Several years after the disappearance of Margery Benson and Nancy Collett, an anonymous parcel was delivered to the Entomology Department at the Natural History Museum, postmarked Borneo. Inside was one leather-bound notebook, sixteen drawings of a beetle no one had ever seen before, and three pinned pairs of specimens, male and female. The diagrams were impeccable. The notes gave exact descriptions of the beetle’s size and appearance, its habitat—a remote peat swamp forest in Borneo—as well as accounts of its mating patterns, diet, and the wormlike larvae the female buried in the roots of swamp trees. The beetle’s presence in the ecosystem was vital: its larvae fed on bugs that were attacking the roots of the swamp trees. It was labeled Sphaeriusidus enidprettyi.

In the next thirty years, more anonymous parcels were sent to the Entomology Department, not regularly but every once in a while, and from all over the world. They always contained a leather-bound notebook and sixteen anatomical drawings of a new beetle, as well as three pairs of perfectly preserved specimens. No one had any idea who was sending them, but they became a mystery that the department enjoyed. For a while a story went round that one of the deceased curators had faked his own death and was actually back in the field.

Thirty years after the first parcel came one more, addressed not to the Entomology Department in general, but specifically to Freya Bartlett, the only woman working there at the time. Freya had heard about the strange packages that turned up occasionally and, like everyone else, she was curious as to who might have sent them. She didn’t know why but she had a feeling they were the work of another woman. Maybe it was just her fantasy. She was lonely, that was the truth, really lonely. Her working hours were so long she’d given up on the idea of having a family—she couldn’t even hold down a relationship—and when she went on an expedition, she was set apart from her male colleagues by problems they didn’t have to think about. Not only periods, or where to pee safely, not even the endless jokes about her physical strength. But the sense she was never really going to get what she wanted. More than a few times a colleague had reached out a hand when she didn’t need help, and squeezed too hard. She’d been talked down and talked over. She’d missed a couple of promotions she should have got.

And yet, deep down, she knew she couldn’t really blame anyone else. Out of some strange mad desire not to upset the status quo, she’d become complicit. She had laughed when she should have been angry, or said nothing when she should have said a lot. She’d belittled her own achievements, calling them small or unformed or even lucky when they were none of those things. And it wasn’t simply opportunities at work she’d lost out on: she had—and, again, this was her own choice—missed the weddings of her closest friends, just as she’d missed their children’s christenings. Only a month ago her oldest friend had written, inviting her to Scotland for her godson’s birthday, “But I guess it will be difficult for you to get away.” And it was true. Some nights Freya worked so late, she took her sleeping bag out of her locker and slept on the floor under her desk. She actually kept a toothbrush there and a set of spare clothes.

She felt the parcel. It was thin. Too thin to hold anything of interest. Postmarked New Caledonia. She opened it.

There was no leather-bound notebook. No sixteen drawings. No perfect specimens. Just an envelope. Inside the envelope, a black-and-white photograph.

It showed two women. An entomologist and her assistant. The entomologist stood right in the center, a pretty young woman with a big smile on her face, her hand stretched out to meet the camera. Her face was round, proud, happy, as if she’d found something really exciting that she wanted people to see. Her fair hair was loose and thick; she was dressed in a frock and boots, a pair of binoculars round her neck. Freya fetched a magnifying glass. The young woman had a beetle in her hand. Hard to say from a black-and-white photograph, but it was clearly brightly colored. Maybe even gold. Couldn’t be a scarab or a carabid. It wasn’t round enough. Surely not a soft-winged flower beetle. No one had ever found one of those. No wonder the woman looked happy.

Freya moved her magnifying glass to the assistant. She was much older. Too old, really, to be in the field. Tall, big-boned, but frail, dressed in a man’s jacket and loose trousers. She stood at a sideways angle to the camera, gazing off to one side. There was something in her hair. A flower or something. At first Freya couldn’t make it out and then she realized it was a pom-pom and laughed. The old woman must also have suffered some kind of accident: one leg looked stiff and she leaned on a cane. Freya touched the photograph, wanting to know more.

It was the closeness of the two women that got to her—and their different attitudes to the camera, the young woman looking straight at the lens, while the older one gazed to the side as if a third person in the distance held her eye. As if she no longer needed to demand the attention of the world because her love for the young woman was greater. Mother and daughter? Not quite. But Freya could feel their devotion, even in a black-and-white photograph.

She looked again at the beetle in the young woman’s hand. Suddenly she couldn’t tell any more if this woman was showing Freya what she’d found, or inviting her to come and see for herself. Turning the photograph, she found a caption.

The Golden Beetle of New Caledonia. 1983.

Freya drifted to her desk. Already it was midmorning. She riffled through papers, picking them up and putting them down, as if none of them were the things they should be. She checked the atlas for New Caledonia and found an island shaped like a rolling pin on the other side of the world. She made a coffee that she forgot to drink. She put her eye to the microscope and failed to see. She couldn’t stop thinking of the two women. They seemed to inhabit every path she had not followed, every place she did not know, every friend she had not cared for. Freya felt a sudden tingling through her skin, a wildness in her breathing. A bolt of excitement.

Swiftly she found her passport, notebooks, boots, toothbrush, and a few vials, and rolled them into her sleeping bag. She didn’t know if she was going to Scotland first, or New Caledonia. She didn’t know how she was going to get there, or when. But the real failure as a woman was not even to try.

And she was going.