The Botanist’s Daughter : A Novel (2018)

by Nunn, Kayte

  Contents

  Title Page

  Also by Kayte Nunn

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Acknowledgements

  Extract from The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant

  Copyright

  Also by Kayte Nunn

  Rose’s Vintage

  Angel’s Share

  For Sheila, who loved lilies and reading

  I love you as the plant that never blooms

  but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers

  – Sonnet XVII, Pablo Neruda

  Chapter One

  SYDNEY, AUTUMN 2017

  Anna opened the door to see three men standing there. The one closest to her was a lumbering, Neanderthal-browed hulk; the next a middling, middle-aged figure in overalls; and just behind him, there was a shorter, thinner, younger one with tattoos running down the sinewy muscles of his forearms.

  ‘The three bears,’ she said under her breath, noticing as she did that the paint on the jamb had begun to flake. It was a deep mulberry shade called ‘Grand Poobah’, the name of which had made her grandmother honk with laughter in the middle of the hardware store. It had been a few months after Anna’s granddad died, and Gussie had wanted to cheer herself up.

  Shifting her gaze from the men, Anna pressed the tongues of loose paint against the bare wood in a futile attempt to reaffix them.

  ‘What’s that you say?’ asked the lumbering one, who, with his rough halo of golden hair and a belly that strained the weave of his shirt, reminded her distinctly of Papa Bear. ‘Have we got the right place?’ He consulted a notebook, running a stubby forefinger down the page, and then looked across at her. ‘Jenkins, is it?’

  ‘Sorry,’ replied Anna, suddenly flustered at the thought that he might have overheard her. ‘Come in.’

  She stood back and ushered them through the door, and the men looked around, sizing up the place, their heavy boots echoing in the empty house. Anna held her breath as she led them into the kitchen, a tiny space in the middle of the long, narrow terrace that hadn’t seen an update in decades. She gazed at the lemon Formica, the timber cupboards and the orange-and-brown linoleum, its patterned surface worn to a blur by a million steps. She remembered the excitement of coming to stay as a child, being driven across the bridge from her leafy suburban home to what seemed like another world, one of endless, twisting narrow streets and slivers of houses fronted by lacy wrought-iron balconies. Of sitting at the kitchen table eating jam sandwiches washed down with frosted glasses of icy pink Nesquik. Of her granddad taking her and her sister up the street to the corner store, skipping ahead of them over the cracks in the pavement, eager for the Redskins and Violet Crumbles that were stacked on the shop’s narrow shelves. In summer there were sweet and sticky Icy Poles or Paddle Pops. A Monaco Bar if they were really lucky.

  Sweet memories, all.

  Papa Bear spoke. ‘All right then, love, we’ll go and get our gear and make a start. Shouldn’t take us too long,’ he said as he led the others away.

  They returned a few minutes later, armed with crowbars and hammers, and Anna left them to it, going up the stairs and into her grandparents’ old bedroom at the front of the house. The flowered yellow wallpaper was mottled with faded patches where the afternoon sun caught it and the carpet was worn. As she reached the centre of the room she caught a faint whiff of Gussie’s perfume – Youth Dew. Applied with a generous hand and worn without a hint of irony. She half-expected Gussie to come bustling out at her, grey hair neatly curled, drying her hands on a towel and scolding her for the lack of warning, a ready smile dimpling her cheeks nonetheless. Granddad had died when Anna was a teen, but it was the loss of Gussie she felt the most.

  Of course, in recent years, more often than not when Anna would call round her grandmother would mistake her for her mother, or worse, not recognise her at all. Now, the sombre tick of the clock on the mantel was the only welcome.

  Anna ran a finger along the dusty windowsills, then opened the French doors onto the balcony that faced the street, letting in the breeze. The house had been shut up for a few months, and the smell of damp couldn’t be ignored; it had been an insufferably humid summer.

  Her grandparents had favoured dark, heavy furniture with sturdy turned legs that weighed an absolute ton; the house had been crammed with it, every last bit of wall space taken up with sideboards and dressers, their surfaces laden with floral china, crocheted doilies, dusty glass ornaments, collectors’ dolls dressed in native costume from countries they would never visit. But the clearance firm had been the week before and now the place was emptier than Anna had ever known it, almost all trace of its former occupants erased. Sudden grief overwhelmed her and brought a rush of wet heat behind her eyes.

  It’s only stuff, she told herself sternly. None of it will bring Gussie back. Her grandmother had left this house, the Paddington terrace she’d been born in, raised a family in and died in, solely to Anna. That had been a surprise. Almost as shocking as the fact of her grandmother’s death. Despite her fading memory, the old lady had been spry, insisting on living by herself. ‘What would I want with a load of old strangers dribbling into their tea and cacking their undies?’ she’d asked when Anna’s mum had tentatively suggested several times over recent years that she might want to think about moving to a retirement home, especially after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

  Anna felt suddenly overwhelmed. Was she doing the right thing? Should she have waited? Did she have the strength to do this on her own?

