I tried to find out what happened to Kate Dickinson after Valentine Baker’s trial for rape and assault, but I’ve drawn a near total blank.

Secretly I wanted her to become a campaigner for women’s rights or alternatively one of these indomitable Victorian lady botanists who strode the jungles of south east Asia, armed only with a botanical press.

But no. Only in my dreams.

The only reference I’ve found is in Richard Hall’s 1980 biography of Samuel and Flora Baker, in which he states that Miss Dickinson withdrew from public life after the trial, never married, and devoted the rest of her life to painting watercolours, and that she died in 1915.

Irritatingly, he doesn’t give a source for this information, but given the accuracy of much of the rest of his research, I’m prepared to assume it’s accurate …