour to produce. Excitement bubbled through me.

Under the image on my phone, the sender had written in Dutch: Wat denk je, Feine?

What do you think, Feine?

Only a handful of people knew me from my Texel days and only one, apart from Marieke, was bold enough to use my childhood nickname. Bram, is that you?

It’s me, he wrote back. I’ve changed phones. Glad this is still your number! Did you get the photo?

I did! What’s the time there?

A little after 5am. I’m at the clubhouse in Oudeschild. Sem’s here, too. He says congratulations on that piece you wrote for The New Yorker! We bought three copies and had one framed for the display room. You’re famous, Feine!

The article, a watered-down version of my PhD, had been published five years ago to coincide with the opening of an exhibition on Tudor women hosted by a London gallery. I’d argued that the intimate items of Elizabeth Tudor’s boudoir actually belonged to her lover, a woman. One of her ladies-in-waiting, to be precise, the daughter of a wealthy landowner who had made his fortune selling acres of oak forest cut down and repurposed into a fleet of naval ships. The story had been picked up by international media outlets and syndicated across the globe. It was the only article I’d ever written that had gone viral and, looking back, I was woefully unprepared for the fallout. For a few months, my phone was clogged with weekly message from journalists demanding exclusive interviews or armchair historians wanting to discuss their own Tudor theories. Worst of all was the avalanche of hate mail I received from die-hard monarchists who despised the suggestion of homosexuality in any members of the institution, living or dead. The whole experience had left me wary of committing too early to a theory and espousing it publicly before I was mentally ready to deal with the outcome.

Tell me about the dress, I wrote.

We were diving a wreck yesterday out near De Ezei – a galleon, a big old grandmother ship. She’s usually under a layer of mud but a storm uncovered her. Blew all the mud and sand away. Nearly blew us away! There was a sealed chest on the upper deck. We had to break it open with a knife. Then the wind picked up again and the visibility turned to shit so we grabbed everything we could and hauled it back to our boat. Sem unrolled the fabric and we realised it was a dress. We couldn’t decide what to do with it. Then somebody remembered your article. I haven’t even shown you the other stuff yet. Stand by.

I watched three tiny circles revolve while more photos loaded. The first was a 17th-century lice comb on a black background, the blond wood purled with knots, the edges needled with sharp, uneven teeth. I’d handled a similar one years ago in a lab in Oxford, cleaning the wood with a fine sable paintbrush before prising the desiccated bodies of centuries-old lice out of the tines. Next came a four-sided drawstring purse, the exterior worn so thin that the hard leather scaffold showed through the patched velvet like exposed cartilage. A woman would have tied those purse strings around her waist and stored her personal items inside – a sewing kit, perhaps, or a herbal pomander, something to ward off the foul stench of the city streets. The final image revealed a scattering of crimson carpet fragments piled up beside a damp leather book cover. The book’s pages had long since dissolved, leaving just the fragile bindings. A heraldic crest was stamped on the leather, but the camera had failed to capture the finer details so all I could make out was a blurred shape resembling a sword or a staff hemmed inside a scrolled cartouche.

I waited but there were no more photos, only a text message. So? What do you think of our treasures?

I hesitated for exactly ten seconds before pressing the tiny telephone logo. Bram picked up on the second ring. His voice was warm and familiar, despite the oceans and years separating us.

‘Feine! Or should I call you Doctor Baaker?’

I could tell he was grinning. I pictured his sparkling eyes and lopsided grin, the way his chipped right tooth always snagged on his bottom lip – the legacy of an adolescent encounter with a 40-pound scuba tank. I tried to remember when we’d last spoken. It must have been around four years ago. He’d called to invite me to a school reunion which I’d declined to attend, although I could have easily flown from London, where I was based, to Amsterdam and arranged a hire car. The reunion was to be held in the college gymnasium of our old high school on the Dutch mainland. When I’d lived on Texel, the student population was so insignificant that the local government didn’t feel they could justify paying a teacher. Instead, each morning Bram and I had taken the ferry together, crossing the deep, cold waters of the Marsdiep, the tidal race that thundered between Texel and the coastal village Den Hoorn, providing the only access to the island except by air.

At sixteen, Bram had towered over the sixth-form boys and some of the teachers, too. He was smart, a joker, always ready to laugh at his own expense. In the summer holidays, he could be found in the backroom of the scuba-diving shop his father owned, filling air tanks and washing wetsuits and kitting out the tourists with snorkels and masks. We’d lost touch a bit after I moved away, eventually reconnecting in our mid-twenties when Bram tracked me down via the staff website of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Book Club Questions
• About the Author
• Copyright