  Don’t be ridiculous, she scolded herself. The decision had been made. She would see this through.

  She walked down the stairs, stepping over the one that had always creaked, cast a swift look at the builders, who had begun the demolition of the front room – the ‘good room’, she remembered with a faint smile – then turned towards the back of the house. She passed through the draughty sleep-out where she and her sister used to stay when they were kids, and opened the back door.

  She let out a long sigh.

  She shouldn�
��t have been surprised as she’d not been out the back for months, but she was disheartened nonetheless. The garden, for so long her grandmother’s pride and joy, was in a complete state. Overgrown wasn’t a strong enough word for it: great choking weeds had sprung up, overwhelming the once carefully tended plantings. Anna, who as a girl had loved to potter about in the postage-stamp-sized space equipped with her own little trowel and fork, helping her grandmother weed and water, had been too concerned with the life ebbing away inside the house to do so much as even peer outside; and then, after Gus’s death she hadn’t wanted to linger in the house. She spent her days looking after other people’s gardens and had left this one untended.

  The east fence was an unkempt hedge of murraya, its normally heady-scented bell-shaped flowers dried up and brown. The path had almost disappeared beneath a creeping mat of tradescantia. Ivy curled its strangling tendrils up the crepe myrtle. And the wisteria, trained over the back fence, had collapsed on itself. Under her breath, she recited the names of her grandmother’s favourite plants as if they were a litany, searching for each among the tangle of weeds. She murmured their names under her breath as much to reassure herself as anything else … brilliant orange strelitzia – birds of paradise – purple aster, a deep magenta bougainvillea, hippeastrum, hellebores, camellia, pelargonium and delicate viola in the shade there … the familiar words a salve to her sorrow.

  As she cleared a space to sit on the weathered Lutyens bench at the back of the garden, her gaze rested on a spider’s web that billowed in the breeze like a parachute, its gossamer threads stretched almost to breaking point. Had it been nearly six months? Half a year already? For all that time she’d been an automaton, roused daily from heavy sleep by her alarm, going through the motions at work, barely remembering conversations with her clients, losing herself in the repetitive digging and weeding of garden beds and the mowing of summer lawns. She had avoided returning to this garden, a place she was once so fond of.

  She squinted up at the sun, which had climbed higher in the sky and then across to the apple tree in the corner, last season’s wizened fruit still hanging from its branches. Here in this garden was the proof: while some lives ended, the rest of the world marched relentlessly on. Trying to stop it was as futile as attempting to catch water in a web.

  She sat, surveying the scene, when from inside the house suddenly came a louder thump than all the preceding ones, followed by a shout. She heard her name called and sprang up, hurrying back along the path.

  As she entered the house, clouds of white dust filled the air, and what were once three small rooms on the ground floor was now an open space, bigger than she had imagined it might be. It had all come apart so quickly. The old carpet had been pulled up and rolled up and now lolled halfway out the front door. Bricks and crumbling mortar and plasterboard littered the floor.

  ‘All right, love?’ said the tall, lumbering one. ‘We thought you might want to see this.’ He pointed at the bookshelves, which the builders had begun to rip away from the far wall. ‘Almost a shame to pull them out, really. You don’t often see workmanship like that these days.’

  ‘What?’ Anna had left clear instructions to demolish the shelves, in order to widen the narrow room, so she wasn’t sure what they were showing her.

  ‘Look a bit closer, there,’ he said, pointing to the wall that had been covered by the bookshelf furthest from the window. She did as she was asked and then she saw it – a hole at about waist height. As she stepped forward to get a better look, she noticed the smallest of the demolition men standing to her left. ‘Here,’ he piped up, his voice as reedy as his frame, and as she turned towards him he held out a battered notebook. It was completely grey, covered in dust and fine spider filaments. ‘Not sure what this is, but you might like to take a gander at it.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She took the notebook and blew on its surface, sending a cloud of ash puffing into the air. She wiped at the book with one finger, revealing a dark blue cover. She opened it carefully and saw dense, spidery writing covering the yellowed pages. ‘How odd. I wonder how something like this ended up in the brickwork?’

  ‘Well, what is it?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘I’m not sure. It must have got stuck behind there before the shelves were built. I’ll take a better look at it later.’

  She returned to the garden and, after placing the notebook on the bench beside her, was pondering where to start work, when there was another crash and a shout for her. What this time?

  She retraced her steps and leant around the door: this time the middle-sized builder was holding a greyish box, about the size a pair of boots might come in.

  ‘In there?’ Anna asked, staring at the hole in the wall, which scarcely looked large enough to have contained the box. As if to convince herself, she stepped forward and peered into the space. She shuddered as she looked into the pitch blackness, imagining enormous spiders and the round, hard shells of dead woodlice.

  ‘Take a look,’ said the boss, picking up a torch and shining it upwards.

  She stared up into the narrow opening: about half a metre up, the chute widened slightly to some kind of shelf.

