The Winter Dress, page 1
Praise for The Winter Dress
‘From a few shimmering strands of truth, Lauren Chater has spun an intriguing story of love, loss and fulfilment.’
Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words
‘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 sumptuous 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
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For my husband Michael, who journeyed with me.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Winter Dress was inspired by a collection of 17th-century artefacts discovered off the coast of Texel, a small island in North Holland in 2014. The most unusual artefact retrieved by divers – a well-preserved 17th-century silk dress – was later identified by leading dress historians as one of the most significant and exciting discoveries in textiles history. The story of the dress’s discovery spread to the Dutch mainland where it became an international sensation, attracting the attention of conservators and academics eager to unravel its mysterious origins. After reading an article about the dress published in The New Yorker, I instantly knew I wanted to write about it. Something about its ethereal, unearthly beauty captured my imagination and I was intrigued by the life of the woman who wore it as well as her fate.
In June 2019, I travelled to the Netherlands to interview the Texel divers who made the discovery as well as the historians and specialists charged with preserving the artefacts. Their theories formed the basis of The Winter Dress, however I have taken the liberty of inventing an entirely new cast of characters and fictionalising dramatic turning points to enhance the novel’s themes. I’m indebted to the staff at the Kaap Skil Museum on Texel (particularly Alec Ewing and Corina Hordijk), as well as members of the Texel Diving Club, for showing me around the island and sharing their stories. Thanks also to Rob van Eerden for allowing me to view the dress – a spellbinding and unforgettable experience I drew on many times during the writing of this novel.
Introductory note for The Winter Dress
Alec Ewing, Head Curator, Kaap Skil Museum, Texel
In 2014, local divers from the Dutch island of Texel stumbled onto a unique discovery: a nearly complete satin gown, dating back to the 17th century. The gown was found in a broken chest, located near the main mast of a wrecked vessel. Remains of other textiles were found alongside it, while nearby chests held silverware and rich book bindings. Locals had already given it a name: the Palmwood Wreck, named after the previously discovered cargo of boxwood.
The existence of the wreck itself is not unusual. The seas surrounding Texel are in fact littered with shipwrecks. Historically, the island was strategically located in the middle of several trade routes, with the eastern coast serving as a busy roadstead during the 17th and 18th centuries. Several dozen wrecks have reappeared from beneath the sands in the last few decades. Due to their poor state, few can be historically identified. While parts of the rigging, weaponry and robust cargo can still be salvaged, textiles are a big exception. As organic material is usually the first to disintegrate, a decayed sock or sleeve is a rare discovery.
While all are heritage sites that yield important information about Dutch history, none have come close to matching the value of these discovered textiles. Remarkably, this gown has survived a nearly 400-year-long stay below the surface of the water rather well. While no undergarments remain, the gown itself is almost completely whole. Its silk still carries a shine and its floral patterning still clearly stands out. Its colours are reds, browns and cream, though it has clearly been contaminated by the dyes from other fabrics stored in the same chest. Parts of those other garments have been salvaged as well, though none are as complete.
Extensive research into the gown and the rest of the collection has been ongoing since 2016. Why did these textiles survive? Are they part of one wardrobe with a single owner? What was the ship’s name, and how was it lost? Not all answers have been found, but an image is taking shape: of a well-armed Dutch merchantman returning from the Mediterranean between about 1650 and 1670. Whatever its name, that ship took several chests filled with valuable goods on board somewhere along the way. They are rich, worldly, personal, and often feminine. Some carry an English connection, others a Dutch one, and some are more exotic. The textiles and silverware would not look out of place in the highest social circles of Western Europe, but who in Holland would be wearing a kaftan?
Though much room is still left for speculation, the value of the collection is already hard to overstate. In many ways, it is shining new light onto fashion, travel and material culture in North-western Europe during the 17th century and is spurring on new insights and research initiatives. Highlights of the collection will be put on permanent display in Museum Kaap Skil on Texel in 2022.
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 t
‘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.
