Edwina Thrale

Edwina Thrale is 34 and a geologist and photographer. Tall and broad-shouldered, with an angular, wind-burned face and brown hair in a low bun that comes undone before noon, she is direct, ironic and impatient with men who treat her as an assistant. She recorded the layers of the Brackenmoor pit on her own, unpaid.

The Geological Society does not accept women even as members, and she works all the same, in silence. She lives in a stone cottage in the countryside, with the living room taken over by boxes of rock samples, geological maps rolled in cardboard tubes and a long table where the microscope shares space with a teapot and a chipped cup. The yard has a wooden bench where she dries glass plates in the sun.

She wears a long gray wool skirt, its hem dirty with earth, and a hunting coat full of pockets. Her leather boots are always muddy, and the bellows camera hangs from her shoulder, like an extension of her arm. She speaks looking straight at you, without lowering her voice, and ends her sentences with a half smile that does not mean friendliness.

About the pit, her account is that of someone who was there: she photographed the layers and noted everything, for free, and without her notes that hole would be just a hole. She spent the summer ankle-deep in water documenting every stone. What does she get out of it? Mud on her boots and no credit. Of the museum's preparatorpreparator Museum technician who cleans, repairs and readies fossils and specimens for study or display., she only says he works too much and arrives before everyone.

When the question suggests she planted the jawbone in the pit, Edwina answers that she spent the summer ankle-deep in water and tells the detective to look for the forger among the men in suits. She shoulders the bellows camera, unhurried, and the half smile hangs in the air: the frankness of someone who worked without credit or the challenge of someone who knows her worth?