  ‘Yeah, up there,’ he confirmed. ‘I was having a bit of a sticky beak. I just about got my arm up there and tipped it over, and down it came. It got stuck, but I managed to wiggle it out.’

  Anna turned back to the builder who was holding the box. Taking it from him, she was surprised at its weight and had to tense her biceps to avoid dropping it. It wasn’t in fact grey, just covered in dust and cobwebs as the notebook had been. She rubbed her fingers across the top to reveal a tarnished metal surface. The edges of the box had been etched into shapes and as Anna brushed more of the dust away, she discovered three-dimensional bees and curlicues of plants and flowers. Four-leafed clovers were carved at each corner. ‘Bloody hell,’ she exclaimed. ‘How bizarre.’

  ‘If you say so, love,’ said the boss, scratching his head. ‘Lucky it didn’t break Nathan’s arm when it came down.’

  ‘Yes, I guess it was,’ she replied absently, still absorbed in the box. She put it down on the floor and tried the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. Wiping away the dust from the sides with her hands, she discovered a small heart-shaped padlock keeping it shut tight. It must have once been brass, but it was now as tarnished and black as the rest of the box. ‘I wonder what it is?’

  ‘Want us to have a crack at it?’ asked the boss, lifting his sledgehammer.

  ‘No!’ cried Anna, still bent down looking at it. ‘No. I don’t want it damaged.’

  ‘I’ve got a crowbar,’ Nathan added.

  ‘I think I’d better take it to a locksmith actually,’ she said, hating the primness in her voice. ‘But thanks for the offer.’

  ‘Okay, love, whatever you say. We’ll crack on, then. I reckon we’ll have most of the demolition in here done by the end of the day.’

  Anna looked at the flimsy remains of the bookshelves and nodded. ‘Okay, thanks.’

  She picked up the box again, holding it away from her body to avoid covering herself in more dust as she headed for the stairs. She felt a shiver as a gust of wind blew through the open front door. How on earth had such a thing come to be hidden away in the wall cavity? Even through the grime she could see that it must have once been very beautiful. Probably valuable, certainly antique. What had possessed someone to hide it like that? Could Granny Gus have wedged it up there, hidden it somewhere it would almost certainly never be discovered? Anna reached for her phone. She had to speak to her mother.

  Chapter Two

  CORNWALL, 1886

  The boots were newly arrived from London, ordered in happier times. There were twelve tricky buttons, each firmly hooked into the Moroccan leather, and Elizabeth wrestled with them, trying unsuccessfully to pull each boot from her swollen feet. The bootmaker was renowned as one of the county’s finest, and the leather the softest money could buy, but after a mere hour’s wear they had given her blisters. If she were at the hous
e, Daisy would have been there to help, button hook at the ready, but as it was she had to make do with her own fumbling fingers, wondering whether the correct last had been used.

  Several minutes later, her toes were finally free of their wretched encasement and she wiggled them luxuriously, pressing the tender red spots on her heels and assessing the damage. ‘Oh Lord save us, who would wear such things if they had the choice?’ Elizabeth said aloud.

  Not that there was anyone to hear her complaint.

  Earlier, she had escaped the torpor brought on by the late-afternoon heat that crept into every corner of the rambling Trebithick Hall. It had rendered its few occupants – with Elizabeth the sole exception – into a state of dozy insensibility. And so she was able to slip unnoticed into the gloom of the stables, where she commanded Banks, the stablemaster, to bring Achilles to her. ‘With my father’s saddle, if you please,’ she said, daring him to contradict her. Now was not the time for a lady’s sidesaddle.

  Once he had led the black stallion up to the mounting block, she dismissed him. ‘I can certainly manage from here.’ She didn’t want Banks to see her struggle with her dress, nor – heaven forfend – catch sight of her undergarments. Standards of propriety might have temporarily been eased at Trebithick Hall, but she didn’t want to make Banks feel more uncomfortable than he doubtless already was. Hitching up the black bombazine of her skirts, she clambered awkwardly astride the sweating horse and kicked him on. She tried not to think about the fact that she had never ridden Achilles before, and certainly wouldn’t have been granted permission when her father was alive, never mind to ride him astride. ‘Sidesaddle is the only decorous way for ladies to comport themselves,’ John Trebithick had always insisted. Though progressive in other ways – he had encouraged Elizabeth and her sister to study Latin and ancient Greek, for example – he had been immovable on that particular point of decorum.

  ‘Come on, boy, let’s go!’ she’d cried, wheeling the big horse around the yard and pointing him out of the hall’s side gate and towards the bridleway that ran along the eastern boundary of the Trebithick estate. Achilles needed little encouragement and Elizabeth gripped the reins as he bucked at the unfamiliar weight on his back. Much like her, he had been cooped up for months, as her father became too frail to venture outdoors let alone ride his favourite mount. Although Banks had turned the horse out, letting him kick up his heels in the meadow with the rest of the stable the day before, he was still as fresh as new milk.