CHAPTER SIX #2
He opened his mouth—no doubt to protest—but I reached for his tea tin and took it firmly from his hand.
“You really do look quite wretched, you know.”
If I had been more timid, there is no question he would have cursed me and gone straight back to work.
But I was dauntless, and he allowed me to take the tin from him as he stretched his limbs upon the sofa.
Almost as soon as he was recumbent, his entire body succumbed to fatigue and he slept.
Huxley puffed a sigh of indignation, for his master was far too large to permit him to share the sofa.
He retreated under it to snore wetly as I roamed the workshop.
I moved to the specimen shelves to look over the Wardian cases, handsomely made, and each set with a small metal plaque incised with a series of letters—R.T.-V.
I traced them idly with a fingertip, a growing suspicion beginning to take root in my mind.
“R.T.-V.,” I murmured.
“Revelstoke Templeton-Vane.
Now, this is a very interesting development indeed.”
I dredged up all that I knew of the famed explorer and natural historian, but the facts were few and I had been on the other side of the world when his story had been splashed across English newspapers.
The darling of the naturalists, he had established himself as a brilliant scholar with a series of papers reconciling Darwin’s and Huxley’s conflicting views of natural selection.
But everything had been lost on a disastrous expedition to .
.
.
Where was it?
I cudgeled my brain and could not recall until I remembered Mr. Stoker’s brief mention of hiking the .
That was it, of course.
He had headed a single expedition to South America, and that one trip had seen his career wrecked upon the shoals of infamy.
I had heard only snatches of his ruin, but there had been vicious rumors, and he had all but disappeared from the scientific community for years.
But here were his Wardian cases, consigned to a derelict Thames-side warehouse.
And then there was the matter of his name.
It took little imagination to derive Stoker from Revelstoke.
So, the once brilliant comet whose light had burned out so flamboyantly had come to rest in obscurity and poverty, I reflected as I looked about the dilapidated room.
I ran a finger over one of the cases and it came away black.
I shuddered.
It was unthinkable to sit idly by when I was surrounded by so much filth.
As a scientist I rebelled against the disorder, and I had long since discovered that nothing thwarted the mental processes like clutter.
While Mr. Stoker slumbered on, I swept the floor, dumping the sweepings into the dirt yard I found behind the workshop.
I cleared out the ashes from the stove, putting them carefully aside in a pail and leaving a thick bed under the grate.
This I polished and laid with a new fire, kindling it merrily as I rummaged about the meager stores for the makings of a soup.
I scoured a wide pot and put it to the boil, hoping it had not held something unsavory in the recent past.
I found a beef bone only a little past its prime and put it into the pot, adding a few limp carrots and their tops, and an onion with its sprouted green cap.
In the dirt yard I discovered a struggling herb, etiolated as it was, and chopped it to add to the pot.
There was salt in great quantities—he apparently used it in many of his preparations—and I did not think he would begrudge a little for the soup pot.
I added this with crumbs of the loaf from the earlier repast to thicken the broth.
As it bubbled away, I found spoons and took up the pail of ashes to polish them, rubbing them until they gleamed.
After this, I continued to tidy the workshop, dusting the cases and straightening the books and wiping the sticky worktables of the worst of their grime.
The endless stacks of newspapers, I was amused to see, had provided him with drawing paper, for most of the margins held small sketches—some faces or ships, others botanical specimens or animals.
He was a gifted artist, I realized, capturing in a few strokes of pencil or charcoal the essence of what he intended to depict.
I had attempted enough sketches and paintings of my butterflies to know true talent when I saw it.
His technique was rough and hasty, but his talent was far beyond my own.
I tamped the newspapers into neat bundles without sorting them, skimming the headlines to see what I had missed in the years I had been abroad.
The Irish question appeared often, as did the Mahdist War in the Sudan.
The Prussians featured frequently, but that was no surprise.
The Prussians were always up to something nefarious.
And there had been an impressive number of gunfights in cities in the western United States.
But that, too, was no great surprise.
In my experience, Americans were very friendly and very fond of their firearms.
I put these aside and moved on to the shelves holding bottles of chemicals.
He had a collection of them, many potent, all flammable, and quite a few capable of producing nasty burns if permitted to touch bare skin.
Most bottles contained preservatives in various dilutions, although one bore a label that crumbled at the tentative poke I gave it.
I sniffed experimentally and was assaulted at once by the cloying pickled smell of formaldehyde.
I gave it a wide berth and continued on, tidying until I had brought a reasonable semblance of order to the place.
I was intrigued to find a florilegium of Romantic poetry tucked under a pot of hide glue and was just about to settle in to read when I heard a roar of outrage.
“Holy Christ, I told you not to touch anything.”
Mr. Stoker had come awake, wincing a little as he sat up and worked the stiffness from his muscles.
“I did not move anything,” I assured him.
“I merely stacked the books and correspondence so they would not fall over, and I cooked a meal.
I would have replaced the preservative solution in some of those appalling jars, but it does not seem to be plain ethyl alcohol, and I did not wish to damage the specimens by changing the solution.”
“At least you have that much sense,” he said grudgingly.
“The solution is of my own devising.”
“And not very effective,” I told him, pointing towards the jars of suckling pigs floating in scummy yellow fluid.
“Those were early efforts, designed to show me where the flaws were in the formula,” he said nastily.
“And if Your Highness would care to look at the specimens on
that shelf, I think you will find the solution is clear as Irish crystal.”
I did as he bade, nodding in approval.
“Well-done.
That is perhaps the finest preserving work I have seen.
Did you use plain formaldehyde?
No, of course, you will not tell me.
I ought not to have asked.
I should love to see you preserve something.
I have only ever managed to fix butterflies, and of course, mounting Lepidoptera is nothing so difficult as mounting mammals.”
He gave me a curious and not wholly friendly stare.
“How did you come to be interested in butterflies?
They are the usual province of the lady naturalist, but I am rather surprised you didn’t find yourself studying something with teeth.”
“Hm.”
I was examining another of his little pigs, marveling at the curl of its pink tail.
“How extraordinary.
One can almost hear it squealing.”
The specimen, one of his best, was so arrestingly lifelike I was not entirely certain it had not moved.
Like my butterflies, it gave the impression of cessation, as if it had paused in whatever it was doing but only for a moment.
Stillness coupled with expectancy; these are the qualities all good preparations must convey.
I shook myself free of my reverie.
“What was that?
Oh, butterflies.
They afforded me the chance to get away from the villages where I grew up.
Girls are not supposed to go roaming about the countryside without purpose.
It is considered eccentric.
So I bought a butterfly net and a killing jar, and that made it quite all right.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips.
“That I can understand.
I was always thought odd for stuffing my pockets with jars of frogspawn and dissecting rabbits instead of eating them.”
I smiled at the notion of him as a boy with a pocketful of bottled tadpoles, but he suddenly tired of conversation.
With an abruptness I had noted before in his manner, he gave me a cool look and picked up his pot of glue.
“I think I will return to my elephant.
I have wasted quite enough time already.”
He strode back to his pachyderm, leaving me to amuse myself with Huxley.
I did not mind.
“Reclusive men are a good deal of work,” I murmured to the dog.
Mr. Stoker was not my first encounter with a fellow uncomfortable in the company of women, and would assuredly not be the last.
He might have a pathological dislike of women in general, but with a certainty borne of experience, I put his thorniness down to a heartbreak in his tender youth.
Some people never recovered from their early losses, I reflected.
I ladled out bowls of soup for Huxley and myself, pointedly ignoring Mr. Stoker as he worked at the elephant.
The fragrance of the soup rose in a steamy cloud, inviting and rich, and the dog and I sipped contentedly until Mr. Stoker threw down his spatula and stalked to the soup pot.
“What is this, then?”
“Food for the dog,” I said evenly.
He gave me a sour look and ladled up a portion.
There were no other bowls, so he took his in a chipped porcelain basin that was clearly a piece of laboratory equipment.
“It is a miracle you have not poisoned yourself,” I observed.
He shoveled a spoonful of soup into his mouth.
“I would make a rather cutting remark about poisoning myself on your cooking, but I cannot.
This is sublime.
I can’t think when the last time was I had hot food.”
He ate three bowls, each more slowly than the last, until he scraped the final savory spoonful and gave a sigh of repletion.
“You do not take very good care of yourself,” I said.
It was an observation, not an accusation, and he seemed to take it as such.
He shrugged.